‘Are there people who get involved in all this out of sheer solidarity?’ she asked.
It was a new question, one Jakob had never had at any of his lectures before.
‘After all, there are plenty of organisations in Sweden and the rest of Europe working with refugees, so isn’t there anyone there who helps asylum seekers get to Sweden?’ she went on. ‘In a better and more humane way than the smugglers?’
The question sank in and took hold. He hesitated for quite a while before he replied. Not quite knowing how much he ought to say.
‘Helping people enter Europe illegally is a criminal act. Regardless of what we think about it, that’s a fact. And it also means anyone doing that would be committing a punishable offence, which is enough to deter even the most noble of benefactors.’
He hesitated again.
‘But I have heard that things might be starting to change. That there are people who empathise strongly enough with the refugees to want to give them the chance of getting to Europe for a considerably lower sum. But as I said, that’s only hearsay, nothing I know for certain.’
He paused, felt his pulse start to race as he prayed a silent prayer.
He wound things up the way he always did.
‘As I’ve told you, I don’t think we need to worry that there are vast numbers of people in the world wishing they lived on a sink estate in Stockholm with no work or permanent housing. What we really must think about, on the other hand, is this: is there anything a father will not do to make secure provision for his children’s future? Is there any act a human being will not commit to create a better life for him- or herself?’
At the same time as Jakob Ahlbin was bringing his final lecture to a close and receiving loud applause, a Boeing 737 that had left Istanbul a few hours before touched down at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport. The captain who had flown the plane to the capital was informing the passengers that it was minus three outside and that snow was forecast for the evening. He said he hoped to welcome them back on board soon and then an air steward asked all passengers to keep their safety belts fastened until the sign was switched off.
Ali listened nervously to the voices making the announcements but understood neither the English nor the other language they spoke, which he took to be Swedish. Sweat was trickling down his back, making the shirt he had bought for the journey stick to his skin. He tried not to lean back against his seat, but did not want to attract attention by leaning forward as he had done on the flight from Baghdad to Istanbul. He had been asked several times by the cabin crew if everything was all right and whether he needed anything to drink or eat. He shook his head, wiped the sweat from his top lip with the back of his hand and closed his eyes. He hoped that they would be there soon, that it would all be over and he would know he had reached safety.
He was tingling all over with anxiety. He squeezed the armrests with both hands and clenched his jaw. For what must have been the hundredth time he looked around the plane, trying to work out who his escort might be. Who was the secret person sitting among all the other passengers just to make sure he behaved himself and followed his instructions? A shadow, sent by his liberator. For his own good. For everybody else’s good. So there would be no problem for others, like him, who would be given the chance to come to Sweden on such generous terms as himself. The false passport was tucked into the breast pocket of his shirt. He had put it in his hand luggage to start with, but had to take it out when the stewardess came and pointed at the sign saying his seat was next to an emergency exit. That meant you were not allowed to have your bags under the seat in front of you but had to stow them in the overhead compartments. Ali, almost giving way to panic, could not bear to be separated from his passport. With trembling hands he opened the zip of his bag and rummaged for the passport, which had slipped down to the bottom. He gripped its hard covers, thrust it into his shirt pocket and handed the bag to the stewardess.
The instructions once he was in Sweden were crystal clear. On no account was he to ask for asylum while he was still at the airport. Nor was he to leave his documentation behind or hand it over to the escort on the plane before he got off. The passport contained a visa that said he was a business traveller from one of the Gulf States and entitled to enter the country. The fact that he spoke no English should not be a problem.
The plane taxied in, gliding surprisingly softly over the hard, frost-covered tarmac, and approached Gate 37 where the passengers were to disembark.
‘What happens if I fail?’ Ali had asked his contact in Damascus who had first made him the offer.
‘Don’t worry so much,’ the contact replied with a thin-lipped smile.
‘I’ve got to know,’ said Ali. ‘What happens if I fail in any of these tasks I’ve got to do? I’ve spoken to other people going to the same place. This isn’t the way it usually happens.’
The contact’s look had darkened.
‘I thought you were grateful, Ali.’
‘Oh I am,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s just that I wonder . . .’
‘Stop wondering so much,’ the contact broke in. ‘And you are not, under any circumstances, to say anything about this to anyone else. Not ever. You’ve got to focus on just one thing, and that’s getting into this country the way we’ve arranged, and then you must carry out the task we shall be giving you. After that you can be reunited with your family. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘More than anything else.’
‘Good, so worry less and focus more. If you don’t, the risk is that you could be more unhappy than you have ever been in your life.’
‘I can’t be any more unhappy than I am now,’ whispered Ali, head bowed.
‘Oh yes you can,’ answered his contact in a voice so cold that Ali stopped breathing from sheer terror. ‘Imagine if you lost your whole family, Ali. Or they lost you. Being alone is the only true unhappiness. Remember that, for your family’s sake.’
Ali closed his eyes and knew he would never forget. He recognised a threat when he heard one.
As he went through passport control ten minutes later and knew he had got into the country, the thought came back to him again. From this point on, there was only one way forward: the path taking him away from the life he was now even more certain he had left behind him for ever.
WEDNESDAY 27 FEBRUARY 2008
STOCKHOLM
The home-made croissants on offer in the Criminal Investigation Department staff room looked like something else entirely. Peder Rydh took two at once and grinned as he nudged his new colleague Joar Sahlin, who gave him a blank look and made do with one.
‘Cocks,’ clarified Peder in a word, holding up one of the croissants.
‘Pardon?’ said his colleague, looking him straight in the eye.
Peder stuffed half a croissant into his mouth and answered as he was chewing it.
‘They look like limp prickth.’
Then he sat himself down beside the female police probationer who had started work on the same floor a few weeks earlier.
It had been a tough autumn and winter for Peder. He had celebrated his twin sons’ first birthday by leaving their mother, and since then he had screwed up pretty much everything else as well. Not at work, but privately. The woman who had wanted to be his girlfriend, Pia Nordh, suddenly turned her back on him, saying she had found someone else.
‘It’s the real thing this time, Peder,’ she had said. ‘I don’t want to sabotage anything that feels so right.’
Peder gave a snort and wondered how serious it could really be for a good lay like Pia Nordh, but had the sense not to voice his opinion out loud. Not just then, anyway.
The really frustrating thing after Pia dumped him was that it had been so hard to find any new talent for a bit of fun. Until now. The probationer couldn’t be more than twenty-five, but she seemed more mature somehow. The main point about her was that she was too new to have heard all the stories about how Peder had behaved. About the way he had left his wife, and been
unfaithful even while they were still together. About his boys, so little and doubly abandoned by their daddy, who in the middle of his paternity leave decided he could not stand being cooped up at home with the babies and handed them back to their mother. Who had just managed to start working part time after a post-natal year of serious depression.
Peder sat as close to the probationer as he could without seeming weird, still well aware that it was too close anyway. But she did not move away, which Peder took as a good sign.
‘Nice croissants,’ she said, putting her head on one side.
She had her hair cut short, with wayward curls sticking out in all directions. If she hadn’t had such a pretty face, she would have looked like a troll. Peder decided to chance it and grinned his cheekiest grin.
‘They look almost like cocks, don’t they?’ he said with a wink.
The probationer gave him a long look, then got to her feet and walked out. His colleagues on the next sofa pulled mocking faces.
‘Only you, Peder, could make such a cock-up of a chance like that,’ one of them said, shaking his head.
Peder said nothing but went on with his morning coffee and croissant in silence, his cheeks flushing.
Then Detective Superintendent Alex Recht stuck his head round the staff-room door.
‘Peder and Joar, meeting in the Lions’ Den in ten minutes.’
Peder looked around him surreptitiously and noted to his satisfaction that normal order had been restored. He could not get away from his reputation as the randiest male on the whole floor, but he was also the only one who had been promoted to DI when he was only thirty-two, and definitely the only one with a permanent place in Alex Recht’s special investigation team.
He rose from the sofa in a leisurely fashion, carrying his coffee cup. He left it on the draining board, despite the fact that the dishwasher was wide open and a bright red sign headed ‘Your mum doesn’t work here’ told him where everything should go.
In something that seemed as distant as another life, Fredrika Bergman had always been relieved when night came, when fatigue claimed her and she could finally get to bed. But that was then. Now she felt only anxiety as ten o’clock passed and the need for sleep made itself felt. Like a guerrilla she crouched before her enemy, ready to fight to the last drop of blood. She usually had little trouble emerging victorious. Her body and soul were so tightly strung that she lay awake well into the small hours. The exhaustion was almost like physical pain and the baby kicked impatiently to try to make its mother settle down. But it hardly ever succeeded.
The maternity clinic had referred her to a doctor, who thought he was reassuring her when he said she was not the only pregnant woman afflicted by terrible nightmares.
‘It’s the hormones,’ he explained. ‘And we often find it in women who are experiencing problems with loosening of the joints and getting a lot of pain, like you.’
Then he said he would like to sign her off sick, but at that point she got up, walked out and went to work. If she was not allowed to work, she was sure it would destroy her. And that would hardly keep the nightmares at bay.
A week later she was back at the doctor’s, sheepishly admitting she would like a certificate to reduce her working hours by twenty-five per cent. The doctor did as she asked, without further discussion.
Fredrika moved slowly through the short section of corridor in the plainclothes division that was the territory of Alex’s team. Her stomach looked as though a basketball had accidentally found its way under her clothes. Her breasts had nearly doubled in size.
‘Like the beautiful hills of southern France where they grow all that lovely wine,’ as Spencer Lagergren, the baby’s father, had said when they saw each other a few evenings earlier.
As if the painful joints and the nightmares were not enough, Spencer was a problem in himself. Fredrika’s parents, entirely unaware of the existence of their daughter’s lover even though they had been together for over ten years, had been dismayed when she told them just in time for Advent Sunday that she was pregnant. And that the father of the baby was a professor at Uppsala University, and married.
‘But Fredrika!’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How old is this man?’
‘He’s twenty-five years older than me and he’ll take his full share of the responsibility,’ said Fredrika, and almost believed it as she said it.
‘I see,’ her father said wearily. ‘And what does that mean, in the twenty-first century?’
That was a good question, thought Fredrika, suddenly feeling as tired as her father sounded.
What it meant in essence was simply that Spencer intended to acknowledge voluntarily that he was the father and to pay maintenance. And to see the baby as often as possible, but without leaving his wife, who had now also been let in on the secret that had hardly been a secret.
‘What did she say when you told her?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.
‘She said it would be nice to have children about the house,’ replied Spencer.
‘She said that?’ said Fredrika, hardly knowing if he was joking or not.
Spencer gave her a wry look.
‘What do you think?’
Then he had to go, and they had said no more on the subject.
At work, Fredrika’s pregnancy aroused more curiosity than she had hoped, and since nobody actually came out with any direct questions, there was inevitably a good deal of gossip and speculation. Who could be father to the baby of single, career-minded Fredrika Bergman? The only employee in the Criminal Investigation Department without police training behind her, who since her recruitment had managed to annoy every single one of her male colleagues, either by paying them too little attention or by questioning their competence.
It was a surprise, thought Fredrika as she stopped outside Alex’s closed door. That she, initially so sceptical about staying in her police job, seemed to have found her niche there in the end and stayed on beyond her probationary period.
I was on my way out from the very start, she thought, putting one hand on her belly for a moment. I wasn’t going to come back. Yet here I am.
She rapped hard on Alex’s door. She had noticed his hearing did not seem that good these days.
‘Come in,’ muttered her boss from the other side of the door.
He beamed when he saw who it was. He did that a lot these days, and certainly much more often than anyone else in the department.
Fredrika smiled back. Her smile lasted until she saw that his expression had changed and he was looking concerned again.
‘Are you getting much sleep?’
‘Oh, I get by,’ she replied evasively.
Alex nodded, almost to himself.
‘I’ve got a fairly simple case here that . . .’ he began, but stopped himself and tried again. ‘We’ve been asked to take a look at a hit-and-run incident out at the university. A foreign man was found dead in the middle of Frescativägen. He’d been run over and they haven’t been able to identify him. We need to put his prints through the system and see if it comes up with anything.’
‘And otherwise wait for someone to report him missing?’
‘Yes, and go over what’s been done already, so to speak. He had a few personal items on him; ask to see them. Go through the report, check that there doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious about the case. If there isn’t, close the file, and report back to me.’
A thought flashed through Fredrika’s mind so fast that she had no time to register it. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to retrieve it.
‘Okay, I think that’s all,’ Alex said slowly, looking at her contorted face. ‘We’ve got a group meeting in the Den about another case in a minute or two.’
‘See you there, then,’ said Fredrika, getting up.
She was back in the corridor before she realised she had forgotten to bring up the matter she went to see Alex about in the first place.
The curtains were closed in the meeting room known as the Lions’ Den, and the place was like
an overheated sauna. Alex Recht threw back the curtains to see light flakes of snow falling from the dark sky. The TV weather girl had promised that morning that the bad weather would move away by evening. Alex had his own views on that subject. The weather had been capricious ever since the start of the new year: days of snow and temperatures below zero alternating with rain and gales, fit to make anyone curse.
‘Bloody weather,’ said Peder as he came into the Den.
‘Dreadful,’ Alex said curtly. ‘Is Joar on his way?’
Peder nodded but said nothing, and Joar came into the room. The group’s assistant Ellen Lind was right behind him, along with Fredrika.
The newly installed projector up on the ceiling whirred away quietly in the background and all Alex’s attention was focused on the computer as he tried to coax it into action. The group waited patiently; they knew better than to point out that any one of them would be better at the technical stuff than their boss.
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ a gruff Alex said in the end, pushing the laptop aside. ‘As you may have noticed, this group hasn’t really been working as initially planned. We were brought together so we could be called on for particularly difficult cases, above all missing persons and particularly brutal violent crimes. And when Fredrika went down to part time, we were given Joar as back-up, for which we’re extremely grateful.’
Here, Alex looked at Joar, who met his eye without comment. There was something reserved and reticent about the young man that Alex found surprising. The contrast with the skilful but sometimes wayward Peder was striking. At first he had seen this as a positive thing, but within a couple of weeks he began to have his doubts. It was obvious Joar found Peder’s way of talking annoying and offensive, while Peder seemed frustrated by his new colleague’s calmness and flexibility. Pairing Joar with Fredrika Bergman would probably have been a better idea. But she was on reduced hours on doctor’s orders now, and hampered by this pregnancy that was taking so much out of her. Certificates referring to severe pain, sleep problems and nightmares crossed Alex’s desk, and when Fredrika did manage to come into the office, she looked so pale and weak that her colleagues were quite shocked.
Silenced: A Novel Page 2