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She felt guilty, sitting in comfort and drinking wine when a four-year-old girl, in the best-case scenario, was lost in the woods. But that was how her mind worked. It was too awful to dwell on all the bad things that might happen to a child, so she subconsciously turned her thoughts to something banal and meaningless. That was a luxury Nea’s mother couldn’t afford at the moment. She and her husband had found themselves caught in a living nightmare.
Erica straightened up and set her wine glass on the coffee table. She reached for her notebook. Over the years she’d got in the habit of always having paper and pen nearby. She liked to jot down whatever thoughts and ideas popped into her head, and she made lists of things she needed to do in order to move forward with her book. That was what she wanted to do now. All her instincts told her that Nea’s disappearance was somehow connected to Stella’s death. She’d spent the past few weeks loafing. Summertime laziness and sunshine had taken over, and she hadn’t made the sort of progress she’d hoped with her book. Now she was going to set her mind to it. That way, if the worst happened, she might be able to offer help, based on what she’d learned about the previous case. Maybe she could find the link that she was sure existed.
Erica glanced at her mobile. Still no word from Patrik. Then she began feverishly jotting down notes.
THE STELLA CASE (#ulink_657c737c-9be3-5e1c-9891-f3438b44c80c)
She knew even before they reached her. The heavy footsteps. Their eyes fixed on the ground. They didn’t have to say a word.
‘Anders!’ she screamed, and her voice was so shrill.
He came rushing out of the house, but stopped abruptly when he saw the police officers.
He fell to his knees on the gravel. Linda rushed over to him, put her arms around him. Anders had always been so big and strong, but right now she was the one who had to keep them both going.
‘Pappa? Mamma?’
Sanna stood in the doorway. The light from the kitchen lit up her blond hair like a halo.
‘Did they find Stella, Mamma?’
Linda couldn’t meet her daughter’s eye. She turned towards one of the officers. He nodded.
‘We’ve found your daughter. I’m afraid she’s … she’s dead. We’re so sorry.’
He stared down at his shoes and swallowed hard to hold back the tears. He was as pale as a ghost, and Linda wondered whether he’d seen Stella. Seen the body.
‘But how can she be dead? That can’t be true. Mamma? Pappa?’
She heard Sanna’s voice behind her, rattling off questions. But Linda had no answers to give her. Nor any solace to offer. She knew she ought to let go of Anders and take her daughter in her arms. But only Anders understood the pain she now felt in every fibre of her body.
‘We want to see her,’ she said, finally making herself raise her head from Anders’s shoulder. ‘We have to see our daughter.’
The taller of the two officers cleared his throat.
‘And you will. But first we have to do our job. We have to find out who did this.’
‘What do you mean? It was an accident, surely?’
Anders pulled away from Linda and stood up.
The tall policeman quietly replied.
‘I’m afraid this was no accident. Your daughter was murdered.’
The ground suddenly rose up towards Linda. She didn’t even have time to be surprised before everything went black.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_36d378e5-383d-5031-aab0-b26b7481329c)
Only twenty more to go.
James Jensen was hardly out of breath as he did the next push-up. The same routine every morning, in summer as well as winter. On Christmas Eve and on Midsummer Eve. These sorts of things had meaning. Routines had meaning. Consistency. Order.
Ten left.
Helen’s father had understood the meaning of routines. James still missed KG, although the feeling was a form of weakness he normally didn’t allow himself. KG had suffered a heart attack almost ten years ago, and no one had ever been able to take his place.
The last one. James got up after his hundred push-ups. A long life spent in the military had taught him the value of being in top physical condition.
James glanced at his watch: 08.01. He was behind schedule. When he was home he always had breakfast at eight o’clock sharp.
‘Breakfast is ready!’ called Helen, as if she’d read his mind.
James frowned. The fact she was calling him meant she’d noticed he was late.
He used a towel to dry off the sweat, then left the deck and went into the living room. The kitchen was right next door, and he could smell bacon cooking. He always ate the same breakfast. Scrambled eggs and bacon.
‘Where’s Sam?’ he asked as he sat down and started in on the eggs.
‘He’s still sleeping,’ said Helen as she served him the bacon, which was perfectly crisp.
‘It’s eight o’clock and he’s still asleep?’
Annoyance crept over him, as it always did when he thought about Sam. Sleeping past eight in the morning? He’d always been up by six in the summertime, and then he’d worked until late in the evening.
‘Go wake him,’ he said, taking a swig of coffee, but the next instant he spat it out. ‘What the hell? No milk?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Helen, taking the cup from his hand.
She poured the coffee into the sink, refilled it, and added a dash of whole milk.
Now it tasted the way it should.
Helen hurried out of the kitchen. He could hear her rushing up the stairs, followed by a murmur of voices.
His annoyance returned. The same annoyance he felt when he was deployed with a unit and one or more of the soldiers tried to downplay or avoid situations out of fear. He couldn’t understand that kind of behaviour. If a man chose to join the military, especially in a country like Sweden where it was completely voluntary to deploy to a war zone in another country, then he should do the job he’d been assigned. Fear was something you left at home.
‘Where’s the fire?’ grumbled Sam as he came sauntering into the kitchen, his black hair standing on end. ‘Why do I have to get up at this hour of the morning?’
James clenched his fists under the table.
‘In this house we don’t sleep away the day,’ he said.
‘But I couldn’t find a summer job, so what the hell am I supposed to do?’
‘No swearing!’
Both Helen and Sam flinched. For a moment anger made everything go black before his eyes, and James forced himself to take several deep breaths. He had to maintain control, both over himself and over his family.
‘At nine hundred hours we’ll meet out back for target practice.’
‘Okay,’ said Sam, looking down at the table.
Behind him Helen was still cringing.
They’d been walking all night. Harald was so tired he could hardly see straight, but he had no intention of going home. That would mean giving up. Whenever the fatigue got the better of him, he’d returned to the farm for a short break to warm up and drink some coffee. Each time he’d found Eva Berg sitting mutely in the kitchen, her face grey with worry. That was enough for him to go back out to rejoin the search party.
He wondered whether the others knew who he was. And what role he’d played thirty years ago. He was the one who had found the other little girl. People who had lived in Fjällbacka back then knew about it, of course, but he didn’t think Eva and Peter did. At least, he hoped not.
When they were assigned search areas, he had deliberately chosen the area with the lake where he’d found Stella. And that was the first place he’d gone to search. The small lake had dried up long ago, leaving behind only a patch of wooded land. But the old tree trunk was still there. The huge tree had clearly withstood a good deal of wind and weather, and it looked more brittle and drier than thirty years earlier. But he found no little girl lying there. He caught himself heaving a sigh of relief.
The search party had regrouped several times during the night. Some people had gone home to get a few hours’ sleep, then come back and joined different groups. New volunteers had also arrived as the summer night gave way to morning. Those who had not gone home to rest included the men and boys from the refugee centre. Harald had chatted with them as they searched. They spoke in halting Swedish while he tried out his halting English. But somehow they’d managed to communicate.
He was now part of a small group that included the man who had introduced himself as Karim, and Johannes Klingsby, a local builder whom Harald had hired whenever he needed renovations done at the bakery. They were moving slowly and resolutely through the woods as the sun broke through and the day brightened. The police officers in charge of the search had reminded them several times during the night not to hurry. It was best to make their way forward carefully and methodically.
‘We’ve been searching this area all night,’ said Johannes. ‘She can’t have gone this far.’
He threw out his hands.
‘Last time we spent twenty-four hours searching,’ said Harald.
Once again he pictured Stella’s body in his mind.
‘What?’ asked Karim in English, shaking his head. It was hard for him to understand Harald’s broad Bohuslän accent.
‘Harald was the one who found the dead girl in the woods, thirty years ago,’ Johannes explained in English.
‘Dead girl?’ said Karim, stopping. ‘Here?’
‘Yes. Four years old, same as this girl.’
Johannes held up four fingers.
Karim looked at Harald, who nodded quietly.
‘Yes. It was right over here. But there was water back then.’
He was ashamed of his poor English, but Karim nodded.
‘There,’ said Harald, pointing at the tree trunk. ‘It was not a big lake, it was a … the Swedish word is “tjärn”.’
‘A small lake, more like a pond,’ Johannes chimed in.
‘Yes, yes. A pond,’ said Harald. ‘A pond over there by that tree, and the girl was dead.’
Karim slowly walked towards the tree. He squatted down and placed his hand on the trunk. When he turned to look at the other men, his face was so pale that Harald took a step back.
‘Something is under the tree. I can see a hand. A small hand.’
Harald staggered back another step. Johannes leaned over a bush, and they soon heard him sobbing. Harald met Karim’s eye and saw a reflection of his own despair. They needed to call the police.
Marie held the script on her lap as she tried to learn her lines for the upcoming scene, but she couldn’t concentrate. The scene was going to be filmed indoors, in the big industrial warehouse in Tanumshede. Inside, they’d constructed a number of sets, almost like mini-worlds, ready for the actors to enter. For the most part, the rest of the filming would be done on location, on the island of Dannholmen. Ingrid Bergman had spent a great deal of time on the island when she was married to the theatre director Lars Schmidt. She’d carried on visiting Dannholmen long after she and Lars were divorced.
Marie stretched out her arms and shook her head. She wanted to be rid of all the thoughts that had started haunting her when people began talking about the missing girl. All those memories of a laughing Stella running ahead of her and Helen.
Marie sighed. She was here now, about to play her dream role. This was what she’d been working towards for so many years; it was the thing that had kept her going after the roles in Hollywood dried up. She’d earned this part, and she was a good actress. It didn’t take much effort for her to immerse herself in a role, pretending to be someone else; after all, she’d had plenty of practice, ever since she was a child. Lying or acting – there was so little difference between the two. She’d learned to master both early on.
If only she could stop thinking about Stella.
‘How does my hair look?’ she asked Yvonne.
The make-up artist approached nervously and came to such an abrupt halt she almost stumbled. She surveyed Marie from head to toe, then removed a comb stuck in the bun at the nape of her neck and smoothed a few stray strands of hair. She handed Marie a mirror and waited for her to inspect the results.
‘It looks fine,’ said Marie, and the tense, anxious look on Yvonne’s face vanished.
Marie turned towards the designated wardrobe area where Jörgen was arguing with Sixten, who was in charge of lighting.
‘Are you ready for me yet?’ she asked.
‘Give us another fifteen minutes!’ called Jörgen.
His frustration was obvious in his voice. Marie knew why. Delays cost money.
Once again she wondered how things were going with the finance for the film. This wasn’t the first time she’d worked on a film that started shooting before the money was in place, and on those previous occasions the plug had been pulled on the entire production. Nothing was certain until they passed the point when the film had already cost so much that it wouldn’t be feasible to stop. But they weren’t there yet.
‘Excuse me, but could I ask you a few questions while you’re waiting?’
Marie looked up from her script. A man in his thirties was looking at her with a big smile on his face. Obviously a reporter. Normally, she would never agree to an interview that hadn’t been scheduled in advance, but his skin-tight T-shirt showed off well-toned muscles that made her reluctant to dismiss him out of hand.
‘Sure, ask away. I’m only sitting here waiting.’
Thankfully, Ingrid had always been stylish, so the shirt she was wearing for today’s scene was particularly flattering.
The guy with the six-pack introduced himself as Axel, a reporter from Bohusläningen. He began with several banal questions about the film and her career before he got to what was clearly the purpose of the interview. Marie leaned back and crossed her long legs. The past had served her career well.
‘So how does it feel to be back here? Oh, I almost said “back at the scene of the crime”, but let’s call that a Freudian slip. Because you and Helen have always maintained your innocence.’
‘We were innocent,’ said Marie, noting with satisfaction that the young reporter couldn’t stop staring at her décolletage.
‘Even after you were found guilty of the crime?’ said Axel, making an effort to tear his gaze away from her chest.
‘We were children and completely incapable of committing such a crime, even though we were charged and convicted. Witch hunts still go on, even in this day and age.’
‘So what was it like for you, in the years that followed?’
Marie tossed her head. She would never be able to describe those years to him. He’d probably grown up with two perfect parents who helped him with everything, and he now lived with a significant other and their kids. She glanced at his left hand. A wife, not a significant other, she corrected herself.
‘It was … educational,’ she said. ‘I plan to write about it in detail in my memoirs some day. It’s not something I can describe in a few sentences.’
