For some reason he felt reluctant to turn round and meet her eye.
‘So where do we go from here?’ said Pia, folding her arms.
‘Have you got any Panadol?’ asked Peder wearily, and started brushing his teeth. With Pia’s toothbrush.
Without a word, Pia opened a bathroom cabinet and got a strip of tablets out of a box. Peder took the lot from her; he’d be needing the rest later in the day.
‘You might at least say something.’
Peder hurled the toothbrush impatiently into the basin.
‘Don’t you understand how I’m feeling right now?’ he thundered, afraid his head would explode the moment he raised his voice. ‘The kid’s been found dead, murdered! Don’t you understand that I can’t think about anything else at the moment?’
Pia stared at him.
‘Just go, Peder,’ she said.
She left the bathroom without waiting for a reply.
Peder sat down on the floor and took several deep breaths.
He had let his wife down.
He had let his employer down by being in such a state.
He had very likely let little Lilian down as well.
And now Pia Nordh wanted to make out he had let her down, too. What the hell did the woman want of him?
Peder straightened up. He’d got to focus. He’d got to get up and get out. How he would get to Sara Sebastiansson’s flat would be a question for later. He most probably wouldn’t be able to drive.
Peder got up from the floor, put on his clothes and shoes and hurriedly left Pia’s flat.
A short while later he was standing on a pavement in the rain with wet hair, ringing for a taxi. He blinked a couple of times and peered up at the sky.
He stopped for a moment.
For the first time in ages, it looked as though the sun might manage to break through the cloud cover. Summer had arrived.
Jelena was on her way back to Stockholm. In a plane. She had ditched the car as planned. She had never flown before. She leant forward and looked out of the plane window in fascination. Incredible, she thought. Bloody incredible.
Anxiety came washing over her. The man hated it when she swore. He had punished her very severely for it at the beginning. Well, not punished, reprimanded was the word he generally used. And only for her own good.
Jelena smiled as she sat there. The man really was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She squeezed the armrest of her seat. The man was in actual fact the only good thing that had happened to her. He was so generous. And smart. Jelena loved seeing the man working and planning. He was so, so handsome when he was doing that. The fact that he had worked out how to hold up that stupid cow in Flemingsberg so she missed the train, for example, had impressed Jelena enormously.
And besides, thought Jelena, in Flemingsberg they had had several strokes of luck.
The man naturally wouldn’t have agreed with her, but they really had been served Sara Sebastiansson on a plate when she decided to get off the train to make her call. The original plan had been for Jelena to attract Sara’s attention by knocking on the window by her seat and trying to lure her out onto the platform by frantic gesticulations. And if that hadn’t worked, they would have tried to snatch Lilian the day after instead, when her mother handed her over to her father. But they hadn’t needed to do any of that, after all.
Jelena didn’t really know why the man had chosen her. She had been so lucky. The man must have known there were loads of other young girls who’d give their right arm to be part of his battle. He must have had so many to choose from. He had actually said as much.
‘I could have taken anybody, Doll,’ he whispered every evening when they were going to sleep. ‘I could have taken anybody, Doll, but I chose you. And if you disappoint me, I’ll choose someone else.’
Jelena hardly had words for the terror she felt whenever he hinted that she was replaceable. Jelena had been replaceable for almost as long as she could remember. It was not at all nice remembering the years she had lived before she met the man, so she seldom did. It was only at night, in her dreams, that the memories would not leave her in peace. Then she remembered all the disgusting things, every detail. Sometimes the dreams refused to end, and then she would find she had woken herself by sitting up in bed and howling.
‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’
The man never wanted to hear about her dreams. He would just pull her back down into bed and whisper to her:
‘You’re the one in charge of your sleep, Doll. You’ve got to understand that. If you don’t, you’ll carry on dreaming things you don’t like. And if you do that, Doll, if you carry on dreaming things you don’t like, and you don’t try hard enough, then you’re a weak person. And you know what I think about weak dolls, don’t you?’
To start with, she had tried to object, tried to tell him she was doing her very best, but the dreams came anyway. To start with, she had cried.
Then he would lie down on top of her in the bed, so heavy she could hardly breathe.
‘There is nothing, Doll – nothing – more worthless than tears. Try to understand that. Know that you have to understand it. I don’t want to see anything like that again. Ever. Do you understand?’
Jelena nodded beneath him, felt him making himself even heavier.
‘Answer so I can hear, Doll.’
‘I understand,’ she whispered hastily. ‘I understand.’
‘If you don’t understand,’ he went on, ‘I’ll be happy to reprimand you.’
His fingers twined their way into her hair, and she saw his other hand clench into a fist.
‘Do you understand?’
‘I understand,’ she said, her eyes wide with fear.
‘Maybe you’d understand better if I reprimanded you, like I had to do in the beginning?’
Jelena started to tremble involuntarily beneath him, and tossed her head from side to side on the pillow.
‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘Please, no.’
He lowered his raised fist and stroked her cheek.
‘Now come on, Doll,’ he said, his voice silky. ‘We don’t plead. Not you and me.’
She took slow breaths, still with the heavy weight of his body on top of hers. Waited for his next move.
‘You don’t need to be afraid of me, Doll,’ he said. ‘Not ever. Everything I do, Doll, I do in your best interests. In our best interests. You know that. Don’t you?’
She nodded between breathing in and breathing out.
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Good,’ he said, and rolled off her. ‘Because when our fight begins, when we start our campaign to rouse those damned sinners from their slumbers, there’ll be no room for mistakes.’
Alex Recht just found time to pop into HQ before he had to head for the airport. Fredrika was able to tell him that someone had rung from where Gabriel Sebastiansson worked, and then he spoke to Peder, who had just left Sara’s flat. Peder confirmed that Sara would be going to Umeå, accompanied by her parents, to identify the dead girl. Alex reminded both Fredrika and Peder of the need to establish whether the Sebastiansson family had any links with Umeå.
Very soon Alex was in a taxi on his way out to Arlanda. He wasn’t expecting to stay long up in Umeå, in fact he’d probably fly back later that day. Somewhat reluctantly, he had sent Peder with the duty clergyman to break the bad news to Sara. Peder could hardly be called ideal for the job, but sending Fredrika would have been even more unthinkable.
People whose own emotional lives were dysfunctional could scarcely be entrusted with a demanding task like breaking the news that someone had died.