Lying in the dark beside a man she thought she loved in spite of everything, Fredrika knew that the day she told him she was having a baby, Spencer would be on his way out of her life. Not because she was replaceable, but because there was no room for a child in their relationship.
Fredrika and Spencer hadn’t talked about it for a long time, but after a long period of reflection, Fredrika was increasingly realizing that she might not find a man to start a family with, and that she might need to start thinking about the alternatives. It wasn’t a decision she could postpone indefinitely; she had to decide. Either she did something about it, even though she was alone, or there might be no children at all. She found it unexpectedly painful trying to visualize a whole life without the experience of parenthood. To put it bluntly, it felt unfair and unnatural.
There were various alternatives to weigh up. The most unthinkable of them was to force Spencer into paternity: she could stop taking the pill without telling him. Less unthinkable was a trip to Copenhagen to buy a chance of motherhood at a fertility clinic. The option that seemed the most feasible was adopting a child.
‘For fuck’s sake just send in the forms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had said, a few months earlier. ‘You can always back out, say you applied in too much of a hurry. You’ll have oceans of time to think it over; it takes forever to be approved to adopt. I’d get in the queue straight away.’
At first she hadn’t even seen it as a serious suggestion. What was more, it would amount to giving up somehow. The day she sent in her application to adopt would be the day she really gave up all hope of having a family of her own, with a partner. Had she reached that point?
The answer to that question came when Spencer didn’t answer the phone, either his mobile or his job number. After several days of silence, she started ringing round hospitals. He was in the cardiac department of the University Hospital in Uppsala. He had suffered a major heart attack and been given a pacemaker. Fredrika cried for a week and then, with a new perspective on what is enduring in life, she sent in the application form.
Fredrika planted a light kiss on Spencer’s forehead. He smiled in his sleep. She smiled back. She still hadn’t told him about her plan to adopt a little girl from China. After all, her friend was right: she had oceans of time.
One last thought formed in her head before she succumbed to sleep. How much time did Lilian have? Did she have oceans of it, too, or were her days numbered?
WEDNESDAY
The woman on the TV screen was talking so fast that Nora almost missed the news report. It was early morning and her flat was shrouded in darkness. The only light came from the television, but since the blinds were down, Nora was almost certain its flickering gleam couldn’t be seen by anyone looking in from the street.
For Nora, this was very important. She knew she was condemned to feel unsafe, but she also knew there were certain little things she could do to improve her odds. One of them was simply not to be seen. By requesting protected identity from the tax authorities, she became less visible; by never having the light on in the flat in the evening, she became even less visible. She had a minimal circle of friends. She only had sporadic contact with her grandmother, always ringing her from a phone box in the street, and always from some other town. Her job was useful in that respect; she had to travel a fair amount.
When she heard the news she was in the kitchen, making a sandwich, with the fridge door open. The light in the fridge was useful; it meant she didn’t need to switch on any other lights to see what she was doing.
The woman’s voice cut through the silence and reached Nora as she struggled with the cheese slice.
‘A six-year-old girl went missing yesterday from a train travelling between Gothenburg and Stockholm,’ the woman’s voice intoned. ‘The police are appealing for anyone who was on the train that left Gothenburg at 10.50 a.m. yesterday morning, or at Stockholm Central Station around…’
Nora dropped the cheese slice and ran to the television.
‘Oh God,’ whispered Nora, feeling her heart thud. ‘He’s started.’
She listened to the end of the news, then switched off the set and sank down on the settee. The words she had just heard sank slowly into her consciousness, one by one. Together they formed whole sentences creating violent echoes from a time she had tried so hard to put behind her.
‘The train, Doll,’ whispered the echo. ‘You’ve no idea what people leave behind on the train. And you’ve no idea how unobservant all the rest are. The ones who don’t leave things behind, but are just travelling. That’s what people do on the train, Doll. They travel. And they don’t see a thing.’
She sat there on the settee until her hunger reminded her of the sandwich she had made. Only then did she reach a decision about what to do. She switched the TV back on, and clicked to teletext. The police number for members of the public with any information was at the end of the item about the missing child. She keyed it into her mobile. She would ring later in the day. Not from her mobile, of course, but from a telephone box.
Nora pulled the blind aside and peeped cautiously out into the street. If only it would stop raining.
Alex Recht woke up just after six, almost an hour before the alarm clock was due to go off. Carefully, so as not to wake his wife Lena, he got out of bed and padded out of the room to make his first cup of coffee of the day.
The house was light on this bright morning, but the sun had already settled behind a clump of thick cloud. Alex suppressed a sigh as he measured the coffee into the filter of the machine. No, he honestly couldn’t remember ever experiencing a worse summer. The rest of his holiday leave lay just a few weeks ahead. They would feel like totally wasted weeks if the weather didn’t improve.
Mistrustful of the weather, he opened the back door to check whether it had started raining yet and made a brisk foray to retrieve the morning paper. He unfolded it even before he was back inside. A headline about the disappearance of Lilian Sebastiansson looked back at him from the front page of the national daily. ‘Child of six missing since yesterday…’ Excellent, even the big papers had been in time to run the story.
Alex took his cup of coffee and newspaper and crossed the little hall, painted a deep blue, to his study. It had been Lena’s idea to paint the hall blue. Alex had been sceptical.
‘Doesn’t it make small spaces look even smaller if you paint them a dark colour?’ he said doubtfully.
‘Maybe,’ said Lena. ‘But more to the point, it makes them look nice!’
That, Alex realized, was an argument he had little hope of countering, so he allowed himself to be persuaded more or less without a fight. It fell to his son to do the painting job, and it certainly did look lovely. And cramped. But they didn’t talk about that.
Alex sat down in the enormous desk chair that was more like a small armchair on wheels. He had inherited it from his grandfather and would never part with it. Alex gave the arm of the chair a contented pat. Not only was it handsome, it was also comfortable. Alex and the chair would soon be celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. Thirty years! That was a terribly long time to sit in one chair. Actually, thought Alex, it was a terribly long time in every way. Longer than he had been married to Lena, in fact.
Leaning back in the chair, Alex closed his eyes.
He didn’t feel properly rested. He had not slept well last night. For the first time in several years, he had had nightmares. However much he would have liked to blame it on the weather, he knew the bad dreams had their origins elsewhere.
Alex was more than vaguely aware that in the course of his years with the police, he had come to be viewed as something of a legend. On the whole, he thought it was a reputation he deserved. The number of investigations and cases that had crossed his desk was too great for him to count, and he had solved most of them sooner or later. Never alone, but he had generally taken the lead. Just as he was doing this time. But now he was becoming aware of the passage of the years. They were talking about bringing the pension age for police officers down to sixty-one. Alex initially thought it sounded a lousy idea, but now he felt differently. It did no good for an authority like the police to be weighed down by a lot of tired and ageing officers. It was important to bring new blood into the organization.