The Chosen (29 page)

‘Where were you between one and two p.m. today?’

For a moment Alex thought he had misjudged the situation, and that Saul Goldmann was about to attack him. The other man was far more disturbed by the question than Alex had expected him to
be.

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘I mean exactly what I say, and nothing else. Please answer the question.’

‘Am I suspected of some crime? Do you think I’ve taken Polly? Is that why I’m here?’

Alex slowly put down his pen.

‘In less than a week, three children have gone missing from the Solomon Community here in Stockholm. Two of them have been found dead. One of them was your son. It’s my duty to find
out what their close family and friends were doing when those children disappeared. Because however much I wish it wasn’t the case, the perpetrator is usually someone known to the child.
So answer the bloody
question!
’

Adults who feel under pressure often start to behave like children. Alex had seen the phenomenon many times, yet he was still surprised when he saw Saul’s reaction. The man’s eyes
shone with defiance.

What was it that he found so infuriating?

‘I was out for a walk. A circuit around Djurgården.’

The most classic of all walks in Stockholm.

‘With Daphne?’

‘Alone.’

‘Did you meet anyone you knew while you were out walking?’

‘No.’

‘Did you make or receive any phone calls?’

‘No.’

So he had no alibi.

That was why he was so angry. Because he was afraid. Afraid of looking like a suspect.

‘I’ve just lost my only child. I needed to be alone. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

Alex moved on; he didn’t want to waste time on the issue of Saul’s alibi at this stage, so he pretended to let it go. It was clear that Saul was surprised. Alex sat calmly opposite
him, waiting.

Eventually Saul broke the silence.

‘So was there anything else?’

Alex glanced at his watch. Wished the time wasn’t going so fast. Not just for his own sake, but mainly for Polly Eisenberg’s. Because in spite of all the roadblocks, all the
officers who had been called in to work overtime, in spite of the fact that every media outlet in the country was following Polly’s disappearance, Alex had the horrible feeling that he was in
the middle of a chain of events over which he had no influence whatsoever.

The chances of finding Polly alive weren’t just small, they were infinitesimal.

And sitting opposite Alex was a man who, like certain others, had chosen not to tell the police everything he knew.

A man who didn’t have an alibi.

That wasn’t enough to make him a suspect, of course. They had to understand the motive in order to find the perpetrator.

‘Yes,’ he said to Saul. ‘There was something else. I have several more questions. Let’s start with something that should be comparatively simple. Do you know a man by the name of Efraim Kiel?’

I
n the world of fairy tales, limitations were set only by the bounds of imagination, which appealed to Fredrika Bergman. The impossible became possible; the happy ending was obligatory. And as a
reader she always had the option of setting the book aside if the story got too unpleasant.

Which was what her daughter did when Fredrika tried to read to her.

‘Yuck,’ she said, knocking the book out of her mother’s hands.

Fredrika picked it up, looked at the dark images. Saga was right. It was a dark and scary story, not the kind of thing she should be reading to a child who was only three.

Her thoughts turned to the tale of the Paper Boy. The story Gideon had grown up with, told with the aim of keeping the children at home in the evenings. In a country like Israel, there was
probably good reason to frighten a child in that way. The problem was that the Paper Boy seemed to have come to life – but not in Israel, in Stockholm.

Fredrika had searched online, but no one seemed to have heard of him. Nothing had been written about him. Perhaps her lack of success was due to her inability to read Hebrew; her searches in
English and Swedish got her nowhere.

But something told Fredrika that even if she had been able to speak Hebrew, she wouldn’t have found many hits. Carmen had heard of the Paper Boy through Gideon, when she was an adult; he hadn’t featured in her childhood.

The Paper Boy.

Fredrika shuddered. The very concept was too abstract to stimulate the imagination. Why boy and not man? The Paper Man would be more logical. Using a child to frighten a child was tasteless, and
surely ineffective: who would be scared of someone called the Paper Boy?

Me. I was scared of everything when I was little.

Fredrika gazed at her daughter, who had already forgotten about the story and was playing with a car instead. A blue car that Spencer had bought for their son. In his rather conservative
view of the world, little girls couldn’t possibly be interested in such things. She laughed quietly to herself. Spencer was a good man, in spite of his shortcomings. Almost perfect. And
he was perfectly capable of backing down when he was wrong. If his daughter wanted to play with cars, that was fine.

Beyond the fairy stories and the fun lay her trip to Israel. Without Spencer. He wasn’t up to it, that was obvious. She hated the thought of travelling alone, even though it was only for a
couple of days.

She tried to shake off her feeling of unease. What could go wrong in such a short time?

Everything. The cataclysmic changes don
’
t happen over a long period, but from one second to the next.

The sound of her mobile interrupted her thoughts.

‘Could we meet up before you go?’ Alex said.

Fredrika didn’t like the idea at all; she really didn’t want to leave her family again at this stage.

Alex picked up on her reluctance.

‘I can come to you, if that’s easier.’

Fredrika was taken aback.

‘Come here? To the apartment?’

‘It was just a suggestion.’

Why not?

‘Of course,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Good idea.’

Spencer opened the door to Alex a little while later. Fredrika heard them say hello, saw them shake hands. She had to smile as she watched Alex trying to hide his surprise. Just like everyone
else, he knew that she lived with a man who was twenty-five years older than her, but he still seemed bemused by how old Spencer actually was. Which was the way most people reacted when they first
met him.

Alex glanced over at her, seemingly at a loss. He was acting as if someone had forced him across the threshold at gunpoint, rather than as if the whole thing had been his idea in the first
place.

The children realised someone had arrived, and came running.

Like eager little puppies. They certainly weren’t shy.

‘Coffee?’

Alex declined. Fredrika led him into the library and closed the door.

‘Right you two, shall we make a start on tea?’ she heard Spencer say to the children. His voice was hoarse; he definitely wasn’t well.

‘He seems nice,’ Alex said, mainly for the sake of having something to say.

‘He is,’ Fredrika said. ‘And good-looking.’

Nothing was as liberating as humour.

Alex laughed uncertainly.

‘Are you on the same flight tomorrow?’ he asked.

Fredrika looked downcast.

‘Spencer’s not coming,’ she said. ‘He isn’t well enough.’

‘But you’re still going?’ Alex asked anxiously.

‘I am.’

He looked relieved.

‘We’ve questioned Saul and Daphne Goldmann,’ he said with an air of resignation. ‘I wish I had some useful information to pass on, but unfortunately that’s not
the case. To start with, they had nothing to add to the story of the Paper Boy; they merely confirmed what Gideon and Carmen had told us, that it was used to frighten children.’

‘Saul grew up on the same kibbutz as Gideon,’ Fredrika said, ‘so it’s hardly surprising that he’s heard of the Paper Boy too. But what about Daphne? Was she already
familiar with the story?’

‘She was, but that’s not surprising either – she grew up on the neighbouring kibbutz.’

Fredrika made a mental note of that snippet.

‘Do we have the names of these kibbutzim? I’m just wondering whether I ought to try and visit them.’

‘I think you should – if they’re still there, that is. Quite a lot have gone bankrupt or closed down for other reasons.’

Time had moved on from the basic premise of the kibbutz, an idealistic society where everything was owned collectively and no one earned more than anyone else, even though some carried more
responsibility than others.

Alex went on:

‘Then they were asked about the Lion. Same again – they had nothing to add to what we had already heard from Gideon and Carmen.’

Fredrika thought about the prospects of finding the Lion in Israel; after all, it was from Jerusalem that his emails had been sent.

‘Have you spoken to the Israeli police?’ she asked.

Alex nodded. ‘We’ve given them everything our tech guys have found out about the Lion, and they’re going to help us search for him. They should have done a fair amount by the
time you get there.’

‘So we’ve made a formal request for assistance?’

‘Sweden doesn’t actually have an international agreement with Israel, but as the victims belonged to the Solomon Community, it wasn’t particularly difficult to persuade them to
co-operate with us. I don’t think we’d be able to secure an extradition to Sweden, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘How did Daphne and Saul react to the photograph of Abraham with the paper bag over his head?’

‘Like the Eisenbergs, but even more strongly. Particularly Saul – he was very vocal.’

There was nothing strange about that; the pictures were terrible. Fredrika could still see the boys lying there on their backs in the snow, barefoot and with a bullet wound in their chests. And
a paper bag on their heads.

‘And still the parents seem unable to help us move forward,’ she said.

‘They insist they have no idea why this is happening to them, but I’m not sure they’re telling the truth. Now that Polly Eisenberg has gone missing too, I’m more
convinced than ever that chance has nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Of course not. It’s obvious that there’s a personal motive behind the murders and Polly’s disappearance; the only question is what that motive might be.’

Fredrika thought about the Paper Boy once more, wondering who the perpetrator was. The Paper Boy seemed like a suspect, an evil fairy-tale figure who didn’t exist.

Except that he did exist, because the children who had died on Lov
ö
n had been marked in the way that the Paper Boy marked his victims, according to the
legend.

‘I’ve spoken to the tech guys about whether it would be possible to trace the Lion’s other contacts,’ Alex said. ‘They’ve spoken to the administrators of
Super Troopers, and it turns out that the information was still on the system, in spite of the fact that the Lion had deleted his profile.’

Fredrika felt a flicker of hope.

‘And you’re only telling me this now?’

Alex pulled a face.

‘It was another dead end, I’m afraid. The Lion had no contact with any of the other members.’

Fredrika’s mind was whirling. She didn’t regard that as a dead end at all.

‘Which means he was only interested in Simon and Abraham. But how did he know he would find them on Super Troopers?’

‘That’s a bloody good question. Maybe someone tipped him off?’

Maybe, maybe not. So many questions, so few answers. What a mess. Fredrika tried another tack.

‘We wondered if the Lion could be the person who picked up the boys; did we follow up the car rental idea?’

‘As we don’t have a name to go on, I haven’t set the ball rolling yet,’ Alex said.

‘Didn’t the Lion say his first name was Zalman?’

‘Yes, but that’s not necessarily true. But you’re right; we’ll check it out. He could have two sets of ID papers.’

Could he? Fredrika thought about Efraim Kiel, an Israeli security expert who had entered Sweden and now couldn’t be found. Alex had probably been wise to contact Eden; the police lacked
the tools to identify their suspects, which said something about their background. Something very unpleasant.

‘Did the Goldmanns know who Efraim Kiel was?’

‘They knew him from their military service, but that’s all.’

Alex ran a hand over his chin. ‘I have a feeling the parents are hiding a lot of things from us, but I don’t understand why. It’s so bloody frustrating.’

People lied for the strangest reasons, Fredrika knew that. A groundless fear of becoming a suspect was often the main motivation; they got themselves entangled in all kinds of unnecessary lies
in order to make life simpler, which had the opposite effect. Always and without exception.

Alex met Fredrika’s gaze.

‘I’m not saying that I expect you to achieve miracles during your trip, but almost . . . Are you sure you can cope with all this?’

‘I can cope.’

She looked at her watch, working out how long Polly had been missing. Her heart sank as she thought the unthinkable: they weren’t going to find her in time. Not if she
had been taken by the same person who had abducted her brother.

A
rlanda was a quiet place on a Saturday evening. Eden Lundell loved airports. She was fascinated by the stream of people who had something in common: they were all heading to or from
somewhere.

And the sense of being in the midst of that stream usually brought her a feeling of peace.

However, peace was sadly lacking as Eden sat waiting for her flight to London. Stress crawled under her skin, making it impossible for her to sit still.

I shouldn
’
t have left Mikael and the children alone.

In many families it was the man who was the hunter-gatherer, who protected his family, took on the physical responsibility. But not in Eden’s case. From a purely physical point of
view, Mikael was the perfect warrior; Eden had no doubt that he would give up his life for her and their daughters. The only problem was that death was rarely a particularly productive option. It
was noble, but not very sensible. If Mikael chose that option, both he and the children would be gone in two seconds.