Silenced

THURSDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2008

STOCKHOLM

She had lots of red hair, a shapeless mauve dress and very irritating body language. Her voice was shrill, her words harsh and angry. Peder Rydh was pretty sure she had BO and unshaven armpits, too.

Peder was sitting right at the back, at the end of the row of chairs, wondering what he was doing there. On a course about equality in the workplace. When there were so many more important things to do. If Margareta Berlin had been there, too, she would have been feeling shamefaced about her decision. Of all the equality courses in the world, this must be the worst. Pity. For Ms Berlin.

He fidgeted. Restlessness tingled in his legs, bubbled up and made his blood boil. It fucking well wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t.

He turned red at the recollection of Margareta Berlin’s scolding. She had looked so goddamn sure of herself, imposing the sentence from behind her desk. As if she was the right person to be teaching him how to behave in the force.

And she’d had the nerve to bring up that little misunderstanding at the Christmas party, too.

Peder swallowed hard. He felt shame and apprehension, but also fury, pure fury. It hadn’t been his fault. Anybody could see that. And what was more, Margareta Berlin had her facts wrong. The police force was no different from any other workplace; you could go to bed with anybody you liked.

More pictures came into his mind’s eye, this time from the Christmas party.

Hot bodies on a cramped, improvised dance floor in the staff room. Far more alcohol than had been intended, dancing to some music that was not part of the main programme. As his colleague Hasse put it the day after the party, things had got quite heavy. Peder had made the most of it. Lots of partying, lots of dancing. His feet had done the moves by themselves as he went whirling round with one female workmate after another.

Then he danced with Elin Bredberg. Shiny face, dark hair and bright eyes. Peder had seen eyes like that before, oh yes. Hungry, come-hither eyes. On the pull. Gagging for it.

And Peder was never backward in coming forward. If the door was open, he stepped inside. That was just the way he was. First he pulled Elin closer to him. Her eyes narrowed but were still smiling. Tempting, inviting. So Peder moved his hand from her back down to her bottom. Squeezed it and kissed her cheek.

Before he knew it, her hand came flying through the air and smacked him round the face. And the party was over.

Peder thought there were certain unwritten rules in life. Elin Bredberg must have known what messages he was receiving. He told her so, and demanded she take her share of the blame, if not all of it, which was what she really ought to do. In the end he had accepted that the fault was on his side. Not until the next day, when they were both a bit more sober and capable of normal conversation, but they had sorted it out between them, at least.

Though Peder still thought she was the one in the wrong.

And now look where it had got him. In a school hall in working hours, being lectured on equality by a woman who looked like a scarecrow and probably hadn’t had any decent sex since Jesus was walking about in sandals.

Peder gave an inward groan. It was always so unfair. There was always some bad experience to shatter the least hint of happiness whenever it came along. That bastard who had squealed about the croissants had better mind his bloody back, because he had made himself an enemy in the force. A suspicion had dawned on him during the night, and the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed.

‘Gender is power,’ the lecturer boomed. ‘And women are, in a way, second-class citizens in this country. Even though Sweden is one of the leading democracies in the world.’

She took a breath, her hair swinging all over the place.

‘We’re going to do a little exercise,’ she said crisply, surveying the hall. ‘I need a volunteer, a nice young man from the audience.’

Nobody moved.

‘Oh come on now,’ she cooed. ‘It’s not difficult. Just an exercise that’s been around since time immemorial. And it’s fun, as well.’

Peder sighed. Sighed and let his thoughts drift to Ylva, from whom he had separated six months before. Months of lonely evenings in his flat in the suburbs, and the boys coming to stay every other weekend. The odd evening or week of meaningless dates that never led to anything except sex that was hot the first time and then rapidly cooled.

His chest tightened, his eyes smarted and he slumped a little in his seat. He wondered if it was the same for Ylva. He wondered if she felt empty, too.

Because that was how he felt.

Empty. So bloody empty.

The doctor’s voice made Fredrika feel she was being watched, even though she knew it was ridiculous. The doctor was on the telephone and not there in front of her. If she were to guess what he looked like, she would say he had glasses and thinning hair. And maybe narrow green eyes.

‘Karolina Ahlbin was brought to the hospital in an ambulance last Thursday,’ said the doctor, whose name was Göran Ahlgren. ‘She was diagnosed with what would popularly be called an overdose, in this case an overdose of heroin injected into the crook of her arm. We did what we could to save her, but her internal organs had already taken such a battering that it was impossible to bring her back. She died less than an hour after she was admitted.’

Fredrika jotted down what he had told her.

‘I can send over copies of the confirmation of death and cause of death forms,’ he added.

‘We’ve already had those,’ said Fredrika, ‘but I would be grateful for a complete copy of the patient’s notes, if you wouldn’t mind.’

She could hear the hesitation in Göran Ahlgren’s voice as he went on.

‘Are there any suspicious circumstances?’ he asked.

‘No, not in her case,’ said Fredrika. ‘But her death is linked to another case, so…’

‘I shall make sure you have the paperwork you need by this afternoon,’ said the doctor.

Fredrika got the feeling he was rather keen to hang up.

‘Had she been a patient at the hospital before?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Göran Ahlgren. ‘Never.’

There was a knock at Fredrika’s door and Ellen Lind came in with some papers, which she put on the desk. They gave each other a nod and Ellen departed.

We should see more of each other outside work, thought Fredrika, and felt tired at the very prospect.

She hardly had the energy to socialise with her existing friends.

Göran Ahlgren cleared his throat to remind her he was still on the line.

‘Sorry,’ Fredrika said quickly. ‘I just had a couple more questions about how Karolina was identified. Did she have any ID documents on her?’

‘Yes she did. She had a wallet in her back pocket with a driving licence in it. Identification was made using the picture on the driving licence and confirmed by her sister, who came with her in the ambulance.’

Fredrika was struck almost dumb.

‘Sorry?’

‘Her sister. Just a moment, I’ve got the name here,’ said the doctor, leafing through some papers. ‘Yes, here we are. Her name was Johanna, Johanna Ahlbin. She was here to identify her sister.’

The thoughts were whirling round inside Fredrika’s head.

‘We haven’t been able to contact her sister,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she is?’

‘I didn’t speak to her for long,’ said Göran Ahlgren wearily. ‘But I remember she mentioned an imminent trip abroad. I believe she left over the weekend.’

Fredrika felt a growing sense of frustration. There had been no reference to the sister’s presence in any of the documentation she had received from the hospital or the police.

‘Did the police officers who were sent to the hospital speak to the sister?’

‘Only briefly,’ said the doctor. ‘There weren’t any obvious irregularities that needed looking into. I mean, the deceased came in with her sister, who filled us in on the background. And the identification was a straightforward matter, too.’

The fatigue that normally slowed Fredrika’s brain suddenly cleared away. She gripped her biro hard and stared straight ahead. So Johanna Ahlbin had been present when Karolina died. Then she had gone abroad and was not contactable. And two days ago her father’s grief had made him take his own life.

‘Who informed Karolina Ahlbin’s parents of her death?’ she asked, her voice unnecessarily stern.

If she had not known better, she would have said the doctor was smiling as he replied.

‘I can’t say for certain,’ he said. ‘But Johanna Ahlbin said she would do it.’

‘Do we know if she told anyone else about the death? Did she ring anyone while she was at the hospital?’

‘No,’ replied Göran Ahlgren, ‘not that I saw.’

Bewildered, Fredrika tried to get to grips with the story that was emerging.

‘What sort of mood did Johanna Ahlbin seem to be in while she was with you?’

The doctor paused, as if he did not understand the question.

‘She was upset, of course,’ he said. ‘But not in a particularly dramatic way.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, she wasn’t as distraught as a lot of relatives are when someone dies unexpectedly. I got the impression Karolina Ahlbin’s drug abuse was known to the family and had been a problem for a long time. That doesn’t necessarily mean the death was expected, of course, but it did mean the relatives were to some extent prepared for the possibility that this was how it might end.’

Not her father, Fredrika thought dully. He was entirely unprepared. He shot his wife and then himself.

She ended the call to the doctor, not at all clear about what she had discovered.

An odd family. Very odd, in fact.

A glance at the clock showed it would soon be time for the morning meeting in the Den. She reached for the papers Ellen had left on her desk. A copy of the follow-up report on the unidentified hit-and-run victim. She leafed through it quickly and saw there was nothing new in it. The pathologist performing the autopsy would send in a report later in the day.

Her thoughts went to the crumpled scraps of paper and the Arabic script she was having translated. They probably meant nothing, but still needed checking out.

The translator answered after the third ring.

‘It wasn’t the easiest handwriting to decipher,’ he said.

‘But you could make it out?’ Fredrika asked urgently.

‘Yes of course,’ said the translator, sounding almost offended.

Fredrika suppressed a sigh. It was always so easy to tread on people’s toes, to cross lines that were never evident from the outset.

‘We’ll take the straightforward part first,’ began the translator. ‘The pamphlet. It’s a prayer book. A collection of verses from the Koran, nothing strange about it at all. And there was nothing written in it, either. But then there are these bits of paper.’

Fredrika could hear rustling at the other end.

‘The first one has the names of two locations in Stockholm: the Globe and Enskede. Two Swedish words, but written down phonetically, in Arabic. That must be it, otherwise I’ve no idea what it means. And I’m an Arab myself, so I ought to know.’

He gave a laugh and Fredrika had to smile. The translator’s laugh died away.

‘The other one, the one you told me had a ring wrapped in it, says: ‘‘Farah Hajib, Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq’’.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Fredrika.

‘No idea,’ said the translator. ‘And it may mean nothing beyond the most obvious thing, namely that in Sadr City in Baghdad there lives a woman called Farah Hajib. Perhaps the ring’s hers?’

‘What sort of place is Sadr City?’

‘It’s a lesser-known district of Baghdad which is, or at any rate used to be, controlled wholly or in part by the Shiite grouping known as the Mehdi Army,’ explained the translator in a matter-of-fact way. ‘A real trouble spot, you could say. Many people had to flee from there because of the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the fall of Saddam’s regime.’

Pictures from the news reports of the inferno of internal antagonisms and clashes that was post-2003 Iraq resurfaced in Fredrika’s mind. Millions of people moving into the interior of the country and into neighbouring states. And added to those the very few, all things considered, who had made it all the way to Europe and to Sweden.

‘Maybe she’s here?’ said Fredrika. ‘As an asylum seeker?’

‘I’ll send up my translation in the internal post,’ said the translator, ‘so you can check with the Migration Agency. Though I suspect it will be hard to locate her with just a name. You can’t even be sure she has given the authorities here the same name.’

‘I know,’ said Fredrika, ‘but I still want to check. And how did you get on with the map? Could you decipher anything?’

‘Ah yes, the map. I’d forgotten that.’

There was more rustling.

‘The writing says: ‘‘8, Fyristorg’’.’

‘An address in Uppsala, then?’

‘It seems to be, yes. That’s all there was. But as I said, I’ll send this up and you can get back to me if you’ve got any questions.’

Fredrika thanked him for his help and decided her immediate priority was to check out the address in Uppsala, the city where she and Spencer had first met.

It was nearly ten and she only had a few minutes before the meeting. Time to banish Spencer from her thoughts so she could concentrate. She raised her eyebrows when she discovered what was at 8, Fyristorg.

It was the address of a Forex foreign exchange bureau.

Fredrika frowned and tried hard to think what had made her react so strongly to seeing the name Forex. Nothing came to mind, so she logged on to Vilma, the Migration Agency’s system, to see if she could find a Farah Hajib in their database. Maybe the woman was in Sweden. And maybe she was missing a ring.

When he heard the key in the lock, he felt such a surge of relief that he almost burst into tears. The night had felt interminable and the flat was very cold. The lovely frost patterns on the outsides of the windows were the only aesthetically appealing things in this drab, temporary home.

Ali was not feeling good. He had had stomach ache and diarrhoea for several days. The air in the flat was thick with cigarette smoke because none of the windows opened, and he sometimes found himself trying not to breathe in too often. He was also feeling the effects of prolonged insomnia. It had only taken a couple of sleepless nights for his senses to start feeling distorted by fatigue. Now, he forgot a thought before he had even finished thinking it, and sometimes felt he was asleep even though he was awake.

This was not the life he had paid for. Even if he had paid a good deal less than many other people.

He met them in the hall, wanting to show that he was glad to see them, even so.

It was early in the day, not much after nine-thirty.

It was the same woman who had met him at the bus station. She had a man with her. He was short and very blond. It was hard to assess his age, but he looked about sixty. Ali’s spirits fell. He had hoped for someone who spoke Arabic. To his surprise, the man opened his mouth and greeted him in his own language.

‘Salaam aleikum, Ali,’ he said softly. ‘How have you been getting on in this flat?’

Ali swallowed and cleared his throat several times. It was so long since he had had anyone to talk to.

‘It’s fine,’ he said, his voice scratchy.

He swallowed again and hoped they could not tell that he was lying. It would be a disaster if they thought he was being insolent. The very worst thing would be if they sent him home. That would put him and his family back to square one.

The man and woman went further into the flat and Ali trailed after them. They sat down in the living room. The woman put a few unopened packets of cigarettes on the coffee table and nodded to Ali. He smiled and tried to express his gratitude. He had had nothing to smoke all night, which had only increased the stress levels in his body.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered in Arabic. ‘Thank you.’

The fair-haired man said something to the woman and she laughed.

‘We hope you didn’t think we had deserted you,’ said the man, leaning back on the sofa with a troubled look. ‘It’s just that we have to leave a few days between visits, as I’m sure you understand.’

When Ali did not reply at once, the man added: ‘It was for your own sake, too, you know.’

Ali took the first drag at a cigarette, feeling the nicotine start to soothe him.

‘It was no problem at all,’ he said quickly, putting the cigarette to his mouth again. ‘I’ve been fine.’

The man nodded and looked reassured. The woman picked up the briefcase she had with her and put it on her knee. The lock flew open with a quiet click and she opened it.

‘We’ve come to discuss the final part of your payment for setting you up here in Sweden,’ the man said with authority. ‘So you can get your residence permit and bring your family over, start a new life. And so you can move to your new home, learn Swedish and look for a job.’

Ali nodded eagerly. He had been waiting for this ever since he got off the plane.

The woman passed him a plastic wallet with some papers in it.

‘This is the house in Enskede we thought you and your family could have,’ said the man, encouraging Ali to take out the papers. ‘We thought you might like to see it.’

The pictures showed an anonymous little house joined to some others. The house was white and the lawn in front was very green. There were curtains at the windows. Ali could not help smiling. His family would love living there.

‘Do you like it?’

Ali nodded. The man spoke Arabic well, better than many other foreigners Ali had encountered since the outbreak of the Iraq War. He wondered if he would be able to speak Swedish that well one day. The feeling of hope warmed his chest. Only those who did not make an effort risked losing everything.

The woman reached for the document wallet and Ali handed it back quickly.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, shifting impatiently in the armchair.

His eyes were stinging with fatigue and hunger was making the pains in his stomach even worse.

The man smiled his warm smile again.

‘How much did you tell them, back home in Iraq?’

Ali sighed.

‘Not much. Just that you had a different sort of payment system from the other networks. That we paid less money and the rest was based on…’

He groped for the right words.

‘… favours on both sides.’

The man’s smile got even broader.

‘Exactly,’ he said in the most approving of tones, as if Ali had done something first rate. ‘Favours on both sides, that’s exactly it.’

He gave a little cough and his troubled look returned.

‘As I hope you realise, we’re doing this because we wish you and your countrymen well. But everything costs money. The house costs money, the false passport that got you here cost money. And remember, in our system, on no account must you apply for your residence permit yourself. We have contacts who see to all that for you.’

That was the very part of their arrangement that sounded so amazing and made Ali accept their very unusual terms: he was not to tell a single person, even his family, where he was going. Nor was he to say who his contacts were, prior to his departure. And he must swear on his honour that he had never been in Sweden before and did not know anyone there.

The first of these conditions was the only one that had really given Ali any trouble: not being able to tell his family anything. He had had to slip away from his marital home like a thief in the night, and set out on his trip to Europe and Sweden all alone. He had, however, broken the third condition. He did in fact have a friend in Sweden, in a town called Uppsala, and he had alerted that friend in the most unobtrusive of ways to his arrival. The friend was no doubt already waiting for him to get in touch, though he had explained it would be a while before they were free to meet.

The other refugee smugglers seemed to hold the men in their charge in contempt. They cost between five and ten times more, and their terms were downright miserable. There was no question of a residence permit with them, and Ali was very well aware of the prospects. The Swedish Migration Agency had initially granted permits to just about every asylum seeker from Iraq, but was now turning down seventy per cent of all applications. If you were turned down, then you could appeal, but it could take years before you got a final decision. And if you lost, you had to go underground to stop the authorities throwing you out.

He could imagine nothing worse. The very thought of being separated from his wife Nadia for that long made it difficult for him to breathe.

So he nodded eagerly to this man who spoke of favours on both sides and the need to finance his residence permit.

‘What is it you want me to do?’ he asked again.

The man observed Ali in silence for a long time. Then he leant forward and told Ali what he had to do.

Once upon a time, everything had all been very different. Alex Recht had been a new, young member of the police force and had soon established himself as one of the promising names. After just a few years in uniform he had been brought into the CID, and there he had stayed. He was usually pretty sure he was happy there.

The idea of putting him at the head of a special investigation group with a hand-picked team from the Stockholm Police had not been his. He had in fact been rather sceptical about the whole thing. He pictured a future in which huge, unwieldy investigations would land on his desk and there would never be enough people to deal with them, while between cases they would be twiddling their thumbs. He had been proved right, and that was still the position. After the summer’s wide-ranging investigation of Lillian Sebastiansson’s disappearance and murder, the flow of cases had been very uneven. The opening line was always the same: ‘Alex, could your group take a look at this?’

Sometimes the case proved to be as aberrant as it first appeared, but often there turned out to be no logical reason for Alex and his special team to take it on.

Alex currently had two cases on his plate: the case of the shooting of the Ahlbins, and the case of the unidentified hit-and-run victim in Frescativägen, up at the university. By the time he opened the meeting in the Den, Alex had already made his mind up. Unless Fredrika had come up with anything persuasive on the latter, they would hand it over to their colleagues in the Norrmalm Police.

Alex gave a bitter sigh. He was convinced that the furrow across his brow would soon be a permanent fixture. And he was not so sure he enjoyed his job any more.

‘Right, we’re all here,’ he said loudly, so everyone would sit down.

They were few in number, as usual. Fredrika, Joar and Ellen. Peder was missing, but Alex passed no comment.

‘But Peder…’ began Ellen.

‘He’ll be in later,’ Alex said, with evident irritation.

Then he and Joar listened attentively while Fredrika told them what her call to the hospital had yielded.

‘So it was Karolina’s sister who identified her?’ Joar said in surprise.

‘Not just identified,’ said Fredrika. ‘She came with her in the ambulance and was there while they tried to resuscitate her. I’ve spoken to the officers who talked to her at the hospital. She seemed quite in control and told them very matter-of-factly about all her sister’s problems. She told the officers it was a relief that her sister had found peace.’

Alex stroked his chin. His fingers ached a bit, but the physiotherapy was gradually achieving the desired effect.

‘So what does all this tell us?’ he said slowly, leaning back in his chair. ‘Karolina dies in the hospital on the Thursday. Her father doesn’t get the news until Sunday, possibly from the other daughter Johanna, according to the hospital doctor. But the mother is told nothing. And Johanna goes underground.’

He shook his head.

‘What have we managed to find out from Johanna Ahlbin’s workplace? Where is the woman?’

‘She’s on leave of absence at the moment,’ replied Joar. ‘I finally managed to track down the company where she works and spoke to somebody in authority, who told me she was on a period of leave. She’s been gone a fortnight and isn’t expected back for another three weeks.’

‘So she was already on leave of absence when her sister died?’ said Fredrika.

‘Yes,’ said Joar. ‘But the employer couldn’t tell me why she’d been granted it. Private reasons, it sounded like. They weren’t even sure if she was in the country.’

‘What employer grants five weeks’ leave of absence without going into the whys and wherefores?’ asked Fredrika.

‘This one obviously does,’ said Joar with a dubious expression. ‘I explained to her boss why we were looking for her, and that it was urgent. But he still couldn’t tell me any more.’

‘We haven’t got an email address, have we?’ Ellen put in.

‘We can’t break bad news like this by email,’ Alex said in dismay.

‘No, but we could tell her we needed to speak to her,’ said Ellen.

‘They gave me her work email address,’ said Joar. ‘But there’s no guarantee she’ll be checking that while she’s on leave. Her work mobile’s switched off.’

No one said anything. Alex turned over in his mind what he had heard, wanting his thoughts to fall into place so a clearer picture emerged.

‘There’s still something not right here,’ he said emphatically. ‘Why on earth would she break news as dramatic as her sister’s death to her father and then leave the country? Without exchanging a word on the subject with her mum?’

Joar nodded, mainly to himself.

‘It sounds odd, even when we take into account that the family knew about her sister’s drug abuse so the death was not entirely unexpected.’

‘Which leads us to another strange thing,’ Fredrika went on. ‘How could anyone in their circle of acquaintances still have been oblivious to Karolina’s addiction? She’d been heavily into drugs for a long time.’

‘I think Ragnar Vinterman gave us a clue to that,’ said Alex. ‘Karolina’s addiction was something they chose not to talk about out loud.’

‘But if they’d had time to get used to the fact that she might die, that makes her father’s reaction very strange,’ said Joar, steering the discussion back to the same old track. ‘According to Ragnar Vinterman, Karolina’s drug habit had been wearing her parents down for a long time, and we’ve also learnt that Johanna wasn’t exactly distraught when her sister died.’

‘Perhaps they weren’t that close?’ suggested Fredrika. ‘Do we know anything about their relationship?’

‘Or Johanna’s relationship with her parents, for that matter,’ Alex added. ‘Why did she go off directly after breaking the news? She knew how unstable her father could be. Just because you keep your distance from your family, as we’ve heard that she did, it doesn’t mean you behave completely irresponsibly towards them.’

They were all absorbed in their thoughts. Alex drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk.

‘But we mustn’t confuse one thing with another,’ he said sternly. ‘The fact that their family relationships were rather odd is neither here nor there in this case, really. I don’t see that any of the points we’ve been discussing change anything crucial.’

The others nodded in agreement. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex could see Fredrika fiddling with some other sheets of paper she had in front of her. He had almost overlooked the unidentified man.

‘We’ll email Johanna Ahlbin at the address we’ve got,’ he said. ‘And we’ll ask her employer to approach some of her colleagues, see if she was friendly with any of them outside work, in case they know where she is at the moment. And Joar and I will go to that other house, the one registered in the sisters’ names, and see if we can turn up anything useful there. What do we know about the place, Fredrika?’

Fredrika put aside the sheaf of papers she was holding and shuffled through another one.

‘The house is out at Ekerö,’ she told them. ‘It’s been in Marja Ahlbin’s family for a long time: it was originally bought by her maternal grandparents in the 1930s. Ownership was transferred to Marja in 1967, and then to Karolina and Johanna four years ago.’

‘Have they got equal shares in it?’ asked Joar.

Fredrika nodded.

‘Yes, according to the registry Johanna and Karolina Ahlbin own half each.’

‘And Marja’s parents?’ said Alex. ‘They’re no longer with us, I hope, because otherwise we’ve forgotten to let them know that their daughter’s been shot in the head by her own husband.’

Fredrika’s vigorous nodding confirmed this.

‘Yes, Jakob’s and Marja’s parents have all been dead for some years,’ she said. ‘Jakob had a brother, too, but he emigrated to America. Marja had no brothers or sisters.’

‘Is this house out at Ekerö a big place?’ asked Joar, looking thoughtful.

‘I printed out a map,’ said Fredrika, showing them. ‘The house is at the far end of a little road. It’s got a lot of ground with it and the property as a whole is valued at two and a half million kronor.’

Alex whistled.

‘So I assume the house goes to Johanna now Karolina’s dead?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Fredrika. ‘But I don’t know if it could be called a windfall. There’s still a big mortgage to pay off.’

‘Why was it transferred to their names so soon?’ asked Joar. ‘Why would you put assets like that in the hands of a drug addict?’

‘We’d better take a closer look at the conveyancing,’ said Fredrika.

‘Let’s look at the actual house first,’ declared Alex. ‘Then we can go into the paperwork.’

He glanced over at Fredrika to check she had not taken exception to his rather authoritarian tone. They had had a few communication problems of that nature when she first joined the group.

But Fredrika did not look in the least bit ruffled.

Alex went on.

‘How are you getting on with our unidentified man?’

Fredrika briefly summarised her results. The fact that the man had written various place names and addresses on scraps of paper, and wrapped a ring in another bit of paper with a woman’s name on it. The woman did not seem to be in Sweden, or at least, there was no asylum seeker from Sadr City in Baghdad registered under that name in the database.

‘There isn’t necessarily anything strange about it being a Forex bureau,’ Alex said tentatively. ‘He may just have had money to change, or something like that.’

‘But why do it in Uppsala?’ wondered Fredrika.

‘Because he lived there?’ suggested Joar with a smile.

A faint smile crept across Fredrika’s otherwise sombre, earnest face. It had struck Alex on numerous occasions that she was actually rather beautiful.

‘So what was he doing on the main road outside Stockholm University in the middle of the night?’ she went on. ‘I get the feeling our man lived here, not in Uppsala.’

Alex pulled himself upright.

‘Is there anything at all to underline suspicions that he was killed deliberately?’ he asked bluntly.

‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘Not as things stand. But I’m still waiting for the CID to get back to me about the fingerprint check, and I haven’t had the autopsy report yet, either.’

‘All right,’ said Alex, ‘wait for those two reports, and then we’ll decide how we’re going to continue the investigation. If we’re going to continue the investigation,’ he added.

Whether it was the effect of her pregnancy or for some other reason, Fredrika did not seem to have any objections to that arrangement, either.

She’s not herself, thought Alex, and started to brood. She generally advanced her ideas more tenaciously.

A knock at the door interrupted the meeting, and Peder came in. He did not look anyone in the eye, merely sank into a spare seat at the table.

‘Hi,’ he said.

One step behind him came a man whom Alex knew was from the technical division.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he drawled, standing in the doorway. ‘I thought you might like to see this,’ he went on, passing Alex some sheets of paper.

‘What are these?’ asked Alex.

‘Print-outs of emails sent to Jakob Ahlbin’s church email account,’ said the technician. ‘We were given access today. He seems to have been receiving threats for a while now. He’d saved the emails in a separate folder.’

Alex raised his eyebrows.

‘Really?’ he said.

The technician nodded.

‘See for yourself,’ he said. ‘They were threatening to do some really nasty things, if Jakob didn’t stop his activities. He seems to have got involved in some dispute he ought to have kept out of.’

Joar got quickly to his feet and moved so he could read over Alex’s shoulder.

‘Look at the dates,’ he said, pointing. ‘The last one came less than a week ago.’

Alex felt his pulse racing as he read the print-outs.

‘So he was receiving threats, after all,’ he declared.

And with that, the case of the late Jakob and Marja Ahlbin took a new turn.

BANGKOK, THAILAND

Her friend had told her to wait until he got back to her with instructions. He had promised to be in touch by two o’clock the next day. She looked uneasily at the time; it was just after three. Back home in Sweden it was nine in the morning.

For the hundredth time she took her mobile out of her bag and checked it. Still no missed calls. But then, timekeeping had never been his strong point.

The proprietor of the internet café offered her another cup of coffee. He recognised her now, and looked sorry when she declined.

‘Can I help?’ he asked.

She tried to smile and shook her head.

‘No, but thanks anyway.’

Her eyes went back to the computer screen. She instinctively wished that her problems were the kind that could be solved by the intervention of a Thai café owner. She had carried on ringing her parents, but to no avail. The only thing that had changed since yesterday was that her mother’s mobile was now cut off, too. Her email was still not working and Thai Airways still maintained they had never heard of her booking.

‘Don’t worry,’ her contact said. ‘I’ll get this mess sorted out for you. If you can just hang on till tomorrow you’ll see, it’ll all be okay.’

She wondered if she should ring him again, ask why he had not rung back.

Her stomach was rumbling and her head felt heavy. She ought to eat and drink something, top up her energy levels. She decided on the spot to go back to the hotel and try to find something to eat on the way.

The heat hit her as she came out onto the pavement. She went along Sukhumvit, the great artery through Bangkok city, relieved to know that her hotel was only two blocks away. Her handbag was rubbing her shoulder and she upped her pace. She slipped into a side street to get out of the sun. Her head turned from side to side as her eyes looked out for the first suitable place to eat.

Her mind on food, she was not concentrating and did not see him until it was too late. Suddenly he was there on the pavement with his knife drawn and his lips compressed. The cacophony of cars and people was less than thirty metres away, but in the side street it was just the two of them.

I’m not going to get out of this, she thought, and did not initially feel any fear.

The fear only came when he started to speak.

‘Your bag,’ he spat, threatening her with the knife. ‘Your bag.’

Standing there, she felt like crying. Not so much because she was being robbed for the first time in her life, but because she would now face even greater problems. Everything was in her bag. Her purse, her Visa card, her mobile. That had been her decision for the whole trip; she had judged it more risky to leave anything of value in the hotel than to carry it with her. The only exception was the computer, which she could not face lugging round with her. But that had been emptied of all information.

Her breath came in gasps. The bag reluctantly dislodged itself from her shoulder and slid down to her elbow.

‘Quick, quick,’ the man with the knife exhorted, gesturing to her with his free hand to let go of the bag.

When she did not immediately do so, he launched himself forward and forced her to take two rapid steps back to avoid a stab wound to her arm. She tripped on an uneven bit of tarmac and fell over. The bag slipped to the ground and in a second the man was standing over her, grabbing it.

But he did not go. He unzipped the bag and started going through the contents.

‘USB,’ he demanded.

She stared at him uncomprehendingly.

‘USB,’ he shouted. ‘Where is it?’

She swallowed several times, shaking her head frantically.

‘I haven’t got one,’ she answered in English, trying to shuffle backwards along the pavement, still on her back.

The man leant forward and yanked her to her feet. She struggled to get free, twisting like a snake. Then the knife lunged at her again, very close this time. He pressed it to her face and she gave an involuntary jerk as she felt the cool metal against her skin.

Stressing every syllable, he said again:

‘Where is it?’

In silent panic she weighed up the alternatives. There were none, she realised as she saw the man’s expression. It was angry and aggressive, but very controlled. He knew all too well what he was looking for.

She fumbled for the memory stick on the chain round her neck. He was still gripping her, far too hard. When he saw what she was doing, he wrenched at the chain and it broke. The memory stick fell onto the tarmac and he dived after it.

There would be no better chance of escape than this.

She ran faster than she had ever run before, her sandals slapping on the tarmac. If she could just get out onto Sukhumvit she’d be safe.

‘Stop!’ shouted the man from behind her. ‘Stop!’

But naturally she did not stop, convinced as she was that it would be the most dangerous thing she could possibly do. This man had been employed by someone, and his assignment was not just to rob her. She had realised almost at once what was strange about his behaviour. Muggers do not usually go through a handbag hunting for a USB stick. And how could he have known? How did he even know there was a USB stick to look for?

She ran all the way back to the hotel, taking a route that meant she could keep to the bigger streets all the way. She did not know exactly when he had given up the chase, but he stopped shouting after she put on a spurt along Sukhumvit. She did not turn round until she was in the hotel lobby, almost fainting and drenched in sweat. He was not there.

She sank to the lobby floor in despair.

A security guard and one of the receptionists came dashing over. Was she all right? Could they help her?

She wished with all her heart she could have laid the whole story in their open arms. She was tired now, incapable of summoning up the inner resources to see her project through. Coming on this trip alone suddenly seemed like a really stupid idea. What had she been thinking? Hadn’t she understood the risks, sensed imminent danger?

‘I’ve been robbed.’

The hotel staff were dismayed. Robbed? In broad daylight in Bangkok? A white woman? They looked shocked, said they had never heard of such a thing before. The female receptionist went to get some water and the guard to ring the police.

As she drank, the receptionist enquired kindly whether she needed anything else.

‘No,’ she replied, trying to smile. ‘I’d just like my key so I can go up to my room and wash.’

The receptionist disappeared off to the desk and the guard paced impatiently up and down the lobby.

‘The police will be here within half an hour,’ he assured her.

She tried to look grateful, well aware that the police could hardly help her in any significant way.

The receptionist returned. She looked worried.

‘Pardon me, but what room number did you say it was?’

‘214,’ she said wearily.

She gulped some more water, picked herself up and went over to the desk.

‘I’m sorry, miss,’ said the receptionist. ‘In 214 we have a man who booked in the day before yesterday. Are you sure you have the right number?’

Suddenly she could not breathe. She stared at the hotel logo, which was all over the reception area to remind guests where they were.

Manhattan Hotel. The hotel where she had been staying for the past five nights.

Panic rose inside her. The hotel staff were now observing her with watchful eyes. She tried to keep her voice steady as she spoke.

‘Sorry,’ she said with an effort. ‘I must have got mixed up. You’re right, I don’t remember my room number.’

‘Miss, we want to help you, but your name is not on our computer. Not for any room.’

She swallowed hard.

‘Okay, then perhaps you’ve registered me as having checked out, by mistake.’

The receptionist gave an unhappy sigh.

‘According to the computer, you have not been staying here at all.’

A few seconds passed. She blinked to hold back the tears.

She looked the receptionist entreatingly in the eye.

‘But you must recognise me. I’ve been going in and out of this hotel for several days now.’

The receptionist exchanged glances with the guard, looked as though she wanted to ask something. Then she shook her head.

‘Sorry, miss,’ she said, appearing genuinely sorry. ‘I have never seen you before. And no one else here has, either. Would you like me to help you ring for a taxi?’

STOCKHOLM

Peder Rydh tried to keep his anger in check as Joar and Alex set off for the Ahlbin sisters’ house at Ekerö. Alex had left him the job of going through the emails that had come to light and working with the technical section to try to establish who had sent them. Fredrika had been entrusted with finding out as much as possible about Jakob’s activities with refugee organisations. Even that seemed more exciting than poring over lousy emails.

Peder took out his mobile and tried ringing his brother Jimmy. There was no answer and Peder threw the phone onto his desk. Of course he hadn’t answered, everything else was going down the pan, so why not that, too?

A sense of guilt set in almost immediately. He should be glad Jimmy was not answering his phone, because it meant he was too busy doing something he enjoyed more.

‘Jimmy’s lucky having a big brother who cares about him so much,’ said the carers at the assisted living unit whenever Peder went there.

It sometimes seemed as if the unit was the only place on earth where Peder still made a good impression and felt welcome. Jimmy had lived there since he turned twenty, and seemed happy. It made his world the size he could handle and he was surrounded by people like himself who could not manage on their own.

‘You have to remember that in spite of any setbacks, you’re still living an enormously privileged life,’ his mother would say.

Peder knew what she meant, but it still bothered him to hear her say it. Fredrika Bergman, for example, hadn’t got a sibling who had suffered brain damage at the age of five in a stupid game that went wrong; did that mean she was less duty-bound than Peder to make the most of herself and her life?

Sometimes when he was sitting with one of his little boys on his lap he would think about how incredibly fragile life was. Indelible images from childhood reminded him of the accident with the swing that had destroyed his brother’s life and underlined how easily something could be irrevocably lost if you were not careful.

Careful. Trustworthy. Aware.

God knew when he had last been any of those things.

His mother, who functioned more or less as a nanny to the twins, had started watching him with a worried look when he got home late smelling of beer or went for drinks after work three evenings in a row. Something had happened to him to make him less considerate and more neglectful. It had happened when the boys were born and Ylva was sucked into that goddamn post-natal depression that went on and on.

But now it was as if he was the one who couldn’t get his health back on track, not her. When they first separated he had felt strong and responsible. He had broken out of an impossible situation and done something radical to improve his life.

But it had all gone to hell in a handcart.

As usual he just gritted his teeth. At least at work he had other things to think about.

He went through the checklist he had put together of all the threats sent to Jakob Ahlbin’s church email account in the past two weeks. The tone grew more hostile as time went on, and the threats seemed to have started after the clergyman intervened in some dispute that the sender felt was none of his business. The emails were not signed with a name, but with the initials SP. The initials also featured in the email address used to issue the threats.

Peder frowned. He was not sure what SP stood for.

He read the emails again. The first was dated 20 January.

Dear Reverend Scumbag, we advise you to back off while you still can. SP

Back off from what, wondered Peder.

The next email had come a few days later, 24 January.

We damn well mean it, vicar. Keep away from our people, now and for ever. SP

So SP was some kind of group, Peder could work out that much. But what else? The rest of the threatening emails did not offer any more contextual clues, but Peder saw that the tone had hardened. An email from the last day of January read:

If you don’t give a toss about our friends, we don’t give a toss about yours. We’re going to make it hell for you. An eye for an eye, you fucking priest. SP

Hardly well-written. But the message was clear. Peder wondered what Jakob Ahlbin himself had thought. He had not reported any of the threats as far as Peder could see. Did that mean he had not taken them seriously? Or that he had other reasons for keeping the messages from the police?

The last two emails had arrived in the final week of Jakob’s life. On 20 February, the person had written:

You ought to listen to us, vicar. You’ve got the trials of Job ahead of you if you don’t stop your activities right away.

And then the last one, on 22 February:

Don’t forget how it all ended for Job; there’s always time to change your mind and do the right thing. Stop looking.

Peder pondered. Stop looking for what? The name Job sounded familiar, but he could not place it. He was assuming it must be biblical. A quick internet search confirmed it.

Job was apparently the man God tested more than any other to show the Devil how far he could push those who lived righteously.

Job lost everyone, Peder noted grimly. But he himself survived.

He reached for the telephone receiver and rang the technical division to see if they had come up with any names for the sender of the anonymous emails.

It took no more than half an hour to drive out of Stockholm to Ekerö. The roads were clear in the middle of the day, not clogged with rush-hour traffic.

‘What do you think?’ asked Joar non-committally.

‘I don’t think anything,’ Alex said firmly. ‘I prefer to know. And I know too little in this case to be able to say anything. But it’s a cause for concern that Jakob received such serious threats just before he was found dead.’

Alex did not need to spell out why it was a cause for concern. The problem was clear. If it turned out that there was proof Jakob had not been the perpetrator, they were in deep trouble with the investigation. Forensics had been through the flat with a fine-toothed comb without finding a shred of evidence that anyone else had been there at the time of the shootings. In his heart of hearts, Alex hoped Jakob would turn out to have done it. Otherwise things were going to get hellishly complicated.

They parked in the driveway and got out of the car. The sky was cloudless and the snow frozen hard. The best kind of winter weather and not the sort of conditions you spontaneously linked with death and misfortune.

The snow lay pristine in front of the house and all round it.

‘No one’s been here for a while,’ said Joar.

Alex said nothing. For no particular reason, his thoughts went to Peder. Maybe he had been too hard on him; the case had been his from the start. But colleagues in this business had to expect a severe reprimand to result from improper behaviour. It was irrelevant that he was having a rotten time at home; you could not bring private problems to work with you. Especially if you were a police officer.

‘We’ll go in as soon as the technicians get here,’ Alex said out loud, to stop the thoughts chasing round in his head. ‘I think they were just behind us on the road.’

They had been granted a search warrant by the prosecutor because a criminal act was suspected. Finding a key to the house had been harder. Elsie and Sven Ljung may have had a spare key to Jakob and Maria’s flat at Odenplan, but they did not have one to the house, and the daughters obviously could not be asked. In the end they had asked permission to go into the Ahlbins’ and Karolina’s town flats to look for the key, but could not find anything. So the technicians were coming to help them force entry through the front door with minimal damage.

‘What did Karolina’s place look like?’ Alex asked Joar, who had been in on the search.

Joar initially did not seem to know quite how to answer.

‘I certainly wouldn’t say it looked like the home of a drug addict,’ he said finally. ‘We took some pictures; you can see them later.’

‘Did it look as if someone had gone in and cleaned it up afterwards?’ he asked, thinking of Johanna, who might have done something of the kind after her sister’s demise.

‘Hard to tell,’ Joar said honestly. ‘It looked more as though nobody had been there for a while. As if somebody had done a thorough tidy-up and then gone away.’

‘Hmm,’ said Alex thoughtfully.

The snow crunched under the wheels of the technicians’ vehicle as they pulled up alongside the other car. Ten minutes later, they were in the house.

The first thing Alex noted was that the house was warm. The second was that it was furnished in a pleasant, homely fashion not at all like the way Joar and Peder had described Mr and Mrs Ahlbin’s flat. It was clean and neat. The walls were hung with photographs of the family at various ages. There were home-woven runners on the tables and the windows had curtains of a fairly modern style.

They went round in silence, unsure what they were looking for. Alex went out into the kitchen, opened cupboards and drawers. There was a litre of milk in the fridge; the carton was unopened and two weeks beyond its use-by date. That meant it could not be all that long since someone had been there.

The house had two storeys. The two bedrooms upstairs each had a set of bunk beds in them. The landing between them was used as a TV room. On the ground floor were a kitchen and dining room, and a largish living room. There were bathrooms on each floor.

‘Two lots of bunk beds,’ Alex remarked. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? Before the sisters took over the house you would have thought they were here as a family. It seems odd that Mr and Mrs Ahlbin slept in separate beds.’

Joar considered this.

‘Maybe it hasn’t always been like this?’ he said.

Alex heaved a sigh.

‘Well, let’s hope so,’ he said, heading back downstairs.

He wandered round the rooms, studying the photos. Something was disturbing him but he was not sure what. He looked again. Mum, Dad and two daughters sitting in the garden. It must be an old photograph, because the girls were little. More garden pictures, the girls older. Karolina and her parents, and one of Karolina on horseback.

Alex realised what it was that had disconcerted him.

‘Joar, come here,’ he called.

Joar’s feet thudded down the stairs.

‘Look at these pictures,’ said Alex, sweeping a hand over the living-room wall. ‘Look at them and tell me what you think.’

Joar studied the photos in silence, walking up and down in front of them.

‘Were you thinking of anything in particular?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘Johanna,’ Alex said resolutely. ‘Don’t you see? She suddenly disappears from the shots and only Karolina’s left. Looking the picture of health, I might add.’

‘But these photos go back a long time, surely?’ said Joar doubtfully.

‘They do,’ said Alex. ‘But the more recent ones look about five years old at most.’

They did another tour of the house. Karolina was in several of the pictures upstairs, including an enlargement of one with her parents that had pride of place on the TV set. Johanna was conspicuous by her absence.

‘Maybe they didn’t like her,’ said Alex, mostly to himself. ‘Maybe they had a major falling out over something.’

But that theory did not seem to fit, either. Johanna was part-owner of the house, after all. Why was she not in the photographs in her own home?

A technician stuck his head round the open front door.

‘There seems to be a way into a basement round the back,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to open that door, too?’

The lock turned out to be frozen solid and not at all as cooperative as the first one. The technician had to work at it for nearly twenty minutes before the door finally creaked open. Alex looked down and saw a short, steep set of steps leading down to a basement. He was about to ask for a torch when he saw the light switch on the wall, and turned on the light as he went down the steps. A light bulb flickered into life.

What it revealed was a fully furnished basement that had probably not been used for a very long time. The kitchen had clearly been fitted in the early 1980s and the air was thick with dust, but they could see all they needed to. A bed settee in one corner, with some armchairs and a coffee table. Three sets of bunk beds along the walls. A very basic bathroom with a smell of mould. Another small room, windowless, with a further set of bunk beds. There was no bed linen on the beds, but they all had blankets and pillows.

Alex gave a laugh.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he muttered. ‘It seems as though the rumours were right. If Jakob Ahlbin wasn’t hiding illegal migrants here, then I’d very much like to know what he did use this basement for.’

Joar looked about him.

‘Confirmation classes, maybe,’ he said drily.

Alex had to smile, but was soon grave again.

‘Gun cabinet,’ he said, nodding over to a tall metal cabinet standing in one corner of the room.

They went over and tried the doors. They were unlocked.

‘We need to check whether any of the family had firearms licences apart from Jakob,’ said Alex.

The siting of the gun cabinet gave Alex pause for thought. Why was it in the basement and not the main house, if the basement was used for concealing fugitives? Alex concluded it must have been moved at some stage, perhaps when the basement fell into disuse.

‘Is this where he got it?’ Joar said quietly.

‘Got what?’

‘The murder weapon,’ Joar clarified. ‘Was this where he got the hunting pistol for killing his wife and himself?’

‘Or where somebody else did?’ Alex said thoughtfully.

About an hour after the policemen left the house in Ekerö, another car turned into the driveway. It parked in the tyre tracks of the police cars. Two men climbed out into the snow.

‘Damn nuisance,’ said one of them, ‘them finding their way here before we did.’

The other one, a younger man, was more relaxed.

‘No damage done, I’m sure,’ he said gruffly.

‘No, but it was a bloody close call,’ hissed his companion, kicking the snow.

The younger man put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Everything’s going to plan,’ he insisted.

The other man gave a snort.

‘That’s not the impression I’m getting,’ he said. ‘Some of us have even left the country, you know. When will she be back, anyway?’

‘Soon,’ said the other man. ‘And then this will all be over.’

Fredrika Bergman was hard at work assembling information about Jakob Ahlbin’s work with refugee groups, and it was proving quite a task. Much of the material was not available electronically and she was obliged to go into the old paper archives in the library.

Jakob’s commitment to the refugee cause went back decades and had occasionally been a matter of dispute even within the Church. There had been particular trouble when Jakob actively championed a very sensitive asylum case, allowing the family to live in the church to avoid deportation.

‘The day the police cross the threshold of my church with weapons drawn is the day I lose my country,’ he was quoted as saying in one of the many newspaper articles the story generated.

The family stayed in the church for months and was finally given a residence permit.

It wasn’t so much Jakob Ahlbin’s views that courted controversy, more his actions. Jakob had not contented himself with writing articles and opinion pieces but had also campaigned for his cause in the streets and squares of various towns. He had even debated publicly with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.

Jakob Ahlbin was in fact one of the few who had dared to engage in debate with the xenophobic groups that existed in Sweden, and unconfirmed sources also said he was part of a support group for young men in Stockholm – because the problem of right-wing extremists was an almost exclusively male one – who wanted to find a way out of whatever group or network they had joined. That fitted with the email messages telling Jakob to keep out of things that were none of his business, thought Fredrika. She printed out the material on that subject, too. Peder would be glad to see what she had come up with.

Just after lunch she had the call from the pathologist who had completed the autopsy on the hit-and-run victim. The pathologist was quite curt, and as usual launched into phrases Fredrika did not understand. She hoped he was not going to go into too much detail; now she was pregnant she seemed much more sensitive to anything too specific about injuries and mangled bodies.

I’ve turned into a wimp, thought Fredrika, and had no idea what she could do about it.

‘He died as a direct result of extreme external violence that must have been caused by the impact of the vehicle, a car,’ said the pathologist. ‘The injuries are consistent with a very violent impact which threw him a distance of several metres.’

‘Was he run into from in front or behind?’ asked Fredrika.

‘In front,’ replied the pathologist. ‘But it could be that he heard the car coming and turned round. What ought to interest you more is that they didn’t just ram into him but also drove over him.’

Fredrika held her breath.

‘First we have the injuries that caused his death – the initial impact. On top of that he has injuries to his back, stomach and neck, which must have been inflicted directly afterwards, crush injuries. My guess would be that whoever it was simply backed over him as he lay there in the middle of the road.’

Queasiness came flooding over Fredrika and she had to steel herself to go on. That was just the sort of thing she did not want to hear.

She took a deep breath.

‘So what you mean in plain language is that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said the pathologist.

All of a sudden, Fredrika felt very tense. Now there was another murder enquiry for them to deal with. Damn.

Alex and Joar were back at HQ by early afternoon. To Peder’s irritation, Joar went straight to his room and did not offer him even the slightest update on the way. Peder rose resolutely from his desk chair and went in to see him.

‘How did it go at Ekerö?’ he asked, not bothering with any niceties.

He had his arms tightly folded across his chest and tried to look casual.

‘It went fine,’ said Joar after he had observed Peder in the doorway for a few moments.

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Well, yes and no,’ replied Joar, starting to sort through some papers. ‘I don’t know that we were looking for anything in particular. But we found something, all right.’

Cheeks flushing bright red, Peder persisted: ‘Like what?’

‘Like a basement that seemed to fit the story of Jakob Ahlbin hiding illegal migrants.’

Peder nodded, suddenly unsure what to do next.

‘Fredrika and I dug up some important things, too,’ he said.

Joar smiled but did not look at Peder, and nor did he ask what they had found.

‘Good,’ was all he said. ‘I hope you’ll tell the rest of us all about it at the next session in the Den.’

Peder said nothing and left. He had never come across such a goddamn stuck-up workmate in all his life. He was more high and mighty than even Fredrika used to be. Peder still had vivid memories of the heavy weather he and Fredrika had made of working together at first. If only she could be a bit more relaxed, a bit less pretentious. No. She’d always been good-looking, but that was about all you could say in her favour.

Peder could not make any sense of it. After all, unlike Fredrika, Joar was a regular police officer and a proper detective. The two of them should have worked well as a team. It was inexplicable to him why the powers that be had decided a few years back to recruit civilian investigators into the police. It was an affront to the collective competence of the force, as Peder saw it, and he was taken aback on his transfer to Alex’s group to find one of those civilians in it. Time had passed since then, and Fredrika no longer made such a fuss all the time. To start with she had questioned everything, and taken a disproportionately major role in some of the investigations. Peder felt pushed to the point where he needed to bring up Fredrika’s inadequacy in certain areas with Alex. But then she had got pregnant and that had turned her into another person.

He could not help a little grin as he thought of that pregnancy; there are plenty of rumours going round as to who the father is. An older, married man. Peder had laughed his head off the first time he heard it, and said he’d put money on it not being true. You would never catch Little Miss Prim making herself available to someone who belonged to someone else. Never. After a while he had started having second thoughts. It did not sound quite so out of the question as he had first thought. And it would explain why Fredrika was saying so little about the baby and the pregnancy. He couldn’t stop chuckling to himself. There was a whore in every Madonna, as his grandad used to say. Though his grandad had often wondered aloud what a Madonna was.

‘Have you got a minute?’ he asked as he knocked on the open door of Fredrika’s room.

She was sitting at her desk and gave a start, but smiled when she saw who it was.

‘Come in,’ she said.

Her unusual smile and long, dark hair often set Peder off on smutty flights of fancy, and it made no difference that she was expecting.

He came in and sat down opposite her.

‘Found anything?’ he asked nonchalantly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Fredrika, looking rather pleased with herself as she took a pile of photocopies out of a plastic folder. ‘I found out quite a lot about Jakob Ahlbin’s refugee activities. And some important stuff about him belonging to a support network for former right-wing extremists. The group’s still active, and is made up of police officers, social workers and people from various immigrant associations.’

She pushed the papers across to Peder.

‘Perfect,’ he said flatly, wondering why he had never heard of the support group. He would have liked to work on that sort of thing.

‘I’ve already been in touch with them,’ Fredrika went on, ‘and they’ve confirmed that Jakob Ahlbin was a member. He was one of the ones who took the initiative in setting up the group, in fact. It’s been going a couple of years.’

Peder gave a whistle.

‘And it upset a certain Mr Tony Svensson so much that he started firing off threatening letters. Or emails.’

‘Tony Svensson?’ asked Fredrika, confused. ‘Is that his name, the one who sent the emails?’

Peder nodded with satisfaction.

‘Yes it is, according to the technical boys and Comhem, the broadband service provider. We were able to trace the IP address most of the emails came from and he’s the registered owner of that.’

‘Weren’t there several people involved?’ asked Fredrika. ‘You said the emails had come from different IP addresses.’

‘The others were at a library out in Farsta and a Seven-Eleven shop in the Söder district. So there’s no specified owner as such. But it seems logical for this Tony Svensson to have sneaked out and sent emails from different places. The content of all the emails was the same, which seems to point to them all being sent by the same person.’

Fredrika gave a thoughtful nod.

‘I haven’t read them all yet. Could you let me have copies?’

‘Sure,’ said Peder.

‘What do we know about Tony Svensson? Is he known to the police?’

Peder’s face split into a broad grin.

‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he said triumphantly, settling into his seat to tell her all about what he had discovered. ‘Have you heard of an organisation called SP?’

Alex convened a meeting in the Den when he and Joar got back from Ekerö. He felt a warm glow as he listened to Peder’s account of the man who had issued the threats to Jakob Ahlbin. When Peder put his stupid behaviour on hold, he was a very skilful detective.

‘Tony Svensson was born and raised in Farsta,’ he reported. ‘He’s twenty-seven now, and had his first brush with the police when he was twelve. Shoplifting and vandalism. The Söder police and social services worked pretty closely together on his case until he turned eighteen. He’s had a couple of custodial sentences, the first one when he was seventeen and beat up his stepfather. Nearly killed him.’

‘Ah,’ said Alex with a resigned air. ‘Let me guess – the stepdad was beating up his mum?’

‘No,’ said Peder. ‘The stepdad refused to lend Tony 3,000 kronor for a holiday in Ibiza.’

‘Damn,’ Alex said, taken aback. ‘So he’s a right roughneck?’

‘Yep,’ said Peder. ‘The other assault was gang-related. He kicked another guy black and blue and rounded it off by smashing an empty wine bottle over his head. Then he used a bit of the broken glass to slash…’

‘Please,’ said Fredrika, whose face had drained of all colour, ‘can we leave the details for later?’

She looked self-conscious and put a protective hand on her stomach. Almost as if she expected someone to come rushing through the door and assault her or the baby with a broken bottle.

Peder moved on, a bit put out that he had not been able to give every gory detail.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘He was going to be done for aggravated rape, too, but the prosecutor had to drop it for lack of evidence because the girl refused to cooperate. As usual,’ he added.

‘Possibly frightened into keeping her mouth shut,’ Joar put in quietly, almost as if trying not to disturb anyone but still aware that he was doing so.

Peder clenched his fist under the table and went on as if Joar had not spoken.

‘What’s more, Tony Svensson’s been implicated in a series of thefts and break-ins and he’s also under suspicion of committing armed robbery. And to top it all, he’s a known right-wing extremist and long-term member of a neo-Nazi organisation called Sons of the People, the same lot who signed the emails to Jakob Ahlbin.’

He indicated that his lecture was over by putting down the pen he had been holding throughout.

‘Well done, Peder,’ Alex said automatically. ‘We’ve clearly got a good deal to go on here. Have we anything more concrete on the conflict between Jakob Ahlbin and this group?’

‘We’re looking at it now,’ Peder answered. ‘Maybe Fredrika can tell us where we stand?’

Fredrika sat up at the mention of her name and began as usual by opening her notebook. Alex had to suppress a smile that could have been misinterpreted as mocking. She was always so well prepared.

‘Jakob Ahlbin has drawn attention to himself in two particular contexts,’ she began, and went on to tell them about the refugee family allowed to take refuge in his church while the Migration Agency ruled on their case. ‘And then there’s the support group,’ she went on. ‘I’ve contacted the person who runs it, Agne Nilsson. He seemed very distressed by Jakob’s death and wanted to come here and talk to us tomorrow morning. I said that would be fine.’

‘Did you say anything about the threats Jakob had been sent? Was he aware of those?’ asked Alex.

‘Yes, he was,’ answered Fredrika. ‘But no one had taken them seriously. I mean, they knew their work antagonised various people. And anyway, Agne thought the emails had stopped.’

Alex looked surprised.

‘Why did he think that?’ asked Peder.

‘Because they talked about it last week, and Jakob said he hadn’t had any for over a week.’

Peder leafed through the sheets of paper in front of him.

‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘He got another three emails in the last fortnight he was alive.’

‘Strange,’ said Alex. ‘We’d better ask him about that tomorrow.’

He made a note on his pad.

‘And there’s another strange thing,’ he said, ‘namely that no one else seemed to know about the threats. Not Sven Ljung, who found the bodies, and not Ragnar Vinterman, either. Why hadn’t Jakob confided in anyone?’

Joar put his head on one side.

‘It might not be that odd,’ he said softly. ‘Not if Jakob wasn’t taking the emails seriously. Maybe it had happened before when he was working on other cases.’

‘Are there any other threatening messages in his inbox?’ Alex asked Peder.

Peder shook his head.

‘No, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t had any. Just that he hadn’t saved them.’

Alex glanced at the time and decided to wind things up.

‘Okay,’ he summed up. ‘We still don’t know whether the threats are relevant for our purposes, but we definitely can’t discount this information until we’ve talked to the support group and, of course, Tony Svensson himself. I want a print-out of all telephone traffic to and from all the numbers Jakob Ahlbin used; see if we can find out if this Tony called him as well as emailing. Then we’ll go to the prosecutor and ask if we can bring him in for unlawful menace to start with. Is there anything else in this case we need to discuss just now?’

Peder hesitated but then raised his hand.

‘The fact that Job was mentioned in one of the last emails,’ he said, and told them his own thoughts on the matter.

He suddenly felt very stupid.

But Alex was paying attention.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘What do the rest of you think?’

Joar shifted in his seat.

‘Might be interesting, but not all that startling, It clearly hasn’t passed Tony Svensson by that he was emailing a clergyman,’ he said, making Peder feel hot and uncomfortable.

‘Assuming we can expect someone with Tony Svensson’s background to know who Job was,’ said Fredrika. ‘Isn’t that the most important thing to consider?’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Alex.

‘I mean exactly what I say, that the odds of someone like Tony Svensson casually throwing biblical names into his correspondence and making them fit his purposes so well don’t seem all that high.’

Alex looked faintly embarrassed.

‘I have to admit I didn’t know exactly who Job was until Peder gave us his story just now.’

Fredrika smiled and said nothing.

‘By the way, has anybody got anything new on Johanna, the daughter?’ Alex asked, to change the subject. ‘It seems more and more vital for us to find her asap. Especially in the light of our visit to the Ekerö house today.’

Nobody answered. None of them had anything new to impart.

Alex ran his eyes round the assembled company.

‘Anything else?’ he enquired.

Fredrika put her hand up.

‘Yes?’

‘Well, I’ve got more on that hit-and-run victim,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘Do tell us!’

‘It seems he was murdered,’ said Fredrika. ‘He wasn’t just run over, you see – the car was also backed over him.’

Alex groaned aloud with frustration.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Just what we need, another murder enquiry.’

His sense of the huge amount of work in front of him intensified. This was clearly a mess he was not going to untangle any time soon.

As she was leaving work, Fredrika tried to phone Spencer. He did not answer, which unsettled her. Her need to hear his voice more regularly was growing daily, especially as evening approached and the time left to her before the terrors of the night was short.

How did I end up here? she wondered, for what must be the thousandth time. How could all my dreams and plans lead me to this miserable crossroads in my life?

The answer was always the same, as it was this evening, too. It was decades since she had been guided by her innermost dreams. She had been navigating by makeshift solutions and setting her sights on second-rate choices.

I am what you turn into when you are robbed of freedom of choice, she thought wearily. I am a residual product, marked by that wretched bloody Accident.

So there it was in her mind again, the Accident. The most tangible cut-off point.

Early in life she had set herself the goal of becoming a violinist. Music was her family’s natural setting; Fredrika and her brother had practically grown up in the wings of a succession of major stages where they had waited with their father for the end of their mother’s latest concert or recital.

‘Can you see Mummy playing?’ their father would whisper, his eyes suffused with pride. ‘Can you see the way she lives for what she does?’

Then, Fredrika had been too young to reflect on what her father was saying, but later on in life she had started to question that phrase. Living for what you did, could that really be right?

And what dreams and visions did her father have? She was horrified to realise she had no concept of that at all. Perhaps he had had no greater wish than to follow his wife around the world and watch her dazzle one audience after another? Things had changed when the children started school, of course. Her mother accepted fewer engagements abroad, and for the first time, the children had a clearer idea of their father’s professional identity. He had a job that meant having to wear a suit, and he sold things. Successfully, it seemed. Because they were certainly well off.

Fredrika started violin lessons when she was just six. It was perhaps her first experience of what is described as love at first sight. She loved both the violin and her teacher, who must have thought her a good pupil, because he remained her teacher right up until the accursed Accident. And he had been at her side throughout her convalescence, offering encouragement and assuring her that it would still be possible to play as she had before.

But he was wrong, thought Fredrika, closing her eyes for a moment.

Many years had passed, but it was still so easy to conjure up the images in her mind. The car as it skidded, somersaulted and went flying. The hard ground, the skis tumbling out of the roof box. Her friend’s endless screaming when she saw her mother’s face smashed against the side window of the car. And the firemen’s desperate struggle: ‘The car could explode at any minute. We’ve got to get them out of there, and fast!’

Fredrika sometimes thought it would have been just as well if they had left her there in the car, since the life that came afterwards was not worth living. Her left arm had been badly injured and would never be the same again. They made so many attempts that her whole life came to revolve round the battle to restore her arm.

‘It won’t be up to the strain,’ said the doctor who finally delivered a verdict. ‘You’ll be able to play for a few hours a week, but several hours a day? Out of the question. You would be in the sort of pain that would be intolerable in the long term. And the wear and tear on your arm could easily make it entirely unusable.’

He had not understood what he was saying, of course. He lived under the illusion that she was grateful, and glad to have survived. That she was glad she had not died, as her friend’s brother had died. But she had no feelings of that kind.

Not then and not now, Fredrika thought dully, sitting on the sofa in the quiet of her flat.

She had never played the violin just for fun, but as a way of life, a way of earning a living. And since the Accident she had not played at all. At the very top of a cupboard, right at the back, the violin lay untuned in its case, waiting.

Fredrika stroked her stomach, where the baby lay resting.

‘If you ask me really nicely, maybe I’ll play a little something for you one day,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe.’

It was six o’clock by the time Alex got home. His wife met him at the door. There was a strong aroma of garlic.

‘Italian tonight,’ she smiled as he kissed her. ‘I’ve got out a bottle of wine.’

‘Are we celebrating something?’ Alex asked in surprise.

They seldom had wine in the week.

‘No, I just thought we deserved a little treat,’ Lena replied. ‘And I got home from work a bit early today.’

‘I see. Why was that?’

‘Oh, no special reason, but I had the chance so I thought I’d come home and make something nice for dinner.’

She gave a slightly shrill laugh from the kitchen, where she was making a salad.

Alex went though the day’s post. They had a card from their son in South America.

‘Great postcard,’ he called out.

‘Yes, I saw it,’ Lena responded. ‘It’s so nice to hear from him, isn’t it?’

And she laughed that laugh again.

Alex went out to the kitchen and observed her as she stood with her back turned. She had always been the more open-hearted and attractive of the two of them. She could have had whoever she wanted, but she had chosen Alex. Even though he had grey streaks in his dark hair from an early age and deep lines on his face. For some reason he had always found it a bit unsettling that he was somehow more of a chosen one in the relationship than she was. Over the years he had at times felt incredibly jealous when other men got too close to her or he felt inadequate in some way. This jealousy had been a problem for both of them and a source of shame for him. What was wrong with him, not trusting Lena, who had given him such a fantastic home and two wonderful children?

As time passed he felt more secure. That was partly thanks to his job. His profession helped him develop a good sense of intuition, and that almost always helped him get the better of the demons that taunted him with fancies that his wife was deceiving him behind his back.

His intuition brought him certainty. Certainty when everything was all right, and also when it was not. And this time it was not.

The feeling had been creeping over him for several weeks now. She was talking differently, waving her arms about in a way he could not recall seeing earlier. She would go on at length about subjects that were unfamiliar to both of them. About places she wanted to visit and people she wished she had stayed in touch with. And then there was that laugh, which had changed so rapidly from deep and intense to shrill and superficial.

Watching her from the back, he even thought her posture had changed. She seemed stiffer somehow. And she gave a little shudder when he took hold of her, laughed her new laugh and pulled away. Sometimes her mobile rang and she went into another room to answer it.

‘Can I help with anything?’ he asked her back view.

‘You can open the wine,’ she answered, trying to sound happy and relaxed.

Trying. That was the thing. She was trying to be herself, as if playing some strange theatrical role that had unexpectedly landed in her lap. Alex’s stomach hurt as fear clutched his insides and the demons awoke once more.

We ought to be able to talk about this, he thought. Why aren’t we?

‘Did you have a good day at work?’ she asked him when they had been sitting in silence for a while.

‘Yes,’ Alex said gently. ‘It was fine. Lots on.’

Normally she would have picked up the thread and asked more. But not any more. Now she only seemed to ask things she didn’t really seem to care about.

‘How was yours?’ he asked.

‘That was fine, too,’ she said, opening the oven to check whatever it was she had cooked.

The smell was amazing, but Alex did not feel hungry. He asked her a few more questions about work, as always, and she gave him brief answers, her head turned away.

When they sat down to eat the delicious dinner and drink the good wine, he had to force himself to swallow as he chewed.

‘Skål,’ she said.

‘Skål.’

When he raised his head to catch her eye, he could have sworn it looked as though she was starting to cry.