The Girl in the Woods

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 towards 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.’