‘Could you tell me more precisely what happened on the platform at Flemingsberg?’ Fredrika asked, hoping she was now steering the conversation in a direction Sara would feel more comfortable with.
Sara nodded several times but said nothing. Fredrika hoped she wasn’t going to start crying, because tears were something she found very hard to deal with. Not privately, but professionally.
‘I got off the train to make a call,’ Sara began hesitantly. ‘I rang a friend.’
Fredrika distracted by the rain, checked herself. A friend?
‘And why didn’t you ring from your seat?’
‘I didn’t want to wake Lilian,’ came Sara’s quick response.
A little too quick. What was more, she had told the policeman she spoke to earlier that she got off the train because she was in the so-called quiet coach.
‘She was so tired,’ whispered Sara. ‘We go to Gothenburg to visit my parents. I think she was getting a cold, she never sleeps for the whole journey usually.’
‘Ah, I see,’ said Fredrika, and paused for a minute before going on. ‘So it wasn’t that you didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation?’
Sara admitted it almost immediately.
‘No, I didn’t want Lilian to hear the conversation,’ she said quietly. ‘My friend and I have… only just met. And it would be a bad idea to let her find out about him at this stage.’
Because then she’d tell her dad, who was presumably still beating up her mum even though they’d separated, thought Fredrika to herself.
‘We only talked for a couple of minutes. Less than that, I think. I said we were almost there, and he could come round to my place later this evening, once Lilian was in bed.’
‘All right, and what happened next?’
Sara pulled her shoulders back and sighed heavily. The body language told Fredrika they were about to talk about something she found really painful to remember.
‘It made no sense at all, none of it,’ Sara said dully. ‘It was completely absurd.’
She shook her head wearily.
‘A woman came up to me. Or a girl, you might say. Quite tall, thin, looked a bit the worse for wear. Waving her arms and shouting something about her dog being sick. I suppose she came up to me because I was standing separately from the other people on the platform. She said she’d been coming down the escalator with the dog when it suddenly collapsed and started having a fit.’
‘A fit? The dog?’
‘Yes, that was what she said. The dog was lying there having a fit and she needed help to get it back up the escalator again. I’ve had dogs all my life, until a few years ago. And I could honestly see what a state the girl was in. So I helped her.’
Sara fell silent and Fredrika considered what she’d said, rubbing her hands together.
‘Didn’t you think about the risk of missing the train?’
For the first time in their conversation, Sara’s tone was sharp and her eyes blazed.
‘When I got off, I asked the conductor how long the train would be stopping there. He said at least ten minutes. At least.’
Sara held up her hands and spread her long, narrow fingers wide. Ten fingers, ten minutes. Her hands were shaking slightly. Her lower lip was quivering again.
‘Ten minutes,’ she whispered. ‘That was why I helped the girl shove the dog up the escalator. I thought – I knew – I had time.’
Fredrika tired to breathe calmly.
‘Did you see the train leave?’
‘We’d just got to the top of the escalator with the dog,’ said Sara, her voice unsteady. ‘We’d just got the dog back up when I turned round and saw the train starting to pull out.’
Her breathing was laboured and her eyes were on Fredrika.
‘I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes,’ she said, and a single tear ran down her cheek. ‘It was like being in a horror film. I ran down the escalator, ran like mad after the train. But it didn’t stop. It didn’t stop!’
Although Fredrika had no children of her own, Sara’s words aroused a genuine feeling of anguish in her.
She felt something akin to stomach ache.
‘One of the staff at Flemingsberg station helped me get in touch with the train. And then I took a taxi to Stockholm Central.’
‘What was the girl with the dog doing while this was happening?’
Sara wiped the corner of her eye.
‘It was a bit odd. She just sort of made off, all of a sudden. She bundled the dog up onto some kind of parcel trolley that had been left there at the top of the escalator, and went out through the station entrance. I didn’t see her after that.’
Sara and Fredrika stood for a while saying nothing, each absorbed in their own thoughts. It was Sara’s voice that broke the silence.
‘And you know what, I wasn’t really too worried once I’d got through to the train. It felt pretty irrational to get worked up about a little thing like Lilian being by herself for that last little bit of the journey from Flemingsberg to Stockholm.’
Sara moistened her lips, and then cried openly for the first time.
‘I even sat back in the taxi. Closed my eyes and relaxed. I relaxed while some bloody sick bastard took my little girl.’
Fredrika realized this was a pain she had no chance of alleviating. With great reluctance she did what she would never normally do: she reached out a hand and stroked Sara’s arm.
Then she realized it had stopped raining. Lilian had been missing for another hour.
It was trickier than Jelena had expected to get out of Flemingsberg by bus.
‘You mustn’t take the commuter train, you mustn’t take a taxi, you mustn’t drive,’ the Man had told her that very morning, as they went over every detail of the plan for the hundredth time. ‘You’re to go by bus. Bus to Skärholmen, then take the underground home. Understand?’
Jelena had nodded and nodded.
Yes, she understood. And she would do her very, very best.
Jelena felt at least ten anxious butterflies fluttering in her stomach. She hoped desperately that it had all worked. It simply had to work. The Man would be furious if he hadn’t managed to get the kid off the train.
She peered at her watch. It had taken more than an hour. The bus had been late, and then she’d had a wait for a tube train. She would soon be home and then she would know. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. She could never be really sure whether she was doing things right or wrong. Not until later, when the Man either praised her or told her off. Just recently she’d done almost everything right. It had even gone okay when she practised driving, and when she had to practise talking properly.
‘People have to be able to understand what you’re saying,’ the Man would tell her. ‘You don’t speak clearly. And you’ve got to stop your face twitching like that. It scares people.’
Jelena had had a real struggle, but in the end the Man had given her his seal of approval. All she had now was a slight twitch at the corner of one eye, and really only when she was nervous or unsure. When she was calm, it didn’t twitch at all.
‘Good girl,’ the Man said then, and patted her on the cheek.
Jelena felt all warm inside. She hoped for more praise when she got home.
The train got to her stop at last. It was all she could do not to rush out of the carriage and run all the way home. She must walk calmly and unobtrusively, so nobody would notice her. Jelena kept her eyes on the ground, and fiddled with a bit of her hair.
The rain was beating on the road when she came up out of the underground, impairing her vision. It didn’t matter – she saw him anyway. For a brief second, their eyes met. She thought he looked as if he was smiling.
A highly sceptical Peder Rydh observed Fredrika’s pathetic attempt to offer comfort. She was patting Sara Sebastiansson with the same reluctance as you would pat a dog you found utterly revolting, but had to pat because it belonged to a good friend. People like her had no business in the police force, where everything depended on how you handled people. Different sorts of people. All sorts. Peder gave an irritated sigh. It really had been a very bad idea to recruit civilians into the police.