‘Okay,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll see how Peder’s fixed. He’s on his way to Nyköping at the moment to interview the woman who claims the Flemingsberg woman was her foster child.’
‘Nyköping!’ exclaimed Fredrika. ‘Well, that’s on the way.’
Alex took a deep breath.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Peder straight away. Has Ellen got the crook’s details?’
‘Yes,’ Fredrika confirmed.
‘Fine. Let me know when you’ve landed,’ said Alex.
Then he just sat there with the receiver in his hand. For the first time since Fredrika Bergman had joined his team, she was displaying a bit of enthusiasm for her job. Until now she’d just sat there looking self-conscious, full of objections. Alex thought she even sounded as if she was enjoying what she was doing.
It went against the grain to admit it, but the fact was, Fredrika had been the first of them to see the lead that had got the investigation to where it was now. Not that the others couldn’t have found it without her, but she had actually been faster. She was quick to identify connections in the vast array of information that Alex generally needed longer to digest. On the other hand – if Gabriel Sebastiansson had been the culprit, Fredrika would have been the last person in the group to pick it up. And that was hardly encouraging.
Alex peered at a diagram he had made of what they knew, and felt his spirits sink.
Regardless of how they had got to this point in their enquiries:
What did they really know for certain?
Alex felt they could be virtually sure that there were two perpetrators, not just one. The woman with the dog in Flemingsberg, and the man with the Ecco shoes. He looked at Ellen’s note of the call from the woman in Jönköping. Nora. If it was the same woman. Alex gave a sigh of frustration. What the hell, he’d work on the assumption that it was.
Ellen had written that the woman seemed confused. She was scared, and she rang in a hurry, Alex interpreted.
The woman had said she thought the perpetrator was someone with whom she had been in a relationship. Someone who often hit her. Alex’s thoughts went automatically to what Peder had said after his visit to the car hire firm. The Flemingsberg woman had been knocked about, too. Ellen had also jotted down a few little quotes. The woman had said the man was waging some kind of battle and wanted the woman to be part of it. ‘The women weren’t to be allowed to keep their children, because they didn’t deserve to.’ Hmm. Alex read on. ‘The women didn’t deserve their children, because if you don’t like all children, you shouldn’t be allowed to have any at all.’
No beating about the bush there, Alex thought grimly.
He did not understand what he was reading. What did it mean: ‘if you don’t like all children’? It goes without saying that people don’t like all children equally. And above all, that there are no children you like better than your own, Alex reasoned.
He read Ellen’s note again. The women had to be punished, the women couldn’t be allowed to keep… The women? His stomach knotted.
‘You’re wrong, Fredrika,’ he mumbled to himself.
The man’s fury was not directed only at Sara Sebastiansson. Not if what the woman in Jönköping said was true. The man’s fury was directed at a number of women. Women who didn’t like all children equally. And if the woman in Jönköping was telling the truth, the man had tried to put his plan into action earlier, but not carried it through.
What’s this madness, thought Alex. And who are the other women?
It had taken Magdalena Gregersdotter several years to start feeling at home in Stockholm. So she and her husband had put off having a family until she felt a bit more settled in her new hometown.
‘I don’t want any children until I feel as if I’ve got a social network of my own to fall back on,’ Magdalena said firmly.
Torbjörn, her husband, went along with it of course. For one thing, he always did, and for another, he knew better than to insist on starting a family when the prospective mother didn’t feel ready for it.
But things did not really go the way they had planned. When they eventually did launch their baby project, it turned out they could not have any children. They tried on their own for a whole year – oh how they hated that word ‘tried’ – and then spent the following year having tests. Then another year of ‘trying’. They endured eleven rounds of IVF treatment in all. Then Magdalena suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
‘To hell with it,’ she wept in her hospital bed. ‘I can’t take any more of this.’
Nor could Torbjörn, so they took some unpaid leave and went round the world for six months. Then they decided to adopt.
‘But then it won’t really be yours,’ Torbjörn’s mother said.
It was the only time in her life Magdalena considered hitting another person.
‘Of course she’ll be ours,’ Magdalena hissed emphatically.
And of course, she was. Torbjörn and Magdalena travelled to Bolivia, returning one March day with Natalie, and not a single day had passed since without Magdalena waking with a smile on her lips. It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud, but it was completely true, all the same. It was also true that she was now no longer dreading her imminent fortieth birthday, not even a bit.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Torbjörn had whispered into her ear that morning.
‘Of course I am. I’m young, you know,’ she had responded.
Anyone with young children must be young, too, the way Magdalena saw it. And little Natalie still hadn’t turned one, so by that token, Magdalena must be especially young.
In retrospect, she could not remember why she had suddenly felt the urge to look at Natalie. Though Natalie was growing fast, she still slept outside in her pram every day. First Magdalena would take her out for a walk in the pram to get her off to sleep, and then she would park it in the little patch of garden that went with the ground-floor flat. The garden was shielded from view by a tallish hedge that Torbjörn had fortified still further with a little fence.
So Magdalena felt comfortable leaving Natalie asleep in her pram. She always left the garden door open, and she always had a baby monitor in the pram. Through it, she could hear if even a tiny bird hopped near the pram, and the faintest sound that should not have been there. Maybe it was such a sound that suddenly alerted her attention and caused her to worry. Maybe it was such a sound that made her cover the distance between the kitchen and the garden so quickly.
She saw the pram through the glass door as she approached and slowed her steps.
A little gust of wind crept in at the open door and the long, linen curtains stirred. A flower petal dropped from a potted plant and floated gently to the floor. Later, it was these two details she would remember most vividly, and never forget.
Magdalena bent over the pram. It was empty. As if in a trance, she straightened up and ran her eyes along the hedge and beyond. There was nobody to be seen.
Where was Natalie?
Peder Rydh trekked round Söder from one driving school to the next. He found two other people who thought they could identify the woman in the picture, but nobody could say for sure. Peder, however, felt pretty confident they had all encountered the same woman, since their accounts were identical. For one thing, she had seemed nervous. For another, she had bruises on her face and arms. And for a third, she wanted to know the quickest possible way to get a driving licence. Both driving school proprietors had suggested an intensive course, but when she realized it was a residential course, several days in length and in another town, she had immediately lost interest. She couldn’t get the time off work, she said. And left.
What the hell did she need a driving licence for? Peder thought, feeling frustrated. So she could take the body to Umeå while her sick boyfriend went off to Jönköping to snuff out an old flame?