The clouds hung thick and dark in the sky and a faint rumble presaged thunder as they got out of the car. The air was incredibly heavy and humid. It was the sort of day when you longed for rain and thunder to make the air more breathable. A flash of lightning etched itself dully on the clouds somewhere over the Old Town. There was another storm approaching.
Alex and Fredrika hurried in through the main entrance to Stockholm Central. Alex took a call from the mobile of the third member of the investigating team, Peder Rydh, to say he was on his way. Alex was relieved. It wouldn’t have felt right starting an investigation like this with no one but a piece of office furniture like Fredrika.
It was after half past three by the time they got to platform seventeen where the train had pulled in to become the subject of a standard crime scene investigation. Swedish National Railways had been informed that no precise time could be given for the train to be put back in service, which in due course led to the late running of several trains that day. There were only a few people on the platform not in police uniform. Alex guessed that the red-haired woman looking exhausted but composed, sitting on a large, blue plastic box marked ‘Sand’ was the missing child’s mother. Alex sensed intuitively that the woman was not one of those parents who lose their children. He swallowed hastily. If the child hadn’t been lost, it had been abducted. If it had been abducted, that complicated matters significantly.
Alex told himself to take it easy. He still knew too little about the case not to keep an open mind.
A young, uniformed officer came along the platform to Alex and Fredrika. His handshake was firm but a little damp, his look somewhat glazed and unfocused. He introduced himself simply as Jens. Alex guessed that he was a recent graduate of the police training college and that this was his first case. Lack of practical experience was frightening when new police officers took up their first posts. You could see them radiating confusion and sometimes pure panic in their first six months. Alex wondered if the young man whose hand he was shaking couldn’t be said to be bordering on panic. He was probably wondering in turn what on earth Alex was doing there. DCIs rarely, if ever, turned up to conduct interviews themselves. Or at any rate, not at this early stage in a case.
Alex was about to explain his presence when Jens started to speak, in rapid bursts.
‘The alarm wasn’t raised until thirty minutes after the train got in,’ he reported in a shrill voice. ‘And by then, nearly all the passengers had left the platform. Well, except for these.’
He gave a sweeping wave, indicating of a clump of people standing a little way beyond the woman Alex had identified as the child’s mother. Alex glanced at his watch. It was twenty to four. The child would soon have been missing for an hour and a half.
‘There’s been a complete search of the train. She isn’t anywhere. The child, I mean, a six-year-old girl. She isn’t anywhere. And nobody seems to have seen her, either. At least nobody we’ve spoken to. And all their luggage is still there. The girl didn’t take anything with her. Not even her shoes. They were still on the floor under her seat.’
The first raindrops hit the roof above them. The thunder was rumbling somewhere closer now. Alex didn’t think he’d ever known a worse summer.
‘Is that the girl’s mother sitting over there?’ asked Fredrika with a discreet nod towards the red-haired woman.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said the young policeman. ‘Her name’s Sara Sebastiansson. She says she’s not going home until we find the girl.’
Alex sighed to himself. Of course the red-haired woman was the child’s mother. He didn’t need to ask such things, he knew them anyway, he sensed them. Fredrika was entirely lacking in that sort of intuition. She asked about everything and she questioned even more. Alex felt his irritation level rising. Detecting simply didn’t work that way. He only hoped she would soon realize how wrong she was for the profession she had decided was suitable for her.
‘Why did it take thirty minutes for the police to be alerted?’ Fredrika continued her interrogation.
Alex immediately pricked up his ears. Fredrika had finally asked a relevant question.
Jens braced himself. Up to that point, he had had answers to all the questions the senior police officers had asked him since they arrived.
‘Well, it’s a bit of an odd story,’ Jens began, and Alex could see he was trying not to stare at Fredrika. ‘The train was held at Flemingsberg for longer than usual, and the mother got off to make a phone call. She left her little girl on the train because she was asleep.’
Alex nodded thoughtfully. Children don’t vanish, people lose them. Perhaps he had misjudged Sara the redhead.
‘So anyway, a girl came up to her, to Sara that is, on the platform and asked her to help with a dog that was sick. And then she missed the train. She rang the train people right away – a member of staff at Flemingsberg helped her – to tell them that her child was on the train and that she was going to take a taxi straight to Stockholm Central.’
Alex frowned as he listened.
‘The child had gone by the time the train stopped at Stockholm, and the conductor and some of the other crew searched for her. People were flooding off the train, you see, and hardly any of the passengers bothered to help. A Securitas guard who normally hangs round outside Burger King downstairs gave them a hand with the search. Then the mother, I mean Sara over there, got here in the taxi and was told her daughter was missing. They went on searching; they thought the girl must have woken up and, like, been one of the first off the train. But they couldn’t find her anywhere. So then they rang the police. But we haven’t found her either.’
‘Have they put out a call over the public-address system in the station?’ asked Fredrika. ‘I mean in case she managed to get off the platform and onto the concourse?’
Jens nodded meekly and then shook his head. Yes, an announcement had been made. More police and volunteers were currently searching the whole station. Local radio would be issuing an appeal to road users in the city centre to keep an eye out for the girl. The taxi firms would be contacted. If the girl had walked off on her own, she couldn’t have got far.
But she had not been spotted yet.
Fredrika nodded slowly. Alex looked at the mother sitting on the big blue box. She looked like death. Shattered.
‘Put out the announcement in other languages, not just Swedish,’ said Fredrika.
Her male colleagues looked at her with raised eyebrows.
‘There are a lot of people hanging about here who don’t have Swedish as their mother tongue, but who might have seen something. Make the announcement in English, too. German and French, if they can. Maybe Arabic, as well.’
Alex nodded approvingly and sent Jens a look that told him to do as Fredrika suggested. Jens hurried off, probably quailing at the prospect of somehow getting hold of an Arabic speaker. Cascades of rain were coming down on the people gathered on the platform, and the rumbling had turned into mighty claps of thunder. It was a wretched day in a wretched summer.
Peder Rydh came dashing along the platform just as Jens was leaving it. Peder stared at Fredrika’s beige, double-breasted jacket. Had the woman no concept at all of the way you broadcast that you were part of the police when you weren’t in uniform? Peder himself nodded graciously to the colleagues he passed on his way and waved his identity badge about a bit so they would realize he was one of them. He found it hard to resist the urge to thump a few of the younger talents on the back. He had loved his years in the patrol car, of course, but he was very happy indeed to have landed a job on the plain-clothes side.