Unwanted (32 page)

Magdalena bent over the pram. It was empty. As if in a trance, she straightened up and ran her eyes along the hedge and beyond. There was nobody to be seen.

Where was Natalie?

P
eder Rydh trekked round Söder from one driving school to the next. He found two other people who thought they could identify the woman in the picture, but nobody could say for sure. Peder, however, felt pretty confident they had all encountered the same woman, since their accounts were identical. For one thing, she had seemed nervous. For another, she had bruises on her face and arms. And for a third, she wanted to know the quickest possible way to get a driving licence. Both driving school proprietors had suggested an intensive course, but when she realized it was a residential course, several days in length and in another town, she had immediately lost interest. She couldn’t get the time off work, she said. And left.

What the hell did she need a driving licence for? Peder thought, feeling frustrated. So she could take the body to Umeå while her sick boyfriend went off to Jönköping to snuff out an old flame?

He glanced at his watch as he got into the car to head for Nyköping for his appointment with the woman who thought she had fostered the Flemingsberg girl. He’d have to make sure he didn’t run too late.

Ylva had said she was taking the twins to the swimming beach at Smedsudde on Kungsholmen. He had felt like saying he didn’t think it was a very good idea. She always found it too much when she was on her own with the boys. She hadn’t really thought through what taking them to the beach would involve. But on the other hand, Ylva could hardly be accused of being the irresponsible one in the family.

Peder hardly dared look at his mobile. If he saw he had a missed call from Ylva or Pia, he would drive off the road. He started wondering if he might be ill. Hadn’t he read an interesting article about men with extra-strong sexual urges? It seemed unlikely that everybody felt as driven by them as he did. The only problem was, it hadn’t been like that before the twins were born. What had gone and happened to his old life? And what sort of person had he turned into?

Ylva and Peder had tried for a baby for nearly a year before it finally ‘worked’. They had been so happy. Terrified, but happy.

‘Holy shit,’ Peder said when Ylva did the pregnancy test. ‘There’s someone growing in here.’

Then he put a warm hand on her bare belly and tried imagining what life must be like in there. They had made love at every possible opportunity until the results of that bloody ultrasound scan. There certainly hadn’t been anything wrong with Ylva’s urges. She couldn’t get enough of him. One time, she had even rung to summon him home in his lunch hour.

‘Must be the hormones,’ she giggled as they got dressed again afterwards.

The notion of Ylva calling him home over lunch for a good screw seemed so distant that a dry laugh burst out of him. It wasn’t even about the sex, really. It was about closeness, and feeling needed. And being allowed to have needs yourself. The times she did ring him at work had to do with strange, other needs. Difficult needs that were impossible to meet if you had a job to hold down. Peder’s needs had ceased to exist. One night he got home from work after he and some other officers found two pensioners who had been robbed and murdered. Shot in the face. He tried to sleep close to Ylva that night. She had wriggled and squirmed.

‘Do you have to lie so close, Peder? I can’t sleep with you breathing in my face.’

He retreated. So Ylva could sleep. Though he shut his eyes as tight as he could, sleep did not come to him. Either that night or the next.

Peder had cried so few times in his adult life that he thought he could remember them all. He cried when his grandfather died. He cried when the twins were born. And he cried two weeks after they found the pensioners who had been shot. Like a child he cried, in his mother’s presence.

‘It just goes on and on,’ he whispered, referring to his problems with Ylva. ‘It just goes on and on.’

‘Things will change,’ his mother replied. ‘Things will change, Peder. Misery has its natural limits. There comes a point when you know for certain that things can’t get worse, only better.’

This from a woman who had once believed she would bring up two healthy boys into adult manhood, and had then had to accept that one of them would never be anything other than an overgrown child.

Peder somehow felt he had now passed beyond that misery limit his mother had talked about. Above all by taking up with Pia again. Something was on its way towards ending. Peder’s whole body could sense it. His marriage. It genuinely hadn’t been his intention, and he certainly wasn’t following any conviction that this was the way to extract himself from his hell. But there was a risk it would happen.

At least if he went on seeing Pia.

The road to Nyköping felt much shorter than he had expected. It didn’t take long to get there at all. Had he already missed the turning off, in fact?

He had just found the right address and parked outside when his mobile rang. He answered as he climbed out of the car. It was still quite hot, though the sun had once again stubbornly taken cover behind heavy cloud. Peder surveyed the houses around him. Middle class. No brand new cars, but no dented old ones, either. No new bikes, but decent, used ones. Some clean, wholesome looking children were playing a little way along the road. The safety and security many a Swede hankered after.

Alex’s voice put an end to his impromptu analysis of the neighbourhood.

‘Are you there yet?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Peder. ‘Just got out of the car. What’s up?’

‘Nothing. It was just . . . if you were still on the road. I had a thought. But we can take it later.’

Peder saw out of the corner of his eye that the door of the house he was heading for had opened.

‘Sure it can keep?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Alex replied. ‘I’ll carry on refining my little theory, and call you later. Though there was one other thing, too.’

Peder guffawed. ‘A theory?’ he said. ‘You ought to be ringing Fredrika, not me.’

‘I will, naturally. But as I said, there was another thing. Sara Sebastiansson’s got an ex in Norrköping. A small-time crook she was with just before she went on that writing course in Umeå. Think you could have a quick word with him before you come back to Stockholm?’

‘In Norrköping?’ Peder said dubiously.

‘Yes,’ Alex said cautiously, ‘it’s on your way . . .’

‘Okay,’ Peder said. ‘Okay. As long as you can fill me in on the background.’

Alex sounded relieved.

‘I’ll get Fredrika to give you a ring later,’ he promised. ‘Best of luck!’

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

He smiled at the lady standing on the front steps of the house and went towards her.

Birgitta Franke served homemade cinnamon buns and coffee. Peder couldn’t remember when he’d last been offered such delicious looking buns. He took two.

Birgitta Franke seemed a kindly but no-nonsense sort of woman. Her voice was gruff, but the expression in her eyes was warm. She had grey hair, but a fairly young-looking face. She was, in short, a woman who had learned from what life had thrown at her, Peder surmised.

Peder asked discreetly if he could check her ID card, and saw then that she had just passed her 55th birthday. He wished her a belated happy birthday and praised her baking again. She thanked him and smiled. Her smile made little wrinkles appear round her eyes. They suited her.

‘You rang the police hotline about an identikit picture we’d issued,’ he put in at last, to get away from the small talk about buns and kitchen furnishings.

‘Yes,’ said Birgitta. ‘I did. And what I’d like to know first of all is why she’s wanted.’

Peder drank some more of his coffee, looked at Birgitta’s curtains and thought of his grandmother for the first time in years.

‘She’s not wanted as such, nor formally under suspicion. It’s just that we’d like to have a talk to her, because we think she has information that has a crucial bearing on this case. I’m afraid I can’t go into what sort of information it is.’

Birgitta nodded thoughtfully.

For some reason, Peder’s mind went to Gabriel Sebastiansson’s mother. That old hag had plenty to learn from Birgitta when it came to how to communicate with other people.

Birgitta leapt up from the kitchen table and went out into the hall. Peder heard her open a drawer. She came back carrying a large photograph album, which she put down in front of Peder, and then turned over a few pages.

‘Here,’ she said, indicating the photographs. ‘This is where it starts.’

Peder stared at the pictures, which showed a younger version of Birgitta, a man of the same age who Peder could not identify, and a girl who with a little stretch of the imagination could be said to resemble the Flemingsberg woman. There was a boy in two of the shots, as well.

‘Monika came to us when she was thirteen,’ Birgitta began her story. ‘It was rather different being a foster parent in those days. There weren’t as many children in need of a new home as there are nowadays, and the general view was that a bit of love and tolerance could solve most problems.’

Birgitta gave a slight sigh and pulled her coffee cup towards her.

‘But it wasn’t like that with Monika,’ she sighed. ‘Monika was what my husband called damaged, not entirely normal. To look at these pictures, you might think she was almost like anyone else. A blonde girl with lovely eyes and delicate features. But inside, she didn’t function. Wrongly programmed, you might say these days, if you worked with computers.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Peder, leafing through the album.

More pictures of Monika and her foster parents. Monika was not smiling in a single one. But Birgitta was right. She had nice eyes and fine facial features.

‘Her background was so dreadful that looking back, we hardly understood how we could have taken her on in the first place,’ said Birgitta, resting her head in her hands. ‘Though I can honestly say we weren’t given the full picture until after disaster struck. And by then it was too late. More coffee?’ she said.

Peder looked up from the album.

‘Yes please,’ he said automatically. ‘Where’s your husband, by the way?’

‘He’s at work,’ answered Birgitta. ‘But he’ll be back in an hour or two if you’d like to stay and eat with us this evening.’

Peder had to smile.

‘That’s kind of you, but I’m afraid I won’t have time.’

Birgitta smiled back.

‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘because you seem such a nice lad.’

She reached for the coffee jug and poured some for them both.

‘Where was I?’ she said, and supplied the answer herself. ‘Oh yes, the girl’s background.’

She got up and went out to the hall again. She came back with a file.

‘This is where my husband and I kept all the information we were given about our foster children,’ she said proudly, putting the file in front of Peder. ‘You see, we couldn’t have any children ourselves, so we decided to foster instead.’

She had a rather satisfied expression as she flicked through the file for Peder.

‘Here,’ she said, ‘this is what social services sent us before she came. The rest was classified, so I’ve no copies of that.’

Peder pushed the photograph album to one side and read the papers from the social service department.

Peder read two more pages detailing how the girl’s schooling had fallen by the wayside. By the time she came to live with the Frankes, she had already been arrested once, on suspicion of shoplifting and theft.

His thoughts flew at once to the woman in Jönköping. Hadn’t she, too, grown up in a succession of foster homes?

‘I see,’ he said when he had finished reading. ‘And you mean there was other information you and your husband should have been given, apart from all this?’