Fredrika was smiling as she spoke. Her voice was insistent, her body language full of pent-up energy.
She’s got it in her, thought Alex. I was wrong. And so was she. She’s deluding herself when she says she hasn’t got the hunger for it.
They heard quick footsteps in the corridor outside. Ellen stuck a flushed face round his door.
‘I’ll forget my own head next,’ she said, clearly under pressure. ‘Left the car keys in my room.’
She stopped when she saw their exhilarated expressions.
‘What’s happened?’
The question made them all start to laugh. It was the laughter of relief, Alex noted.
‘We think we’ve got him, Ellen,’ he said with a grin.
‘Are you sure,’ asked Ellen, blanching.
‘Well,’ said Alex. ‘You can never be a hundred per cent sure, but we’re as sure as we can be at this stage.’
He pushed the sheet of paper with the print-out of the passport photo across the desk to her.
‘Let me introduce…’ he began, but then stalled. ‘What was this joker’s name again?’ he asked irritably.
Fredrika and Peder smiled.
‘Well, if you’re not going to listen to what we tell you, we’d better start reporting to some other boss,’ sighed Peder with a flamboyant sweep of his hands.
None of them noticed how Ellen reacted as she took two steps towards the desk and stared at the man in the photo. None of them noticed her cheeks turning pink and her attempts to blink away the tears that were blurring her vision. But they all heard her murmur:
‘Thank you God.’
They all fell silent.
She pointed a trembling finger at the picture.
‘I thought for a while it was… I thought it might be the man I was…’
She gave a laugh.
‘What daft ideas we get into our heads sometimes,’ she said with a sob, smiling through her tears.
Then her mobile rang. Her son was gabbling at the other end, his voice strained.
‘Mum, you’ve got to come home right now.’
‘What’s happened, love?’ asked Ellen, still with the smile on her lips.
‘Mum, please come now,’ her son repeated nervously. ‘He says you’ve got to come now. Come home as quickly as you can. He doesn’t seem very well at all.’
It came like a bolt from the blue when the last child disappeared. They got the news just as they were making final preparations for the swoop on Aron Steen.
Alex charged out into the corridor and found Fredrika and Peder in the Den, the latter in the middle of strapping on a bulletproof vest. Fredrika was poring over some papers, frowning.
‘He’s taken another child,’ Alex said. ‘A four-year-old boy’s gone missing from a children’s playground in Midsommarkransen, near where Steen lives, half an hour ago. The parents rang in and said they’d found his clothes and what looked like tufts of his hair left behind a tree on the edge of the playground.’
‘But we’ve got his place under surveillance,’ exclaimed Peder. ‘They reported seeing him through the window of the flat, and they haven’t seen him come out.’
‘Well he must have done,’ said Alex tersely, ‘because another kid’s been snatched.’
‘Well he can’t have got very far,’ said Fredrika, fiddling with a piece of paper in front of her.
‘No, we don’t think he can,’ Alex said urgently. ‘And this time he must have been in a real fucking hurry. The clothes were just chucked down in a heap and he hadn’t scalped the boy but just chopped off a few chunks of hair at random.’
‘He knows we’re on his tail,’ said Peder resolutely, fixing his service pistol to his belt.
Fredrika looked askance at the gun but said nothing.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘We carry out the operation as planned,’ Alex said firmly. ‘We need to get into the flat and see if we can pick up any leads to where he might have taken the boy. But he won’t get far, as I say. We’ve got roadblocks on all routes out of town and a nationwide alert’s gone out for him.’
Fredrika looked troubled.
‘I assume we’re interviewing the boy’s parents?’ she said. ‘About the background to the abduction, I mean.’
‘Of course,’ said Alex. ‘We’ve got a couple of detectives round there now. This time we know what we’re looking for. The mother will need to be asked where the final stage of her abortion took place, and then we’ll have to be there when he shows up with the child.’
Fredrika nodded, but her brow remained furrowed.
‘If it’s not already too late. If he’s in as much of a hurry as he seemed to be in the playground, the boy could already be dead. We can’t rule it out.’
Alex swallowed hard.
No,’ he said. ‘No, of course we can’t. But we can work as hard as hell to prevent it being that way.’
Peder was thinking.
‘But if we assume he knows we’re looking for him?’ he began tentatively.
‘Yes?’
‘Either he’s as off his head as we thought, in which case he’ll cut it short with the kid, even though the whole thing’s a lot less tidy than he planned it to be. Or parts of him are still rational in spite of everything, in which case he won’t dispose of the boy at the very start.’
‘But use him to bargain for his freedom,’ Alex added.
‘Exactly,’ said Peder.
The Den went very quiet.
‘Has anybody heard how Ellen got on, by the way?’ asked Fredrika.
Alex shook his head.
‘She was adamant she wanted to go home on her own, said she’d be fine, but I sent a patrol car round anyway. There was something about that story that didn’t feel right.’
Enthusiastic rays of sunlight were finding their way into the Den, spreading heat. Little balls of fluff went rolling across the floor. The air conditioning had spluttered into life.
Rapid steps were approaching. A young DC came rushing in.
‘The surveillance team at Steen’s place just rang,’ he blurted. ‘He’s back home again.’
‘Who’s back home again?’ asked Alex in irritation.
‘Aron Steen. He’s just got back to his flat.’
‘What about the kid?’ asked Peder.
‘He was carrying him naked in his arms. As if he knew we were watching but didn’t care.’
For a few short hours, Ellen had fully believed the reason she hadn’t heard from Carl was quite simply that he was the child murderer they were hunting. And that the reason her children weren’t answering the phone was that Carl had kidnapped them.
But it wasn’t true.
Ellen couldn’t fathom how she’d let her private and professional lives get entangled to that extent. When had she lost control of her own imagination? When had work become such a major part of her existence that she couldn’t distinguish it from other important parts any more?
I’ve really got to think this through, Ellen decided. I need to work out what’s truly important to me.
The children hadn’t answered the phone because they’d been round at a neighbour’s enjoying a nice brunch. And forgotten the home phone lines. It was no stranger than that.
But as for Carl.
Ellen peered sideways at him as she sat there on her living room floor. The children had immediately retreated to their rooms when she got home.
‘He was sitting on the front steps when we got back from brunch,’ her daughter had told her, nodding towards Carl who was sitting on the bottom step with his legs stretched straight out in front of him. ‘You’d better talk to him. He seems totally out of it.’
Ellen was initially dubious.
Should she let him into her home?
A patrol car went slowly past her house and pulled up.
Ellen invited Carl in, but left the front door open. The patrol car waited.
The first thing Carl did was to collapse onto Ellen’s old chesterfield sofa and burst into tears. Ellen decided to sit on the floor at a slight distance. And that’s the way they had been ever since.