Unwanted Read online

‘When I got off, I asked the conductor how long the train would be stopping there. He said at least ten minutes. At least.’

  Sara held up her hands and spread her long, narrow fingers wide. Ten fingers, ten minutes. Her hands were shaking slightly. Her lower lip was quivering again.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ she whispered. ‘That was why I helped the girl shove the dog up the escalator. I thought – I knew – I had time.’

  Fredrika tired to breathe calmly.

  ‘Did you see the train leave?’

  ‘We’d just got to the top of the escalator with the dog,’ said Sara, her voice unsteady. ‘We’d just got the dog back up when I turned round and saw the train starting to pull out.’

  Her breathing was laboured and her eyes were on Fredrika.

  ‘I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes,’ she said, and a single tear ran down her cheek. ‘It was like being in a horror film. I ran down the escalator, ran like mad after the train. But it didn’t stop. It didn’t stop!’

  Although Fredrika had no children of her own, Sara’s words aroused a genuine feeling of anguish in her.

  She felt something akin to stomach ache.

  ‘One of the staff at Flemingsberg station helped me get in touch with the train. And then I took a taxi to Stockholm Central.’

  ‘What was the girl with the dog doing while this was happening?’

  Sara wiped the corner of her eye.

  ‘It was a bit odd. She just sort of made off, all of a sudden. She bundled the dog up onto some kind of parcel trolley that had been left there at the top of the escalator, and went out through the station entrance. I didn’t see her after that.’

  Sara and Fredrika stood for a while saying nothing, each absorbed in their own thoughts. It was Sara’s voice that broke the silence.

  ‘And you know what, I wasn’t really too worried once I’d got through to the train. It felt pretty irrational to get worked up about a little thing like Lilian being by herself for that last little bit of the journey from Flemingsberg to Stockholm.’

  Sara moistened her lips, and then cried openly for the first time.

  ‘I even sat back in the taxi. Closed my eyes and relaxed. I relaxed while some bloody sick bastard took my little girl.’

  Fredrika realized this was a pain she had no chance of alleviating. With great reluctance she did what she would never normally do: she reached out a hand and stroked Sara’s arm.

  Then she realized it had stopped raining. Lilian had been missing for another hour.

  It was trickier than Jelena had expected to get out of Flemingsberg by bus.

  ‘You mustn’t take the commuter train, you mustn’t take a taxi, you mustn’t drive,’ the Man had told her that very morning, as they went over every detail of the plan for the hundredth time. ‘You’re to go by bus. Bus to Skärholmen, then take the underground home. Understand?’

  Jelena had nodded and nodded.

  Yes, she understood. And she would do her very, very best.

  Jelena felt at least ten anxious butterflies fluttering in her stomach. She hoped desperately that it had all worked. It simply had to work. The Man would be furious if he hadn’t managed to get the kid off the train.

  She peered at her watch. It had taken more than an hour. The bus had been late, and then she’d had a wait for a tube train. She would soon be home and then she would know. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. She could never be really sure whether she was doing things right or wrong. Not until later, when the Man either praised her or told her off. Just recently she’d done almost everything right. It had even gone okay when she practised driving, and when she had to practise talking properly.

  ‘People have to be able to understand what you’re saying,’ the Man would tell her. ‘You don’t speak clearly. And you’ve got to stop your face twitching like that. It scares people.’

  Jelena had had a real struggle, but in the end the Man had given her his seal of approval. All she had now was a slight twitch at the corner of one eye, and really only when she was nervous or unsure. When she was calm, it didn’t twitch at all.

  ‘Good girl,’ the Man said then, and patted her on the cheek.

  Jelena felt all warm inside. She hoped for more praise when she got home.

  The train got to her stop at last. It was all she could do not to rush out of the carriage and run all the way home. She must walk calmly and unobtrusively, so nobody would notice her. Jelena kept her eyes on the ground, and fiddled with a bit of her hair.

  The rain was beating on the road when she came up out of the underground, impairing her vision. It didn’t matter – she saw him anyway. For a brief second, their eyes met. She thought he looked as if he was smiling.

  A highly sceptical Peder Rydh observed Fredrika’s pathetic attempt to offer comfort. She was patting Sara Sebastiansson with the same reluctance as you would pat a dog you found utterly revolting, but had to pat because it belonged to a good friend. People like her had no business in the police force, where everything depended on how you handled people. Different sorts of people. All sorts. Peder gave an irritated sigh. It really had been a very bad idea to recruit civilians into the police.

  ‘The force needs an injection of top skills,’ was the explanation from certain individuals high up in the organization.

  Fredrika had mentioned on several occasions what subject she had read at university, but to be honest, Peder couldn’t have cared less. She used too many words, with too many letters. She complicated things. She thought too much and felt too little. She simply wasn’t made of the right stuff for police work.

  Peder could only admire the police union’s persistent opposition to the position and status that civilians had been given in the force. Without any relevant work experience whatsoever. Without the unique set of skills that can only be gained by learning police work from the bottom up. By spending at least a few years in the patrol car. Manhandling drunks. Talking to men who hit their wives. Giving pissed teenagers a lift home and facing their parents. Breaking into flats where lonely souls have died and just lain there, rotting.

  Peder shook his head. He had more pressing things to think about than incompetent colleagues. He thought over the information he had garnered from talking to the train crew so far. Henry Lindgren, the conductor, talked too much, but he had a good eye for detail and there was certainly nothing wrong with his memory. The train left Gothenburg at 10.50. It reached Stockholm eight minutes after the time it was due, at 14.07.

  ‘I wasn’t the one in charge of the delay in Flemingsberg,’ Henry pointed out. ‘That was Arvid. And Nellie.’

  He looked sadly at the train, still standing at the platform. All the doors were open, gaping like great dark holes along the side of the train. More than anything else on earth, Henry wished that the little girl would suddenly come stumbling out of one of those holes. That she had somehow lost her way on the train, gone back to sleep, and then woken up. But with all the certainty that only grown-up human beings can muster, Henry knew it wasn’t going to happen. The only people getting on and off the train were policemen and technicians. The whole platform had been cordoned off, and a fingertip search of the damp surface for traces of the missing child was in progress. Henry felt a lump in his throat that proved impossible to swallow.

  Peder went on with the interview.

  ‘You say you were keeping an eye on the child; then what happened?’

  Peder could see Henry literally shrink, as if he was ageing as he stood there on the platform, faced with explaining what had made him leave the girl.

  ‘It was hard, trying to be in lots of places at the same time,’ he said dejectedly. ‘Like I told you, there’d been trouble in several of the coaches, and I had to leave the girl and get to coach three, smartish. But I called Arvid on the two-way radio. I called him really loud, and I tried several times, but he never replied. I don’t think he can have heard. I didn’t seem to be getting through at all.’

  Peder decided not to make any comment on Arvi
d’s behaviour.

  ‘So you left the child, and didn’t ask any of the passengers to keep an eye on her?’ he asked instead.

  Henry threw out his arms in dramatic appeal.

  ‘I was only in the next carriage!’ he cried. ‘And I thought, yes I thought, I’ll be straight back. Which I was.’

  His voice almost gave way.

  ‘I left the girl for less than three minutes, I was back the minute the train stopped and people started getting off. But she’d already gone. And nobody could remember seeing her get up and go.’

  Henry’s voice was choked as he went on:

  ‘How’s that possible? How can nobody have seen a thing?’

  Peder knew all too well how. Get ten people to witness the same crime and they will come up with ten different versions of what happened, the order it happened in, and what the perpetrators were wearing.

  What was strange, on the other hand, was the way Arvid Melin had acted. First he let the train leave Flemingsberg without Sara Sebastiansson, and then he failed to answer Henry’s call.

  Peder quickly sought out Arvid, who was sitting by himself on one of the seats on the platform. He seemed very twitchy. As Peder approached, he raised his eyes and said:

  ‘Can we go soon? I’ve got to be somewhere.’

  Peder sat down beside Arvid deliberately slowly, fixed him with a look and replied:

  ‘A child’s gone missing. What have you got to do that’s more important than helping to find her?’

  After that, Arvid uttered hardly a word that was not a direct answer to a direct question.

  ‘What did you say to passengers who asked you how long the train would be stationary at Flemingsberg?’ Peder asked sternly, finding he was addressing Arvid like some kind of schoolboy.

  ‘Don’t remember exactly,’ answered Arvid evasively.

  Peder noted that Arvid, who must have been nearing thirty, responded in the way he expected his own kids would answer questions when they reached their teens.

  ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Out!’ ‘When will you be home?’ ‘Later!’

  ‘Do you remember a conversation with Sara Sebastiansson?’ Peder enquired.

  Arvid shook his head.

  ‘No, not really,’ he said.

  Peder was just wondering whether he could give Arvid a good shake, when he went on:

  ‘There were lots of people asking the same thing, see. I think I remember her, the girl’s mother, being one of them. People have to take a bit of responsibility for themselves,’ he said in a choked voice, and only then did Peder realize how shaken he really was. ‘It’s not a bloody promise that the train’s going to be stopped for ten minutes, just because we say so. All the passengers, all of them, want to get there as fast as possible. There’s never any problem about setting off earlier than we first said. Why did she leave the platform? If she’d been standing there, she’d have heard me make the announcement on the train.’

  Arvid kicked an empty cola bottle that was lying at his feet. It bounced angrily against the train and went spinning across the platform.

  Peder suspected both Arvid Melin and Henry Lindgren would be having some disturbed nights for a good time to come if the girl failed to turn up.

  ‘You didn’t see Sara Sebastiansson being left behind?’ Peder asked gently.

  ‘No, definitely not,’ said Arvid emphatically. ‘I mean, I looked along the platform, the way we usually do. It was empty, so we left. And then Henry says he called me on the two-way radio, but I didn’t hear . . . because I’d forgotten to switch it on.’

  Peder looked up at the dark grey sky and shut his notebook.

  He would just have a brief talk to the rest of the train crew and the others on the platform. If Fredrika had finished getting the mother’s statement, perhaps she would help him.

  Peder saw Fredrika and Sara Sebastiansson out of the corner of his eye, exchanging a few words and then going their separate ways. Sara looked the picture of dejection. Peder swallowed. An image of his own family rose to the surface of his consciousness. What would he do if anyone tried to harm either of his children?

  His grip on his notebook tightened. He would have to get a move on. There were more people to talk to and Alex did not like to be kept waiting.

  They drove back to the HQ in Peder’s car. As the car swished along the rain-soaked tarmac, Fredrika and Peder were both lost in their own thoughts. They parked in the basement garage and took the lift in silence up to the floor where the team had its offices. Close to the county police and National Crime Squad’s base, close to the Stockholm Police Department. Nobody was ever willing to say it out loud, but Alex Recht’s investigative team most definitely served two masters. Well three, really. A special resources group, comprising a small number of hand-picked people of different background and experience, who on paper were part of the Stockholm police, but who in practice worked very closely with, and could be called upon by, both the national and county departments. It was a political solution to something that shouldn’t have been a problem.

  Fredrika sank down wearily in the office chair behind her desk. Was there any better place for thinking and acting than behind her desk? She realized she had been naive to think that her specialized skills would be welcomed and made full use of within the police organization. She could not for the life of her understand police officers’ deep-rooted, all-embracing contempt for advanced, academic qualifications. Or was it really contempt? Did they in actual fact feel threatened? Fredrika couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She only knew that her current work situation was not tenable in the long term.

  Her route to Alex Recht’s team had taken her via an investigative role at the Crime Prevention Council, and then a couple of years with social services, where she had been an expert adviser. She had applied to the police force to broaden her practical experience. And she would not be staying on. But she was relaxed about her current situation. She had an extensive network of contacts that could gain her entry to plenty of other organizations. She just needed to hold her nerve, and some new opportunity would eventually turn up.

  Fredrika was very conscious of the way she was perceived by her colleagues in the force. Difficult and reserved. As someone with no sense of humour or normal emotional life.

  That’s not true, thought Fredrika. I’m not cold, I’m just so damn confused about where I’m going at the moment.

  Her friends would describe her as both warm and sympathetic. And extremely loyal. But that was in her private life. And now here she was in a workplace where she was expected to be private even on duty. It was completely unthinkable as far as Fredrika was concerned.

  It wasn’t that she felt nothing at all for the people she encountered in the course of her job. It was just that she chose to feel a little less.

  ‘My job’s not pastoral care,’ she had said to a friend who had asked why she was so unwilling to get emotionally involved in her work. ‘It’s detecting crimes. It’s not about who I am – it’s about what I do. I do the detecting; someone else has got to do the comforting.’

  Otherwise you’d drown, thought Fredrika. If I were to offer comfort to every victim I met, there’d be nothing left of me.

  Fredrika could not remember ever having expressed a desire for a police job in her life. When she was little, her dreams had always been of working with music, as a violinist. She had music in her blood. She nurtured the dreams in her heart. Many children grow out of their earliest dreams about what they want to be when they grow up. But Fredrika never did; instead, her dreams developed and grew more concrete. She and her mother went on visits to various music schools and discussed which would suit her best. By the time she started at secondary school, she had already composed music of her own.

  Just after she was fifteen, everything changed. For ever, as it turned out. Her right arm was badly injured in a car crash on the way home from a skiing trip, and after a year of physiotherapy it was obvious that the arm could not cope with the demands of playi
ng the violin for hours every day.

  Well-meaning teachers said she had been lucky. Theoretically and rationally, Fredrika understood what they meant. She had been to the mountains with a friend and her family. The accident left her friend’s mother paralysed from the waist down. The son of the family was killed. The newspapers called their accident the ‘Filipstad tragedy’.

  But for Fredrika herself, the accident would never be called anything but The Accident, and in her mind she thought of The Accident as the most concrete of dividing lines in her life. She had been one person before The Accident, and became a different person after it. There was a very clear Before and After. She did not want to acknowledge that she had had any kind of Luck. But even now, almost twenty years later, she still wondered if she would ever accept the life that came After.

  ‘There’s so much else you can do with your life,’ her grandmother said reasonably, on the rare occasions when Fredrika voiced the dreadful sense of despair she felt at being robbed of the future opportunities she had dreamt of. ‘You could work in a bank, for example, seeing as you’re so good at maths.’

  Fredrika’s parents, on the other hand, said nothing. Her mother was a concert pianist and music had a holy place in everyday family life. Fredrika had virtually grown up in the wings of a series of great stages on which her mother had played, either as a soloist or as part of a larger ensemble. Sometimes Fredrika had played in the ensembles. There were times when it had been quite magical.

  So Fredrika’s discussions with her mother had been more productive.

  ‘What shall I do now?’ nineteen-year-old Fredrika had whispered to her mother one evening just before she left school, when her tears would not stop.

  ‘You’ll find something else, Fredrika,’ her mother had said, rubbing her back with a sympathetic hand. ‘There’s so much strength in you, so much willpower and such drive to achieve things. You’ll find something else.’

  And so she did.

  History of art, history of music, history of ideas. The university had an unlimited range of courses on offer.