While they were waiting at Flemingsberg, Henry noticed the auburn-haired woman quickly get off the train, alone. He watched her surreptitiously from the window of the tiny compartment in coach six that was reserved for the train crew. He saw her take a few determined steps across the platform, over to the other side where it was less crowded. She took something out of her handbag; could it be a mobile phone? He assumed the child must still be asleep in her seat. She certainly had been a little while ago, as the train thundered through Katrineholm. Henry sighed at himself. What on earth was he thinking of, spying on attractive women?
Henry looked away and started on the crossword in his magazine. He was to wonder time and again what would have happened if he had kept his eye on the woman on the platform. It made no difference how many people tried to persuade him that he couldn’t possibly have known, that he mustn’t reproach himself. Henry was, and forever would be, convinced that his eagerness to solve a crossword had destroyed a young mother’s life. There was absolutely nothing he could do to turn back the clock.
Henry was still busy with his crossword when he heard Arvid’s voice on the public-address system. All passengers were to return to their seats. The train was now ready to continue on its way to Stockholm.
Afterwards, nobody could recall seeing a young woman running after the train. But she must have done so, because it was only a few minutes later that Henry took an urgent call in the staff compartment. A young woman who had been sitting in seat six, coach two with her daughter had been left behind on the platform in Flemingsberg when the train set off again, and was now in a taxi on her way to central Stockholm. Her little daughter was therefore alone on the train.
‘Bugger it,’ said Henry as he hung up.
Why could he never delegate a single duty without something going wrong? Why could he never have a moment’s peace?
They never even discussed stopping the train at an intermediate station, since it was so close to its final destination. Henry made his way briskly to coach two, and realized it must have been the red-haired woman he’d been watching on the platform who had missed the train, since he recognized her daughter, now sitting alone. He reported back to the communication centre on his mobile phone that the girl was still asleep, and that there was surely no need to upset her with the news of her mother’s absence before they got to Stockholm. There was general agreement, and Henry promised to look after the girl personally when the train pulled in. Personally. A word that would ring in Henry’s head for a long time.
Just as the train went through Söder station on the southern outskirts, the girls in coach three started scuffling and screaming again. The sound of breaking glass reached Henry’s ears as a door slid open for a passenger to move between coaches two and three, and he had to leave the sleeping child. He made an urgent and agitated call to Arvid on the two-way radio.
‘Arvid, come straight to coach three!’ he barked.
Not a sound from his colleague.
The train had come to a halt with its characteristic hiss, like the heavy, wheezing breath of an old person, before Henry managed to separate the two girls.
‘Whore!’ shrieked the blonde one.
‘Slut!’ retorted her friend.
‘What a terrible way to behave,’ said an elderly lady who had just got up to retrieve her case from the rack above.
Henry edged swiftly past people who had started queuing in the aisle to get off the train and called over his shoulder:
‘Just make sure you leave the train right away, you two!’
As he spoke, he was already on his way to coach two. He just hoped the child hadn’t woken up. But he had never been far away, after all.
Henry forged his way onward, knocking into several people as he covered the short distance back, and afterwards he swore he’d been away no more than three minutes.
But the number of minutes, however small, changed nothing.
When he got back to coach two, the sleeping child had gone. Her mauve sandals were still there on the floor. And the train was disgorging onto the platform all those people who had travelled under Henry Lindgren’s protection from Gothenburg to Stockholm.
Alex Recht had been a policeman for more than a quarter of a century. He therefore felt he could claim to have wide experience of police work, to have built up over the years a significant level of professional competence, and to have developed a finely tuned sense of intuition. He possessed, he was often told, a good gut instinct.
Few things were more important to a policeman than gut instinct. It was the hallmark of a skilled police officer, the ultimate way of identifying who was made of the right stuff and who wasn’t. Gut instinct was never a substitute for facts, but it could complement them. When all the facts were on the table, all the pieces of the puzzle identified, the trick was to understand what you were looking at and assemble the fragments of knowledge you had in front of you into a whole.
‘Many are called, but few are chosen,’ Alex’s father had said in the speech he had made to his son when he got his first police appointment.
Alex’s father had in actual fact been hoping his son would go into the church, like all the other firstborn sons in the family before him. He found it very hard to resign himself to the fact that his son had chosen the police in preference.
‘Being a police officer involves a sort of calling, too,’ Alex said in an attempt to mollify him.
His father thought about that for a few months, and then let it be known that he intended to accept and respect his son’s choice of profession. Perhaps the matter was also simplified somewhat by the fact that Alex’s brother later decided to enter the priesthood. At any rate, Alex was eternally grateful to his brother.
Alex liked working with people who, just like him, felt a particular sense of vocation in the job. He liked working with people who shared his intuition and a well-developed feeling for what was fact and what was nonsense.
Maybe, he thought to himself as he sat at the wheel on the way to Stockholm Central, maybe that was why he couldn’t really warm to his new colleague, Fredrika Bergman. She seemed to consider herself neither called to her job, nor particularly good at it. But then he didn’t really expect her police career to last very long.
Alex glanced surreptitiously at the figure in the passenger seat beside him. She was sitting up incredibly straight. He had initially wondered if she had a military background. He had even hoped that might be the case. But however often he went through her CV, he couldn’t find a single line to hint that she had spent so much as an hour in the armed forces. Alex had sighed. Then she must be a gymnast, that was all it could be, because no ordinary woman who had done nothing more exciting than go to university would ever be that bloody straight-backed.
Alex cleared his throat quietly and wondered if he ought to say anything about the case before they got there. After all, Fredrika had never had to deal with this sort of business before. Their eyes met briefly and then Alex turned his gaze back to the road.
‘Lot of traffic today,’ he muttered.
As if there were days when inner city Stockholm was empty of cars.
In his many years in the police, Alex had dealt with a fair number of missing children. His work on these cases had gradually convinced him of the truth of the saying: ‘Children don’t vanish, people lose them.’ In almost every case, almost every case, behind every lost child there was a lost parent. Some lax individual who in Alex’s view should never have had children in the first place. It needn’t necessarily be someone with a harmful lifestyle or alcohol problems. It could just as well be someone who worked far too much, who was out with friends far too often and far too late, or someone who simply didn’t pay enough attention to their child. If children took up the space in adults’ lives that they should, they went missing far less often. At least that was what Alex had concluded.