Unwanted (21 page)

The pictures were hidden in a folder labelled ‘Reports 2nd Quarter Version III’, the one that had caught Martin Ek’s attention. Having failed to find the report he needed anywhere else, he had opened this folder full of loathsome material that no normal person would wish ever to see.

In a taxi on the way back to HQ, Peder rang his colleagues to have another arrest warrant issued for Gabriel Sebastiansson, on a charge of child pornography. Gabriel would soon be detained in his absence and a nationwide hunt for him would be in progress. Analysis of the pictures –
How would that happen? Who had the stomach to pore over vile stuff like that?
– would show whether Gabriel was guilty of the sexual exploitation of children, or had contented himself with watching others do so. Inside Peder there was also a growing sense of horror that they might find pictures of Lilian, but he hadn’t yet dared to think the thought consciously.

He had had a word with Alex, who was just off the plane in Umeå, to inform him of developments.

‘We still don’t know where this takes us,’ Alex said circumspectly. ‘But something tells me we’re getting a bit closer.’

‘But this must bloody well mean we’ve got him?’ said an agitated Peder.

‘No mistakes now,’ Alex warned him. ‘Until we find Gabriel Sebastiansson, we’ve got to keep our minds open to possible alternatives. Fredrika will need to go through Sara’s acquaintances with a fine-toothed comb and see if any alternative suspects present themselves. And you can do the same on Gabriel’s side. Get all the skeletons out of his cupboard.’

‘Aren’t child porn and wife beating enough?’ objected Peder doubtfully.

Alex paused to heighten the effect of what came next.

‘When we find this man, Peder, there mustn’t be any doubts. No doubts at all, okay?’

‘Okay,’ said Peder, and ended the call.

Then he rang Fredrika. He glanced out of the taxi window. The sun was still shining. Amazing.

Peder couldn’t stop himself sounding elated when Fredrika answered.

‘We’ve got him!’ he said, pressing the mobile to his ear in his exhilaration.

‘Who?’ Fredrika asked vaguely.

Peder was astonished and irritated.

‘We’ve got the father,’ he said exaggeratedly clearly, but avoided saying Gabriel’s name in the taxi.

‘All right,’ was all Fredrika said.

‘Child porn charges,’ Peder said in triumph, and saw the driver staring at him in the rearview mirror.

‘What?’ said Fredrika in surprise.

‘You heard what I said,’ said Peder, leaning back in satisfaction. ‘But we can talk about it back at HQ. Where are you, by the way?’

Fredrika didn’t respond straight away, and when she did, she said:

‘There was just something I had to check, but I’ll be back at work in fifteen minutes. I’ve got some news as well.’

‘Can hardly be anything of the same calibre as mine,’ sneered Peder.

‘See you,’ said Fredrika brusquely, and rang off.

Peder felt pleased with himself as he ended the call. This was police work at its best. The investigation team had done a great job, in actual fact. Okay, the girl had died. That undoubtedly had to be seen as a police failure. But still. Looking back, it seemed somehow inevitable, almost as if the job of the police had never been to save her. It had been to find the person who took her life. What Peder fixed on was that they seemed to have cleared up a macabre crime in no time at all. Soon, very soon, they would find Gabriel Sebastiansson. Peder would insist on being present at all the interrogations. Presumably Fredrika wouldn’t be trying to compete for that particular task.

His phone rang again.

He wrenched it out of his pocket.

It was only when he saw who was calling that it all came back to him. He had completely forgotten to ring Ylva.

A
lex Recht had only been to Umeå once before. In fact his sorties north of Stockholm had been embarrassingly few in number overall. He’d been to visit Lena’s relations in Gällivare on one occasion and once – back in his youth – went to see a girlfriend up in Haparanda. And that was about it.

After he had spoken to Peder, his mood was considerably better than it had been on boarding the plane. The news that Gabriel Sebastiansson’s colleagues had found pornographic images of children on his computer didn’t really change things much, but confirmed what they already knew in several respects. There was too much pointing at Gabriel for it not to be him, when it came down to it. He still hadn’t been in touch, he had abused his wife, and he had child porn on his computer.

For Alex, it was all fairly clear-cut.

He was perhaps slightly dubious about the motive. It bugged him that he still hadn’t encountered Gabriel, hadn’t got any sense of what he was like. Was he a madman who had gone off his head and calculatingly planned and carried out the murder of his own daughter? Or was it something else? Did he hate Sara so much that he had to punish her by murdering their child?

DCI Hugo Paulsson met him at the airport. The men shook hands gravely and then Hugo showed him to where the car was parked. Alex made a comment about the airport being bigger than he remembered it and Hugo mumbled something about memory not always being reliable ‘as we get older’. They said no more until they were on their way into Umeå. Alex peered sideways at Hugo Paulsson. ‘Older’, he had called them. Alex didn’t really think either of them could be classed as older. The two of them looked about the same age. His colleague’s hair was possibly a shade greyer and a touch thinner, but generally they both seemed equally young and healthy.

‘It’s the children who keep us young, Alex,’ Lena sometimes said.

He noted without comment that Hugo was not wearing a wedding ring. Maybe he had no children, either?

‘Recht, is that a German name?’ asked Hugo, making an attempt at small talk.

‘Partly German,’ said Alex. ‘Jewish.’

‘Jewish?’ echoed his colleague, looking at him as if it was utterly remarkable to have a Jewish surname.

Alex gave a slight smile.

‘Yes, but it’s a long story. For various reasons, my grandfather on my father’s side took his mother’s surname when he was born, the Jewish Recht. But since his father wasn’t Jewish, the family never observed any Jewish traditions. So my nearest Jewish relation is my grandfather.’

Alex could have sworn that Hugo looked relieved, but he made no further comment on the subject. Instead he said:

‘The file’s in the glove compartment. You’re welcome to look, but be prepared for the pictures.’

Alex nodded and took out the file. He opened it carefully, almost reverently, and took out the little bundle of photographs. He nodded to himself again. It was definitely Lilian, no question.

He felt a pang. Sara Sebastiansson and her parents would be on the next plane – they had been held up in traffic on the way to Arlanda – and then the identity of the child would be formally established. Alex looked at the photos again, leafing through the heart-rending pile. In actual fact, the identification process would be unnecessary and cruel. There wasn’t the least doubt that the child was Lilian.

Alex shifted his weight. The old Saab had nasty, hard seats that were giving him backache even on this short journey.

‘I thought we ought to go straight to the hospital,’ said Hugo Paulsson. ‘We’re seeing the pathologist, who can give us a preliminary report on the cause of death. Then I assume the forensics people in Stockholm will take over, once the girl’s been identified?’

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Alex. ‘You said she’d been dead about twenty-four hours when she was found, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Hugo confirmed. ‘And they found her around one in the morning.’

That meant Lilian had been alive for less than a day from the time of her disappearance from the train. And she had definitely been dead by the time her mother took delivery of the parcel of clothes and hair.

‘Have you interviewed the people who found her?’ Alex asked.

Hugo nodded. Yes, they’d asked both the doctor and the nurse about what had happened. They had both given very matter-of-fact accounts of the evening’s events, and there was no reason to suspect them of being involved.

‘Is there anything to indicate the girl could have been killed here in Umeå?’ Alex asked delicately.

The question was important, because the answer would determine which police authority took formal responsibility for the investigation. It was the scene of the crime, not the scene of the discovery of the body, which decided it.

‘Hard to say,’ said Hugo. ‘The girl had been lying there in the rain for a while – up to half an hour maybe – and we’re afraid a good number of clues could have been simply washed away.’

Alex was opening his mouth to say something when Hugo went on:

‘She had a funny smell, the girl, acetone or something like that. We think somebody tried to wash her, but was in too much of a hurry to finish the job. And her nails had been cut right down, as short as they could possibly be.’

Alex sighed heavily. For some reason, the details made him more convinced than ever that it was Gabriel Sebastiansson who had taken the girl. Somebody had tried to wash all the evidence off the child. Somebody had cut her nails so no evidence could be scraped from under them. The murderer was evidently a person of some intelligence.

But why ever had they dumped her outside the hospital in Umeå, of all places? That was clearly where Lilian’s murderer had wanted her to be found. But why?

He’s mocking us,
Alex thought grimly. He’s mocking us, and laying the girl at our feet.
Look,
he’s saying,
look how close I can get. And you still can’t see me.

Hugo pointed out of the window.

‘Here we are. This is the hospital.’

F
redrika Bergman rang Swedish Railways as soon as she had finished talking to Peder. She introduced herself as a police investigator and said she was ringing about the child who disappeared from the X2000 train from Gothenburg two days before. The man at the other end knew at once what she was referring to.

‘I’ve just got one quick question,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ said the man, and waited.

‘I wonder what caused the delay. Why did the train have to be held in Flemingsberg?’

‘Er, well,’ the man said hesitantly, ‘in the end the train was only delayed a couple of minutes . . .’

‘I know that,’ Fredrika interrupted him, ‘and I’m not really interested in exactly how many minutes it was delayed. I just want to know what the problem was.’

‘It was what we call a signalling problem,’ the man replied.

‘Right, and what caused that problem, as it were,’ Fredrika asked.

The man at the other end sighed.

‘It was probably some foolhardy youngsters playing on the track. A few kids die that way every year, you know. Usually it doesn’t cause too much disruption, it’s just like in Flemingsberg; it takes a few minutes and then it’s all working again.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘So it was some kind of sabotage that delayed the train?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Or it could have been some animal getting at the transmitter. But I don’t think that’s very likely in this case, because the problem was only just outside Flemingsberg station.’

Fredrika nodded to herself.

‘Thanks, that’s all for now,’ she said, committing the man’s name to memory. ‘I expect I’ll be back in touch soon with a few more questions or a formal request for a written statement.’

When she had rung off, she gripped the steering wheel hard.

She scarcely dared to think what the investigating team had lost by not following up such an obviously important line of enquiry.

It might simply mean, of course, that Gabriel Sebastiansson had been working with the woman in Flemingsberg. Fredrika swallowed. She didn’t really think that, but that was how she would present it to the team. She’d never get the authorization to pursue it any further, otherwise.

Fredrika felt anything but elated. It was a wretched business from start to finish. Fredrika’s vision clouded as she wondered whether Sara would be able to summon the strength to identify her dead child.

Some years before, Alex couldn’t recall exactly how long ago, his mother-in-law had been admitted to hospital. The diagnosis, incurable cancer of the liver and pancreas, had plunged Lena into despair. How could her father carry on? How would it be for her and Alex’s children growing up without their grandma?

Alex had not been too worried for the children’s sake. Naturally they would miss their grandma, but their sense of loss could hardly be compared with what his father-in-law would go through.

‘We’ve got to be there for Dad now,’ Lena said the evening they heard the bad news.

‘Yes of course,’ Alex replied.

‘No, more than that,’ Lena said. ‘More than that, of course, Alex. These are the times people need all the support and love they can get.’

The memory of the time his mother-in-law lay ill ached in Alex as he sat there in Sonja Lundin’s office at Umeå University Hospital. Hugo Paulsson sat beside him.