The Disappeared Read Online Free

piercing. DNA tests would either confirm or disprove his theory. Peder had his doubts. Admittedly, the piece of jewellery was unusual, particularly in view of the disc with the word ‘Freedom’ on it, but they couldn’t base the identification on that alone.
    The damp earth and the plastic bags had played their part in preserving the body, but judging by the photographs it was difficult to imagine what the woman had looked like when she was alive. Had she been fat or slim? Straight-backed, or the kind of person who always lifted her shoulders a fraction too much, giving a hunched impression? Peder opened the file Alex had given him and took out a photograph of Rebecca Trolle, taken just before she disappeared. Pretty. Healthy. A freckled face, smiling broadly into the camera. A plum-coloured top that brought out the blue of her eyes. Dark blonde hair caught up in a ponytail. Confident.
    And now she was dead.
    She had had many strings to her bow. Twenty-three years old, and working towards a degree in the history of literature at the University of Stockholm. She had spent a year in France after leaving school, and was a member of a French reading group. She sang in the church choir, and ran a swimming class for babies one evening a week.
    It made Peder feel tired. How could young people cope with doing so many different things at the same bloody time? He didn’t recall living that way himself, with so many irons in the fire, always on the way to a different activity.
    She had been single at the time of her disappearance. There was an ex-girlfriend who had been interviewed by the police on several occasions, and there were rumours of a new love, but no one had come forward and the police hadn’t managed to extract a name. She had had a lot of friends, all of whom seemed to have been interviewed at least once. The same applied to her tutors at the university, her colleagues at the swimming baths and the members of the choir.
    Peder realised that the investigation had got absolutely nowhere. He was relieved that he hadn’t been involved in such a depressing case. He read through Alex’s notes in the margins of the documentation, and could see that the situation must have been desperate. In the end the police had started to wonder whether Rebecca Trolle might simply have decided to disappear. She had been upset by a quarrel with her mother, and this might have made her firm up her plan to spend some time studying abroad. Her father no longer lived in Stockholm: he had moved to Gothenburg when Rebecca was twelve. The police had spoken to him as well.
    Rebecca had disappeared on a perfectly ordinary evening when she was on her way to a so-called mentors’ social event at the university. She had called her mother at about six o’clock and told her about the party. Then she had received a call from a mobile with an unregistered pay-as-you-go card. At seven o’clock her neighbour had met her in the corridor of the student hostel on Körsbärsvägen where she lived, dressed up and obviously stressed. There were witnesses who had seen her on the number four bus at quarter past seven, heading towards Radiohuset, the headquarters of Swedish Radio. This had puzzled the police, because it was in completely the opposite direction from the university. The friends who had been waiting for her at the party said that she never arrived. And nobody knew where she might have been going on the number four bus.
    Just before seven thirty, she had been seen getting off the bus and walking towards Gärdet. There were no more witness statements from that point; it was as if Rebecca had been swallowed up by the earth.
    Peder took out a map that had been used in the original investigation. All the people who had featured in the case in any way and who lived in the vicinity of Radiohuset had been marked on it; none had seemed more suspect than any other. There were only a handful of individuals, and they all had a viable alibi. None of them had