Professor Rowland drank some of his now cold coffee.
Fredrika asked tentatively:
‘The places where the children were found, might they be linked to the so-called crime?’
‘Perhaps,’ replied the Professor. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the first body was not presented precisely as the man had envisaged. You’re working on the hypothesis, aren’t you, that the woman now in the hospital drove the car, while the man went to Jönköping to silence Nora? That hypothesis is probably quite correct, so we can’t assume Lilian was found exactly the way the man planned. He delegated the important final stage of the plan to the woman, so he relinquished control of the situation for a brief period.’
Alex and Peder exchanged looks. To hell with confidentiality, thought Alex.
‘The little girl was lying on her back,’ he said. ‘The baby was found curled up in a foetal position.’
‘Really? That’s extremely interesting. That could have been the detail the woman missed, and that’s why he beat her up.’
‘But how can a little detail like that be so significant in the overall context?’ asked Fredrika.
‘We mustn’t forget that although our adversary is very sharp, very intelligent, he’s far from rational. For you and me, it wouldn’t matter a damn whether the child was on its back or curled up, we’d be focused on getting rid of the body as unobtrusively as possible. But this man’s focused on something else. He’s arranging the dead children; he wants to tell us something.’
It all went quiet again. The only sound was a fan whirring in one corner. Nobody said a thing.
‘There are two gaps in your theory,’ Rowland summed up. ‘You don’t know what form of contact the man had with the women, but you can say almost for sure that it must have been a long time ago. The concrete role played by the locations he selected remains unclear, but look more closely into whether the women have any special link to those particular places that hasn’t emerged up to now. The other thing you don’t know is exactly what the women were punished for, but it’s to do with their inability to love all children equally. Look into their pasts. Maybe they worked with children, and were involved in an accident of some kind.’
Alex looked out of the window. More cloud was rolling in over the capital.
‘You all look dejected,’ said Professor Rowland with a smile. ‘But I don’t think it’ll take you long to solve this one. We mustn’t forget, either, that we can reasonably expect to find there’s a reason for his becoming such a sick person. When you do find the perpetrator, there’s every likelihood you’ll discover he had a very disturbed childhood himself, probably without one or both of his parents.’
Alex gave a wan smile.
‘Just one more thing,’ Peder put in swiftly before the meeting broke up. ‘That woman Nora met him, er, seven years ago. Does that mean there were earlier murders? And why did it take him almost ten years to find a new partner?’
Professor Rowland looked at Peder.
‘That’s an excellent question,’ he said slowly. ‘And I recommend that’s where you start. Where was our man in the years that elapsed between his first and second accomplice?’
The meeting did not go on for long after Professor Rowland had left the Den to be escorted to the exit by Ellen. Everyone in the team, whether old, new or borrowed, was on tenterhooks round the table.
Fredrika had rather the same feeling she used to get when she watched a thriller and could sense in every fibre of her body how near the plot was to its denouement, but still had no idea how it would end. Inviting Professor Rowland had been a stroke of genius. Fredrika made a mental note to tell Peder later what a great initiative it had been.
She was pleased to see everyone in the room looking equally elated. It certainly said something about the case, the fact that so much energy could be generated even on a Saturday.
Alex set out the two main lines of enquiry they were to follow from there. Their top priority was to be individuals who had served sentences and been released that year, or at the end of the previous year. Alex admitted they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but there were a number of indications as to the age of the murderer, and he was probably an educated man. He might even be a psychologist, as he had told Nora and Jelena. To get a better fix on the time, they would need to interview Jelena Scortz again about when she first met the man. They could also check with her whether he had disfigured hands or fingers.
The other priority was investigating the pasts of Sara Sebastiansson and Magdalena Gregersdotter. At what stage of their lives had they been associated with the places where their children were later found murdered?
The division of labour was covered in just two sentences: Peder would be in charge of the task of identifying released prisoners who fitted the criteria. Fredrika would be in charge of the task of mapping the two women’s earlier lives. Alex laid a heavy hand on Fredrika’s shoulder.
‘It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.’
He gave a tired wink as he said it.
Fredrika found nothing to complain about in terms of the task she had been allocated. Quite the opposite: she was very happy with it. She gave a melancholy smile as she thought of Alex’s words: ‘You being so keen on cause and effect…’ There was nothing much she could say at times like that, she’d discovered. It was best just to go along with it.
Fredrika closed her eyes and put her head in her hands.
An A &E department in a town Sara Sebastiansson went to over fifteen years ago.
A bathroom in a house where Magdalena Gregersdotter lived over twenty years ago.
She repeated the words to herself several times. An A &E department in a town…
She tried leaning back in her chair. She was filled with a feverish kind of tension. They were missing something. Something fundamental.
Alex’s words echoed in her head again. It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.
Then she heard Professor Rowland’s voice. The women are probably both being punished for the same crime.
A thought slowly began to take shape in her mind. Afraid of losing focus, she groped for pen and paper without changing her position in her seat.
Her pulse started racing when she finally gave the thought its freedom.
Of course.
You just had to play around with the words a bit, and they fell into place.
The common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland. That was what Fredrika had said with a bitter laugh when Alex rang and she went out onto Margareta Andersson’s balcony in Umeå to take the call. But Alex had said something else. Something about finding a link between a bathroom in Bromma and an A &E department in Umeå.
Of course. It was only when the thought occurred to her that she realized what they had overlooked, and not followed up in the investigation. It wasn’t Umeå that was relevant here, but the A&E department itself.
The wrong questions inevitably yielded the wrong answers. Bearing in mind that the other child was found in a bathroom, it seemed very odd if the intention had been for the first one to be lying outside the hospital. By that token, the baby could just as well have been left on the pavement outside the house where it was found. So the person who dumped Lilian in Umeå had made more than just one mistake. And paid dearly for it.