‘Contact the police immediately if anything unusual happens, anything you weren’t expecting,’ Alex Recht had urged her the night before. ‘You’ve got to report it, Sara, whatever it is. Odd phone calls, odd rings at the door. Even though we’re inclined not to think so, it could be that Lilian’s been kidnapped, and in that case the perpetrator may try to contact you.’
Standing there with the package in her arms, Sara wondered if this should be considered an abnormal event. Her parents would be arriving any minute; should she wait for them to get there?
Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or the driving forces of desperation and curiosity, that made Sara Sebastiansson decide on the spur of the moment to open the parcel straight away. She laid it gently on the kitchen table and put her mobile phone beside it. She would open the parcel and then ring Alex Recht or Fredrika Bergman. If there was any reason to. It could just be something she’d ordered and forgotten about.
Sara peeled off the tape sealing the lid of the box. Her long fingers grasped both sides of the lid and lifted them up. A bed of polystyrene foam granules confronted her. Sara frowned. What was this?
She pushed the granules carefully aside. At first she could not make out what it was she had been sent. Her eyes sought some kind of context they could comprehend. Hair. A mass of medium-length, wavy hair, chestnut brown. Dumbstruck, Sara touched the hair, revealing what lay beneath it. Then Sara instantly knew whose hair she was holding in her hands, and let out a loud, animal howl. She went on screaming until her parents arrived some minutes later and rang for the police and a doctor. Then the screams, which were starting to make her hoarse, turned into sobs of bewilderment and bottomless despair. The dam she had so skilfully built up to hold back her rising sense of panic had burst. What had she done to deserve this? What in heaven’s name had she done?
Sara Sebastiansson’s parents’ call came through to the police just after 9 a.m. Alex was immediately informed and drove crazily fast to Sara’s flat, taking Fredrika Bergman with him. To her unfeigned amazement, Fredrika noted as they left that Peder looked very unhappy about Fredrika being asked to answer the emergency call and not him.
Once the cardboard box with its nauseating contents had been sent off by special courier to the National Forensic Science Laboratory, SKL, in Linköping, Alex and Fredrika returned to HQ. Both occupants of the car derived a certain comfort from the silence that settled over them as they began the short return journey from Södermalm to the police building in Kungsholmsgatan. They swept up onto Västerbron and looked out from the bridge over a Stockholm wreathed in almost autumnal darkness. The next front of heavy clouds that had rolled in over the capital overnight were vividly reflected in the water spreading out beneath them. Fredrika reflected on the fact that they coloured the water grey, making the view a good deal less attractive than usual.
Alex cleared his throat.
‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika.
Alex looked at her and shook his head.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ he said quietly.
He was reluctant to admit it, but Alex was shocked by what he had just seen. The package turned the case from what initially seemed a routine investigation involving two adults going through a painful divorce in which their child had inevitably become a pawn, into a case with a much less predictable outcome. The experience had been made no less upsetting by Sara Sebastiansson’s panic, which filled the whole flat and was made all the more tangible by her mother’s tearful entreaties to her daughter to calm down. Alex could see at once that Sara Sebastiansson had gone beyond the point where a human being can simply ‘calm down’. He decided the most efficient course of action was to wait for the doctor and then, when Sara had been given a sedative, to investigate the box and its contents himself.
It was clear from Sara’s reaction to the parcel that the hair must be Lilian’s. Tests would establish the fact for certain. Underneath the mass of hair were the clothes Lilian had been wearing when she disappeared. A green, knee-length skirt and a little white T-shirt with a green and pink print on the front. There were two little hairbands, too. Her panties were missing, for some reason.
Seeing the clothes made Alex’s stomach lurch. Someone must have taken them off her. Of all the sick people in the world, he found none more repugnant than those who violated children.
There were no bloodstains or anything like that on the clothes. At least none that were visible, but SKL would establish that, of course, as well as checking for traces of other bodily fluids.
Alex thought he understood the message a package like that was intended to convey all too well. Somebody wanted to frighten Sara in a big way. Sara’s hysterical reaction showed how very successful the sender had been. Later on, Sara would have to be asked about both the package and the person who delivered it, but any sort of conversation or interrogation was out of the question in her present state.
Soon, thought Alex. Soon.
He gripped the steering wheel hard, very hard.
‘Did you get anything useful out of the call to where the ex-husband works?’ he asked Fredrika.
Fredrika gave a start.
‘Yes and no.’
She sat up straighter in her seat. She’d rung Gabriel Sebastiansson’s employer earlier that morning.
‘According to his boss, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s on holiday at the moment, but he couldn’t say where he is. He’s been off since Monday.’
Alex gave a whistle.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Particularly as he clearly hasn’t told his ex-wife about it, even though they have a child together. And didn’t he tell his old mum he was on a business trip?’
‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘Or at least, that’s what she told me he said. But to be honest, I didn’t have a very good feeling about her.’
Alex frowned.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean that just because she says he said he was on a business trip, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Her sense of loyalty to her son is so fierce, I presume she wouldn’t have any objection to lying for his sake.’
Alex thought this over. They were almost back at HQ. Fredrika wondered why it was that she was always the passenger rather than the driver when she went anywhere by car with her male colleagues. Presumably this fact, too, could be explained by her never having been to police training college, never having done her stint in a patrol car, so she must clearly be an incompetent driver.
‘Go round to her place,’ Alex said roughly, completely forgetting to applaud the moment of Fredrika’s first ever admission that she was acting on an instinct. ‘Go round and see the ex-husband’s mother. We’ll just have a quick meeting first.’
‘I will,’ said Fredrika.
They turned into the garage entrance and carried on down the tunnel to the parking area.
‘Are we still sure it was the father took the girl?’ Fredrika asked quietly, afraid of reigniting Alex’s anger by questioning his working hypothesis. ‘Would a father scalp his own daughter and send the hair to her mother?’
The question prompted Alex to think of the burn from the iron on Sara’s arm.
‘Normal fathers wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But Gabriel Sebastiansson is not a normal father.’
Peder Rydh was frustrated. The emergency call from Sara Sebastiansson’s had taken the whole group totally by surprise, and then – just as the situation was at its most acute – Fredrika was asked to go along, rather than Peder. He had to carry on following up tip-off after tip-off. He felt he was worth better than being stuck on something so apparently unimportant, compared to a trip to interview Sara again.
Admittedly he was getting a lot of valuable help from Mats Dahman, the data analyst from the National Crime Squad; Alex had asked if he could call him in to help with the investigation as soon as Sara’s parents rang. Mats had a handy programme for sorting the information that had come in. You could easily identify who had reported things that happened too early, for example. All those who claimed to have seen Lilian Sebastiansson at Stockholm Central Station at quarter to two, for example, could be weeded out automatically, because Lilian hadn’t disappeared by then. But the later ones were trickier. One woman who had been on the same train as Sara and Lilian said she had noticed a short man carrying a sleeping child when they got out onto the platform. But if the perpetrator took size 46 shoes, he was hardly likely to be particularly short. He was presumably quite tall, in fact. Assuming the shoeprints had anything at all to do with Lilian’s disappearance.