‘Hello again and thanks so much for the wonderful time last night. Hope to see you at the weekend too. S.’
Fredrika felt warm inside. There was somebody for everybody. And she had Spencer Lagergren. Sometimes, anyway.
Then the thoughts she had been having the previous night resurfaced. What was the relationship with Spencer really costing her? One of her girlfriends once pointed out that Spencer made her feel comfortable, which meant she never met anyone she could start a serious relationship with. Fredrika protested and said that wasn’t the case at all. Spencer was a comfort blanket she could reach for whenever the longing to be close to someone got the better of her. If she didn’t have him, she wouldn’t have been less lonely; she’d have been desperately lonely.
Fredrika went back to her list, well aware that the thoughts would be back all too soon.
Why was there no other witness to corroborate Ingrid Strand’s version of events? Why hadn’t anybody else seen the girl being carried around on the platform by a tall man?
Alex’s explanation was that it was quite simply the sort of everyday sight that people don’t react to and therefore don’t remember. A father carrying his child, who would see that as noteworthy?
Fredrika could buy that argument to some extent. She could also appreciate that Ingrid Strand remembered it because she had had some contact with the child in question on the train journey. But still. Fredrika had discreetly made enquiries of Mats, the analyst who Alex seemed uninterested in introducing to the rest of the team. Had there really been no calls to corroborate that version of events?
Mats, who was dealing with the information from the public one bit at a time, entering it into a database, pursed his lips and shook his head as he searched through the tip-offs. No, no one else had rung in with information to support Ingrid Strand’s story.
Fredrika did not doubt that Ingrid Strand had really seen what she had told the police she saw. She simply wondered where Lilian and her father – if it was him Ingrid had seen – had gone once they left the platform. Why hadn’t anyone else seen them after that?
They had questioned taxi firms and people who ran shops inside Stockholm Central Station, but not the slightest lead had been forthcoming. Nobody could remember encountering a tall man carrying a child who looked like Lilian. That didn’t mean they hadn’t seen them, of course, but no one remembered anything of the kind. And that troubled Fredrika, because there had been huge numbers of people with every opportunity of seeing them.
Alex didn’t sound particularly concerned about their inability to pin down how Lilian had left the station.
‘Give people a bit of time,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later somebody’s going to remember something.’
Give people a bit of time.
Fredrika gave an involuntary shiver. How much time had they got, in actual fact?
Everything depended on who had taken the girl and why? Fredrika realized with a sinking feeling that she was the only one in the team who had still not discounted it being anyone other than Gabriel Sebastiansson.
The examining magistrate had largely gone along with Alex and Peder and thought it most likely to be Lilian’s father who had taken her off the train. Admittedly, Ingrid Strand hadn’t seen the man’s face, but the information she had been able to give them pointed in that direction. But of course it was no crime to collect your daughter from a train. There was no order banning Gabriel Sebastiansson from contact with his daughter, even though it would naturally be desirable for him to keep her mother informed of where he was taking her. The fact that her hair had been shaved off, on the other hand, could readily be categorized as assault, the examining magistrate argued. But since there was no evidence to link her father to the parcel of clothes and hair, they could not exclude the possibility that something else entirely had happened to the girl, even though the magistrate said several times that this was highly unlikely.
After half an hour’s deliberation, the magistrate reached her conclusion: the child had been abducted; her mother had not been informed; the child had suffered maltreatment and the parcel sent to the mother could be construed as a threat. That was sufficient for classifying the crime as a potential abduction, with Gabriel Sebastiansson as the prime suspect. A warrant could therefore be issued for his arrest, and Alex would issue a national alert.
Alex and Peder looked hugely relieved as they left the examining magistrate’s office. Fredrika walked two steps behind them, frowning.
She peered at the list of Sara Sebastiansson’s circle of acquaintances and family, people she would try to see the next day. Predictably enough, Peder was delighted to find her so willing to hand over the task of continuing to investigate Gabriel’s contacts. He looked quite triumphant, as if he had just won the lottery.
But Fredrika preferred to maintain her sceptical stance.
She no longer doubted that the perpetrator was someone with whom Sara had some kind of relationship, wittingly or unwittingly. But she was not convinced that that person had to be Gabriel. She thought about the woman Ellen had spoken to that afternoon. The woman who had lived with a man who hit her, and who now believed him to be the man who had taken Lilian. There was a microscopic chance that the man she was talking about actually was Gabriel Sebastiansson, but even there, Fredrika was keeping an open mind. No one else had reported Gabriel to the police, and surely they would have done if he were the man the anonymous woman was talking about? That was if they worked on the hypothesis that the woman’s call constituted an actual report of being assaulted by the man. Alex and Peder had impatiently dismissed her attempt to try to unravel the information in the woman’s call, asking her to focus on ‘real, concrete scenarios’ rather than the invented variety.
Fredrika gave a grim laugh. Invented scenarios. Where did they get these expressions from?
Thanks to the analyst Mats, she had at least been able to find out what happened when they tried to trace the call. The woman had rung from a telephone box in central Jönköping. The lead stopped there. In Jönköping. Fredrika ran a quick check to see if Gabriel Sebastiansson had any contacts there, but drew a complete blank.
Fredrika, for her part, was sure the incoming call had nothing at all to do with Gabriel. The question was whether it was worthy of attention, even so. Ellen was right, of course: whenever the police appealed to the public for help, there always were a number of very odd people who rang in.
Fredrika frowned. Maybe Alex was right when he said she hadn’t got the right feel for the job. On the other hand. Fredrika took a deep breath. On the other hand. If you took notice of what Alex and Peder classed as the nub of police work, then the work Fredrika was doing now could be classed as the very sharpest end of that work.
Because when it came down to it, in the case of the woman with the dog on the platform in Flemingsberg, and in the case of the woman who rang in with the tip-off, Fredrika had absolutely nothing to go on but her gut instinct. That was something those boys ought to approve of.
Gut instinct. The very phrase made her feel queasy.
She put one hand cautiously on her stomach while the other noted down yet one more thing that needed doing the next day. Pay a visit to Flemingsberg Station.
Her guts rumbled.
Dialogue, thought Fredrika. Right now, there was nobody apart from her own guts to have a dialogue with.
Peder Rydh felt relaxed as he left work later that evening. In fact, he felt great. For the simple reason that he was not intending to spoil his evening by going home to his sulky wife, but was heading out for a beer with some of his workmates instead.
He felt curiously relieved. They had known all along that Gabriel Sebastiansson had taken the girl, of course, but now they knew it more definitely, they wouldn’t have to grapple with the ‘who’ any more and could concentrate on the ‘where’. Where was the girl?