The air suddenly seemed too heavy to breathe in, and the older man gave a sort of shudder. When he breathed out, his shoulders slumped and the tears ran more swiftly down his cheeks.
‘When the little girl was born, we thought the game was up. All our friends congratulated us, but… It was the start of something new, after all, and yet… After that there was no way back, after that it was bound to end in disaster.’
‘Do you think,’ Peder began tentatively, ‘do you think Gabriel Sebastiansson could have anything to do with what’s happened to the little girl?’
The other man raised his head and looked Peder in the eye.
‘That man is evil incarnate,’ he said in a voice that was tired but firm. ‘There are no limits to what he’d do to harm and wound Sara. No limits at all.’
He seemed to be about to fall forwards, so Peder rushed to catch him. But the man hung there in his arms, crying like a child.
Before too long, Peder was on his way out of the centre of town, heading for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s workplace. He had to keep swallowing to keep back his own tears. Then it struck him that he still hadn’t rung Ylva.
He clenched his mobile. Now he was in big trouble. But she’d just have to wait. He was already late for his appointment with Gabriel’s colleague.
Martin Ek met him outside the front entrance of SatCom. Peder could see he was tense and nervous. Generally Peder was no great genius when it came to reading other people, but Martin Ek was plainly on edge. Very much on edge.
‘Thanks for coming so quickly,’ Martin Ek said, with a firm shake of the hand.
Peder noted that the palms of the other man’s hands were sweating profusely, and saw him wipe them on his suit trousers. Charming.
Martin Ek said no more until they were in the lift on their way up to the executive floor. Peder’s intuition told him the lift was too small and they were standing too close together. He hoped he didn’t smell of drink.
‘I went into his office this morning,’ said Ek, staring straight ahead of him. ‘There was an important quarterly report I needed, and Gabriel didn’t answer his mobile. I tried him over and over again. But he never replied.’
Peder recognized that Martin Ek was trying to justify going into his colleague’s computer, which wasn’t necessary at all.
‘I understand,’ he said reassuringly, stepping out of the cramped lift with relief as soon as the doors opened.
Martin relaxed a little and discreetly showed Peder through the open-plan office to his own room. Peder noted a number of raised eyebrows and wondered whether he ought to ask to be introduced to the rest of the staff. He decided it could wait.
Safely inside his room, Martin nodded obligingly towards the visitor’s chair, and took a seat behind his desk. He clasped his hands on his blotter and cleared his throat.
Behind him, Peder could see a row of photos in colourful frames. The pictures radiated warmth and harmony. Peder saw that Martin had three children, all of them probably under ten, and a lovely wife. If the pictures were telling the truth, Martin had a good marriage and loved his wife enough to want to look at her every day. Peder felt himself shrivel as he sat there in the visitor’s chair. He was a disgrace to the male sex. Alex had loads of family photos in the office too, didn’t he?
‘So I went to Gabriel’s room to get the report,’ Martin began again, forcing Peder to focus on what he was saying.
‘We’re authorized to do that,’ he added, ‘if there’s no alternative. And our boss, mine and Gabriel’s, gave me the go ahead.’
Peder nodded again, somewhat more impatiently this time.
‘I didn’t find the report,’ Martin went on. ‘I looked in his filing cabinets; we’ve got special, secure cabinets where we keep sensitive material, and our receptionist has a master key to them all.’
Another pause for effect.
‘When I couldn’t find the report, it occurred to me that he must at least have a working copy in his computer that I could print out.’
Martin shifted the position of his desk chair a little, and suddenly his whole family was hidden from view, for which Peder was truly grateful.
‘That was when I came across the photos,’ he said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. ‘Do you want to see them now?’
Peder had had a few words with Alex on that subject. If the photos really were criminal in content, it would be extremely important for the computer to be handled correctly, so it did not appear that the police had illicitly come by the information about what Gabriel Sebastiansson stored on the hard disk of his computer at work. But if the information was presented by a third party who had gone into Gabriel’s computer of his own volition, there was no reason why Peder could not take a passive look at them. Peder, however, felt instinctively that looking at the photos was one of the last things he wanted to do.
‘You didn’t want to say any more about the photos on the phone,’ he said softly, ‘but maybe you could just give me a rough idea of what’s in them before we take a look?’
Martin Ek squirmed in his seat. His eyes went to a small photo on the desk in front of him, presumably showing his youngest child. He cleared his throat again, looking pale and rigid. His gaze was fixed as it met Peder’s. Then he answered in just two words:
‘Child pornography.’
Fredrika Bergman drove swiftly out of town and down to Flemingsberg. She wondered if what she was doing amounted to official misconduct. Alex had expressly asked her to concentrate on interviewing Sara’s family and closest acquaintances. He had asked her to see Teodora Sebastiansson again as a matter of priority, and to work out how Umeå fitted into the picture. He had definitely not asked her to go out to Flemingsberg to check out a station nobody else in the team thought of any interest.
But here she was on her way there, all the same.
Fredrika parked outside the local public prosecution office, close to the station. She looked about her as she got out of the car. The brightly coloured apartment blocks, where she had occasionally gone to see friends in her student days, were outlined against the sky in the middle distance on the far side of the tracks. The hospital was just beyond them. Her stomach lurched as she saw the signs pointing the way to it and her thoughts turned automatically to Spencer.
I could have lost him, thought Fredrika. I could have been left all on my own.
The walk from the car to the station made Fredrika quite hot. She took off her jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her shirt. It was disconcerting to find herself thinking about Spencer so much nowadays. Shouldn’t she be thinking instead about the adoption application she’d sent in a while ago? Dear Spencer seemed suddenly to be pursuing her, day and night. Fredrika felt a slight tremor in the ground beneath her. Was she just imagining things, or had her relationship with Spencer changed since the start of the summer? They met more often and it felt… different.
But it was hard to pin down exactly what was different.
I’ve coped with my relationship with Spencer for over ten years without starting to assume anything or make it something it’s not, Fredrika thought. There’s no reason to complicate matters now, either.
She went into the station and looked around. There was an escalator down to each platform. At the far end were the escalator and steps down to platform one, where the intercity trains heading north to Stockholm came in. Sara must have gone pelting down there when she missed the train, thought Fredrika.
She went over to the girl in the ticket window by the barriers down to the local commuter services on platforms two and three, and showed her ID. She introduced herself and briefly explained why she was there. The girl in the cramped space of the ticket booth instantly sat up straight. She realized from Fredrika’s earnest look that it was important to answer the questions properly.