Beyond All Reasonable Doubt

by Malin Persson Giolito

  “I’m not interested in money. I’m an idealist. Didn’t you hear that Sibbe guy? I’m completely obsessed with my firm belief that everyone must be able to rape and do drugs and sex-murder tiny, tiny babies without being punished for it.”

  Ludwig shook his head and ate a few more bites. Sophia followed suit.

  “Professor Death. Stig Ahlin.” It sounded like he was talking to himself. “Even just that name. Old Professor Stig, disgusting killer pig. That’s a life sentence in itself. It’s practically a goddamn nursery rhyme.”

  Then he set his fork on the tray and took Sophia’s hand.

  “Honestly now. I have to ask. Do you really believe that Stig Ahlin is innocent? I mean, forget reeling off all that crap about how it’s important you don’t worry about innocence, I get it, really, but do you seriously believe he didn’t do it? I understand why you’d take it on even if you don’t believe that, but I want to know.”

  Sophia swallowed. She had the sudden urge to thank him. And not just for salvaging Anna’s dinner last night.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” she said at last. “I’m sure he never should have been found guilty. There simply wasn’t enough for a conviction. But what I believe? Do I believe he’s innocent? I suppose I do. The more I read, the stranger it gets. So, yes. I believe there’s a considerable risk he’s been locked up for thirteen years for something he didn’t do. It’s horrible, almost unbearable to think about, but I don’t think he’s the one who killed Katrin Björk. I never would have spent so much time on him if I thought otherwise.”

  It’s true, she thought, almost surprised. I actually believe he’s innocent.

  Ludwig nodded. Sophia went on.

  “But it also feels like I’m the only one who believes that. Getting a new trial is a hopeless task even in typical cases. But this case is…everyone knows who Stig Ahlin is, and everyone believes he’s guilty. How am I supposed to fight that? I’ve gotten myself into something I’ll never manage to pull off. If I were the only one who’s going to suffer for it, I suppose that would be fine. But I’m not. Stig Ahlin is going to be stuck where he is.”

  Sophia took a bag from the wardrobe. Ludwig remained in the bed. Now he was eating bacon with his fingers.

  “Do you really eat pork?” she wondered. “Doesn’t your mother get awfully upset?”

  “Fuck, why do you keep bringing up my mother?” He swallowed and took another bite. “Only on very special occasions. Fateful ones. Like when I’ve met my future wife. Or on Sundays. Then I eat pork. And on Christmas Eve. But not otherwise. Even though, between us, it’s much tastier than carp. And much more effective than cholent when you’re hung over.”

  Sophia laughed.

  “But, Sophia? If you don’t want to keep sleeping with me, I mean, marry me…” — Ludwig licked his thumb — “…couldn’t you still come work for me? You can come to my defense in case I happen to beat my wife’s new boyfriend to death, or in case his shitty firm suddenly goes bankrupt.”

  Sophia took three dresses from the wardrobe and carefully folded them. She would choose one later.

  “Why would you need a lawyer if his business goes under? We’re in a recession. Lots of people are losing their jobs. You can’t be held legally responsible for being a megalomaniac and thinking you can influence the stock market.”

  “You see!” Ludwig Venner leaned out of the bed as far as he could and tugged at Sophia, who was digging through a drawer for a pair of tights. His hand slid down her back and landed on her ass. “Hear that? You said that without even having a charge sheet in front of you. Fuck, that’s sexy. It’s like I’ve always said: there’s no way I can manage without you.”

  Sophia smiled and slapped at Ludwig’s hand. She shoved a bundle of nylons and some underwear into her bag, then fetched her toiletries from the bathroom. Anyway, she was only celebrating New Year’s with Grandpa and Carl and his parents. They’d seen her without makeup before.

  “Lock the door behind you when you leave,” she said. “And do me a favor. Start going to therapy. You need tons of help. But not from a lawyer. Stay away from lawyers.” She kissed him on the cheek and zipped the bag. “Put the keys in the mailbox. There is no way you are keeping my keys, because we are never doing this again.”

  * * *

  —

  “I Googled your friend.” Sture gave a contented laugh. “I Googled Stig Ahlin.”

  They were in the car Sophia had rented for the weekend. It had started to snow as they turned out of the parking lot at Fjärilsgården. Even though Sophia had turned the wipers and the defrost on high, the windshield was fogging up.

  “I didn’t know you did that stuff,” Sophia said. I didn’t even know you had the Internet, she thought.

  “My dear Sophia. Everyone uses the Internet. Except Hans Segerstad. Surely, he still writes on his old Remington. Even though he could benefit from a spell-check program. And why wouldn’t I use Google? There’s a lot to learn. And besides, everything is perfectly true. Very practical. ‘Wikipedia is Minerva’s own abode,’ as Mark Twain said. You have no idea how much I’ve learned about Ahlin. The symbol of patriarchal oppression in our society; one of Sweden’s most abominable sex offenders ever. I Googled you too. Know how many hits there were?”

  Sophia shook her head and wiped the windshield with the sleeve of her coat. It barely made a difference.

  “Around seventy thousand. I had nine hundred. Thousand, that is. Stig Ahlin got seven hundred and ninety thousand.” Sture smacked his lips in satisfaction. “He’s very famous. I also found a couple of entertaining Web sites. Forums, they’re called. Kids these days get all their knowledge from them. I read the most hair-raising stories there. A whole lot of honorable citizens, the journalists of the future, provide information. And they use aliases too. Good old-fashioned journalists would consider such things beneath them. But here! The real entertainers are on these forums. Signed Cousin Cocaine, Zulu Zumba, Shopping Cart Klutz, Litigashunner, Jeezus, and The Illiterate, what hard-hitters! Armed with nuclear weapons. They fear nothing in the battle against evil. The stories they tell…how Stig Ahlin arranged parties with prostitutes in the morgue at Karolinska, and how even as a child he was suspected of rape but couldn’t be convicted since he wasn’t yet fifteen. Did you know that about your client?” Sture laughed.

  “Yes.” Sophia wasn’t laughing. “I’m familiar with those stories.”

  Sophia hadn’t only read them; she had to some extent fact-checked as well. Naturally, there was no evidence to back them up in the least. But they were combined with reports on the two crimes Stig Ahlin had actually been accused of. And they existed online. Along with the convictions, along with the events the justice system had determined really happened. And they were part of the public image of Professor Death, her client. In some ways, this was the battle she had to fight.

  “He really is popular, your pedophile. And they’re all in agreement. Stig Ahlin ought to be locked up in the toughest of all prisons, and back when he was imprisoned our dear prime minister Göran Persson should have swallowed the key along with his breakfast Danish. By the way, have you been out there to see how he’s doing?”

  “Have I been out to Göran Persson’s house to see how he’s doing?”

  “No, to Emla, obviously. I’ve been there a few times. I’ve been to Göran’s place too, but I won’t go back. The food he offered was inedible. You’d never believe it, considering how food seems to be one of his interests, in contrast to politics. Furthermore, that man is unbearable. He’s incapable of talking about anything but himself.”

  “Right,” Sophia said, refraining from pointing out the obvious. “I have been to Emla. I’ve even seen how they live.” She turned the heat on high. “I was surprised to find I thought it was awful.”

  At last she could see through the windshield without too much trouble. They had reached Uppsalavägen. The
snow was sticking; there were no plows in sight.

  “I wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes,” she said. “If they locked me up in there I would collapse into a fetal position and stop breathing.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Sture snorted. “You may think you would, but that’s only because you’re spoiled. We could perform a simple experiment. I’ll take you to a motel. We’ll get you a single room and I’ll lock the door on you from the outside. You can lie in your clean bed and stare at the TV and chow down on candy all night, and then I’ll come let you out the next morning. That’s prison life. You will survive.”

  Sophia shook her head.

  “You’ve never been inside one of those cells, Grandpa. They’re nothing like a hotel room.”

  She recalled the narrow bed, the rubber mattress, and the yellow blanket with the logo of the Prison Service. Sture drew a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

  “Three square meals a day, education, free-time activities — what else do you think the taxpayers should be financing?”

  “They wash their own clothes and sheets. And they prepare food themselves.”

  “Of course.” Sture raised his eyebrows. “Poor and misunderstood.” He blew his nose into his hand and wiped it on the seat. “Why don’t we give them a medal? For years of meritorious service to the Kingdom of Sweden. Perhaps the Order of the Seraphim?”

  Sophia didn’t bother to respond. Sture turned on the radio, channel-surfing for a while before he turned it off again. On a straightaway, just after Sophia exited the highway, Sture pushed back his seat, turned his face toward the window, and dozed off. He was snoring when Sophia’s phone chirped. She picked it up and glanced at the screen. It was a text from Ludwig Venner.

  “Primetime 60 min is doing your trial pet. Airs feb 20. My loyal subjects will call jan 9. Be prepared.”

  She read it half a second at a time; she didn’t want to take her eyes from the road. She read. Looked at the road. Read some more. Looked at the road.

  “Yikes,” she whispered, putting her phone in her lap. She held tight to the wheel and tried to catch her breath. Deep, deep into her lungs. It felt like she needed oxygen.

  Primetime 60 Minutes was not just any program. It was TV4’s greatest investment ever. They’d moved their most respected reporters to the show and supplied them with a nearly unlimited budget. February twentieth was the premiere. The program was expected to reach an enormous number of viewers, and her petition for a new trial would be part of it. If Channel 4 stuck to the format of the American original, 60 Minutes, there wouldn’t be more than three stories per show, four tops.

  And it wasn’t just your average reporting. 60 Minutes presented only scoops, only sensational stories. They were always looking for new angles on old truths. It seemed obvious that if they addressed the Stig Ahlin case, they would question the conviction; otherwise there would be no point in bringing it up.

  Her mind was spinning.

  Be prepared. How could she prepare herself? What had she found, really? An analysis from the National Board of Forensic Medicine that had been relegated to the slush pile when it should have been part of the preliminary investigation file. But that wasn’t enough for a new trial. Nor would it be good enough for sensationalist reporters. They would want a great deal more.

  And when the program was broadcast, Katrin’s parents would be watching; presumably they would refuse to participate, but even so they would find out what Sophia had learned. About their daughter’s mental state before she was killed.

  Would they speak with Stig’s ex-wife, Marianne? Would they have to bring up the incest allegations as well, even if those weren’t part of the indictment? Everyone wanted to know what Stig Ahlin had done to his daughter. They wanted to know how she was doing in the present day. And what she thought of her father.

  Sophia clung to the wheel. Suddenly it felt like the curves were coming too fast.

  Many years had passed since Katrin’s death. The wounds she’d left behind must have healed, to some extent. But now they were about to be ripped open again. And Sophia was going to contribute.

  The road was quiet; the forest flashed by outside the windows. The sun was low in the sky, and the road seemed to sparkle. The snow was blinding, so she pulled down the visor and squinted. She glanced at Sture. He was still asleep, his mouth agape. His face looked different. She swallowed.

  Damn you, Ludwig, she thought. I’m not ready for this.

  29

  Stig would have appreciated it if his attorney, that Sophia Weber, had prepared him. He knew she would have to speak to them, but he would have liked to have been informed before it happened.

  The prisoners couldn’t buy newspapers on the day before New Year’s Eve. The commissary wouldn’t open again until January fourth. But one of the guards had left the paper out, open. Forgotten in the common room.

  It wasn’t a long article. Only half a page, on this page. The photograph of him had been taken during the district court trial. He’d seen it before. In it he was smiling. He couldn’t remember having smiled a single time during the trial, but he must have. Because it was by far the most used photograph when they wrote about him.

  It was a smile of great pleasure. He was like a clown in face paint, a stiffened death mask. The photo of Sophia Weber wasn’t even half as large. She was posing at a desk. But Stig didn’t recognize her hairstyle; it was much shorter than when she had visited him. It must have been taken on an earlier occasion and was lying around in the newspaper archives, ready to be used for this sort of occasion. Because the article was no interview. “Attorney Sophia Weber confirms that she is preparing Stig Ahlin’s petition for a new trial.” That’s what it said. If they’d interviewed her, it would have said so.

  Maybe she hadn’t been aware, either, that this article was going to be published. But she did know she’d spoken with a journalist. And she should have told him. Even if it wasn’t as important to her as it was to him.

  Stig Ahlin took the newspaper into his room. He read the article four times. He paged through the paper three times, back to front and front to back, but he couldn’t find anything more.

  Slowly his heart rate went back to normal. I could be exaggerating, he thought. It doesn’t matter. This is only a petition for a new trial. Not something they’re likely to care much about. It doesn’t mention that there’s any doubt it was me. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Another journalist — to be safe, it was one employed by the same newspaper — had agreed to be interviewed about the case. He commented on Stig Ahlin’s chances of being granted a new trial. This skinny man with the neck of a vulture stated that the chances were about equal to his own chances of scoring the lead role in the next Scorsese film.

  Stig Ahlin wiped the sweat from his palms. He took a deep breath. Why did this upset him? The journalist was right.

  Stig didn’t put the paper back where he’d found it. He didn’t toss it in the common room wastebasket. He tore it into tiny strips and put it in his own wastebasket. Each time he went to the bathroom, he would take a fistful along and flush it. There was no reason for anyone else but him to read it. The fewer people who knew what he was up to, the better.

  He began by tearing up the page with the article. He and Sophia Weber weren’t the only ones whose pictures had been printed. She was there too. Katrin Björk. Her class photo. No makeup, smiling. One eye slightly narrower than the other, freckles and tiny pimples on her forehead. By now he had seen it many times, but he never got used to it. The person in that photo was a child, and that’s not how he remembered her.

  Katrin

  1997

  In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts had a stash of multicolored condoms and did everything but kiss; Katrin had seen the movie tons of times. Katrin didn’t have condoms, a wig, thigh-high boots, or, really, rules. She just did whatever Stig wanted.

 
Katrin and Stig seldom went to his place. Not after that first time. They ended up at different spots. Hotels. A colleague’s overnight apartment; Stig was allowed to borrow the keys. The backseat of his car.

  She didn’t care where they were. She came along. Didn’t ask questions. Did as she was told. The place didn’t matter to her.

  Stig was allowed to French kiss her. His tongue met hers; it was thick at its root, moving around, going back and forth. Kissing wasn’t hard at all.

  A few times, he paid her. Smooth, new bills in white envelopes. He was the only one who paid her. She wasn’t the only one Stig paid; she knew that. But she was special, he said. Not like the others. He paid her because he wanted to give her something, not because he had to.

  She took the envelopes.

  She said thanks.

  And threw the money away as fast as she could. She didn’t even count it.

  30

  The last four kilometers were a private drive. In the summer it was a narrow gravel road with a grass strip down the middle, but now it consisted of two deep, unsanded tracks in the snow.

  Sophia skidded gently through the open gates. She parked the car. The walk had been shoveled, and she helped Sture out of his seat. This was the fourth year in a row they’d been invited to spend New Year’s with Carl Bremer and his parents Carl Johan and Adrienne. At their “place,” as Carl Johan called it.

  She’d met Carl at a party at Stockholm’s Nation in Uppsala back when Carl was studying medicine and Sophia was in her second year of law school. It had been an early-summer evening, the fresh air easy to breathe. Sophia had been working at the student bar. She liked it there. Behind the protection of the counter she dared to laugh at bad jokes. She might even allow someone to lean over and touch her arm.

  She and Carl had struck up a conversation toward the end of the night. She was playing her own music on the bar’s sound system; she’d turned up the volume and was singing along so loudly that she became hoarse and picked up a large glass carafe to serve herself a drink she’d mixed herself. Carl stuck around until after closing time and then they went out dancing at a club none of Sophia’s friends knew about. She’d fallen asleep in Carl’s bed, but never thought he wanted anything from her but the bright laughter that flowed from her when they were together.