Unwanted (24 page)

J
elena nervously put the key in the front door. Her hand always shook a bit when she was excited or nervous. Just now she was both of those things. She had done it. She had done absolutely everything the Man had instructed her to do. She had driven the car up to Umeå, got rid of the Foetus in almost exactly the way and exactly the place he wanted, and then caught the plane back. No one had seen her, no one had suspected what she was doing. Jelena was sure she had never performed better in her whole life.

Silence received her as she shut the door behind her.

She fumbled as she took off her shoes and arranged them precisely beside each other, the way the Man always insisted their shoes should be lined up in the little hall.

‘Hello,’ she said tentatively, going further into the flat. ‘Are you there?’

She took a few more steps. Wasn’t it strangely quiet?

Something was wrong, so wrong.

He suddenly detached himself from the shadows. She sensed rather than saw the great fist coming towards her and hitting her right in the face.

No, no, no, she thought desperately as she flew backwards through the air and landed hard on her back, her head hitting the wall.

Pain and fear were throbbing in her body, which had learnt that in situations like this, by far the safest thing was not to react at all. But the blow was so unexpected and so ominous that she almost wet herself in terror.

He came swiftly towards her and pulled her to her feet. There was blood running from one corner of her mouth and her head was spinning. Darts of pain were shooting through her back.

‘You bloody whore, you complete bloody misfit,’ he hissed through clenched teeth, and his eyes seethed with a fury she had never seen before.

‘Oh no, no, please, somebody help me,’ she mumbled to herself.

‘She should have been lying in a foetal position,’ he said, holding her face so close to his own that she could see every tiny detail of it. ‘She should have been lying in a foetal position and quite apart from that –
quite apart from that!
– what the fucking hell was she doing on the pavement? How bloody hard can it be to understand?’

He yelled the last bit with such force that she was struck dumb.

‘I . . . ,’ she began, but the Man broke in.

‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘Shut up!’

And when she made another attempt to explain, explain that there hadn’t been time to arrange the Foetus
exactly
as they –
as he
– had planned, nor in
exactly
the right place, he yelled at her again to shut up, and silenced her with another punch in the face. Two punches. A knee in her stomach. A kick in her side once she was on the floor. Ribs cracked, making the same sound as when frosty branches snap in a forest in winter. Soon she could no longer hear his yelling or feel his blows. She was scarcely conscious as he tore off her clothes and dragged her into the bedroom. She began to whimper as she saw him get out the box of matches. He kept her quiet by stuffing a sock in her mouth, and then lit the first match.

‘How do you want things, Doll?’ he whispered, holding up the burning match in front of her wide, terrified eyes. ‘Can I rely on you?’

She nodded desperately, trying to get the sock out of her mouth.

He grabbed her by the hair and leant forward. The match was burning.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said, bringing the match closer to the thin skin where her neck met her chest. ‘I’m really not sure.’

Then he lowered the match and let the flickering flame lick at her skin.

A
lex Recht and Hugo Paulsson met Sara Sebastiansson and her parents in a so-called family room an hour or so after they had identified Lilian. Warm colours on the walls. Soft armchairs and sofas. Indian wood tables. No paintings, drawings or photos on the walls. But there was a bowl of fruit.

Alex scrutinized Sara.

Unlike when she had been given the box with the hair, and later the preliminary news of the death, she now seemed more composed. With the emphasis on ‘seemed’. Alex had met enough suffering, grieving people in his professional life to know that Sara had a very long road ahead of her before she got back to anything resembling a normal, everyday life. Bereavement had so many faces, so many phases. Somebody, Alex couldn’t remember who, had said it was as hard to bear intense grief as it was to walk on thin ice. One moment it feels all right, the next it suddenly gives way and you are suddenly plunged into the darkest darkness of pain.

Just at the moment, Sara seemed to be standing on a very small, but solid piece of ice. Alex felt he was viewing her from a distance. She was not really present, but not really absent, either. Her eyes were still red and puffy from crying, and she had a paper tissue in her hand. From time to time, her hand went up and wiped her nose with the tissue. The rest of the time, it lay motionless in her lap.

Her parents sat quietly, their eyes bright with moisture.

It was Hugo who broke the silence. First with the offer of coffee. Then with the offer of tea. And then with a promise that the interview would not take long.

‘We’re wondering why Lilian ended up here in Umeå,’ Alex began hesitantly. ‘Has the family got any connections in the town, or the area?’

At first no one said anything. Then Sara herself replied.

‘No, we’ve no connections here,’ she said quietly. ‘None at all. Nor has Gabriel.’

‘And you’ve never been here before?’ asked Alex, turning to look at Sara again.

She nodded. It was almost as if her head was not properly fixed to her neck, as it was wavering around in all directions.

‘Yes, once. My best friend Maria and I were here, the summer after we finished school,’ she whispered, and then cleared her throat. ‘But that was – let me see – seventeen years ago. I went on a writing course at a centre a little way outside the town, and then I got a summer job there as an assistant to one of the teachers. But I wasn’t here long, as I say, maybe three months in all.’

Alex regarded her thoughtfully. In spite of the fatigue and grief that seemed to envelop her whole face, he could see a very slight twitch in the corner of her eye as she spoke. There was something bothering her, something that had nothing to do with Lilian.

Her lower lip trembled a little and her chin was jutting out. Did she perhaps look a bit defiant, despite the tears welling in her eyes and threatening to overflow?

‘Did you make any new friends up here? Maybe a boy or something?’ Alex asked vaguely.

Sara shook her head.

‘Nobody at all,’ she said. ‘I mean, I met some nice people on the course, and some of them lived here in Umeå, and we saw each other a bit after I started working at the centre. But you know how it is, you go back home, and then it all seems so far away. I lost touch with most of them.’

‘And you didn’t make any enemies here?’ Alex asked kindly.

‘No,’ said Sara, and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘No, not one.’

‘And the friend you came with?’

‘Maria? No, nor did she. Not as far as I can remember. We don’t keep in touch these days.’

Alex leant back in his chair and indicated with a nod to Hugo that he was free to ask any questions he wanted. Alex and Hugo both felt a bit dubious about the link to the writing course, but to be on the safe side Hugo took down the names of all the other people on the course that Sara could remember. There was, after all, nothing else to go on as they tried to find out why the girl’s body had turned up in Umeå.

For now, the team in Umeå was working on the basis that the girl had been killed in Stockholm and that Alex’s team should therefore take the lead in the enquiry.

Hugo’s group had, however, collated all the information about the discovery of Lilian’s body. The telephone call that had initially lured Anne the nurse out into the car park had come from a mobile with an unregistered top-up account. The call had come from thirty kilometres south of Umeå. The phone had not been used since. No woman about to give birth had showed up at the hospital with her partner that night, so the investigating team assumed the call had only been made to get a member of staff out to the car park. Someone wanted the child to be found, without delay.

There was so much that baffled Alex about this case. And he felt very clearly that he wouldn’t be able to focus his mind on it properly where he was. He needed to get back to Stockholm as soon as possible, so he could sit down in peace and think things through. He felt a disturbing sense of anxiety. The story just didn’t fit together. It just didn’t.

Sara Sebastiansson’s husky voice broke into his thoughts.

‘I never regretted having her,’ she whispered.

‘Pardon?’ said Alex.

‘It said “Unwanted” on her forehead. But it wasn’t true. I never regretted having her. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

Fredrika spent the rest of the day trying to get through as many interviews as possible with Sara Sebastiansson’s friends, acquaintances and colleagues, using the contact details supplied by Sara and her parents. The list had expanded as a result of the first ring round. She allocated some of the people on the list to the extra investigator.

It was an unambiguous picture of Sara that emerged. She was basically seen as a very warm and positive person, a
good
person. Almost everyone, even those not so close to her, thought her private situation had been very difficult for the past few years. Her husband was inconsiderate and inflexible, cold and controlling. Sometimes she was limping when she came to work, and sometimes she wore long-sleeved tops even in the middle of summer. They couldn’t be sure, of course . . . but . . . how many times could a person accidentally trip and hurt herself?

None of the people Fredrika and her assistant spoke to recognized Teodora Sebastiansson’s picture of Sara as an irresponsible mother and unfaithful wife. But one of Sara’s closest friends told them Gabriel had been cheating on Sara with other women from the very start. She was crying as she spoke, and said:

‘You see, we all thought she’d get away from him, find the strength to leave him. But then she got pregnant. And then we knew, then we knew almost for sure that the game was up. She would never be rid of him.’

‘But she left him, didn’t she?’ asked Fredrika, frowning. ‘They’re getting divorced.’

Sara’s friend cried even harder, and shook her head.

‘None of us really believe that. People like him always come back. Always.’

One thing Fredrika picked up on in the course of the interviews was that even the individuals Sara referred to as ‘friends from way back’ turned out to be people she had got to know in adult life. She had not retained a single friend from when she was growing up in Gothenburg. To judge by the list, her parents were the only contacts she had on the west coast.

‘Sara once told me she had to break off with almost everybody once she met Gabriel,’ her friend explained. ‘The rest of us got to know Sara and Gabriel as a couple, pre-packaged, but I think Sara’s friends from before could never accept that she was with him.’

The information coming out of interview after interview indicated that Sara did not have an enemy in the world, apart from her husband.

Fredrika returned to HQ exhausted, clutching a hot dog in her hand. She fervently hoped Alex was back. And if he wasn’t, Fredrika was going to take the opportunity to shut herself in her room and try to relax for a little while. She needed to put her feet up and listen to a piece of music her mother had recommended, which she had downloaded to her MP3 player.

‘Something to meditate to,’ her mother had said with a smile, knowing that Fredrika, like her, considered music as important an element of everyday life as food and sleep.

But it was Peder she ran into first.

‘Ooh, hot dog!’ he exclaimed.

‘Mmmm,’ answered Fredrika with her mouth full.

To her surprise, Peder followed her into her office and virtually collapsed into her visitor’s chair. Clearly there would be neither rest nor music for her at the moment.

‘How was your day?’ he asked, sounding tired.

‘Good and bad,’ she said evasively.

She still hadn’t told him that she had taken herself off to Flemingsberg, still less that she had then sent an identikit artist there to make a sketch of the woman with the dog who had held up Sara Sebastiansson and made her miss the train.

‘Did the searches reveal anything?’ she said instead.

Peder took his time to frame his thoughts and eventually said:

‘They certainly did. And it all seems a damn sight murkier than we thought, to be honest.’

Fredrika sat down at her desk and studied Peder. He still looked the worse for wear. Her attitude to him had at times been one of casual contempt. He was childish, puppylike, and unhealthily fond of showing off. But this particular afternoon, when they were all feeling the effects of what had happened over the past few days, she could see him in a different light. There was a human being inside Peder, too. And that human being was not coping well.

She quickly ate up her hot dog.

Peder somewhat hesitantly laid a thin sheaf of papers on her desk.