‘How do you want things, Doll?’ he whispered, holding up the burning match in front of her wide, terrified eyes. ‘Can I rely on you?’
She nodded desperately, trying to get the sock out of her mouth.
He grabbed her by the hair and leant forward. The match was burning.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, bringing the match closer to the thin skin where her neck met her chest. ‘I’m really not sure.’
Then he lowered the match and let the flickering flame lick at her skin.
Alex Recht and Hugo Paulsson met Sara Sebastiansson and her parents in a so-called family room an hour or so after they had identified Lilian. Warm colours on the walls. Soft armchairs and sofas. Indian wood tables. No paintings, drawings or photos on the walls. But there was a bowl of fruit.
Alex scrutinized Sara.
Unlike when she had been given the box with the hair, and later the preliminary news of the death, she now seemed more composed. With the emphasis on ‘seemed’. Alex had met enough suffering, grieving people in his professional life to know that Sara had a very long road ahead of her before she got back to anything resembling a normal, everyday life. Bereavement had so many faces, so many phases. Somebody, Alex couldn’t remember who, had said it was as hard to bear intense grief as it was to walk on thin ice. One moment it feels all right, the next it suddenly gives way and you are suddenly plunged into the darkest darkness of pain.
Just at the moment, Sara seemed to be standing on a very small, but solid piece of ice. Alex felt he was viewing her from a distance. She was not really present, but not really absent, either. Her eyes were still red and puffy from crying, and she had a paper tissue in her hand. From time to time, her hand went up and wiped her nose with the tissue. The rest of the time, it lay motionless in her lap.
Her parents sat quietly, their eyes bright with moisture.
It was Hugo who broke the silence. First with the offer of coffee. Then with the offer of tea. And then with a promise that the interview would not take long.
‘We’re wondering why Lilian ended up here in Umeå,’ Alex began hesitantly. ‘Has the family got any connections in the town, or the area?’
At first no one said anything. Then Sara herself replied.
‘No, we’ve no connections here,’ she said quietly. ‘None at all. Nor has Gabriel.’
‘And you’ve never been here before?’ asked Alex, turning to look at Sara again.
She nodded. It was almost as if her head was not properly fixed to her neck, as it was wavering around in all directions.
‘Yes, once. My best friend Maria and I were here, the summer after we finished school,’ she whispered, and then cleared her throat. ‘But that was – let me see – seventeen years ago. I went on a writing course at a centre a little way outside the town, and then I got a summer job there as an assistant to one of the teachers. But I wasn’t here long, as I say, maybe three months in all.’
Alex regarded her thoughtfully. In spite of the fatigue and grief that seemed to envelop her whole face, he could see a very slight twitch in the corner of her eye as she spoke. There was something bothering her, something that had nothing to do with Lilian.
Her lower lip trembled a little and her chin was jutting out. Did she perhaps look a bit defiant, despite the tears welling in her eyes and threatening to overflow?
‘Did you make any new friends up here? Maybe a boy or something?’ Alex asked vaguely.
Sara shook her head.
‘Nobody at all,’ she said. ‘I mean, I met some nice people on the course, and some of them lived here in Umeå, and we saw each other a bit after I started working at the centre. But you know how it is, you go back home, and then it all seems so far away. I lost touch with most of them.’
‘And you didn’t make any enemies here?’ Alex asked kindly.
‘No,’ said Sara, and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘No, not one.’
‘And the friend you came with?’
‘Maria? No, nor did she. Not as far as I can remember. We don’t keep in touch these days.’
Alex leant back in his chair and indicated with a nod to Hugo that he was free to ask any questions he wanted. Alex and Hugo both felt a bit dubious about the link to the writing course, but to be on the safe side Hugo took down the names of all the other people on the course that Sara could remember. There was, after all, nothing else to go on as they tried to find out why the girl’s body had turned up in Umeå.
For now, the team in Umeå was working on the basis that the girl had been killed in Stockholm and that Alex’s team should therefore take the lead in the enquiry.
Hugo’s group had, however, collated all the information about the discovery of Lilian’s body. The telephone call that had initially lured Anne the nurse out into the car park had come from a mobile with an unregistered top-up account. The call had come from thirty kilometres south of Umeå. The phone had not been used since. No woman about to give birth had showed up at the hospital with her partner that night, so the investigating team assumed the call had only been made to get a member of staff out to the car park. Someone wanted the child to be found, without delay.
There was so much that baffled Alex about this case. And he felt very clearly that he wouldn’t be able to focus his mind on it properly where he was. He needed to get back to Stockholm as soon as possible, so he could sit down in peace and think things through. He felt a disturbing sense of anxiety. The story just didn’t fit together. It just didn’t.
Sara Sebastiansson’s husky voice broke into his thoughts.
‘I never regretted having her,’ she whispered.
‘Pardon?’ said Alex.
‘It said “Unwanted” on her forehead. But it wasn’t true. I never regretted having her. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.’
Fredrika spent the rest of the day trying to get through as many interviews as possible with Sara Sebastiansson’s friends, acquaintances and colleagues, using the contact details supplied by Sara and her parents. The list had expanded as a result of the first ring round. She allocated some of the people on the list to the extra investigator.
It was an unambiguous picture of Sara that emerged. She was basically seen as a very warm and positive person, a good person. Almost everyone, even those not so close to her, thought her private situation had been very difficult for the past few years. Her husband was inconsiderate and inflexible, cold and controlling. Sometimes she was limping when she came to work, and sometimes she wore long-sleeved tops even in the middle of summer. They couldn’t be sure, of course… but… how many times could a person accidentally trip and hurt herself?
None of the people Fredrika and her assistant spoke to recognized Teodora Sebastiansson’s picture of Sara as an irresponsible mother and unfaithful wife. But one of Sara’s closest friends told them Gabriel had been cheating on Sara with other women from the very start. She was crying as she spoke, and said:
‘You see, we all thought she’d get away from him, find the strength to leave him. But then she got pregnant. And then we knew, then we knew almost for sure that the game was up. She would never be rid of him.’
‘But she left him, didn’t she?’ asked Fredrika, frowning. ‘They’re getting divorced.’
Sara’s friend cried even harder, and shook her head.
‘None of us really believe that. People like him always come back. Always.’
One thing Fredrika picked up on in the course of the interviews was that even the individuals Sara referred to as ‘friends from way back’ turned out to be people she had got to know in adult life. She had not retained a single friend from when she was growing up in Gothenburg. To judge by the list, her parents were the only contacts she had on the west coast.
‘Sara once told me she had to break off with almost everybody once she met Gabriel,’ her friend explained. ‘The rest of us got to know Sara and Gabriel as a couple, pre-packaged, but I think Sara’s friends from before could never accept that she was with him.’