‘Monika came to us when she was thirteen,’ Birgitta began her story. ‘It was rather different being a foster parent in those days. There weren’t as many children in need of a new home as there are nowadays, and the general view was that a bit of love and tolerance could solve most problems.’
Birgitta gave a slight sigh and pulled her coffee cup towards her.
‘But it wasn’t like that with Monika,’ she sighed. ‘Monika was what my husband called damaged, not entirely normal. To look at these pictures, you might think she was almost like anyone else. A blonde girl with lovely eyes and delicate features. But inside, she didn’t function. Wrongly programmed, you might say these days, if you worked with computers.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Peder, leafing through the album.
More pictures of Monika and her foster parents. Monika was not smiling in a single one. But Birgitta was right. She had nice eyes and fine facial features.
‘Her background was so dreadful that looking back, we hardly understood how we could have taken her on in the first place,’ said Birgitta, resting her head in her hands. ‘Though I can honestly say we weren’t given the full picture until after disaster struck. And by then it was too late. More coffee?’ she said.
Peder looked up from the album.
‘Yes please,’ he said automatically. ‘Where’s your husband, by the way?’
‘He’s at work,’ answered Birgitta. ‘But he’ll be back in an hour or two if you’d like to stay and eat with us this evening.’
Peder had to smile.
‘That’s kind of you, but I’m afraid I won’t have time.’
Birgitta smiled back.
‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘because you seem such a nice lad.’
She reached for the coffee jug and poured some for them both.
‘Where was I?’ she said, and supplied the answer herself. ‘Oh yes, the girl’s background.’
She got up and went out to the hall again. She came back with a file.
‘This is where my husband and I kept all the information we were given about our foster children,’ she said proudly, putting the file in front of Peder. ‘You see, we couldn’t have any children ourselves, so we decided to foster instead.’
She had a rather satisfied expression as she flicked through the file for Peder.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is what social services sent us before she came. The rest was classified, so I’ve no copies of that.’
Peder pushed the photograph album to one side and read the papers from the social service department.
13-year-old girl, Monika Sander, from a very unsettled background, requires immediate placement with a loving family within a stable, structured framework. The child’s mother lost custody when Monika was three, and has had very limited contact with her since.
Monika was taken into care as a result of her mother’s alcohol and drug addiction problems. The mother has had a succession of male sexual partners since the girl’s birth, and is probably a prostitute. The father disappeared off the scene at a very early stage when he was killed in a car crash. The mother’s problems began after the father’s accident.
The girl was in her first foster home for three years. The foster parents then separated and the girl could not be kept on. She went through a succession of short-stay fostering arrangements until she was eight, and then lived in a children’s home for a year. She was then placed in a foster home that was expected to offer her a long-term solution.
The girl’s schooling has been disrupted from a very early stage by her difficult circumstances. There were suspicions that she had been abused, but investigations could not substantiate this. Monika has found it difficult to socialize with other children. From her third school year, she has been receiving individual remedial tuition, and has been placed in a special class with only six pupils. This has worked relatively well, though it is still not entirely satisfactory.
Peder read two more pages detailing how the girl’s schooling had fallen by the wayside. By the time she came to live with the Frankes, she had already been arrested once, on suspicion of shoplifting and theft.
His thoughts flew at once to the woman in Jönköping. Hadn’t she, too, grown up in a succession of foster homes?
‘I see,’ he said when he had finished reading. ‘And you mean there was other information you and your husband should have been given, apart from all this?’
Birgitta nodded and took a few sips of coffee.
‘We meant so well,’ she said, looking Peder in the eye. ‘We thought we could be the support the girl needed in life. And God knows we tried. But it was all futile.’
‘Did you have other foster children here at the same time?’ Peder asked, thinking of the boy in some of the photographs.
‘No,’ said Birgitta. ‘If it’s the young man in the photos you’re thinking of, that’s my nephew. He was the same age as Monika, so we thought they might enjoy each other’s company. And they were due to go to the same school.’
Birgitta gave a faint smile.
‘It didn’t work, of course. My nephew was very tidy and organized even at that age. He couldn’t stand her, said she was nuts, disturbed.’
‘Because she stole stuff?’
‘Because she was frightened of odd things,’ said Birgitta. ‘She found any kind of social occasion difficult and made herself scarce. She could be angry and all over you one minute and collapse into a tearful little heap the next. She had violent nightmares about her past; she’d wake up in the middle of the night, yelling. Drenched with sweat. But she never told us what she’d been dreaming, we could only imagine.’
Peder felt weary. That was the obvious drawback to police work: you hardly ever got to talk to, or about, easy-going, unproblematic people.
‘How long was she with you?’ he asked.
‘Two years,’ Birgitta told him. ‘Then we’d had enough. She gave up going to school almost entirely; she would disappear for long periods and then turn up and not tell us where she’d been. And then there were her various illegal activities: stealing, smoking hash.’
‘Boyfriends?’ Peder asked.
‘I never met any, but of course she had boyfriends.’
Peder frowned.
‘And what was it you wish they’d told you before you took her on?’
Birgitta crumpled.
‘That she was originally adopted,’ she said quietly.
‘Sorry?’
‘That the woman who was identified as her mother in the social services report you just read wasn’t Monika’s biological mother. Monika was adopted.’
‘But how on earth could a woman like that get approval to adopt?’ Peder asked in bewilderment.
‘Because what the report says is true: the adoptive mother’s problems only started when her husband died. Or quite possibly they started much earlier, but until then she was living a perfectly normal life with a home, a job, a car. Then things went rapidly downhill. The mother had apparently moved in some pretty socially unacceptable circles when she was younger, and she drifted back to them when she was left alone with the girl and lost her job.’
‘Where did Monika come from originally?’ asked Peder.
‘Somewhere in the Baltic states,’ replied Birgitta, and then shook her head. ‘I don’t quite remember which country, or the exact circumstances of the adoption.’
Peder’s brain was working furiously to process all this new information.
‘Who told you? That she was adopted?’
‘One of the case workers,’ Birgitta sighed. ‘But I never saw it in black and white. The social service department really mismanaged the whole Monika case. They should have intervened much sooner in her life. You could say she was doubly let down: first by her biological mother and then by her adoptive one.’
Birgitta hesitated.
‘And then maybe by another foster family, too,’ she said, ‘but that isn’t clear.’