The Disappeared by Kristina Ohlsson Read Free Book Online

this new boyfriend. I mean, it could be someone she met on the internet.’
    Alex nodded in agreement.
    ‘You’re right. But in that case, why didn’t one single person tell us she was meeting men online? Girls talk about that kind of thing, don’t they?’
    ‘They do.’
    Fredrika looked pensive.
    ‘The child,’ she said. ‘Someone must have know she was expecting. She must have contacted a pregnancy advisory centre.’
    ‘Must she? By the fourth month?’
    Fredrika rummaged through the piles of paper.
    ‘I’ve looked very carefully at the list of items the police took away,’ she said. ‘You turned her student room upside down, made a note of which fluoride tablets she used, her preferred brand of tampons. There’s nothing about contraceptive pills.’
    Alex came into the room, walked behind Fredrika and read over her shoulder.
    ‘They made a note of every item of medication found in Rebecca’s room.’
    ‘Cough medicine, Alvedon, Panodil,’ Fredrika read. ‘Believe me, none of them work as a contraceptive.’
    ‘Perhaps she’d run out?’ Alex suggested. ‘And because she wasn’t in a relationship, she didn’t renew the prescription?’
    ‘And when she did have sex after all, they didn’t use any protection. That sounds odd to me, given how careful she had been in the past.’
    Fredrika turned to face Alex.
    ‘I’d like to speak to Diana Trolle again. Ask if she knew where her daughter got her prescription for the pill.’
    ‘OK. Hopefully, that will enable us to find out when she stopped taking it.’
    ‘Exactly. And it should give us more information about her pregnancy, at least if she usually had her prescription filled at a clinic. There’s no reason to think that she would go somewhere completely different to discuss her pregnancy.’
    ‘If she did actually discuss it with anyone.’
    Fredrika gathered up the documents on her desk and handed them to Alex.
    ‘I’ll ring Diana straight away. Then I’m going home. Have you heard anything about Håkan Nilsson from the surveillance team?’
    Alex clutched the folders to his chest.
    ‘Nothing so far. He’s still at work. Peder and I will probably bring him in for a chat this evening.’
    Fredrika nodding, trying to remember what Håkan Nilsson had looked like in the pictures she had seen in the files. Pale, thin, a lost look in his eyes. His expression seemed angry in some of the photographs. How angry do you have to be to kill someone, then dismember their body? Put the pieces in plastic bags and bury them? She shuddered. Death was never pretty, but sometimes it was so ugly that it was completely incomprehensible.
    Diana Trolle knew exactly where her daughter got her contraceptive pills from: first of all from the youth clinic in Spånga, then later on – when she was too old to go there any more – from the Serafen clinic opposite City Hall.
    ‘She said a lot of positive things about that place,’ Diana recalled. ‘But I’ve never been there myself.’
    Fredrika decided to call in at the clinic on her way home, partly because she felt like a walk, and partly because she was curious.
    She tried to phone Spencer as she was leaving work. They had already spoken twice during the day. She could hear from his voice that he was tense, and she wondered if he had taken on too much. If that was the case, she would have to stay at home for a while longer, that was all there was to it. At the same time, she was frightened by the direction her thoughts were taking.
    What would happen to Saga if Fredrika died, and Spencer was unable to look after his daughter? Would she go and live with Fredrika’s brother?
    No chance. Spencer would never abandon his only daughter, Fredrika was sure of that.
    Spencer interrupted her brooding when he finally answered his mobile. Saga was asleep, he informed Fredrika. It was fine if she came home a bit later than they had agreed.
    The walk from police headquarters in Kronoberg to the clinic opposite City Hall