Since Lena spent Christmas with Robert in Paris, helping him with his case, it was the middle of January when she came to Malmo to visit the house of another missing girl. Britta Svenson was a thirteen-year-old brunette with already developed breasts and a cheeky smile, when she disappeared, just as other kids, during an orientation run. Her mother was an attractive woman in her late forties, an unnatural blond who took care of her appearance and figure. She was skeptical about Lena’s visit, it seemed as though she didn’t like talking about her daughter. Her English was the worst among other parents, whom Lena had already visited, and she carefully monitored the pictures Lena took of Britta’s room and the family photo album, which her mother was willing to show her.
‘I think she run away with some boyfriend and take drugs with him. She is naughty, she don’t listen to me or my partner.’
‘She didn’t listen to you and her father?’
‘Not her father, my partner. I broke up with her father when she was a little child. Now I’m with Kaj. He’s Dutch.’
Lena had some sense of deja-vu when she heard Britta’s mother talk about her. She carefully looked at Britta’s pictures.
‘She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes, but she was just a child. I don’t understand this interest in her. She run away. And join some sect. She want me hurt.’
Lena made sure that she took enough pictures of Britta from the album, including the pictures of her mother and Kaj. She looked at Kaj pretty carefully and saw in the eyes of Britta that she pretty early on stopped being a girl. Or maybe it was a memory from her own teenage years. She wasn’t entirely sure.
It lasted for some time. Not only did they kiss in his office during these rare breaks when he asked her to come to deal with some urgent issues, but soon he started arranging meetings after classes in an unattended class or a cloakroom when the school was empty in the evening. They made love quickly and hastily, afraid of being caught. Lena felt like in a film, a character of a femme fatale novel. She knew that it was all wrong but she just felt so happy and so womanly in his arms that she couldn’t resist it. He brought her flowers, jewelry, and boxes of chocolate. He tried to smuggle a smile, whenever she was in the corridor, attending children, or sat with her during lunch and engaged in meaningless conversations, not always, but occasionally, trying not to raise suspicions of other teachers and school employees.
Lena, on the other hand, was proud of the fact that other female teachers commented on Karol’s appearance and his professional approach and experience. Her womanhood was flattered that it was her who was selected by this popular man. She was blissfully happy to be desired by him, caressed, kissed, and showered with little gifts. She felt more beautiful than she felt in years, even more so than during the time she had a boyfriend of her own.
One conversation, however, changed all that to make her realize that she was nothing more than the other woman.
‘I saw his wife,’ the maths teacher said to her friend who taught biology, ‘She’s a very attractive woman, she’s expecting a child. I know that they have a little boy already. They seemed to be very happy. He was so proud of her. He introduced her to everybody.’
Lena quietly left the room. She couldn’t explain the sensation. It was a mix of shame, guilt, broken-heart, and pain.
‘She’s expecting a child.’ was ringing in her mind like a little annoying bell stabbed with nails, hurting more and more with every move.
She couldn’t stop caring for him, but realized something else. She was just a whim, an option, a second best, which was available at school when nobody was watching. She would never be introduced to anybody as his official girlfriend. Let alone be the proud mother of his children as he already had one and she was bringing another one into this world.
It was peculiar to visit Lulea and speak to little Lars’ mother, as her whole room was covered in bigger and smaller pictures of Jesus, Marry, and saints. Ever since the son disappeared, the mother seemed to fall into the madness of making sure that he would come back through the powers of prayer. To this day, there were no effects of her wishful thinking. Lars disappeared, without any message, without any sign of living. Lena repeated all of her routine actions, took careful pictures of Lars’ private place, saved the files that she found on his computer, wrote down every question that she asked his parents, including every hesitation and every answer.
‘The strangest thing,’ the mother added at the end of their conversation, ‘is that Lars really didn’t like running. He was pretty asthmatic all his life, he easily lost breath. I would be less surprised if he took something along the lines of painting or music classes, but running was really not his cup of tea. He never even ran with other children, he always dragged somewhere at the end...’
‘Was there anything that Lars didn’t like apart from running.’
‘No.’
Lars’ father made a sudden moaning voice and looked at his wife.
‘Well, maybe one thing. He didn’t really like going to church. We are pretty religious, but Lars started rebelling against Sunday masses. He didn’t seem to like them.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s just that he always hated them. We befriended a nice priest, priest Gunter, when Lars was eleven. He visited us at home very often, we engaged in the life of the church community. Lars was really eager to go to every single mass when priest Gunter was with us. But soon he was transferred to some other parish and Lars stopped enjoying the religious life at all. He isolated himself, started running. It was all pretty mysterious to me, this sudden change. He didn’t even want to pray with us in the evening.’
‘Maybe priest Gunter did something to him? You hear so much about child molestation, pedophiles. I don’t want to offend your religious feelings but such things happen all the time.’
‘We thought... we thought about it,’ the mother was entirely honest, ‘But we didn’t have any proofs, Lars didn’t speak about it, and now we cannot even ask him.’
Lena left the house of Lars’ parents and from Lulea came back to Stockholm. She had another question mark and very few answers formed in her head to lead her on the right path.
