Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

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

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

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

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

  The officer standing just behind them nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who?’

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

  The officer took a surreptitious look at his notebook.

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

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

  ‘No, that more or less sums it up.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He crouched down.

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

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

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

  ‘From the inside?’

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

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

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

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

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

  Joar and Peder exchanged glances.

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

  ‘Down on Vanadisplan. They’re in.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘But anything else?’

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

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘Try.’

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

  Joar waited.

  ‘Explain.’

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

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

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

  The parquet flooring creaked as Joar moved across the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Fredrika burst into tears, sobbing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Alex waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And with these words he had finally won the battle.

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

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

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘You won’t forget your physio appointment?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said peevishly.

  They talked about what to have for dinner and what they really thought of their daughter’s new boyfriend, who looked like a hard rocker and talked like a politician. ‘A bloody disaster,’ was Alex’s succinct verdict, and that made Lena laugh.
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  Her laugh was still echoing in his head even after they had hung up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Croissants.’

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

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