The Ice Child Read online

  When she reached the cement floor, she took a few deep breaths to calm her nerves. This was just an empty cellar inside an abandoned house. Nothing more. And it did look like an ordinary basement. A few shelves remained, and an old work bench that had belonged to Vladek, but no tools. Next to it stood an empty oil can, and several crumpled old newspapers had been tossed in a corner. Nothing startling to look at. Except for one small detail: the chain, about three metres in length, which had been fastened with screws to the wall.

  Erica’s hands shook badly as she searched for the right photograph. The chain was the same as back then, merely rustier. But the shackles were missing. The police had taken them. And in the police report, she’d read that they had been forced to saw them off, because they couldn’t find the key. She squatted down and picked up the chain, weighing it in her hand. It was heavy and solid, clearly sturdy enough to have restrained a much larger person than a thin and undernourished seven-year-old girl. How could anyone do that to a child?

  Erica felt a wave of nausea rise to her throat. She was going to have to take a break from visiting Laila. She didn’t know how she could face her again after coming here and seeing with her own eyes these traces of the woman’s wickedness. Photographs were one thing, but as she held the cold, heavy chain in her hands, she had a much clearer idea of what the police must have found on that day in March 1975. She felt the same horror they must have felt when they came down to the cellar and discovered a child chained to the wall.

  A rustling in the corner made Erica stand up abruptly. Her pulse again began racing. Then the light went out and she screamed. Panic seized hold of her and she started taking short, shallow breaths. Close to tears, she fumbled her way towards the stairs. Odd little sounds were coming from all directions, and when something brushed against her face, she screamed again. She flailed her arms about until she realized that it was just another cobweb. Feeling sick to her stomach, she threw herself in the direction where the stairs ought to be and then had the breath knocked out of her when she ran right into the railing. The light flickered and then came back on, but she was so filled with terror that she grabbed hold of the railing and dashed up the stairs. She missed one of the steps and hit her shin, but then managed to stumble the rest of the way up to the kitchen.

  Gratefully she fell to her knees after slamming the cellar door closed behind her. Her leg and midriff were bruised, but she ignored the pain, focusing all her attention on breathing calmly. She felt a bit ridiculous as she sat there, but her childhood fear of the dark never seemed to go away, and in the cellar sheer terror had surged through her whole body. For a few minutes she had experienced a little of what Louise must have felt down there in the basement. The big difference was that she had been able to rush upstairs to the light and freedom, while Louise had been chained down there, in the dark.

  For the first time a real awareness of the girl’s fate struck her with full force, and Erica bowed her head and wept. She was crying for Louise.

  Martin studied Marta as she switched on the coffeemaker. He had never met her before, but like everybody else in the Fjällbacka area, he knew of the veterinarian and his wife. She was as beautiful as everyone had said, but it was an inaccessible type of beauty, and the slightly cold impression that she gave was further enhanced by the fact that she was remarkably pale.

  ‘Maybe you should talk to someone,’ he now said.

  ‘You mean a pastor? Or a psychologist?’ Marta shook her head. ‘I’m not the one who’s in a bad way. I’m just a bit … upset.’

  She looked down at the floor but then raised her head to fix her gaze on him.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about Victoria’s family. They finally got her back, only to lose her again. Such a young and talented girl …’ Marta fell silent.

  ‘I know. It’s awful,’ said Martin. He looked around at the kitchen. It wasn’t exactly ugly, but he could tell that the people who lived here didn’t care much about home decor. Everything seemed to have been put together haphazardly, and even though the room appeared to be clean, there was still a faint odour of horse.

  ‘Do you have any idea who could have done this to her? Are other girls in danger?’ asked Marta. She poured the coffee and sat down across from him.

  ‘That’s not a question we can answer.’ He wished he had a better reply, and his stomach clenched when he thought about how worried all the parents of young girls must be right now. He cleared his throat. It would do no good to get caught up in those kinds of thoughts. He needed to focus on doing his job and find out what happened to Victoria. That was the only way he could help them.

  ‘Tell me about yesterday,’ he said, taking a sip of coffee.

  Marta took a few minutes to formulate her response. In a low voice she then told him how she’d gone out riding and how she’d seen the girl come out of the woods. She hesitated a couple of times, but Martin didn’t try to rush her. He let her tell the story at her own pace. He couldn’t begin to imagine how awful a sight the girl must have been.

  ‘When I realized it was Victoria, I called to her several times. I tried to warn her about the oncoming car, but she didn’t react. She just kept walking forward, like a robot.’

  ‘Did you see any other vehicle nearby? Or anyone in the woods?’

  Marta shook her head.

  ‘No. I’ve tried again and again to recall the details, but that’s all I saw, both before and after the accident. The driver and I were the only ones around. Everything happened so fast, and I had all my attention focused on Victoria.’

  ‘Were you and Victoria close?’

  ‘That depends what you mean by that,’ replied Marta, running her finger along the rim of her coffee cup. ‘I try to establish a close relationship with all the girls at the stable, and Victoria had been coming to the riding school for years. We’re like a family here, even though it can be a dysfunctional one at times. And Victoria was part of the family.’

  As she looked away, Martin saw tears welling up in her eyes. He reached for a paper napkin on the table and handed it to her. She took it and dabbed at her eyes.

  ‘Do you remember anything suspicious happening around the stable, anyone who seemed to be spying on the girls? Have you had anyone working here that we should take a closer look at? I know we’ve asked you these questions before, but they’re even more relevant now that Victoria was found so close by.’

  Marta nodded. ‘I understand. But I can only repeat what I’ve already said. We haven’t had any problems like that, and we don’t have any employees. The riding school is in such a remote location that we would notice if anyone started hanging about. Whoever did this must have seen Victoria somewhere else. She was a lovely girl.’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ said Martin. ‘And she seems to have been a nice girl too. What did the other girls think of her?’

  Marta took a deep breath. ‘Victoria was well-liked at the stable. She had no enemies that I know of. She was a completely ordinary teenager from a good family. I can only think that she was unlucky enough to fall into the hands of an extremely sick individual.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Martin. ‘Although the word “unlucky” doesn’t seem adequate, given the circumstances.’

  He stood up, signalling that the conversation was over.

  ‘That’s true.’ Marta made no sign of getting up to accompany him to the door. ‘“Unlucky” can’t begin to describe what happened.’

  The hardest thing to get used to back when she started her prison time was that the days were all the same. But gradually the routines had become Laila’s lifeline. She took comfort in knowing that each day would be exactly like the previous day. It was a way of fending off her fear of staying alive. That had been the reason for her suicide attempts during those first few years. The fear of seeing life stretching out endlessly before her as the weight of the past pulled her down into darkness. Because of the routines, she had been able to cope. But the weight was ever-present.

  Now everyt
hing had changed, and it was too big a burden for her to bear alone.

  With trembling hands she turned the pages of the evening papers, which could be read only in the common room. The other inmates wanted to read them too, and they were growing impatient because she was taking so long. So far the journalists didn’t seem to know much, but they were making the most of the few details they had. The sensational tone of the reports disturbed her. She knew what it was like to be on the other side of the big headlines. Behind every such article was someone’s life, and real suffering.

  ‘Are you done yet?’ asked Marianne, coming over to her.

  ‘Almost,’ Laila murmured without looking up.

  ‘You’ve had the papers for ever. Finish reading them so we can have a turn.’

  ‘All right,’ she said as she continued to study the same pages that she’d spread open on the table quite a while ago.

  Marianne sighed and went over to a table near the window to sit down and wait.

  Laila couldn’t take her eyes off the photo on the left-hand page. The girl looked so happy and innocent, so unaware of the evil that existed in the world. But Laila could have told her all about it. How evil could live right next to what was good, in a community where people wore blinkers and refused to see what was right in front of their noses. Once you saw evil up close, you could never close your eyes to it again. That was her curse, and her responsibility.

  She closed the newspaper, got up, and set it down in front of Marianne.

  ‘I’d like to have it back when all of you are done with it,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ muttered Marianne, already engrossed in the entertainment section.

  Laila stood there for a moment, looking at Marianne as she bent over an article about the latest Hollywood celebrity divorce. How nice it must be to go through life wearing blinkers, she thought.

  What bloody awful weather. Mellberg couldn’t understand how his partner Rita, who was originally from Chile, had been able to get used to living in a country with such a terrible climate. Personally, he wouldn’t mind emigrating. Maybe he should have taken the time to go home and change into warmer clothes, but he hadn’t expected to be sent into the woods. As police chief, he was the one who was supposed to tell people what to do. His plan had been to brief the people who had turned up to help with the search, telling them in which direction to go while he stayed in the car with a thermos of hot coffee.

  But that wasn’t what happened. Of course Hedström had insisted that the two of them should help with the search. What foolishness! Aside from being a waste of his supervisory skills, he’d probably end up getting sick after plodding around in the freezing cold, and then how would the station function? The whole place would fall apart within hours. It was a mystery to him why Hedström didn’t realize that.

  ‘Damn it!’ His thin shoes slipped on the icy ground and he instinctively reached out to grab a tree branch in order to stay upright. The manoeuvre shook the tree, causing snow to come tumbling down and over him like a cold blanket, seeping under his collar and down his back.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Patrik. He didn’t seem to notice the cold, no doubt because he had on a fur hat, heavy boots, and an enviably thick winter jacket.

  Mellberg angrily brushed off the snow. ‘Don’t you think I should head back to the station to get things ready for the press conference?’

  ‘Annika is taking care of all that. And it’s not until four this afternoon. We’ve got plenty of time.’

  ‘But this is a total waste of time. The snow that fell yesterday wiped out her tracks, and even the dogs can’t find a scent in this cold.’ He motioned towards a gap in the trees where they could see a handler with one of the two police dogs that Patrik had managed to call in. The dogs had been given a head start so as not to confuse them with new tracks and smells.

  ‘So tell me again, what exactly should we be looking for?’ asked Mats, one of the volunteers. He’d come from the local sports club after hearing the appeal for help with the search. Everyone in the community wanted to contribute in whatever way they could.

  ‘Anything that Victoria might have left behind. Footprints, bloodstains, broken branches … Anything that catches your attention,’ Mellberg told him, repeating word for word what Patrik had said when he spoke to the volunteers before they began the search.

  ‘We’re also hoping to find the place where she was being held,’ added Patrik, pulling his fur hat further down over his ears.

  ‘She couldn’t have walked far. Not in the condition she was in,’ Mellberg muttered, his teeth chattering.

  ‘No, not if she was on foot,’ said Patrik, slowly continuing onward as his eyes swept the ground and the surrounding area. ‘But she could have escaped from a car. If the perpetrator was in the process of moving her, for example. Or she could have been dropped off here on purpose.’

  ‘Would the perp really have let her go free? Why would he do that? That would be a very risky thing for him to do.’

  ‘Why?’ Patrik stopped. ‘She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t see, and she was probably seriously traumatized. Presumably we’re dealing with a perpetrator who is starting to feel extremely confident, given that he’s been at large for two years and the police haven’t found so much as a trace of the girls who disappeared. Maybe he wants to taunt us by releasing one of his victims and showing us what he’s done. As long as we don’t know anything, we can’t assume anything. We don’t know for sure that she was being held in the vicinity, but it’s possible she was.’

  ‘Okay, okay. You don’t need to talk to me like I’m some amateur,’ said Mellberg. ‘I’m just asking the questions that the general public will be asking us.’

  Patrik didn’t reply. He had bent down to focus his attention on the ground again. Mellberg shrugged. Junior officers could be so touchy. He crossed his arms to hug his chest while he tried to stop his teeth from chattering. Another half hour and then he planned to supervise the search from his car. There had to be a limit to such a waste of resources. He just hoped that the coffee in the thermos would still be hot.

  Martin didn’t envy Patrik and Mellberg wandering about in the snow. He felt as if he’d drawn the winning lottery ticket when he was assigned to interview Marta and Tyra. In truth, he didn’t think it was making optimal use of Patrik’s time for him to be out combing the woods, but over the years they’d worked together enough for Martin to understand why his colleague was doing this. For Patrik it was important to get close to the victim, physically to be on-site, aware of the same smells, listening to the same sounds, in order to have a sense of what happened. That instinct and ability had always been Patrik’s strong suit. The fact that it would also allow him to keep Mellberg occupied was a positive side effect.

  Martin was hoping that Patrik’s instinct would lead him in the right direction, because thus far their investigation had failed to come up with any explanation for Victoria’s disappearance. They desperately needed to uncover some clue out there in the woods that would tell them where she’d been all these months. If they didn’t, and if the autopsy produced no concrete results, then it was going to be difficult to find any new leads.

  While Victoria was missing they had talked to everyone with whom she might have come into contact. They had gone over her room with a fine-tooth comb and searched through her computer, looking for chat contacts, emails, and text messages, but without result. Patrik had cooperated with the other police districts, and they had devoted a good deal of time to looking for common denominators between Victoria and the other missing girls. But they hadn’t found any connection. The girls didn’t seem to share common interests or like the same music; they had never been in contact with each other, or been members of the same Internet forums, etc. No one in Victoria’s family or circle of friends recognized the name of any of the other girls.

  Martin got up and went into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. He was drinking too much coffee these days, but with so many sleepless nights, he
needed caffeine in order to function. After Pia died, his doctor had prescribed sleeping pills and antidepressants, which he’d tried for a week. But the pills wrapped him in a shroud of indifference, which scared him. So on the day of Pia’s funeral, he tossed them in the bin. He no longer remembered what it felt like to sleep through a whole night. In the daytime things were gradually getting better. As long as he kept busy – worked hard, fetched Tuva from day-care, cooked dinner, cleaned the house, played with his daughter, read her stories, put her to bed – he managed to hold on. But at night he was overwhelmed by grief, and thoughts kept whirling through his head. Hour after hour he would lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling as memories came rushing in and he was filled with an unbearable longing for a life that would never return.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Annika placed her hand on his shoulder, and he realized he was standing in the middle of the room holding the coffee pot in his hand.

  ‘I’m still not sleeping well,’ he said, filling his cup. ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Sure. Thanks,’ she said, reaching for a cup.

  Ernst came ambling in from Mellberg’s office, no doubt hoping that a coffee break in the kitchen meant there would be some treat for him too. When Martin and Annika sat down at the table, he lay down underneath and placed his head on his paws, keeping an eye on their every move.

  ‘Don’t give him anything,’ said Annika. ‘He’s starting to get fat, and that’s not good for his health. Rita does what she can to make sure he gets exercise, but she can’t keep up with the pace that would be needed to balance out what he eats.’

  ‘Are you talking about Bertil or Ernst?’

  ‘I suppose it would apply to both of them.’ Annika smiled, but then her expression turned serious. ‘So how are you really doing?’

  ‘I’m okay.’ He noticed Annika’s sceptical look. ‘It’s true. I’m just not sleeping much.’

  ‘Is anyone helping out with Tuva? You need a chance to rest and get caught up with things.’