The Disappeared (24 page)

Why hadn’t he said that he lived in Stockholm? Perhaps he was lying about the child as well. The database showed that this wasn’t the case: Spencer Lagergren did indeed have a child – a daughter just under one year old, by the name of Saga.

Peder stared at the screen. Saga. Like Fredrika’s daughter. He took a deep breath. Clicked on the child’s name. Mother and legal guardian: Fredrika Bergman. Father and legal guardian: Spencer Lagergren.

His heart was pounding, his pulse rate increasing.

What the hell was going on here? Why hadn’t Fredrika said anything?

He stopped himself.

She hadn’t known. Nobody in the team had actually mentioned Spencer Lagergren’s name.

Peder buried his face in his hands, overcome with embarrassment. Admittedly it was very odd that nobody on the team knew the name of the man Fredrika was living with, but it was even more odd that Peder had called Spencer without checking on his background in advance. Sloppy. Spencer must have wondered what the hell Fredrika’s colleagues were up to.

‘Bloody unprofessional,’ Peder muttered to himself.

His mobile rang, and Peder was relieved to see that it was Jimmy.

‘You answered!’

It was very easy to win Brownie points in Jimmy’s limited world, where his brother Peder was king, and beyond reproach. Even when he let Jimmy down.

‘Of course I answered – you called me, didn’t you?’

Jimmy’s clear laugh echoed down the phone.

They talked for a while. Jimmy had been out for a walk with someone who had a dog. They had made biscuits in the assisted living complex, and Jimmy had taken one of the biscuits for the dog.

Peder felt a stab of sorrow. In just a few years, his own sons would have passed their uncle in terms of development.

‘The weekend was good,’ Jimmy said.

He was referring to Saturday, which he had spent with Peder and his family. It had been more than just dinner; Jimmy had wanted to be picked up at lunchtime.

‘It was,’ Peder replied.

‘Can we do it again next weekend?’

‘Maybe. If not, I’ll see you soon.’

When Jimmy had rung off, Peder felt the emptiness grow in his breast. The therapist had told him he had to accept Jimmy as a source of joy; he couldn’t go on grieving for everything his brother was missing out on. He couldn’t spend his life feeling guilty because he had become an adult while Jimmy remained a child.

It didn’t matter how many times Peder heard those words; he would always feel a pang of guilt.

Alex walked in and interrupted his brooding.

‘Spencer Lagergren,’ he said.

Peder groaned.

‘Look, I’m really sorry I stuffed up, Alex. I had no idea he was Fredrika’s . . . boyfriend.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Alex closed the door.

‘What did you say? What are you talking about?’

‘He’s Fredrika’s partner. The father of her child.’

He pointed to the computer.

‘Unless I’ve mixed him up with another Spencer, but I really don’t think I have. I just called him.
Before
I checked who he was. He must think we’re a right load of clowns.’

Alex sat down.

‘I knew I recognised the name Spencer,’ he said. ‘The thing is, Fredrika isn’t as open as the rest of us. She doesn’t even have a photograph of him on her desk. Which isn’t all that strange, when you think about it. After all, he was married to another woman, more or less right up until Fredrika gave birth to their child. And she hasn’t been in work since then. All I knew was that he was a professor.’

He looked at Peder.

‘Rebecca contacted Spencer Lagergren when she wasn’t happy with Gustav Sjöö.’

‘Was he her new supervisor?’ Peder asked, sounding surprised.

‘So it seems.’

Peder shuffled uncomfortably.

‘Perhaps that’s not so strange. Sjöö knew Lagergren; perhaps he recommended him.’

‘In which case he should have mentioned that when we interviewed him.’

‘He did say that Lagergren could confirm his alibi. And it doesn’t really matter whether Rebecca found Lagergren herself, or through Sjöö.’

‘According to Spencer Lagergren’s profile on the university website, the main focus of his research has been prominent Swedish women writers who have been active during the past fifty years.’

‘Like the subject of Rebecca’s dissertation – Thea Aldrin.’

‘Exactly.’

Alex bit his lip.

‘Bloody hell, why does he have to be Fredrika’s partner? Then again, that’s irrelevant as far as the case goes. If we need his help, we have to ask for it.’

‘What do you want to talk to him about?’

‘I want to know whether he and Rebecca ever met, if he noticed anything he would like to share with us. The same questions we’ve asked everybody else who had any contact with Rebecca during the last part of her life.’

Peder looked out of the window.

‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’

Alex smoothed down the crease in his trousers.

‘No. We’ll inform Fredrika that her partner has cropped up in the investigation.’

He fell silent, and Peder sensed there was something else on his mind.

‘I’m just wondering why he didn’t come forward in the first place. Rebecca’s name has been all over the news since Wednesday. He must have realised that the police would want to speak to him. That we would have wanted to speak to him when she disappeared two years ago, in fact.’

There was another pause. Peder scratched his arm.

‘Perhaps they never met, in which case there was nothing to tell.’

‘He was in her diary, Peder.’

‘I know, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. She might have had her eye on him as a possible replacement for Gustav Sjöö, but then she disappeared before they started working together – so there’s nothing he feels he ought to pass on to the police.’

Alex spread his arms wide.

‘I’m sure you’re right. But we still need to talk to him. I assume there’s nothing on him in our records?’

‘I haven’t had time to check yet,’ Peder admitted. ‘I’ll do it right now.’

Alex stayed where he was as Peder opened the police intranet and did a multiple search of all records. There was a match in criminal records; Spencer had several fines for speeding.

‘Nothing serious,’ Peder murmured.

Alex stood up and looked at Peder’s screen over his shoulder.

There was a match in the database of those currently under suspicion of a criminal offence.

They both saw it at the same time.

The colour drained from their faces as they read the complaint.

‘Fuck,’ Alex whispered. ‘I’ll ring the Uppsala police straight away.’

30

Peder’s door slammed, and a second later, Fredrika saw Alex walk quickly past her office. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ground and didn’t look in her direction. Had something happened?

She wondered whether to go and ask Peder, but dismissed the idea. To her relief, he hadn’t got annoyed when she followed up Rebecca’s appearance on the website, and then Rebecca’s dissertation. They were working well together; a situation which would have been unthinkable when she first joined the team.

Valter Lund, the businessman who had been Rebecca’s mentor, would have to be looked at. And then there was the material relating to Rebecca’s dissertation, which Fredrika had brought from the aunt’s garage. She decided to tackle that first.

Fredrika didn’t quite know where to begin. Both Diana Trolle and Gustav Sjöö had made it clear that Rebecca had spent too much time on her dissertation, and had got far too involved in her topic in the end. In fact, she didn’t get it finished. The dissertation should have been handed in in January 2007, but Rebecca wasn’t satisfied, and was aiming to submit it later, during the spring term.

How come? The subject had been the life and work of a writer who was almost seventy years old. Thea Aldrin hadn’t been a hot topic of conversation for decades. And even when her case had been in the news, no one had really been talking in terms of guilt or innocence. Thea Aldrin was guilty of the crimes for which she had been convicted; the evidence was almost ridiculously convincing.

But Rebecca had thought differently, according to her mother and her supervisor. She had insisted that Thea was innocent of the murder of her ex-husband. How could she have reached such a conclusion?

Fredrika started to go through the articles Rebecca had photocopied, trying to familiarise herself with Thea Aldrin’s background. Rebecca had been meticulous, seeking out older articles as well. Virtually every newspaper in Sweden had followed Thea’s trial, telling her story over and over again.

The court case formed a kind of bizarre finale to years of remarkable episodes in Thea’s life, Fredrika discovered. It began when she gained success as an author. Some people were horrified by her status as a single mother, because no one seemed to know who the child’s father was, and because Thea hadn’t even been married. Should parents really be giving their children books by a woman like this?

The answer to the question was clearly yes – Thea’s books had sold in large numbers, not only in Sweden but also on the international market. Some cynics maintained that Thea should have had more sense, and published her books under a pseudonym instead so that her private life wouldn’t have affected her success.

Rebecca had gathered together a large collection of articles. A person who was unfamiliar with the topic would have found it difficult to produce a time line, but Fredrika had a certain amount of basic knowledge to help her. She knew that there were certain critics who never gave up in their efforts to destroy once and for all the image of Thea Aldrin as an independent woman with a child and a career.

In 1976, just such an opportunity arose. A small and relatively new publisher brought out the books
Mercury
and
Asteroid
, two short works with the sole aim of provoking debate, apparently. Extremely heated debate. In more recent times, only Brett Easton Ellis had aroused a similar outcry with
American Psycho
. The stories in
Mercury
and
Asteroid
contained sequences of exaggerated and violent pornography which always ended in murder. They also contained deeply unpleasant murders of women in a variety of sexual contexts.

Fredrika hadn’t read the books herself, but she had always wondered why it was rumoured that Thea Aldrin had written them. The publisher behind the books, Box, refused to comment.

The rumours about Thea’s involvement might well have died away, but for the fact that her son disappeared in 1980.

The boy seemed to have been something of a sore point in Thea’s life even when he was a child. She had given very few interviews, and had consistently refused to discuss her private life. She protected her son as fiercely as a lioness. There was only one photograph of the boy when he was little, taken at the premiere of a British film in Stockholm, according to the article. The year was 1969, and the boy was five years old. His hands were pushed deep in his pockets, and he was staring into the camera with a defiant expression. Fredrika leaned forward to look more closely at the picture. It was a poor copy, and the image wasn’t very sharp. It looked as if Thea and the boy were standing in the foyer of the cinema, with people crowding around them. She read:

‘Thea Aldrin is a rare guest at film premieres, but this evening she has brought her son Johan along. The author has a keen interest in film, and is a member of the exclusive film club known as The Guardian Angels, which meets on a regular basis to watch and discuss both new and old films.’

The Guardian Angels.

Fredrika immediately thought of the floppy disks she had found in the garage. One of them had been labelled with those very words: The Guardian Angels. She must remember to hand them over to the IT boys.

She concentrated on the article again. The slightly blurred caption below the picture read:

‘Thea and Johan Aldrin. Morgan Axberger, who is also a member of The Guardian Angels, can be seen in the background.’

Morgan Axberger, former vice president of Axbergers, where Valter Lund worked, and now chairman of the board. She could picture Morgan Axberger today – he was a man who personified the concept of power in every way. Tall and imposing, exuding authority. He had inherited his father’s empire in the 1970s, and had ruled it with an iron hand ever since. In spite of the fact that he had recently celebrated his seventieth birthday, no one was expecting him to retire. Nor was it clear who would take over from him in the future, because there were no heirs.

Rebecca must have wanted to meet Morgan Axberger to talk about the film club. Fredrika dug out the copy of Rebecca’s diary that Peder had given her; she leafed through it without coming across Axberger’s name. However, he was one of the most influential people in Swedish industry, so it would probably have been difficult to arrange a meeting with him. Then again, with Valter Lund as her mentor, it shouldn’t have been impossible. Feeling frustrated, Fredrika put the question to the back of her mind and decided to take a break.

She found the floppy disks she had brought from the garage and headed for the IT department. In the corridor, she met Peder, who gave a start when he caught sight of her.

‘Hi, there.’

She laughed.

‘Hi there.’

He stopped.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing – it’s just the way you said, “Hi, there.” It’s not your usual greeting.’

Peder shrugged, looking as if he was forcing himself to smile at her. Then he walked away.

Something was wrong, she could feel it, but curiosity with regard to what she might find on the disks overshadowed everything else.

The IT department was almost empty; the only person available to help her was one of the admin staff.

‘So you want to know what’s on these disks?’

‘Please. And if there isn’t too much on there, I’d like a printout straight away.’

‘OK, let’s see what we can do.’

Fredrika hurried back to her office. Her intention was to try to work fewer hours per day than she had done in the first week – if that was possible while she was working on the Rebecca Trolle case.