Unwanted (29 page)

He’s woken up now, Fredrika thought to herself. He lost his bearings early on and wandered off in the wrong direction, but now he’s back on track.

‘Are we having a meeting?’ she asked out loud.

Alex jumped.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’m just sitting thinking. How did it go in Uppsala?’

Fredrika reflected.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine. But there’s something weird about that writing course.’

‘How do you mean, “weird”?’

‘Something happened up there, or just beforehand, that made Sara decide to stay up there much longer than her friend.’

Alex stared ahead, pondering what she had said.

‘I’d like to go up to Umeå,’ said Fredrika, taking one step over the threshold.

‘Umeå?’ Alex repeated, surprised.

‘Yes, and talk to whoever was running that course, ask them if they know what it was that had that effect on Sara.’

Before Alex could reply, Fredrika added:

‘And I thought I’d have another word with Sara herself. If she’s up to it, that is, and assuming she’s back in Stockholm.’

‘She’s back,’ said Alex. ‘She and her parents got back this morning.’

‘Did you know the parents are very religious?’

‘No,’ said Alex. ‘No, I didn’t. Could that be relevant here?’

‘It could,’ said Fredrika. ‘It could.’

‘I see,’ said Alex. ‘Well then, you’d better come in and tell me more about it.’

He ventured a smile as Fredrika came into the room. She sat down at the opposite side of the table.

‘Where’s Peder?’ she asked.

‘On his way to Umeå,’ said Peder, right behind her.

He had come into the meeting room with a holdall slung over one shoulder.

Like a boy, thought Fredrika. Like a boy on his way to football practice.

She raised her eyebrows.

‘What’s happened?’

Peder surveyed the room irritably.

‘Are we supposed to be having a meeting now?’

Alex gave a chuckle.

‘No, not really. But since you’re both here . . .’

Peder sank onto a chair. He had already told Alex everything, so he briefed Fredrika in a single sentence.

‘They’ve found a murdered woman in Jönköping who had our public hotline number stored in her mobile, and her grandmother lives in Umeå.’

Fredrika gave a start.

‘In Jönköping?’

‘Yep. We’ve no idea of course why she had it in her phone, especially as she doesn’t ever seem to have used it to make a call, but . . .’

‘But she
did
make a call,’ Fredrika broke in.

Alex and Peder stared at her.

‘Don’t you remember? Ellen told us about a woman who wanted to stay anonymous, who thought she knew the perpetrator and had once lived with him.’

Alex was suddenly tense.

‘You’re right,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re right. But how do you link that to the woman in Jönköping?’

‘The call was made from a public telephone in Jönköping,’ said Fredrika. ‘Mats, the analyst, checked it out.’

‘How long have we known that?’ asked Peder indignantly.

‘We dismissed the call as unimportant,’ Fredrika retorted, equally indignantly. ‘And Jönköping wasn’t in the picture at all at that point.’

Alex raised a hand to stop them.

‘And it’s all there in Mats’s database, for anyone who asks,’ Fredrika swiftly added.

Peder’s face dropped.

‘I didn’t check this with him,’ he admitted.

He glanced in Alex’s direction.

Alex gave a couple of dry little coughs.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s assume it was the murdered woman who rang. Is there any written record of what she said?’

Fredrika gave an eager nod.

‘Ellen made a note; I think that’s in the database, too.’

Peder leapt to his feet.

‘I’ll go and talk to Mats,’ he said, and was out of the room before either Alex or Fredrika had time to say anything.

Fredrika gave an almost imperceptible sigh.

‘Wait a second,’ called Alex, and Peder came back into the room.

‘Fredrika apparently needs to go to Umeå as well. But I don’t see any point in sending you both up there just now.’

Fredrika and Peder listened, both on tenterhooks.

‘We’ve already had several calls about the woman with the dog in Flemingsberg,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been with the analyst, er . . .’

‘Mats,’ supplied Fredrika.

‘Yes, Mats, and we went through them all, and there are two that definitely need following up. One was from the proprietor of a car hire place. He thinks he hired out a car to a woman who looked a bit like the one in the picture. And then a woman rang and said she was the girl’s foster mother some years ago. She gave us a provisional description to go on.’

Silence descended on the room. Fredrika and Peder glanced at each other.

‘It might just be,’ Alex said slowly, enunciating every syllable, ‘that it would be more appropriate for Fredrika to go to Umeå to take care of a poor old grandmother and a writing teacher. And for you, Peder, to deal with the car hire man and the foster mother.’

Peder and Fredrika nodded to each other in agreement.

‘Is there anything else I should know about the dead woman in Jönköping?’ asked Fredrika.

Peder stuck a memo under her nose.

‘Here’s everything we’ve got,’ he said curtly.

Fredrika began to read.

‘A pair of Ecco shoes size 46,’ she said softly.

‘We mustn’t get our hopes up,’ said Alex, who had already seen the memo, ‘but it’s certainly a coincidence, isn’t it?’

Fredrika read on, frowning.

‘Good, that’s decided then,’ said Alex.

A sceptical Fredrika watched Alex and Peder as they hurried out of the room.

Chaos, she thought. These men live at the epicentre of chaos. I honestly don’t think they’d be able to breathe anywhere else.

At that moment, Alex turned round.

‘By the way,’ he said very loudly.

Peder and Fredrika both listened. Ellen put her head out of her office.

‘I contacted the National Crime Squad with what we got from Gabriel Sebastiansson’s emails,’ he said. ‘Apparently “Daddy-Long-Legs” is well known in those circles. The Crime Squad is gearing up for a major move against him and his network and was very glad of our input. I was to pass on their thanks.’

P
eder Rydh had had certain preconceptions about the police world when he applied for a place on the training scheme ten years before.

The first was that the police force was a place where stuff really happened. The second was that being a police officer was an important profession. And the third was that other people looked up to the police.

That third point had been a crucial one for Peder. Getting respect. Not that he wasn’t used to people showing him respect. But this was a
different kind
of respect, one that went deeper.

And he certainly did find himself respected. The only slightly strange thing was that since he had left the uniformed branch and was in plain clothes, people perceived him as less of an authority figure and treated him accordingly.

The proprietor of the car hire firm who had rung in to say he recognized the picture of the girl at Flemingsberg station was a case in point. When Peder arrived the man regarded him very suspiciously until he showed his ID. He then lowered his guard a little but still wasn’t entirely satisfied.

Peder glanced around him to get the measure of the place. It was a little office in the heart of Södermalm. The posters in the windows offered both car hire and driving lessons. Not a very usual combination. And there was nothing in the office to indicate that any kind of driver instruction was conducted on the premises.

The other man saw Peder surveying the scene.

‘The driving school’s downstairs,’ he said peevishly. ‘If it’s them you’re looking for.’

Peder smiled.

‘I was just taking a little look round,’ he said. ‘Good place for a car hire firm, I should think.’

‘How do you mean?’

What a bloody misery guts, thought Peder angrily, but kept his smile on and said, ‘I just meant there can’t be too much competition round here. Most of the car hire places are at the big petrol stations, aren’t they, so they’re a fair way out of the city centre?’

When the man did not respond, and went on looking annoyed, Peder decided not to waste any more energy trying to be pleasant.

‘You rang and said you thought you’d seen this woman,’ he said briskly, putting the drawing of the Flemingsberg woman on the counter separating him from the other man.

The man studied the picture.

‘Yes, that looks like her, the one who was here.’

‘When was she here?’ Peder asked.

The car hire man frowned and opened a large desk diary he had in front of him.

‘Is she the one who murdered the kid?’ he asked insensitively. ‘Is that why you’re looking for her?’

‘She’s not under suspicion for anything,’ Peder said rapidly. ‘We just want to talk to her; she might have seen something of interest to us.’

The man nodded as he looked through the calendar.

‘Here’, he said, stabbing a fat finger onto the open page. ‘That’s when she was here.’

Peder leant forward. The man turned the calendar round. He had his finger on the left-hand page. June the seventh.

Peder’s spirits fell.

‘What makes you remember it was that day?’ he said dubiously.

‘Because it was the day I was having my goddamned wisdom tooth taken out,’ said the car hirer, looking very pleased with himself as he drummed on a straggly doodle on the page. ‘I was just going to close the shop and go to the hospital when she came in.’

He leant over the desk with a glitter in his eye that made Peder feel very uncomfortable.

‘Petrified little beggar,’ he said in a thick voice. ‘Stood staring around her like a little animal caught in the car headlights. Those ones that never shift even though the danger’s right on top of them. That’s the way she looked.’

He gave a short, coarse laugh.

Peder ignored the other man’s attitude, though he suspected some of what had just been said ought to be stored away in his mind for future reference.

‘Which car did she hire, and how long for?’ he asked.

The man seemed nonplussed.

‘Eh?’ he said, eyeing Peder in confusion. ‘Whaddya mean, which car? She didn’t want a car.’

‘Didn’t she?’ said Peder, looking foolish. ‘What did she want, then?’

‘She wanted a driving licence. But that was before I’d started that business, so I told her to come back at the beginning of July. But she never turned up again.’

Peder’s brain was working overtime.

‘She wanted a driving licence?’ he echoed.

‘Yep,’ said the car hirer, slamming his desk diary shut.

‘Did she give her name?’ Peder asked, though he already knew the answer.

‘No, why should she? I couldn’t put her down for lessons. I hadn’t got the paperwork sorted by then.’

Peder sighed.

‘Do you remember anything else about her visit?’

‘No, only what I’ve already told you,’ said the car hirer, massaging his beard with one hand and his belly with the other. ‘She was scared shitless, and she looked washed out. Her hair must’ve been dyed, it was so dark it didn’t look natural. Almost black. And someone had been knocking her about.’

Peder pricked up his ears.

‘There were bruises on her face,’ the man went on, indicating his left cheek. ‘Not new ones, more the sort that’ve been there a while, know what I mean? Looked quite nasty. Must’ve been painful.’

Neither of them said anything. The door behind Peder opened and a customer came in. The car hirer waved to the man to wait.

‘I’m just going,’ said Peder. ‘Anything else you can remember?’

The car hirer gave his beard a vigorous scratch.

‘No, only that she talked strangely.’

‘Talked strangely?’ repeated Peder.

‘Mmmm. It was kind of disjointed. I s’pose it was because she’d been beaten up. Women usually learn to hold their tongues then.’

Once Peder and Fredrika had left HQ, the same feeling descended on Alex that he used to get when his children still lived at home and had gone round to a friend’s for the evening. It was so quiet and peaceful.

Peder and Fredrika were not the only ones who worked on the same corridor as Alex, far from it, but he still had a palpable sense of their absence, which he sometimes found a positive blessing.

His wife rang him on his mobile.

‘So what about this holiday?’ she asked. ‘In view of this case you’re working on, I mean. The travel agent rang about confirmation and payment.’