Beyond All Reasonable Doubt

by Malin Persson Giolito

  “But how will we do it?” Hans Segerstad had made a tent of his hands and was looking at Sophia. “What can they test now, after all these years?”

  “I don’t know. But we have to try.”

  They fell silent again. Hans rocked on his chair. Sophia looked around for somewhere to sit.

  “I hope Stig Ahlin isn’t expecting a quick solution. That he’s prepared to wait.”

  “Well, he doesn’t seem to be dying of stress, anyway.” Hans Segerstad clasped his hands behind his neck.

  “But if the truth is, he’s stuck in prison for no good reason…,” Sophia trailed off.

  Hans’s jaw tensed. “Then we’d better get to work.”

  Sophia took a seat in one of the chairs at the conference table. She lay her hand on top of one stack of papers and looked at the sea of documents. At all the files that had amounted to Stig Ahlin’s fate. The piles that were his only hope for a future beyond the one the courts had decided for him. Thousands of documents, and no one but the two of them looking for an answer. It was up to her and Hans Segerstad. If there was something there, they would find it. They had to find it. There was no other option. Otherwise the answer would remain hidden.

  16

  “I’ve never written this kind of letter before.” They all started out that way. No one had ever written that she often penned this sort of letter, that this was just one of many. Stig Ahlin had once even received two letters from the same woman, with identical opening lines: “I’ve never written this kind of letter before. This is the first time.”

  It was pathetic. They were pathetic. But these letter writers should get a bonus from the post office, Stig thought. Because no one else sent actual letters anymore. Only prison groupies and people who wanted him to die. And the only people who received handwritten letters in the mail anymore were people like him.

  The women always wanted to tell him the same things. That they understood him. That they wanted him. They’d seen something in him that no one else had. For reasons they couldn’t quite explain, Stig was the one they’d been looking for all their lives. Some described in detail what they wanted him to do to them, sexually. Some enclosed photographs. Those photos didn’t always make it through inspection — Stig assumed they took the nudes and pinned them up in the guards’ office — but he kept the ones he was allowed in one of his two desk drawers. Or else he got rid of them, so he wouldn’t exceed the allowed prison limit of fifty postcards or photographs.

  Among his own pictures, there was one of Stig and his family, the way they were before everything fell apart. It was an awful photo, taken indoors in their old apartment. Stig no longer recalled who the photographer had been — maybe he’d taken it himself with the timer function. Ida was blurry, in the center of the image; someone had brushed her hair out of her face, making it look like she had side bangs. She wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to the right. The only one who was looking was her mother, Marianne, who had red-eye from the flash. Stig was sitting with his back to the others, as if he had already left them. He often thought he had.

  The lens didn’t capture the rest, what he recalled but wasn’t in the shot: the green-glazed tile oven that leaked smoke into the room; the dining table they never used; their gazes that never met. The accusations, arguments so loud their next-door neighbors could listen in.

  On the back of the photo, Stig had written “February 1996.” Ida was two. Outside, the snow had been shoveled into tall piles. Two months later, he moved out. Later on, his wife would have reason to tell the newspapers she had kicked him out. That, naturally, was made up. He was the one who left them. He couldn’t stay. He’d felt trapped. As if he’d known what being trapped really felt like.

  The women who wrote to him said they understood how wronged he had been, and that they would fix him, repair what had broken. That they would teach him to trust again. That he could depend on them, even though he had been hurt by so many women.

  Had he? Maybe. Maybe not. Stina, the first girl he got to kiss, had been twelve. They had skinny-dipped once, and she had downy fuzz between her legs and smelled like sweat. She stuck the tip of her tongue in his ear and said that was what people did. He opened his mouth against hers and sucked on her lower lip. His stomach fluttered, and he thought, I’m in love.

  They played together all the time that summer. They were the only ones who hadn’t gone to a summer cabin or a charter swimming pool. There was a phone booth on the platform for the train to Stockholm. You could buy candy in a kiosk right outside: Kexchoklad, Emser, Nickel, AKO toffees, and Zig Zags. They played there at the station — either they lay in the ditch and threw gravel at passing cars or they earned money. The sky hung over them, those fluffy clouds in blue skies that childhoods are meant to be full of. Stig no longer recalled who came up with the idea, but it turned out to be a lucrative one. It was the phone booth. A tiny opening, large enough for two or three grown-up fingers, and it wasn’t hard to dig out the change that fell down at the end of a phone call, or that came back after using a one-krona coin to pay for a call that only cost twenty-five öre. They folded a small piece of cardboard to look like a box without a lid, then stuffed it up in that opening. Each day they ran to the train station, waited for a suitably unguarded moment, and emptied the phone of coins.

  If only they could have gotten along, they would have become rich. Because each time they checked, there was money. One day they found eleven kronor and ten öre in the phone booth. It was remarkable that the piece of cardboard didn’t fall out under the weight of the coins.

  The day they became enemies began with a prank-call session from the phone booth. Stina would make prank calls until she went hoarse, but she seldom let Stig talk. There was no point, she thought. Stig was so bad at it that they would be found out right away. So, as Stina used a squeaky voice to talk to someone at city hall about flowers and allergies, Stig used a retracted ballpoint pen to carve things on the booth. Now and then he tugged at the cord; he wanted a turn too. But Stina just shoved him away.

  Stig got bored. So he thrust his hand into Stina’s bag and took out a photograph she always carried with her. It was of her mother — or at least that’s what Stina said. But no one knew what Stina’s mom looked like; she had left when Stina was a baby. Stig took the ragged bit of paper, which was yellowed and square. His laughter bubbling in his throat, he stepped out of the telephone booth, waving it at Stina.

  She went bananas. She slammed the receiver onto its hook and ran at Stig, ran and ran and shoved him off the platform. Over the edge you were supposed to stay back from, the edge of the tracks where the train would arrive to pick up everyone going to Gothenburg or even to Stockholm, with its Gröna Lund amusement park and subways and the royal palace.

  Stig fell. He screamed. But not very loudly; he even landed on his feet. Then he sat down with his legs folded beneath him and waited for death. At this, a man climbed stoically down onto the tracks and heaved Stig up with a strength that might have come from a life of manual labor. The whole adventure lasted somewhere between thirty and forty-five seconds.

  Stig wasn’t the one who had thrown his best friend down toward the millions of lethal volts that could have fried him to death. Stig was the one who believed he would smell like burned meat and that he would be buried in chunks, sliced up and grilled like the chicken he ate on days Mom didn’t feel like cooking. Yet Stig was the one who got the blame. Quick as lightning, and without anyone bothering to ask what had really happened. Stina dashed off while he was being lifted to the platform, and when she came home she said he had done terrible things. She’d had to shove him, although she didn’t mean for him to end up on the tracks. No one was interested in Stig’s version of events. He simply had no shame. Plus, he was a thief. Because the second thing Stina did after she closed the door behind her was tattle about the phone booth. Stig was the only one to be punished for that too. Stina was given an ice cream. Sa
y you’re sorry, the grown-ups demanded. And then came the autumn leaves.

  The women who wrote to Stig wanted him to get his sentence converted to time-limited. Attorney Sophia Weber wanted the same thing. The prison therapists talked about remorse. They wanted him to start over, have a new life. A different life. He could give in, improve himself. They would fix what was broken. Say you’re sorry. He didn’t understand what they meant.

  17

  Sophia was sitting on the floor of the living room, a long roll of paper before her: nine pages of A4 graph paper, taped together. On it she had drawn a timeline of the investigation into Katrin Björk’s homicide.

  There was a cold draft on the parquet. Nocturnal city sounds lay like a backdrop beyond the window.

  Sophia had begun this practice back when she was studying the history of law. She would cover one wall of her student housing room with sheets of paper and fill in, using four different colors, the various events that marked legal milestones in current-day society. She hadn’t removed the papers until exams were over and she was about to move out. Then, after much hesitation, she crumpled them up and threw them away. But if she closed her eyes, she could still picture that timeline: The Östgöta Law, 1290. King Magnus IV’s Country Law, 1350. The Civil Code of 1734. The Criminal Code of 1864. The Constitution Act of 1974. She couldn’t recall that these had in fact been helpful in preparing for exams, and yet they were what she remembered best of what she’d learned in her law school days. And she had come to realize it was a fantastic method to get an overview of a truly complicated case.

  Now it was not Swedish legal history that she must memorize, but all the most important documents from the investigation of Katrin Björk’s murder. She would locate them on the timeline. She didn’t expect to finish in one evening, but she wanted to get started. Yet when she spread all the papers out on the floor of her apartment, she realized it would be best to get as far as she could before packing it all up again. And the hours had flown by. There was plenty to fill in. She was no longer aware of the time; she just wanted to finish up and go to bed.

  Beyond getting a sense of the material, Sophia wanted to demonstrate that the investigation had changed direction when Stig Ahlin showed up. She had a feeling this was true, but there was no point in saying so unless she could give specific examples of the investigation’s substandard quality and show that it had not been sufficiently unbiased, that they had been sloppy with much of the evidence.

  During the first twenty-four hours after Katrin Björk’s body was discovered, a number of documents had been drawn up, and almost as many were prepared in the following days. Only after a few weeks did new memos appear less frequently.

  The first thing Sophia had drawn onto her overview was the emergency call. At 00:16, Katrin Björk’s neighbor had called emergency dispatch. One hour and fourteen minutes later, the first police officers arrived on the scene.

  Katrin’s body had been delivered to the Solna offices of the National Board of Forensic Medicine less than twenty-four hours after she was killed. The initial examination of her body was performed there.

  A great many of the samples harvested there were later sent to the city of Linköping to be analyzed at SKL, the National Laboratory of Forensic Science. The results from these tests bore various dates. Some test results were ready quickly; others took time. Other, additional analyses were only ordered after the investigation sparked new questions.

  Sophia took notes by hand. She filled page after page of her timeline with new information. She wrote on every available surface; words climbed along the edges of the pages, onto the other side, and sometimes she had to tape on extra notes to have room for everything.

  This is too messy to be useful, she thought. Lars’s intern will have to copy down a clean version for me.

  Sophia picked up a document from the floor: the preliminary investigation leader’s request that the marks on Katrin’s body be examined. It had been addressed to the forensic odontologist in Solna, and according to the date it fit into Sophia’s timeline just after Stig Ahlin was questioned for the first time. She moistened her fingertip and paged through the piles of paper. Where was the answer? When had the results come back?

  That dentist really took his sweet time, Sophia thought. So much time.

  She browsed on. Anna-Maria hadn’t yet printed out all the documents from the file. But Sophia had brought all the test results home, she was sure. It had to be somewhere in there.

  Being a scientist could be the dream job for eighties kids, she thought. Hanging out in the Mushroom Kingdom. Doing crosswords while you wait for your bacterial cultures to grow. Watering them once a day, or whatever it is you do to get bacteria to reproduce. Not exactly super stressful. Although an odontologist doesn’t grow bacteria, right? Then why did it take so long?

  Bingo. There it was. Sophia took the paper from the floor and frowned. She looked at the request from the investigation leader once more. It had been addressed to the National Board of Forensic Medicine. But the results had come from a lab in Great Britain.

  An ambulance went by on the street outside. The morning paper dropped onto the rug and the mail slot closed with a bang. Sophia was startled. It was still pitch black outside. She looked at the clock; she’d worked for much longer than intended. Way, way too long. In five hours, she had to meet a client at the office. She needed to spend at least a few of those sleeping.

  Sophia put down the documents and gathered them into a neat stack. She tried to fold up the timeline, so she could take it to work and tack it up in her office. There wasn’t much room, but she would make it work. She wanted to gaze at it so often that she saw it when she closed her eyes.

  The interview with Stig Ahlin’s mother is what made them suspect Stig, she thought. It’s not unusual that the prosecutor would have requested an analysis of the bites only once Stig Ahlin was a suspect. Before then, they didn’t have any teeth to compare the marks to. And isn’t it perfectly logical that they would have turned to the forensic odontologist in Solna?

  Sophia gathered the rest of the papers that were spread across her living room floor and put them into the file as well. Before she closed it, she took out the analysis again. The stamp in the upper right corner said that the document was a translation from an original in English. She hadn’t been surprised to find that it was a foreign report; those were done regularly. And she had already compared the translation to the English version. It seemed perfectly correct. What she had overlooked the first time was the addressee on the prosecutor’s request. It hadn’t sparked a reaction before. But it should have.

  Now it was time to sleep. She had to sleep. But after the meeting tomorrow she would take another look at the slush pile. Because something was off. If the prosecutor had sent a request to the National Board of Forensic Medicine, why had the results come back from a different lab?

  18

  Tech support. Sophia and her colleagues forked over tons of money for it each month. She had no idea why, because no one ever actually offered support. But Sophia tried to get some anyway.

  She’d called tech support because she wanted help turning the digital materials she’d received from Hans Segerstad into searchable text. Then she would be able to identify what came from the National Board of Forensic Medicine or the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, make a list of search terms, and weed out some of the enormous amounts of scanned material.

  After more than thirty minutes on hold and thirty-five minutes in dialogue with a man who gave instructions she couldn’t understand and chewed her out when her computer screen showed messages that didn’t match what “should have” been there, she gave up. She hung up the phone and went back to picking through the slush manually.

  Not a single file was date-stamped. Nor did the file names provide any hint of their contents. Rarely, a document was numbered. But what that number meant was impossible to know before you op
ened it. Sometimes it was a case number; sometimes it was an abbreviation of the date. In a few instances, it seemed the number had to do with a classification system used by the police.

  Sophia found she simply had to open each file and start reading until she knew what it was about, at which point she could close it and move on to the next one. It was an extremely tedious task.

  Once every half hour, she stood up, jumped up and down in place a few times, and rubbed her eyes. Then she went back to clicking and reading, closing and scrolling. But she didn’t give up. It was there. It had to be there.

  And she was right. It had taken over nine hours, but there it was in front of her. Just what she was looking for. Something she would have found in minutes if the material had been searchable. Sophia expanded the document so it filled her screen. Then she leaned back. It was a relatively large file and contained several individual documents.

  Sophia read it. She looked at the photographs. Once, twice. The date. When she scrolled down, she also found the prosecutor’s handwritten notes on the file. They were attached to the analysis and had been scanned at the same time. District Prosecutor Petra Gren had written, in her upright cursive: “The forensic odontologist’s analysis does not provide useful results. Nor can SKL’s analysis bring anything of value to the investigation.”

  Sophia raised her arms over her head in a lonely gesture of victory. She clenched her fists and smiled.

  She really would have liked to share this with someone, laugh out loud, say I swear it’s true, have a celebratory beer. But her colleagues had gone home; she was the only one left at the office. She couldn’t even call Hans Segerstad. Even he should be asleep at this hour.