Unwanted (9 page)

They found him asleep under a spruce some ten kilometres from home, further away than expected, beyond the radius of the initial search. He was reunited with his parents early the next morning, and the last thing Alex heard as he left the place was the parents bickering loudly and bitterly about whose fault it was the boy had gone off.

Then, of course, there were cases Alex found it harder to reconcile himself to. Cases in which the child had been subjected to such abominations when it was snatched that it was basically a completely different child by the time it was restored to its parents. There was one particular little girl who always came back into Alex’s mind when another child went missing. The girl had been gone for several days before she was found in a ditch by a motorist. She was unconscious for more than a week after she was admitted to hospital, and could never give any proper account of what had happened to her. Nor was there any need. The injuries to her body bore witness to the kind of scum that must have taken her, and though doctors, psychologists and well-meaning parents did everything in their power to heal her wounds, there were psychological scars that no medical treatment or words on this earth could remove.

The girl remained dysfunctional and disturbed as she grew up, not interacting with those around her at home or at school. She became more and more of a loner. She didn’t finish secondary school. Still not of age, she ran away from home and turned to prostitution. Her parents brought her home time after time but she always made off again. And before she was twenty, she died of a heroin overdose. Alex could remember crying in his office when the news reached him.

Alex had felt an overwhelming urge to go and see Sara Sebastiansson for himself the previous evening, and that was why he had accompanied Fredrika Bergman to Sara’s flat. He was afraid Fredrika took it as a sign that he questioned her competence in that area of work. Which he did, to some extent, but that wasn’t why he had wanted to go with her. No, he had just wanted to get a better feel for the case. And he certainly had.

First Fredrika and Alex talked to Sara on her own for a while, and then her new friend Anders Nyström turned up. The checks on his personal data had not yielded anything, but Fredrika had nonetheless interviewed him briefly in Sara’s kitchen, while Alex continued his conversation with Sara in the living room.

The information that emerged troubled him.

Sara had no enemies. At least none she was aware of.

On the other hand, she didn’t seem to have many friends, either.

She told him that her ex-husband used to abuse her, but that it was no longer a problem, and she didn’t believe for a moment that he had taken their daughter. That was why she had chosen not to mention the earlier abuse to Fredrika when they first spoke. She didn’t want the police investigation getting unnecessarily sidetracked, as she put it.

Alex didn’t believe a word of it. For one thing, he had explained in as lecturing a tone as he could without sounding downright arrogant, it was not Sara’s role to evaluate the various avenues of investigation, if indeed there were more than one. And for another, Alex did not believe Sara’s ex-husband was now leaving her in peace. It took him a while to talk her round, but eventually she showed him her forearms, which she had clearly been trying to hide inside her sleeves. Just as Fredrika had suspected, the arms showed clear signs of physical violence. A large and evidently very painful patch stood out sharply on her left arm. The skin was orangey-red and Alex could see signs of blisters that were now starting to heal. A burn, without a doubt.

‘He burnt me with the iron, just before we separated,’ Sara said in a flat voice, with an empty gaze that was trying to fix on a point somewhere behind Alex.

Alex took her arm gently in his hand and said quietly but emphatically:

‘You’ll have to report this, Sara.’

At that, she slowly turned her head and looked him straight in the eye.

‘He wasn’t here then.’

‘What?’

‘Haven’t you read the police reports? He’s never here when it happens. There’s always someone who can confirm he was somewhere else.’

Again her eyes went to that point behind Alex.

It disturbed Alex to see the extent of Sara Sebastiansson’s injuries. To his great annoyance and dismay, her ex-husband had not been in touch at all that evening. Alex sent a radio car to his address for the second time that day, but the officers reported back that the house was still in darkness and no one had answered the door. Fredrika then said she would contact Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother again the following day, and ring the place where he worked.
Somebody
must know where he was.

Sitting there in his grandfather’s office chair, Alex could feel the anger rising inside him. There were certain fundamental rules that he had grown up with and learnt to respect in his almost fifty-five years in this world. You did not hit women. You did not hit children. You did not lie. And you took care of the elderly.

Alex shuddered as he remembered the burn.

What made you do something like that to the person closest to you?

Alex found it hard to stomach the political mood that was now sweeping the country, talking of ‘men’s violence against women’. It would be unthinkable to make sweeping generalizations like that in other areas. To take just one example, a colleague had said at a police conference that ‘the immigrant tendency not to obey laws or regulations is costing society untold sums of money’. That statement almost cost the colleague his job. If he went round saying things like that, it was argued, the public would think all immigrants chose to live outside society’s rules, and that was definitely not the case.

No, thought Alex, it was definitely not the case. Any more than saying that all men hit all women.
Some
men hit women. A huge number of others did not. Unless that was the accepted starting point, the problem would never be properly addressed.

There had been no need for the team to meet again the previous evening. Alex had updated Peder once he and Fredrika left Sara Sebastiansson’s flat. Alex was neither stupid nor gullible. Peder had an almost childlike urge to show how clever he was, and Alex was a little concerned that this might have a negative impact on his judgment in stressful situations. But at the same time he didn’t want to inhibit Peder, who showed exemplary enthusiasm for his job and had so much energy.

It would have been nice if Fredrika could display a little more of that, he thought drily.

He glanced at the clock. Nearly seven. Time to get dressed and head into town. He was so lucky to live on an island like Resarö, so close to the city, yet just far enough away. He would never exchange this house for any other. It was a real find, as his darling Lena had said when they bought it a few years before. Alex got up from his desk chair and took the blue corridor back to the kitchen. By the time he stepped into the shower a short while later, the first rain shower of the morning was already drumming on the window.

T
he train service between Gothenburg to Stockholm is more or less hourly. Sara Sebastiansson’s parents took the earliest train they could, leaving Gothenburg at six in the morning. This was not their first emergency trip from coast to coast, but it was definitely the gravest of its kind. On several previous occasions they had had to drop everything at home and at work to look after Lilian while Sara tried to recover from the damage done to her body as quickly as she could. They had systematically refused to have anything more to do with their son-in-law after the first attack. They had tried every way they could to persuade Sara to be strong and keep away from him. They had implored her to move back to the west coast. But she had always refused. She was not going to let Gabriel destroy any more aspects of her life, she told them. She had been away from Gothenburg for fifteen years, and would never move back. Never. Her life was in Stockholm now.

‘But Sara, love,’ her mother said, ‘he could kill you. Think of Lilian, Sara. What will happen to Lilian if you’re dead?’

But Sara hardened herself against her mother’s tears, and carried on saying no.

Had she done the right thing?

Sitting at her kitchen table the morning after Lilian disappeared, she asked herself if she had made a mistake of incalculable proportions. She wondered if Gabriel really had taken Lilian. God knows the man had done monstrously evil things. Never directly aimed at Lilian, but affecting her indirectly all the same, since she had more than once been woken from her innocent sleep by her mother Sara’s screams from an adjacent room. Once, Lilian had crept out of bed and tearfully found her way to where the sound was coming from.

Sara could still see the scene in her mind’s eye. She was lying on the floor, prevented from getting up by the intense pain in her side where Gabriel had kicked her. Gabriel, seething with rage, bending over her. And in the midst of it all, Lilian’s little voice.

‘Mummy. Daddy.’

As if in a trance, Gabriel turned round.

‘Oh,’ he whispered, ‘is Daddy’s little darling awake?’

He took a couple of swift strides across the kitchen, lifted up the child and carried her out of the room.

‘Mummy just fell over and landed all wrong, darling,’ Sara heard him say. ‘We’ll leave her to have a little rest, and then she’ll be as good as new. Do you want me to read you a story?’

Sara had done a university foundation course in psychology, and she knew that many men who beat their wives showed great remorse afterwards. Gabriel never did. He never said sorry; he never gave any hint of thinking what had happened was abnormal or wrong. He just looked at her injuries and bruises with such casual contempt that she wished she could fall dead on the spot.

She knew she was too exhausted to go on much longer. That night, the first night without Lilian, had been so relentlessly long.

‘Try to get some rest,’ Alex Recht had advised her. ‘I know it sounds impossible, but it really is the best thing you can do for Lilian, so you can be strong. Because when she comes back, she needs a rested mum to look after her. Okay?’

Sara had tried to hang on to that thought. She had tried to sleep, tried to prepare herself for her daughter’s return. She clung on to Alex’s last words: ‘Because when she comes back . . .’ Not
if
she comes back, but
when
she comes back.

As she lay there in bed, Sara realized almost at once that it had been a big mistake to send Anders away so soon. It had felt like a kind of betrayal of Lilian to have him around, as if his presence somehow worsened the odds of getting her daughter back. At two in the morning, she rang her parents. Her father went totally quiet, she heard him breathing into the phone.

Finally she heard his husky voice: ‘We’ve always known we’d lose one of you,’ he said. ‘It could never end well with that evil man in your lives.’

Hearing those words, Sara dropped the phone and slumped to the floor. She clawed at the parquet floor of the kitchen as her tears flowed.

‘Lilian,’ she cried, ‘Lilian.’

Somewhere in the background, from the telephone lying where it had fallen, she heard her father’s desperate voice.

‘We’ll come right away, Sara. Mum and I will come right away.’

Sara cradled her cup of coffee. She liked the fact that it got light early in the mornings, despite the bad weather. She had slept for less than an hour in total. She tried to convince herself that this didn’t make her a bad mother. A mother who didn’t care at all must be worse than one who cared too much. Sara was taken aback by her own thoughts. Was there really a limit to how upset you were allowed to be if your child vanished? She hoped not. She prayed not.

The shrill tone of the doorbell cut through the silence. Sara had just switched off the radio. She had heard the news of her daughter’s disappearance on both television and radio. At first the girl newsreader’s voice felt like a big, warm blanket. Somebody out there cared. Somebody out there wanted to help look for her child. But by the end of the third or fourth news bulletin, the warm blanket felt more like a noose, throttling her, an ever-present reminder of Lilian’s absence, of which Sara was already all too painfully aware.

The doorbell rang again.

Sara considered. A quick look at the clock showed it was almost half past eight. She had been in touch with the duty officer at the police station an hour previously, and he had updated her. Still no news.

Sara peered cautiously through the peephole in the front door, hoping it would be Fredrika Bergman or Alex Recht. It was neither. No, there was some kind of postman standing there. And he had a parcel.

Sara opened the door, surprised.

‘Sara Sebastiansson?’ asked the man with the parcel.

She nodded. The thought occurred to her as she did so that she must look quite a sight, drained and exhausted as she was.

‘I’ve got a parcel for you,’ said the man, holding it out. ‘It was to go directly to you, not to one of our collection points. Can you take delivery?’

‘Yes,’ said Sara warily, taking the package. ‘Thank you.’

‘Thank
you
!’ said the man, smiling. ‘Have a nice day!’

Sara made no reply to this, but shut the door and locked it. She gave the parcel a gentle shake. It weighed scarcely anything, and made no sound when she shook it. She looked for the address of the sender, there was none. It was a box about the size and shape for a DVD player or something like that. She turned it round, turned it over. Hesitant at first, then more deliberate.