The Ice Child

‘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 everything 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?’