We’ve been pushing the boundaries recently, she thought. We see each other more often and we’ve started putting how much we mean to each other into words.
There were still people working at their desks as Fredrika offloaded her handbag and jacket in her little room. In the police world, success was measured in terms of the number of square metres of office space you were given. Rumour had it that the security services were planning to move out of HQ and house their staff in a new building with open plan offices. Fredrika sniggered at the thought of the outcry there would be if a plan like that were ever put forward in her department. She could hear her colleague Håkan raising his voice in protest:
‘You expect me to work in an open plan office? When I’ve waited twenty-two years to move into the office next to mine!’
Fredrika was in a good mood, to put it mildly. But as she stood in the doorway of Alex’s room a moment or two later, she felt all the energy and appetite drain from her.
‘Has something happened?’ she asked automatically when she saw the grim look on Alex’s face.
She immediately regretted her choice of words. Two little girls had been murdered in under a week – that alone made the phrasing of her question ludicrous.
But Alex wasn’t one to notice the choice of words. Fredrika more than made up for him in that respect.
‘So did your sudden flying visit produce anything?’ was all he said.
Fredrika had surprised him several times in recent days. He had high expectations of her now.
‘I think I know what crime the women had committed, and the reason why he’s punishing them,’ she said.
Alex raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ve got a theory, too,’ he smiled. ‘Shall we see if they match?’
Peder started by looking at all the men serving sentences for violation of a woman’s integrity who had been released since the previous November. There were far too many of them. He refined his search to a particular age group, men between forty and fifty.
He saw that most of the men had only served very short sentences. It was seven years since Nora had known the man; what had he been doing since? Were there other women who had been through the same thing, but who they just hadn’t found yet? Worse still, were there more children who had died in similar circumstances? Peder felt close to panic. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why had they assumed these were the murderer’s first victims?
Then he calmed down a bit. If there were any police officers in the country who had worked on similar cases over the past twenty years, they would undoubtedly have been in touch with their Stockholm colleagues by now. Unless the murderer had tried, and failed? Maybe he had abducted a child, but not gone through with the actual murder?
Peder shook his head in frustration. They had to take the risk of concentrating their efforts, had to dare to choose which line to pursue first. Peder jotted down the options he had ruled out. ‘Glad to see you prioritizing!’ Fredrika would have said if she’d seen him.
Peder decided to ask Alex to delegate to some other member of the team those lines of enquiry he still considered important, but less pressing.
He looked at the lists he had collated. There were altogether too many people on them with sentences way too short. If he bore in mind what the team had agreed on:
1. that their murderer had for some reason been inactive since he lost control of Nora, and had ‘recruited’ Jelena in her place;
2. that he was probably on their files and might have been convicted of some grievous crime of violence that had kept him locked up for most of the period since Nora left him;
3. that he was in all probability mentally ill;
4. that he possibly visited prostitutes
then there shouldn’t be that many names left on the list. But how did you sift out that kind of information?
Peder worked frantically at his keyboard.
Police files weren’t damn well designed for this kind of investigation, he thought angrily.
He’d had help in retrieving the first set of data he had worked on. But the help, that is to say Ellen, had finished for the day, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Perhaps it was time for Peder to call it a day, too, go home and get some sleep.
The very thought filled Peder with anxiety. He didn’t feel the least bit inclined to go home and be confronted with his crumbling marriage. He missed the children. But he was intensely tired of their mother.
‘What the hell shall I do?’ muttered Peder. ‘What in fuck’s name shall I do?’
He’d heard nothing from Pia Nordh since he left her flat. He was thankful for that. He felt thoroughly ashamed of the way he had behaved that morning. And it scared him that it felt like several years ago, when it fact it was only a few days.
Peder looked down at his conscientiously scribbled notes. He read through them. He read through them again.
He opened his filing cabinet and got out the diagram he and Fredrika had drawn up with timelines for Gabriel Sebastiansson’s movements the day his daughter was kidnapped. He took a blank sheet of paper out of his desk drawer and started drawing a new timeline.
It’s all too rushed, he thought as he drew. There are too few of us with too much to get into our heads too quickly; that’s why we keep missing little things.
Magdalena Gregersdotter’s parents had sold their house in Bromma over fifteen years ago. If Natalie’s murder had anything to do with Magdalena’s family home, then the murderer must have had contact with Magdalena – in some unfathomable way – before her parents sold the house.
So let’s see. First the murderer was in Stockholm for a time. Somehow he became aware of Magdalena, probably when she committed the ‘crime’ that she was now being punished for. Then he moved – temporarily or permanently – to Umeå. He stayed there long enough to come across both Sara Sebastiansson and Nora from Jönköping, now deceased.
Peder paused for thought, then decided to try refining his search through the bulk of material still further. The man they were looking for had probably committed the crime for which he served his prison sentence in Umeå, or somewhere nearby.
Peder went through his list. Then he added a final bullet point:
The man had not necessarily been in prison for seven years. He could have been sentenced to psychiatric care.
There was a knock at Peder’s door.
‘Can you come along for a very quick meeting in the Den before we call it a day?’
‘Sure,’ answered Alex, as he fired off his email request to Ellen.
She would have to deal with it in the morning.
‘Abortion?’ Peder said in amazement.
‘Yes,’ replied Fredrika.
Peder’s drooping eyes were suddenly wide open.
‘Did Magdalena Gregersdotter have an abortion, too? Remember the psychologist said the women had probably both committed the same “crime”…’
Fredrika gave an eager nod.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t had a chance to talk to Magdalena yet. I’ll get round there tomorrow morning.’
‘Could he have been the doctor who performed their abortions?’ Peder wondered aloud.
‘We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves,’ warned Alex, holding up a hand. ‘First we need to establish that Magdalena did have an abortion. And if so, we must try to clarify why he crept in and put her dead child on the bathroom floor of her parents’ old house, and not at the hospital where the abortion was carried out.’
‘In the old days, women did their own abortions,’ began Peder, but was silenced by both Fredrika and Alex.
Peder decided to keep his mouth shut.
‘And we must certainly find out,’ said Alex in a businesslike tone, ‘why we weren’t told this earlier.’
‘Because you think in the way you just sounded,’ Fredrika said frankly.
Peder and Alex looked blank.