Unwanted (40 page)

‘You are almost certainly looking for a very charismatic, determined person,’ the Professor continued. ‘He may have a military background, but whatever his exact background, he’s well-educated. He’s good-looking. That’s how he attracts these abandoned girls and gets them to worship him to the point where they’ll do anything for him. If he is a psychologist, as both girls claim he told them, that scarcely makes him less of a threat to us.’

‘But the first woman walked out on him,’ Fredrika objected, thinking again of Nora in Jönköping.

Who had had the strength to break free and make a new start.

‘True,’ said the Professor, ‘but then she wasn’t entirely alone. She had a strong grandmother behind her. Our killer would certainly have learnt from that mistake the first time – if it was the first time. The woman he seeks has to be weak, and entirely on her own. There mustn’t be anyone in her life with any influence over her. He alone must be able to dominate her and dictate the terms of how she lives.’

Professor Rowland shifted his position on the hard chair. It was apparent that he liked talking, and would carry on as long as no one interrupted him.

‘He thought he had complete control over this last woman, Jelena, yet even she sprang a surprise and left him. His woman is important to him, practically but also mentally. She affirms him; she intensifies his perception of himself as a genius. And . . .’

Professor Rowland looked serious, and held up a warning finger.

‘And, my friends, he
is
a genius. Neither of the women knows what his name is, where he works, or even what type of car he has. They never call him anything but “The Man”. He could be absolutely anywhere. The best you can hope for is that you pick up his fingerprints in the woman’s flat, but I rather doubt you will. Bearing in mind how strategically this man seems to operate, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s disfigured his own fingers.’

There was a spontaneous murmur from his audience, and Alex impatiently hushed them.

‘What do you mean, disfigured?’

‘Oh, it’s not difficult,’ Professor Rowland smiled. ‘Nor even particularly uncommon. A lot of asylum seekers do it, to make it hard to register their fingerprints. Then they can seek asylum in a series of other countries if their application is turned down in the first one they go to.’

There was not a sound in the Den. Alex had been pinning his hopes on fingerprints or DNA from the flat providing the solution to the case, always assuming the man had a previous conviction. He straightened his back.

‘Wait a minute, you mean you think the man has been convicted before?’

‘If he hasn’t, then there’s more likelihood of your finding his fingerprints in the flat,’ said Professor Rowland. ‘If he has, and I believe that to be the case, then I would be very surprised if he’d been careless enough to leave any concrete traces behind him.’

Fredrika considered what the Professor had said about the perpetrator seeming to speed up the pace once the woman escaped from the flat.

‘Can we infer that more children will go missing?’ she asked, frowning.

‘We certainly can,’ replied Professor Rowland. ‘I think we can more or less assume he has a list of kids he’s planning to abduct. It’s not something he decides as he goes along – he already has this all worked out.’

‘But how does he find them?’ blurted Peder in frustration. ‘How does he choose the children?’

‘It’s not the children he finds,’ said the Professor. ‘It’s their mothers. It’s the mothers being punished; the children are just a means to an end. He’s taking revenge on someone else’s behalf. He’s putting things to rights.’

‘But that still doesn’t answer my question,’ Peder said in desperation. ‘And what’s driving him?’

‘No,’ the Professor agreed, ‘not exactly. But almost. Both women have been punished in the same way: he stole and killed their children and dumped them in a place to which they had some link. So one possible conclusion is that both women had committed the same crime. And that the answer to what’s driving him is vengeance.’

Professor Rowland adjusted his glasses and scrutinized Alex’s diagram.

‘He is punishing the women for not loving all children equally. He is punishing them because if you don’t love all children, you are not to have any at all.’

He furrowed his brow.

‘It’s hard to know exactly what he means,’ he sighed. ‘It seems as if these women, wholly or partially unconsciously, have wronged their own children, or some other child. Again, I don’t think the women themselves necessarily remember the precise occasion. They almost certainly haven’t broken any law. But
he
thinks they have.’

‘And so does the woman in the hospital,’ Fredrika put in.

The others looked at her and nodded their agreement.

The Professor made an expansive gesture.

‘The word he uses to mark the children, “Unwanted”, identifies the subject for us with absolute clarity, especially now we know the backgrounds of his two female companions, but we still don’t know exactly what the trigger is, so we do not know either exactly how he once encountered these women who have lost their children. But we know, we
know,
that he must be aware of their pasts, since both bodies were dumped in a town or a place the women have had no contact with for many years.’

Professor Rowland drank some of his now cold coffee.

Fredrika asked tentatively:

‘The places where the children were found, might they be linked to the so-called crime?’

‘Perhaps,’ replied the Professor. ‘On the other hand, it could be that the first body was not presented precisely as the man had envisaged. You’re working on the hypothesis, aren’t you, that the woman now in the hospital drove the car, while the man went to Jönköping to silence Nora? That hypothesis is probably quite correct, so we can’t assume Lilian was found exactly the way the man planned. He delegated the important final stage of the plan to the woman, so he relinquished control of the situation for a brief period.’

Alex and Peder exchanged looks. To hell with confidentiality, thought Alex.

‘The little girl was lying on her back,’ he said. ‘The baby was found curled up in a foetal position.’

‘Really? That’s extremely interesting. That could have been the detail the woman missed, and that’s why he beat her up.’

‘But how can a little detail like that be so significant in the overall context?’ asked Fredrika.

‘We mustn’t forget that although our adversary is very sharp, very intelligent, he’s far from rational. For you and me, it wouldn’t matter a damn whether the child was on its back or curled up, we’d be focused on getting rid of the body as unobtrusively as possible. But this man’s focused on something else. He’s
arranging
the dead children; he wants to tell us something.’

It all went quiet again. The only sound was a fan whirring in one corner. Nobody said a thing.

‘There are two gaps in your theory,’ Rowland summed up. ‘You don’t know what form of contact the man had with the women, but you can say almost for sure that it must have been a long time ago. The concrete role played by the locations he selected remains unclear, but look more closely into whether the women have any
special
link to those particular places that hasn’t emerged up to now. The other thing you don’t know is exactly what the women were punished for, but it’s to do with their inability to love all children equally. Look into their pasts. Maybe they worked with children, and were involved in an accident of some kind.’

Alex looked out of the window. More cloud was rolling in over the capital.

‘You all look dejected,’ said Professor Rowland with a smile. ‘But I don’t think it’ll take you long to solve this one. We mustn’t forget, either, that we can reasonably expect to find there’s a reason for his becoming such a sick person. When you do find the perpetrator, there’s every likelihood you’ll discover he had a very disturbed childhood himself, probably without one or both of his parents.’

Alex gave a wan smile.

‘Just one more thing,’ Peder put in swiftly before the meeting broke up. ‘That woman Nora met him, er, seven years ago. Does that mean there were earlier murders? And why did it take him almost ten years to find a new partner?’

Professor Rowland looked at Peder.

‘That’s an excellent question,’ he said slowly. ‘And I recommend that’s where you start. Where was our man in the years that elapsed between his first and second accomplice?’

T
he meeting did not go on for long after Professor Rowland had left the Den to be escorted to the exit by Ellen. Everyone in the team, whether old, new or borrowed, was on tenterhooks round the table.

Fredrika had rather the same feeling she used to get when she watched a thriller and could sense in every fibre of her body how near the plot was to its denouement, but still had no idea how it would end. Inviting Professor Rowland had been a stroke of genius. Fredrika made a mental note to tell Peder later what a great initiative it had been.

She was pleased to see everyone in the room looking equally elated. It certainly said something about the case, the fact that so much energy could be generated even on a Saturday.

Alex set out the two main lines of enquiry they were to follow from there. Their top priority was to be individuals who had served sentences and been released that year, or at the end of the previous year. Alex admitted they didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, but there were a number of indications as to the age of the murderer, and he was probably an educated man. He might even be a psychologist, as he had told Nora and Jelena. To get a better fix on the time, they would need to interview Jelena Scortz again about when she first met the man. They could also check with her whether he had disfigured hands or fingers.

The other priority was investigating the pasts of Sara Sebastiansson and Magdalena Gregersdotter. At what stage of their lives had they been associated with the places where their children were later found murdered?

The division of labour was covered in just two sentences: Peder would be in charge of the task of identifying released prisoners who fitted the criteria. Fredrika would be in charge of the task of mapping the two women’s earlier lives. Alex laid a heavy hand on Fredrika’s shoulder.

‘It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.’

He gave a tired wink as he said it.

Fredrika found nothing to complain about in terms of the task she had been allocated. Quite the opposite: she was very happy with it. She gave a melancholy smile as she thought of Alex’s words: ‘You being so keen on cause and effect . . .’ There was nothing much she could say at times like that, she’d discovered. It was best just to go along with it.

Fredrika closed her eyes and put her head in her hands.

An A&E department in a town Sara Sebastiansson went to over fifteen years ago.

A bathroom in a house where Magdalena Gregersdotter lived over twenty years ago.

She repeated the words to herself several times. An A&E department in a town . . .

She tried leaning back in her chair. She was filled with a feverish kind of tension. They were missing something. Something fundamental.

Alex’s words echoed in her head again.
It would make things a whole lot easier if you, being so keen on cause and effect, could find a link between a bathroom in Bromma and a child losing its life.

Then she heard Professor Rowland’s voice.
The women are probably both being punished for the same crime.

A thought slowly began to take shape in her mind. Afraid of losing focus, she groped for pen and paper without changing her position in her seat.

Her pulse started racing when she finally gave the thought its freedom.

Of course.

You just had to play around with the words a bit, and they fell into place.

The common denominator of a bathroom in Bromma and a town in Norrland.
That was what Fredrika had said with a bitter laugh when Alex rang and she went out onto Margareta Andersson’s balcony in Umeå to take the call. But Alex had said something else.
Something about finding a link between a bathroom in Bromma and an A&E department in Umeå.

Of course. It was only when the thought occurred to her that she realized what they had overlooked, and not followed up in the investigation. It wasn’t Umeå that was relevant here, but the A&E department itself.

The wrong questions inevitably yielded the wrong answers. Bearing in mind that the other child was found in a bathroom, it seemed very odd if the intention had been for the first one to be lying outside the hospital. By that token, the baby could just as well have been left on the pavement outside the house where it was found. So the person who dumped Lilian in Umeå had made more than just one mistake. And paid dearly for it.

With the last piece of the puzzle finally in place, Fredrika felt nothing but relief. It wasn’t the children who had links to the geographical locations where they were found, but their mothers. So Alex had said the wrong thing, and thought the wrong thing, when he asked her to see a connection between a bathroom in Bromma and a murdered child. But he had been right the first time. The connection was between a bathroom in Bromma and a woman who had once lived in the house. So the equivalent connection must be between Umeå University Hospital and . . .