CHAPTER 1
Private detective. If the police can’t help, call me!
Kouplan isn’t sure if he should have mentioned the police. He knows how words work. Any police officer reading his ad would get stuck on the word police and that could bring unwanted attention. On the other hand, he needed to reach the right kind of clients. Now his ad is up on the same website as all the ads for cheap, really cheap, and super cheap cleaning services. It’s been up for two weeks now and not a bite.
His e-mail address is a regular Hotmail address, like thousands of others, and not connected to any other place on the net. He’s certain it can’t be traced. Nobody can come knocking on his door unexpectedly.
* * *
He’d found the computer in the trash room of his apartment complex. It worked just fine. It had an old operating system and hardly any memory. A week later, he found a monitor in the same trash. Its only fault was that it weighed a ton and had the resolution from the Windows NT era. When he connected it and started the computer, a box popped up and told him the hard drive was full. It seemed there were hundreds of photos of a few neighbors from the other end of the apartment complex. Every once in a while, he’d glance at them. Today he just wants to find out if anyone answered his ad.
Hi Kouplan! Thanks for your message. I’m fine. So are the kids. How are you doing? Are things starting to work out? The lawyers didn’t have anything new for me, but I promise (as you know) to get in touch as soon as I find out anything useful. Right away. Take care now and love from me! Karin
He stares at his message for a whileb and wonders if he should answer now or later. “Are things starting to work out?” Well, now, that all depends on what you mean by that. He clicks the next mail.
Saw your ad. Need your help right away to find my little girl who disappeared last Monday, near the Globe Arena Center. Can’t call the police. Will pay well.
Pay well? Kouplan would have leapt at it even if just the word pay had appeared. As he searches her name, he thinks he would like to believe he’d help even if she didn’t have any money. A missing child. His mom lost a child once. Actually, twice.
* * *
He Googles her name and e-mail. On her Facebook page, she looks blond and average, some office worker, and has thirty-two friends. She works in telephone support, it appears, and he doesn’t detect any hint of an undercover policewoman. He types a reply:
Hi, Pernilla. I’m a private detective. I have worked on kidnappings among other things. Give me your number and I’ll be in contact. I can help you.
He realizes he’s shaking. Walking around in Stockholm would be the stupidest thing he could do, given who he is. Stockholm, a city where people walk through the city with their bags of groceries and talk breezily into their smartphones about their fish pedicures and Princess Estelle. A city where every corner can be dangerous and anyone could dig their claws into you, like a harpy, and demand your soul.
On the other hand, from now on he will be the detective. He’s the one who will be spying on others, not the person spied on, or whatever the word for that could be. He’d be one with the shadows.
CHAPTER 2
Pernilla has noticed that she’s been re-washing clean mugs ever since Julia disappeared. Rubbing invisible stains on the stove, working late into the evening to avoid hearing the silence, the water running through the pipes. Julia’s absence is a vacuum, a deadly gas, if she lets it inside. So she dusts the clean shelves one more time and holds on to whatever keeps her busy. Reads all the papers, looks for clues, takes out money from the bank in case they want a ransom. She searches online under “girl found” and has gone back hundreds of times to the place where Julia pulled her hand away, but she hasn’t contacted the authorities, for her own, very specific reasons. That private detective mentioned situations where the police can’t help. That’s what gave her the courage to contact him.
She’s dusting when her phone pings, shattering the silence. The sound makes her jump. She’s put her phone on the highest volume, so she wouldn’t miss a call in case it was Julia, or someone who found Julia. Now, she slides her finger along the screen, opens the message, hopes. It is the private detective and his last sentence holds her heart like a parachute. I can help you.
The detective with nothing more than a Hotmail address wants her phone number. Her dog Janus is ready to pee on himself. He’s whining and giving small barks as he stands by the door. A dog’s bladder does not care whether or not someone has disappeared.
* * *
There are so many ifs. If they hadn’t decided to go shopping at the Globe Arena Center on that very day. If she had held on tighter to Julia’s hand. If there hadn’t been so many people around. If they’d at least taken Janus with them.
Janus pees on his favorite post. When he’s done, Pernilla raises her voice into an eager falsetto.
“Janus! Find Julia!”
Janus wags his tail.
“Janus! Where’s Julia?”
She tries to make it sound like a game, but her voice breaks. Where is Julia? Is she even alive?
Janus wags his tail and looks around, confused. Pernilla squats down and buries her face in his fuzzy coat.
“It’s all right,” she murmurs into his soft ear. “You wouldn’t know.”
They say mothers can tell by instinct if their children are alive or dead, but the more she tries to feel her instincts, the less she can differentiate her instincts from her desires. Finally, she shoves the thought away. She can’t leave that gateway open. She’s holding hard to the leash with one hand, her telephone with the other.
Thirty seconds after she sends her number, her phone rings.
* * *
Kouplan isn’t sure what he should expect, but he’s still surprised by how small her voice sounds. You can cry your eyes out—can you cry your voice out? Pernilla’s voice isn’t loud, but she has an obvious Stockholm dialect, and he makes his first-ever mental note as a detective:
She’s from here. A native.
She asks what he thinks.
“One website said that if a child has been missing for more than a week, it’s probably … it’s probably too late. Is it? Is it really too late?”
He hasn’t studied the subject, but he knows that answering questions has one purpose: to create trust.
“Each case is different,” he says with his most Swedish accent. “There are always exceptions and there’s always a way.”
“She hasn’t been gone for a week yet,” the voice in his ear says. “Not even a week. It’s only the fourth day.”
“I see,” Kouplan says, because there’s nothing to say when another person is trying to find some hope.
“I don’t want to call the police, but Missing Persons say they won’t do anything until I’ve given them a statement.”
The woman on the other end does not hear Kouplan sigh in relief.
“No, we won’t bring them in,” he says. “We should meet tomorrow morning, early, at the place where she disappeared. What was her name again?”
For a brief moment, he thinks that she’s hung up. Then her voice returns, tinier than ever.
“Julia.”
Kouplan notes it. Then he has to take up that other piece of business.
“Well, the mon … the commission.”
“I’ve read up on that kind of thing and know it’s seven hundred Swedish crowns an hour, more or less.”
Seven hundred an hour? When he worked at a restaurant, he was lucky to get fifteen an hour. Mostly it was twelve. Seven hundred? Did he hear that right?
“I’m only going to take four hundred an hour, but I’d like some of it in advance, if that’s okay.”
Pernilla informs him that she’s aware that an advance is customary. Kouplan writes down the number in the notebook he’d gotten at his Swedish as a Second Language class. Julia, 400, the Globe Arena Center.
Copyright © 2019 by Sara Lövestam
Translation copyright © 2019 by Laura A. Wideburg
