‘The force needs an injection of top skills,’ was the explanation from certain individuals high up in the organization.
Fredrika had mentioned on several occasions what subject she had read at university, but to be honest, Peder couldn’t have cared less. She used too many words, with too many letters. She complicated things. She thought too much and felt too little. She simply wasn’t made of the right stuff for police work.
Peder could only admire the police union’s persistent opposition to the position and status that civilians had been given in the force. Without any relevant work experience whatsoever. Without the unique set of skills that can only be gained by learning police work from the bottom up. By spending at least a few years in the patrol car. Manhandling drunks. Talking to men who hit their wives. Giving pissed teenagers a lift home and facing their parents. Breaking into flats where lonely souls have died and just lain there, rotting.
Peder shook his head. He had more pressing things to think about than incompetent colleagues. He thought over the information he had garnered from talking to the train crew so far. Henry Lindgren, the conductor, talked too much, but he had a good eye for detail and there was certainly nothing wrong with his memory. The train left Gothenburg at 10.50. It reached Stockholm eight minutes after the time it was due, at 14.07.
‘I wasn’t the one in charge of the delay in Flemingsberg,’ Henry pointed out. ‘That was Arvid. And Nellie.’
He looked sadly at the train, still standing at the platform. All the doors were open, gaping like great dark holes along the side of the train. More than anything else on earth, Henry wished that the little girl would suddenly come stumbling out of one of those holes. That she had somehow lost her way on the train, gone back to sleep, and then woken up. But with all the certainty that only grown-up human beings can muster, Henry knew it wasn’t going to happen. The only people getting on and off the train were policemen and technicians. The whole platform had been cordoned off, and a fingertip search of the damp surface for traces of the missing child was in progress. Henry felt a lump in his throat that proved impossible to swallow.
Peder went on with the interview.
‘You say you were keeping an eye on the child; then what happened?’
Peder could see Henry literally shrink, as if he was ageing as he stood there on the platform, faced with explaining what had made him leave the girl.
‘It was hard, trying to be in lots of places at the same time,’ he said dejectedly. ‘Like I told you, there’d been trouble in several of the coaches, and I had to leave the girl and get to coach three, smartish. But I called Arvid on the two-way radio. I called him really loud, and I tried several times, but he never replied. I don’t think he can have heard. I didn’t seem to be getting through at all.’
Peder decided not to make any comment on Arvid’s behaviour.
‘So you left the child, and didn’t ask any of the passengers to keep an eye on her?’ he asked instead.
Henry threw out his arms in dramatic appeal.
‘I was only in the next carriage!’ he cried. ‘And I thought, yes I thought, I’ll be straight back. Which I was.’
His voice almost gave way.
‘I left the girl for less than three minutes, I was back the minute the train stopped and people started getting off. But she’d already gone. And nobody could remember seeing her get up and go.’
Henry’s voice was choked as he went on:
‘How’s that possible? How can nobody have seen a thing?’
Peder knew all too well how. Get ten people to witness the same crime and they will come up with ten different versions of what happened, the order it happened in, and what the perpetrators were wearing.
What was strange, on the other hand, was the way Arvid Melin had acted. First he let the train leave Flemingsberg without Sara Sebastiansson, and then he failed to answer Henry’s call.
Peder quickly sought out Arvid, who was sitting by himself on one of the seats on the platform. He seemed very twitchy. As Peder approached, he raised his eyes and said:
‘Can we go soon? I’ve got to be somewhere.’
Peder sat down beside Arvid deliberately slowly, fixed him with a look and replied:
‘A child’s gone missing. What have you got to do that’s more important than helping to find her?’
After that, Arvid uttered hardly a word that was not a direct answer to a direct question.
‘What did you say to passengers who asked you how long the train would be stationary at Flemingsberg?’ Peder asked sternly, finding he was addressing Arvid like some kind of schoolboy.
‘Don’t remember exactly,’ answered Arvid evasively.
Peder noted that Arvid, who must have been nearing thirty, responded in the way he expected his own kids would answer questions when they reached their teens.
‘Where are you going?’ ‘Out!’ ‘When will you be home?’ ‘Later!’
‘Do you remember a conversation with Sara Sebastiansson?’ Peder enquired.
Arvid shook his head.
‘No, not really,’ he said.
Peder was just wondering whether he could give Arvid a good shake, when he went on:
‘There were lots of people asking the same thing, see. I think I remember her, the girl’s mother, being one of them. People have to take a bit of responsibility for themselves,’ he said in a choked voice, and only then did Peder realize how shaken he really was. ‘It’s not a bloody promise that the train’s going to be stopped for ten minutes, just because we say so. All the passengers, all of them, want to get there as fast as possible. There’s never any problem about setting off earlier than we first said. Why did she leave the platform? If she’d been standing there, she’d have heard me make the announcement on the train.’
Arvid kicked an empty cola bottle that was lying at his feet. It bounced angrily against the train and went spinning across the platform.
Peder suspected both Arvid Melin and Henry Lindgren would be having some disturbed nights for a good time to come if the girl failed to turn up.
‘You didn’t see Sara Sebastiansson being left behind?’ Peder asked gently.
‘No, definitely not,’ said Arvid emphatically. ‘I mean, I looked along the platform, the way we usually do. It was empty, so we left. And then Henry says he called me on the two-way radio, but I didn’t hear… because I’d forgotten to switch it on.’
Peder looked up at the dark grey sky and shut his notebook.
He would just have a brief talk to the rest of the train crew and the others on the platform. If Fredrika had finished getting the mother’s statement, perhaps she would help him.
Peder saw Fredrika and Sara Sebastiansson out of the corner of his eye, exchanging a few words and then going their separate ways. Sara looked the picture of dejection. Peder swallowed. An image of his own family rose to the surface of his consciousness. What would he do if anyone tried to harm either of his children?
His grip on his notebook tightened. He would have to get a move on. There were more people to talk to and Alex did not like to be kept waiting.
They drove back to the HQ in Peder’s car. As the car swished along the rain-soaked tarmac, Fredrika and Peder were both lost in their own thoughts. They parked in the basement garage and took the lift in silence up to the floor where the team had its offices. Close to the county police and National Crime Squad’s base, close to the Stockholm Police Department. Nobody was ever willing to say it out loud, but Alex Recht’s investigative team most definitely served two masters. Well three, really. A special resources group, comprising a small number of hand-picked people of different background and experience, who on paper were part of the Stockholm police, but who in practice worked very closely with, and could be called upon by, both the national and county departments. It was a political solution to something that shouldn’t have been a problem.