Ingeborg surveyed the big, white house. It was attractive and a good size. There were enough rooms to accommodate all the children and grandchildren when they came to visit, but was still compact enough to retain its charm and the sense of really being someone’s home. Their home.
‘Johannes!’ Ingeborg called into the quietness of the garden.
Johannes almost overbalanced at the sound of Ingeborg’s shout, and she laughed.
‘I was just going to say: I’m going in for a minute to get a drink. Would you like one, too?’
Johannes gave that slightly lopsided smile, so familiar to her throughout their married life. For thirty-five years, to be exact.
‘A glass of the strawberry cordial would be nice.’
Ingeborg got slowly to her feet, her knees protesting slightly. When she was young, she had never considered that her body would feel weaker and frailer one day.
‘What a summer we’ve had,’ she said under her breath as she stepped into the house from the terrace.
Then she froze. Afterwards she couldn’t really explain why she had stopped just there, just then. Or how she had sensed without going any further that something was wrong.
She walked slowly through the guest room that gave onto the terrace, and out into the corridor between the four bedrooms. She looked left, where the bedrooms were, but nothing was moving. She looked right, towards the main hall, the kitchen and the living room. She could see nothing strange or out of the ordinary there, either. Yet she still knew that someone had been there, that her home had been violated.
She shook her head. What a ridiculous thought; was she getting paranoid in her old age?
She regained control of her thoughts and her home by striding off to the kitchen and making two big glasses of cordial for herself and her husband.
She was just on her way out with the little tray when she decided it would be as well to pop to the toilet while she was in. She just couldn’t fathom how Johannes had managed to go for so long without a pee.
The bathroom was at the far end of the house, beyond the bedrooms. Afterwards, she couldn’t really remember how she got there. She only remembered putting the tray down and being aware that she needed to go to the loo. Whether she remembered it or not, she must have gone from the kitchen to the hall, and along the corridor to the bathroom. Put her hand on the handle, pressed it down, opened the door, turned the light on.
She saw the baby straight away. It was lying naked on the bathroom mat, curled up in a foetal position.
For a few seconds, Ingeborg did not really understand what she was seeing. She had to step forward and bend down. Automatically her hand went out to touch the baby. It was only when her fingers made contact with the hard, cold body that she started to scream.
Fredrika Bergman got the call about the discovery of the dead baby at the elderly couple’s house just as she was being served tea by Margareta Andersson, grandmother of Nora who had been found murdered in Jönköping. Fredrika had to excuse herself and go out onto the balcony.
‘On a bathroom mat?’ she repeated.
‘Yes,’ said Alex grimly, ‘in a house in Bromma. With the same word on her forehead. I’m heading there now. Peder’s on his way to see some psychologist.’
Fredrika frowned.
‘All this must have really got to him, then?’
Alex gave a chuckle of surprise.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s for the case. He decided we could do with the help of one of those profilers, and it would be good if he could get us one.’
Alex was expressing himself so badly and casually that Fredrika thought he must have been drinking. ‘One of those profilers’ and ‘some psychologist’. They didn’t grow on trees.
‘He read about him in the paper,’ Alex explained. ‘That’s what gave him the idea.’
‘Read about who?’ Fredrika asked, at a loss.
‘An American profiler who works for the FBI is over here lecturing to some behavioural science scientists at the university,’ Alex said, more controlled now. ‘Peder was going to try to arrange a meeting with him through some friend of his who’s on the course.’
‘Okay,’ Fredrika said slowly.
‘Is everything all right your end?’ Alex asked.
‘Yes, fine. I’ll get back to Stockholm as soon as I’ve finished here.’
She was silent for a moment.
‘But why ever should the baby turn up in Bromma?’ she went on.
‘You mean he’s breaking the pattern?’
‘I don’t know about any pattern,’ mumbled Fredrika. ‘Maybe we’ve just been imagining there was a clear link to Umeå.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Alex. ‘But I do think we need to find a better common denominator.’
‘A common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland,’ Fredrika sighed.
‘Yes, that’s our second challenge,’ Alex said firmly. ‘To try to understand the connection between the bathroom in Bromma and the A &E department at Umeå hospital. Assuming the geography has any relevance at all, that is.’
If the situation hadn’t been so grave, Fredrika would have allowed herself to laugh.
‘Are you there?’ Alex asked, when she said nothing.
‘Sorry, I was just thinking. What’s our first challenge?’ Fredrika responded. ‘You said the connections were the second one.’
‘Finding Monika Sander,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t think we’re going to understand a bloody thing about this whole mess until we talk to her.’
Fredrika couldn’t help smiling, but immediately felt guilty. She felt awful, smiling when a baby had just been found dead.
‘Okay,’ she said soberly. ‘We’ll just have to do our best.’
‘You bet your life we will,’ Alex said with a sigh.
Fredrika put her mobile away and returned to the flat. She apologized to her hostess.
‘I’m sorry. I had to take that call.’
Margareta nodded to show she accepted the apology.
‘Have you found the baby now, as well?’ she asked, to Fredrika’s astonishment.
‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, after a pause. ‘Yes, we have. But it isn’t official yet, so I’d really appreciate it if…’
Margareta gave a dismissive wave of the hand.
‘Of course I won’t say anything,’ she said. ‘And I don’t talk to anybody anyway, except Tintin.’
‘Tintin?’ Fredrika echoed.
‘My cat,’ grinned Margareta, and indicated a seat for Fredrika at the table laid with teacups and a plate of sliced bun loaf.
Fredrika liked Margareta’s voice. It was deep and throaty, dark yet still feminine. Margareta herself was as broad-shouldered as a wrestler. She was not fat or heavy looking, but simply stable in the purest sense of the word. Safe was another word that came spontaneously into Fredrika’s mind.
She automatically ran over all the information she had had from the Jönköping police about Nora, the murdered woman. Spent her childhood in various foster homes; mental problems; recurring periods of sick leave. In a relationship with the man suspected of having murdered her, Lilian Sebastiansson and now the baby. Moved from Umeå to Jönköping. Held down a job, looked after a home, but had no family and few acquaintances.
Fredrika decided to start from the beginning.
‘How did Nora come to be in a foster home?’
Nora’s grandmother grew very still. So still that Fredrika thought she could hear Tintin purring as he lay there in his basket.
‘Do you know what, I wondered that, too,’ she said slowly.
Then she took a deep breath and laid her wrinkled old hands in her lap. She plucked at the hem of her frock. The fabric was red and brown. To Fredrika’s mind, it was definitely a winter frock.