The Girl in the Woods (Patrik Hedstrom and Erica Falck, Book 10) Page 14

  Anna got up and reached for a magazine on the table. She rolled it up and swung at the fly, mashing it against the wax tablecloth.

  Erica couldn’t help smiling at her hugely pregnant little sister going after that fly. Not an easy task for Anna at the moment.

  ‘Go ahead and smirk,’ said Anna peevishly as she wiped the sweat from her forehead before she sat down again. ‘Now where were we? Oh, right. Those girls confessed, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they did, and it was their confession that got them convicted. Since they were so young, they didn’t receive a sentence, but the matter of their guilt was outlined in a statement at the court hearing.’

  ‘But what if they weren’t guilty?’ said Anna, staring at Erica. ‘What a tragedy that would be. Two thirteen-year-old girls whose lives were destroyed. Doesn’t one of them live around here? That’s awfully brave of her, if you ask me.’

  ‘I know. She moved back after a few years in Marstrand. You can imagine what the locals were saying about her at first, so it must have been hell. But after a while all the talk died down.’

  ‘Have you met her yet? For your book?’

  ‘No. I sent her several requests for an interview, but she never answered. So I was thinking of going to see her. To find out whether she’d agree to talk to me.’

  ‘How do you think your work on the book is going to be affected by what’s happened?’ asked Anna quietly. ‘To the little girl, I mean.’

  Erica had phoned to tell Anna about Nea as soon as she heard that the girl’s body had been found. News of the child’s death would spread like wildfire through the whole community.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Erica hesitantly as she helped herself to more iced tea. ‘Maybe people will be more inclined to talk now, or maybe the opposite. We’ll soon find out.’

  ‘What about Marie? Our glamorous Hollywood star? Is she willing to be interviewed?’

  ‘I’ve been corresponding with her publicist for the past six months. My guess is, she has her own book deal in the works, and she’s not sure whether my book will help or hinder sales. But I’m going to pay her a visit, regardless.’

  Anna looked askance. Erica knew the thought of contacting complete strangers and trying to persuade them to talk was her sister’s worst nightmare.

  ‘Let’s talk about something more pleasant, okay?’ said Erica. ‘We need to arrange a bachelorette party for Kristina.’

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Anna, laughing so hard her huge belly bounced. ‘But what do you do when the bride is a bit … past the usual age? All the traditional games like getting her to sell kisses at a booth don’t seem appropriate, not to mention making her skydive or bungee-jump.’

  ‘You’re right. I can’t imagine Kristina doing any of those things,’ said Erica. ‘Why don’t we just invite a bunch of her friends and spend a nice evening together? How about dinner at Café Bryggan? Good food, good wine. It can be as simple as that.’

  ‘Sounds like a great idea,’ said Anna. ‘Though we should still come up with some kind of fun kidnapping plan.’

  Erica nodded.

  ‘Sure, otherwise it’s not a real bachelorette party! And by the way, when is Dan going to make a respectable woman of you?’

  Anna blushed.

  ‘You can see how I look at the moment. We’ve agreed to have the baby first. Then we’ll start thinking about a wedding.’

  ‘So when do you think—’ Erica began, but she was interrupted by ‘Mambo No. 5’ playing on her mobile.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ she said when she saw the name on the display.

  She listened to what Patrik was saying, giving only a few brief remarks in reply.

  ‘No problem. Don’t worry about the kids. See you later.’

  She ended the call and put her mobile back in her purse. Then she looked at Anna. She knew it was asking a lot to get her sister to babysit the kids again, but she had no choice. Kristina was in Uddevalla all afternoon, so she couldn’t ask her.

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna. ‘I can watch the kids for you. How long will you be gone?’ She laughed when she saw Erica’s embarrassed expression.

  ‘Could I drop them off again around three? Patrik wants me to come over to the station to tell them about the Stella case. I have to be there at three thirty. So I should be back here by five or five thirty. Will that work?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Anna. ‘Your kids are better behaved with me than with you.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Erica, blowing her sister a kiss.

  But it couldn’t be denied that Anna had a point. The children had behaved like angels.

  ‘What do you think they’re scared of?’

  Sam realized he had started to slur his words. The combination of sun and champagne had gone straight to his head. He was holding the glass in his left hand. His right hand ached after the morning’s target practice.

  ‘Scared of?’ said Jessie.

  She too was slurring her words. She’d had several glasses before he arrived and they were now on the second bottle.

  ‘Won’t your mother notice some bottles are missing?’ he asked, motioning with the glass.

  The golden bubbles sparkled when the sunlight hit the glass. He’d never thought about how beautiful champagne was. On the other hand, he’d never seen it close up.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. She won’t care,’ replied Jessie, tossing her head. ‘As long as there’s still some left for her.’

  She reached for the bottle.

  ‘But what did you mean about being scared? I don’t think they’re scared of us.’

  ‘Of course they’re fucking scared,’ said Sam, holding out his glass.

  The foam reached the top and spilled over the rim, but he merely laughed and licked the champagne off his hand.

  ‘They know we’re not like them. They sense … they can sense the darkness inside us.’

  ‘Darkness?’

  She studied him in silence. He loved the contrast between her green eyes and blond hair. He wished she would realize how beautiful she was. He looked beyond her weight and the spots. He had recognized himself in her when he saw her at the Centrum kiosk. He knew they both shared that lost feeling. And he saw in her the same darkness.

  ‘They know we hate them. They see all the hatred they’ve already created in us, but they can’t help themselves, they keep pouring it on, keep creating something they won’t be able to control.’

  Jessie giggled.

  ‘My God, you sound so pretentious. Skål! We’re sitting here in the sunshine, on the dock next to a luxury villa, we’re drinking champagne, and we’re having a fucking great time.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He smiled as their glasses clinked. ‘We’re having a fucking great time.’

  ‘Because we deserve it,’ Jessie said, stumbling over her words. ‘You and me. We fucking deserve it. We’re better than them. They’re nothing compared to us.’

  She raised her glass so abruptly that half the champagne spilled out, landing on her bare stomach.

  ‘Oops,’ she said, giggling.

  She reached for a towel, but Sam stopped her. He looked around. The dock was hidden by a fence, and the boats out in the water were a good distance away. They were alone in the world.

  He knelt down in front of her, between her legs. She looked down at him with excitement. Slowly he licked the champagne off her skin. He sucked up the bubbly that had filled her navel and then ran his tongue over her sun-warmed skin. She tasted of champagne and sweat. He raised his eyes and looked at her. Keeping his eyes fixed on hers, he reached for the edge of her bikini bottoms and slowly pulled them down. When he began licking her, he heard her panting breaths mixing with the sound of the seagulls screeching overhead. They were alone. All alone in the world.

  The Stella Case

  Leif Hermansson took a deep breath before he stepped inside the small interview room at the police station. Helen Persson and her parents, KG and Harriet, were waiting inside. He knew the parents – everyo
ne in Fjällbacka did – though they were no more than chance acquaintances. It was different with Marie Wall’s parents. The police in Tanumshede had had countless opportunities to meet them over the years.

  Leif wasn’t happy about being police chief. He didn’t enjoy supervising others or having to make the decisions. But he was too good at his job, and it had got him promoted. Of course it was only the police station in Tanumshede; he had politely but firmly turned down all opportunities that would have meant moving somewhere else. He had been born in Tanumshede, and that was where he intended to stay until the very end.

  Days like today made him hate being the boss. The responsibility of having to find the perpetrator, male or female, who had killed a little girl, rested heavily on his shoulders.

  He opened the door to the dreary room with the grey-painted walls, allowing his eyes to rest for a moment on Helen’s slumped figure as she sat at the table. Then he nodded to Harriet and KG, seated on either side of their daughter.

  ‘Is it really necessary for us to have this talk here at the station?’ asked KG.

  He was chairman of the Rotary Club and a big shot within the local business community. His wife Harriet was always impeccably dressed, with her hair styled and her nails exquisitely manicured. But Leif had no idea what she did with her time other than taking care of her appearance and attending meetings of the Home and School Association. She always seemed to be at KG’s side at various functions and parties, always laughing and with a martini in her hand.

  ‘We thought it would be easier for you to come to us,’ said Leif, signalling an end to that discussion.

  How the police chose to do their job was their own concern, and he had a feeling that KG would try to take over if he didn’t keep tight control of the conversation.

  ‘It’s the other girl you should be talking to,’ said Harriet, tugging at her freshly ironed white blouse. ‘Marie. She comes from that dreadful family.’

  ‘We have to talk to both girls, since all indications are that they were the last ones to see Stella alive.’

  ‘But Helen has nothing to do with this. Surely you understand that.’

  KG was so indignant, his moustache quivered.

  ‘We’re not saying they had anything to do with the girl’s death, but they were the last ones to see her, and we need to go over the chain of events if we’re going to find the perpetrator.’

  Leif glanced at Helen. She was sitting in silence, staring down at her hands. She had dark hair like her mother. She was pretty in a quiet, ordinary sort of way. Her shoulders were tensed, and she was plucking at her dress.

  ‘Helen, can you tell me in your own words what happened?’ he said gently, surprised to feel a certain tenderness for the girl.

  She looked so vulnerable and frightened, and her parents seemed much too focused on themselves to notice their daughter’s terror.

  Helen glanced at her father, who nodded curtly.

  ‘We promised Linda and Anders to babysit Stella. We live nearby, and sometimes we go over there to play with Stella. They said they’d give us twenty kronor so we could go to the kiosk with Stella and buy ice cream.’

  ‘When did you pick her up?’ asked Leif.

  The girl looked up at him.

  ‘I think it was around one. I went over there with Marie.’

  ‘Marie,’ snorted Harriet, but Leif raised his hand to silence her.

  ‘So it was around one o’clock.’

  Leif jotted down the time in the notebook in front of him. The tape recorder was silently running in the background, but taking notes helped him to organize his thoughts.

  ‘Yes, but Marie would know better than me.’

  Helen shifted position.

  ‘Who was at home when you picked her up?’

  Leif stopped writing and smiled at Helen, but she still refused to meet his eye as she picked invisible lint off her white summer dress.

  ‘Her mother. And Sanna. They were about to leave when we got there. She gave us the money so we could pay for the ice cream. Stella was really happy. She was jumping up and down.’

  ‘Did you leave at once? Or did you stay at the farm for a while?’

  Helen shook her head and a lock of her dark hair fell into her face.

  ‘We played on the farm. Jumped rope with Stella. She likes it when we each take one end of the rope so she can jump. But she kept stumbling and getting tangled up, so we got tired of the game.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘We took her with us and walked to Fjällbacka.’

  ‘That must have taken quite a while.’

  Leif made a quick calculation. It would take him personally about twenty minutes to go from the Strand farm to the centre of town. With a four-year-old in tow, it would take much longer. The child would want to smell the grass and pick flowers and then she’d get a pebble in her shoe, or she’d have to pee, and her legs would get so tired that she wouldn’t want to go any further. Walking from the farm to Fjällbacka with a four-year-old would take for ever.

  ‘We took a pushchair with us,’ said Helen. ‘The kind you can fold up so it gets really small.’

  ‘A collapsible pushchair,’ said Harriet.

  Leif gave her a look that stopped her from saying anything else.

  Helen cast a quick glance at her mother.

  Leif put down his pen.

  ‘So how long did it take you to get there? With Stella in the pushchair.’

  Helen frowned.

  ‘It took ages. It’s a gravel road up to the main road, and it’s hard to steer a pushchair on gravel. The wheels kept getting stuck.’

  ‘But approximately how long did it take?’

  ‘Maybe forty-five minutes? But we didn’t check the time. We don’t have watches.’

  ‘You do have a watch,’ said Harriet. ‘You just refuse to wear it. But I’m not surprised that other girl doesn’t have one. If she did, it probably would have been a stolen watch.’

  ‘Mamma! Don’t say that!’

  Helen’s eyes flashed.

  Leif looked at Harriet.

  ‘If you don’t mind, let’s stick to the matter in hand.’

  He nodded at Helen.

  ‘Then what? How long did you stay in Fjällbacka with Stella?’

  Helen shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. We bought ice cream and sat on the wharf for a while, but we didn’t let Stella go near the edge because she can’t swim, and we didn’t have any life jackets with us.’

  ‘Very smart,’ said Leif with a nod.

  He made a note to speak to Kjell and Anita who owned the kiosk to see if they recalled seeing the girls and Stella yesterday.

  ‘So you ate your ice cream and sat on the wharf. Did you do anything else?’

  ‘No. After a while we started walking back. Stella was tired. She fell asleep in the pushchair.’

  ‘So you spent about an hour in Fjällbacka? Does that sound right?’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘Did you go the same way back?’

  ‘No, on the way back Stella wanted to go through the woods, so she got out of the pushchair and we walked the rest of the way through the woods.’

  Leif jotted down a few notes.

  ‘And when you got back, what time do you think it was?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it took about the same amount of time to walk home.’

  Leif looked down at the notes he’d written. If the girls arrived at the farm around one, played for twenty minutes or so, then walked to Fjällbacka in forty minutes, spent an hour there and then walked back in forty minutes, it would have been about 15.40 when they got home. Although considering Helen’s less than precise sense of time, he couldn’t rely on that, so he wrote ‘15.30–16.15’ in his notebook and drew a circle around it. Even that time frame might not be reliable.

  ‘What happened once you got home with Stella?’

  ‘We saw her father’s car in the yard, so we assumed he was home. And when we saw Stella running tow
ards the house, we left.’

  ‘But you didn’t see her father? You didn’t see her go inside the house?’

  ‘No.’

  Helen shook her head.

  ‘Did the two of you go straight home?’

  ‘No …’

  Helen glanced at her parents.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘We went over to the lake behind Marie’s farm and went swimming.’

  ‘We’ve told you before you’re not allowed—’

  A look from Leif stopped Harriet.

  ‘About how long were you there?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I was home for dinner at six.’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said KG, nodding. ‘Though she didn’t tell us anything about going swimming. She said they’d been babysitting little Stella the whole time.’

  He glared at his daughter, who was still looking down at her dress.

  ‘Obviously we noticed that her hair was wet, but she said they’d been running through the sprinkler with Stella.’

  ‘It was stupid to lie. I know that,’ said Helen. ‘But I’m not supposed to go there. They don’t like me to go anywhere with Marie, but that’s just because of her family, and she can’t help who her parents are, can she?’

  Again her eyes flashed.

  ‘That girl is made of the same stuff as her family,’ said KG.

  ‘She’s just … a little tougher than others,’ said Helen in a low voice. ‘But maybe there’s a good reason for her to be that way. Have you ever thought about that? She didn’t choose to grow up in that family.’

  ‘Let’s all calm down,’ said Leif, holding up his hands.

  Even though their argument told him something valuable about their family dynamics, this wasn’t the right time or place to be airing such matters.

  He read aloud from his notes.

  ‘Does that match more or less what you remember about yesterday?’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘And Marie will tell me the same thing?’

  For a moment he thought he saw a glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. Then she replied calmly:

  ‘Yes, she will.’