‘But you only ever see each other on his terms,’ Fredrika’s friend Julia had objected, a few times. ‘When have you ever been able to ring and suggest getting together on the spur of the moment, like he does?’
Fredrika found questions and observations like that quite upsetting. The terms on which they met were given: Spencer was married, and she wasn’t. Either she accepted it, and the consequences – such as Spencer always being less accessible to her than she could be to him – or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, she might as well look for a different lover and friend. The same was true for Spencer. If he had not accepted that Fredrika occasionally had relationships with other men, and then came back to him, they would have split up long ago.
He doesn’t give me everything, Fredrika would say, but since I don’t happen to have anyone else at the moment, he gives me enough.
Perhaps the relationship was unconventional, but it was genuine and it was practical. And it neither demeaned nor ridiculed either of them. A mutual exchange, in which neither appeared a clear loser. Fredrika chose not to examine too closely whether either of them emerged a clear winner. As long as her heart carried on signalling desire, she surrendered herself to it.
An elderly woman, presumably Gabriel’s mother, was already standing on the front steps as she braked and pulled up at the edge of the gravel forecourt. The woman gestured to Fredrika to wind down the window.
‘Please park your car over there,’ she said, her long, slim finger graciously indicating a space beside two cars Fredrika assumed to belong to the house.
Fredrika parked and climbed out onto the gravel. She breathed in the damp air and felt her clothes sticking to her body. As she walked over to Teodora Sebastiansson, she looked around her. The garden was larger than others she had passed on the way there, almost like a park, secluded and at the end of the road. The lawn was strangely green, and reminded her of the grass on a golf course. A wall ran round the entire garden. The gate through which Fredrika had driven was the only opening to be seen. She had a sense of being both unwelcome and shut in. Large trees of some species she didn’t recognize were growing all around and immediately behind the house. But for some reason, Fredrika could not imagine children ever having played in them. On the lawn over near the wall was a little collection of magnificent fruit trees, and further back, beyond where Fredrika had parked the car, was a greenhouse of abnormally large proportions.
‘We are pretty much self-sufficient in vegetables here in the summer,’ the woman said, answering the question that Fredrika assumed to be reflected in her face as she caught sight of the glasshouse.
‘My husband’s father took a great interest in horticulture,’ the woman added as Fredrika approached.
There was something in her voice that caught Fredrika’s attention. It had a faint echo to it, with a sort of rasp to some of the consonants. The echo was hard to explain, coming from such a small person.
Fredrika held out her hand as she got to the steps and introduced herself.
‘Fredrika Bergman, police investigator.’
The woman took Fredrika’s hand and squeezed it unexpectedly hard, just as Sara had done at Stockholm Central the day before.
‘Teodora Sebastiansson,’ said the woman with a very slight smile.
It struck Fredrika that the smile made her thin face look older.
‘It’s very kind of you to let me come round,’ she said.
Teodora nodded with the same gracious attitude she had displayed when pointing out the parking place. The smile vanished and her face smoothed out.
Fredrika noted they were about the same height, but that was where the similarity ended. Teodora’s grey and presumably quite long hair was pulled back from her face into a severe knot, high at the back of her neck. Her eyes were as icily blue as those Fredrika had seen in her son’s passport photo when she retrieved it from the passport authority records.
Her body language was perfectly controlled. And her hands rested one on top of the other on her stomach, just where her blouse met her grey skirt. The cream blouse was enlivened only by the brooch fastened under her pointed little chin. Her ears were adorned with simple pearl earrings.
‘Naturally I am deeply worried about my little granddaughter,’ said Teodora, but her voice was so impersonal that Fredrika could not believe she really meant it. ‘I shall do everything in my power to help the police.’
She extended one hand in a simple gesture of invitation. Fredrika took three quick steps into the large hall and heard Teodora close the door firmly behind them.
For a brief moment there was silence, while their eyes grew used to the dim lighting in the windowless hall. That moment also felt like stepping straight into a museum of the end of the last century. A tourist from outside Europe would probably be willing to pay a small fortune to stay in the Sebastiansson family mansion. The feeling of being in another age was if anything intensified as Fredrika was shown into what must be the family drawing room. Every detail in the choice of wallpaper, mouldings, stucco ceiling, furniture, every painting and chandelier, had been hand-picked with exquisite precision to give the sense of a home where time stood still.
Fredrika was amazed, and could not remember having seen anything like it before. There had been nothing to rival the sight in front of her even in the homes of her grandparents’ most bourgeois acquaintances.
Teodora Sebastiansson was standing right beside Fredrika, observing the impression her home interiors were making with thinly veiled delight.
‘My father left a huge collection of porcelain, including the china dolls up there on the top shelf,’ she rasped, when she saw Fredrika staring wide-eyed at the tall, glass-fronted case that seemed to have pride of place right next to the gorgeous black grand piano.
Fredrika’s thoughts strayed immediately to her mother. She knew that if she shut her eyes, she would instantly be transported back to the time before The Accident and see herself sitting at the piano with her mother.
‘Can you hear the melody, Fredrika? Can you hear the games it plays before it settles in our ears?’
Teodora followed Fredrika’s gaze and ran her fingers over the instrument.
I’m already losing it with this lady, thought Fredrika. I’ve got to take back the initiative; I wouldn’t have been here at all if I hadn’t invited myself round.
‘Do you live in this big house all by yourself?’ she asked.
Teodora allowed herself a brittle laugh.
‘Yes, so there is going to be no question of an old people’s home where I am concerned.’
Fredrika gave a fleeting smile, and cleared her throat.
‘Well, I’ve come to see you because we’ve been trying to speak to your son, but we haven’t been able to get hold of him.’
Teodora listened and did not stir. Then all at once, she turned to look at Fredrika and said:
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
Fredrika had lost control of the conversation again.
Peder Rydh was trying to do at least ten things at once, with the inevitable result that he perceived his work situation appeared as to be even more chaotic than it really was. An address stamped on the box delivered to Sara Sebastiansson had identified the courier company that brought it. Full of hope, he had rushed round to the company’s unobtrusive office on Kungsholmen. There was a good chance somebody there had accepted the parcel and would be able to give a description of whoever brought it in.
His hopes were dashed pretty soon.
The parcel had been left anonymously at the office the previous evening after closing time. The staff had found it in the morning, in the parcel deposit box that was open round the clock. The system was that the sender of the parcel would stick an envelope to the item, containing the recipient address, requested delivery time and payment in cash. Unfortunately the CCTV camera trained on the box had been out of order for a long time so there was no picture of the person who had left the parcel. The envelope with the money and address details had been seized, of course, and sent straight off to SKL by express courier, but Peder didn’t really expect them to find any trace of the kidnapper on either the money or the envelope.