The woman seemed relieved that he understood what she was saying.
‘But you don’t know where he works?’
She shook her head, looking very miserable.
Peder racked his brains.
‘Do you know what sort of car he drives?’
The woman thought. She seemed to be trying to frown, but her face muscles refused to obey her. She must be in dreadful pain, thought Peder.
‘Diff… rent,’ she whispered at last.
Peder waited.
‘Hardly… ever… the same…’
Peder was taken aback. Did the guy go round in stolen cars, or just hire one when he needed to?
‘Work… car…?’
‘You think he uses different cars from work?’
‘He said… so…’
He’d clearly lied about everything else, so why not lie about his car, too, thought Peder in frustration.
‘Where did you meet him?’ he asked curiously. ‘The very first time, I mean.’
His question prompted an immediate reaction from the woman in the bed. She turned her head away, with a look of what seemed to be anger. Peder waited a few moments and decided not to force it.
‘Maybe you don’t want to talk about that part?’ he said tentatively.
The woman shook her head.
Alex shifted slightly on the other side of the room, but said nothing.
Peder decided to focus on the woman from Jönköping and what she said when she rang the police anonymously. It should have occurred to him at the start that she was the obvious starting point for the interview.
He began a little hesitantly.
‘We think the man who beat you up might have done the same to other women, too.’
Jelena Scortz, exhausted, rested her head back against the pillow, but her eyes were following him with interest.
‘We think he approaches women and asks them to join him in some kind of battle or campaign.’
The woman dropped her eyes but even Peder, with no medical expertise, could see the colour draining from her face. The nurse made an impatient movement and tried to catch Peder’s eye. He avoided her gaze.
‘It’s terribly, terribly important that we find him,’ Peder said, trying not to sound too stern.
After a pause, he went on:
‘It’s absolutely vital that we find him before any more children get abducted and murdered.’
The woman gave a whimper and started to toss helplessly in the bed.
‘I really think…’ began the nurse, stroking Jelena’s hair over and over again.
Delicately, delicately, so as not to hurt her.
Peder, however, felt very satisfied with the reaction he had elicited from Jelena. He knew now that she was implicated. In Lilian’s disappearance, at the very least.
He moved over and sat on the edge of the bed. Jelena refused to look at him.
‘Jelena,’ he said gently, ‘we do know you must have been forced into all this.’
That wasn’t true, either, but it didn’t matter at the moment. The main thing was to get Jelena to calm down, which she did.
‘I need all the information I can get,’ Peder pleaded. ‘How does he locate these children? How does he pick them?’
Jelena was breathing in a strange, jerky way. She still wasn’t looking at him, or at the nurse.
‘How does he pick them?’
‘Their… mothers.’
The answer came so softly that he could hardly hear what she was saying. Yet he had no trouble at all in understanding what she said.
‘Right,’ he said, hoping she would have something to add.
But she said nothing, so he asked:
‘Are they women he knew before? How does he find them?’
She turned her head slowly until she was looking straight at him again. He felt a chill run through him as he saw how dark her eyes were.
‘You don’t… choose,’ she hissed. ‘You love… all the ones… you get. Or none… of them.’
Peder swallowed, several times.
‘Don’t choose what?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand, what is it you don’t choose?’
‘The… children,’ Jelena whispered feebly, and her head lay still on the pillow again. ‘You… have to… love… them all.’
With that, Jelena lapsed into silence, and Peder realized the interview was at an end.
Fredrika was surprised to see that the investigation team corridor was such a hive of activity when she got back to HQ. She located Alex and Peder in the Den. Mats, the analyst from the National Crime Squad, was there – hadn’t he had enough yet? – along with another man whom Fredrika didn’t recognize. She said hello and introduced herself.
‘Fredrika Bergman.’
‘Excuse me?’
Rather taken aback, Fredrika said her name again in what she hoped was a less Swedish-sounding way. The man got it that time, and introduced himself as Stuart Rowland. He took a seat again on the chair that was unobtrusively positioned in one corner of the room.
Peder sprang to his feet when he saw Fredrika introduce herself to the mysterious Stuart Rowland. He explained in English why their visitor was there.
‘Dr Rowland is a psychologist, a so-called profiler,’ he explained in a voice almost quivering with reverence. ‘He has promised to give us the benefit of his knowledge at our meeting.’
As if the Pope himself were paying them a visit, thought Fredrika.
Peder turned to Fredrika and asked her discreetly, in Swedish:
‘I hope you won’t feel uncomfortable if we hold the first part of the meeting in English?’
When she realized he meant the question seriously, she felt her cheeks start to turn crimson.
‘As long as the meeting’s in English, German, French or Spanish, I’ll be absolutely fine,’ she said with a stiff smile.
Peder blinked, completely failing to grasp the implication of her words.
‘Great,’ he said, and sat down again.
Alex, observing Peder and Fredrika from a distance, allowed himself a smile.
‘Fredrika, I’m glad you’re back in time for the meeting. Take a seat, and we can start.’
Fredrika, who had not realized until that moment she was the only one they were waiting for, sat down. Ellen gave her a little grin and pushed the door of the Den shut with her foot.
Every investigation has its critical moment. Alex had a distinct feeling the violent investigation in which he was currently embroiled had reached precisely that point. There were not that many more facts to be gathered, Alex convinced himself. They already had most of them in front of them.
He took a surreptitious look at the psychology professor Peder had virtually hijacked from the university. In his brown jacket with suede elbow patches and suede breast pocket, and an enormous moustache bristling under his nose like a squirrel’s tail, he looked as if he had wandered into the Den straight off the set of some British film.
But Alex knew he couldn’t afford to be choosy. Any form of help had to be seen as worth having at this stage.
‘Okay,’ he said, surveying all those present.
You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Alex swallowed, hard. People this tense could hardly come up with any masterly theories. He glanced at Fredrika. She would be the exception, of course. Fredrika seemed to be able to focus her thoughts on absolutely anything at any time, as long as she was told it was important. And it didn’t get any more important than this.
He went on in English.
‘We say a special welcome to Professor Rowland,’ he said, hoping he sounded formal enough. ‘We are very pleased to have you at our meeting.’
The Professor gave a gracious nod and smiled under his moustache.
Alex had had to get approval for Professor Rowland to attend the meeting from the next level of the police hierarchy. Desperate though the situation was, there were still rules to follow and confidentiality to be observed.
As Alex switched on the overhead projector, he hoped this was clear to everybody round the table. With the help of the analyst, whose name he now knew to be Mats, he had put together an easy-to-use overview of all the material they had amassed in the course of the investigation, including the recent information supplied by Fredrika over the phone.