he spoke.
An older, grim-faced policeman said he had no comment and added a plea for the public to communicate any information about sightings.
He had nodded to that man, twice. The man had been sitting there all the time; Fredrik had nodded on the way into the school, and again on the way out.
Fredrik had turned rigid, but now he could hear Agnes shouting in the phone; her sharp voice hurt his ears. Let her jabber.
He shouldn't have nodded. Shouldn't have.
'Agnes,' he finally said into the receiver. 'I can't talk any more. I must phone somewhere. I'll put the phone down now.'
He pushed the button and waited for a signal. She was still there.
'Agnes! Fuck's sake! Get off the line!' He threw the phone on the floor, ran into the kitchen, grabbed his mobile and rang Micaela, rang the school.
Lars Agestam scanned the courtroom. What a drab, disappointing lot.
The magistrates, political appointees to a man and woman, watched the proceedings with bored, ignorant eyes. Judge von Balvas had begun the trial with a totally unprofessional statement to the effect that she was prejudiced against any person charged with sexual crimes. Hakan Axelsson, the accused paedophile, had given up and was unable even to pretend an understanding of what his acts might have done to the children. The guards behind the accused tried to stare neutrally into mid-distance, while the seven journalists, who seemed agitated and were taking notes furiously, would make mistakes about the most straightforward events in their facts boxes. At least two faces in the public gallery belonged to familiars, women who turned up to enjoy the performance and justified it by chattering about their civic rights. And there was the group of law students, seated at the back as he himself had once been, busily making over the despair of violated children into a piece of useful coursework, hoping for a good z:i at least.
He felt like insisting that the court should be cleared, or screaming at the lot of them to keep a very, very low profile, or else. He didn't, of course. Lars Agestam was a nicely brought-up young man, a newly appointed prosecutor ambitious for better cases; he wanted to go up in the world, up up up, and was smart enough to keep his opinions to himself, to stick to his last and prepare his prosecutions so carefully that he knew more than anyone else around. Only an outstandingly good lawyer for the defence would have a chance of getting the better of him.
Kristina Bjornsson was an outstandingly good lawyer, bloody well excellent.
She was the only one in the room who did not fit in with the overwhelming mediocrity. She was experienced, even wise. So far he had never come across anyone else from the defence side who still believed that even the worst, most moronic of clients was more worthwhile than the size of their fee. Consequently, she was also one of the few who had the clients' full confidence.
Kristina Bjornsson had figured in one of the first anecdotes he had been told when he started attending trials as a student. She was a well-known coin collector and her collection, allegedly one of the best in private hands, had been stolen ten-odd years ago. The news started off an almighty fuss inside all the prisons in the land. An unprecedented, strictly underground search order went out and within the week two heavies with long ponytails turned up at Bjornsson's front door with her collection, accompanied by an apologetic letter and a bouquet of flowers. Every single coin was in place. The letter had been laboriously scripted by three pros in the art and antiques racket, who wanted Kristina to know they were truly sorry. They wouldn't have traded for the collection if they had known whose it was, and should she ever fail to acquire a coin legally, she need only ask and they would see what could be done.
Lars Agestam reflected that if he ever needed a lawyer, Bjornsson would be his choice. She was good this time too. Hakan Axelsson was yet another unfeeling swine, who deserved nothing better than a very long spell inside, and the prosecutor should have had a cast-iron case, given that his primary evidence was a stack of CDs containing digitised images of humiliation and violence. There were corroborating statements too; some members of Axelsson's paedophile ring had talked. But still it looked as if this particular sicko would escape with a couple of years, because Kristina Bjornsson had patiently countered every point the prosecutor made, arguing grave psychological disturbance and hence her client's need for care in a secure psychiatric unit. She wouldn't get her care order, of course, but somehow she had persuaded the magistrates of what had seemed impossible at first: namely that there were other options, compromise solutions. The magistrates approved, that much was obvious, and one of them seemed to feel that the exploitation thing had been pushed too hard, since in his view one of the children had been provocatively dressed.
Lars Agestam raged inwardly. That local council jobsworth, straight from some political backwater, had been droning on about children's clothes nowadays, mixing in stuff about human encounters and shared responsibilities; he was asking for a bloodied nose. Agestam was very close to telling him and all his moronic colleagues to go to hell. His career plans would have gone the same way, of course, ruined in one unsmart move.
He had followed the trials of other porn ring members; so far three out of the seven had been convicted and sentenced to appropriately long terms in prison. Axelsson was just as guilty, but Bjornsson and her tame band of old fools had reached some unholy agreement, so if Bernt Lund hadn't done a runner that very morning they might even have doled out a suspended sentence, a serious loss of face for any aspiring prosecutor. The fact that Lund was on the loose had got the journalists all excited and they showed more interest in Axelsson than they had so far, knowing that by now whatever they wrote would shift from page 11 to page 7 or better. Any link between Axelsson and Sweden's most wanted, most hated man would turn into many column inches. If only to avoid a nasty public row, Axelsson would surely get at least one year in prison.
Once this was over, Agestam did not want any more sex crimes. Not for a long while.
These cases sapped your strength somehow, no matter if the criminal and the victim were no more than names on pieces of paper, because he still invariably lost his professional detachment, his calm bureaucrat's distance. Trouble was, emotional involvement in a prosecutor was worse than useless.
So with any luck, he'd get bank robberies, murder, maybe a little fraud. Please. Less exciting crimes, less opinionated chatter from everyone. He had tried hard to understand the child porn fanatics, read all there was to read, attended a professional course, but nothing fundamental had changed. He wanted no more of this. Above all, he did not want anything to do with putting Bernt Lund back inside. Too much emotion, crimes too appalling to think and write about.
When they caught Lund he would keep his head well down.
He ran out to the car, leaving the front door unlocked, no time to find his keys.
Marie.
He was crying. Tore open the car door. There were his keys, on the same ring as the ignition key. He reversed the car at speed through the narrow gate.
She had not been in the school.
Micaela had listened to his urgent flood of questions and statements, put the receiver down and gone off to look for Marie. First inside, then outside. The girl was nowhere. He had screamed. Micaela had asked him to please speak more calmly; he had pulled himself together, then lost control of his voice so that it rose to a shout again. He always came back to the father on the seat outside and the TV news and the father who was in the photo taken in front of a prison wall. Then he put the receiver down and ran for his car.
He drove along the winding country roads in a panic, crying and screaming.
The father waiting outside the school was the man in the photos, he was sure of it. He let go of the wheel with one hand to phone the emergency number, stating his message at screaming pitch. Within a minute he was connected to the duty officer. He explained that he had seen Lund outside a nursery school in Strangnas, his daughter's school, and that she had disappeared.
Three kilometres from the house to the ferry station. He drove on, past the charming square and the thirteenth- century church, past the cemetery where people were tending graves in the still heat of late afternoon, but for all his urgency he missed the ferry. He checked the time, barely four minutes late, pushed the car horn, blinked with
