Free Unwanted by Kristina Ohlsson

from some other town. Her job was useful in that respect; she had to travel a fair amount.
    When she heard the news she was in the kitchen, making a sandwich, with the fridge door open. The light in the fridge was useful; it meant she didn’t need to switch on any other lights to see what she was doing.
    The woman’s voice cut through the silence and reached Nora as she struggled with the cheese slice.
    ‘A six-year-old girl went missing yesterday from a train travelling between Gothenburg and Stockholm,’ the woman’s voice intoned. ‘The police are appealing for anyone who was on the train that left Gothenburg at 10.50 a.m. yesterday morning, or at Stockholm Central Station around . . .’
    Nora dropped the cheese slice and ran to the television.
    ‘Oh God,’ whispered Nora, feeling her heart thud. ‘He’s started.’
    She listened to the end of the news, then switched off the set and sank down on the settee. The words she had just heard sank slowly into her consciousness, one by one. Together they formed whole sentences creating violent echoes from a time she had tried so hard to put behind her.
    ‘The train, Doll,’ whispered the echo. ‘You’ve no idea what people leave behind on the train. And you’ve no idea how unobservant all the rest are. The ones who don’t leave things behind, but are just travelling. That’s what people do on the train, Doll. They travel. And they don’t see a thing.’
    She sat there on the settee until her hunger reminded her of the sandwich she had made. Only then did she reach a decision about what to do. She switched the TV back on, and clicked to teletext. The police number for members of the public with any information was at the end of the item about the missing child. She keyed it into her mobile. She would ring later in the day. Not from her mobile, of course, but from a telephone box.
    Nora pulled the blind aside and peeped cautiously out into the street. If only it would stop raining.

A lex Recht woke up just after six, almost an hour before the alarm clock was due to go off. Carefully, so as not to wake his wife Lena, he got out of bed and padded out of the room to make his first cup of coffee of the day.
    The house was light on this bright morning, but the sun had already settled behind a clump of thick cloud. Alex suppressed a sigh as he measured the coffee into the filter of the machine. No, he honestly couldn’t remember ever experiencing a worse summer. The rest of his holiday leave lay just a few weeks ahead. They would feel like totally wasted weeks if the weather didn’t improve.
    Mistrustful of the weather, he opened the back door to check whether it had started raining yet and made a brisk foray to retrieve the morning paper. He unfolded it even before he was back inside. A headline about the disappearance of Lilian Sebastiansson looked back at him from the front page of the national daily. ‘Child of six missing since yesterday . . .’ Excellent, even the big papers had been in time to run the story.
    Alex took his cup of coffee and newspaper and crossed the little hall, painted a deep blue, to his study. It had been Lena’s idea to paint the hall blue. Alex had been sceptical.
    ‘Doesn’t it make small spaces look even smaller if you paint them a dark colour?’ he said doubtfully.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Lena. ‘But more to the point, it makes them look nice!’
    That, Alex realized, was an argument he had little hope of countering, so he allowed himself to be persuaded more or less without a fight. It fell to his son to do the painting job, and it certainly did look lovely. And cramped. But they didn’t talk about that.
    Alex sat down in the enormous desk chair that was more like a small armchair on wheels. He had inherited it from his grandfather and would never part with it. Alex gave the arm of the chair a contented pat. Not only was it handsome, it was also comfortable. Alex and the chair would soon be celebrating their thirtieth anniversary.