Alex pondered this.
‘The baby was asleep when she was snatched from her pram,’ he mused aloud. ‘The murderer probably didn’t feel the need to sedate her.’
‘Of course,’ said the pathologist. ‘Of course.’
Then she added:
‘There’s nothing more I can tell you about the baby. No violence was done to her other than the lethal injection, and I found no bruising on her body, new or old.’
‘Old?’ queried Alex, frowning.
He could sense the pathologist blushing at the other end of the line as she answered:
‘There are so many sick parents. It was just as well to check…’
Alex gave a sad smile.
‘Yes, you’re quite right.’
It had initially surprised Alex to find how often the executioner was to be found in the victim’s immediate vicinity. It had taken him years to understand how it was even possible. He could comprehend how someone might lose their head in the heat of the moment and hit out at another person. But the step from there to the cold-blooded killing of another human being, often fully conscious of what you were doing, was too big for him to take. What was more, people seemed capable of killing each other for the most bizarre reasons.
‘It’s a mad world,’ Alex whispered to his wife one evening when they were newly married and about to go to sleep.
She had chosen that moment to tell him they were expecting their first baby. Her timing in breaking the news had done nothing to dispel his conception of the world: it was mad.
But however hard Alex struggled to make the Lilian case fit the mould of all the other missing children cases he had dealt with in his career, however hard he wished it would end in some way he would later find hard to call to mind, he knew that the case of the abduction and death of Lilian Sebastiansson was quite unique, and that he would never forget it.
He peered at the clock. How long were they going to carry on? Was it really worth their while to work all night? How would everyone feel tomorrow if they did? The team had got to be able to stay the course.
The pathologist gave a little cough. The sound interrupted Alex’s thoughts and made him feel foolish.
‘Excuse me,’ he hastened to say, ‘but I didn’t quite hear that last bit.’
The pathologist seemed to be hesitating.
‘The fact that he injects the toxic substance into the child’s head,’ she started slowly.
‘Yes?’
Further hesitation.
‘I don’t know, maybe I’m completely wrong and it’s got nothing to do with the case, but… in some countries that’s an entirely legal method of carrying out a late abortion.’
‘Sorry?’ said Alex, raising his eyebrows.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ said the pathologist, rather more sure of herself now.
When Alex said nothing, she continued.
‘It was practised in a number of countries where very late abortions were allowed. It was really more of a delivery than an abortion. When the baby’s head appeared, the lethal substance was injected straight into the skull, so the child was by definition stillborn when it came out.’
‘Good God,’ said Alex.
‘Well that’s how it was,’ the pathologist said in conclusion. ‘But as I say, it may not be relevant to this case at all.’
The thoughts went chasing round inside Alex’s head.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he told the pathologist. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
Alex returned with renewed energy to the material spread out in front of him.
The atmosphere in the Den had been magical when the American psychologist was talking. It was actually a long time since Alex had encountered someone who spoke that much sense. He had practically laid out the whole structure for the investigation from that point on.
Alex grabbed the report he had just had from the squad that had searched Jelena Scortz’s flat. It had been hard work, very hard work, extracting a search warrant from the examining magistrate. Jelena was considered to have admitted far too little to confirm that she was implicated in Lilian’s murder. It was only when Alex made the point that regardless of the degree to which they could prove she was an accessory to murder, she had at the very least admitted that the main suspect had stayed in the flat. That was enough to justify a search warrant.
But just as the psychologist had predicted, the search of the flat yielded nothing to help them identify the killer. They naturally found huge numbers of fingerprints in the flat. And when they were checked against the National Police Board’s fingerprint register, they nearly all turned out to belong to Jelena herself. Her fingerprints were stored in the system because she had been arrested and charged with theft and receiving stolen goods some years before.
None of the other fingerprints had matched anything in the register. And the perpetrator himself left no fingerprints at all, of course.
Alex felt ill looking at the photos taken in the bedroom where Jelena had been left after the assault. Blood on the sheets, blood on the walls, blood on the floor.
The search team had not found a single object that looked as if it could belong to a man. There was only one toothbrush in the bathroom, and that had been taken for analysis. Alex was absolutely certain they would find no one’s DNA on it but Jelena’s. They found no men’s clothes, either.
There were in fact only two items of potential interest that the police had brought from the flat. One was some individual strands of hair, found on the bathroom floor. With luck they might prove to be Lilian Sebastiansson’s, and then there would be no need to worry any more about linking Jelena to Lilian’s murder. The other was a pair of dark Ecco shoes, size 46. They had been standing neatly in the hall.
Alex was entirely nonplussed. How could anyone as strategic and intelligent as the murderer clearly was make such a blunder?
Then he realized there could only be one answer, and his pulse rate accelerated to an almost dangerous level.
It was obvious – obvious – that the murderer must have returned to the flat after the assault on Jelena. Returned and discovered her gone. It must have been quite easy for him to work out that the police would link Jelena to the crime sooner or later, especially if he had seen the appeal for information about her in the national press.
‘Shit, shit, shit!’ shouted Alex, thumping his fist on the desk.
He stared at the picture of the Ecco shoes, which seemed to be jeering at him. The sheer cheek of it made him feel weak at the knees.
He knew we’d be able to identify Jelena sooner or later, and that would eventually lead us to the flat as well, Alex thought. So he left the goddamn shoes as a greeting.
It was almost half past seven and Fredrika Bergman was wondering whether to drop in on Magdalena Gregersdotter before nightfall or to leave it for the next day. She decided to go back to the office and talk it over with Alex before making up her mind.
Fredrika was so worked up that she could hardly sit still in the car. Music blared from the loudspeakers at top volume. Swan Lake. For the briefest of brief moments, Fredrika was back in the life she had lived before The Accident. Music that made her feel alive, an occupation to which she devoted herself passionately.
And then her mother’s voice:
Play so somebody could dance to the music; always remember the Invisible Dancer.
Fredrika could almost see the Invisible Dancer dancing Swan Lake on the bonnet of her car. For the first time in ages, she felt alive. She hadn’t the words to describe how glorious it felt.
From pure euphoria, she texted Spencer as soon as she had parked outside HQ and thanked him again for a wonderful night. Her fingers wanted to write something more amorous. Reason won as usual, and she slipped the phone into her bag without firing off any declarations of love. But she had that feeling again. That feeling of something being different, something having changed.