ELLEN

10.00 A.M.

The GPS said that she needed to turn right, but there was no street to turn right into. It seemed that all the streets on Brandholmen were named according to a maritime theme, she realised, though she was searching feverishly for Tennisvägen.

Ellen didn’t know whether Kjell Thulin was at home, or whether he would appreciate a visit. Would he even recognise her?

Her nose still ached from yesterday, she was tired, and she probably should have thought the whole thing through properly first. But she wanted to know — had to find out — now. Yesterday had opened up peculiar gaps, and the night had been edged by strange nightmares and troubled sleep. It was hard to separate what was what, and panic kept creeping up.

She turned around, drove against the one-way direction and up onto a pedestrian street, and then decided to park. She couldn’t even find a parking space, so she stopped the car and got out right next to a playground in the middle of the modern residential area. Two mums with strollers glared at her. Calm down, she thought. I’ll be moving the car soon.

When she finally found the right street and arrived at Thulin’s house, she stopped and took a few deep breaths. The little patch of grass in front of the house was fitted with a water sprinkler that was no doubt intended for a considerably larger yard. Regular jets of water were being pumped out over the street and at the house. Ellen walked slowly between the jets. On the door was a brass sign with the name Thulin. It felt so familiar. She remembered him well. At the time, she had been afraid of him. He had been hard and stern and almost angry at her when she couldn’t answer the questions he asked.

She tried to repress the nervous feeling and the impulse to go into a defensive posture.

How should she introduce herself? Presumably, he wouldn’t recognise her name, because she’d changed it. When Elsa had disappeared, their name was von Platen, but when her dad had left them, Ellen had taken her mother’s maiden name. Should she perhaps not mention her name and say she was working with a cold case? When she rang the doorbell, she still hadn’t decided. Her hand was shaking a little when she pressed the button, and she almost hoped he wouldn’t be home.

The bell was far from discreet, and the awful melody let the whole street know he had a visitor. Ellen tried to press the doorbell again to turn it off, but it had the opposite effect. The sound got even louder.

At last, he cracked open the door and looked out. Ellen recognised him, and a strange feeling filtered through her body.

He’d gotten older, much older. The little hair he had left was white, and he had a big sore on his head, as if someone had dug it out. She’d seen it once before. Cancer.

Should she say something about it, or just ignore it? It looked like a recent operation, as if it hadn’t really healed. His back was bent and his body crooked.

‘Hi, do I know you?’ He cleared his throat. Presumably she was the first person he’d talked to today.

‘No, sorry.’ She held out her hand. ‘Ellen Tamm, I’m from TV4 news. I have a few questions about an old case that you worked on.’ She tried not to talk as fast as she usually did and articulated carefully.

‘Really?’ He sounded doubtful.

‘It concerns the disappearance of Elsa von Platen.’

He nodded and looked at her carefully, and she got the sense that he recognised her. The water sprinkler made its presence known again and again, and by this point, her back was soaked. ‘Do you have some time? May I ask a few questions?’

‘For TV, you mean?’

‘No, no, I’m the one looking for information.’ The respect she felt for him when she was little had rushed back immediately. Like a reflex.

‘I see, then. Well, I guess so. Come on in. It’s too warm to be outside. You’re getting soaked. I need to adjust that water sprinkler.’

They went into the hall, past the kitchen, and through the living room to the modern glassed-in porch. It was tastefully furnished and felt Mediterranean, or at least southern European.

‘Sit yourself down, I’ve just put on some coffee, would you like some?’

‘Please,’ said Ellen. She sat down in one of the two wicker chairs and looked out over the boat-filled Nyköping inlet. On the drop-leaf table, newspapers, books, and reference works lay sprawled about in a big jumble, and it reminded her of her own desk. In the middle of the chaos was a glass jar, containing what looked like homemade almond biscuits.

She imagined him sitting there for days on end, solving crossword puzzles. In the background, the radio was playing at low volume, just loud enough that you could hear it was on, but you had to listen very carefully to make out what they were saying. It probably mainly serves as company, Ellen thought, whose feeling was that you should either listen wholeheartedly at a generous volume, or else not have it on at all.

A diary was open on the table. She peeked in it carefully, but didn’t see anything exciting. The weather and boat times.

‘You have a very nice place — amazing view,’ she said when he came back with two cups of coffee.

‘Thank you. This is my little studio.’

Thulin put the cup down in front of her and sat down opposite.

‘Do you paint?’

‘Yes, or I did. Most of the paintings on the walls here are mine.’

Ellen looked back into the living room and at the paintings. Various motifs, but the same colour palette and style.

‘Now I mostly read newspapers and books and do crosswords. I used to do it together with my wife, but she passed away last Christmas. The view made her feel at home, she said. She was French.’

Both of them looked out over Stadsfjärden and the inlet to the Nyköping harbour.

Ellen nodded. His grief was palpable. A heavy feeling that she wished she could filter away. She sipped the steaming coffee.

‘I was thinking a bit about this while I was getting the coffee. The truth is, I wasn’t surprised when you rang the doorbell. In fact, I wondered why you hadn’t come sooner.’

‘How’s that?’ Ellen loosened her hair and let it fall around her like a sort of shield.

‘How come you’re digging into all this old stuff now?’

She shrugged, didn’t really know how honest she should be. ‘I’m trying to remember what happened, and I have memory gaps. I want to move on, but I have a hard time doing that. My psychologist is trying to get me to take control of things and stop repressing what happened, and instead process the grief. I’m not sure, but maybe you might be able to tell me what you remember and help me fill in some details. If you want? It was a great sadness for our family, and we haven’t managed to move on.’

‘You should know that I worked as a policeman my whole life — even if it’s been a while now. I’ve worked on a lot of cases, so I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to answer everything, but if I don’t remember wrongly, this case was categorised as an accident.’

‘Yes, that’s right. And a kidnapping, before she was found.’ Her stomach knotted up.

Thulin drank his coffee and offered her a biscuit. ‘My wife baked them.’

‘No, thanks.’ She didn’t want to waste the biscuit he had left from his wife.

‘To tell the truth, there were a few things about that disappearance that I still wonder about.’

‘Yes?’ said Ellen, both surprised and expecting it, somehow.

‘I don’t remember the exact details, but when I retired almost ten years ago, I brought the files home. Just between us, you’re not really supposed to do that, but what are they going to do about it, put me in the clink?’ He laughed. ‘I should have destroyed them long ago, but I never got around to it. Particularly seeing as the case was shut when they found your sister — but I had a hard time getting rid of them. The case didn’t seem finished. I looked at them sometimes, but it’s been a long time since the last time.’

‘Can I see them?’ Her heart was beating faster.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘But I can try to answer your questions.’

Ellen considered pushing him for the files, but let it be. ‘Why did you have a hard time letting it go?’

‘As a policeman, you meet a lot of people, and it’s often hard to explain what it is — call it gut instinct. Maybe someone behaves strangely, or someone changes their story or sticks to it too hard. It can be little, little things that make your ears perk up as a policeman.’

‘Do you remember what it was in this particular case?’ She couldn’t help asking, but didn’t know if she really wanted to know. It was as if she was walking on a minefield — with every question she asked, it could explode.

‘No, not off the top of my head.’

‘Do you remember me?’

‘Yes, I do. I remember your parents and your brother. Your grandmother. Your brother’s friends. Neighbours on the island. It was an awful tragedy for you and your family. I can understand that you’re still grieving.’

Ellen looked down at the newspapers and tried to hide her emotions, which were taking form as tears in her eyes. ‘It’s strange to meet again after so many years.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Many memories are brought to life.’

She nodded. ‘More than I would have expected. What do you remember?’

‘I remember that you were a sweet little girl who cared about your sister very much. You were utterly crushed. I would imagine that the bonds are even stronger when you’re a twin. There was so much commotion around your sister’s disappearance. It became a real media circus: all of Sweden followed the search.’

Ellen remembered how photographers had crept up on them and even followed her to school. She remembered that their family had been in the newspapers and been talked about on TV. It was hard to grasp for an eight-year-old.

‘It was extremely tough for you. We tried to offer you help at the time, conversation therapy and so on, but I seem to remember that your parents wanted to take care of it themselves.’

She wanted to cry, but fought against it.

‘To be quite honest, I didn’t think it was an accident,’ he continued.

Could she take hearing that? Was coming here really a good idea? Ellen put down the newspaper in front of her and wished she could simply end the chapter there and then. ‘You don’t think that she drowned?’

‘To me, it was no ordinary drowning. Your sister had injuries on her body for which there was never any real explanation.’

‘Did you document the body?’

‘Yes, but at that time we didn’t have digital cameras, so I took photos with an ordinary camera. The image quality turned out so-so.’

‘Do you recall what kinds of injuries there were?’

‘In my view, there were crystal-clear defensive injuries, including scratch marks on the body, but the doctor maintained that they could have come from the reeds. I wanted the body to be sent to forensic medicine, but the doctor quickly determined — a little too quickly — that it was a drowning accident. She did have water in her lungs, so that was what she died from.’

‘Do you still have the pictures?’

He shook his head, but Ellen could tell that he did. But it was probably best that she didn’t see them. She started snapping her fingers.

‘I wanted to send technicians to the place where she was found, but the preliminary investigation was shut down.’ Thulin leant back in his chair and looked out over the sea.

She tried to process what he had just said. For some strange reason, she wasn’t surprised by what he’d revealed.

‘Death, death, death,’ she mumbled, hiding herself behind her hair.

‘I couldn’t get any support and couldn’t get further with my suspicions. I couldn’t prove anything. I understand that this must be hard to hear, but I think that the truth is often easier to handle than lies.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re here for a reason. I don’t want to stir anything up, but if you ask me, I intend to answer.’

Ellen took a deep breath before she asked the next question. ‘What do you think happened?’

‘I think her life was taken. It might have been an accident, something unintentional. I don’t know.’

‘Was there anything besides the injuries that makes you think that?’

‘The stories don’t add up.’

‘Whose stories?’ Ellen pinched herself hard on the hand.

‘In the interviews with your family. Your brother’s friends who were there that evening. People on the estate and so on. As I said, I don’t remember exactly, just that there was something that didn’t add up. Someone was lying.’

‘Who, then, and why?’

‘Yes, if we’d figured that out, then the outcome probably would have been different. Or anyway, if my gut feeling was right. At that time, we didn’t have that much experience questioning children. The images of what you’d seen and experienced were vague and your stories changed. We held long witness interviews. Well, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m being too candid.’

‘No, please, tell me what you remember.’

‘I remember that it was difficult to question you. You were completely out of it. We came to understand later that your parents had given you a sedative, so you could deal with the grief.’

‘What? They drugged me?’ Ellen felt confused.

‘No, I don’t believe that — it was entirely with good intentions. Considering the circumstances, they probably only got a reprimand and were told not to keep giving you the medicine. I think it was your mother’s prescription, so it wasn’t suitable for children. But I understood their intention.’

He leant back in the wicker chair. ‘The alarm must have come in early in the morning. I remember a colleague and I driving out to Örelo. It was a hard place to work. Some of the few traces that were found were, of course, Elsa’s clothes, which were found far outside the area that was cordoned off. The police patrol that arrived at the scene thought they had done everything properly when they cordoned off the area, and yet it still wasn’t enough.’

Ellen tried hard to absorb and analyse everything he was saying. He was both sympathetic and credible.

‘The general public were hearing conflicting rumours and got their information from the newspapers — well, from folks like you,’ he muttered. ‘I must say that your choice of occupation surprises me, considering what you were subjected to.’

Ellen had to suppress the urge to start apologising.

‘We mapped all the paedophiles in the area, which weren’t actually that many.’

‘What other theories did you have?’

‘Accident was not something we discounted completely. Kidnapping, abduction was the other line. The police spent quite a bit of time on something that later turned out be a red herring. And then there were testimonies that were changed. Well, as I said earlier, it was messy.’

Ellen nodded, wanting to know more.

‘One day, a mother came to us with her son and said that he had something he wanted to tell us. That he’d seen something that evening that strengthened my theory. But he changed his story several times, and finally we had to conclude that it must have been birds that he’d heard. It was hard work, extremely hard work. I think he may have been afraid. Maybe he knew more than he said.’

‘Do you remember who that was?’

‘Yes, but that’s not something we need to go into. Elsa was found at the south island, by the Apple Orchard, I think you called it.’

Ellen nodded. To this day, she could hear her mother’s wail when the plainclothes police parked in the gravel yard outside the castle and walked slowly up to the main entry. No words were needed.

‘She was by the rocks, out in the reeds. When I arrived at the scene, your father was trying artificial resuscitation, even though she’d been dead for forty-eight hours. It was a terrible scene. I’ll never forget it.’