Silenced

TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2008

It was almost as if Alex Recht sensed the moment he woke up that this was the day he would later look back on as the one that changed his life. At least that was how he would remember it, when everything was over and he was left alone: the certainty he felt in his body and mind the moment he opened his eyes, ten minutes before the alarm clock rang.

He got up quietly and crept out to the kitchen to make the first cup of coffee of the day. He could not even bring himself to look at Lena as he left the room. The very sight of her unyielding back was painful to him. When he got back from work the day before she had been so tired that she could scarcely say a word to him. She said her head ached and went to bed before eight, just a few minutes after he came through the door.

But now it was morning and work drew him on like a mirage in the desert. The memory of the call from Johanna Ahlbin, put through by the exchange just after seven the previous evening, made his heart beat faster. She had been very brief, apologised for not getting in touch. And he had had some apologies of his own. For the fact that she had heard the news of her parents’ death via the media. For the fact that they had not got hold of her in time. She assured him that she knew they had done their best and that it was partly her own fault. Which had enabled him to resume a rather sterner tone when he informed her that the police wanted to interview her as soon as possible.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow,’ she promised.

And now it was tomorrow.

He had just put on his coat when he realised Lena was there behind him in the hall. He gave a start.

‘You scared me,’ he muttered.

She smiled, but her eyes were as lifeless as a stretch of frozen water.

‘Sorry,’ she said feebly.

Clearing her throat, she went on:

‘We’ve got to talk, Alexander.’

Had he not already known there was something awfully wrong, he would have known it then. Lena had only ever called him Alexander once before, and that was the very first time they met.

He knew instinctively that he did not want to hear what she had to say.

‘We’ll do it this evening,’ he said, opened the front door and went out onto the doorstep.

‘This evening’s fine,’ she said in a muffled voice.

He closed the door behind him without saying goodbye, and went to the car. And on the other side of the door, just as he turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine, Lena sank to the floor and started sobbing, and could not stop for a long time. In that moment at least, there was no justice for either of them.

Fredrika Bergman started to worry something was wrong, and anxiety took up permanent residence inside her mind. She was still sleeping well at nights, but sleep was bringing her neither the harmony nor the rationality she had expected, just more energy for brooding. Spencer had answered when she phoned him the previous evening, but sounded distracted and said little, beyond the unexpected news that he was going away and would not be back until Wednesday evening. He would not be able to see her before then, or to talk on the telephone. He had scarcely touched on where he was going, and had ended the call rather abruptly by wishing her a good night, saying they would speak again soon.

Naturally her pregnancy was making her emotions more volatile than usual, but Spencer’s change in behaviour unsettled her for other reasons, too. Perhaps it had been a mistake to take him round to her parents’ after all? He would hardly have suggested it himself. But on the other hand, the weekend dinner date had had a more or less miraculous effect on her mother, whose comments about the baby and its father were now exclusively positive whenever Fredrika spoke to her.

Was it perhaps the need to dampen down her anxiety that sent her off to work early that morning? At any rate, by half past seven she was already there. The team’s corridor was deserted, but she could tell that both Peder and Joar were in. She decided to go and see Peder.

‘Anything from the national CID on Sven Ljung yet?’

‘No, they’re waiting until they’ve got in some of the other information they’re trying to assemble.’

‘What are they waiting for?’

Peder sighed.

‘Bank account transactions, for example. It’s always worth checking if there’s money tied up in these things.

Fredrika went to her office, and Joar came in after her.

‘Interesting email from our friend Lazarus yesterday,’ he said, meaning Karolina Ahlbin. ‘Particularly in the light of the fact that her sister finally made herself known later on in the evening.’

‘Certainly is,’ agreed Fredrika, taking off her coat and leaning forward to switch on her computer.

‘Though it could be an attempt to put us off the track. Karolina trying to look innocent.’

‘The question is what she’d be trying to look innocent of, and to whom,’ said Fredrika.

‘Drug offences,’ supplied Joar.

‘What?’

‘New information’s come in by fax from the Swedish Embassy in Bangkok after our press conference. They’re six hours ahead of us over there.’

Fredrika took the sheet of paper Joar held out to her and read it with growing surprise.

‘Has anybody rung this Andreas Blom, who apparently interviewed her when she went to the Embassy for help?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Joar. ‘We left it until you got here.’

‘I’ll ring straight away,’ said Fredrika, reaching for the phone even as she spoke.

She glanced over the fax again as she waited for an answer. Karolina Ahlbin was evidently known to the Thai police as ‘Therese Björk’.

Maybe she preferred Therese to Lazarus, Fredrika thought exasperatedly.

Peder was given a special dispensation to postpone his session with the psychologist for a few more days. He ended the call to HR boss Margareta Berlin with a feeling of relief. She sounded more reasonable now, but he had no time to stop and analyse whether it was because he sounded different himself.

Ylva texted to say that his son was much better. He felt another surge of relief and replied that he was glad to hear it. He had scarcely put down his mobile before it bleeped again.

Why not come over and eat with me and the boys tonight, if you’ve got time? The boys are asking for you. Ylva.

Without thinking he fired off a reply:

Good idea! Will try to be there by six latest!

He regretted sending the message the instant it had gone. How the hell could he promise to be anywhere by six – he hadn’t the faintest idea how the Ahlbin case might develop in the course of the day.

Damn. His veneer of feigned cool cracked to reveal the disintegration underneath. And he thought those most forbidden of words: Nothing’s ever going to work in the long run. Not with any woman. I’ve got to make my mind up.

It was unclear to him at that moment quite what it was he had to make up his mind about. But he knew it was not a healthy sign that he viewed dinner with his own family as an imposition, an inconvenient duty. As if work was the only soul mate he wanted in his life.

Furious for no reason, he grabbed the phone again and rang one of his contacts in the CID who was dealing with the double murder on Sunday night.

‘Anything new on the Haga Park murder?’ he asked.

‘No, not a thing. So we thought we’d release the victim’s picture to the media and hope somebody recognised him.’

‘No match for the prints either?’

‘Not a whiff. But we might have something else. Or in fact – we have got something else.’

Peder was listening.

‘Sven Ljung’s car was found just outside Märsta by a woman out for an early morning walk.’

‘Bingo!’ cried Peder, with more enthusiasm in his voice than he had first intended.

‘Don’t get too bloody carried away,’ said the other detective. ‘The car was set on fire and it’d been burning a fair while by the time we got there.’

Peder’s spirits plummeted. A burnt-out car would mean very few clues.

‘Well, at least it means we know there must be some link to the case, or cases,’ he said determinedly. ‘Otherwise the person who took it would hardly have bothered to set fire to it.’

‘Probably not,’ his CID colleague agreed. ‘And there’s another thing we’ve found out.’

‘What’s that?’ Peder asked.

‘That it was very probably used as a get-away car after the security van jobs, not just the one in Uppsala but also the one the media reported in Västerås at the weekend. In the Uppsala case we’ve nothing more to go on than some witness statements that it was a silver metallic car, but in Västerås we got bits of the registration number, and they tallied with Ljung’s.’

Peder rang off with a lingering sense of achievement. Sven Ljung’s car seemed to be implicated in robberies as well as murders. The net was closing and Peder smiled.

It was afternoon in Bangkok by the time Fredrika got hold of Andreas Blom. He sounded troubled, to say the least, and expressed great concern at the information on the desk in front of him.

‘The really distressing thing,’ he said in his lilting Norrland accent, ‘is that she sat here insisting that her name was Karolina Mona Ahlbin. And that she needed a new passport because she’d been robbed in the street. But when I rang the Swedish tax authorities it turned out to be impossible that she was who she claimed to be, because the woman with that name and that personal identity number was deceased.’

‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that she was able to come out with another person’s name and ID number, just like that?’

‘Good Lord, I did what I could. And it’s not that unusual for people in her situation to use double identities.’

Fredrika’s brain attempted to rearrange itself into accepting the idea of Karolina Ahlbin as a drug addict after all. In spite of the irregularities where her passport was concerned, the evidence was pretty overwhelming.

‘What exactly – exactly – did she say her problem was?’ she asked slowly.

‘That she’d had all her valuables stolen, like money, passport and plane tickets, and that she’d had a problem in the hotel where she’d been staying, and all her things had somehow vanished from her hotel room. Though she kept quiet about the hotel part to start with and didn’t bring it up until I confronted her with our other information.’

‘Did you ring the hotel she claimed she’d been staying at? I don’t mean the one where her luggage and the drugs were seized.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Andreas Blom. ‘But only after she’d left. And they weren’t prepared to back up her story at all. They said she was lying and had come stumbling into their foyer saying she had been mugged and was a hotel guest. But none of the staff recognised her and she wasn’t in their computer system.’

‘All right,’ Fredrika said in a measured tone. ‘All right, let’s just see if we can tease this out…’

She broke off, realising this was really a matter to discuss with a colleague rather than a diplomat in Thailand. She took a breath and carried on anyway.

‘Why call the police if she was only hours from being declared wanted by them for drug offences?’

‘Pardon?’ said Andreas Blom.

‘The raid on the hotel where she was supposedly staying happened only hours after she left it. The time of her report of the mugging, according to what you faxed over, was more or less the same. Why would she contact the police and draw all that unnecessary attention to herself at such a critical juncture?’

‘But if she really was robbed,’ began Andreas Blom, ‘then she needed a new passport to get home on…’

‘Exactly. And she needed a copy of an official police report of a stolen passport before the Swedish Embassy could help her get a new one. But why go to the police just then and not earlier?’

Andreas Blom went quiet.

‘Yes, one might well ask,’ he conceded.

When Fredrika did not respond he went on:

‘It isn’t the Embassy’s business to take a view on the question of guilt; all we can do is offer a person in Karolina Ahlbin’s position good advice.’

‘I do realise that,’ Fredrika said quickly, though she suspected that Karolina Ahlbin had not received the support she deserved.

She ended the conversation courteously and went back to her notes. She shuffled through the papers faxed over from Bangkok. A copy of the passport found in the hotel room that was said to be Karolina Ahlbin’s. Therese Björk’s. With Karolina’s photograph in it. But how…?

Fredrika rang Andreas Blom a second time.

‘Sorry to bother you again. I just wanted to ask whether you’ve had a chance since then to take a closer look at the passport which you at the Embassy thought was Karolina’s, the one that was supposedly a Therese Björk’s?’

‘The Thai police have got it,’ replied Andreas Blom. ‘But we’ve been in contact with them since she disappeared and they’ve decided it’s a forgery.’

Fredrika thought about this. A young woman falsely declared dead in Stockholm who then turned up in Bangkok with a false passport, belonging to a person who had an officially registered ID in Sweden. Who would dare undertake such a plan?

Someone who knew Therese Björk was not going to notice or have any objections to her identity being used to muddy some drug dealing in Thailand.

A suspicion had been born and was growing stronger with every passing second. It took her less than two minutes to get Therese Björk’s personal details from the police address register. She learned that Therese was a year younger than Karolina Ahlbin and registered as living at her mother’s address.

Following a hunch, Fredrika tapped Therese’s personal identity number into the police database. She featured in a number of cases and had convictions for several minor crimes and misdemeanours. Fredrika moved on to the register of suspects. She came up there, too, suspected of assaulting a man she claimed was trying to rape her.

After a moment’s hesitation she lifted the receiver and rang the number. She would just have time before the morning meeting in the Den. Someone picked up after the fifth ring.

‘My name’s Fredrika Bergman,’ said Fredrika. ‘I wonder if I could ask a few questions about your daughter Therese?’

For the first time in decades, he felt he was acting decisively and proactively in the issue that had come to colour his entire adult life. Too many years had gone by already and his idea would probably turn out to have come far too late. But that was not the most important thing; Spencer Lagergren had made up his mind. And the journey he was now embarking on could only be made alone.

No one must know, he decided. At least, not until afterwards.

He drove from Uppsala towards Stockholm and on to Jönköping. It looked as though the cloud might break and let a bit of sun through. A beautiful winter’s day in early March. With some irony he noted that he had chosen a very attractive backdrop for his project.

His thoughts went involuntarily back to those early days with Eva. The sense of solidarity they had shared, the life’s work they had decided to make a reality, these had no counterpart in his later life. There had been occasions when he had almost wondered if he ever loved her, but they were very few in number. Of course he had loved her, and it would be absurd to maintain anything different. The problem was that it was a love built on the unhealthiest of foundations. He had confused passion and attraction in a way that could be described as unsuccessful at best and disastrous at worst. As if you could build lifelong love on physical desire. As if you could retain physical desire when the party was over and the daily grind set in, when the body that had been a land of exploration and adventure became the most familiar domestic territory.

He found it impossible to remember which of them had relaxed their hold on the other first. There was so much of their past that he had chosen to lock into that basement room marked Forgotten.

How could we do this to ourselves?

Most of the guilt indisputably lay at his father-in-law’s door. Father-in-law knew Spencer’s darkest secret, the secret so shameful that he had never admitted it to his parents or friends. The fact that he had discovered just before he got engaged that he had fathered the child another woman was expecting. That he had chosen to buy a house in another university town in another part of the country and shift his career from Lund to Uppsala. That he had let down the other woman even though there was still time to do the right thing, in favour of something that seemed more desirable.

The baby had never been born. Because of Spencer’s weakness its mother, Josefine, decided to abort it, which was still considered a sin in those days. By some irony of fate, or was it as a punishment, Spencer and his wife never had any children of their own. Three miscarriages were followed by years of fruitless trying. Until at last they had to face the fact that there would be no children. Perhaps it was even a kind of blessing, for by that stage they had long since stopped wanting any.

Then Fredrika came into his life. And he had actually let her down, too.

Spencer felt a lump come into his throat at the thought of her. That beautiful and intelligent woman who could have had who the hell she liked – if she had only believed in herself a bit more – but who had always come back to him.

Every time. Every time she came back to me.

Perhaps he should have said no. But then she should, too. And she could definitely have refrained from coming back.

We just couldn’t, he thought. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to say no to something that was so much better than what we already had. Loneliness.

‘It’s some years now since I stopped missing my daughter,’ Therese Björk’s mother said simply.

As if it was the most natural thing in the world. As if there was some dividing line where parenthood ends and something else takes its place. Estrangement and discord.

‘I do still love her,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And I cry in the evenings because she isn’t with me any longer. But I don’t miss her. She’s made that impossible, you see.’

Fredrika would really have preferred to go round and see Ingrid Björk personally. On reflection it felt like the wrong choice to have yielded to her impulse and picked up the phone. But Ingrid Björk’s tone indicated that she did not mind. She could cope with a conversation about the most important person in her life over the phone.

I’m damn sure I couldn’t, Fredrika thought wearily. I don’t seem to be able to cope with anything much at the moment.

‘When did things start to go wrong?’

Ingrid Björk thought about it.

‘Oh, early on, when she was in lower secondary school,’ she said confidently.

‘That early?’

‘Yes, I think so. Therese was such a restless spirit; there were things that seemed to leave her no peace. Her dad and I did our best to support her. But I’m sure it wasn’t enough.’

She went on talking about her daughter. About the little girl who grew up into an irresponsible teenager, out of control, and the body invaded by a disturbed mind. About her first boyfriend who led her astray, and her first visit to the child psychiatrist. Years with a succession of psychologists and therapists, none of them ultimately able to save either the daughter, or her parents’ marriage. She tried to describe how she had struggled to save her daughter from going under irrevocably, but was finally forced to admit that the project was doomed and she would never get her daughter back.

‘That’s the way I see it,’ she said gravely. ‘As if she’s not mine any longer, because she belongs to her addiction.’

‘But she’s registered as living with you, isn’t she?’ Fredrika queried.

‘I’m sure she is, but it makes no difference. I haven’t seen her for ages. She stopped getting in touch when she realised she’d be getting no more money.’

The words tore at Fredrika. Words intimating that children could be lost to you even if they were still alive were something alien in the world she knew.

‘Why have you rung to ask me all these questions?’

Ingrid Björk’s question broke into her thoughts.

With agile fingers, Fredrika extracted the file from the bottom of the heap on her desk. The copy of the autopsy report on the person initially believed to be Karolina Ahlbin.

‘Because I’m afraid I know exactly where your daughter is at this moment,’ she said in a subdued tone.

There was a rather febrile atmosphere in the Den when Fredrika came in at the last minute and took a seat at the table.

‘Before this interview with Johanna Ahlbin I want us all to try to identify the gaps and question marks in what we know, the ones we think she can help to clarify,’ said Alex. ‘I also want us all, as a team, to establish if there’s anything we need to be aware of in the interview, any advantages we don’t want to fritter away.’

‘I’ve been able to identify the woman we initially took to be Karolina Ahlbin,’ Fredrika announced, afraid Alex was going to race ahead at the same pace at which he had started, leaving her no opening.

The others looked up in surprise.

‘The woman who died of an overdose almost two weeks ago was called Therese Björk. I’ve just been talking to her mother on the phone.’

‘Therese Björk?’ echoed Joar. ‘The name Karolina Ahlbin was using in Thailand?’

‘Yes.’

Peder shook his head as if trying to make everything fall into place.

‘What the hell does this mean?’

‘Maybe that Karolina and Johanna staged the whole drama together,’ suggested Alex. ‘She’d hardly have given the Thai authorities that particular name otherwise.’

‘But she didn’t,’ Fredrika snapped.

‘Didn’t what?’

‘She didn’t give that name herself; it was the Embassy staff who confronted her with the details, which they got from the Thai authorities who’d seized the false passport.’

‘But why would she have a false passport with those details in it if she didn’t know who Therese Björk was?’ asked Peder, looking lost.

‘I don’t know,’ Fredrika said with a look of exasperation. ‘Karolina flatly denied to the Embassy people that she had ever stayed at the hotel the police raided.’

‘So you reckon she wasn’t part of the conspiracy against Jakob Ahlbin, but more of a victim?’ Joar said.

‘Something like that,’ Fredrika said. ‘We’d already considered the possibility, hadn’t we? That someone wanted to get her out of the way, I mean, but failed. That the intention all along was for her to die, but the murderer wasn’t able to do the job, for some reason.’

‘So you’re saying someone killed Therese Björk specifically in order to have Karolina Ahlbin declared dead in Sweden, while Karolina was put out of action where she was, in Thailand?’ said Alex, sounding unconvinced.

Fredrika drank some water and nodded slowly.

‘But why?’ thundered Alex. ‘Why?’

‘That’s just what I think you should ask Johanna,’ said Fredrika. ‘She’s the one who made the misidentification that set all this in motion, after all.’

Peder shook his head again.

‘What about Sven Ljung, then?’ he said. ‘How do he and his car fit into all this?’

‘Do they need to?’ Fredrika persisted. ‘Maybe it’s just as we first thought, and these are two entirely unrelated cases.’

‘No way,’ said Joar. ‘There are just too many connections.’

‘But are there, really?’ asked a sceptical Fredrika.

Her voice died away at the sound of Alex’s fingers drumming on the table.

‘There don’t need to be that many for us to find them hard to ignore,’ he said, his eyes on Fredrika. ‘We’re pretty sure Sven Ljung’s car was involved in the Yusuf murder up at the university, and in the security van robberies in Uppsala and Västerås. And we know Yusuf was a friend of the man Muhammad in Skärholmen, and he had been in touch with Jakob Ahlbin.’

‘Who was found dead in his own flat by none other than Sven Ljung,’ finished Fredrika with a sigh. ‘I know, I know. He must have something to do with all this, I just don’t get what.’

‘What have the national CID had to say about Sven Ljung?’ Joar asked Peder with a frown. ‘How long are they thinking of waiting before they apply for an arrest warrant?’

Peder’s face darkened as Joar addressed him.

Hmm, thought Fredrika. They still can’t stand each other.

‘They rang back just before the meeting,’ said Peder. ‘They reckon they’ll have everything ready by the end of the morning, then they’ll bring him in for a first interview this afternoon.’

‘From now on I want feedback on every move the CID make on this,’ Alex said doggedly, adding: ‘Peder, I want you to ask to sit in on the interview.’

With the enthusiasm of a ragamuffin who has been tossed a large coin for opening a gate, Peder said he would ring them the minute the meeting was over.

‘As far as interviewing Johanna Ahlbin goes,’ Alex went on, ‘I’d like Fredrika to come with me and take the lead on that.’

Everything went quiet.

Just like it’s always been, thought Fredrika. Stony silence whenever I get given some especially juicy task.

She knew what Alex would have to add for equilibrium to be restored, and sure enough, it was only a matter of seconds before he went on.

‘The primary reason for that, of course, is that it seems important to have a female colleague present when interviewing a young woman like Johanna.’

Fredrika kept her eyes on Peder and Joar, awaiting their reaction. None came. It was only when Alex started speaking again that she thought she saw Peder’s face twitch.

‘But on top of that, Fredrika is as competent an interviewer as anyone else in this room. Just in case there’s anybody here who misunderstood what I said to begin with.’

Fredrika turned to Alex in astonishment, and he gave her a crooked grin.

Things are looking up, she thought, and the prospect made her feel quite dizzy.

Automatically, as in any other situation that made her feel happy or sad, she put her hand to her stomach. Only to realise that it was a long time since she had last felt the baby move.

Everything’s fine, she thought quickly to stem the surging tide of worry she had just unleashed. It’s just asleep.

So she forced herself to smile at Alex, despite her rising sense of apprehension and her continuing concern about why Spencer had gone off at such short notice.

The phone in her pocket vibrated silently, forcing her to pull herself together. She went briskly out of the room to take the call. It was the librarian in Farsta, ringing back.

‘Sorry it took so long,’ the lady apologised.

‘No problem,’ Fredrika forced herself to say.

‘I’ve been through the lists for the time in question,’ the woman went on, and cleared her throat.

Fredrika waited tensely.

‘Though I’m not sure this can be the person you want,’ the librarian said doubtfully. ‘It seems to have been a middle-aged lady at the computer you asked about.’

‘Oh,’ Fredrika said hesitantly. ‘Have you got a name or date of birth?’

‘I’ve got both,’ the librarian said, with evident satisfaction. ‘The woman was born in January 1947 and her name is Marja. Marja Ahlbin.’

Fredrika rushed back into the Den and stopped Alex, who was the last person leaving the room.

‘It was Marja Ahlbin who’d booked the computer in Farsta that the email was sent from.’

‘Good God,’ exclaimed Alex.

Fredrika looked him straight in the eye.

‘What if we’ve misjudged the whole wretched thing,’ she said. ‘What if Jakob really did shoot his wife, but in self-defence, and then couldn’t live with what he’d done and wrote the suicide note?’

‘And where would Karolina’s death fit into that scenario?’

‘I don’t know,’ Fredrika admitted, starting a mental count of the number of times she had said those words in the past few days.

‘We don’t know a goddamn thing,’ snarled Alex. ‘And I’m getting mighty fed up with always being one step behind in this mess.’

‘And Marja’s possible involvement in the threats to Jakob?’

‘I haven’t the least bloody idea at the moment,’ Alex muttered.

Fredrika frowned.

‘I’ll check that out, too,’ she said, sounding as determined as Alex had done.

‘What?’ he asked, confused.

‘We know where the other emails that weren’t from Tony Svensson’s home computer were sent from,’ Fredrika replied. ‘A Seven-Eleven convenience store. I’ll check with Marja’s phone provider to see if her mobile was in use in or near either of those locations at the appropriate times.’

‘You do that,’ said Alex. ‘And try to come up with the answers double quick. We need plenty of data to back us up when we confront Johanna Ahlbin.’

‘I know,’ said Fredrika. ‘Because she’s the only one who can solve this case for us, that’s for sure. Or her sister.’

You seldom got a breakthrough early in an investigation, Peder Rydh had learned that over the years. But there was something very special about some of the cases he had worked on since he joined Alex’s group. Something that made them develop very quickly, and then explode into an orgy of loose threads and leftover pieces of puzzle.

I like it, he thought reflexively. Hell, I don’t think I could live without it.

He made sure he didn’t even glance in Joar’s direction as he went into his room and shut the door. Following Alex’s instructions, he rang his contact in the national CID to ask how close they were to an arrest, and said he would like to be present at the interviews when they took place.

‘We’re bringing him in after lunch,’ said his contact. ‘We’ve had surveillance on him since last night; he and his wife seem to be lurking in their flat.’

‘Neither of them been out since yesterday?’

‘Nope, doesn’t look like it.’

‘Well at least he’s not trying to flee the country.’

The CID man changed tack.

‘We’ve had the information on Sven Ljung’s private finances that we were waiting for,’ he said in a voice indicating there was more news to come.

Peder waited.

‘It looks as if our friend Sven had real problems in the financial department in recent years. The flat’s mortgaged up to the hilt – he remortgaged in December, in fact – and on top of all that he owes various loan companies a fair whack. He and his wife sold a holiday house two years ago and managed to make quite a packet, but that money seems to have disappeared.’

Peder listened attentively. Debts, Money. Always bloody money. Was it that simple this time, too?

‘But what do they live on, he and his wife?’

‘Their pensions, basically.’

‘Nothing to splash about, in other words,’ observed Peder.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ said the other investigator. ‘And his wife’s got no assets to speak of, of course.’

‘But they did have that house,’ Peder reminded him.

‘They certainly did,’ chuckled the other man. ‘And they made a decent profit there, a million kronor. And that money’s all gone, too.’

That’s not all, Peder was thinking. We know where all the money’s gone, we just can’t remember at the moment.

‘We’re working on the hypothesis that Sven got into this whole robbery thing because his finances needed a boost and for no other reason,’ his colleague said.

‘And what about the murder of that Yusuf, up at the university?’

‘I suppose they wanted to get rid of their robber so they could brush it all under the carpet,’ came the simple answer.

Too simple.

‘Which “they” would that be?’ Peder asked dubiously.

The other man was starting to lose patience.

‘Well, of course we don’t think Sven Ljung set all this up on his own,’ he said in a slow, exaggerated way, as if talking to a child and not a trusted colleague.

‘Have you come up with names for any of the other people involved yet?’

‘We’re working on it,’ said the other man. ‘We’ll get back to you when we’ve got something.’

Peder was about to hang up when he remembered another thing Alex had asked him to do:

‘Keep an eye out for Marja Ahlbin in the investigation.’

‘But she’s dead, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, but it’s not impossible you’ll find some earlier contact between them.’

His mouth went dry as he said the words. Alex had told him that Marja was behind some of the threats to Jakob.

Marja and Sven, he thought. Was it your fault your families fell out?

As a little girl, Fredrika loved jigsaw puzzles. She had done her first thousand-piece jigsaw at the age of ten. As her grandfather put it, she had one heck of an eye for detail and a memory like an elephant.

‘Magic,’ her mother called it, and stroked her hair.

Alex gave Fredrika fifteen minutes to engage in a bit of magic before they went down to meet Johanna Ahlbin. The new information from the CID was duly incorporated into the investigation, which had now been in progress for a week and seemed to be approaching some kind of resolution.

‘It’s gone quickly,’ said Alex.

Fredrika could not contradict him. It had gone quickly, and it brought a sense of relief to have got as far as an interview with the elusive Johanna Ahlbin.

Why did you leave them in the lurch? Fredrika wondered. And what the hell did your mother have to do with it all?

This last point took her breath away. To the extent that she had felt obliged to ring the library again and ask what their procedures were. The librarian was adamant. Anybody borrowing a computer for internet use had to provide ID. That made it very improbable that it could have been anyone other than Marja who sent the email.

The technical division went through Marja’s phone lists again and found that at one of the two other critical times she had been in the vicinity of the Seven-Eleven store in question. Fredrika rang the store, but they had no way of checking who had been on a specific computer at any given time.

Circumstantial evidence, thought Fredrika. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.

If she excluded Marja’s potential involvement in all that had happened, Johanna emerged as the most likely perpetrator. Her parents would have no hesitation in letting her into their home, and several of their informants had mentioned her problematic relationship with her father. And he somehow seemed to be the one all this was directed against. According to the supposed suicide note, it was Jakob and not Marja who fired the fatal shots. And it was Jakob who had been threatened, not Marja, though she might possibly have been the one issuing the threats.

A movement from the baby she was carrying interrupted her deliberations.

‘God, how you scared me,’ whispered Fredrika, running both hands over her stomach.

Her eyes filled and it was hard to breathe. There was too much happening all at once. The baby, work, Spencer. She took a gulp of water and felt her body absorb the liquid. Permanently stressed and worried. Never satisfied for more than the occasional day.

The baby obviously had to be her priority. Spencer could be, if he tried a bit harder. She scrunched up a bit of paper fiercely and threw it into the bin. But the blessed man never did, did he? And now he was off on some sudden mission he refused to let her in on.

So I shan’t give a damn about him for now, Fredrika decided, and went back to her notes.

She stared at the short list of questions she had drawn up for Johanna Ahlbin.

We were looking for her for several days, Fredrika thought, but we should have been looking for Karolina at the same time – or in fact even more urgently.

Where was Karolina now? Was she still in Thailand? And how did Thailand fit into the picture, anyway? At the Embassy, Karolina had said that she was the victim of some kind of plot, that she most definitely was not Therese Björk, and that she had never set foot in the hotel where her possessions had been found in the raid.

Fredrika gathered up her papers and prepared to go down to Johanna Ahlbin. Another thought flashed through her mind as she closed the door of her room behind her.

Why had nobody else known Karolina was away, and reacted to the news of her death in Stockholm? Elsie and Sven had not questioned the fact that she was apparently still in the country. Nor had Ragnar Vinterman, nor Jakob Ahlbin’s psychiatrist. Admittedly the police had not interviewed all that many of Karolina’s own friends and acquaintances. But even once her name and fate were all over the media, no one came forward and told the police that Karolina was in fact abroad and could not possibly be lying dead at the hospital.

Why had she left the country on the quiet? Fredrika wondered. And when, if ever, would she be back?

Sudden insight made the ground sway beneath her feet for a moment. There was one person, someone they had discounted, who might just be able to answer those questions. Someone the police had never contacted because it had been dismissed as fruitless, but that person had been very close to Karolina.

She pushed open the door of her room again and thudded back down into her desk chair. It only took her a minute to find the number she was looking for. She waited patiently for an answer as it rang, and rang.

The snow started to fall a few hours before lunch. With tired eyes she watched the heavens through the window. The heavens, the place where the God who had failed her so often was said to be.

I got nothing out of loving You, she thought sullenly, feeling not a shred of fear.

Few people thought of her as old, but judgements of that kind could not have been more wrong. She was old, tired and unhappy after years of difficulties and complications. In those first times of trial she had turned to church, and to the Lord who watched over them all, but in the end she had got so dreadfully tired of her prayers never being heard, so she stopped putting her hands together when it was time to pray in the services at church.

‘He never listens,’ she whispered in response to her husband, when he discreetly tried to correct her.

At first they had argued about it, because her husband refused to accept the hard words she directed at their Lord.

‘That’s blasphemy,’ he hissed in her ear. ‘And in church, what’s more!’

But what else could she do? The two sons she had borne, and initially seen as a blessing, had developed into a curse like a great bruise on her soul. She had expected them to grow up strong and be each other’s closest friend, but they had turned out as different as Cain and Abel. And she scarcely saw either of them these days. She scarcely missed the elder, who had done his younger brother such harm. But the younger one. He had always been a bit weaker, a bit more lost and a much kinder, better person than anyone else in the family; he had never really been able to cope with being perpetually in second place, overshadowed by his more successful brother.

I saw it too late, she thought as she watched the snow-flakes fall from the grey sky. And now there’s nothing I can do.

She was so deep in thought that she did not register his steps behind her.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘The devil himself,’ she said.

He gave a faint cough. His blue eyes sought out something else to look at, down in the street. They came to rest on a single car, parked by the pavement.

‘They’ve been parked there since yesterday,’ he said, so quietly that she could not initially make out what he had said.

‘Who?’ she eventually asked, puzzled.

A tired finger was pointing at her.

‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ he said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes to hell.’

She looked at him for a long time.

‘I know,’ she said, feeling the tears welling up inside her. ‘I already know it all.’

The first thing that struck Alex and Fredrika was that Johanna looked quite unlike her pictures in the Ekerö house. They were both taken aback to see the tall, attractive woman with long, fair hair waiting for them at the appointed time in the big lobby of the police building. Above all they were surprised by how calm and collected she seemed, since these were qualities rarely revealed in photographs.

Not exactly the image of a woman who has just lost her entire family, thought Fredrika.

The moment Johanna took their hands and said hello seemed almost unreal. So many days’ silence and suddenly here she was in front of them.

‘I’m truly sorry to have been so hard to get hold of,’ she said as they went to the interview room Fredrika had booked. ‘But believe me, I’ve had my reasons for not coming forward.’

‘And we’d very much like to hear them,’ said Alex, with a politeness in his voice that Fredrika could not remember hearing before.

They sat down at the table in the middle of the room. Fredrika and Alex on one side, Johanna Ahlbin on the other. Fredrika observed her with fascination. The high cheekbones, the large, enviably shapely mouth, the steely grey eyes. The beige top she was wearing was simply cut to fall straight from her broad shoulders. She had no jewellery except for a pair of plain pearl earrings.

Fredrika tried to interpret the young woman’s expression. All she was feeling and having to bear must have left some kind of mark. But however hard she scrutinised Johanna Ahlbin’s countenance, there was nothing to draw from it. Fredrika started to find the other woman’s composure unsettling.

There was something terribly wrong, she sensed it instinctively.

To her relief, Alex made a brusque start.

‘As you realise, we were very keen to get hold of you. So I suggest we start with that: where have you been these last…’

Alex frowned and stopped.

‘… seven days,’ he went on. ‘Where have you been since Tuesday the 26th of February?

Good, thought Fredrika. Now she’ll have to tell us where she was on the night of the murder.

But Johanna’s reply was so swift and short that it took them both unawares.

‘I’ve been in Spain.’

Alex couldn’t help staring.

‘In Spain?’ he echoed.

‘In Spain,’ Johanna confirmed. ‘I’ve got the travel documents to prove it.’

A moment’s silence.

‘And what were you doing there?’ asked Fredrika.

Silence fell again. Johanna seemed to be considering how to answer, and for the first time she seemed to be showing the effects of what had happened.

A façade, Fredrika suspected. She had been so focused on keeping up a façade that she had become utterly disconnected from her emotions.

‘The original plan was for me to go there on private business,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I’d already arranged the time off work and…’

She broke off and looked down at her hands. Long, narrow fingers with unpainted nails. No wedding or engagement ring.

‘I’m sure you’re aware of my father’s involvement in refugee issues?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Alex.

Johanna picked up the glass of water she had been given and took a few sips.

‘For years I felt very ambivalent about all that,’ she began her story. ‘But then something happened last autumn to change everything.’

She took a deep breath.

‘I went on a trip to Greece; we were going to seal a deal with an important client. I stayed on for a few days to make the most of the warm weather there before going back to the Swedish cold. And that was when I saw them.’

Fredrika and Alex waited in suspense.

‘The refugees would arrive by boat in the night,’ Johanna went on in a low voice. ‘I wasn’t sleeping very well just then, it happens sometimes when I’m stressed. One morning I thought I’d take a walk to the harbour in the village where I was staying, and I saw them.’

She blinked several times and attempted a smile before her face fell.

‘It was all so undignified, so degrading. And I thought – no, not thought – I felt how wrong I’d been all those years. How unfair I’d been on Dad.’

A dry laugh escaped her lips and she looked almost as if she might cry.

‘But you know how it is. Our parents are the last people we give in to, so I chose not to tell my father about my change of heart. I wanted to surprise him, show him I was in earnest. And I planned to show him that by doing some voluntary legal work for a migrant organisation based mainly in Spain. I was going to be there for five weeks in February and March.’

Five weeks, the period of time for which she had leave of absence from work.

Since she seemed to have come to a halt, Alex took up the thread.

‘But it didn’t work out,’ he said.

Johanna Ahlbin shook her head.

‘No, it didn’t. I got dragged into Karolina’s plans.’

Fredrika shifted uneasily in her seat, still with an overwhelming sense that they had not been given the full story.

‘So what happened, Johanna?’ she asked softly.

‘Everything was completely blown apart,’ she said, suddenly looking very tired. ‘Karolina…’

She broke off again, but composed herself to go on.

‘Karolina had very cleverly sold herself as the good, loyal daughter. The one who always took such an interest in what Dad was doing, but it was all totally fake, so I found I couldn’t even pretend to be interested in all that stuff.’

‘In what sense do you mean it was fake?’ asked Fredrika, remembering all the statements they had had about Karolina sharing her father’s outlook.

‘She put it on, year after year,’ Johanna replied with a dark look fixed on Fredrika. ‘Claimed she felt passionately about Dad’s campaigns and shared his underlying values. But none of it was true. In actual fact, the so-called help she gave Dad and his friends was simply that she gave the police anonymous tip-offs about where to find the migrants and how the smugglers operated. To get them here.’

The room suddenly felt very cold. Fredrika’s brain was racing as it tried to take in the picture being painted for her. Was this where police officer Viggo Tuvesson came into the investigation?

‘I tried, countless times, to tell Dad that Karolina wasn’t a scrap better than me. That she was actually a worse person, because she engaged in lies and deception. But he wouldn’t listen to what I told him. As usual.’

Johanna looked grimly resolute. Fredrika almost felt like asking why she wasn’t crying, but refrained. Perhaps the grief was all too private.

‘What about your mother, then?’ asked Alex, and instantly had Fredrika’s full attention.

‘She was somewhere in the middle,’ Johanna said rather evasively.

‘How do you mean?’

‘In the middle, between me and Dad.’

‘In terms of her views, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Karolina have against refugees?’ Fredrika put in, and then corrected herself. ‘I mean what does Karolina have against refugees?’

It was plain to see the effect on Johanna of this revelation, already released to the media, that Karolina was now definitely known to be alive.

She said nothing for a minute, and the words when they did come had all the more impact.

‘Because she was raped by one of the refugees Dad was hiding in the basement of our house at Ekerö.’

‘Raped?’ Alex repeated in a slightly sceptical tone. ‘We haven’t found any reports of a rape in our records.’

Johanna shook her head.

‘It was never reported. It couldn’t be, Mum and Dad said. It would have exposed their whole operation.’

‘So what did they do?’ Fredrika asked tentatively, not really sure she wanted to know.

‘They dealt with it the way they dealt with everything else,’ Johanna said sharply. ‘Within the family. And then Dad wound up his operation at the speed of light, you could say.’

Fredrika thought back to her visit to Ekerö, and could see that Alex was doing the same. The photographs on the walls, dated up to a certain midsummer in the early ’90s. Johanna fading from the pictures like a ghost. Why Johanna and not Karolina?

‘Can you put a date on the event you’ve just told us about?’ Alex asked, though he already knew what the answer would be.

‘Midsummer 1992.’

They both nodded, each jotting down a note. The picture was getting clearer, but it was still not in focus.

‘And what happened after that?’ asked Fredrika.

Slightly less weighed down by the burden of all she had to tell, Johanna appeared to relax a little.

‘The Ekerö house was anathema to us after that; none of us liked being there. It wasn’t just Dad’s hiding of fugitives that stopped, it was as if the whole family died. We were never there to celebrate midsummer again; we would just go for the odd week or weekend. Mum and Dad talked about selling it, but in the end they didn’t.’

‘And how was Karolina?’

For the first time in the interview, an angry look came into Johanna’s face.

‘She must have been feeling absolutely awful, as you’d expect, but it was as if she was pretending it hadn’t happened. Before all that, it was actually the other way round: I was the favourite and she was the one who always wanted not to be part of our family. After the rape I took her side, because I didn’t think any good that Dad’s activities did could ever outweigh what happened to her. So you can imagine how astonished I was to find that Karolina seemed to think it was all okay.’

‘You must have been terribly bitter,’ Alex prompted cautiously.

‘Dreadfully. And lonely. Suddenly it was as though it was my fault the family had split apart, mine and not Dad’s or Mum’s. Or Karolina’s, for that matter.’

‘What felt most frustrating?’ Fredrika asked.

‘What I was telling you before,’ Johanna said mutedly. ‘That although Karolina was changed by what happened, and openly admitted to me that she despised the migrants who came to Sweden, she pretended something else to Dad and Mum.’

And not just to them, Fredrika thought to herself, but to family friends and acquaintances as well.

‘So you distanced yourself from the family, so to speak?’

Johanna nodded.

‘Yes, that was the way it went. I couldn’t bear the hypocrisy. And I didn’t miss any of them, either. Not much, anyway. And definitely not after Dad started talking about taking in refugees again, and I was the only one in the family who seemed to mind.’

Fredrika and Alex exchanged looks, unsure how to proceed. Their impression of Karolina had changed radically in the course of less than an hour. But they were still far from through with this, they both knew that.

It was at that point Fredrika registered the tattoo on Johanna’s wrist, almost hidden by her watch. A flower. Or to be more precise, a daisy. Where had that motif featured recently? Then she recalled the dried flower, the sole ornament on one of the bedroom walls.

Johanna tracked Fredrika’s gaze and tried to conceal the tattoo by moving her watch strap. But Fredrika’s curiosity was already aroused.

‘What does the daisy mean?’ she asked bluntly.

‘It’s a reminder.’

Johanna’s voice was thick as she said it, her expression ambiguous.

‘Karolina’s got one, too,’ she added.

‘A reminder of what?’

‘Of our sisterhood.’

A sisterhood so charged that its symbol had to be hidden under a wristwatch, Fredrika reflected.

It was Alex who broke the silence.

‘Johanna, you’ve got to tell us the rest now. You said you were taking five weeks off work to go to Spain, but Karolina’s plans got in the way. What happened?’

As lithely as a ballet dancer, Johanna straightened her back.

‘You want to know why I identified a dead person as my sister although I knew it wasn’t her?’

‘We certainly do.’

‘I can give you a simple answer: because she asked me to.’

‘Who asked you to?’

‘Karolina.’

Another silence.

‘Why?’

Tears came into Johanna’s eyes for the first time in the encounter. Fredrika felt something akin to relief when she saw them.

‘Because she’d got herself into such a hellishly difficult situation that she literally needed to disappear off the face of the earth. That was how she put it, anyway.’

‘Did she give you any more details?’

‘No, but God knows I kept asking her to. Over and over again. But she wouldn’t answer, just said her past was catching up with her and she’d realised what she had to do. She explained her plan, the idea that she’d die without really dying. My job was to ring for an ambulance and then identify that druggie as my sister. And leave the country. So then I went to Spain.’

‘How did you know she was a drug addict, the woman who died in place of your sister?’

‘Karolina told me. And you could tell by the look of her. That she’d put herself through it.’

‘Was she still alive when you got to the flat?’

‘It didn’t look like it, but she must have been. The ambulance crew tried to save her.’

‘That must have scared you stiff.’

Johanna made no reply.

‘Why did you help her with such a spectacular stunt as staging her own death if she wasn’t prepared to tell you why?’ asked Alex.

A faint smile crept across Johanna’s impassive face.

‘The bond between sisters can be stretched to any length without breaking. It never occurred to me she could be referring to that midsummer episode when she said the past was catching up with the family. But once I realised it was, I stayed on longer in Spain.’

Uncertainty made Fredrika grip her pen even harder.

‘How do you mean?’

As if Fredrika had said something completely insane, Johanna leant across the table.

‘But how else could it all fit together? Why else would she have done what she did?’

The line between Alex’s eyebrows deepened to a crater.

‘What is it you think she did?’

‘I think she had Mum and Dad murdered. And now she’s going to come for me, as well. To punish us for not being there when her life was destroyed in the meadow outside our holiday house.’

‘Do you think she needs protection?’ asked Fredrika as the lift doors parted and they emerged into the team corridor.

‘Hard to say,’ muttered Alex. ‘Bloody hard to say.’

‘At least we know now that we were right, you and I,’ Fredrika said, almost gaily.

Alex looked at her.

‘About it all starting in the holiday house at Ekerö, like we said.’

Alex glanced at his watch. Time had flown, as usual. It was well past lunch and Peder would be off to the national CID to take part in the interview of Sven Ljung. From where he stood, Alex shouted to everyone to come to the Den and make it snappy. Nobody dared drag their feet at the sound of his order, though Fredrika headed for the staff room at a semi-jog to grab a sandwich on the way.

Of course, thought Alex. The woman’s about to have a baby, of course she’s got to eat.

‘What have we got, to corroborate her story?’ asked Joar once Alex had filled them in on what Johanna had said.

‘Not much,’ admitted Alex. ‘On the other hand, we haven’t got much to contradict her version, either.’

‘Are we remanding her in custody?’ asked Peder. ‘I mean for obstructing the course of our enquiries, or for her part in Therese Björk’s death, however minor it was?’

Alex sighed.

‘We’re not sure enough of our facts yet,’ he answered. ‘As for the obstruction, she can explain that by saying she was too scared of what her sister might do once she found out her parents had been killed. And as far as the misidentification’s concerned, we haven’t enough to go on as things stand. Johanna couldn’t even tell us how Therese Björk died; she claims Therese was already there when she got to her sister’s flat.’

‘And that’s precisely where we ought to be able to make progress,’ Fredrika interrupted. ‘An individual who as far as we know had nothing at all to do with either Karolina or Johanna was picked up by ambulance from Karolina’s flat and later died in hospital. That makes Karolina’s flat a potential crime scene. How soon can we get access to it?’

Joar gave Fredrika a cautious smile.

‘Quick thinking,’ he said. ‘But unfortunately I don’t think a CSI in Karolina’s flat’s going to yield much. We’ve already been there and trampled all over any potential evidence when were looking for a key to the Ekerö house.’

‘More to the point, Johanna followed her sister’s instructions to go back to the flat and clean up after she’d wrongly identified Therese Björk,’ Alex added, reminding Fredrika of the latter stages of their interview with Johanna.

‘Did Johanna know Karolina was in Thailand?’ asked Joar.

Alex nodded.

‘Yes, but she didn’t know why. When we told her that her sister was wanted for drug offences, her guess was that Karolina needed the money to pay whoever she hired to kill her parents.’

The room went quiet.

‘It really feels as if we should be interviewing Karolina Ahlbin as well,’ said Peder.

‘Yes,’ said Alex, and took a deep breath. ‘I’d go so far as to say that until we can find out what Karolina’s been up to these past few weeks, we’re stuck.’

Fredrika looked as though she had something to say, but she refrained.

‘Was she able to tell you anything about her mother’s role in all this?’ Joar was curious to know.

‘Not a word,’ Alex said.

‘Well then, we wait eagerly to hear what the Sven Ljung interview produces,’ said Joar, squinting at Peder. ‘Maybe that’s going to shed some light on Marja’s role.’

Fredrika overcame her indecision and said:

‘Erik Sundelius. Jakob’s doctor.’

‘Yes?’ said Alex.

‘He implied Johanna was mentally disturbed.’

‘So he did,’ said Alex. ‘But there we have a man who forgot to impart various bits of information about himself, as we know. So I’m not sure how much weight we should give to what emerged from our interview with him.’

‘I agree,’ said Fredrika. ‘But several people told us Johanna wasn’t well, so we can’t be entirely sure.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of whether either Karolina or Johanna is sick enough to have her own parents murdered.’

When she was younger, Fredrika had often asked herself if she would have preferred having a sister to the brother she had grown up with. As a child she had sobbed out loud when she read Astrid Lindgren’s story My Sister Dearest, and in adult life she had often wished she had a sister to exchange thoughts and ideas with. Poring over her notes from the interview with Johanna brought to mind all the myths surrounding the special bond that was said to exist between any pair of sisters.

We didn’t know anything about Johanna, thought Fredrika, feeling a rising sense of fascination. And just as our focus was shifting onto her, she sought us out by herself.

She returned briefly to one of her earlier theories, namely that the sisters had collaborated in the murder of their parents.

Motives. Separately, each sister had a motive, but if they were jointly guilty, the police lacked any clear idea of a motive.

Karolina’s motive, as Johanna had described it, was not hard to understand. What a broken person you must be after an experience like that. Undoubtedly broken enough to manipulate those around you the way Johanna had described.

But Fredrika was still dubious: surely someone would have seen through her? The Ljungs, the Reverend Vinterman or the psychiatrist. Or her own parents, for that matter. Hadn’t anyone ever questioned her loyalty to her father?

She gave an involuntary shudder. There was no limit to people’s imagination when it came to hurting other people. A new picture of Karolina Ahlbin was emerging. A picture that encompassed a set of problems quite different from the one Fredrika initially had in mind. Johanna being slowly erased from the family picture, and finally losing everything and everyone. A young woman who might be in desperate need of protection.

She thumbed the latest fax from Bangkok. There was nothing to indicate that Karolina Ahlbin had left Thailand, which was reassuring. But if she was the one behind the double murder of Jakob and Marja, she clearly had the capacity to contract killers from a distance.

Either she is as disturbed as her sister Johanna made her out to be, thought Fredrika. Or else…

She put down the sheet of paper and let her eyes stray to the window and the snow falling outside.

Or else Karolina, too, was a victim of the conspiracy that led to the murder of her father.

And her mother.

But why?

Fredrika anxiously checked the clock. It was nearly two, and Spencer had still not been in touch.

She felt she was being assailed by difficulties from all sides. She was aware of a fleeting sense of impending danger.

We’re missing something here, she thought, trying not to let the all too familiar feeling of fatigue get the better of her. And it’s something big, I’m damned sure of it.

She swallowed hard, feeling anxiety contract her windpipe. She ought to go home and leave the case to people with the proper stamina and tempo in their bodies. Go home, go to bed and sleep. Or play some music.

As her thoughts went to her violin, her arm felt mute and tender. She knew there was not a single part of her body that she was not prepared to defy.

When the phone on her desk rang, she virtually sprang to attention.

‘Fredrika Bergman.’

Silence, then a wheezing intake of breath. Then Fredrika knew who it was.

‘Måns Ljung?’ she asked, trying not to sound too eager.

More chesty breathing, someone saying something disjointed. Then suddenly much clearer.

‘You rang about Lina?’

‘That’s right, and I’m very glad you were able to ring me back.’

A strained laugh at the other end.

‘Did Mum tell you I wouldn’t be up to talking on the phone?’

Yes, thought Fredrika. And I was so stupid that I bought it, without further ado.

It was Elsie’s comments that had made the police decide against interviewing her and Sven’s son Måns, even though he had been Karolina’s boyfriend for several years.

‘I’m an in-patient at a so-called rehabilitation clinic, but if it’s to do with Lina, I’ve always got time to talk. Sorry if I sound a bit ropey… I’ve got some sort of infection.’

Fredrika could not have cared less about his state of health. The important thing was that he was capable of holding a conversation.

‘That’s all right,’ she said, and tried to sound professional. ‘What I really need to know is whether Karolina’s tried to contact you in the past week.’

Silence.

‘Why are you asking?’

With one hand round the telephone receiver and the other on her stomach, Fredrika took a deep breath.

‘Because I’m afraid she’s in trouble.’

Another hesitation.

‘She rang and asked me for help last week.’

‘Did she say what the matter was?’

‘Said she couldn’t get hold of Jakob or Marja and it was going to be difficult to get home because someone seemed to have closed down her email and cancelled her flight home from Thailand.’

She must have realised, thought Fredrika. And been scared.

‘Did you know she was there? In Thailand, I mean?’

There was a short fit of coughing, and it sounded almost as if Måns had put down the receiver.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re not in touch very often these days…’

But she trusted you, Måns.

‘What did she want help with?’

‘Getting hold of Jakob. And sorting out her trip home.’

She could hear him snuffling.

‘But I wasn’t, like, in a fit state to help her with anything like that.’

‘Is that what you told her?’

A sigh.

‘No. And I didn’t tell her that her dad was dead. Couldn’t bloody well bring myself to. Not on the phone.’

‘So what did you do, then?’ asked Fredrika, feeling exasperated on Karolina’s behalf.

‘I rang my brother, he’s good at getting things done,’ Måns said in a feeble voice. ‘And asked Karolina to wait. But by the time I rang back, something must have happened, because she wasn’t answering her mobile any longer.’

‘Did she send any emails?’

‘She might have – I don’t check them all that often.’

Fredrika found herself breathing in the same, strained way as Måns.

‘And what about your brother?’ she said, almost whispering, and unaccountably afraid of bursting into tears. ‘What did he do?’

‘He just rang back and told me there wasn’t much he could do, and she’d have to buy a new air ticket home. He advised me not to tell her about Jakob over the phone.’

Sensible, thought Fredrika. Sensible brother.

And she asked one last question.

‘What does your brother do?’

Her follow-up question remained hanging in the air, unsaid. Is he a druggie in rehab, too?

‘You might know him,’ said Måns. ‘He’s a policeman.’

Fredrika had to grin at her own unwarranted prejudice. But the grin froze into a grimace as Måns went on:

‘His name’s Viggo. Viggo Tuvesson.’

Feeling as if he was moving with the same momentum as a goods train on a straight stretch of track, a determined Peder strode the last few metres to the interview room where Sven Ljung was waiting. His CID colleague, Stefan Westin, who was taking the formal lead in the interview, told him the arrest had all gone very quietly. Elsie and Sven were sitting having coffee when the police rang at the door, almost as if they were expecting someone to come and fetch them. Elsie looked tearful as they took her husband out of the flat, but had not protested out loud.

‘She seemed pretty bloody resigned,’ was the way Stefan Westin put it.

Expectations of the impending interview were running high. Peder felt a distinct tightening of his chest as he entered the room and shook Sven Ljung’s hand.

He felt enormous relief that he and not Joar had been entrusted with this interview by Alex. He had to regain some of the ground he had recently lost. He also knew that within the organisation he needed people to have more confidence in him. As things stood, it was too easy to despise him and discount him. Must, must, must do better.

Stefan Westin took charge as they began the interview with Sven Ljung. Having never met Sven before, Peder was struck by how tired and old the man looked. He took a surreptitious glance at his paperwork. According to his notes, Sven was not yet even sixty-five. Still relatively young, in Peder’s eyes. But there was something about the older man. He looked sad and distressed.

As if in mourning, after some heavy, secret loss.

Stefan Westin’s voice broke into his thoughts.

‘You reported your car stolen ten days ago, Sven. Have you any idea who could have taken it?’

Sven said nothing.

Peder raised an eyebrow. He had seen that sort of silence before, during the interview with Tony Svensson. If they had gone and brought in yet another person scared into silence by God knows who, it was going to be a tough and not particularly fruitful interview.

Sven started to talk.

‘No, none at all.’

The room fell silent again.

‘But are you sure it was stolen?’ asked Stefan.

Sven nodded slowly.

‘Yes.’

‘How did you come to discover it was missing?’

‘I needed it on the Friday morning, nearly two weeks ago. And it wasn’t there in the street where I’d left it the day before.’

He suddenly looked much smaller. Deflated.

‘We’ve got compelling evidence that your car was involved in two aggravated robberies of security vans, and a murder, during the time you say it was stolen,’ announced Stefan Westin, and Sven turned pale. ‘Would you like to tell me where you were at the following times?’

Sven had to think about it when he was confronted with the various dates. He said that on each of them he had been at home in the flat with his wife. Just the two of them.

Stefan pretended to be digesting what Sven had just said.

‘Yusuf, do you know him?’ he asked, referring to the man run over at the university.

Sven shook his head.

‘No.’

The chair legs scraped across the floor as Stefan Westin pulled himself up to the table and leant across it.

‘But we know he rang you,’ he said patiently. ‘Several times.’

‘Perhaps he was just somebody you knew and that’s all there is to it?’ Peder prompted when Sven said nothing.

‘That’s right,’ said Stefan. ‘Someone you knew, who just happened to get run over by your car outside the university. I mean, these things do happen, don’t they?’

He looked at Peder and put up his hands.

Then Sven could not hold back his tears.

Silent, rather dignified tears.

Time stood still and Peder scarcely dared to move.

‘I swear I haven’t seen the car since it went missing,’ Sven said finally.

‘We believe you, Sven,’ said Stefan. ‘But we don’t buy your story that you don’t know who took it. We scarcely even buy that it was stolen at all; we think you lent it. More or less voluntarily.’

‘And reported it stolen to rule yourself out as a suspect,’ Peder went on mildly.

A voice and tone that he had previously reserved for his sons. And Jimmy.

The thought of Jimmy hit him like a bolt from the blue. Christ, how many days since they last spoke? Jimmy had been trying to get through, hadn’t he? And Peder hadn’t taken the call, or several calls in fact.

The elderly man on the other side of the table wiped the tears from his cheeks and a resolute look came over him.

‘I truly don’t know who took the car, or what for.’

‘Or you do know, but daren’t tell,’ Stefan said bluntly.

Or don’t want to, thought Peder. Out of loyalty.

‘But you ought to be able to tell us how you knew this Yusuf,’ he said out loud.

Sven considered this.

‘He got my number from some, er, mutual acquaintances. But it was a mistake. I wasn’t the one he wanted.’

Stefan and Peder pricked up their ears. Mutual acquaintances?

‘And what are their names?’

Another hesitation.

‘Jakob Ahlbin.’

His eyes were shifty, but his voice was steady.

He’s lying so well he’s convinced himself, thought Peder.

‘Never on your life,’ said Stefan in such a hard voice that Sven blanched again.

And as Sven continued to sit there in silence, Stefan said quietly:

‘You’ll gain nothing but the odd hour or minute from stalling the interview like this. Wouldn’t it be a relief just to tell us the whole story straight out?’

Sven’s eyes filled up again.

‘It would take a damned long time,’ he said under his breath.

Peder and Stefan leant back ostentatiously in their chairs.

‘We’ve got all the time in the world, Sven.’

It began when Jakob Ahlbin talked of starting to offer refuge to illegal migrants again. Johanna Ahlbin went through the roof and Sven and Jakob fell out badly after Sven suggested he could make a lot of money out of it. Jakob called Sven a selfish fool and Sven retorted by calling Jakob cowardly and self-effacing.

‘I needed money,’ admitted Sven. ‘I always have, at least ever since Måns’ addiction got out of hand. His antisocial habits have cost us vast sums. His stealing and embezzlement have driven us to distraction, but we never had the heart to shut our door to him. Once he even managed to convince himself, and me, that he was getting better and needed some money to start a business. But that all fell apart, of course, and his mother and I didn’t know which way to turn after we lost several hundred thousand.’

He went on wearily.

‘It had never occurred to me that there was money to be made from Jakob’s activities, from hiding refugees. But I came to realise it must be possible, since the people who came over had paid so much for the trip itself, and I thought they must surely have assets with them when they got here. So I put the idea to a good friend… and we started up.’

He turned his head away to cough.

‘We hid the refugees in remote holiday cottages that we could rent at a cheaper price than they paid us.’

‘Did it bring in a lot of money?’ asked Peder.

‘Yes, but still not enough,’ Sven said sadly.

‘Who were you in partnership with?’ asked Stefan.

Another bit of information Sven was reluctant to reveal. And when the answer finally came, it was one they should have expected, but Peder realised he was still shocked.

‘Ragnar Vinterman.’

Stefan and Peder sat dumbfounded and wide-eyed as Sven stumbled on through his story.

‘Ragnar wanted to expand the operation because he needed even more money. He’d lost a lot on bad investments and property speculation abroad. But I felt, well, I felt I couldn’t support his new idea. So I said I was pulling out. It wasn’t just that I felt it was morally wrong, it was a damn risky proposition calling for a lot more people to be involved. Smugglers, reliable interpreters, document forgers.’

Sven lapsed into silence.

Peder sensed they were nearing a point in the story at which it was going to be harder to get any more out of Sven.

‘And how did Ragnar react when you said you wanted out?’

‘He was livid.’

‘What was the expanded operation that he was suggesting and you didn’t want to be in on?’

Anxiety and stress were taking over Sven’s body.

‘Refugee smuggling,’ he said.

Peder held his breath.

‘In a new way.’

‘What does that mean, “a new way”?’ Stefan demanded, but Peder kept his cool.

Here it comes, he was hoping. The last bit of our jigsaw puzzle.

And now Sven had started to talk, it was as if he could not stop, though he did navigate very skilfully round all the points where he should have provided more detail. Names, for example.

‘Ragnar thought it cost an appalling amount for a refugee to get from, say, Iraq or Somalia to Sweden, and that one ought to be able to lure in selected individuals by offering them an easier way of getting to Sweden.’

‘And the aim of that would be what?’ asked Stefan, looking sceptical. ‘It all sounds remarkably generous.’

A joyless laugh from Sven echoed round the interview room.

‘Generous,’ he repeated, looking irate. ‘Believe me, for a man of the cloth Ragnar Vinterman shows exceptionally poor understanding of what that word means. No, Ragnar’s plan was to entice individual refugees over here, who would get in on false documents and then commit crimes to order. Special, hand-picked individuals with a background in the military forces. Then they’d be sent home again, and no one would ever be able to catch the perpetrators of the crimes or trace their link to us.’

‘The security van robberies that have been keeping us busy in recent months,’ began Stefan, and Sven nodded eagerly.

Peder was familiar with the robberies. Minutely planned, and accompanied by violence that was in an entirely different league from the kind generally used in robberies like that.

‘I refused to be part of that hateful business, but when I saw the news reports of the robberies I realised it was up and running anyway.’

A new line creased Stefan’s brow.

‘You said the plan was to send the refugees home again?’

Sven nodded.

‘So why, in at least two cases, have they been found dead in the Stockholm area?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Sven, looking scared stiff.

‘You must have had contact with Ragnar Vinterman about this since,’ Peder persisted.

Sven nodded again.

‘But only when Ragnar came round to make sure I was going to keep my mouth shut. And when Yusuf rang me. He got my number from someone in the network who thought I was still part of it. Ragnar saw to all that.’

Something must have gone horribly wrong, Peder thought to himself as he totted up the grand total, the crescendo of violence and death that Ragnar Vinterman’s business had generated in the past two weeks.

‘What about Jakob Ahlbin, then?’ he asked. ‘Did he know any of this was going on?’

Sven met his gaze with a pained expression.

‘No, we didn’t tell him what we were starting. But I think…’

They waited.

‘I’m afraid he sniffed out the truth even so. And that naïve good-for-nothing evidently went to Ragnar and said he’d heard rumours that a new smuggling network had established itself in Sweden.’

‘A network supposedly much more generous than the rest,’ said Peder.

‘Exactly,’ said Sven.

‘And that set everything in motion,’ Stefan summarised.

‘I think that must be what happened,’ said Sven. ‘But I don’t know anything definitely.’

Stefan waited a moment and then tried again.

‘Who the heck was it that took your car, Sven?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘There’s not a cat in hell’s chance Ragnar did the whole thing on his own. Who else was with him?’ asked Peder.

But Sven’s mouth was sealed now, and the two interviewers realised they were coming to the end of the road.

‘If anybody’s threatened you…’ Peder began.

Sven closed up like a clam.

Peder decided to try a new tack.

‘According to the police report that was made at the time you and Elsie found Jakob and Marja’s bodies, an officer called Viggo Tuvesson was first on the scene. Why didn’t you tell us he was your son?’

‘It didn’t seem necessary,’ said Sven.

‘According to information we’ve recently received, Viggo went to Marja and Jakob’s after a call that you and Elsie made direct to his mobile. Why didn’t you ring the usual emergency number?’

Sven sighed.

‘It was so much easier to ring Viggo direct.’

‘Is he part of Ragnar Vinterman’s network?’ Peder asked bluntly, and Sven turned pale again.

‘I can’t imagine he would be,’ Sven said quietly, but both Peder and Stefan could see he was prevaricating.

Peder decided to pile on the pressure with another question.

‘Johanna or Karolina Ahlbin, then? Were either of them part of it?’

Sven shrank even further and turned even paler.

‘Another question I can’t answer,’ he said in a muted voice.

‘And Marja,’ persisted Peder, as it dawned on him what a ghastly situation must have confronted Jakob in the last hours of his life. ‘Was she in on it, too?’

Sven merely shook his head.

‘Who was it then, Sven?’ Peder said exasperatedly. ‘Who was it that murdered Marja and Jakob, or had them murdered?’

Silence.

With some effort, Peder found a gentler way of expressing himself.

‘Are you scared, Sven?’

The older man nodded mutely.

Then he sat back in his chair, saying nothing.

There were ways of getting information even without the cooperation of Sven Ljung. Going back over the analysis of telephone data the police had been working on throughout the investigation, new contacts could be established now that more telephone numbers had been identified. Marja had rung Ragnar Vinterman a number of times, even quite late at night when it seemed unlikely they were discussing work-related matters. And when new lists of traffic to and from Ragnar Vinterman’s number finally came in after an urgent request to his phone company, it was possible to link Vinterman both to the man killed outside the university and to Muhammad in Skärholmen, victim of the Sunday evening shooting.

Two telephone numbers to unregistered pay-as-you-go accounts recurred in all the telephone lists and this, combined with the fact that neither Johanna nor Karolina Ahlbin featured among the contacts, was a source of frustration to the team.

‘That bloody Viggo Tuvesson from the Norrmalm force isn’t here either,’ thundered Alex Recht when they were all assembled in the Den with cups of coffee in their hands at about half past five that evening. ‘We’ve nothing on him beyond the fact that he’s been in touch with Tony Svensson now and then. And the fact that he’s Sven and Elsie’s son.’

‘He couldn’t give any plausible explanation for his contact with Tony Svensson though, could he?’ Fredrika added.

Alex muttered something inaudible and gave her a hard stare.

‘Shouldn’t you go home now?’

She shook her head.

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll stay a bit longer.’

Peder was fiddling with his watch and looking worried.

‘Do you need to get home?’ Alex asked him.

Peder looked dejected.

‘Well I was supposed to be eating with Ylva and the boys tonight, but…’

‘Go!’ Alex bellowed, making his younger colleague jump. ‘Go home and eat. I’ll ring if I need you back.’

Light feet bore Peder out of the room and he shut the door behind him.

Two seconds later he opened it again.

‘Thanks.’

‘Do we think we can now say for certain why Jakob Ahlbin died?’ Joar asked rhetorically.

‘No,’ said Fredrika, just as Alex said ‘Yes’.

They looked at each other in surprise.

‘He was murdered to keep him quiet, just as you thought,’ Alex said irritably and glared, but Fredrika shook her head. ‘The only question is who did it.’

‘But what about Marja?’ she objected. ‘Why did she have to die as well? I mean, we’re also working on the hypothesis that she was part of Vinterman’s network.’

Alex looked bedraggled. In conjunction with the CID he had had to apply for immediate surveillance of Ragnar Vinterman, to make sure he did not try to get away if and when he found out Sven Ljung had been arrested.

‘Maybe Marja’s death wasn’t intentional,’ Alex said sternly.

Fredrika pursed her lips and said nothing.

‘OK, let’s go back over this,’ Joar suggested firmly. ‘Who do we think had a motive for murdering Jakob, or Jakob and Marja?’

‘Either the Vinterman network or one of the daughters,’ said Fredrika.

‘You mean Karolina?’ said Alex.

‘No, I mean either of them. I’m keeping an open mind until we’ve heard the other version.’

‘All right…’ began Alex, but was interrupted by Ellen’s knock at the door.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but there’s an urgent fax from the Thai police.’

Alex read it with a look of concern.

‘Damn. The Thai authorities are pretty sure Karolina Ahlbin left Bangkok yesterday evening on a direct flight to Stockholm. She was travelling on someone else’s passport. They got some information when they raided a known people smuggler who operates out of Bangkok.’

Anxiety spread through the room.

‘What does that mean for us?’ Fredrika asked quietly.

‘That if they’re right, she’s already back in Sweden,’ Alex said dully. ‘And that whatever her role in all this has been, she’s no doubt extremely worked up. Heaven help Johanna when she finds her.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Joar under his breath.

‘But where will she go?’ Fredrika asked agitatedly. ‘She’s more or less on the run, wanted for serious crimes.’

Alex gave her a long look.

‘We’ve no choice now, we’ll have to sound the alert and issue her description. For her own sake, if nothing else.’

Time had finally caught up with them, and that was all there was to it. And she knew Sven would try until the very last minute to avoid shouldering the responsibility he would have to take. So Elsie stood up resolutely from the kitchen table where she had been sitting since the police took Sven away, and went into the hall.

I should have done the right thing ages ago, she thought grimly. But they say it’s never too late to put right what you once did wrong.

As she struggled into her heavy winter coat, her eye fell on one of the family photos hanging on the wall. It had amazed her that the police had been in their flat three times, and failed to recognise Viggo in the picture. But then, Viggo had been a different man then, a man with an undamaged face.

Elsie felt like weeping.

His role must be clear to them now, she realised, as she pulled on her woolly hat. Even if they didn’t know precisely what he did, they must know that he had a part in all these horrors.

She stroked the picture with trembling fingers. Once upon a time they’d been a proper family, a unit in which everyone cared about everyone else and wanted what was best for them. But it seemed so long ago, now. They had long since lost Måns to his addiction, and as for Viggo… She let out a heavy sigh. He had always chosen the more difficult path. It had surprised them that he wanted to join the police, but they were also baffled by his reluctance to let the doctors try to do something about the scar that so disfigured his face.

‘It’s my trademark,’ he told them when the matter first came up between them.

‘Says who?’ Elsie asked doubtfully.

‘The one I love,’ he replied, and then turned away and got on with something else.

It had been hopeless trying to get any more out of him. He refused to say who he had met, and was adamant that he had no intention of letting his parents meet her. Months went by and became years. They heard no more about her, and assumed it had ended.

But Elsie knew her son and over time a suspicion started to take root. With a pounding heart she had posted herself near the front entrance to his block of flats last summer, and her suspicions were confirmed when he emerged hand in hand with a woman Elsie would have recognised from half a mile away.

‘Nothing ever comes free with that woman,’ she had tried telling her son. ‘Don’t go thinking she’s who she pretends to be. Her mind is sick, Viggo. As sick as they come.’

But he refused to listen and said he had a right to go his own way. What was a modern-day mother supposed to say to that?

Elsie resolutely put her keys in her handbag and opened the front door. She hoped the police hadn’t all gone home for the day. Above all she hoped that the woman detective, the pregnant one, would still be there. She seemed to understand things even without Elsie saying them.

I thought I was looking after them, sparing them from the worst, she thought wearily. When in fact I was just paving the way for our downfall.

She stepped onto the landing and raised her eyes.

She heard herself gasp to see who was standing there.

‘You?’ she just had time to say before surprisingly strong arms bundled her back into the flat.

The snow that had fallen in the course of the afternoon made the road surface slippery, and if he had given it a thought, he might have pulled over and spent the night at a hotel. But his thoughts were locked onto the one thing that felt worth dwelling on just then – the fact that he was going to seek out his father-in-law, thump his fist on the table and be rid of that tyranny at last – and he kept driving. He knew the country roads of Småland; they changed little over the years. He passed through villages and small towns and felt tears come to his eyes as memories he had thought gone for ever forced their way to the surface, punching through his soul.

I’ve been a fool.

He had made two important calls before setting off from Uppsala. The first was to his employer, saying he would not be in for a few days. The other was to Eva, to tell her that he would be leaving her when he got back from his trip. He had been surprised by her silence, and her closing remark had stunned him:

‘Aren’t you going to miss me at all, Spencer?’

Miss.

The word made his heart almost break.

I’ve missed more in these past years than you could ever imagine, he thought as he hung up.

But in the warm bubble of the car he was missing nothing and no one.

‘You’re at a crossroads and have to decide which way to go,’ his father said, when he moved from Lund all those years ago. ‘I can’t really make out what it looks like from where you’re standing and you don’t seem to want to tell me, but there’s one thing I want you to know – the day you need somebody to talk to, I’m here to listen.’

A whole lifetime had gone by since Spencer rebuffed his father, and he had still to discover the full extent of the damage it had done.

I was greedy, he admitted to himself. I wanted everything and my reward was less than half. Because I deserved no more.

At one point in the slow hours of the drive, his thoughts went to Fredrika Bergman. She pretended she did not like him opening the car door for her, though it was a damn lie that she would accept anything else. What would everyday life with her be like? Did they really want to become fixtures in each other’s lives, or would they discover what so many other people in their situation do when they finally get the chance to move in together? That living with each other was only an attractive proposition as long as it remained unattainable? People were good at fooling themselves that way. They never missed what they already had, which meant they didn’t appreciate it, either.

Spencer felt slightly nervous at the thought. Maybe Fredrika, being so honest, would declare that she didn’t want him near her in the way he was now planning.

What the devil will I do then? Spencer wondered listlessly. Where the hell do I go then?

Perhaps it was the weight of all his brooding that made him careless, and he lost control of the car. It took him a few seconds to realise it had lost traction on the snowy, icy road surface, and the skid took him onto the other side of the carriageway. A moment later, the crunching shriek of colliding vehicles resounded along the forest road beneath a black night sky from which the snow just kept on falling. Witnesses saw them meet, buckle and be thrown off the road, where they crashed into the hard trunks of trees that had been standing along the roadside for many, many years.

Then came silence.

When it got to six o’clock, Fredrika went to the staff room to heat up a pie. Alex came in after her and it struck her that he seemed reluctant to go home.

‘We can’t get hold of Johanna Ahlbin,’ he complained exasperatedly.

‘Not even on that new mobile number she gave us?’

‘No.’

The microwave pinged and Fredrika took out her dinner.

‘Might be just as well to send a radio car to her flat to check everything’s okay,’ suggested Fredrika.

‘I’d already thought of that,’ said Alex. ‘They just reported back that there was no answer when they rang the doorbell and the place seemed to be in darkness. They rang at a few neighbours’ doors, but no one had seen or heard anything.’

Alex took a seat opposite Fredrika as she sat down to eat.

‘Why wouldn’t Sven Ljung give us the names of the other people in the Vinterman circle?’ he said, thinking aloud.

Fredrika chewed and swallowed. The pie had gone rubbery in the microwave and tasted disgusting.

‘Either because he’s scared, or for reasons of personal loyalty.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Alex. ‘It could easily be that he’s trying to protect someone, and hasn’t been scared into keeping his mouth shut at all.’

‘His son Viggo, for example,’ said Fredrika. ‘A father shielding his son, that’s pretty classic.’

Alex nodded, his head seeming heavy.

‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘You know, I talked to that Viggo and he didn’t breathe a word about being the Ljungs’ son or growing up virtually next door to Jakob and Marja Ahlbin and playing with their daughters. He even claimed he’d never met them.’

Fredrika quietly set down her knife and fork.

‘We definitely know Karolina “played” a great deal with their son Måns,’ she began.

‘Yes?’ said Alex.

‘Do we know how much the girls had to do with Viggo?’

Alex was slow to answer.

‘Not sure,’ he eventually responded. ‘I don’t think technical has managed to get through his phone lists today; they didn’t come in until later.’

Another bit of pie was forced down Fredrika’s throat.

‘I think we’re going to find something there,’ she said. ‘I reckon this whole thing is a lot better thought through and structured than we can see as yet. I checked when Viggo changed his surname, for example, and he did it the year he went to police training college.’

‘Good grief,’ exclaimed Alex. ‘Could he have been in on it from the word go, when they started taking money for hiding illegal migrants in 2004?’

‘Of course he could,’ said Fredrika. ‘And to avoid attracting attention if his father got caught, he made sure to keep his distance from the family by changing his name.’

‘Which clearly worked pretty well,’ Alex muttered.

‘Not at all,’ Fredrika contradicted him. “We’re sitting here now, knowing it failed.’

Alex gave a lopsided smile.

‘But we couldn’t be any further from arresting the damned man if we tried.’

‘Can we put surveillance on him?’

Her boss’s smile grew broader.

‘They’ve been on him for the past hour,’ he said. ‘He’s sitting tight in his flat, apparently.’

‘Awaiting instructions, perhaps?’

‘Could well be,’ Alex agreed.

He answered after the second ring.

‘I’m setting off now,’ she said.

‘Okay. You want me to come with you?’

She went quiet.

‘Not yet,’ she said eventually, but with such hesitation in her voice that he knew straight away he wouldn’t be able to stop himself going after her.

He felt frightened for her, the way he always did when she was reckless.

‘It could be dangerous,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ she said in the same muted tone.

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘Always.’

They lapsed into silence and the stress of it all made him grind his teeth. He had to ask.

‘Did you go round to Mum’s?’

He heard her stop in mid-step.

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

Another pause.

‘She wasn’t in.’

‘Damn. So she’s one step ahead after all…’

She interrupted him, and said firmly:

‘We’ll just have to hope for the best.’

‘And prepare for the worst,’ he finished.

He sat looking out of the window for a long time after she rang off. His jaws were clenched as he came to his decision. He was much better equipped for physical combat than she could ever be, that was what made them such a successful team. She was the strategist, drawing up the guidelines for their work, while he made sure any problems that arose were dealt with and got out of the way. Time after time.

He took the decision on pure impulse. He was not just going to stay in his flat while the one he loved fought for her life in the theatre of war, where she had suffered such injury all that time ago and learned to view every stranger with the greatest caution and suspicion.

Fredrika was just putting things away and finishing for the day when the call came through from the switchboard. An Elsie Ljung was down at reception looking for her. She was very agitated and said it was urgent.

Fredrika had decided that it really was time to go home and devote some time to herself and her unborn child. She had started feeling that something was not quite right when she and Alex were chatting in the staff room. The baby seemed to be keeping still in a new way, as if summoning up the strength for something imminent.

‘You’re not thinking of coming out now, are you?’ she murmured to herself.

But her uneasiness about the baby was still overshadowed by her worry at not being able to reach Spencer. The phone just rang unanswered whenever she tried. The exhaustion in her body and mind were inhibiting her efforts to come up with a logical explanation. He had been so terribly secretive before he left, not like himself at all.

The receiver weighed heavily in her hand as she spoke to the switchboard operator. Elsie Ljung had taken it upon herself to come to the police out of working hours. Was there something she wanted to get off her chest?

She pulled herself together and went in to tell Alex.

‘Shall we go down together?’ he asked. ‘I’m okay to stay a bit longer.’

‘Don’t know,’ Fredrika said dubiously. ‘She apparently asked to speak to me on my own. I’ve got a feeling she might have something important to tell me.’

‘I’ll wait here then.’

With a slight nod, Fredrika came out of his room to go down and meet Elsie. A glance out of the window as she left showed thick snow coming down. The regal capital was clothed in white again. And a thought came into Fredrika’s mind: Nice not to be out on the roads tonight. They could be really treacherous.

Karolina felt she was only keeping the car on the road by pure strength of will. She had driven this route so many times, longing to get there and be enfolded in the warm walls of the house and all its memories. They were mixed memories, of course, some of them terrible ones that she would gladly have written out of history if she could. Her father had said it was impossible to try to change the past, but you could always improve your own way of relating to it. Bruises were an indication of where you’d been, not where you were going.

The memory of her father stung and smarted, bringing tears to her eyes. How had it all gone so wrong? How had they been forced to pay such a high price?

She thought she knew. Not precisely, but more or less. As her plane landed at Arlanda that morning, she suddenly knew that the disaster that had befallen her parents could not possibly be anything to do with her trip or her father’s special interest in migrant issues. The insight pulsed through her body as the wheels of the plane bounced along the tarmac.

This is personal, she thought.

The moment she understood that to be the case, she also realised who she was up against. Nothing is more of an asset in battle than knowing your opponent. And of all the opponents it could have been, there was none she felt she knew better.

Once again she rang the number from which she had tried, in blind panic and as ultimate proof of her utter naïvety, to get help in Bangkok. And again it rang and rang until it switched over to voicemail. But she knew – she sensed – her enemy at the other end, knew she was sitting there with her hand on the phone and not answering. Her voice was cold when she finally spoke:

‘I’ll meet you where it all started. Come alone.’

For the first time in his adult life, Alex did not want to go home. His chest tightened and he thought of his father, who had survived a heart attack a few years before.

‘It’s inherited, you know,’ he had warned his son. ‘Look after yourself, Alex, and listen to your body when it tries to tell you something.’

But work had to take priority in his mind over worries about his health. There had been a quick call from Lena, wondering when he would be home.

‘Later,’ muttered Alex, hanging up with that nagging feeling of things being all wrong, but still putting off the moment of truth.

The surveillance officers keeping watch on Viggo Tuvesson rang in straight afterwards. Tuvesson had left the flat and was on his way to Kungsholmen by car.

‘Maybe he’s coming into work,’ Alex said doubtfully, looking at the time, which was just after seven. ‘But don’t let him out of sight.’

A few minutes later they rang again. Viggo Tuvesson seemed to have no plans to come to HQ; he was heading out of town on Drottningholmsvägen.

Alex’s first thought was of Ragnar Vinterman.

‘He’s on his way to Bromma,’ he said excitedly. ‘Keep in touch with the team in Bromma and see if Vinterman’s on his way out, too.’

But Vinterman was still safely ensconced in his vicarage and the surveillance team there had nothing new to report.

It was worrying Alex that Johanna Ahlbin seemed to have disappeared off the police radar again. It might mean she had run into trouble herself, but Alex felt in his bones that something else lay behind it.

He looked at the piles of reports strewn around his desk like a broken-up jigsaw puzzle. A vicar who wanted to do everything right, but who had got on the wrong side of virtually his whole family. Two more men of the cloth who had found themselves with such severe financial problems that nothing was holy to them any more. A policeman so deep in the shit that it was hard to understand how he had been able to stay within the system for so long. And two sisters who both appeared to have lost everything one midsummer’s eve, fifteen years ago.

Alex found himself thinking back to his visit to the Ekerö house with Fredrika. The dated pictures, young Johanna choosing a different path, away from the family. Maybe along with her mother. Karolina, staying on in the happy family circle despite the violent attack she had suffered.

Or could it have been the other way round, Alex wondered, with Johanna as the rape victim, turning her back on the family as a result. And Karolina becoming her father’s favourite.

His pulse started to race. But who had carried out the actual murder? The crime scene investigation had given them not a single lead; all the prints and other traces led back to the couple themselves, to Elsie and Sven Ljung or to police officers and ambulance crew at the scene. And at the time of the murder, both Johanna and Karolina were verifiably out of the country.

Alex glanced through the crime scene report again, his brain revving fast. Could it simply be the case, after all, that Sven Ljung had let himself into the flat and murdered Jakob and Marja? Alex knew that was wrong before he even finished thinking it. His brain locked instead onto the most obvious name. The man who could have got away with the whole thing if only he had not been so careless as to use his work telephone when he was drawing up the plans for the appalling crimes he was prepared to commit.

The telephone on Alex’s desk rang so loudly that he almost cried out.

‘He’s not going to Bromma, either,’ surveillance reported.

‘Where is he heading, then?’

‘To Ekerö.’

And that gave Alex the last clue he needed, and he realised with horror where the Ahlbin sisters must be.

As if in a trance, he ended the call and rang the central command unit. He asked them to send all available radio cars to the Ahlbin family’s holiday home at Ekerö.

Looking back, there was no clear dividing line that evening between the time when Fredrika felt secure in her existence and the time when her whole life began to disintegrate. It was an irony of fate that she actually postponed the moment herself by not taking the first call that came through from Spencer’s home number.

I’ve been waiting all day, so now he can jolly well wait while I talk to Elsie Ljung, she decided angrily.

Alex rang her on her mobile just as she was getting a glass of water for herself and the visitor she had escorted to an interview room. He updated her on the situation in a few brisk sentences, warning her that they could be in for a very nasty end to the evening. There was no need for him to say it; Fredrika could imagine all too well how a confrontation between the two sisters might end.

‘Are you going out there?’ she asked.

‘I’m in the garage with Joar and a couple of CID officers,’ Alex replied. ‘We’re going with the flying squad. You concentrate on teasing out of Elsie how Viggo fits into all this. And try to get a handle on which sister it is we need to be most wary of.’

‘They both seem equally disturbed,’ mumbled Fredrika, sounding more casual than she meant to.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Alex, his breathing sounding rather shallow. ‘I think Johanna was lying about which of them was raped that summer, and I think she may have hated her family ever since.’

They were about to end the call when Alex added:

‘If I haven’t made it clear before now, I just want you to know I’m going to miss you in the team when you go off on maternity leave.’

As if it was something he felt he needed to say before he got into the flying squad minibus and left HQ. For some reason it reduced Fredrika almost to tears, and she had to compose herself for a moment before going back to Elsie.

The last thing she did before she opened the door of the interview room was to turn off her mobile phone.

‘So,’ she said to Elsie as she put the water down on the table. ‘What brings you to see us this evening?’

Like many good storytellers, Elsie had a wonderful memory for detail to fall back on as she told her tale to Fredrika.

‘We went out to Ekerö to surprise them that midsummer’s eve,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Marja and Jakob had told us, you know, about the way it was usually just them, just the family, but our plans fell through that year and the boys got on so well with their girls, so we thought we were bound to be welcome if we just turned up.’

They had been surprised all right. Elsie’s memories of that evening were vivid.

‘Driving back later that night, we knew things we could never have imagined about the way Jakob and Marja lived. We didn’t have a clue that he hid refugees like that, and we didn’t know about his medical condition, either. It was Marja’s decision not to ring a doctor or the police; she said as long as the girls got away from the holiday house, it would only be a matter of time before wounds healed and memories faded. It was complete madness.’

Elsie looked furious and Fredrika felt a sense of exasperation coming over her, too. But she had learned not to judge people too hastily or too harshly. Who knew what experiences from her own past life had made Marja act as she did?

‘But surely it was only one of the girls who was… injured?’ Fredrika began, hearing Elsie talk about them in the plural.

‘That depends how you look at it,’ Elsie said tersely. ‘Karolina was a physical mess, of course, but Johanna was beside herself. It was as if her whole world had fallen to pieces when she realised her parents weren’t thinking of any more drastic measures than just getting the refugees out of the house as soon as possible and clearing off back into town.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘So it was Karolina who was raped, after all?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Elsie, ‘and later, when she was grown up and fell in love with our Måns, he and she had a lot of private chats about what happened that evening.’

A look of great sadness came over her as she described the time when Karolina was coming and going as a daughter-in-law in their home.

‘Karolina was awfully good at expressing things in words,’ Elsie said, the tears coming into her eyes. ‘When she was a child, she clearly didn’t know what to make of the “guests in the basement”, as her parents called them. And in those first years after the rape she very naturally felt a burning hatred of every immigrant she saw. But then something happened which changed all that.’

Elsie looked unsure of herself.

‘You must say if I’m telling you things you already know.’

‘I’m more than happy to listen,’ Fredrika said, working out in her head how many minutes away from Ekerö Alex must be by now.

‘Karolina was involved in a car accident just after she took her driving test,’ Elsie said. ‘She was visiting relations in Skåne and the car skidded on black ice when she was going across a bridge. The car went straight through the side of the bridge and fell into the river. She’d never have got out if it hadn’t been for a young man who saw it happen. He threw himself in after her and fought like a tiger to get the car door open and get her out.’

‘And this young man was an immigrant?’

Elsie smiled through her tears.

‘From Palestine. After that, Karolina couldn’t let herself carry on feeling the way she had done. She accepted what had happened that summer and came over to her father’s side. Maybe because she’d done everything she could for several years to show how much she hated him and blamed him. And believe me, Jakob paid a high price.’

‘It made him ill?’

‘Extremely. It was the first time he was so bad that he had to be admitted for treatment. Marja was the only one who went to visit him.’

A suspicion began to take shape in Fredrika’s mind.

‘And Johanna?’

Elsie took a slow, deep breath.

‘Well her story’s really far more tragic than Karolina’s. You see, she was Daddy’s girl all the time she was growing up. And when Jakob let Karolina down so grotesquely after the rape – because however we choose to look at it, it was a sort of betrayal – Johanna fought her sister’s corner. Year after year. Until Karolina’s car accident and conversion. That left Johanna with nowhere to go. Her relationship with Jakob was in tatters, and suddenly her sister was Daddy’s favourite. I think Johanna felt cruelly let down.’

The photos in the Ekerö house came into Fredrika’s mind.

‘So she turned her back on the family,’ she murmured.

‘Yes, or at least, she only saw them sporadically. And it was when Jakob started talking about hiding refugees at the holiday house again that she decided to cross the line and become her family’s worst enemy.’

Fredrika frowned.

‘Like I told you last time we met, she went through the roof and said she never wanted to hear such a tasteless proposal again. And Marja agreed with her.’

Marja. The woman who sneaked into the library and sent threats to her own husband.

‘Jakob’s idea caused a huge amount of friction in the family,’ sighed Elsie. Jakob and Marja made a last desperate attempt to put things right by giving the girls the Ekerö house as a present. But it was already too late by then.’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Fredrika, unconsciously holding her breath.

Elsie looked at her hands and gave a little twist to her wedding ring.

‘He’d already lost Marja by then,’ she whispered. ‘She’d changed sides and started working with Ragnar Vinterman when he set up the new operation. But Jakob didn’t find that out until much later. And by then he was already staring into the abyss that Johanna and Viggo had spent so long getting ready for him.’

The clock seemed to stop. And Fredrika waited.

‘Viggo?’ she echoed out loud.

‘Johanna and our Viggo found each other on the quiet at about the same time as Jakob came up with the idea of restarting his old project. And that’s why I’m here,’ said Elsie. ‘Because Sven would never be capable of giving Viggo away to you lot, in spite of all he’s done to us and his brother.’

But there were other reasons, too, and Fredrika knew it.

‘And I came for Lina’s sake,’ Elsie confirmed in a husky voice. ‘Because I think something dreadful’s about to happen to that girl. You see, Viggo didn’t get interested in Johanna until later. It was Karolina he really wanted. And he couldn’t take it when she turned him down.’

‘She chose Måns in preference to Viggo?’

‘Yes, and they both paid for it. Viggo did all he could to push Måns even further into addiction and break up the relationship. And he won, in the end. Viggo told tales to Måns’ employer and he lost his job and had nothing to do but hang around at home all day. Viggo spread rumours about Måns too, presenting him to his friends in a bad light. Måns went downhill fast. Johanna had a hand in that, as well. Though her motive was really to get at Karolina rather than Måns.’

‘And then Viggo got together with Johanna, instead?’

‘Yes, once it was all over between Karolina and Måns. But they kept the relationship very discreet. They presumably thought it best to, considering all they were planning together. Even Marja didn’t know, although she was working with them on the refugee operation. They’d been together for several years before I realised they were a couple. And I didn’t say a word to anyone except Sven. We decided their relationship wasn’t really any of our business, and we’d just have to wait and see. I regret that now.’

Fredrika hesitated over what had to come next.

‘How would you describe the state of Johanna’s mental health?’

‘She’s sick,’ said Elsie. ‘Utterly sick. Definitely not the sort of woman I’d want as a daughter-in-law.’

‘Have you had any contact with Karolina over the past few days?’

It was Elsie’s turn to hesitate.

‘She came to find me,’ she said. ‘Today. She was worried about Måns and wanted to make sure he was all right. I tried to get her to see reason and hand herself over to the police, but she said she had something important to do first. She said she had to face the person who had destroyed her before she could move on. I think I know where they might be.’

‘So do we,’ said Fredrika, and thought to herself: they deceived Jakob and Marja and lots of other people. The murder of Jakob and Marja was never a matter of dangerous secrets and people needing to be silenced. It was just a clever front for the real motive: personal vengeance.

The house lay dark and deserted as Karolina parked the hired car in the driveway. Without the slightest hesitation, she opened the car door and got out into the snow. She tramped as quickly as she could round the house and in through the basement door. A few moments later she was back out again and unlocked the front door on the other side of the house. A wave of memories overpowered her as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her, still in the dark.

This was where the story had started, and this was where it would reach its conclusion.

First they had destroyed everything for her and Måns. Weakened him to a point where he could no longer be counted on, so any relationship with him became impossible. After that they had carried on working through their plan, so methodically and purposefully that it had scared her witless.

She moved towards the living room. She stretched out an arm and ran her fingertips along all those dear photographs as she passed them. She was the one who had once helped her mother put them up.

Everything had started falling apart right back when she was a child, she realised that now.

But there were other things she could not make head nor tail of, and she would demand answers from her sister about those, as soon as she turned up. Karolina crouched down by one of the big windows and scanned the darkness in front of the house. With all the lights off, she would be invisible to anybody trying to look in, but have a better view of the garden herself.

She kept a tight hold on the shotgun she had loaded in the basement, which was now resting in her lap. She was ready to meet her sister, any second now.

The flying squad minibus was having trouble gripping the slippery road surface, but the driver accelerated even so. Fredrika’s call came through to Alex when they were about ten minutes from the house.

‘Elsie’s confirmed almost everything we thought, and told me more besides,’ she reported. ‘Hiding the migrants was a joint project of Viggo and Sven’s from the word go, but unlike Sven, Viggo carried on in Ragnar Vinterman’s expanded operation. It was Viggo who took the Ljungs’ car and reported it stolen so they’d be in the clear if there were suspicions it had been used to commit a crime.’

‘Well I’ll be…’ began Alex.

‘There’s more,’ Fredrika broke in. ‘Elsie’s sure that Viggo killed Jakob and Marja and that he and Johanna staged the whole thing. They’ve been together for several years, but they didn’t let on to anybody. Oh, and it turns out it was Karolina who was raped at the holiday house, not Johanna.’

Fredrika paused for breath as Alex tried to slot all this new information into the tragic framework. Two brothers, two sisters. Two disintegrating families, and strong individuals who broke loose and demanded redress.

‘Could she tell you anything about Viggo’s reasons for murdering his girlfriend’s parents?’ he asked briskly.

‘Revenge,’ Fredrika said. ‘Viggo and Måns were with their parents on a surprise visit to Ekerö the evening Karolina was raped and heard all about it from Johanna. What nobody realised was that both boys were in love with the same girl, Karolina. To start with it wasn’t a problem because she didn’t want either of them. But later on, when she’d left home to study, she got interested in Måns. In a crazy attempt to outdo the competition, Viggo located the man who raped Karolina, who turned out still to be in the country.’

A gust of wind caught the minibus and tried to knock it off the road. Alex had to concentrate hard to hear what Fredrika was saying.

‘His confrontation with the rapist ended very violently: Viggo was knifed in the face and fled. He’s apparently had a terrible scar ever since.’

‘I thought it was a cleft-palate operation that had gone wrong,’ Alex said, bitterly recalling what Tony Svensson had said to Peder and Joar:

It’s not somebody like me you’re looking for… I haven’t got a name… just a fucking ugly face.

‘That was what everybody who met him later thought,’ Fredrika said eagerly. ‘And the family let them think it, because they were ashamed of the real reason for the scar. The incident was never reported to the police; Karolina’s rapist had too many motives for keeping out of judicial hands.’

‘I don’t suppose Karolina was very impressed by Viggo’s bit of bravado?’ Alex guessed.

‘No he wasn’t, and that seems to have been one of the things that pushed him into helping Johanna with her plan. He never forgave Karolina’s family, or his own, for condemning what he’d done. Johanna was part of the Vinterman network as well, and she got her mother to join, too, because Marja had strong objections to her husband’s idea of starting up his voluntary work again. She felt the refugees had cost her so much personally that she never wanted to help them for free again. Ragnar tempted her with money and I’m sure Johanna had some strong arguments, too.’

Fredrika swallowed.

‘Lots of people were damaged for life that midsummer eve.’

‘And Elsie and Sven knew this all along,’ Alex said dully.

‘We have to understand them,’ Fredrika said. ‘They’ve been fearing for their own lives since they found Jakob and Marja. The only thing they dared give us was their conviction that Jakob hadn’t done it himself. They hoped we’d find out the rest.’

Alex paused.

‘Good God, what a betrayal on Marja’s part,’ he said in a voice that Fredrika had never heard him use before.

‘I don’t think so, Alex,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Johanna convinced her mother there was no risk in the project. Maybe she played on her feelings of guilt about the past, too.’

‘And when she realised the full ghastliness of it…’

‘… it was too late. But she tried anyway. We know she sent those threats to Jakob, and I think we can assume she sent them with the best of intentions. She was trying to save what could still be saved.’

Alex stared out of the minibus window at the whirling snow. He thought ahead to the Ekerö house, where the sisters must be gearing up for their final battle.

‘She could have done more,’ he said sternly. ‘Then maybe she and Jakob would still be alive today.’

‘But they might not. She was a pawn in Johanna’s game, and she presumably wanted nothing better than to see her parents dead. She was just waiting for the right opportunity.’

Initially Karolina could not be sure if it was her sister walking up the road towards the house. She leant up against the window, pressing her forehead to the cold glass to try to see better. When the figure turned in at the driveway, Karolina’s heart missed a beat. It really was her sister.

She did not slow her steps as she walked. In fact she almost strode, very upright, with her long hair hanging loose down the back of her coat, across the garden and up the steps to the front door. Then Karolina heard her pause, and saw the door handle slowly press down. The door opened and Johanna stepped inside, tall and slender and covered in snow. As if she had known all along that Karolina was crouched on the floor by the big window, she slowly turned towards her.

The bright ceiling light went on as Johanna flicked the switch on the wall.

‘Sitting here in the dark?’ she said, observing her sister and the gun.

Karolina leapt to her feet, raising the weapon.

‘I need to know why,’ she said grimly, clutching the gun in her chilled hands.

Not once on all those hunting trips with her father had she ever dreamt she would have to use her skills to defend her own life one day. Against her own sister.

‘Betrayal.’

Karolina shook her head.

‘You’re sick. You’ve had your whole family wiped out and you have the gall to say you’re the one who feels betrayed.’

Her sister’s face twitched.

‘I did everything for you after that goddamn midsummer’s eve,’ she hissed. ‘Everything. I even had the daisy tattoo done as an everlasting reminder of what you’d been through. And what did you do? Turned your back on me and turned Dad against me.’

Karolina felt the tears prick her eyes.

‘You’ve never done anything for anyone but yourself, Johanna. And you turned Dad against you yourself.’

‘You’re lying,’ Johanna yelled with such force that Karolina flinched. ‘Just like the lie that you didn’t care about Måns or Viggo.’

‘We were so young,’ whispered Karolina impotently. ‘How can you still be blaming me for that?’

‘Viggo tried to take revenge for your sake,’ Johanna went on loudly. ‘And you thanked him by choosing his brother instead.’

Mention of Viggo frightened Karolina. She had not realised he was mixed up in all that happened, but of course he must be. Bit by bit the truth dawned on her, and she felt her strength draining away as the picture became clear.

‘So now you understand,’ Johanna said gently. ‘I must say you impress me, Lina. You not only extricated yourself from that unpleasant state of affairs in Thailand, you also managed to get back to Sweden and find out the truth.’

‘Måns,’ whispered Karolina.

‘Quite right,’ smiled Johanna. ‘It was stupid of you – very stupid, in fact – not to realise who Måns would turn to when you rang and asked him for help. We were one step ahead of you the whole way. I wanted you for once in your life to experience what it was like for me, invisible to everything and everyone.’

‘But you never were invisible,’ protested Karolina. ‘You were the one everybody could see. Good grief, I spent half my childhood hearing that I ought to be more like you.’

The air inside the house felt thick in the throat. Johanna was standing stock still, but for a repeated clenching and opening of her fists. She was seething with rage.

‘That’s exactly it. Half your childhood. Then things got better, didn’t they? But not for me. Nor for Viggo.’

Fear and fatigue made Karolina start to cry.

‘I thought this was all about that wretched new network of smugglers,’ she said through her tears, the gun shaking in her hands. ‘Drawing Mum into all this. How could you?’

Johanna’s face darkened still further at the sight of her sister’s tears.

‘I never intended forgiving any of you. Not ever. Believe me, everything that’s happened was going to happen sooner or later anyway. But when our fool of a father kept on sticking his nose in things that were none of his business, I have to admit it got more urgent than we’d originally planned. And it was so easy to pull the wool over Mum’s eyes, it was almost pathetic. She was completely convinced that only Dad was in danger.’

The room closed in as Johanna spoke. Johanna, who had both her parents murdered without feeling the slightest remorse. Karolina still could not quite accept how deranged her sister must be. Her desire for explanation was still not satisfied.

‘I read all about it in the papers,’ Karolina said. ‘And talked to Elsie. Between you all, you’ve murdered so many people.’

Johanna put her head on one side.

‘I do admit that more lives have been lost than we first calculated, but when people can’t stick to the simple rules of the game, it’s hard to be accountable for their actions. We expressly told them they weren’t to let on to anyone that they were going to Sweden, yet several of them still did precisely that. So we couldn’t send them home again.’

‘We? You and Viggo, you mean?’

Johanna sneered, but said nothing.

‘What were you thinking?’ said Karolina. ‘That Mum and Dad would die and I’d rot in jail in Thailand?’

‘I think you deserve some credit after putting us to such trouble,’ Johanna said in a businesslike tone. ‘We had hoped you’d be back home before we tackled Mum and Dad’s activities. But then we realised you’d sniffed out one of our most vital collaborators in Bangkok, and we had to take action.’

‘Just so you know, I didn’t realise how close I’d got.’

‘No, but that doesn’t really change anything, does it? You had to be dealt with on the spot, we decided that straight away. A challenge for us all, but a bit of imagination finds a solution to most things here in life. It was a piece of cake to shut down your email accounts, since you’d usefully provided Dad with your password and user name. Just think, he kept them in a notebook on his desk. So easy I was almost disappointed. And we had all the contacts we needed to make stuff happen in Bangkok. The mugging, shifting your gear to another hotel, putting the drugs in your room, tipping off the police so they mounted the raid.’

Johanna stopped for a moment.

‘Everything has its price,’ she said. ‘No one can do what you lot did to me without paying for it.’

Its price. Words piled up in Karolina’s head, but in the wrong order. She thought about Viggo again. Viggo, who had got into her parents’ flat, raised a gun and shot them in the head. At what point had they realised they were going to die? Did they ever get time to realise why?

‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a couple?’ Karolina asked feebly. ‘You and Viggo.’

A hollow laugh echoed round the room.

‘What was there to tell, Lina? That I’d picked up the pieces you didn’t want? You and I have scarcely seen each other for years, so why should I confide in you?’

There was nothing to say, nothing to add. It was all over, and this was the end. Everything has its price. So Karolina abandoned the topic, and asked:

‘Where is he now? Is he waiting for you somewhere?’

‘He’s in the garden,’ Johanna answered in such a cool voice that Karolina had to take her eyes off her and turn her head to the big window at the front of the house.

And she saw his outline, out there in the falling snow. The man who had once loved her so much that he had committed a crime to take revenge for an injustice she had long since put behind her.

‘You’re never going to get away with this, the pair of you. You’ve deceived too many people, forced them into a chain of murders I refuse to believe they wanted to be part of.’

‘It’s very touching that the last thing you do in your life is to worry about how I’m going to get out of this awkward situation,’ Johanna said.

If the light had not been on in the room, she would have seen what he had in his hands and possibly been the first to shoot. But in the event it was Viggo, surrounded by swirling snow and standing a few metres from the house with one of her father’s shotguns raised to his shoulder, who fired the first shot. The weight of her sorrow was the last thing she felt.

The police were very close to the house when the shot rang out. It reverberated dully among the snow-laden trees and sent the adrenalin pumping round the officers’ blood.

Damnation, thought Alex, sensing Joar’s eyes on him.

The vehicles braked to a halt in the snow, the doors were wrenched open and the cold air streamed in. The squad left the minibus first and took up their positions round the house. Over the radio the detectives heard one of them say there appeared to be two people standing talking inside the house. Neither of them came out when the police ordered them to do so.

Alex peered up towards the house with a growing sense of anticipation. That horrendous holiday home, cradle of so much unhappiness and tragedy. Unspoken tensions mingled with the cold evening air. Alex blinked and knew everyone else was thinking the same thing. If there were two people visible through the window, was there a third, the victim of the shot they had all heard?

Johanna looked at her sister’s limp body. A pool of blood was slowly spreading out beneath her. Johanna reached out a hand and switched off the light.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Viggo, stroking his arm.

He stood numbly beside her.

‘It was the only right thing to do,’ Johanna said in a low voice. ‘And you know it.’

She followed his look out of the window, to the flashing lights of the police vehicles and dark figures moving across the snow.

‘We won’t get anywhere,’ he said.

She looked unsure, but not for long.

‘Well we’ve nowhere to go, anyway.’

Slowly he turned towards her.

‘So what shall we do?’

‘We’ll do what has to be done.’

She cautiously bent down and picked up the gun that Viggo had put aside. Blinded by his own naïvety and the belief that in Johanna he had found a woman who loved him, he did not react when she pointed the barrel of the gun in his direction.

‘You never loved me as much as you did her,’ Johanna said in an empty voice as she pulled the trigger and shot him in the chest.

For a single second she stood still, staring at the wounded body. She did not care what happened now; she had achieved her goal. Wearily she tossed down the weapon and made herself run out onto the front steps in full view of the silent police officers.

‘Help me,’ she screamed. ‘Please help me! He shot my sister!’

Ragnar Vinterman realised the game was up several hours before the police rang at his door. He felt nothing but relief when it came to it. So much had gone so completely and utterly wrong. People had had to pay with their lives for his, and other people’s, greed.

The truth of the matter was that, at heart, Ragnar shared Jakob Ahlbin’s innocent view of the group of people known as refugees who found their way to Sweden. He had most certainly not felt he was exploiting people in real need when he first provided them with food and lodging for payment, or when he got the idea of expanding his venture into people smuggling. Initially, nothing could have been further from his mind. Everybody could pay the price he was asking, after all. It ought not to be a problem for any of the parties involved.

But then Sven put his foot down and refused to continue the collaboration. At that point, Ragnar started to feel the first hint of doubt. Unlike Jakob, Sven could not be dismissed as emotional or irrational. Sven was a solid sort of person, but forced into criminal activity so he could provide the huge sums of money being milked out of him by his son. But he did not lack a sense of basic judgement, and that was what made Ragnar so unsure when Sven openly declared he had had enough.

The problem was Marja and Johanna. Ragnar had wondered, certainly, how two women in Jakob’s own family had come to move so far from the fundamental values the family had once all shared. But if they saw nothing to object to in the operation, why should Ragnar?

Just once, he had tried to discuss the matter with Marja, but she seemed troubled and embarrassed by his overture and evaded his questions. Her only proviso was that Jakob must not on any account find out what was going on. And he did not, until one of the hand-picked refugees Johanna called daisies broke the cardinal rule, and told a friend how he got to Sweden.

That was when we lost our grip, Ragnar thought hopelessly. That was when we turned into murderers.

The scheme was only in action for six months. It had been easy to create a network for generating money from hiding refugees, but harder to build up structures for bringing people to Sweden illegally, making them commit complex crimes, and then sending them home again. In actual fact they only sent three people back before they came to the conclusion they would have to dispose of the daisies some other way. People talked too much, it was as simple as that. And talk generated rumours, and that was not acceptable.

He would never forget that evening when, about to retire to bed, he heard on the radio that a couple had been shot in their home at Odenplan. He had carried on hoping to the very last that it would not need to go that far. That Jakob would see reason. But as usual, Jakob did not allow himself to be frightened into silence, and then there was only one way it could end. And Marja… Johanna insisted she had to be taken out of the equation, too, because she would never keep quiet if they had Jakob killed.

It would never fade, the memory of Johanna’s impassive face as she informed him they could leave the silencing of her parents to her. Nor did Ragnar think he would get an answer to the question that was causing his clergyman’s heart such torment: what must be missing from a person for them to be capable of killing their own maker?

Then the bell rang and Ragnar went to open the door. The police would demand the names of the others involved in his operation. The woman who knew the document forger, the man who spoke Arabic, all those people making a living smuggling refugees.

I shall give them everything, Ragnar decided. Because I have nothing more to hide.

He opened the door without saying a word and handed himself meekly over to the police. And the parish had lost yet another of its faithful servants.

The next call came just as Fredrika was about to go home. It was past nine o’clock, and Alex had rung in a final report that sounded so crazy she could hardly take it in. Johanna Ahlbin had handed herself over to the police, claiming to have shot Viggo in self-defence after he murdered Karolina. According to the doctors, Viggo was dead but Karolina would probably pull through.

‘We’re eagerly awaiting her statement,’ Alex said sarcastically, and urged Fredrika to go home.

But Fredrika didn’t. First she sorted and filed away all her paperwork, then she realised someone ought to ring Peder and let him know how events had played out. He seemed cheerful.

‘We’re just having dinner,’ he said. ‘My brother’s here, too.’

She thought he sounded in good spirits. Or possibly a touch embarrassed. Either way, she was glad for him. It would be a good thing for all concerned if Peder got his priorities in life sorted out.

The wind had dropped and it had briefly stopped snowing as she pulled on her coat to walk home. Her mobile rang and she saw it was another call from Spencer’s home number, which she answered as she put on her hat with the other hand.

Strange he’s not using his mobile, she thought.

‘Is that Fredrika Bergman?’ said an unfamiliar female voice.

Taken aback at the realisation of who she must be talking to, Fredrika stopped dead in the deserted corridor.

‘Yes,’ she said finally.

‘This is Eva Lagergren. I’m Spencer’s wife.’

Fredrika had worked that out already, but somehow it was still such a shock that she had to sit down. She sank slowly to the floor. Then Eva Lagergren said the words that nobody wants to hear:

‘I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.’

Fredrika held her breath.

‘Spencer’s been involved in a car crash. He’s in hospital in Lund.’

No, no, no. Anything but this.

Misery hit her like a punch in the stomach, and she had to lean forward and clutch her belly.

Deep breaths. In, out.

‘How is he?’

Her voice was scarcely a whisper.

She heard the other woman’s intake of breath.

‘They say he’s critical but stable.’

Eva seemed to be hesitating, and it sounded as if she was crying when she went on:

‘It would be good if you could get there this evening. He’s sure to want you there when he wakes up.’

Alex had a strangely festive feeling as he drove back into the city. His body felt far too wired for him to want to go straight home from Ekerö, so he went to HQ to write his report and wind down. Fredrika must have called it a night; her light was off and her coat had gone.

Alex was still feeling quite upbeat as he turned into the drive of his house in Vaxholm. Then it struck him that he and Lena were meant to be having a talk that evening, and he hadn’t even rung to tell her he would be very late.

He glanced at his watch. It was after one in the morning. The chances of Lena still being awake were minimal.

So he was very surprised to find her sitting in an armchair in the living room. He could see she had been crying, and it also struck him that she had lost weight. A great deal of weight, what was more. Then fear washed through him like physical pain. It was as if he was seeing his wife properly for the first time in several weeks. Thin, pale and without lustre.

I’ve missed something crucial, something dreadful.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, and sat down on the sofa, facing her.

She shook her head.

‘I rang the switchboard and they told me what was happening. Did it go all right?’

The question made him want to laugh.

‘Depends what you mean by all right,’ he muttered. ‘But basically no, it didn’t go all right. Not at any level, in fact. The special group’s future looks shaky, to say the least.’

Lena shifted uneasily in her seat, grimacing as if it hurt to move.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Something I’ve known for a while, but… I just couldn’t say anything. Not until I knew for sure.’

He frowned, feeling his anxiety turn to panic.

‘Knew what for sure?’

What was it that she couldn’t even tell her very best friend? Because he knew he was, just as she was his. That was what lay at the core of their long, secure marriage. Their relationship was founded on friendship.

Guilt cut his soul like a knife. She wasn’t the one who had forgotten it; he was.

I’ve spent so bloody long chasing ghosts that I’ve lost my senses, he thought hopelessly.

And even before she started speaking, he knew that what she was going to say would change everything and rob him of any chance of making up for his grotesque mistake.

‘I’m going to have to leave you,’ she sobbed. ‘You and the children. I’m ill, Alex. They say there’s nothing they can do.’

Alex stared at her, blank-eyed. As the consequences of what she had just said sank in, he knew with utter clarity that for the first time he was facing a situation he would never be able to accept. Still less learn to live with.

They fell asleep with their arms around each other. It was late. The house was dark and silent and outside the snow had stopped falling. That was the last of that winter’s snow, except for a few showers in April.

And by the time autumn came, it was all over.