Alex leant back on the headrest in the back seat of the taxi. Lilian’s body had been found outside the A &E department in Umeå at about one o’clock the previous night. Alex understood that she had been found by a nurse and a duty doctor, and had been lying stretched out on her back on the footpath, naked and wet in the rain. Someone had written the word ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead.
The child was already dead when they found her. There had been no attempt at resuscitation. Cause of death had not yet been established, but an initial examination of her body indicated that she had been dead for about twenty-four hours when they found her. That in turn meant she had lived only a few hours after the time when she was abducted. A few hours. If they’d known that was the sort of margin they had to play with…
But that was the thing. They hadn’t known. And they’d had no reason to expect it. Or had they?
Alex felt a large lump in his throat, and swallowed to try to banish it. His thoughts went to his own children. With quick, fumbling fingers he got out his mobile and rang the home number of Viktoria, his daughter. She answered at the fifth ring and Alex could tell from her voice that he had woken her.
‘I’m so glad you answered,’ he said, his voice almost cracking.
His daughter, used to her father occasionally trying to ring her at odd times, didn’t say much, and rang off without really discovering why he had called. It didn’t matter. Experience told her that she would eventually find out. Maybe not until the next time he rang, but then if not before.
Alex, happy and relieved, put the phone back in his inside pocket.
Some part of him had always hoped, as all parents do deep down, that one of his children would choose the same career as him. Or at least something similar. But neither of them had.
Viktoria had become a vet. For a long, long time, Alex had clung to some sort of hope that her all-embracing interest in horses might make her join the mounted police, but as she took her final school exams and prepared to go to university, he had to admit it was very unlikely.
He couldn’t really object. After all, he had chosen a career path quite different from the one expected of him. It was more a case of having nurtured some kind of hope that Viktoria, physically the very image of her mother, might turn out to be her father’s daughter in spirit. But she didn’t. Alex would swell with pride whenever he thought of her, though he was aware of letting it show far too infrequently. He could sometimes detect something anxious and quizzical in her steady gaze.
‘Are you happy with me, Dad?’ it whispered. ‘Are you satisfied with the person you made me into?’
Alex felt another lump in his throat. He was so unutterably satisfied that the very word ‘satisfied’ seemed banal in a context such as that.
He reminded himself that he was satisfied with both his children, not only Viktoria but also her younger brother, Erik. His son, the eternal seeker. Alex knew it was rather harsh of him to classify his younger child as a seeker when he hadn’t even reached twenty-five, but he honestly couldn’t see Erik ever putting down roots. Not really. Not the way he lived.
For a brief period, when he had just left school, it looked as though Erik might find a niche in military life. Alex didn’t really want a son in the armed forces, but if it proved a good opening for Erik, then he would have no objections. But Erik left the officer training course he had enrolled on, and said he wanted to become a pilot instead. And though nobody could quite work out how, the lad got into some kind of flying school down in Skåne. Then something else got in the way, and to his parents’ unfeigned amazement, he left the training course and the country, and moved to Colombia to live with a woman he had met at evening classes in Spanish. The woman was ten years older than him and had just left her husband. Alex and Lena simply didn’t know what to say, so they let their son go without much of an argument.
‘He’ll soon get tired of her, too,’ said Lena, trying to console him a bit.
Alex merely shook his head in resignation.
News of his son’s life on the other side of the globe filtered through in the form of emails and calls from the boy himself, but also via Viktoria. Sure enough, the relationship with the woman petered out, but they were not surprised when he soon found someone else and decided to stay on a bit longer. He had now been living there for two years, and Alex hadn’t seen him in all that time.
We should go out there, Alex thought in the taxi. Show him we care. Then maybe he’ll come back home. Then maybe we won’t lose him.
He looked distractedly out of the taxi window. The sun was shining. Alex’s mouth felt dry. This was a fine bloody day for summer to make its appearance.
A very bright Stockholm enfolded Peder Rydh as he stood there outside Sara Sebastiansson’s block of flats. Peder felt absolutely terrible. His flesh was crawling. Sara’s howls and cries were still echoing in his head. Poor beggar, he thought to himself. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, simply refused, to imagine anything like that happening to him. Peder’s children would never go missing. Those children were his children and no one else’s. He made a solemn vow to himself to keep watch over them better than he had until now.
The sound of the door opening behind him made him jump. Sara Sebastiansson’s father stepped gingerly out onto the pavement and waited right by the wall. Peder could swear the man had aged in the fifteen minutes that had elapsed since Peder and the clergyman came to the flat. His grey hair looked lifeless and his eyes were so full of despair that Peder found it hard to meet his gaze. He felt even more ashamed of the fact that he was again forced to ring for a taxi, as he was still not in a fit state to drive.
‘Tell me,’ said the older man before he had a chance to be the one to break the silence, ‘if there’s any chance it might not be our little girl they’ve found.’
Peder swallowed and felt his stomach knot as he saw the other man was crying.
‘We don’t think so,’ he said thickly. ‘We’ve had pictures to help us and we’re almost completely sure we’ve identified her. And then there’s the fact that she didn’t have any hair when she was found… I’m sorry, but we’re pretty convinced.’
He took a deep breath.
‘We won’t take it as positive identification until you’ve had a chance to see her, of course, but as I say, we’re not in any doubt.’
Sara’s father nodded slowly. His tears fell like heavy drops of rain onto his dark jumper and the spots grew into little wet patches weighing down his already weary shoulders.
‘We knew all along this would end badly, Mother and I,’ he whispered, and Peder took a step towards him.
Took a step towards him and put his hands in his pockets. He realized what he had just done and took them out again.
‘You see,’ said the man, ‘Sara’s mother and I have only got Sara. And we knew, we knew straight away when Sara met that man that things would turn out badly.’
His voice quavered, and his look vanished far, far away beyond Peder.
‘The first day she introduced him to us, I said to Mother that he was no good for our girl. But they were so in love. She was so in love. Even though he started mistreating her almost straight away. Not to mention his witch of a mother.’
Peder frowned, and put in:
‘But from what we understood from the police reports, it was a few years before he started abusing her. Isn’t that right, then?’
The older man shook his head.
‘He didn’t hit her, but there are other ways of hurting another person. He had other women, for example, all the time. Almost from the start. Disappeared off some evenings without saying where he was going, stayed away whole weekends. And she always took him back. Over and over again. And then they had Lilian. Then she was as good as stuck.’