In his years in the police force, Alex had encountered more desperate individuals than he could remember. Sara Sebastiansson was the latest of them. But she hadn’t let any real despair show yet. She was keeping herself together in a quite remarkable way, thought Alex. He had no doubt that inside she was being torn apart by her anxiety and her desperate longing to see the child, but she was forcing herself not to show it. It was as if she thought that if she exposed for a single second – a single second – the horror she was going through, then the world would split apart beneath her feet and her daughter would be lost for ever. As Alex understood it, she hadn’t even rung her parents yet.
‘I’ll do it tomorrow, if Lilian’s not back by then,’ she had said.
Now it was tomorrow, and as far as Alex knew, Lilian was still missing. He looked at his mobile phone. No missed calls, no missed news.
There were a few other basics to bear in mind where missing children were concerned. Almost all such children, the vast majority, were found. Sooner or later. And ‘later’ was seldom more than a day or so. That had been the case, for example, for the little boy out on the coast last year, when Alex was called in precisely because he had handled a number of missing child cases in the course of his career. The boy, perhaps five years old, had slipped away from his family’s summer place at Ekerö when his parents were having an argument, and then simply run or walked so far from the house that he couldn’t find his way back again.
They found him asleep under a spruce some ten kilometres from home, further away than expected, beyond the radius of the initial search. He was reunited with his parents early the next morning, and the last thing Alex heard as he left the place was the parents bickering loudly and bitterly about whose fault it was the boy had gone off.
Then, of course, there were cases Alex found it harder to reconcile himself to. Cases in which the child had been subjected to such abominations when it was snatched that it was basically a completely different child by the time it was restored to its parents. There was one particular little girl who always came back into Alex’s mind when another child went missing. The girl had been gone for several days before she was found in a ditch by a motorist. She was unconscious for more than a week after she was admitted to hospital, and could never give any proper account of what had happened to her. Nor was there any need. The injuries to her body bore witness to the kind of scum that must have taken her, and though doctors, psychologists and well-meaning parents did everything in their power to heal her wounds, there were psychological scars that no medical treatment or words on this earth could remove.
The girl remained dysfunctional and disturbed as she grew up, not interacting with those around her at home or at school. She became more and more of a loner. She didn’t finish secondary school. Still not of age, she ran away from home and turned to prostitution. Her parents brought her home time after time but she always made off again. And before she was twenty, she died of a heroin overdose. Alex could remember crying in his office when the news reached him.
Alex had felt an overwhelming urge to go and see Sara Sebastiansson for himself the previous evening, and that was why he had accompanied Fredrika Bergman to Sara’s flat. He was afraid Fredrika took it as a sign that he questioned her competence in that area of work. Which he did, to some extent, but that wasn’t why he had wanted to go with her. No, he had just wanted to get a better feel for the case. And he certainly had.
First Fredrika and Alex talked to Sara on her own for a while, and then her new friend Anders Nyström turned up. The checks on his personal data had not yielded anything, but Fredrika had nonetheless interviewed him briefly in Sara’s kitchen, while Alex continued his conversation with Sara in the living room.
The information that emerged troubled him.
Sara had no enemies. At least none she was aware of.
On the other hand, she didn’t seem to have many friends, either.
She told him that her ex-husband used to abuse her, but that it was no longer a problem, and she didn’t believe for a moment that he had taken their daughter. That was why she had chosen not to mention the earlier abuse to Fredrika when they first spoke. She didn’t want the police investigation getting unnecessarily sidetracked, as she put it.
Alex didn’t believe a word of it. For one thing, he had explained in as lecturing a tone as he could without sounding downright arrogant, it was not Sara’s role to evaluate the various avenues of investigation, if indeed there were more than one. And for another, Alex did not believe Sara’s ex-husband was now leaving her in peace. It took him a while to talk her round, but eventually she showed him her forearms, which she had clearly been trying to hide inside her sleeves. Just as Fredrika had suspected, the arms showed clear signs of physical violence. A large and evidently very painful patch stood out sharply on her left arm. The skin was orangey-red and Alex could see signs of blisters that were now starting to heal. A burn, without a doubt.
‘He burnt me with the iron, just before we separated,’ Sara said in a flat voice, with an empty gaze that was trying to fix on a point somewhere behind Alex.
Alex took her arm gently in his hand and said quietly but emphatically:
‘You’ll have to report this, Sara.’
At that, she slowly turned her head and looked him straight in the eye.
‘He wasn’t here then.’
‘What?’
‘Haven’t you read the police reports? He’s never here when it happens. There’s always someone who can confirm he was somewhere else.’
Again her eyes went to that point behind Alex.
It disturbed Alex to see the extent of Sara Sebastiansson’s injuries. To his great annoyance and dismay, her ex-husband had not been in touch at all that evening. Alex sent a radio car to his address for the second time that day, but the officers reported back that the house was still in darkness and no one had answered the door. Fredrika then said she would contact Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother again the following day, and ring the place where he worked. Somebody must know where he was.
Sitting there in his grandfather’s office chair, Alex could feel the anger rising inside him. There were certain fundamental rules that he had grown up with and learnt to respect in his almost fifty-five years in this world. You did not hit women. You did not hit children. You did not lie. And you took care of the elderly.
Alex shuddered as he remembered the burn.
What made you do something like that to the person closest to you?
Alex found it hard to stomach the political mood that was now sweeping the country, talking of ‘men’s violence against women’. It would be unthinkable to make sweeping generalizations like that in other areas. To take just one example, a colleague had said at a police conference that ‘the immigrant tendency not to obey laws or regulations is costing society untold sums of money’. That statement almost cost the colleague his job. If he went round saying things like that, it was argued, the public would think all immigrants chose to live outside society’s rules, and that was definitely not the case.