Half an hour later? So My Sennevall had seen this person she believed to be Stella not just once, but twice on the same night.
“How can you be so sure it was Stella you saw? Do you know her?”
She bowed her head.
“I know she works at H&M. I said so to the police right away.”
She looked at me again. My Sennevall certainly seemed peculiar, but there was nothing to suggest she was lying. I was sure she had seen someone last Friday, and she was convinced it was Stella. I found myself thinking that she didn’t look like a liar. A bizarre thought.
“Do you know everyone who works at H&M, or just Stella?”
She snorted at me again.
“I am uncommonly good at remembering faces,” she said, looking out the window. “I have a very good memory overall. I notice things that other people miss.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said.
“I’ve seen your daughter at H&M lots of times. When the police showed me a picture, I was one hundred percent sure. They said it’s unusual for witnesses to be so convincing.”
I stooped a little to re-create the perspective she would have had when sitting in the chair and found that it afforded a full view of the sidewalk across the street.
“Then I woke up because a guy was screaming. Or howling. At least it sounded like a man.”
“When was that?”
“I had just gone to bed, so it must have been around one o’clock.”
Just as Blomberg had said. One o’clock.
“I always go to bed at one. Anyway, I ran over here to the window and watched for a while. I didn’t see anything, but I’m pretty sure the sounds were coming from the playground over there.”
I tried to imagine what it would look like in the dark. To be sure, there were several streetlights along the sidewalk, but even so it couldn’t be easy to make out details in the middle of the night.
“How can you be so sure it was her?” I asked. “You understand you might destroy someone’s life, several people’s lives, if you identify the wrong person, don’t you? You have to be totally sure.”
“I am. I told you that.”
It sounded so na?ve, almost like she was out of touch with reality. It seemed completely insane that Stella was locked up in a cell based on a claim made by this woman.
I had to restrain myself. All I really wanted was to grab My Sennevall and give her a good shake.
“You don’t know Stella! You’ve only seen her in the shop where she works. How can you say you’re so sure?”
My Sennevall met my gaze. Her eyes were full of sympathy.
“It wasn’t the first time Stella was here.”
20
One day, when the girls were fourteen, Amina came to see me in the church hall. She stood in the doorway on trembling summer legs, looking as if the world might swallow her up at any second.
“Pastors have confidentiality, right?”
As soon as she spoke those words, I knew that things were going to change. Her frightened doe eyes seemed to reflect life hanging in the balance.
Amina has truly been a big part of Stella’s upbringing. There have been times when Stella was at the Be?i?s’ house as often as she was at home with us. Amina didn’t have any siblings either, and although we never discussed it with Dino and Alexandra, Ulrika and I suspected they—like us—had never managed to get pregnant again.
“What’s going on?” I asked, placing a hand on Amina’s shoulder.
In many respects I consider myself something of an extra dad to her.
“You have confidentiality, right?” she asked again. “Whatever I say, you can’t tell anyone else?”
“That depends on what you’re going to say.”
I asked her to have a seat and offered her orange juice and Ballerina cookies. Before we got to the point, we spent a few moments discussing everything and anything else: how school was going, about friends and handball, and about her dreams. Then she said she’d come about Stella.
* * *
I waited two days, and then I had to bring it up with Ulrika.
“Drugs?”
My wife just stared at me. She appeared to be waiting for me to take it back, say I was only joking.
“That’s what Amina says.”
“And why would Amina tell you something like that?”
She truly did not want to believe it.
“I suppose she’s scared,” I said.
In the days that followed, Ulrika was firing on all cylinders. She contacted the principal and the school nurse, who arranged for drug testing.