RETURNING TO HER SATCHEL, my mum took out a poster. She unfolded it across the coffee table and sat back down beside me.
These weren’t produced on Håkan’s computer. He employed a professional printing company, using the highest-quality paper. Even the layout is stylish, more like a supplement pulled from the pages of Vanity Fair or Vogue magazine—the world’s most extravagant missing person poster. They were everywhere. I spent a day spotting them and counted over thirty, wrapped around tree trunks, on a notice board on the beach, in the church and the shop windows along the promenade. The positioning was troubling to me because Mia wasn’t going to be hiding in any of these places. If she’d run away, she’d be in one of the cities. If she’d run away, she was going to be far, far away, not here, not a mile from home. And if she’d run, she’d never have told a soul, because that information would’ve reached Håkan in a second, so these posters served no useful purpose except as a grand gesture that Håkan had done the right thing, that he was playing the part expected of him.
Look at the bottom of the poster—
A rich reward for useful leads and that isn’t a misprint: one hundred thousand Swedish krona, ten thousand pounds! He might as well have offered a million dollars, or a chest of pirate gold; he knew it would provide no new information. It was a crass statement about him:
“Look at how much money I’m prepared to pay! My love for Mia has a number attached to it and it’s greater than any number you’ve ever seen on a missing person poster before!”
From your expression, you’ve interpreted these posters as evidence of his innocence just as you were intended to do.