Ellen looked at the calendar she had on her desk. She had counted the weeks since they got back from Turkey. Five weeks had passed. In those five weeks, she and her new love had seen each other four times. Bearing in mind that he didn’t live in town, Ellen thought that felt like a very solid start, a verdict confirmed by the friend who looked after the children for her when she went on her dates.
‘I’m so happy for you,’ she whooped.
Ellen fervently hoped her friend’s enthusiasm wouldn’t wear off, because it looked as though she was going to need a babysitter again soon. She had just reached for her mobile to call her lover, when her desk phone rang. It was the central command unit, asking her to take a call from someone with something to report about the missing girl, Lilian. Ellen accepted the call at once, and heard a reedy female voice at the other end.
‘It’s about that child that went missing,’ she said.
Ellen took it slowly.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I think…’ the woman went quiet. ‘I think I might know who did it.’
More silence.
‘I think it might be a man I met,’ she said in a low voice.
Ellen frowned.
‘What makes you think that?’ she asked gently.
Ellen could hear the other woman breathing, not being sure whether to go on or not.
‘He was just horrible. Just… out of his mind.’
Another pause.
‘He was always talking about it, about doing it.’
‘Sorry,’ said Ellen. ‘You’ve lost me there. What was it he talked about doing?’
‘Putting everything right,’ the woman whispered. ‘He talked about putting everything right.’
The woman sounded as though she was starting to cry.
‘What did he want to put right?’
‘He said there were women who’d done things that meant they didn’t deserve their children,’ the woman said in a brittle voice. ‘That was what he wanted to put right.’
‘He was going to take their children from them?’
‘I never understood what he said, I never wanted to listen,’ said the woman, and now Ellen was sure she was crying. ‘And he hit me so hard, so hard. Shouted at me: I’d got to stop having nightmares, I’d got to fight against it. And I’d got to help put everything right.’
‘Sorry, but I don’t think I understand all this,’ Ellen said tentatively. ‘The nightmares and all that.’
‘He said,’ the woman sobbed, ‘that I’d got to stop dreaming, stop remembering what had happened before. He said that if I couldn’t do it, that showed I was weak. He said I’d got to be strong, to join the fight.’
The woman was silent for a moment, and then she said:
‘He called me his doll. He’d never be able to do it on his own; he must have another doll now.’
Ellen was so nonplussed that she really did not know what to say next. She decided to try to steer the conversation back to the bit about children.
‘Have you got children of your own,’ she asked the woman.
The woman gave a weary laugh.
‘No, I haven’t got any,’ she said. ‘And he hadn’t, either.’
‘Was that why he wanted to take another person’s child?’
‘No, no, no,’ the woman protested. ‘He wasn’t just going to take it; he didn’t want it for himself. The important thing was for the women to get their punishment, to have their children taken away from them.’
‘But why?’ Ellen asked in desperation.
The woman said nothing.
‘Hello?’ said Ellen.
‘I can’t talk any more now, I’ve already said too much,’ the woman whimpered.
‘Tell me your name,’ pleaded Ellen. ‘You’ve nothing to be afraid of. We can help you.’
Ellen admittedly doubted the confused woman’s story had any relevance for the case, but she was quite convinced the woman needed help.
‘I can’t tell you my name,’ the woman whispered. ‘I can’t. And don’t you go saying you can help me, because you lot have never been able to. But the women weren’t to be allowed to keep their children, because they didn’t deserve to.’
Why not, Ellen wondered. Out loud she said:
‘Where did you meet him? Tell me his name.’
‘I can’t tell you any more now, I just can’t.’
Ellen thought the woman was going to hang up, and tried to keep her on the line by asking:
‘But why did you ring if you don’t want to tell us who he is?’
The question made the other woman hesitate.
‘I don’t know what his name is. And the women didn’t deserve their children, because if you don’t like all children, you shouldn’t be allowed to have any at all.’
Then she ended the call, and Ellen sat there with the receiver in her hand, bewildered. She was sure she hadn’t found out anything of particular value. She hadn’t got a name, and the woman hadn’t explained why the man she knew had taken that particular child. Ellen shook her head, replaced the telephone receiver and wrote a short memo of the incoming call, which she put with all the rest. She made a mental note not to forget to mention it to the others in the team.
They were all waiting for Fredrika in the Den when she got back to HQ from Teodora Sebastiansson’s. It was several hours after lunchtime, and in a desperate attempt to boost her blood sugar level a little, Fredrika gulped down a chocolate wafer she found in the bottom of her handbag.
Alex Recht was standing by himself in one corner of the room. His expression was tense. He was deeply concerned. The case of Lilian Sebastiansson’s disappearance was developing in a direction he could never have predicted. Initial tests had confirmed the hair and clothes were Lilian’s. They had nothing else to go on at all. There wasn’t a single fingerprint on the box, inside or out. There were no traces of blood or anything like that. And the call on that goddamned courier company had yielded no information either.
When Fredrika turned up, Peder slipped in through the door behind her. Alex opened their third meeting in the Den in a very short space of time.
He called on Fredrika to report back on her meeting with Lilian’s grandmother. Alex had had misgivings from the very start about letting Fredrika conduct such vital questioning without the assistance of a more experienced colleague, but as Fredrika’s story emerged, Alex – and even Peder – realized they could scarcely have sent anyone other than Fredrika to interview such an eccentric old lady.
‘What was the overriding impression you brought away with you?’ Alex asked.
Fredrika put her head on one side.
‘I’m really not sure about her,’ she had to admit in the end. ‘I get the feeling she’s lying, but I don’t know how much or what about. I don’t know if she believes herself that her son would never have hit Sara, and I don’t know if she’s lying because she knows something or because she’s simply protecting her son, regardless of what he may have done.’
Alex nodded thoughtfully.
‘Have we got enough on him to issue an arrest warrant? Arrest him in his absence?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ was Fredrika’s forceful response. ‘The only thing we could use would be the earlier wife-battering.’
Alex was opening his mouth to say something, when Fredrika added:
‘And we know he takes a size 45 shoe and has a mother who’s pretty bloody disturbed.’
Alex was so surprised to hear Fredrika Bergman swear that he completely forgot what he was about to say.
‘Size 45 shoe,’ he eventually echoed.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Fredrika. ‘According to his mother he does. So it’s not entirely unthinkable that he might own a pair in size 46, as well.’