‘You rang and said you thought you’d seen this woman,’ he said briskly, putting the drawing of the Flemingsberg woman on the counter separating him from the other man.
The man studied the picture.
‘Yes, that looks like her, the one who was here.’
‘When was she here?’ Peder asked.
The car hire man frowned and opened a large desk diary he had in front of him.
‘Is she the one who murdered the kid?’ he asked insensitively. ‘Is that why you’re looking for her?’
‘She’s not under suspicion for anything,’ Peder said rapidly. ‘We just want to talk to her; she might have seen something of interest to us.’
The man nodded as he looked through the calendar.
‘Here’, he said, stabbing a fat finger onto the open page. ‘That’s when she was here.’
Peder leant forward. The man turned the calendar round. He had his finger on the left-hand page. June the seventh.
Peder’s spirits fell.
‘What makes you remember it was that day?’ he said dubiously.
‘Because it was the day I was having my goddamned wisdom tooth taken out,’ said the car hirer, looking very pleased with himself as he drummed on a straggly doodle on the page. ‘I was just going to close the shop and go to the hospital when she came in.’
He leant over the desk with a glitter in his eye that made Peder feel very uncomfortable.
‘Petrified little beggar,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘Stood staring around her like a little animal caught in the car headlights. Those ones that never shift even though the danger’s right on top of them. That’s the way she looked.’
He gave a short, coarse laugh.
Peder ignored the other man’s attitude, though he suspected some of what had just been said ought to be stored away in his mind for future reference.
‘Which car did she hire, and how long for?’ he asked.
The man seemed nonplussed.
‘Eh?’ he said, eyeing Peder in confusion. ‘Whaddya mean, which car? She didn’t want a car.’
‘Didn’t she?’ said Peder, looking foolish. ‘What did she want, then?’
‘She wanted a driving licence. But that was before I’d started that business, so I told her to come back at the beginning of July. But she never turned up again.’
Peder’s brain was working overtime.
‘She wanted a driving licence?’ he echoed.
‘Yep,’ said the car hirer, slamming his desk diary shut.
‘Did she give her name?’ Peder asked, though he already knew the answer.
‘No, why should she? I couldn’t put her down for lessons. I hadn’t got the paperwork sorted by then.’
Peder sighed.
‘Do you remember anything else about her visit?’
‘No, only what I’ve already told you,’ said the car hirer, massaging his beard with one hand and his belly with the other. ‘She was scared shitless, and she looked washed out. Her hair must’ve been dyed, it was so dark it didn’t look natural. Almost black. And someone had been knocking her about.’
Peder pricked up his ears.
‘There were bruises on her face,’ the man went on, indicating his left cheek. ‘Not new ones, more the sort that’ve been there a while, know what I mean? Looked quite nasty. Must’ve been painful.’
Neither of them said anything. The door behind Peder opened and a customer came in. The car hirer waved to the man to wait.
‘I’m just going,’ said Peder. ‘Anything else you can remember?’
The car hirer gave his beard a vigorous scratch.
‘No, only that she talked strangely.’
‘Talked strangely?’ repeated Peder.
‘Mmmm. It was kind of disjointed. I s’pose it was because she’d been beaten up. Women usually learn to hold their tongues then.’
Once Peder and Fredrika had left HQ, the same feeling descended on Alex that he used to get when his children still lived at home and had gone round to a friend’s for the evening. It was so quiet and peaceful.
Peder and Fredrika were not the only ones who worked on the same corridor as Alex, far from it, but he still had a palpable sense of their absence, which he sometimes found a positive blessing.
His wife rang him on his mobile.
‘So what about this holiday?’ she asked. ‘In view of this case you’re working on, I mean. The travel agent rang about confirmation and payment.’
‘We’ll get our holiday, don’t worry,’ was all Alex said.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Do I generally lie about things like that?’
He smiled, and knew she was smiling back.
‘Will you be late home this evening?’
‘Probably.’
‘We could have a barbecue,’ Lena suggested.
‘We could go to South America.’
Alex was surprised to hear himself utter the words. But he didn’t take them back, just left them hanging there between them.
‘What did you say?’ asked Lena at length.
Alex felt his throat go dry.
‘I said we should go and visit our son, who lives there, sometime. So he knows we still want to be part of his life.’
Alex’s wife took a little while to respond.
‘Yes, we certainly should,’ she said softly. ‘This autumn, perhaps?’
‘This autumn, perhaps.’
Love for a child wasn’t like anything else, thought Alex when they had rung off. Love for a child was so fundamental, so unnegotiable. Alex sometimes thought it was actually love for the children that had made it possible for him and Lena to be married for nearly thirty years. What else explained the way they’d come through every setback, every spell of dreary, day-to-day boredom?
Admittedly Alex was the boss, but he was aware of the gossip circulating in the corridor. He knew what they said about Peder, that he had a woman in the Södermalm force. Alex had never been unfaithful to his wife, but he could still visualize quite easily how a situation like that could arise.
If you were really, really down. If you were really, really weighed down with a huge burden of problems.
But not when you had young children at home, as Alex knew Peder did. And definitely not with a work colleague and so indiscreetly that other people noticed. That was low and irresponsible.
Alex felt a stab of irritation. Young people were so spoilt these days. He knew he sounded old-fashioned and even a bit reactionary, but he had some genuine objections to young people’s way of viewing the world, and what they expected from it. Life was supposed to be one long walk in the park with no obstacles in your way. The world had turned into an enormous playground where anybody could play wherever they fancied. Could Alex have done what his son was doing? Could he have moved to South America? No, he could not. And that was just as well, because if you had options like that open to you, how could your spirit ever settle? You would be bound to end up like Peder.
Alex was starting to feel guilty about sitting there, thinking. He had no business having opinions on how his colleague lived his life. But still. He was thinking of Peder’s wife and children. Why wasn’t Peder doing that?
His gloom was dispelled somewhat by a call from Peder. There was at least something driven in that voice, something to tell Alex that Peder liked what he did in his days at work. It was hard to see that as anything but positive.
But this time his young colleague sounded less than happy.
‘The only new thing we’ve found out is that she tried to get a driving licence,’ he said morosely. ‘Even assuming it’s her.’
Alex stopped Peder in his tracks.
‘We also know she gets beaten up at regular intervals, which indicates pretty strongly that we’ve found the right girl. And the right man,’ he said firmly, and went on rather more eagerly. ‘Just think about it, Peder. The girl who was murdered in Jönköping had had protected identity since she broke up with a man who abused her. When she was on the phone to Ellen, she talked about some kind of campaign, about the man wanting to punish certain women. Just suppose that lunatic’s found himself another girl as a partner and assistant. Another girl whose life has gone off the rails – way off – and who for some reason falls for this man. If, and I mean if, it’s the man who took Lilian that murdered the girl in Jönköping, then we also know he must have had help to get Lilian – dead or alive – to Umeå, since he can hardly have been in two places at once. And that means it would have been very handy if his sidekick could pass her driving test in time.’