What’s driving him, Fredrika thought to herself. What on earth is driving him?
Peder Rydh was heading back to Stockholm at the speed of light. Alex had rung with news of the second child’s disappearance just as he got to Norrköping. They agreed that the interview with Sara Sebastiansson’s ex-boyfriend should still go ahead. There was a microscopic chance, in spite of everything, that he was behind Lilian’s abduction, and had now taken another child to make it look as though Lilian had fallen victim to a serial killer rather than her mother’s former boyfriend.
But the instant Peder saw Sara’s ex, his hopes were dashed. In short, there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that the man Peder had before him in Norrköping could have kidnapped, scalped and murdered a little child. He had a few offences to his name, to be sure, and he admitted he had felt bitter about Sara for a surprisingly long time after they broke up, but it was a huge step from there to the murder of Sara’s child fifteen years later.
Peder gave a weary sigh. This was another day that hadn’t turned out the way he’d envisaged. But he was very glad indeed that it was Fredrika and not him who had been sent to Umeå. For one thing he felt too shattered for the journey, and for another it was good to have Fredrika out of the way now things were hotting up with another missing child.
Peder was not at all happy about the way the case was developing. It seemed to be moving beyond the stretch of his imagination. As long as they were working on the hypothesis that it was Lilian’s own father who had first taken and then murdered her, Peder had known what he was doing. The guilty party in cases like this was nearly always someone close to the victim. Nearly always. This was an indisputable fact that should inform every normal policeman’s thinking. There had been no other circumstances to take into consideration. There were no other children missing; there was no one else Sara was in conflict with.
Fredrika had been more flexible in her thinking virtually from the word go. She had identified Sara, rather than Gabriel, as the parent who must be linked to the murderer, and had tried to get them to consider alternatives to Gabriel as Lilian’s kidnapper. The fact that nobody had listened to her had unfortunately cost the investigation valuable time. Peder knew this to be the case, but he also knew he would never admit it out loud. Least of all to Fredrika.
But Peder was still doubtful whether they had ever had any reasonable chance of saving Lilian from her death. He didn’t think so. Even Sara Sebastiansson had not thought there could be anyone in the world who hated her so much that they would murder her daughter to punish her. So how could the detectives possibly understand the course of events?
And now another child was missing. Peder felt his guts churn. A baby. What normal person could possibly bring himself to hurt a baby? Naturally there was a simple answer to Peder’s question: anyone who you could imagine killing a baby or a child was not normal.
It distressed Peder to have to think it, but it did not seem likely that the investigation team would be able to find or save this child, either.
Peder slammed his fist down on the steering wheel.
What the hell was he thinking? It went without saying that they would do their utmost to find the child. But he felt instantly deflated again. Unfortunately it also went painfully without saying that if the murderer intended to kill child number two within fewer than twenty-four hours, too, then the team was not going to find it in time.
We’ll find it when he wants us to, Peder thought dejectedly. We’ll find it where he puts it, when he wants to show it to us.
The police could be heroes, but they could also be helpless. Peder wondered what he’d actually achieved that day. He thought he had the identity of the woman who had helped the man with the Ecco shoes. But what did that connect her to, in fact? She had behaved oddly with a dog at Flemingsberg station. Maybe to delay Sara Sebastiansson. She had tried to get a driving licence. Maybe to drive Lilian’s body to Umeå. There were too many maybes for comfort.
Peder swallowed. If she was who they thought she was, and had played the role in all this that they suspected she had, then it was absolutely vital to the investigation to find her and talk to her.
Alex had decided straight away to release Monika Sander’s name and picture to the press and issue an appeal for her to get in touch. Or anybody who knew who she was. And where she was. They would also ask Sara if she recognized the name or picture; there was always a chance that she might be able to confirm it was the same woman. They would ask the parents of the missing baby, too.
But both Alex and Peder were convinced that Monika Sander could hardly have been behind the baby’s disappearance. If the picture her foster mother had painted of her was not misleading, the plan was too precise and sophisticated for Monika to have conceived it and made everything happen at the right time. Yet she was still clearly a key figure in the story.
Peder shook his head. There was something he should have thought of, something he ought to be remembering.
The dryness in his throat persisted. He was thirsty but there was no time to stop to buy something to drink. Priority number one had to be to get back to Stockholm and get underway with the new investigation, to see if they could link it into the existing one.
There must be a connection. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the baby’s clothes and hair had been put in a box and left in the garden, or wherever it was. The details of Lilian’s abduction were still not known to the press; the team had not released them.
Peder had only one thought in his head as he neared Stockholm and saw the silhouette of the Globe Arena away to the east. If only they could find Monika Sander. And quickly.
The nurses in Ward Four of the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna, just outside Stockholm, had been instructed to be very gentle with the patient lying alone in Room Three. The young woman patient had been brought to A &E by ambulance during the night. Her neighbour had been woken by strange noises in the stairwell and had looked through the spyhole in his front door to see if it was burglars making the most of everyone being away for the summer. What he actually saw was the girl in the next-door flat lying on the landing floor, badly beaten up, with her feet still inside the flat and her body resting on the hard, marble floor.
He immediately rang for an ambulance and then sat on the landing to keep watch over the little slip of a girl, who was barely conscious as the ambulance crew lifted her onto the stretcher and carried her down the stairs.
The neighbour was asked what the girl was called.
‘Jelena, or something like that,’ he told them. ‘But the place isn’t hers. The actual owner hasn’t lived here for several years. The girl’s just the latest of all his sub-lets. There’s a man who stays here sometimes as well, but I don’t know his name.’
There was no name on the door of the flat. The injured woman mumbled something scarcely coherent when a paramedic gave her a gentle slap on the cheek and asked her what her name was. A nurse who had come with them thought she could make out a name. It sounded as if she was saying Helena.
Then the battered woman slipped into unconsciousness.
When she was seen on arrival at A &E, her injuries were assessed as extremely serious. Examination revealed her to have four broken ribs, contusions to her cheekbones, a dislocated jaw and several broken fingers. She had bruising to her entire body, and when an X-ray of her skull showed that her brain was swollen as a result of all the blows to her head, she was put in intensive care.
The hospital staff were taken aback by the sheer number of bruises, cuts and broken bones the patient had. What shocked them most of all were her burns. There were more than twenty, inflicted with what they assumed to be lighted matches. The thought of how painful the burns must be made the nurses’ flesh creep as they took it in turns to keep watch at the bedside.