Unwanted (10 page)

‘Contact the police immediately if anything unusual happens, anything you weren’t expecting,’ Alex Recht had urged her the night before. ‘You’ve got to report it, Sara, whatever it is. Odd phone calls, odd rings at the door. Even though we’re inclined not to think so, it could be that Lilian’s been kidnapped, and in that case the perpetrator may try to contact you.’

Standing there with the package in her arms, Sara wondered if this should be considered an abnormal event. Her parents would be arriving any minute; should she wait for them to get there?

Perhaps it was lack of sleep, or the driving forces of desperation and curiosity, that made Sara Sebastiansson decide on the spur of the moment to open the parcel straight away. She laid it gently on the kitchen table and put her mobile phone beside it. She would open the parcel and then ring Alex Recht or Fredrika Bergman. If there was any reason to. It could just be something she’d ordered and forgotten about.

Sara peeled off the tape sealing the lid of the box. Her long fingers grasped both sides of the lid and lifted them up. A bed of polystyrene foam granules confronted her. Sara frowned. What was this?

She pushed the granules carefully aside. At first she could not make out what it was she had been sent. Her eyes sought some kind of context they could comprehend. Hair. A mass of medium-length, wavy hair, chestnut brown. Dumbstruck, Sara touched the hair, revealing what lay beneath it. Then Sara instantly knew whose hair she was holding in her hands, and let out a loud, animal howl. She went on screaming until her parents arrived some minutes later and rang for the police and a doctor. Then the screams, which were starting to make her hoarse, turned into sobs of bewilderment and bottomless despair. The dam she had so skilfully built up to hold back her rising sense of panic had burst.
What had she done to deserve this? What in heaven’s name had she done?

S
ara Sebastiansson’s parents’ call came through to the police just after 9 a.m. Alex was immediately informed and drove crazily fast to Sara’s flat, taking Fredrika Bergman with him. To her unfeigned amazement, Fredrika noted as they left that Peder looked very unhappy about Fredrika being asked to answer the emergency call and not him.

Once the cardboard box with its nauseating contents had been sent off by special courier to the National Forensic Science Laboratory, SKL, in Linköping, Alex and Fredrika returned to HQ. Both occupants of the car derived a certain comfort from the silence that settled over them as they began the short return journey from Södermalm to the police building in Kungsholmsgatan. They swept up onto Västerbron and looked out from the bridge over a Stockholm wreathed in almost autumnal darkness. The next front of heavy clouds that had rolled in over the capital overnight were vividly reflected in the water spreading out beneath them. Fredrika reflected on the fact that they coloured the water grey, making the view a good deal less attractive than usual.

Alex cleared his throat.

‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika.

Alex looked at her and shook his head.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ he said quietly.

He was reluctant to admit it, but Alex was shocked by what he had just seen. The package turned the case from what initially seemed a routine investigation involving two adults going through a painful divorce in which their child had inevitably become a pawn, into a case with a much less predictable outcome. The experience had been made no less upsetting by Sara Sebastiansson’s panic, which filled the whole flat and was made all the more tangible by her mother’s tearful entreaties to her daughter to calm down. Alex could see at once that Sara Sebastiansson had gone beyond the point where a human being can simply ‘calm down’. He decided the most efficient course of action was to wait for the doctor and then, when Sara had been given a sedative, to investigate the box and its contents himself.

It was clear from Sara’s reaction to the parcel that the hair must be Lilian’s. Tests would establish the fact for certain. Underneath the mass of hair were the clothes Lilian had been wearing when she disappeared. A green, knee-length skirt and a little white T-shirt with a green and pink print on the front. There were two little hairbands, too. Her panties were missing, for some reason.

Seeing the clothes made Alex’s stomach lurch. Someone must have taken them off her. Of all the sick people in the world, he found none more repugnant than those who violated children.

There were no bloodstains or anything like that on the clothes. At least none that were visible, but SKL would establish that, of course, as well as checking for traces of other bodily fluids.

Alex thought he understood the message a package like that was intended to convey all too well. Somebody wanted to frighten Sara in a big way. Sara’s hysterical reaction showed how very successful the sender had been. Later on, Sara would have to be asked about both the package and the person who delivered it, but any sort of conversation or interrogation was out of the question in her present state.

Soon, thought Alex. Soon.

He gripped the steering wheel hard, very hard.

‘Did you get anything useful out of the call to where the ex-husband works?’ he asked Fredrika.

Fredrika gave a start.

‘Yes and no.’

She sat up straighter in her seat. She’d rung Gabriel Sebastiansson’s employer earlier that morning.

‘According to his boss, Gabriel Sebastiansson’s on holiday at the moment, but he couldn’t say where he is. He’s been off since Monday.’

Alex gave a whistle.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Particularly as he clearly hasn’t told his ex-wife about it, even though they have a child together. And didn’t he tell his old mum he was on a business trip?’

‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘Or at least, that’s what she told me he said. But to be honest, I didn’t have a very good feeling about her.’

Alex frowned.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that just because she says he said he was on a business trip, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Her sense of loyalty to her son is so fierce, I presume she wouldn’t have any objection to lying for his sake.’

Alex thought this over. They were almost back at HQ. Fredrika wondered why it was that she was always the passenger rather than the driver when she went anywhere by car with her male colleagues. Presumably this fact, too, could be explained by her never having been to police training college, never having done her stint in a patrol car, so she must clearly be an incompetent driver.

‘Go round to her place,’ Alex said roughly, completely forgetting to applaud the moment of Fredrika’s first ever admission that she was acting on an instinct. ‘Go round and see the ex-husband’s mother. We’ll just have a quick meeting first.’

‘I will,’ said Fredrika.

They turned into the garage entrance and carried on down the tunnel to the parking area.

‘Are we still sure it was the father took the girl?’ Fredrika asked quietly, afraid of reigniting Alex’s anger by questioning his working hypothesis. ‘Would a father scalp his own daughter and send the hair to her mother?’

The question prompted Alex to think of the burn from the iron on Sara’s arm.

‘Normal fathers wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But Gabriel Sebastiansson is not a normal father.’

Peder Rydh was frustrated. The emergency call from Sara Sebastiansson’s had taken the whole group totally by surprise, and then – just as the situation was at its most acute – Fredrika was asked to go along, rather than Peder. He had to carry on following up tip-off after tip-off. He felt he was worth better than being stuck on something so apparently unimportant, compared to a trip to interview Sara again.

Admittedly he was getting a lot of valuable help from Mats Dahman, the data analyst from the National Crime Squad; Alex had asked if he could call him in to help with the investigation as soon as Sara’s parents rang. Mats had a handy programme for sorting the information that had come in. You could easily identify who had reported things that happened too early, for example. All those who claimed to have seen Lilian Sebastiansson at Stockholm Central Station at quarter to two, for example, could be weeded out automatically, because Lilian hadn’t disappeared by then. But the later ones were trickier. One woman who had been on the same train as Sara and Lilian said she had noticed a short man carrying a sleeping child when they got out onto the platform. But if the perpetrator took size 46 shoes, he was hardly likely to be particularly short. He was presumably quite tall, in fact. Assuming the shoeprints had anything at all to do with Lilian’s disappearance.

Peder leant back in his desk chair and gave a dejected sigh. It hadn’t been particularly great last night, either. He hadn’t got home until ten, despite having made up his mind to get back earlier, and he’d found Ylva sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of tea. She’d been at home all day, but she was still feeling tired. For some reason, Peder found that infuriating, and had to make a real effort not to say anything critical or unkind. He made himself repeat the same old mantra that had been going round and round inside his head for the last ten or eleven months:

She’s tired; she’s not well. She can’t help it. And if we take it slowly, one step at a time, she might improve. Things can only get better.

Until about a year before, Peder had been one of those people who really enjoy their lives to the full. He considered it almost a duty for anyone lucky enough to have a healthy body and a decent situation in life. He enjoyed going to work every day. He enjoyed life in general, and a career that was finally taking off, and he enjoyed his Ylva and the thought of the family they were about to become. In short, he was a secure, straightforward, positive and harmonious person. Happy and outgoing. That was how he saw himself, anyway.

But things changed when Ylva gave birth to the twins, their first children. Life as Peder knew it evaporated, never to return. The boys were immediately put in a special care incubator, and Ylva disappeared into a vast darkness called ‘post-natal depression’. In place of the life he had before, Peder got a different one: full of dissatisfaction and regret, of prescription drugs and long-term sick leave, and constant phone calls asking his mother to look after the children again. What was more, he had to cope with the misery of an everyday life with a total lack of sex. Peder felt instinctively that this was a life he had neither asked for nor deserved.

‘Ylva is so depressed that she doesn’t feel she wants any kind of physical relationship with you,’ the elderly, not to say ancient, doctor had explained to Peder. ‘You’ll have to be patient.’

And Peder really had been patient. He tried to think of Ylva as incurably ill, almost the way he thought of Jimmy, with no prospect of getting better. Peder – and his mother, he mustn’t forget – took over all the day-to-day running of things at home. Ylva slept her way through September, October and November. She cried all through December, except for Christmas itself, when she pulled herself together for a day for the family’s sake. In January she was a little better, but Peder still had to be patient. In mid-February she had another setback and was down all month. In March things improved a bit again. But by then it was already more or less too late.

In March, the Södermalm police, where Peder was working at the time, held its big spring party, and Peder spent half the evening having sex with his colleague Pia Nordh. A delicious relief. Horribly sinful. Totally unforgivable. And yet – in Peder’s world – entirely understandable.

Afterwards he felt the deepest and most awful remorse he had ever known. But then, as Ylva gradually got better and better, and the days longer and longer, Peder started to forgive himself. He had a right to a bit of physical pleasure now and then, after the hell he’d been through. He had the solidarity and support of some of his colleagues, who knew his secret. It was only natural for him to fancy screwing someone else. Not all that often, but occasionally. He felt sorry for himself, thought he deserved a better fate. Bloody hell, he wasn’t even thirty-five. So he got together with Pia every so often. The damage was already done, after all.

He stopped like a shot when she asked him if he was thinking of leaving Ylva, though. Was she crazy? Leave Ylva for some colleague dying for a fuck? Pia obviously had no idea about what was important in life, thought Peder, and dumped her by text message.

Soon after that, he got a new job, moving on from the uniformed branch to become a DI – sooner in his career than most people. He was allocated to the investigation team of the almost legendary Alex Recht, and threw himself wholeheartedly into the new job. At home, to Peder’s genuine delight, Ylva started talking about the future, and how it would be in the autumn, when Peder was to take a spell of paternity leave, and then the boys would start at nursery; and they all went to Majorca for the last week in May. Peder and Ylva made love for the first time in over ten months, and after that some things seemed to start going back to more like what Peder thought of as normal.

‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get everything back to how it was,’ his mother warned him. ‘Ylva’s still sensitive.’

Peder actually felt like saying that Ylva was still bordering on the unrecognizable, but the week away had given him new hope. Ylva was gradually showing more sides of herself that he could recognize. It really would be risking everything to tell her about the affair with Pia Nordh, he told himself. And anyway, he had so deserved a bit of fun just then.