No, thought Alex, it was definitely not the case. Any more than saying that all men hit all women. Some men hit women. A huge number of others did not. Unless that was the accepted starting point, the problem would never be properly addressed.
There had been no need for the team to meet again the previous evening. Alex had updated Peder once he and Fredrika left Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Alex was neither stupid nor gullible. Peder had an almost childlike urge to show how clever he was, and Alex was a little concerned that this might have a negative impact on his judgment in stressful situations. But at the same time he didn’t want to inhibit Peder, who showed exemplary enthusiasm for his job and had so much energy.
It would have been nice if Fredrika could display a little more of that, he thought drily.
He glanced at the clock. Nearly seven. Time to get dressed and head into town. He was so lucky to live on an island like Resarö, so close to the city, yet just far enough away. He would never exchange this house for any other. It was a real find, as his darling Lena had said when they bought it a few years before. Alex got up from his desk chair and took the blue corridor back to the kitchen. By the time he stepped into the shower a short while later, the first rain shower of the morning was already drumming on the window.
The train service between Gothenburg to Stockholm is more or less hourly. Sara Sebastiansson’s parents took the earliest train they could, leaving Gothenburg at six in the morning. This was not their first emergency trip from coast to coast, but it was definitely the gravest of its kind. On several previous occasions they had had to drop everything at home and at work to look after Lilian while Sara tried to recover from the damage done to her body as quickly as she could. They had systematically refused to have anything more to do with their son-in-law after the first attack. They had tried every way they could to persuade Sara to be strong and keep away from him. They had implored her to move back to the west coast. But she had always refused. She was not going to let Gabriel destroy any more aspects of her life, she told them. She had been away from Gothenburg for fifteen years, and would never move back. Never. Her life was in Stockholm now.
‘But Sara, love,’ her mother said, ‘he could kill you. Think of Lilian, Sara. What will happen to Lilian if you’re dead?’
But Sara hardened herself against her mother’s tears, and carried on saying no.
Had she done the right thing?
Sitting at her kitchen table the morning after Lilian disappeared, she asked herself if she had made a mistake of incalculable proportions. She wondered if Gabriel really had taken Lilian. God knows the man had done monstrously evil things. Never directly aimed at Lilian, but affecting her indirectly all the same, since she had more than once been woken from her innocent sleep by her mother Sara’s screams from an adjacent room. Once, Lilian had crept out of bed and tearfully found her way to where the sound was coming from.
Sara could still see the scene in her mind’s eye. She was lying on the floor, prevented from getting up by the intense pain in her side where Gabriel had kicked her. Gabriel, seething with rage, bending over her. And in the midst of it all, Lilian’s little voice.
‘Mummy. Daddy.’
As if in a trance, Gabriel turned round.
‘Oh,’ he whispered, ‘is Daddy’s little darling awake?’
He took a couple of swift strides across the kitchen, lifted up the child and carried her out of the room.
‘Mummy just fell over and landed all wrong, darling,’ Sara heard him say. ‘We’ll leave her to have a little rest, and then she’ll be as good as new. Do you want me to read you a story?’
Sara had done a university foundation course in psychology, and she knew that many men who beat their wives showed great remorse afterwards. Gabriel never did. He never said sorry; he never gave any hint of thinking what had happened was abnormal or wrong. He just looked at her injuries and bruises with such casual contempt that she wished she could fall dead on the spot.
She knew she was too exhausted to go on much longer. That night, the first night without Lilian, had been so relentlessly long.
‘Try to get some rest,’ Alex Recht had advised her. ‘I know it sounds impossible, but it really is the best thing you can do for Lilian, so you can be strong. Because when she comes back, she needs a rested mum to look after her. Okay?’
Sara had tried to hang on to that thought. She had tried to sleep, tried to prepare herself for her daughter’s return. She clung on to Alex’s last words: ‘Because when she comes back…’ Not if she comes back, but when she comes back.
As she lay there in bed, Sara realized almost at once that it had been a big mistake to send Anders away so soon. It had felt like a kind of betrayal of Lilian to have him around, as if his presence somehow worsened the odds of getting her daughter back. At two in the morning, she rang her parents. Her father went totally quiet, she heard him breathing into the phone.
Finally she heard his husky voice: ‘We’ve always known we’d lose one of you,’ he said. ‘It could never end well with that evil man in your lives.’
Hearing those words, Sara dropped the phone and slumped to the floor. She clawed at the parquet floor of the kitchen as her tears flowed.
‘Lilian,’ she cried, ‘Lilian.’
Somewhere in the background, from the telephone lying where it had fallen, she heard her father’s desperate voice.
‘We’ll come right away, Sara. Mum and I will come right away.’
Sara cradled her cup of coffee. She liked the fact that it got light early in the mornings, despite the bad weather. She had slept for less than an hour in total. She tried to convince herself that this didn’t make her a bad mother. A mother who didn’t care at all must be worse than one who cared too much. Sara was taken aback by her own thoughts. Was there really a limit to how upset you were allowed to be if your child vanished? She hoped not. She prayed not.
The shrill tone of the doorbell cut through the silence. Sara had just switched off the radio. She had heard the news of her daughter’s disappearance on both television and radio. At first the girl newsreader’s voice felt like a big, warm blanket. Somebody out there cared. Somebody out there wanted to help look for her child. But by the end of the third or fourth news bulletin, the warm blanket felt more like a noose, throttling her, an ever-present reminder of Lilian’s absence, of which Sara was already all too painfully aware.
The doorbell rang again.
Sara considered. A quick look at the clock showed it was almost half past eight. She had been in touch with the duty officer at the police station an hour previously, and he had updated her. Still no news.
Sara peered cautiously through the peephole in the front door, hoping it would be Fredrika Bergman or Alex Recht. It was neither. No, there was some kind of postman standing there. And he had a parcel.
Sara opened the door, surprised.
‘Sara Sebastiansson?’ asked the man with the parcel.
She nodded. The thought occurred to her as she did so that she must look quite a sight, drained and exhausted as she was.
‘I’ve got a parcel for you,’ said the man, holding it out. ‘It was to go directly to you, not to one of our collection points. Can you take delivery?’
‘Yes,’ said Sara warily, taking the package. ‘Thank you.’
‘Thank you!’ said the man, smiling. ‘Have a nice day!’
Sara made no reply to this, but shut the door and locked it. She gave the parcel a gentle shake. It weighed scarcely anything, and made no sound when she shook it. She looked for the address of the sender, there was none. It was a box about the size and shape for a DVD player or something like that. She turned it round, turned it over. Hesitant at first, then more deliberate.