‘Were you working last Tuesday?’ Fredrika asked.
To her relief, the girl at the ticket window nodded. This wasn’t going to take long.
‘Do you remember seeing a woman with a sick dog any time that day?’
The girl frowned, but then nodded eagerly again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I do. You mean a tall, lanky girl? With a big Alsatian?’
Fredrika’s heart skipped a beat as she remembered Sara’s description of the woman who had held her up in Flemingsberg.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying hard not to sound too excited. ‘That fits the description we’ve been given.’
The girl smiled.
‘I definitely remember her,’ she said, almost triumphantly, reminding Fredrika of the assistant police officer at Stockholm Central at the time Lilian was reported missing, and the way he had received her and Alex.
‘I saw it later on the news, like, about that little girl going missing from the train,’ said the girl at the ticket window. ‘The girl with the dog was here at the same time as that train from Gothenburg came into the platform, and had to wait there for a while. I remember, because I was the one who helped the little girl’s mum make the call to our control centre after she missed the train.’
Fredrika smiled. Excellent.
‘Where was she travelling to?’ she asked. ‘If you can remember, that is.’
The girl looked confused.
‘The one who lost her kid?’
‘No,’ said Fredrika patiently. ‘The one with the dog.’
‘I don’t know. She just wanted to go down onto the platform to meet someone off the train. She asked me where the train from Gothenburg comes in.’
‘Ah,’ Fredrika said quickly, ‘and what happened then?’
‘Well, I could see there was something wrong with the dog,’ the girl said. ‘It could hardly stand; she was yanking it by its lead. Then sort of shoving it along in front of her. I saw them go down the escalator, and after that I heard her shouting. The girl with the dog, that is.’
She paused.
‘And it was only a minute or two later she came up again with the redheaded woman, who was helping her. At first I thought they were together, but when the X2000 pulled out, the one with the red hair almost had hysterics, and rushed down onto the platform again. She was yelling, “Lilian”, the whole time.’
Fredrika felt her throat constrict.
She cleared her throat.
‘And what did the dog woman do after that?’
‘She bundled the dog onto a mail trolley that was parked just over there,’ said the girl at the ticket window, pointing out through the glass.
Fredrika looked, but saw no trolley.
‘I’ve never seen one of those trolleys in here before, now I come to think of it,’ said the girl, ‘but I just assumed the postmen had left it behind, or something.’
Fredrika made a sharp intake of breath.
‘Anyway, that was when I realized they didn’t know each other, the dog girl and the other one,’ the girl went on. ‘And as far as I could see, the dog girl wasn’t, like, with anyone else. I assumed that the person she’d come to meet hadn’t shown up, and she thought she’d better get a move on because the dog wasn’t well. Though in fact, it seemed poorly from the word go.’
Fredrika nodded slowly, but inside she felt a growing conviction that the woman with the dog had gone down onto the platform with the sole purpose of delaying Sara Sebastiansson, to make her miss the train.
‘Do you think the girl with the dog has anything to do with the kid who went missing?’ the girl in the ticket window asked curiously.
Fredrika forced herself to smile.
‘I don’t know,’ she said swiftly. ‘We’re just trying to have a word with everyone who might have seen something. Would you be able to give a clear description of the woman with the dog if I sent someone over to do an identikit drawing?’
The girl sat up straight and looked earnest.
‘Definitely,’ she said.
Fredrika took her contact details, and also asked for the phone number of the Swedish Railways control centre. She thanked the girl for her time and said she would be back later on that day.
She was just on her way out when the girl shouted after her:
‘Wait a minute!’
Fredrika turned round.
‘What about the little girl? Have you found her?’
There are pictures that speak a thousand words. And there are pictures you just don’t want to see, because you want nothing to do with the words associated with them. Those were the kind of pictures stored on Gabriel’s office computer. To avoid the risk of sounding the alarm for nothing, Peder looked at one of them. He instantly regretted it, and would regret it for the rest of his life.
The pictures were hidden in a folder labelled ‘Reports 2nd Quarter Version III’, the one that had caught Martin Ek’s attention. Having failed to find the report he needed anywhere else, he had opened this folder full of loathsome material that no normal person would wish ever to see.
In a taxi on the way back to HQ, Peder rang his colleagues to have another arrest warrant issued for Gabriel Sebastiansson, on a charge of child pornography. Gabriel would soon be detained in his absence and a nationwide hunt for him would be in progress. Analysis of the pictures – How would that happen? Who had the stomach to pore over vile stuff like that? – would show whether Gabriel was guilty of the sexual exploitation of children, or had contented himself with watching others do so. Inside Peder there was also a growing sense of horror that they might find pictures of Lilian, but he hadn’t yet dared to think the thought consciously.
He had had a word with Alex, who was just off the plane in Umeå, to inform him of developments.
‘We still don’t know where this takes us,’ Alex said circumspectly. ‘But something tells me we’re getting a bit closer.’
‘But this must bloody well mean we’ve got him?’ said an agitated Peder.
‘No mistakes now,’ Alex warned him. ‘Until we find Gabriel Sebastiansson, we’ve got to keep our minds open to possible alternatives. Fredrika will need to go through Sara’s acquaintances with a fine-toothed comb and see if any alternative suspects present themselves. And you can do the same on Gabriel’s side. Get all the skeletons out of his cupboard.’
‘Aren’t child porn and wife beating enough?’ objected Peder doubtfully.
Alex paused to heighten the effect of what came next.
‘When we find this man, Peder, there mustn’t be any doubts. No doubts at all, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Peder, and ended the call.
Then he rang Fredrika. He glanced out of the taxi window. The sun was still shining. Amazing.
Peder couldn’t stop himself sounding elated when Fredrika answered.
‘We’ve got him!’ he said, pressing the mobile to his ear in his exhilaration.
‘Who?’ Fredrika asked vaguely.
Peder was astonished and irritated.
‘We’ve got the father,’ he said exaggeratedly clearly, but avoided saying Gabriel’s name in the taxi.
‘All right,’ was all Fredrika said.
‘Child porn charges,’ Peder said in triumph, and saw the driver staring at him in the rearview mirror.
‘What?’ said Fredrika in surprise.
‘You heard what I said,’ said Peder, leaning back in satisfaction. ‘But we can talk about it back at HQ. Where are you, by the way?’
Fredrika didn’t respond straight away, and when she did, she said:
‘There was just something I had to check, but I’ll be back at work in fifteen minutes. I’ve got some news as well.’
‘Can hardly be anything of the same calibre as mine,’ sneered Peder.
‘See you,’ said Fredrika brusquely, and rang off.
Peder felt pleased with himself as he ended the call. This was police work at its best. The investigation team had done a great job, in actual fact. Okay, the girl had died. That undoubtedly had to be seen as a police failure. But still. Looking back, it seemed somehow inevitable, almost as if the job of the police had never been to save her. It had been to find the person who took her life. What Peder fixed on was that they seemed to have cleared up a macabre crime in no time at all. Soon, very soon, they would find Gabriel Sebastiansson. Peder would insist on being present at all the interrogations. Presumably Fredrika wouldn’t be trying to compete for that particular task.