Fredrika sank down wearily in the office chair behind her desk. Was there any better place for thinking and acting than behind her desk? She realized she had been naive to think that her specialized skills would be welcomed and made full use of within the police organization. She could not for the life of her understand police officers’ deep-rooted, all-embracing contempt for advanced, academic qualifications. Or was it really contempt? Did they in actual fact feel threatened? Fredrika couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She only knew that her current work situation was not tenable in the long term.
Her route to Alex Recht’s team had taken her via an investigative role at the Crime Prevention Council, and then a couple of years with social services, where she had been an expert adviser. She had applied to the police force to broaden her practical experience. And she would not be staying on. But she was relaxed about her current situation. She had an extensive network of contacts that could gain her entry to plenty of other organizations. She just needed to hold her nerve, and some new opportunity would eventually turn up.
Fredrika was very conscious of the way she was perceived by her colleagues in the force. Difficult and reserved. As someone with no sense of humour or normal emotional life.
That’s not true, thought Fredrika. I’m not cold, I’m just so damn confused about where I’m going at the moment.
Her friends would describe her as both warm and sympathetic. And extremely loyal. But that was in her private life. And now here she was in a workplace where she was expected to be private even on duty. It was completely unthinkable as far as Fredrika was concerned.
It wasn’t that she felt nothing at all for the people she encountered in the course of her job. It was just that she chose to feel a little less.
‘My job’s not pastoral care,’ she had said to a friend who had asked why she was so unwilling to get emotionally involved in her work. ‘It’s detecting crimes. It’s not about who I am – it’s about what I do. I do the detecting; someone else has got to do the comforting.’
Otherwise you’d drown, thought Fredrika. If I were to offer comfort to every victim I met, there’d be nothing left of me.
Fredrika could not remember ever having expressed a desire for a police job in her life. When she was little, her dreams had always been of working with music, as a violinist. She had music in her blood. She nurtured the dreams in her heart. Many children grow out of their earliest dreams about what they want to be when they grow up. But Fredrika never did; instead, her dreams developed and grew more concrete. She and her mother went on visits to various music schools and discussed which would suit her best. By the time she started at secondary school, she had already composed music of her own.
Just after she was fifteen, everything changed. For ever, as it turned out. Her right arm was badly injured in a car crash on the way home from a skiing trip, and after a year of physiotherapy it was obvious that the arm could not cope with the demands of playing the violin for hours every day.
Well-meaning teachers said she had been lucky. Theoretically and rationally, Fredrika understood what they meant. She had been to the mountains with a friend and her family. The accident left her friend’s mother paralysed from the waist down. The son of the family was killed. The newspapers called their accident the ‘Filipstad tragedy’.
But for Fredrika herself, the accident would never be called anything but The Accident, and in her mind she thought of The Accident as the most concrete of dividing lines in her life. She had been one person before The Accident, and became a different person after it. There was a very clear Before and After. She did not want to acknowledge that she had had any kind of Luck. But even now, almost twenty years later, she still wondered if she would ever accept the life that came After.
‘There’s so much else you can do with your life,’ her grandmother said reasonably, on the rare occasions when Fredrika voiced the dreadful sense of despair she felt at being robbed of the future opportunities she had dreamt of. ‘You could work in a bank, for example, seeing as you’re so good at maths.’
Fredrika’s parents, on the other hand, said nothing. Her mother was a concert pianist and music had a holy place in everyday family life. Fredrika had virtually grown up in the wings of a series of great stages on which her mother had played, either as a soloist or as part of a larger ensemble. Sometimes Fredrika had played in the ensembles. There were times when it had been quite magical.
So Fredrika’s discussions with her mother had been more productive.
‘What shall I do now?’ nineteen-year-old Fredrika had whispered to her mother one evening just before she left school, when her tears would not stop.
‘You’ll find something else, Fredrika,’ her mother had said, rubbing her back with a sympathetic hand. ‘There’s so much strength in you, so much willpower and such drive to achieve things. You’ll find something else.’
And so she did.
History of art, history of music, history of ideas. The university had an unlimited range of courses on offer.
‘Fredrika’s going to be a history professor,’ her father said proudly in those early years.
Her mother said nothing; it was her father who had always boasted far and wide of the great success in life he envisaged for his daughter.
But Fredrika did not become a professor. She became a criminologist specializing in crimes against women and children. She never completed her doctorate, and after five years at university she felt she had had more than enough of theoretical study.
She could see in her mother’s eyes that this was unexpected. It had been assumed that she would not want to leave the academic world. Her mother never expressed her disappointment openly, but she admitted she was surprised. Fredrika would dearly have liked to possess more of that quality herself: never to be disappointed, only surprised.
Consequently Fredrika knew a fair bit about pleasure and idleness, about passion and not knowing which way to go in life. As she printed out the accusation of abuse that Sara Sebastiansson had now formally lodged against her ex-husband, she wondered as she so often did why women stay with men who batter them. Was it love and passion? Fear of loneliness and exclusion? But Sara had not stayed. Not really. At least not judging by what Fredrika could deduce from the documents in front of her.
The first formal accusation had been lodged when her daughter was two years old. Sara, unlike many other women, claimed then that her husband had never hit her before. In cases where women themselves came forward to make complaints, there was usually a history. At the time of the first report, Sara had come to her local police station with extensive bruising on her right side and face. Her husband denied all the accusations and said he had an alibi for the evening when Sara claimed to have been attacked. Fredrika frowned. As far as she understood it, Sara never withdrew her accusation as so many women do. But nor did it lead to any kind of prosecution. The evidence did not hold, as three friends of her husband could attest that he had been playing poker until two o’clock on the night in question and had then spent the night at the home of one of them.
Two years then passed before Sara Sebastiansson lodged another complaint. She then claimed that he had not hit her on any occasion in between, but when Fredrika read about the extent of Sara’s injuries and compared them with those she had had the first time, she felt pretty much convinced Sara was lying. She had also been raped. There were no marks at all to be seen on her face.