Silenced

WEDNESDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2008

STOCKHOLM

The home-made croissants on offer in the Criminal Investigation Department staff room looked like something else entirely. Peder Rydh took two at once and grinned as he nudged his new colleague Joar Sahlin, who gave him a blank look and made do with one.

‘Cocks,’ clarified Peder in a word, holding up one of the croissants.

‘Pardon?’ said his colleague, looking him straight in the eye.

Peder stuffed half a croissant into his mouth and answered as he was chewing it.

‘They look like limp prickth.’

Then he sat himself down beside the female police probationer who had started work on the same floor a few weeks earlier.

It had been a tough autumn and winter for Peder. He had celebrated his twin sons’ first birthday by leaving their mother, and since then he had screwed up pretty much everything else as well. Not at work, but privately. The woman who had wanted to be his girlfriend, Pia Nordh, suddenly turned her back on him, saying she had found someone else.

‘It’s the real thing this time, Peder,’ she had said. ‘I don’t want to sabotage anything that feels so right.’

Peder gave a snort and wondered how serious it could really be for a good lay like Pia Nordh, but had the sense not to voice his opinion out loud. Not just then, anyway.

The really frustrating thing after Pia dumped him was that it had been so hard to find any new talent for a bit of fun. Until now. The probationer couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but she seemed more mature somehow. The main point about her was that she was too new to have heard all the stories about how Peder had behaved. About the way he had left his wife, and been unfaithful even while they were still together. About his boys, so little and doubly abandoned by their daddy, who in the middle of his paternity leave decided he could not stand being cooped up at home with the babies and handed them back to their mother. Who had just managed to start working part time after a post-natal year of serious depression.

Peder sat as close to the probationer as he could without seeming weird, still well aware that it was too close anyway. But she did not move away, which Peder took as a good sign.

‘Nice croissants,’ she said, putting her head on one side.

She had her hair cut short, with wayward curls sticking out in all directions. If she hadn’t had such a pretty face, she would have looked like a troll. Peder decided to chance it and grinned his cheekiest grin.

‘They look almost like cocks, don’t they?’ he said with a wink.

The probationer gave him a long look, then got to her feet and walked out. His colleagues on the next sofa pulled mocking faces.

‘Only you, Peder, could make such a cock-up of a chance like that,’ one of them said, shaking his head.

Peder said nothing but went on with his morning coffee and croissant in silence, his cheeks flushing.

Then Detective Superintendent Alex Recht stuck his head round the staff-room door.

‘Peder and Joar, meeting in the Lions’ Den in ten minutes.’

Peder looked around him surreptitiously and noted to his satisfaction that normal order had been restored. He could not get away from his reputation as the randiest male on the whole floor, but he was also the only one who had been promoted to DI when he was only thirty-two, and definitely the only one with a permanent place in Alex Recht’s special investigation team.

He rose from the sofa in a leisurely fashion, carrying his coffee cup. He left it on the draining board, despite the fact that the dishwasher was wide open and a bright red sign headed ‘Your mum doesn’t work here’ told him where everything should go.

In something that seemed as distant as another life, Fredrika Bergman had always been relieved when night came, when fatigue claimed her and she could finally get to bed. But that was then. Now she felt only anxiety as ten o’clock passed and the need for sleep made itself felt. Like a guerrilla she crouched before her enemy, ready to fight to the last drop of blood. She usually had little trouble emerging victorious. Her body and soul were so tightly strung that she lay awake well into the small hours. The exhaustion was almost like physical pain and the baby kicked impatiently to try to make its mother settle down. But it hardly ever succeeded.

The maternity clinic had referred her to a doctor, who thought he was reassuring her when he said she was not the only pregnant woman afflicted by terrible nightmares.

‘It’s the hormones,’ he explained. ‘And we often find it in women who are experiencing problems with loosening of the joints and getting a lot of pain, like you.’

Then he said he would like to sign her off sick, but at that point she got up, walked out and went to work. If she was not allowed to work, she was sure it would destroy her. And that would hardly keep the nightmares at bay.

A week later she was back at the doctor’s, sheepishly admitting she would like a certificate to reduce her working hours by twenty-five per cent. The doctor did as she asked, without further discussion.

Fredrika moved slowly through the short section of corridor in the plainclothes division that was the territory of Alex’s team. Her stomach looked as though a basketball had accidentally found its way under her clothes. Her breasts had nearly doubled in size.

‘Like the beautiful hills of southern France where they grow all that lovely wine,’ as Spencer Lagergren, the baby’s father, had said when they saw each other a few evenings earlier.

As if the painful joints and the nightmares were not enough, Spencer was a problem in himself. Fredrika’s parents, entirely unaware of the existence of their daughter’s lover even though they had been together for over ten years, had been dismayed when she told them just in time for Advent Sunday that she was pregnant. And that the father of the baby was a professor at Uppsala University, and married.

‘But Fredrika!’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How old is this man?’

‘He’s twenty-five years older than me and he’ll take his full share of the responsibility,’ said Fredrika, and almost believed it as she said it.

‘I see,’ her father said wearily. ‘And what does that mean, in the twenty-first century?’

That was a good question, thought Fredrika, suddenly feeling as tired as her father sounded.

What it meant in essence was simply that Spencer intended to acknowledge voluntarily that he was the father and to pay maintenance. And to see the baby as often as possible, but without leaving his wife, who had now also been let in on the secret that had hardly been a secret.

‘What did she say when you told her?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.

‘She said it would be nice to have children about the house,’ replied Spencer.

‘She said that?’ said Fredrika, hardly knowing if he was joking or not.

Spencer gave her a wry look.

‘What do you think?’

Then he had to go, and they had said no more on the subject.

At work, Fredrika’s pregnancy aroused more curiosity than she had hoped, and since nobody actually came out with any direct questions, there was inevitably a good deal of gossip and speculation. Who could be father to the baby of single, career-minded Fredrika Bergman? The only employee in the Criminal Investigation Department without police training behind her, who since her recruitment had managed to annoy every single one of her male colleagues, either by paying them too little attention or by questioning their competence.

It was a surprise, thought Fredrika as she stopped outside Alex’s closed door. That she, initially so sceptical about staying in her police job, seemed to have found her niche there in the end and stayed on beyond her probationary period.

I was on my way out from the very start, she thought, putting one hand on her belly for a moment. I wasn’t going to come back. Yet here I am.

She rapped hard on Alex’s door. She had noticed his hearing did not seem that good these days.

‘Come in,’ muttered her boss from the other side of the door.

He beamed when he saw who it was. He did that a lot these days, and certainly much more often than anyone else in the department.

Fredrika smiled back. Her smile lasted until she saw that his expression had changed and he was looking concerned again.

‘Are you getting much sleep?’

‘Oh, I get by,’ she replied evasively.

Alex nodded, almost to himself.

‘I’ve got a fairly simple case here that…’ he began, but stopped himself and tried again. ‘We’ve been asked to take a look at a hit-and-run incident out at the university. A foreign man was found dead in the middle of Frescativägen. He’d been run over and they haven’t been able to identify him. We need to put his prints through the system and see if it comes up with anything.’

‘And otherwise wait for someone to report him missing?’

‘Yes, and go over what’s been done already, so to speak. He had a few personal items on him; ask to see them. Go through the report, check that there doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious about the case. If there isn’t, close the file, and report back to me.’

A thought flashed through Fredrika’s mind so fast that she had no time to register it. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to retrieve it.

‘Okay, I think that’s all,’ Alex said slowly, looking at her contorted face. ‘We’ve got a group meeting in the Den about another case in a minute or two.’

‘See you there, then,’ said Fredrika, getting up.

She was back in the corridor before she realised she had forgotten to bring up the matter she went to see Alex about in the first place.

The curtains were closed in the meeting room known as the Lions’ Den, and the place was like an overheated sauna. Alex Recht threw back the curtains to see light flakes of snow falling from the dark sky. The TV weather girl had promised that morning that the bad weather would move away by evening. Alex had his own views on that subject. The weather had been capricious ever since the start of the new year: days of snow and temperatures below zero alternating with rain and gales, fit to make anyone curse.

‘Bloody weather,’ said Peder as he came into the Den.

‘Dreadful,’ Alex said curtly. ‘Is Joar on his way?’

Peder nodded but said nothing, and Joar came into the room. The group’s assistant Ellen Lind was right behind him, along with Fredrika.

The newly installed projector up on the ceiling whirred away quietly in the background and all Alex’s attention was focused on the computer as he tried to coax it into action. The group waited patiently; they knew better than to point out that any one of them would be better at the technical stuff than their boss.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ a gruff Alex said in the end, pushing the laptop aside. ‘As you may have noticed, this group hasn’t really been working as initially planned. We were brought together so we could be called on for particularly difficult cases, above all missing persons and particularly brutal violent crimes. And when Fredrika went down to part time, we were given Joar as back-up, for which we’re extremely grateful.’

Here, Alex looked at Joar, who met his eye without comment. There was something reserved and reticent about the young man that Alex found surprising. The contrast with the skilful but sometimes wayward Peder was striking. At first he had seen this as a positive thing, but within a couple of weeks he began to have his doubts. It was obvious Joar found Peder’s way of talking annoying and offensive, while Peder seemed frustrated by his new colleague’s calmness and flexibility. Pairing Joar with Fredrika Bergman would probably have been a better idea. But she was on reduced hours on doctor’s orders now, and hampered by this pregnancy that was taking so much out of her. Certificates referring to severe pain, sleep problems and nightmares crossed Alex’s desk, and when Fredrika did manage to come into the office, she looked so pale and weak that her colleagues were quite shocked.

‘It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that when it comes to the crunch, there aren’t enough of us and we need reinforcements, and in between times we’re often on loan to the Stockholm Police Homicide Department to help out with their cases. So the question has been asked: do we need to be a permanent group, or should we be dispersed among the Stockholm Police or the county CID instead?’

Peder was the one who looked most dismayed.

‘But, but…’

Alex held up a hand.

‘There’s been no formal decision yet,’ he said, ‘but I just wanted to let you all know that it’s on the cards.’

No one said a word, and the projector stopped whirring.

Alex fiddled with the papers he had in front of him on the desk.

‘Anyway, we’ve now got a case, well two actually, that our friends in the Norrmalm Police need a hand with. A couple in their sixties, Jakob and Marja Ahlbin, found dead yesterday evening in their flat by another couple who had been invited round for dinner. When nobody answered the door, and the other couple couldn’t get through on any of the phones either, they opened the door with their own key and found the pair dead in the bedroom. According to the preliminary police report, which is based mainly on a suicide note written by the dead husband, he shot his wife and then himself.’

The computer belatedly began to cooperate, and crime-scene pictures flashed up on the white screen behind Alex. Ellen and Joar each gave a start at the sight of the enlarged pictures of bodies with gunshot wounds, but Peder was spellbound.

He’s changed, Alex thought to himself. He wasn’t like that before.

‘According to the note, he had found out two days earlier that their elder daughter, Karolina, had died from a heroin overdose, and he saw no reason to carry on living. He himself was treated for serious and recurring bouts of depression all his adult life. Only this January he underwent ECT treatment, and he was on anti-depressants. A chronic sufferer, in fact.’

‘What’s ETC?’ asked Peder.

‘ECT,’ Alex corrected him. ‘Electroconvulsive therapy, it’s used in particularly difficult cases of depression. As a way of kick-starting the brain.’

‘Electric shocks,’ said Peder. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘As Alex said, in controlled form it has had very positive benefits for severely ill patients,’ Joar interjected in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘The patient is under anaesthetic during the actual treatment and the vast majority show striking improvement.’

Peder stared at Joar but said nothing. He turned to Alex.

‘Why have we been saddled with this case? It’s already solved, isn’t it?’

‘It might not be,’ replied Alex. ‘The two people who found the couple say it’s impossible to believe that the man murdered his wife and then shot himself. They did recognise the weapon, a 22-calibre hunting pistol, because the two men would often go hunting together, but they were adamant when questioned that it would be entirely out of character for him to be so crazed by grief as to act like that.’

‘So what do these friends think did happen, then?’ asked Fredrika, making her first contribution to the meeting.

‘They think they must have been murdered,’ said Alex, giving her a look. ‘Both of them apparently held positions in the Swedish Church: he was a vicar and she was a cantor. Jakob Ahlbin has been quite prominent in recent years in debates about immigration. These friends of the couple claim they were such fervent believers that suicide simply wouldn’t have been on the cards. And it seems incomprehensible to them for Jakob to have received the news of his daughter’s death and not passed it on to his wife.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Peder, still not convinced the case was worthy of their attention.

‘We’ll interview the two who found the couple again,’ Alex said firmly. ‘And we need to get hold of the Ahlbins’ younger daughter, Johanna, who has probably not been informed of her sister’s and parents’ deaths. That may prove tricky; no one’s managed to locate her yet. I dread the thought of the media releasing the names and pictures of the deceased before we find her.’

He looked at Joar and then at Peder.

‘I want you two as a team to interview the friends, once you’ve been to the scene of the crime. See if there seems any good reason to pursue this any further. Then divide your forces and interview other people if you need to. Find more people who knew them in the Church.’

As they were getting to their feet, Peder asked:

‘And what about the other case? You said there were two.’

Alex frowned.

‘The other one I’ve already allocated to Fredrika,’ he said. ‘Just a routine thing, an unidentified man found dead near the university this morning. He seems to have been in the middle of the road after dark and was run over by someone who didn’t dare to stop and hand himself over to the police. And don’t forget what I said.’

Peder and Joar waited.

‘Make sure you find the daughter double-quick. Nobody should have to get the news that their parents have died from the tabloid press.’

BANGKOK, THAILAND

The sun was just disappearing behind the skyscrapers when she realised she had a problem. It had been an incredibly hot day with temperatures way above normal, and she had been feeling hot and sticky since early that morning. She had had a long succession of meetings in stuffy rooms with no air conditioning and a picture had started to emerge. Or perhaps it was more of a suspicion. She could not decide which, but the follow-up work when she got home would undoubtedly answer all her questions.

Her return to Sweden was not many days away. In fact it was approaching all too quickly. It had been her original intention to round off the long trip with a few days of holiday sunshine down in Cha Am, but circumstances beyond her control had put paid to the plan, and she realised the most practical thing now was to stay in Bangkok until it was time to go home.

What’s more, her father’s latest email had made her uneasy:

You must be careful. Don’t extend your stay. Be discreet in your investigations. Dad.

Once the last meeting of the day was over, she asked to borrow a phone.

‘I have to ring the airline to confirm my flight home,’ she explained to the man she had just interviewed, taking out the plastic wallet with the electronic tickets she had printed out.

The phone rang several times before the operator answered at the other end.

‘I’d like to confirm my flight back with you on Friday,’ she said, fiddling with a Buddha figurine on the desk in front of her.

‘Booking number?’

She gave her booking reference and waited as the operator put her on hold. Tinny music began to play in her ear, and she looked idly out of the window. Outside, Bangkok was on the boil, getting ready for the evening and night ahead. An unlimited choice of discothèques and nightclubs, bars and restaurants. A constant din and a never-ending stream of people going in all directions. Dirt and dust mixed with the strangest sights and scents. Hordes of shopkeepers and street vendors, and the occasional huge elephant in the heart of the city, although they were prohibited. And between the maze of buildings, the river cutting the city in two.

I must come back here, she told herself. As a proper tourist, not for work.

The tinny music stopped and the operator was back on the line.

‘I’m sorry, miss, but we can’t find your booking. Could you give me the number again?’

She sighed and repeated the number. The man who had lent her his office was clearly losing patience, too. A discreet knock at the door indicated his wish to reclaim it.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ she called.

The knocking stopped as the endless loop of music resumed. She was kept waiting longer this time and was deep in reverie, imagining future tourist trips to Thailand, when the operator’s voice broke in.

‘I’m really sorry, miss, but we can’t find your booking. Are you sure it was with Thai Airways?’

‘I’ve got my e-ticket right here in front of me,’ she said irritably, looking at the computer print-out in her hand. ‘I’m flying from Bangkok to Stockholm with your airline this Friday. I paid 4,567 Swedish kronor. The money was taken from my account on the 10th of January this year.’

She could hear the operator working away at the other end; he had not bothered to put her on hold this time.

‘May I ask how you travelled to Thailand, miss?’ he asked. ‘Did you fly with us?’

She hesitated, recalling the earlier stages of her trip, which she did not want to refer to.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘No, I didn’t come with you. And I was not travelling from Stockholm when I entered Thailand.’

The names of a string of cities flashed on and off in her mind. Athens, Istanbul, Amman and Damascus. No, it wasn’t information anyone else needed to know.

The line went quiet for several minutes, and the man knocked on the office door again.

‘Will you be much longer?’

‘There’s a bit of a problem with my airline ticket,’ she called back. ‘It won’t take long to sort out.’

The operator came back on the line.

‘I’ve made a really thorough check and spoken to my line manager,’ he said firmly. ‘You have no booking with our company and as far as I can see, you never did have.’

She took a breath, ready to protest. But he pre-empted her.

‘I am very sorry, miss. If you would like to make another booking, we can help you with that, of course. Not for Friday, I’m afraid, but we can fly you home on Sunday. A single ticket will cost you 1, 255 dollars.’

‘But this is ridiculous,’ she said indignantly. ‘I don’t want another ticket, I want to fly on the one I’ve already bought. I demand that you…’

‘We’ve done everything we can, miss. The only thing I can suggest is that you check your email account to make sure it really was our airline you booked with and not someone else. There are sometimes false tickets on sale, though it’s extremely rare for that to happen. But as I say, check that and then contact us again. I’ve reserved a seat for you for Sunday. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she answered in a weak voice.

But it was not okay. Not at all.

She felt weary as she hung up. This was the last thing she needed just now. The whole trip had been dogged by administrative hitches. But it had never occurred to her to worry about the flight home.

She strode out of the room into the corridor.

‘I’m sorry to have taken so long, but there seems to be a problem with my flight home.’

He looked concerned.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

‘Is there a computer with internet access I could borrow? Then I could get into my email and double-check my booking.’

He shook his head.

‘Sorry, miss, I’m afraid we haven’t got one here. Our internet connection was so bad that we decided we’d be better off popping to the internet café round the corner when we needed to go online.’

She took her leave, thanking him for his help and all the important information he had been brave enough to entrust her with, and went to the café he recommended.

There was a spring in her long-legged step as she entered the café and asked to use a computer for fifteen minutes. The proprietor showed her to computer number three and asked if she wanted coffee. She declined the offer, hoping she would be on her way back to the hotel very shortly.

The fan inside the computer whirred as the processor tried to upload her inbox onto the screen. She drummed her fingers impatiently on the table, sending up a silent prayer for the system not to crash so she had to start all over again. She knew from experience that the internet abroad was not what it was in Sweden.

The café’s air conditioning was as noisy as a small tank rumbling along, reminding her of the region she had visited before her trip to Thailand. Her hand went automatically to the chain she wore round her neck, under her blouse. Her fingers closed round the USB memory stick that hung on it, resting against her chest. There, encased in that one little bit of plastic, were all the facts she had collected. She would soon be home and all the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place.

‘Sure you’ll be all right?’ her father had asked with an anxious note in his voice, the evening before she left.

‘Course I will.’

He stroked her cheek, and they said no more about it. They both knew she was more than able to look after herself, and anyway, the trip had been her own idea, but the question still needed asking.

‘Just ring if you need any help,’ her father said as they parted at Stockholm’s main airport.

But she had only rung once and the rest of their communication had been by email. She had deleted the emails as she went along without really knowing why.

The computer had finally accessed the site and something came up on the screen.

‘You have entered the wrong password. Please try again.’

She shook her head. This was clearly not going to be a good day. She tried again. The computer growled as it laboured away. And again:

‘You have entered the wrong password. Please try again.’

She tried three more times. Each time the same message. She swallowed hard.

Something’s going wrong. Really wrong.

And another part of her mind threw up the thought: should she, in fact, be scared?

STOCKHOLM

Peder and Joar drove in silence through Kungsholmen, over St Erik’s Bridge and on towards Odenplan where the elderly couple had been found dead. Peder was at the wheel, racing to every red light. A suspicion had planted itself in the back of his mind after the croissant incident in the staff room. Joar had not even cracked a smile when Peder came out with his funny cock joke. That was bad. Clearly a sign. Peder had got better at observing those over the years. Signs. Signs that a colleague was of the other persuasion. Batting for the other side. Gay.

Not that he had anything against it. Absolutely not. Just as long as he didn’t try it on with him. Then he’d see him in hell.

He squinted sideways at Joar’s profile. His colleague’s face was remarkably finely drawn, almost like a painting. A face like a mask. The eyes were ice-blue, the pupils never dilated. The lips were a little too red, the eyelashes implausibly long. Peder screwed up his eyes to get a better look. If Joar wore make-up, he could take his own car in future.

The traffic lights turned from green to red and Peder had to put his foot down to get through. He did not need to look at Joar to know his colleague disapproved.

‘Hard to know whether to stop or speed up when it’s like that,’ said Peder, mainly to have something to say.

‘Mmm,’ responded Joar, looking the other way. ‘What was the name of the street?’

‘Dalagatan. They lived on the top floor. Big flat, apparently.’

‘Are the bodies still there?’

‘No, and forensics are supposed to be finished now, so we can go in.’

They said nothing as Peder parked the car. He fished out the parking permit and slunk after his colleague into the building. Joar ignored the lift and set off up the five flights of stairs to the couple’s flat. Peder followed, wondering why the hell they weren’t taking the lift when it was so many floors up.

The stairwell was freshly decorated, the walls white and shiny. The steps were marble, the window frames painted brown. The lift shaft in the middle was an old-fashioned, wrought-iron affair. Peder’s thoughts went to the woman from whom he had separated, Ylva. She hated confined spaces. Peder had once tried to seduce her in his parents’ guest cloakroom during a boring family dinner, but Ylva found making love in such a small space so stressful that her skin came up in bumps and she couldn’t breathe properly.

They had laughed over that story countless times.

But not this past eighteen months, Peder observed bitterly. There hadn’t been much bloody laughing at all.

There was no sign of forced entry to the couple’s front door. The label on the letterbox simply said ‘Ahlbin’. Joar rang the bell and a uniformed police officer opened the door. He and a crime-scene technician were the only ones there.

‘All right if we come in?’ asked Peder.

The officer nodded.

‘They’re just doing the windows, then they’ll be finished on the forensic side.’

Peder and Joar advanced into the flat.

‘Was it rented?’ asked Joar.

The officer shook his head.

‘Owner-occupied. They’d lived here since 1999.’

Peder gave a whistle as he went round the flat. It was spacious and had high ceilings. All the rooms had beautiful stucco work and the expanses of white wall were sparingly hung with paintings and photographs.

Peder thought Fredrika would have loved this flat, though he had not the least idea how her own home was decorated.

Why was that? Why didn’t people go round to each other’s places nowadays? The fact that he had never been to Fredrika’s was not very surprising, but with other colleagues it was harder to understand. He hated the lonely evenings in the flat where he had moved the previous autumn. Although he was buying rather than renting, he hadn’t done any work on it. His mother made curtains and bought cushions and tablecloths, but when he showed no sign of wanting to help she lost interest. He could hardly blame her.

The couple’s flat had windows looking out in three directions and there were four main rooms. The kitchen and living-room area was open plan. A sliding wall divided the living room and library. Then there was a guest bedroom and the bedroom where the two bodies had been found.

Peder and Joar stopped at the door and surveyed the room. They had both seen the crime-scene report written by the officers who were first to arrive. The initial assessment would presumably hold good even once forensics had finished their job. Jakob Ahlbin had shot his wife in the back of the head. She must have been standing with her back to the doorway, where Jakob had presumably been. So she had first fallen headlong onto the bed but subsequently slipped onto the floor. Then her husband had walked round the bed, lain down on it and shot himself in the temple. The farewell letter had been on the bedside table.

There was nothing in the room to indicate any sort of struggle before either of them died. No furniture seemed to have been moved; nothing was broken or smashed. The woman was in her dressing gown when they found her. The indications were that she had started getting ready for the guests they were expecting about an hour later.

‘Do we have a more exact time of death?’ asked Peder.

‘Their friends found them at seven and the pathologist estimated they’d been dead scarcely two hours. So they must have died at about five.’

‘Has anyone interviewed the neighbours?’ asked Joar. ‘The shots must have echoed through the building.’

The officer standing just behind them nodded.

‘Yes, we’ve talked to everyone who was at home, and they heard the shots. But it all happened so fast and the residents here are all fairly elderly and couldn’t be sure exactly where the sound was coming from. One of them even rang the police, but when the patrol car turned up, no one could say for sure which flat the shots had come from, and there was no other disturbance. Nobody had noticed anyone coming or going just afterwards. So the patrol car moved on.’

‘So sound travels in the building? Since people were confident enough to say fairly definitely that nobody came or went?’ Joar asked tentatively.

‘Yes, that must be right,’ replied the uniformed officer.

Just then there was the sound of furniture scraping the floor in the flat below.

‘There, what did I say, sound travels here,’ said the officer, rather more self-assured now.

‘Were they in the whole time?’ Peder asked.

‘Who?’

‘The neighbours you interviewed, the ones who live below here.’

The officer took a surreptitious look at his notebook.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t get back until eight last night, unfortunately. And there’s only one other flat on this floor, and the people who live there weren’t at home either.’

‘So none of the nearest neighbours were in when the shots were fired?’ Peder observed.

‘No, that more or less sums it up.’

Joar said nothing, just walked around the room, frowning. He glanced occasionally at Peder and the uniformed officer, but held his tongue.

There’s something shady about him, thought Peder. Apart from the fact that he’s gay, he’s got something else to hide.

‘This mark,’ Joar said suddenly, breaking into Peder’s thoughts. ‘Do we know anything about that?’

He indicated a streak of pale grey arcing across the wall at the head of the bed, just behind the lamp on the bedside table.

‘No,’ said the officer. ‘But it could have been there for ages, couldn’t it?’

‘Of course,’ said Joar. ‘Or it could have been caused by the lamp being knocked sideways off the table onto the floor. If that’s what happened.’

‘You mean there could have been a violent tussle in here after all, and the lamp went flying?’ asked Peder.

‘Exactly so, and when it was all over, someone put the lamp back in its original place. We can ask forensics to check it out, if they haven’t already.’

He crouched down.

‘It’s not plugged into the wall,’ he added. ‘Maybe it was pulled out of the socket when it fell off the table.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Peder, and went over to the window to look out.

‘All the windows in the flat were shut when we got here,’ reported the policeman. ‘And the front door was locked.’

‘From the inside?’

‘Erm, there was no way of telling. That’s to say, it could have been either. But we think the door was locked from the inside.’

‘But it could have been locked from outside? Do we know who had keys to this place?’

‘According to the friends who found the bodies, they were the only ones with keys to the flat. And the daughter who’d just died had a set. That was something they found extremely upsetting, by the way.’

‘The fact that she had keys to the flat, too?’ Peder asked, baffled.

‘No, the fact that she’s supposed to have taken an overdose,’ the officer clarified. ‘Admittedly they hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, but as far as they were aware, she had a very good relationship with her parents. And it was news to them that she was on drugs.’

Joar and Peder exchanged glances.

‘We need to talk to those friends of theirs as soon as possible,’ said Joar. ‘Do they live near here?’

‘Down on Vanadisplan. They’re in.’

‘Let’s get down there right away,’ said Peder, already on his way to the front door.

‘Give me a minute,’ said Joar. ‘I just want one more good look round before we go.’

Peder planted himself in the middle of the living room and waited impatiently for Joar to finish whatever it was he was doing.

‘Going round the flat, what sort of sense do you get of the people who lived here?’ Joar asked him.

Peder looked about him at a loss, caught off guard by the question.

‘That they’re not short of money,’ he said eventually.

Joar, who had come to a stop a few metres away, facing him, put his head on one side.

‘True,’ he said. ‘But anything else?’

Joar’s tone of voice made him feel uneasy, though he could not work out why. As if the questions triggered some complex within him that he had been unaware of until now.

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Try.’

Provoked, Peder tramped demonstratively round the living room and into the kitchen area. He carried on through the hall, into the library and guest room and then back to his starting point. ‘They’re well off,’ he reiterated. ‘They’ve had money for a long time. Maybe inherited some. It almost looks as if they don’t live here. Not properly.’

Joar waited.

‘Explain.’

‘There are almost no pictures of their children. Only a few from when they were little. The photos on the walls aren’t of people, they’re landscapes. I don’t know enough about art to say much about their pictures, but they look expensive.’

‘Is there any exception to what you’ve just said? About it looking as though nobody really lives here?’

‘The bedroom, maybe. They’ve got photos of themselves in there that look quite recent.’

The parquet flooring creaked as Joar moved across the room.

‘I thought exactly the same as you,’ he said, his tone indicating he was pleased about it. ‘And I wonder what that tells us, because down at Vanadisplan we’ve got another couple who claim they knew this family extremely well. Whereas I get the impression that the people who lived in this flat are pretty cool and impersonal people who don’t let anybody get particularly close. I think we need to bear that in mind when we go and see them in a minute. That, and the fact that the impression we’ve got might well mean something else as well.’

‘Like what?’ asked Peder, interested in Joar’s analysis in spite of himself.

‘That they had a second home where they felt more themselves, and where we can presumably get to know them better.’

It was a strange world she worked in. It was hardly the first time the thought had occurred to her, but every time it did, it caught her slightly off guard. Fredrika Bergman was generally very careful to point out to herself and others that she had chosen her current position as part of a longer-term career strategy, and did not see it as anything she would be doing for very long. The reason she took such care to point this out was as simple as it was depressing: she did not like the job very much.

As a civilian appointee in a sea of police officers, uniformed or otherwise, she was constantly being reminded of how different she was and how odd her colleagues found her. She had thought on numerous occasions how peculiar this was, because she was rarely seen as odd or different in other contexts. But things had undeniably improved. Particularly as far as Alex and Peder were concerned; they seemed to view her in a different light since that case they had worked on together the previous summer. A baptism of fire for them all.

Fredrika was also aware that she herself had changed since then, too. She tried to pick her battles. Initially she had flared up at everything, but the unexpected tribulations of pregnancy had made her increasingly reluctant to rise to the bait. But there were still times when conflicts proved unavoidable. Take her recent little visit to the CID fingerprint unit. She had asked one simple question: had they by any chance found a match for the fingerprints of the unidentified man found dead in the road at the university, either in their own records or in those of the Migration Agency?

The question produced an extremely defensive response from the woman she had found to ask. Didn’t Fredrika know what the workload round here was like since it all got too much for Gudrun last month? Didn’t she realise the big biker gang investigation the CID had launched the previous week took precedence?

Fredrika had not been particularly sympathetic, knowing nothing of Gudrun or her sick leave, or the biker investigation, for that matter. What’s more, she was pretty sure there was no specific reason for the delay; the woman had simply forgotten to check the dead man’s prints.

‘You can’t come charging in here making all sorts of demands,’ the woman snapped from behind her computer. ‘Absolutely typical of someone like you with no police experience, no sense of priorities.’

Fredrika merely replied that she was sorry to hear her colleague had so much on her plate, and of course she could wait a few more days for the result, which the woman could pass through when it was ready. She thanked her and withdrew in the direction of the lifts as fast as she could.

Fredrika sat down heavily in her office chair. Her mother thought she was still unusually slim for someone at such an advanced stage of pregnancy, but Fredrika found it hard to take that seriously. The baby was kicking frantically, its angry little feet pounding against the inside of her belly.

‘Getting a bit impatient, aren’t you?’ murmured Fredrika, putting one hand on her stomach. ‘Me too.’

Her parents asked her if the pregnancy was planned, and she told them it was. But she had avoided going into much detail. It was last summer, that summer of never-ending rain, when the plans assumed concrete form. Fredrika was coming up to thirty-five and had to reach a decision on how to deal with childlessness. Or rather – what steps she should take. There were not that many options. Either she adopted a child as a single parent, or she went to Copenhagen and solved the problem by insemination. Or she found someone to live with and had children the natural way.

But this last option did not feel entirely uncomplicated. The years had gone by and Fredrika had not yet been able to make a relationship really work. And after every failed attempt she had gone back to Spencer, who seemed eternally chained to a marriage neither he nor his wife was happy with.

It was not until they were on holiday together at Skagen that Fredrika felt able to bring up the subject.

‘I’m thinking of adopting,’ she said. ‘I want to be a mother, Spencer. And I understand that you can’t be, and don’t want to be, part of that, but I still need to tell you how I feel.’

Spencer’s reaction had taken Fredrika completely by surprise. He was dismayed, and went on at great length about how reprehensible it was to uproot children from other parts of the globe simply to send them to love-starved people in Sweden.

‘Are you really going to subscribe to a system like that?’ he asked.

Fredrika burst into tears, sobbing:

‘What alternative have I got? Tell me that, Spencer, what the hell am I supposed to do?’

So they had talked about it instead. For a long time.

Fredrika smiled. It was childish of her to think that way, but it did amuse her how much the project had provoked her parents.

‘But, Fredrika, whatever’s got into you?’ her mother asked sceptically. ‘And who is this Spencer, anyway? How long have you known him?’

‘Over ten years,’ said Fredrika, looking her mother firmly in the eye.

Fredrika swallowed. Pregnancy and all those hormones had triggered extreme mood swings. One minute she would be laughing out loud, the next minute crying. Perhaps she ought to re-evaluate her self-image. It clearly wasn’t only police colleagues who considered her abnormal; her own family was starting to wonder, too.

Frustrated, she reached for the report drawn up at the scene of the unidentified man’s death. No identity documents. He still had not been reported missing. Hardly any personal possessions on him. The doctor who examined the body when it reached the hospital said in his preliminary report that he had found nothing on the body to indicate the man had been subjected to any physical violence before the impact. Fredrika noted that a full autopsy had been requested.

She went through the plastic wallet on the desk in front of her, which contained the things found on the man’s person. A pamphlet in Arabic script. A gold necklace. A ring with a black stone, wrapped in a slip of paper. Another scrap of paper, rolled into a hard little ball that took ages to unwind. More Arabic characters, on both bits of paper. And then a map. It looked as though someone had torn one of the map pages out of an old telephone directory and crumpled it into a ball. Fredrika frowned. It was a map of Uppsala city centre. On the edge of the map, someone had scribbled something; this, too, seemed to be in Arabic.

The fatigue that sporadically paralysed her brain briefly gave way to a suspicion. She wondered what to do with it. It probably wouldn’t lead anywhere, but it was just as well to check. She went into the next room to consult Ellen.

‘Where can I find someone to read and translate Arabic text?’ she asked.

It was Alex Recht himself who took the call from the vicar of Bromma parish. They exchanged a few polite phrases before the vicar got to the point.

‘It’s about Jakob Ahlbin, who was found dead yesterday.’

Alex waited.

‘I just wanted to assure you on behalf of the Church that we will help you with everything you need. Everything. This is a terribly sad day for us. What happened is simply unfathomable.’

‘We do understand that,’ said Alex. ‘Did you see each other socially, as well?’

‘No, we didn’t,’ said the vicar. ‘But he was a highly valued member of our parish team. As was Marja. They’ve left a gaping hole behind them.’

‘Would it be convenient for us to come and see you sometime today?’ asked Alex. ‘We want to talk to as many of the people who knew them as we can.’

‘I’m at your disposal whenever you want,’ the vicar replied.

When the call was over, Alex briefly considered ringing his father. It was an impulse he felt increasingly rarely these days, and the only reason he had it now was that the case was so clearly linked to the Church. Alex’s father was a Church of Sweden clergyman, as was his younger brother. Alex had had to fight hard once upon a time to justify his choice of career to his parents. All firstborn sons in the family had taken holy orders, going back generations.

Finally his father had given in. A career in the police was a kind of calling, after all.

‘I’ve chosen this because I can’t see myself making a better job of anything else,’ Alex had said.

And with these words he had finally won the battle.

The telephone on his desk rang. It made him feel warm inside to hear his wife Lena’s voice, even though it had started to make him feel a bit uneasy of late. There was something worrying her, but she was not saying what.

‘Are you going to be late tonight?’ she asked.

‘Probably not.’

‘You won’t forget your physio appointment?’

‘Of course not,’ he said peevishly.

They talked about what to have for dinner and what they really thought of their daughter’s new boyfriend, who looked like a hard rocker and talked like a politician. ‘A bloody disaster,’ was Alex’s succinct verdict, and that made Lena laugh.

Her laugh was still echoing in his head even after they had hung up.

Alex looked down at his scarred hands. They had got badly burnt in that insane case of the missing girl the previous summer. Little children were abducted from around the capital and later found murdered. The hunt for the perpetrator had taken less than a week all told, but it had been more intense than anything else in his whole career. The fire in the murderer’s flat was like a bizarre grand finale to an equally bizarre case.

Alex flexed his fingers. The doctors had promised him full mobility if he just gave it time, and they had been right. Alex remembered nothing of the fire itself, and he was glad of it. He had never been on sick leave for so long before, and just a few weeks after his return to work, he and Lena had gone to South America to visit their son.

He chuckled, as he always did when he thought about the trip. Good grief, what a mess the police force was over there.

The phone rang again. To his great surprise it was Margareta Berlin, head of HR.

‘Alex, we’ve got to talk about Peder Rydh,’ she said flatly.

‘Oh yes?’ said Alex hesitantly. ‘What’s up?’

‘Croissants.’

Although he had been in Sweden for a number of days, he hadn’t yet seen the country at all. He had taken the airport bus from Arlanda into the centre of Stockholm as instructed, and waited in the bus station on a seat outside a newsagent’s shop.

He had had to wait half an hour before the woman came. She did not look at all as he had expected. She was much shorter and darker than he had imagined Swedish women to be, and she was wearing a man’s suit, with trousers instead of a skirt. He was suddenly unsure of what to say.

‘Ali?’ asked the woman.

He nodded.

The woman glanced over her shoulder, then took a mobile phone from her bag and gave it to him. Such relief washed over him that it almost made him cry. Handing over the phone was the signal he had been waiting for, the receipt for having found the right place.

He stuffed the phone into his pocket with clumsy fingers, feeling for his passport in his shirt pocket with his other hand. The woman gave a distinct nod as he passed it to her, and leafed quickly though it.

Then she gestured to him to go with her.

She took him through the bus station, which was called the City Terminal, out onto a street full of cars. Just to the left of the entrance, alongside the pavement, were more bicycles than Ali had ever seen at a bus station. Swedish people must cycle all the time.

The woman urged him to keep up and when they reached her car she directed him to get into the passenger seat. He watched with fascination as she took her place at the wheel and started the car. It was much colder than he had expected, but the car was still warm.

They drove through the city in silence. Ali assumed she spoke no Arabic, and he had no English. He stared out of the window, taking in everything he saw. All these bridges and stretches of water everywhere. Low buildings and much less noise than he was used to in cities. He wondered where all the street vendors plied their trade.

Fifteen minutes later, the woman parked in an empty street and indicated that he was to get out of the car. They went into one of the low-rise buildings and up the stairs to the second floor. It took three keys and a succession of locks before she got the door open. She went into the flat first; he followed, head bowed.

The place smelled of cleaning products with an underlying hint of stale cigarette smoke. Ali could smell fresh paint, too. The flat was not large, and he assumed he would get a larger flat later on, when his family came to join him. He felt a pang at the thought of his wife and children. He hoped they were all right and would be able to manage until he got his residence permit. His contact had promised it would not take long; he would get the permit as soon as he had fulfilled his side of the bargain with those who had financed his escape.

The woman showed him the small bedroom and living room. The fridge was fully stocked with food and there were plates, saucepans and other utensils in the kitchen cupboards. Ali had scarcely ever cooked a meal before, but that was the least of his problems. The woman gave him a folded sheet of paper and then turned on her heel and left the flat. He had not seen her since.

Three days had now passed.

Anxiety was making his skin crawl. For what must have been the hundredth time he took out the piece of paper the woman had left him and read the short text in Arabic.

Ali, this is your home for your first weeks in Sweden. Hope you had a good journey and will soon settle into the flat. We have tried to make sure you have everything you need. Please stay indoors until we contact you again.

Ali sighed and shut his eyes. Of course he would not leave the flat – he was locked in, after all. Tears burned the insides of his eyelids, though he had not cried since he was a little boy. The flat had no telephone and the mobile phone the woman had given him did not seem to work. The TV set only showed channels he did not understand; Al-Jazeera was not on offer. Nor did there seem to be a computer. The windows would not open and the fan in the kitchen did not work. He had smoked quite a few packets of cigarettes and did not really know what he would do when they ran out.

Other things were running out, too. He had drunk all the milk, and the juice. He had eaten nearly all the bread in the freezer because he had not felt like doing any proper cooking. The plastic-wrapped burgers in the fridge had acquired a grey coating and when he started peeling some potatoes to cook, he found they were green.

Ali rested his head against the window, drumming on the glass with his long fingers.

It’s got to be over soon, he thought. They’ve got to come back so I can keep my side of the agreement.

The call from Alex took Fredrika by surprise. He explained in a few succinct phrases that Peder had been recalled to HQ and he, Alex, wanted her to go with Joar to interview the elderly couple who had found the Reverend Ahlbin and his wife.

They were sitting in a sort of circle. Four large armchairs round a little wooden octagonal table. Fredrika, Joar, and the man and woman who had found their friends shot dead the evening before: Elsie and Sven Ljung, both children of the mid-1940s and retired for several years. Fredrika reflected on how different people’s appearances could be. Elsie and Sven really did look like pensioners, even though they had barely reached state pension age. Maybe that was what happened when you stopped working and stayed at home all day?

‘Have you always lived this close to each other?’ asked Fredrika, referring to the proximity of the dead couple’s home to their own.

Elsie and Sven exchanged glances.

‘Well yes,’ said Sven. ‘We have, actually. Our houses were near each other back in the days when we all lived out in Bromma, and then we all moved into town within a few years of each other. Once the children had left home. But it wasn’t something we planned, living this close to each other again. We laughed at the way fate takes a hand in things sometimes.’

The corner of his mouth twitched, but the smile did not reach his dark eyes. It struck Fredrika that Sven must have been quite good-looking in his youth. Craggy features, a bit like Alex Recht, and grey hair that must once have been dark brown. He was tall and rather stately, his wife quite diminutive by comparison.

‘How did you get to know each other?’ asked Joar.

Fredrika was finding that Joar’s voice often startled her. He had the knack of sounding so genuinely interested in everything. Yet so correct. Tedious bugger, she had heard Peder mutter on occasions. It was not a view she shared.

‘Through the church,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘Jakob was an assistant vicar in the local parish, you know, just like Sven, and Marja was in charge of church music. I was a lay reader myself.’

‘So you all worked in the same parish? How long for?’

‘Almost twenty years,’ said Sven with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Elsie and I worked in Karlstad before that, but we moved to the Stockholm area when the children started senior school.’

‘So your children were friends, too? asked Fredrika.

‘No,’ Elsie said hesitantly, looking away from her husband for some reason, ‘not really. Marja and Jakob’s two girls were a bit younger than our boys, so they didn’t go to school together. Of course we met on social occasions as families, and sometimes at church. But no, I wouldn’t say they were good friends.’

Why not? thought Fredrika. The boys can’t have been that much older.

She left it for the time being, but thought she could detect Elsie blushing.

‘What can you tell us about Jakob and Marja?’ asked Joar with a slight smile. ‘I know all this is terribly hard for you, and I know you’ve already had to tell other officers all this, before we were put on the case, but Fredrika and I would be very grateful if you had time to answer a few questions.’

Elsie and Sven slowly nodded their assent. There was something about their body language that Fredrika found disturbing. Something awkward. Fredrika could not in her wildest dreams imagine the couple to be involved in what had happened, but they had been behaving as if they had something to hide even before she and Joar began their questioning.

‘Jakob and Marja’s relationship was a very solid one,’ Elsie declared. ‘A really good marriage. And they had two lovely girls. Both of them good at what they did, in their different ways.’

Fredrika caught herself surreptitiously rolling her eyes. ‘A really good marriage.’ What did that actually mean?

‘Were they very young when they met each other?’ asked Joar.

‘Yes, they were,’ said Elsie. ‘He was seventeen and she was sixteen. It was considered a bit scandalous, back then. But once they got married and had children, everyone forgot about how it all started.’

‘But as I said, that was before we knew them,’ put in Sven. ‘We only know what Jakob and Marja told us.’

‘Were you close friends?’ Fredrika asked delicately.

And she saw she’d scored a bull’s eye. Sven and Elsie fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

‘We were close friends, of course we were,’ said Sven. ‘I mean, we had keys to each other’s flats, for example. For practical reasons, mainly, and because we always have done, what with living so near each other.’

But, observed Fredrika. There was a ‘but’ trying to get out.

She waited.

It was Elsie who came out with it.

‘But we were closer before,’ she said in an undertone.

‘Any particular reason for that?’ Joar asked lightly.

Elsie appeared to droop.

‘Not really, but, well, how shall I put it, I suppose we grew apart. It doesn’t just happen when you’re young, it can happen in later life, too.’

Sven nodded eagerly, almost too eagerly, as though Elsie had said something really brilliant, though not necessarily true.

‘We’ve found ourselves in different circles these last few years,’ he said, looking almost cheerful as he spoke, as if the words were coming much more easily than he had thought they might. ‘And after Elsie and I gave up work, church wasn’t quite such a hub for us any longer.’

‘But they’d invited you to dinner yesterday?’ Fredrika enquired.

‘Oh yes. We still saw each other socially sometimes.’

This steered the conversation naturally round to what had actually happened the evening before. They had rung the doorbell repeatedly, knocked and then hammered on the door. Waited and then knocked again. Tried ringing the house phone and then Jakob and Marja’s mobiles. And got no answer anywhere.

‘I started to have this feeling,’ Elsie said, her voice trembling. ‘A sort of premonition that something awful had happened. I can’t explain why I had that feeling and insisted we let ourselves into the flat with our key. Sven thought I was being silly and we ought to just go back home and wait. But I wouldn’t, and said if he went home I’d go in and look by myself.’

Elsie had won the debate on the landing and unlocked the front door with the key she had in her handbag.

‘Why did you have their spare key with you?’ asked Fredrika.

Sven sighed.

‘Because I think keys are valuables you should always keep with you,’ Elsie replied almost angrily, glaring at Sven.

‘So you always carry all your keys with you?’ asked Joar with a disarming laugh.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Elsie.

‘Our house keys, our younger son’s house keys, the boat keys,’ muttered Sven, shaking his head.

Joar leant forward in his armchair and said: ‘What did you think when you found them?’

It went very quiet.

‘We thought somebody had shot them,’ whispered Elsie. ‘We ran out of the flat and rang the police straight away.’

‘But now you know the police found a farewell note,’ ventured Fredrika.

For the first time in the interview, Elsie looked on the verge of tears.

‘Jakob’s been struggling with his condition as long as we’ve known him,’ she said in a high-pitched voice. ‘But he’d never have done anything as crazy as shooting himself and Marja. Never.’

Sven nodded in agreement.

‘Jacob was a man of the Church and would never have betrayed his God like that.’

Joar stroked his coffee cup.

‘We all like to think we know our friends inside and out,’ he said in a controlled tone. ‘But there are a few basic facts in this particular case that can’t be ignored.’

To Fredrika’s surprise, Joar got up and started walking slowly round the room.

‘One. Jakob Ahlbin suffered from chronic depression. He’d had electric shock therapy for it, several times. Two. Jakob was on medication. We found pills and prescriptions in the flat. Three. A few days ago he was told that his elder daughter had died of an overdose.’

Joar paused.

‘Is it really out of the question for him to have gone mad with grief and shot his wife and himself to end their suffering?’

Elsie shook her head vigorously.

‘That’s not right!’ she cried. ‘None of it. For Lina, of all people, to have taken an overdose. I’ve known that girl since she was tiny and I can swear on the Bible she’s never been anywhere near any kind of addiction.’

Sven nodded again.

‘For people like us, who’ve known the family for decades, none of this makes any sense,’ he said.

‘But then all families have their problems and secrets, don’t they?’ Fredrika said.

‘Not that sort of secret,’ Elsie said with conviction. ‘If either of the girls had been on drugs, we would have known about it.’

Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, silently agreeing to change tack. The daughter was dead; there was no point discussing it further. And Jakob’s state of health would be better assessed by a doctor than an elderly couple who happened to be his acquaintances.

‘All right,’ said Fredrika. ‘If we disregard the most obvious line in this enquiry, namely that Jakob was the perpetrator, who else could have done it?’

There was silence.

‘Did Marja and Jakob have any enemies?’

Elsie and Sven looked at each other in surprise, as if the question had caught them unawares.

‘We’re all agreed that they’re dead,’ Joar said mildly. ‘But if it wasn’t Jakob, who was it? Were they involved in any kind of dispute, as far as you could tell?’

Elsie and Sven both shook their heads and looked down at the floor.

‘Not as far as we could tell,’ Elsie said wanly.

‘Jakob’s work with refugees made him quite a prominent figure, of course,’ said Fredrika. ‘Did that ever create problems for him?’

Sven straightened up instantly. Elsie tucked back a lock of grey hair that was hanging down over her pale cheek.

‘No, not that we ever heard,’ said Sven.

‘But it was an issue he felt very strongly about?’

‘Yes indeed. His own mother came from Finland, and then stayed here. I’m sure he saw himself as being of immigrant stock.’

‘And what did his work comprise, exactly?’ Joar asked with a frown, sitting back down in the armchair.

Elsie looked shifty, as though she did not know what to say.

‘Well, he was involved with all sorts of organisations and so on,’ she replied. ‘He gave lectures to lots of groups. Was very good at it, at getting his message across, just like when he was preaching.’

‘Men and women of the Church sometimes hide illegal migrants,’ Joar went on, with a lack of subtlety that surprised Fredrika. ‘Was he one of those?’

Sven took a gulp of coffee before he answered and Elsie said nothing.

‘Not as far as we were aware,’ came Sven’s reply at last. ‘But yes, there were rumours of that kind.’

Fredrika glanced at her watch and then at Joar. He gave a nod.

‘Well, thank you for letting us take up your time,’ he said, and put his visiting card on the table. ‘We shall probably need to come back and speak to you again, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re welcome to come whenever you need to,’ Elsie said quickly. ‘It’s important to us, being able to help.’

‘Thank you for that,’ said Fredrika, and followed Joar into the hall.

‘By the way, do you know where we can get hold of the couple’s other daughter, Johanna? We’ve done all we can to contact her, so she doesn’t hear about her parents’ death from the media,’ said Joar.

Elsie blinked, hesitated.

‘Johanna? She’ll be on one of her trips abroad, I imagine.’

‘You don’t happen to have her mobile phone number?’

Elsie pursed her lips and shook her head.

They had put on their coats and were on their way out when Elsie said: ‘Why didn’t they cancel?’

Fredrika stopped, half a metre from the door.

‘Pardon?’

‘If the girl had died of an overdose,’ Elsie said, her voice tense, ‘why didn’t they cancel the dinner party? I talked to Marja yesterday, and she sounded her usual calm, cheerful self. And Jakob was playing his clarinet in the background, the way he often did. Why were they behaving like that if they knew their own deaths were only hours away?’

BANGKOK, THAILAND

The darkness had wrapped Bangkok in a blanket of night by the time she gave up. She had been to no less than three internet cafés in the naïve hope that one of her two email addresses would work, but in vain. The system just kept telling her she had typed in either the wrong user name or the wrong password, and should try again.

She was dripping with sweat as she moved through the Bangkok streets. It was a coincidence, of course. Thai Airways’ failure to locate her booking must just have been caused by some internal blip in the airline’s system. The same applied to her email accounts, she told herself. There must be some major server problem. When she tried tomorrow, it would all be fine.

But she felt her stomach knotting, the pain radiating in all directions. She could not shake off her sense of unease. She had taken all the precautions the project demanded. Only a handful of people knew about her trip, and fewer still knew the real reason for it. Her father was one of them, of course. She did a mental calculation and concluded it must be about one in the afternoon in Sweden. Her hand was slippery with sweat as she felt in her pocket for the mobile phone she had equipped with a Thai SIM card the day she arrived.

The phone crackled, cars tooted and voices shouted to be heard above all the noise with which Bangkok city was vibrating. She pressed the phone to one ear and put her finger in the other to try to hear. The phone rang once and then an unknown woman’s voice informed her that the number no longer existed and there was no forwarding option.

She stopped abruptly in the middle of the pavement, heedless of people walking into her from in front and behind. Her heart was pounding and the sweat was pouring off her. She rang again. And again.

She glared distrustfully at the phone and tried ringing her mother instead. She was transferred straight to voicemail, but decided there was no point leaving a message because her mother virtually never used her mobile. She tried ringing her parents’ landline instead. She closed her eyes and imagined the telephone ringing in the library and hall simultaneously and her parents each leaping to a phone as usual. Her father generally got there first.

The phone echoed into emptiness. One ring, two, three rings. Then an anonymous female voice told her this number, too, no longer existed, and no forwarding number was available.

What on earth was going on?

She could not honestly remember an occasion on which she had felt truly afraid. But this time it was impossible to ward off the anxiety that was creeping over her. She racked her brains in vain for a rational explanation for her failure to get hold of her parents. It was not just that they were out, it was more than that. They were no longer subscribers. Why ever would her parents do that without telling her? She told herself to stay calm. She ought to get herself something to eat and drink, perhaps sleep for a while. It had been a long day and she had to decide what she was going to do about the trip home.

She gripped the mobile phone hard. Who else could she ring? If she restricted herself to people who already knew where she was, the list would not be very long. And anyway, she had not got their numbers; they were her father’s friends. As far as she knew, most of them were ex-directory to make sure they were not disturbed outside work. She felt tears prick her eyes. Her rucksack was heavy and her back was starting to ache. Worn out with worry, she set off back to the hotel.

There was in fact one more person she ought to be able to ring. Just to make sure everything was all right, just for some help to reach her parents. Yet she still hesitated. They had not been close for several years now, and from what she had heard, he was in considerably worse shape than he had been then. On the other hand, she did not have many options left. She made up her mind just as she stopped to buy something to eat from a stall selling chicken kebabs.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said, relieved to hear the familiar voice answer. ‘I need a bit of help.’

To herself she added:

‘I’m being cut off from the world.’

STOCKHOLM

Alex Recht assembled his team in the Den straight after lunch. Fredrika slipped in just as he was starting the meeting. Alex noted that she looked a bit brighter. He avoided catching Peder’s eye. He had still not told him why he had been summoned back to HQ, only sent a message via Ellen that he was to take a look at anything on the Ahlbin case that the public had rung in with. Since the couple’s identities had not yet been released in the media, the number of calls had been pretty sparse.

‘Right,’ Alex said briskly. ‘Where do we stand?’

Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, then Joar looked at Peder, who nodded mutely to Joar to present what they had found out in the course of the day. Joar rounded off with a report of the conversation with Sven and Elsie Ljung, who were convinced their friends had been murdered.

‘So they stuck to that when they talked to you, too?’ asked Alex, leaning back in his chair.

‘Yes,’ said Fredrika. ‘And they raised quite an important point, actually.’

Alex waited.

‘They went round to their friends’ place because they’d been invited to dinner. Why wasn’t the dinner called off if the couple had just heard their daughter had died?’

Alex sat up straight.

‘Very good objection,’ he said, but furrowed his brow. ‘Though according to the farewell note, only Jakob knew the terrible news. So in that case it wasn’t surprising that Marja sounded normal on the phone.’

‘But the Ljungs also queried the whole story of the daughter’s death,’ Joar elaborated. ‘And as regards whether Marja knew about her daughter or not, we can’t be sure.’

‘But it can’t be that difficult to check, can it?’ said Alex dubiously. ‘Whether the daughter’s dead, I mean.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Fredrika. ‘We’ve got copies of the doctor’s forms, confirmation of death and cause of death, from Danderyd Hospital. She apparently died from a drugs overdose, and it was clear from the paperwork that she’d been an addict for some years. The hospital called the police but there were no indications that the death was anything other than self-inflicted. So no further steps were taken. But we don’t know who actually broke the news to her parents. Their friends didn’t seem to know she was a drug addict.’

‘That bit about the Ljungs and Ahlbins not being so close any more is interesting,’ said Alex, changing tack. ‘Did they say why?’

Fredrika hesitated.

‘Not exactly,’ she said slowly. ‘There was something they didn’t really want to tell us, but I didn’t get a sense of it being particularly relevant to the case.’

Silence fell. Fredrika gave a discreet cough and their assistant Ellen Lind jotted something on her pad.

‘Okay then,’ said Alex. ‘Where shall we go from here? Speaking for myself, I shan’t be happy until we’ve interviewed more of the Ahlbins’ friends and acquaintances. It would be a shame if we couldn’t find anyone taking a contradictory view to the Ljungs on whether Jakob Ahlbin fired the gun and whether the daughter was on drugs.’

He shook his head irritably.

‘What more do we know about the daughter’s death?’ he said, frowning. ‘Anything strange there?’

‘We haven’t had time to go into it in detail,’ Joar put in. ‘But I was planning, sorry, we were planning to take a closer look this afternoon. If it seems worth our while.’

Alex tapped his pen gently on the table.

‘I’d like to suggest something else. Fredrika, how’s your afternoon looking?’

Fredrika blinked several times, almost as though she had been sleeping through the meeting.

‘I’m going to try to get some scraps of paper translated,’ she replied. ‘That thing I rang you about. I’ve nothing else on.’

‘Scraps of paper,’ echoed Peder suspiciously, mainly to have something to say.

‘The hit-and-run victim outside the university had various scraps of paper on him, scrunched into little balls. They’ve got things written on them in Arabic.’

‘Since we’re talking about that case,’ said Alex, his eyes on Fredrika, ‘is there anything at this stage to indicate it could have been a deliberate criminal act?’

‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘At least, not according to the doctor who did the preliminary report, but there’ll be a full autopsy later.’

Alex nodded.

‘But that’s hardly going to take all afternoon, knowing you. How about going into the Ahlbin daughter’s death a bit more and trying to write a summary of what happened, so we’re all clear on the sequence of events? Not because I think we’ll unearth anything revolutionary, but it would be good to know we’d checked it out thoroughly.’

Fredrika gave a cautious smile, hardly daring to look at Joar. Maybe he was like Peder, one of those who hated to be passed over. She had not had time to form any proper opinion of him, but her first impression had been a good one. Really good. A quick glance in his direction reassured her. He looked completely unperturbed. Yes, she was impressed.

‘I’ll be glad to follow up the daughter’s death,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay very long this afternoon.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You can carry on tomorrow morning,’ Alex added quickly.

Peder tried to catch his eye across the table, wondering what was going on.

Alex felt anger bubbling up inside him, and swallowed several times.

‘Joar and I are going to pay a visit to the parish where the Ahlbins worked,’ he went on. ‘I had a call from the vicar there, earlier on today, and he was very keen to sound cooperative. We’ll interview him before we decide how to take it from there – see if there’s any reason to think anyone else was involved, or if we can assume Jakob was the sole perpetrator. And we’ll all offer up a prayer that we find their other daughter, Johanna, by the end of the day.’

Peder was staring at Alex.

‘And what am I going to do?’ he asked, trying not to sound as if he was whining.

He failed.

‘You are going to see the head of HR at two o’clock,’ Alex said dully. ‘And if I were you, I wouldn’t be late.’

Peder’s heart leapt with anxiety.

‘Was there anything else?’ said Alex.

Joar hesitated, but then went ahead.

‘We got the feeling the flat wasn’t their proper home,’ he said.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Alex.

Joar looked sideways at Peder, but found his colleague was sitting staring at the wall, his face immobile.

‘As I say, it was just a feeling,’ said Joar. ‘But it seemed so impersonal, almost as though the whole place was designed just for entertaining.’

‘We ought to investigate that angle,’ said Alex. ‘Summer cottages and the like won’t necessarily be in the parents’ names; one of the daughters could just as well be the registered owner. Fredrika, can you look into that, too, while you’re at it?’

Then Alex declared the meeting closed.

Peder, full of foreboding, went to see the head of HR, Margareta Berlin, at exactly two o’clock. He could not get Alex’s stern look out of his mind. He had to wait outside her door for a few minutes, before she asked him in. What the hell was this about?

‘Come in and shut the door,’ said Ms Berlin in her inimitable husky voice, very probably the result of high whisky consumption and lots of shouting at subordinates as she climbed her way to the top.

Peder did as he was told. He had enormous respect for the tall, powerfully built woman behind the desk. She wore her hair cut short, but still looked very feminine. Her large hand waved to indicate he was to take a seat on the other side of the desk.

‘Does the name Anna-Karin Larsson say anything to you?’ she asked, so brusquely that Peder jumped.

He shook his head and swallowed.

‘No,’ he said, embarrassed to find he had to clear his throat.

‘No?’ said Margareta, suddenly less abrasive, though her eyes were still dark with anger. ‘Hm, that’s rather what I thought.’

She paused before going on.

‘But maybe you do know whether you like a croissant with your coffee?’

Peder almost sighed with relief. If this was about nothing worse than that stupid remark, the meeting would soon be behind him. But he still had no idea who Anna-Karin Larsson was.

‘So,’ said Peder, with the lopsided smile he used for disarming women of all ages. ‘If it’s yesterday’s croissant incident you want to talk about, let me start by saying I meant no harm.’

‘Well that’s reassuring, at any rate,’ Margareta said drily.

‘No, I really didn’t,’ he said magnanimously, holding up his hands. ‘If anybody in the staff room took offence at my, er… how shall I put it, slightly crude way of expressing myself, I apologise. Of course.’

Margareta observed him across the desk. He stared back stubbornly.

‘Slightly crude?’ she said.

Peder hesitated.

‘Very crude, maybe?’

‘Yes, actually,’ she said, ‘extremely crude, even. And it’s a matter of deep regret that Anna-Karin was confronted with that sort of behaviour in only her third week with us.’

Peder gave a start. Anna-Karin Larsson. Was that her name, the luscious new trainee he’d made such a fool of himself with?

‘I shall go and see her and apologise in person, naturally,’ he said, talking so fast he almost started stuttering. ‘I…’

Margareta held up one hand to stop him.

‘Naturally you’ll apologise to her,’ she said forcefully. ‘That’s so self-evident as not to count as any kind of redress here.’

Bollocks. Some third-rate bit of skirt who couldn’t cope with the pressure except by running off to HR at the first opportunity. As if she could read his thoughts, Margareta said: ‘It wasn’t Anna-Karin who told us about this.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ Peder said mistrustfully.

‘No, it was someone else who found your behaviour offensive,’ said Margareta, who was now leaning across the table with a concerned look. ‘How are you, Peder, really?’

The question nonplussed him so much that he could not summon a reply. Margareta shook her head.

‘This has got to stop, Peder,’ she said loud and clear, in the sort of voice normally only used for addressing children. ‘Alex and I have been aware of what you’ve been going through these past eighteen months, and how it’s affected you. But that’s not enough, I’m afraid. To be blunt, you’ve put your foot in it once too often now, and this morning’s croissant episode was the final straw.’

Peder almost started to laugh, and raised his arms in a gesture of appeal.

‘Now hang on…’

‘No,’ roared Margareta, bringing the palm of her hand down on the desk with such force that Peder thought he could feel the floor shake. ‘No, I’ve hung on long enough. I wondered whether to intervene when you got drunk at the Christmas party and pinched Elin’s bottom, but I heard the two of you had worked it out between you and assumed you realised you’d gone too far. But clearly you hadn’t.’

You could have heard a pin drop, and Peder felt his objections to her verdict piling up and turning into a shout, which he only kept inside him with a huge effort. This wasn’t fair in any way and Peder was going to bloody well throttle the bastard who’d squealed about the croissants.

‘I’ve booked you a place on a workplace equality course which I think might be an eye-opener for you, Peder,’ she said frankly.

Seeing his reaction, she went on quickly:

‘My decision isn’t negotiable. You attend the course, or I take this problem to a higher level. I also want you to agree to an appointment with a psychologist through the healthcare provider we have a contract with.’

Peder opened his mouth and then closed it again, his face flaming.

‘We as employers cannot accept this sort of conduct, it simply won’t do,’ she said in the same firm tone, pushing a sheet of paper over the desk towards him. ‘The police force is no place for office fornication. Here, these are the dates and times of your appointments.’

For a moment he contemplated refusing to take the sheet of paper and telling her to shove it up her fat arse, and making a run for it. But then he remembered that Alex knew the story and even seemed to be in on the conspiracy. Peder clenched one fist so hard that the knuckles went white, and snatched the paper with the other hand.

‘Was there anything else?’ he said with effort.

Margareta shook her head.

‘Not for now,’ she said. ‘But I shall be keeping a close eye on how you deal with your colleagues from now on. Try to see it as a fresh start, a second chance. Take the opportunity of getting something out of this, especially out of your talk to the psychologist.’

Peder nodded and left the room, convinced he would fucking well kill the woman if he stayed a second longer.

Neither Alex Recht nor Joar Sahlin said a word as they drove the short stretch from HQ in Kungsholmen to Bromma Church where Jakob and Marja Ahlbin had worked. Ragnar Vinterman, the vicar, had promised to meet them at the parish rooms at two thirty.

Alex’s thoughts went to Peder. He knew he had been hard on him at the meeting in the Den, but he did not really know what else he could have done. The croissant episode was as odd as it was unacceptable, and revealed poor judgement in a colleague whose employer had placed a good deal of trust in him. Alex knew well enough that the boy had been having a hard time in his private life over quite a long period. It was only natural for that sort of thing to affect one’s judgement, and if Peder had ever commented on his own conduct in a way that showed he knew he was behaving badly, people might have been more tolerant. But Peder had not. He got himself into awkward situations more and more often, embarrassing his employer in front of other employees.

In front of other female employees.

Alex suppressed a sigh. And then there was Peder’s peculiarly lousy sense of timing. The last thing they needed at the moment was any negative publicity, with the special investigation group’s continued existence currently under discussion. It was enough that their only civilian appointment and only female investigator had been forced to go part time by a more than hellish pregnancy which Alex’s bosses had initially construed as symptoms of stress and exhaustion. He had been more than thankful the day Fredrika finally gave in and followed the rules for a proper reduction in hours backed up by a convincing doctor’s note.

Meanwhile, the group had acquired new blood in the shape of Joar. Admittedly only for a limited period, but still. The decision was in itself an indication that the group had not been written off. It had not taken Alex long to appreciate Joar as an exceptionally talented detective. By contrast with both Peder and Fredrika, he also seemed mentally stable. He never flared up like Peder, and never seemed to misconstrue things the way Fredrika tended to. He always stayed calm and his integrity appeared boundless. For the first time in many months, Alex felt as though he had someone he could talk to at work.

‘Mind if I ask about your surname?’ Joar suddenly said. ‘Is it German?’

Alex gave a laugh; it was a question he was often asked.

‘If we go back far enough in our family tree it apparently is,’ he replied. ‘Jewish.’

He glanced sideways at Joar, keen to see if he reacted. He did not.

‘But that was a long time ago,’ Alex added. ‘The men whose surname it was married Christian women, and the Jewish blood ties between mother and child were broken.’

They were approaching the church. Alex parked outside the parish rooms as arranged. A tall, dignified-looking man was on the front steps in his shirtsleeves and dog collar, waiting for them. He was silhouetted like a dark statue against the white building and pale grey sky. Commands respect, was Alex’s assessment before he was even out of the car.

‘Ragnar Vinterman,’ said the clergyman, taking Alex’s hand and then Joar’s.

Alex noted that he could not have been on the steps for long, because his hand was still warm. And large. Alex had never seen such large hands before.

‘Let’s go in,’ said Ragnar Vinterman in a deep voice. ‘Alice, our parish assistant, has provided some refreshments.’

There were coffee cups and a generous plate of buns set out on one of the big tables in the parish rooms. Other than that, the whole place looked deserted, and Alex could feel how chilly the place was even before he took off his coat. Joar kept his on.

‘I’m sorry it’s so cold,’ said Ragnar with a sigh. ‘We’ve been trying to sort out the heating here for years; we almost despair of ever getting it to work. Coffee?’

They accepted the hot drinks gladly.

‘I should probably start by expressing condolences,’ Alex said cautiously as he put down his cup.

Ragnar nodded slowly, head bowed.

‘It’s a huge loss to the parish,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s going to take us a very long time to get over it. The grieving process is going to be hard work for us all.’

The man’s bearing and voice filled Alex with instinctive trust in him. Alex’s daughter would have said that the vicar had the body of a senior athlete.

The vicar ran a hand through his thick, dark brown hair.

‘Here in the church we always follow the saying “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst”, but to do that you need to form a clear view of what the worst conceivable thing would be.’

He stopped abruptly and fiddled with his coffee cup.

‘I fear we who work and worship here had not really done that on this occasion.’

Alex frowned.

‘I don’t think I quite understand.’

‘Everybody here knew about Jakob’s health problems,’ he said, meeting Alex’s gaze. ‘But only a few of us knew how bad things sometimes got for him. Only a handful of colleagues and parishioners knew he had had electric shock treatment several times, for example. When he was in the clinic we would generally say he was at a health resort or away on holiday. He preferred it that way.’

‘Was he afraid of being seen as weak?’ asked Joar.

Ragnar turned his gaze to the younger man.

‘I don’t think so,’ he answered, leaning back in his chair slightly. ‘And he knew, just as we did, that there are so many preconceptions about the condition he suffered from.’

‘We gather he’d been living with it for a long time,’ said Alex, kicking himself for not yet having got hold of Jakob’s doctor.

‘For decades,’ sighed the vicar. ‘Ever since his teens, really. Thank goodness treatment in that area has made such strides as time has gone on. From what I can understand, those early years were pretty ghastly for him. His mother was apparently diagnosed with the same thing.’

‘Is she still with us?’ asked Joar.

‘No,’ said the vicar, and drank some coffee. ‘She took her own life when Jakob was fourteen. That was when he decided to take holy orders.’

Alex gave a shudder. Some problems seemed to pass from generation to generation like a relay baton.

‘What’s your view on what happened yesterday evening?’ he said tentatively, seeking eye contact.

‘You mean do I think Jakob did it? Did he shoot Marja and then himself?’

Alex nodded.

Ragnar swallowed several times, looking past Alex and Joar and out of the window at the snow covering the trees and ground.

‘I’m afraid I think that is exactly what happened.’

As if he had just realised that he was sitting very uncomfortably, he shifted position on his chair and put one knee over the other. His big hands rested on his lap.

The only other sound was that of Joar’s pen at work, adding to the half-page of notes he already had.

‘He was in such a wretched state those last two days,’ Ragnar said, his voice strained. ‘And I regret, yes, I regret with all my heart that I didn’t sound the alarm and at least tell Marja everything.’

‘Such as what?’ asked Alex.

‘About Karolina,’ said Ragnar, leaning forward over the table and resting his face in his hands for a few moments. ‘Little Lina, whose life had gone so far off course.’

Alex registered that Joar had stopped writing.

‘Did you know her well?’ he asked.

‘Not as an adult, better when she was younger,’ said Ragnar. ‘But I heard reports from Jakob every so often on how she was living. On her addiction and her attempts to get free of it.’

He shook his head.

‘Jakob didn’t realise what her problem was until a few years ago,’ he went on. ‘I mean, she’d always demanded so much of herself, and when she couldn’t really reach that standard in her student years she started taking various kinds of drugs. At first to enhance her performance, but later on the addiction was yet another problem she had to deal with.’

‘But her mother, Marja, she must have been aware of the problem, too?’ Alex said dubiously.

‘Of course,’ said Ragnar. ‘But the girl was much closer to her father, so he was the only one with the full picture. And since they had other problems in their life, he chose not to pass on to his wife all the details of what was happening to their daughter.’

‘But she must have noticed something,’ said Joar. ‘As I understand it, the girl had been severely addicted for a number of years.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ragnar, a sharpness coming into his voice. ‘But with a bit of determination, things can be glossed over well enough, especially if the mother can’t cope with the truth, even if she chose to see it.’

‘You mean she chose to shut her eyes to aspects of her daughter’s state?’ said Alex.

‘Yes, I do,’ Ragnar said firmly. ‘And I don’t know if it’s all that surprising really. They had had problems for many years with Jakob’s condition, and suddenly their daughter was another problem. I suppose it was all too much for Marja. That’s how it is sometimes.’

Alex, himself the father of two children, was not sure that he agreed with the clergyman, but then he had no experience of what it was like to live with someone suffering from severe depression. There certainly was a natural limit to how much misery any one person could bear. Ragnar Vinterman was right in that respect.

‘He got the news on Sunday evening,’ Ragnar went on. ‘He rang me just afterwards and sounded shocked, desperate.’

‘Who broke it to him?’ asked Alex.

Ragnar looked momentarily confused.

‘I don’t actually know. Does it matter?’

‘Probably not,’ said Alex, but he still wanted to know.

Joar shifted uneasily.

‘But he said nothing to his wife?’ he asked.

Ragnar bit his lower lip and shook his head.

‘Not a word. And he begged me not to say anything, either. He said he needed to try to understand the implications himself before he told Marja. I saw no reason not to do as he asked, and gave him until Wednesday, until today.’

‘Until today?’ echoed Alex.

The vicar inclined his head in assent.

‘Marja was coming to a parish meeting here today, and if Jakob still hadn’t told her, I was going to do it myself. I mean, she had to know.’

The thoughts went round and round in Alex’s head. A picture was slowly taking shape.

‘Did you speak to him again later, or was that the last time you were in touch?’

‘We spoke once more after that,’ said Ragnar, sounding strained again. ‘Yesterday. He sounded oddly relieved on the phone, said he was going to tell Marja all about it in the evening. Said everything would be all right.’

The vicar took a deep breath. Alex did not expect him to start crying, and nor did he.

‘Everything would be all right,’ repeated the vicar, his voice thick. ‘I should have realised, should have done something. But I didn’t. I didn’t do a thing.’

‘That’s very common,’ Joar said in such a matter-of-fact voice that both Alex and the vicar stared at him.

Joar put down his pen and pushed away his notepad.

‘We think we’re going to be rational and understanding in all situations, but unfortunately human beings don’t work like that. We aren’t mind readers, in fact the only thing we are good at is “realising” afterwards, when all the facts are at hand, what we should have done. And then we hold ourselves responsible. When there’s no need.’

He shook his head.

‘Believe me, you lacked vital information that, with hindsight, you’ve convinced yourself you had all along.’

Alex looked at his younger colleague in astonishment.

There’s so much we don’t know about each other, he thought.

‘Some of Marja and Jakob’s other friends say it’s out of the question for Jakob to have shot his wife and himself,’ he said, moving the conversation on.

Ragnar Vinterman appeared to hesitate.

‘You mean Elsie and Sven?’ he said gently. ‘It’s a long time since they were really good friends with Marja and Jakob, and there was a lot they didn’t know.’

Like the daughter’s drug habit, Alex thought to himself.

‘Why was that?’ asked Joar. ‘Why weren’t they such good friends any more?’

‘Oh, they were still good friends,’ said Ragnar. ‘Just not as close, from what Jakob said. Why? Well, I hardly know. They fell out over something a few years ago, and it was never quite the same after that. Then Elsie and Sven retired early, and when they left the parish they had even less contact with Jakob and Marja.’

Joar was making notes again.

‘And what about their other daughter, Johanna? Did she have problems as well?’ asked Alex.

The vicar shook his head.

‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘I only ever heard good things about her. On the other hand,’ he added uncertainly, ‘I suppose I did hear rather less about her. She made it clear at quite an early stage that she wasn’t as interested in the Church as the rest of the family, wasn’t a believer, and that created a certain distance.’

‘Do you know what she’s doing now?’ Alex asked curiously.

‘She’s a lawyer,’ replied Ragnar. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know any more than that.’

‘So you don’t know where we can get hold of her?’ asked Joar.

‘No, unfortunately not.’

They sat in silence for a while. Alex drank some coffee and mulled over what they had discovered. Most of it now seemed quite logical. Jakob had not cancelled the dinner date because it might have made Marja wonder what was going on. And the reason he had sounded so relieved on the phone was in all likelihood the classic one: he had decided to end their lives and thus found peace.

The only question mark was the daughter Johanna. Had she really drifted so far apart from her family that Jakob felt it legitimate to rob her of her parents? They really did need to get hold of her, and fast.

He decided to ask one last question.

‘Say we pretend we don’t think Jakob was disturbed enough to take his own life and his wife’s, who else could it have been? Can you think of any possible alternative perpetrator?’

Ragnar frowned.

‘You mean someone Jakob and Marja had such a violent disagreement with that they were murdered?’

Alex nodded.

‘No idea. None at all.’

‘Jakob did a lot of campaigning on refugee issues…’ began Joar.

‘Yes, that might have landed him in trouble, of course,’ said Ragnar. ‘I don’t know anything about it, though.’

With that, the meeting was over. The men ate the last of the buns and drank up their coffee, chatting about the snow, which was causing various disruptions. Then they shook hands and parted.

‘I’m afraid his assessment may be correct,’ Alex said thoughtfully in the car on the way back to Kungsholmen. ‘But we must get hold of the daughter first and check that story against hers. And we must talk to the doctor in charge of Jakob’s treatment.’

But by the time Alex and Joar left work some hours later, they still had not located either of them. And although Alex had thought he had everything under control, a sneaking suspicion was beginning to grow that this might not be the case.

Fredrika Bergman was running for her life. With a protective hand round her belly, she was running faster than she had ever run before through the dark forest. The long tree branches clawed at her face and body, her feet sank into damp moss and hot summer rain plastered her hair to her head.

They were close now, her pursuers. And she knew she was going to lose. They were calling to her.

‘Fredrika, give up! You know you can never escape us! Stop! For the sake of the baby!’

The words lashed her onwards. It was the baby they wanted, it was the baby they were trying to get at. She had seen that one of the men had a knife. Long and glinting. When they caught her, they would cut the baby out of her stomach and leave her to die in the forest. Just as they had all the other women she could see lying on their backs among the trees.

She could not go on much longer and her desperation grew. She would die in the forest, unable to save her unborn child. The tears pulled and tugged at her, slowing strides that had been so long and swift at first.

She finally tripped over a tree root and fell hard. Landed awkwardly, on her stomach, and the baby froze to ice and stopped moving.

Within a few seconds they were in a ring around her. Tall and dark. Each with a knife. One of them squatted down beside her.

‘Now come on, Fredrika,’ he whispered. ‘Why are you making it so hard when it could be simple?’ They crowded round her exhausted body, forced her onto her back, held her down.

‘Breathe, Fredrika, breathe,’ said the voice, and she saw one of the knives being raised.

She screamed with the full force of her lungs, fought to get free.

‘Fredrika, for Christ’s sake, you’re frightening the life out of me,’ boomed a familiar voice.

She forced her eyes open, looking around in confusion. Spencer’s hard arms were holding her firmly; her legs were tangled in the duvet. She was sweating all over and tears were running down her face.

Spencer felt her relax, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He held her in silence.

‘Good God, what’s wrong with me?’ whispered Fredrika, sobbing into his neck.

Spencer said nothing, just hugged her tightly.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

Fredrika, not even able to recall that they had arranged to meet, was just glad he was there and said nothing for a long while.

‘What time is it?’ she finally asked.

‘Half past eleven,’ sighed Spencer. ‘The plane from Madrid was delayed.’

A memory forced its way to the surface. Madrid. He had been at a conference in Madrid. He was meant to land at half past six, they were going to have dinner together. But in the event he had only got there just before midnight, letting himself in with his own key. Before she got pregnant they had always met at Spencer’s father’s old flat but now, with the baby, and Fredrika having such a hard time, they more often met at her flat instead. New challenges meant new routines.

Tears of disappointment welled in her eyes.

‘I’m so bloody fed up with all this. I thought you were supposed to be happy when you were pregnant; placid. Pathetic, almost.’

Spencer gave that wry smile that had made her want to have him more than she had ever wanted any other man.

‘Pathetic, you?’ he grinned, taking off his outdoor things.

‘You didn’t even hang your coat up?’ Fredrika asked foolishly.

‘No, you were making such a racket when I came in that I thought I’d better see to you first.’

He padded swiftly back. Tousle-haired, with tired eyes. He was no youngster, Spencer. And he would soon be a father for the first time in his life.

‘Good Lord, Fredrika, is this how it is every night?’

‘Almost,’ she replied evasively. ‘But you’ve seen me like that before.’

‘Yes, but I thought it only happened now and again. It’s awful to think of this going on when I’m not here.’

Be here then, Fredrika wanted to say. Leave your boring wife and marry me instead.

The words froze inside her, swallowed up by an ocean of habit. Her relationship with Spencer was as crystal clear as it had always been: they were a couple, certainly, but only within certain limits. He had never led her to believe things would be different just because he accepted his role as father of her child.

Fredrika got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Spencer had vanished into the kitchen to make a quick sandwich. She threw her sweat-drenched nightdress into the washing basket and took a shower. The warm, gentle jets of water felt desperately welcome on her skin. She twisted and turned under the flow, too tired to register that she was crying. Afterwards she wrapped herself in a big towel.

At least she had had a good day at work. Short, but good. It had been hard to find anyone to translate the Arabic on her scraps of paper because all the translators were tied up on a big immigrant-smuggling case, with lots of material to work on for the national CID. Finally one of them had taken on her small enquiry and agreed to report back the next day.

Fredrika suppressed a sigh. There certainly would be plenty to do tomorrow. The translator’s feedback to go over, of course; and the doctor who had been responsible for Karolina Ahlbin when she was admitted to hospital and then died of the overdose was also due to get back to her. The only concrete result of Fredrika’s day was a memo about a big property out at Ekerö, a house and some land, that was registered in the names of the Ahlbin sisters and had previously been under their parents’ names. Maybe that was the house where the family spent time together?

Fredrika felt a lump in her throat at the thought of Johanna Ahlbin, left all alone now. Fredrika had not been able to resist looking her up in the national register, while she was at it. Johanna Maria Ahlbin, born 1978, one year after her sister. Unmarried, no children. No one but her registered at that address, so it was a single-person household.

Was there anything worse? The child moved, as if worried it might get forgotten. Fredrika tried to soothe it by stroking her stomach. The baby was unborn. It was there, and yet it was not. If anyone had rung at her door and told her that her parents and brother were dead, she would fall apart. She would miss her brother above all. Fresh tears pricked her eyes. Apart from Spencer there was really no one she thought of more highly.

She wiped away the tears that were running down her cheeks like lost beings. Her own child was hardly likely to have any siblings.

‘You’ll just have to manage,’ she whispered.

Then she raised her head and met her own red-rimmed eyes in the bathroom mirror. And felt ashamed. What had she got to be so upset about, when it came down to it? She was living a good life with friends and family, and expecting her first baby with a man she had loved for many years.

Grow up, she thought angrily. And stop feeling so sorry for yourself. It’s only in fairy stories that people get any happier than this.

With the towel wrapped round her head, she left the bathroom and went out to Spencer in the kitchen.

‘Can you make me a sandwich, too?’

The ring of the telephone cut through the flat just before midnight. He went to answer as quickly as he could, before it woke his wife as well. He moved cautiously past her closed door, grateful for once that they no longer shared a bedroom. His bare feet sounded loud on the parquet floor. With one smooth movement he silently pulled the study door shut behind him.

‘Yes?’ he said as he lifted the receiver.

‘She’s rung,’ said the voice at the other end. ‘She rang earlier today.’

He did not respond immediately. He had been expecting the call, but it churned him up, even so. He decided it was a healthy reaction. No human being could be part of a project like this without feeling something.

‘All according to plan, then,’ he said.

‘Everything’s going according to plan,’ confirmed the voice at the other end. ‘And tomorrow we go on to the next stage.’

‘Did she seem to suspect anything? Has she realised the all-encompassing nature of her predicament, so to speak?’

‘Not yet. But she will tomorrow.’

‘And by then it’s too late for her,’ he concluded with a sigh.

‘Yes, by then it’ll all be over.’

He played with a pristine notepad on the oak desk. The gleam of a street light coloured the flowers on the windowsill yellow.

‘And our friend who came from Arlanda the other day?’

‘He’s in the flat where his contact left him. He should be ready for his task tomorrow.’

Cars were passing in the road outside. Their wheels crunched over the snow. The exhaust fumes were white in the cold. How strange. Out there, everything seemed to be carrying on exactly as before.

‘Perhaps we ought to have a break in operations when we’ve finished this?’ he said softly. ‘Until all the fuss dies down, I mean.’

He could hear the breathing at the other end of the line.

‘You’re not getting cold feet?’ said the voice.

He moved his head from side to side.

‘Of course not,’ he said in a quiet, emphatic voice. ‘But a bit of caution does no harm at the moment, with everyone’s eyes on us.’

The caller gave a low laugh.

‘You’re the only one they can see, my friend. The rest of us are invisible.’

‘Exactly,’ he said huskily. ‘And that’s what we want, isn’t it? It would be a shame if they found reason to take a closer look at me. Then it would only be a matter of time before they saw you, too, my friend.’

He put particular stress on the last words, and the laughter at the other end stopped.

‘We’re both on the same side in this,’ the voice said in a muted tone.

‘Just so,’ he persisted. ‘And it would be as well if I wasn’t the only person to remember that.’

He hung up. Lit a cigarette, even though he knew his wife hated him smoking indoors. And outside the snow fell as if the weather gods were desperately trying to bury all the evil in the world beneath frozen rain.