The Disappeared (27 page)

Rebecca had always occupied a special place in Diana’s heart. Not a better place than the one reserved for her son, but somehow more important. People say that every parent has a particularly strong bond with their first-born, and for Diana, this was an absolute truth. The daughter she had once carried was special, a perfect mosaic of qualities and characteristics inherited from her parents, mixed with her own unique personality. This applied to both the physical and the spiritual elements.

The night she was born, Diana and Rebecca’s father had stood gazing at the child as she slept.

‘She looks like both of us,’ Diana had said.

‘She’s an individual.’

‘It doesn’t do any harm to have an inheritance.’

How those words had hurt her over the past two years, when Diana suddenly discovered that was all she had left. During the first twenty-four hours of the search, she had managed to remain calm. She had phoned her ex and explained what had happened, told him there was no need to come to Stockholm. Rebecca would soon be back.

The following morning he was on her doorstep. He stayed for ninety days. Slept on her sofa and wept in her arms when the pain got too much for him.

Ninety days. That was how long the search for their daughter had remained active. After that, there was a change. When Diana went to see Alex Recht at police HQ, she could feel that things were different. There were fewer officers still searching. Far fewer. Alex placed his big hands on her shoulders and said:

‘We’ll never stop looking. But we have to accept that the chances of finding her alive are now minimal. At least the police have to take that view.’

The consequences of his comments were implicit: he had to re-prioritise the deployment of his staff. He would be leading a new team.

‘I don’t care whether you find her alive; I just want to know what’s happened to her,’ Diana said.

After that, her ex-husband had gone back to Gothenburg. His new wife couldn’t cope without him any longer. It was summer, and it had rained every single day. Diana was glued to the television when six-year-old Lilian Sebastiansson vanished from a train. She felt for the child’s mother, who was a single mum, and wished her well. By the time the summer drew to a close, Diana had fallen apart. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know how she could ever be whole again. She didn’t want to be whole again. As long as her daughter was missing, she had no reason to feel at peace.

With the autumn came a return to everyday life. The knowledge that her daughter would have wanted her mother to go on living carried Diana through the days. She began painting more, spending time with her son. The memory of Rebecca didn’t fade for a second. Her face was the last thing Diana saw when she closed her eyes and fell asleep at night, and the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning. The child she had given life to might have disappeared, but the memories remained, as Diana and her son frequently reminded one another.

She’s here, even though we can’t see her.

Rebecca was dead. Diana had known that when that hellish summer with all its rain came along. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why her daughter couldn’t be found. Where was she?

In the ground.

Someone had given Rebecca a grave without telling her family. Diana wanted to go there, to Midsommarkransen. Stand at the edge of the grave and look down into the hole that some unknown person had dug. Alex had advised her against it, told her it would be best to wait until the police had finished their work.

Alex.

Who had led the search for her daughter and identified her with the help of a piece of jewellery. She liked him. She had liked him two years ago, when Rebecca went missing. She knew he had sorrows of his own. It didn’t feel right to compare her pain with his; she could see that he was suffering, but didn’t know how to ease his torment.

Or how he might be able to help her.

Diana burst into tears. How could her daughter have been pregnant, and never said a word? For several months!

I thought we had no secrets from one another.

Alex wasn’t saying much about the way the police were thinking. Rebecca’s pregnancy was one of several important lines of inquiry. Diana couldn’t understand how there could be a number of different leads.

She called her son, hoping she wasn’t disturbing him.

‘Of course not, Mum.’

She had to smile.

‘That’s what the police say when I ring them.’

Her eyes filled with tears.

‘Was there something in particular, or did you just want a chat?’

He was so like his father, always wanting to know how things stood.

‘Both.’

She hesitated before going on.

‘I want you to be absolutely straight with me. Are you sure you didn’t know Rebecca was pregnant?’

‘For God’s sake, Mum, you’ve asked me that a hundred times, and every time I tell you . . .’

‘. . . that you didn’t know. I’m sorry to keep asking, it’s just that I’m finding it so difficult –
so
difficult – to cope with the thought that she never mentioned it to either of us.’

Damn, she couldn’t stop herself from crying.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You have to accept that she had secrets, Mum.’

‘But why keep that a secret?’

‘I suppose she was intending to have a termination.’

‘All the more reason to tell me. I wouldn’t have judged her, she knew that.’

Her son said nothing; he couldn’t deal with his mother’s grief as well as his own.

‘What about that Valter Lund?’ he said eventually.

‘Her mentor?’

Diana could hear the surprise in her voice.

‘But he was much older than her. Are you saying he might have been the father?’

‘There was something odd about all that, Mum. He came to church once to hear her sing.’

‘Wasn’t he religious?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything? He was there, Mum. He sat right at the front, staring at her.’

‘You were there too?’

‘Yes, and I know what I saw.’

Diana allowed her son’s words to sink in. Alex wasn’t prepared to say whether the police had found the father of Rebecca’s child. Could it be Valter Lund? That would explain Rebecca’s silence. And Alex’s.

34

At first, it looked as if Valter Lund had never existed. The high-flying financier who shot across the company directors’ sky like a comet had no past.

‘Why does it look like this?’ Fredrika asked Ellen as they attempted to map out his life together.

‘Because he didn’t come to Sweden until 1986. He’s been a Swedish citizen since the beginning of the nineties; started his first company the year he arrived.’

Fascinated, Fredrika carried on leafing through the documents.

‘What an amazing story. It looks as if what people say about him really is true; he came from nowhere and broke through with a force that would have frightened Thor himself.’

‘Who?’

Fredrika smiled.

‘Thor, the Norse god. The guy with the hammer.’

Ellen laughed.

‘Is he in our records?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Shame.’

Ellen bit her lower lip.

‘I don’t know if this is of any interest, but . . .’

Fredrika turned to look at Ellen, the papers sliding out of her hands.

‘What?’

‘Carl, my partner, he works with Valter Lund occasionally. And he’s told me a bit about his life. His private life, I mean.’

‘Go on.’

Ellen sat down. Fredrika noticed that she was wearing a loose top yet again. Was she pregnant? It wasn’t out of the question; Ellen was under forty.

‘Well, Carl said that Valter Lund always attended functions and work-related events alone. Without exception. And of course that led to a certain amount of speculation about his sexual orientation.’

Fredrika’s hopes began to fade. If Valter Lund was gay, he was hardly likely to have had a relationship with Rebecca. But Ellen hadn’t finished.

‘But then he turned up at one dinner with a much younger woman on his arm. It only happened once, but it was enough to start a fresh rumour. People said he was only interested in women half his age.’

‘If it only happened once, it seems a bit rash to draw such a conclusion,’ Fredrika said. ‘Perhaps the girl was his niece, or some other relative?’

Ellen shook her head decisively.

‘That was the whole point. She wasn’t a relative; he introduced her as “a young woman who has yet to find her true path in life”.’

‘And you think this might have been Rebecca Trolle?’

‘When Valter Lund’s name cropped up in the investigation, I remembered Carl telling me about that girl. I mentioned it to him, and he’s absolutely certain it was Rebecca.’

Fredrika took out her copy of Rebecca’s diary.

‘Does he remember the date?’

‘Not the exact date, but it was around the beginning of February 2007.’

Fredrika flicked through week after week in the relevant month. Plenty of meetings, but nothing with the initials ‘VL’.

‘Maybe there’s nothing odd about it,’ she said. ‘After all, he was her mentor; perhaps he was just being kind and inviting her to a dinner. We’ll ask Diana; she might have heard Rebecca mention it even though it isn’t in her diary.’

Ellen pursed her lips.

‘Feel free to speak to her mother, but I’m absolutely certain there was something dodgy about it.’

‘Because?’

‘Because the dinner was in Copenhagen. How many other mentors invited their students to spend a weekend in a luxury hotel in Denmark’s capital city?’

The gold watch that had been dug up in Midsommarkransen gleamed in Alex’s hand.

‘
Carry me. Your Helena’

He had read the inscription on the back of the watch several times. Simple words, worth their weight in gold.

How many watches like this could there be? Not many. It should have been all they needed to identify the man in the grave. Who was he, this man who had lain in the ground for decades without being missed by anyone?

It just couldn’t be true.

No one disappears without being missed by a single person. No one.

Alex held on tightly to the watch. He had asked one of his colleagues to try to trace its origins, as far back as possible.

‘Try jewellers and specialist watch makers. Find out when it was made, where it might have been bought.’

The officer in question was given a series of pictures to take with him; Alex hoped he would be back soon. If the watch couldn’t help them, he had already decided to turn to the media. He would publish pictures of the watch and pray that someone recognised it. Preferably this afternoon.

Forensics called about the axe and the knife; there were very old traces of blood on both. It was unlikely that the blood had come from either Rebecca Trolle or the unidentified man, but it was impossible be sure. Alex shuddered at the thought of having yet another dead person to deal with.

He glanced at his watch. Peder should be in Uppsala by now; he was going to speak to the local police to find out what they knew. He was also intending to visit Spencer Lagergren’s ex-wife, who still lived in Uppsala; Lagergren had been living with her when Rebecca disappeared.

Alex went back to the lists of Rebecca Trolle’s telephone activity, which didn’t directly link her to Lagergren; all they had were the calls to the university switchboard. Which proved absolutely nothing.

Nor had it been possible to trace any emails from Rebecca to Spencer, at least not from her account. That was no guarantee that messages hadn’t been sent, of course, just that they hadn’t been traced.

But if they had spoken on the phone only infrequently, and hadn’t exchanged emails, how had they been in touch? The conclusion could well be that they hadn’t been in touch, and that Spencer Lagergren had no place in the investigation.

Alex sent up a silent prayer that this would turn out to be the case.

The image of Gustav Sjöö emerged from the shadows of his mind: the supervisor who had named Spencer Lagergren as the witness who could confirm that he had not left the conference in Västerås, and who therefore could not be involved in the murder of Rebecca Trolle. A witness who was now accused of having sexually harassed a female student, just like Sjöö.

What if they knew one another?

The thought was intriguing. What if the two of them had worked together, each providing the other with an alibi to protect them? Their profiles were very similar: two men in their sixties, recently divorced, subsequently finding it difficult to maintain appropriate relationships with young women.

Peder called.

‘I’ve spoken to our Uppsala colleagues about Lagergren.’

His voice was tense; it sounded as if he was making the call outdoors.

‘What did they say?’

‘That a Tova Eriksson has made the accusation. She claims that Lagergren used his position of power as her supervisor to force her to provide sexual favours. And when he didn’t get what he wanted, she says he scuppered her dissertation.’

‘Fuck.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure that everything is as it seems, Alex.’

Peder sounded anxious, his voice peppered with uncertainty.

‘This isn’t like the accusations against Gustav Sjöö.’

‘No?’

‘The women who complained about Sjöö had attended lectures given by him on a small number of occasions. They had no real “relationship” with him. In Lagergren’s case, the girl was in a position of dependency, in a way. The accusations come from a young student who was given a poor grade by her supervisor. She didn’t make any kind of complaint before he failed her dissertation.’

‘So you think she made the whole thing up?’

‘I’m saying that she might well have a reason to make up something like this so that she would appear in a better light. If you see what I mean.’

Alex could see exactly what he meant. Spencer Lagergren had made the mistake of rejecting a student who had hoped to gain a better grade by getting close to her supervisor.

‘She was the one who came on to him, rather than the other way around,’ Alex said.