For the Missing Read online

  For a long time, Charlie had hoped their disappointing attitude would improve over time, but it was as though their jealousy and suspicion only intensified as she rose through the hierarchy. When she was new, she had defended herself, argued, left the break room in protest and written angry emails to her managers. But then she had done what most of the women who had made it within the police profession had done: lowered her voice and stopped smiling. And after that, she had had more time and energy to dedicate to what she was paid to do. Lazy, she berated herself sometimes: cowardly and selfish. But if she hadn’t done it, she wouldn’t have been able to stay, develop, climb – and that drove her more than her desire to fight meatheads who didn’t know any better.

  Not all men on the force were the same, of course. There were some exceptions, and one of those exceptions was called Anders Bratt and was her closest colleague. He was only a few years older than her, and she had liked him from the first. They came from completely different backgrounds. Anders was a typical upper-class bloke, the kind of person who had enjoyed a stable and well-to-do childhood, sailing camp in the summer and skiing in the Alps in the winter. He could be smug, condescending and annoying, but Charlie forgave him everything because he had the three qualities she appreciated in a person: a good heart, a sense of humour and self-awareness.

  Anders would often joke about how much he had enjoyed her joining the group, stirring shit up. There had been talk about her name. On the first day, someone had asked her if she would be okay with being called Charline, just to make things easier, otherwise they would have to add surnames every time they referred to her or the boss. And Charlie had said that she wasn’t okay with it. She wanted to be called Charlie and nothing else.

  Later on, Anders had told her that everyone had laughed at that, at how the boss had been forced to change his name when she started. How many people could make their boss change their name, just like that?

  Charlie missed a step and let out a curse.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Challe said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Could you stop by later?’ Challe said.

  Charlie’s chest went cold. Was she on today? Challe telling her to take the day off – had that been a dream?

  ‘I know you’re supposed to be off,’ Challe continued, ‘and I know there’s a heatwave and all that, but something’s come up. Have you seen the headlines?’

  ‘Headlines?’ Charlie realised she hadn’t checked the news on her phone.

  ‘A seventeen-year-old girl is missing in Västergötland.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Friday. The hicks down there reckoned at first that she’d run away, so they didn’t file a report. But since then things have come to light that suggest suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The usual: her phone hasn’t been used and her bank account hasn’t been touched.’

  ‘Where in Västergötland?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘In Gullspång.’

  Charlie froze mid-step. Challe carried on talking about the case, but she had stopped listening. The only thing ringing in her ears was the name of the place. Gullspång.

  ‘Charlie?’ Challe said. She could hear him lighting a cigarette. ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sending you and Anders. It might do you good,’ he continued, ‘to get away for a bit.’

  Charlie couldn’t help retorting that if that were true it would be equally good for Hugo to get away. Besides, she had her hands full with other things. But Challe told her he was going to reassign the case she was working on, since the investigation was in its early stages anyway, and, well, of course he could send Hugo just as easily, but Charlie shouldn’t think of it as a punishment but rather as a …

  This is it, Charlie thought. This is the time to tell him I can’t go.

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go.’ Is the old police station even still there, she wanted to ask. But instead she heard herself say she would be there in an hour.

  After they hung up, she went into the nearest 7-Eleven. Under the headline Missing, a big-eyed, strawberry-blonde girl started at her from the newspaper placards. She opened her news app and read. The girl was seventeen-year-old Annabelle Roos. The surname sounded familiar, but Charlie couldn’t place it. How was she supposed to remember all the families in that place? She hadn’t been back for … she counted the years. Had it really been nineteen years?

  3

  Charlie was still several blocks from her flat. No taxis had turned up and she never took the underground. There was something about being underground that made her struggle to breathe. Her feet ached in her high-heeled shoes. She stopped and took her shoes off. The asphalt was warm against the soles of her feet. If people saw me now, she mused, they’d be hard-pressed to guess my profession.

  When she entered her flat and caught sight of her face in the hallway mirror, she cursed loudly. A cut just above her left eyebrow glowed angrily against her pale skin. She touched the thick scab and realised she wouldn’t be able to magic it away with make-up. How the fuck had she cut her forehead? Then it suddenly came back to her: the shower, how she and that Martin bloke had been lathering each other up and how she had slipped and hit … the shower head? She didn’t even know what she had hit.

  I’m like a caricature of a detective, she thought to herself, this lonely loser who drinks too much. But then she told herself it was only a periodic thing. Everything always got more dire when summer was approaching or when life messed her about.

  She almost regretted not having a man for her colleagues to focus their suspicions on. Now everyone would assume the cut was … actually, what would they assume? Given their most recent office party, over-indulgence in alcohol would probably be high on the list. Challe would tell her she needed help and she would say she was doing fine, that everything was under control.

  But did she even believe that herself?

  Self-medication? an earnest therapist had once asked her when she had reluctantly told her about her relationship with alcohol. Do you drink to reduce your anxiety?

  Charlie had told her it wasn’t about that.

  So what was it about then?

  It was about being able to relax, about calming her nerves, silencing her thoughts; sometimes she just needed a glass or two to feel good.

  The therapist had given her a stern look and told her that was the very definition of self-medication.

  Charlie went into the living room. Beer cans and an ashtray littered the coffee table. Good work on the smoking, she thought to herself as she went to fetch a plastic bag to put it all in. When she had cleared the worst of it, she sat down on the sofa and looked at her flat: the surfaces, the high ceilings, the wooden floors. It might have been beautiful if not for the dying plants, the piles of clothes and the windows that hadn’t been washed in years. Everything pointed to its occupier being someone who didn’t care one jot about decorating. In fact Charlie would have liked to have a nice home, but it was as though she was incapable of creating one. Every now and again, on a whim, she would decide to turn her flat into a show home – the kind she saw in pictures in the glossy magazines at her dentist’s. She reckoned a completely white flat would make her happier, or at least less unhappy. White walls, white floors and then a few strategically placed antiques, either inherited or brought back from foreign lands … But she had never inherited anything, and as for foreign lands … she never went anywhere. Besides, she knew far too many miserable people who had lovely homes to fall for the ruse.

  A single cigarette was sitting on the kitchen counter. She was about to bin it when she changed her mind, lit it instead, sat down under the kitchen fan and smoked it all the way down to the filter. This is when I call, she thought. This is when I call Challe back and tell him I can’t go, not to that place … that I have personal reasons. She picked up her phone, then put it back down again. The cigarette had made her feel nau
seous, so she stood up and went into the bathroom instead.

  In the shower, she turned to face the jet and told herself she was going to behave professionally. So long as she behaved professionally, everything would be fine. Right? She had done what she could to forget and move on. Forget the place, the house, the parties, forget Betty’s light and darkness. Sometimes she almost thought she had succeeded, but over the years she had come to learn that it was only ever a temporary respite, that calmer periods were inevitably followed by heavier ones, that the memories could overwhelm her at any moment and hurl her back to that place, that night.

  Such an inspiration, that was what a lady from social services in Gullspång had called her when they ran into each other in central Stockholm one day. A neglected child who had succeeded against all odds.

  And Charlie had looked at her over-enthusiastic face and thought, maybe you should learn to read between the lines.

  When she was done in the bathroom, she went to pack her things. The three books she was reading were piled on the bedside table. She dog-eared each one and put them in a bag. There were almost no clean clothes in the pile in her wardrobe. She grabbed a few dresses, jeans and jumpers from the laundry basket and reflected that what she was going to wear was the least of her problems.

  4

  ‘What the fuck happened to your forehead?’ was the first thing Anders said when Charlie met him in the lobby of the police headquarters on Polhemsgatan.

  ‘I hit my head.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured, but how?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘You’re going to have another scar.’

  ‘I’m a good healer.’

  They walked through the barriers. At the lift, they parted ways. Charlie always took the stairs. She didn’t care that her colleagues made fun of her claustrophobia. The worst thing that could happen, they liked to explain to her, was that the elevator got stuck, and all you had to do then was call maintenance. But to Charlie, the thought of being stuck between floors in such a small space was horrifying. She would lose her mind well before help arrived.

  ‘Challe is waiting for you in the conference room,’ Anders said, when they met outside the lift on the third floor.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get a cup of tea. I had a brutal night.’

  And how is tea going to help with that, Charlie thought.

  ‘Annabelle Roos,’ Challe said when Anders had joined them with his cup of tea and they had sat down on the soft red conference room chairs. ‘She disappeared last Friday after a party she did not have permission to attend. From the looks of things, it was a fairly wet event, so the other guests have not been able to provide much in the way of information. At some point during the night, probably between midnight and one a.m., she left the party on her own and since then … since then she’s missing. Her phone has not been found and no money has been withdrawn from her bank account.’

  ‘Four days ago,’ Anders said. ‘How come they didn’t start looking earlier?’

  ‘She’s seventeen,’ Challe replied, ‘and apparently, this isn’t the first time she’s gone missing. According to the local police, she has a reputation for being … uninhibited.’

  ‘Uninhibited?’ Charlie said. ‘What kind of word is that anyway?’

  ‘I’m only telling you what they told me. In any case, they need assistance, that much is obvious. I’ve emailed you all the information we have. It’s almost two hundred miles to Gullspång, so you’ll have time to start going over the material on the way.’

  Anders disappeared to the bathroom. Charlie pulled out her laptop, logged in, opened her email and started skimming the documents Challe had sent her. It didn’t help that the reports were formal and matter-of-fact; for her, it was all in vivid colour.

  ‘You look pale,’ Anders said as they walked to the car.

  ‘I’m just a bit tired,’ Charlie replied. ‘It must be the heat.’

  Neither one of them liked riding shotgun, and their trips always started with bickering about who would drive. But today, with breath that reeked of a night out and alcohol, Charlie was not in a position to argue.

  Charlie turned down the sun visor and studied her face in the little mirror. Anders was probably right. She was going to have another scar. Just next to her left eye was the white reminder of the incident with the glass bottle. It was shaped like a backwards S. Betty had told her she had been supremely unlucky to have such an unfortunate fall, but lucky nonetheless that her eye was okay. It could have been a lot worse.

  ‘Late night?’ Anders looked at her.

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it. And you never go home either. You always have to close the place when you go out.’

  ‘It actually wasn’t that long since you and I used to close those places together.’

  Anders heaved a sigh. ‘It feels like a whole other lifetime.’

  Charlie didn’t reply. It bothered her that Anders had changed so much since becoming a father. These past few months, he had been irritable and grumpy most of the time. Charlie knew his wife was keen on gender equality and to her that meant the two of them taking turns staying up nights. It made no difference that she was on maternity leave, Anders liked to gripe, because taking care of a child all day was as much work as a salaried job. He would say things like that to elicit Charlie’s sympathy, but Charlie honestly didn’t know what she thought about it; she figured it depended on what kind of job it was, what kind of child.

  Anders turned the radio up. A country song was playing.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said when Charlie leaned forward to change the channel. ‘Listen – it’s about a girl named Annabelle.’

  Anders upped the volume even more.

  ‘Eerie for this song to be playing. A dead girl with the same unusual name as the one in our investigation.’

  ‘That’s just chance,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Aren’t you the one who’s always saying you don’t believe in chance?’

  ‘You have me mixed up with Challe. Fate is what I don’t believe in.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit dull, to just believe in chance? Most people I know believe in some form of predestination.’

  ‘That’s because they can’t tell the difference between fate and chance,’ Charlie said, ‘that, and a lot of wishful thinking.’

  ‘I suppose most people would like to imagine things happen for a reason.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why they start imagining there’s such a thing as fate.’ She turned the music back down and wished Anders would stop talking.

  5

  ‘Have you read up on where we’re going at all?’ Anders said.

  They had reached the motorway and Charlie was feeling increasingly peevish about his uneven driving. She shook her head and tried to suppress her rising nausea by watching the road and not thinking about all the things she had poured down her throat last night. She had promised herself to stick to beer (most nights began with a promise of that kind). She had met up with a former colleague and everything had started so well: a few pints, memories and shooting the breeze. But around midnight her colleague had called it a night: he had to get up early to travel somewhere. And that was when that Martin bloke had come over and ruined everything. She thought about the sweet cocktails and suppressed a gag reflex. More and more memories of the night before were surfacing. She had spilled a glass of wine all over herself, and that was when Martin had carried her into the shower and in there … in there he had pressed her up against the shower wall and taken her while the water streamed down on them. Almost like a film, she thought, if they hadn’t been so drunk, if she hadn’t slipped and hit her head and had needed help to get to the bed and … bloody hell, why did she never learn from her mistakes?

  Anders started telling her what he had read about Gullspång online. It was a small manufacturing town, six thousand inhabitants, youngest mothers in the country, bad dental health, high unemployment. Sounded like a grea
t place, he chuckled.

  ‘You’re such a Stockholmer,’ Charlie sighed, ‘condescending and sarcastic about anything outside the city limits.’

  ‘Someone’s in a right foul mood.’

  ‘How am I supposed to feel when I’m being thrown from one case to another?’

  ‘You don’t usually have a problem with that. Aren’t you the one who always says you play the position the coach gives you?’

  ‘Not when he’s punishing me.’

  Anders didn’t understand. What did she mean ‘punish’? Challe wasn’t the kind to hold a grudge. If she was still thinking about the Christmas party, surely that was water under the bridge by now?

  He knows, Charlie thought. He knows everything.

  ‘What have you heard?’ She turned to him.

  ‘What do you mean? I was mostly thinking about how you got a bit … how you were somewhat inebriated. Why are you staring at me?’

  ‘Because I suddenly have the feeling you know things about me I haven’t told you.’

  ‘But you never tell me anything about yourself.’

  ‘Who blabbed?’ Charlie said. ‘Challe? Hugo?’

  ‘Neither. I saw you once. One time when you probably thought everyone had left. In the conference room …’

  Charlie blushed. She thought about how she had told Hugo no, how she had told him they should go back to hers instead. It’s not that she was a prude, but her job was everything to her and she had no desire to be caught with her trousers around her ankles on a conference table. She had tried to resist but Hugo had been adamant. He had wanted her right then and there. And so he had touched her in all the right places until she gave up and forgot where she was. And meanwhile, Anders had still been around, apparently. What had he seen?