The Disappeared (18 page)

Saga crawled towards Fredrika, clutching a big piece of Lego in her hand. She grabbed her mother’s legs and pulled herself up, beaming with delight.

‘She’ll be walking any day now.’

Spencer was standing in the doorway.

‘It certainly looks that way,’ Fredrika replied.

The joy of being a mother suffused her entire body; work was far, far away.

Until her mobile rang.

It was the colleague who had accompanied her to the porn shop in Söder. Fredrika avoided looking at Spencer as she answered; she didn’t really want to tell him about her trip to the depths of sexual behaviour.

‘The IP number belongs to the university,’ her colleague said. ‘And the name didn’t get us anywhere.’

‘Rebecca’s profile was uploaded from a computer at the university?’

‘Yes – one of the student computers that anyone can book.’

A fresh hope sprang up.

‘We had a similar situation when we were working on the murder of the Ahlbins last year,’ she said. ‘Check with the university to see if they keep their booking records. If they do, we can see who booked that particular computer and . . .’

‘I’ve already called them. They don’t keep any records.’

‘Damn.’

She was about to hang up, feeling crestfallen, when something occurred to her.

‘Can you send the pictures on the CD to my private email address?’

Her colleague hesitated.

‘What for?’

‘I want to look at them again; I thought something rang a bell in one of them.’

Her colleague promised to send them over.

‘Are you working this weekend?’ Spencer asked when she had finished speaking.

There was nothing accusatory in his tone; it was a simple enquiry. She shook her head firmly.

‘This weekend is our time.’

She had left the carrier bag full of Rebecca’s papers in her office. She thought of the floppy disks; she had forgotten to go through them. They could wait.

They looked at one another, and Fredrika smiled. She could play her violin later.

‘Would you like to do something special, Professor?’

It would soon be evening; the colours in the sky left no doubt. Alex Recht looked at his watch: it was almost half-past six, and the department was almost deserted.

His reluctance to go home was almost insurmountable. The children had questioned his decision to stay on alone in the house in Vaxholm; shouldn’t he move closer to the city, try living in an apartment?

He didn’t want to think about that too much. Alex and Lena had always planned to move into a city apartment when they got older, but now he was alone, and the project had completely lost its appeal. If he moved out of the house, he would no longer know who he was. His daughter understood better than his son.

‘It’s a house, for God’s sake. Sell the bloody thing.’

It had been impossible to reason with his son when he returned from South America. His girlfriend had found it difficult to obtain a residence permit, and he had cursed Swedish bureaucracy. He picked quarrels with Alex, telling him the hours he worked were just ridiculous. He cursed his mother for not getting better, and he hated his sister who was in a serious relationship with a man the rest of the family found slightly odd.

‘Stop fighting with the rest of us and focus on your own life instead,’ Lena had said to her son the day she died. ‘It’s not our fault you’ve found it difficult to grow up.’

Her words had brought about a change. There were fewer arguments, and when the family gathered in church for Lena’s memorial service, Alex felt that their son was at peace.

The very thought of the service made him want to cry.

He turned to the computer and read through the log that had been set up to record the progress of the case. No leads on the person who had published pictures of Rebecca Trolle after her disappearance on a website aimed at those looking to buy sexual services. But Fredrika had asked for copies of the pictures to be sent to her home email: Why?

He thought about the profile. Could Rebecca have been kept prisoner as a sex slave and sold to the highest bidder, then murdered and buried? He didn’t think so. The profile had been taken down after a few weeks, and had not reappeared.

Alex read on. Several interviews had been conducted with Rebecca’s friends and fellow students, but nothing new had emerged. A few hastily written lines caught his eye. One of the students had remembered that Rebecca had been so dissatisfied with her supervisor that she had secretly contacted another researcher at the University of Uppsala to ask for help. The student wasn’t sure if Rebecca had managed to establish regular contact with this new supervisor, but she thought they had spoken on the phone. She couldn’t remember his name.

Alex took out the copy of Rebecca’s diary and leafed through it. The abbreviations that had not yet been identified had been circled in red:

HH

UA

SL

TR

Could one of these be the new supervisor? If Alex had been younger he would have gone to the home page of the Department of the History of Literature at the University of Uppsala, to check if any of the academic staff had the initials HH, UA, SL or TR. But instead, he wrote an email to Ellen Lind, asking her to check when she came in on Monday. It seemed rather foolish to suspect every male employee at a Swedish university, but then again . . .

He was determined to leave no stone unturned.

His mobile rang just as he was about to pack up and go home to dig out his old fishing equipment ready for Sunday’s outing with Torbjörn Ross.

It was the officer at the grave site who had begged for more manpower. It was becoming impossible to keep the journalists at bay. They were bombarding the police with questions: why were they still digging? What were they expecting to find?

No bloody idea.

‘Sorry to disturb you on a Friday evening,’ his colleague said. It sounded as if he thought Alex was at home.

‘No problem.’

‘I just wanted to let you know that we’re going to take a break from digging until Sunday or Monday. The lads are worn out, and I haven’t had the relief team I asked for.’

No relief team? Was there really another case that had been given a higher priority? Alex doubted it.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I know you’re doing your best. Go home and rest; just make sure someone stays there to guard the site.’

Otherwise, the graves would be turned into a sandpit overnight. It wasn’t only the journalists who were curious; a number of private individuals were also keen to see what was going on. They would come tiptoeing along, watching the police from a safe distance, expectant and desperate for excitement. It was as if the trees and the ground had been transformed into a magical place over the past few days.

The day they buried Lena, Alex had seen several people he didn’t recognise in the church.

The priest had explained, ‘There are always those who don’t belong, but come to join in.’

‘But why?’

‘Because they’re lonely. Because they have nothing better to do. Because they couldn’t bear it if they weren’t able to share in the misery of others. Someone else’s grief gives them a perspective on life.’

Alex had been astounded. And slightly annoyed. If there were people who wanted to prey on his grief, they could at least ask permission first.

Slowly, he got ready to go home. The days when he had been eager to leave work were long gone. The house that was waiting for him was silent and empty and full of memories. Fridays were the worst. Sunday evenings were the best.

When he finally got to his feet he decided to drive past the site of the graves in Midsommarkransen. He somehow felt that he wasn’t grounded in this case; he was fumbling among the different lines of inquiry. There were too many of them, and they were too vague.

Countless times, he had tried to imagine the final hours of Rebecca Trolle’s life. He had pictured her calling her mother, telling her about the social event with the mentors. Leaving the student hostel and walking towards the bus stop. Travelling to Radiohuset and getting off the bus.

Why was it so difficult to work out where she had been going?

Feeling frustrated, Alex closed the door of his office and locked it.

A colleague from Nyköping called: they had picked up Gustav Sjöö’s chainsaw from his summer cottage. SKL, the National Forensics Lab, would attempt to match the chain with the surfaces of the bones in Rebecca’s skeleton where the body had been cut in half. He sounded optimistic; if they got a match, it would mean they had identified the tool that had been used to dismember the body.

True, Alex thought. But we won’t get a match. Because it isn’t Gustav Sjöö we’re looking for.

22

The apartment had become a prison. Håkan Nilsson looked out of the window, making sure he was standing to one side and not right in the middle. They were sitting down there in the car, he was absolutely sure of it. He had seen them when he left for work this morning, and when he came back from the police station this afternoon. Surveillance. Watching his every move.

Håkan guessed that they had started listening in to his telephone calls as well, which was why he kept his mobile switched off in his jacket pocket and had unplugged the landline. This didn’t really affect his life – he had very few friends, and they wouldn’t react if they couldn’t get hold of him for a few days. His mother might be a bit anxious. She worried about everything, and seemed to have developed an actual need to be nervous.

He hoped she wouldn’t realise who the newspapers were writing about. The headlines were mercifully vague: ‘
Suspected killer is friend of Rebecca Trolle
’. He avoided watching the parts of the news broadcasts that related to him. He wished that the whole circus would come to an end, that they would leave him in peace.

There were words within the general hubbub of news that hit him so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Her body had been in plastic bin bags. Dismembered. He almost threw up. She had been desecrated before she was laid to rest. If only he had known where she was during the two years he had been without her. If only he had had a place to go where he could feel her presence.

Håkan started to cry, and moved away from the window, sticking close to the walls to make himself invisible in his own apartment. He went into the bedroom and lay down. The photo album was under his pillow; he rolled over onto his stomach and slid it out. He opened it with trembling hands, gazed at the many photographs.

The first class photo, taken when they started secondary school. All those expectant faces looking into the camera. Their naivety made him feel sick again. The others in the class had seemed younger than him, immature. But not Rebecca, who always smiled when he was talking to her, who lit up his world.

‘Don’t get bogged down in all that boring stuff,’ she used to say. ‘You’re letting yourself down more than anyone when you refuse to have some fun.’

He had learned to listen, to follow her advice and take note of her ideas. He had tried to be around her as much as possible, to feel her energy and lust for life rubbing off on him. He loved to see her face light up when he appeared, welcoming him into her circle.

The problem was that he could never get her alone. Håkan leafed through the album. Pictures of his father, which Rebecca had encouraged him to keep. He had wanted to chuck the lot, get rid of everything his father had ever touched. He hated him for his betrayal, for the fact that he hadn’t thought Håkan was enough, and had taken his own life. And had let Håkan find him.

Håkan was left alone with his mother; how he had hated life in those days. His mother drank more than ever, and smoked forty cigarettes a day. Håkan stank. The smoke got everywhere, into his freshly washed clothes and his newly showered hair. The stench betrayed the fact that his home life was in a state of collapse, and he had to start seeing a counsellor – a complete idiot who hadn’t a clue how things really were for Håkan.

But Rebecca knew. She listened when he talked, sat close to him even though he smelled horrible. Sometimes he would go back to her house after school and have tea with her mother and brother. They were a proper family, and Håkan loved being a part of it. When he and Rebecca did their homework together, he wanted to be at her house rather than in the library. There were photos of those occasions in the album, taken by Rebecca’s mother Diana. Håkan ran his finger over Rebecca’s face; she was gazing steadily into the camera. She was such a strong person compared to him.

More pictures, this time from the weeks before their final school exams. Their first crisis. Håkan sighed. All good relationships have to go through a crisis in order to define their parameters. The problem was that Rebecca had blown their crisis out of all proportion. She had said she couldn’t breathe, that he was suffocating her, that he was always in exactly the same place as she was, and that it was too much. She wanted to see her other friends, and he was getting in the way.

How could that possibly be true?

They had a perfect relationship, and gave each other everything they needed. Rebecca kept saying they had to give each other space, that Håkan mustn’t misinterpret what they had together.

A new page in the album, and Håkan felt a surge of irritation as usual. After the student pictures, there was a gap of a whole year in the time line. The year when Rebecca went to study in France. He found out a week before she left. His rage had threatened to boil over. He had kept out of the way ever since the exams, giving her every opportunity to understand the importance of their relationship. And she had responded by asking for more time.

He clenched his fist, slammed it down on the bed. It was lucky for Rebecca that Håkan was such a patient and generous person. He congratulated himself on his own magnanimity as he turned to the final page in the album. Few people would have show their beloved such tenderness and tolerance.

The tears began to flow as he looked at the very last picture.

A blurred, black-and-white image. An ultrasound image.