Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘Ali?’ asked the woman.

  He nodded.

  The woman glanced over her shoulder, then took a mobile phone from her bag and gave it to him. Such relief washed over him that it almost made him cry. Handing over the phone was the signal he had been waiting for, the receipt for having found the right place.

  He stuffed the phone into his pocket with clumsy fingers, feeling for his passport in his shirt pocket with his other hand. The woman gave a distinct nod as he passed it to her, and leafed quickly though it.

  Then she gestured to him to go with her.

  She took him through the bus station, which was called the City Terminal, out onto a street full of cars. Just to the left of the entrance, alongside the pavement, were more bicycles than Ali had ever seen at a bus station. Swedish people must cycle all the time.

  The woman urged him to keep up and when they reached her car she directed him to get into the passenger seat. He watched with fascination as she took her place at the wheel and started the car. It was much colder than he had expected, but the car was still warm.

  They drove through the city in silence. Ali assumed she spoke no Arabic, and he had no English. He stared out of the window, taking in everything he saw. All these bridges and stretches of water everywhere. Low buildings and much less noise than he was used to in cities. He wondered where all the street vendors plied their trade.

  Fifteen minutes later, the woman parked in an empty street and indicated that he was to get out of the car. They went into one of the low-rise buildings and up the stairs to the second floor. It took three keys and a succession of locks before she got the door open. She went into the flat first; he followed, head bowed.

  The place smelled of cleaning products with an underlying hint of stale cigarette smoke. Ali could smell fresh paint, too. The flat was not large, and he assumed he would get a larger flat later on, when his family came to join him. He felt a pang at the thought of his wife and children. He hoped they were all right and would be able to manage until he got his residence permit. His contact had promised it would not take long; he would get the permit as soon as he had fulfilled his side of the bargain with those who had financed his escape.

  The woman showed him the small bedroom and living room. The fridge was fully stocked with food and there were plates, saucepans and other utensils in the kitchen cupboards. Ali had scarcely ever cooked a meal before, but that was the least of his problems. The woman gave him a folded sheet of paper and then turned on her heel and left the flat. He had not seen her since.

  Three days had now passed.

  Anxiety was making his skin crawl. For what must have been the hundredth time he took out the piece of paper the woman had left him and read the short text in Arabic.

  Ali, this is your home for your first weeks in Sweden. Hope you had a good journey and will soon settle into the flat. We have tried to make sure you have everything you need. Please stay indoors until we contact you again.

  Ali sighed and shut his eyes. Of course he would not leave the flat – he was locked in, after all. Tears burned the insides of his eyelids, though he had not cried since he was a little boy. The flat had no telephone and the mobile phone the woman had given him did not seem to work. The TV set only showed channels he did not understand; Al-Jazeera was not on offer. Nor did there seem to be a computer. The windows would not open and the fan in the kitchen did not work. He had smoked quite a few packets of cigarettes and did not really know what he would do when they ran out.

  Other things were running out, too. He had drunk all the milk, and the juice. He had eaten nearly all the bread in the freezer because he had not felt like doing any proper cooking. The plastic-wrapped burgers in the fridge had acquired a grey coating and when he started peeling some potatoes to cook, he found they were green.

  Ali rested his head against the window, drumming on the glass with his long fingers.

  It’s got to be over soon, he thought. They’ve got to come back so I can keep my side of the agreement.

  The call from Alex took Fredrika by surprise. He explained in a few succinct phrases that Peder had been recalled to HQ and he, Alex, wanted her to go with Joar to interview the elderly couple who had found the Reverend Ahlbin and his wife.

  They were sitting in a sort of circle. Four large armchairs round a little wooden octagonal table. Fredrika, Joar, and the man and woman who had found their friends shot dead the evening before: Elsie and Sven Ljung, both children of the mid-1940s and retired for several years. Fredrika reflected on how different people’s appearances could be. Elsie and Sven really did look like pensioners, even though they had barely reached state pension age. Maybe that was what happened when you stopped working and stayed at home all day?

  ‘Have you always lived this close to each other?’ asked Fredrika, referring to the proximity of the dead couple’s home to their own.

  Elsie and Sven exchanged glances.

  ‘Well yes,’ said Sven. ‘We have, actually. Our houses were near each other back in the days when we all lived out in Bromma, and then we all moved into town within a few years of each other. Once the children had left home. But it wasn’t something we planned, living this close to each other again. We laughed at the way fate takes a hand in things sometimes.’

  The corner of his mouth twitched, but the smile did not reach his dark eyes. It struck Fredrika that Sven must have been quite good-looking in his youth. Craggy features, a bit like Alex Recht, and grey hair that must once have been dark brown. He was tall and rather stately, his wife quite diminutive by comparison.

  ‘How did you get to know each other?’ asked Joar.

  Fredrika was finding that Joar’s voice often startled her. He had the knack of sounding so genuinely interested in everything. Yet so correct. Tedious bugger, she had heard Peder mutter on occasions. It was not a view she shared.

  ‘Through the church,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘Jakob was an assistant vicar in the local parish, you know, just like Sven, and Marja was in charge of church music. I was a lay reader myself.’

  ‘So you all worked in the same parish? How long for?’

  ‘Almost twenty years,’ said Sven with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Elsie and I worked in Karlstad before that, but we moved to the Stockholm area when the children started senior school.’

  ‘So your children were friends, too? asked Fredrika.

  ‘No,’ Elsie said hesitantly, looking away from her husband for some reason, ‘not really. Marja and Jakob’s two girls were a bit younger than our boys, so they didn’t go to school together. Of course we met on social occasions as families, and sometimes at church. But no, I wouldn’t say they were good friends.’

  Why not? thought Fredrika. The boys can’t have been that much older.

  She left it for the time being, but thought she could detect Elsie blushing.

  ‘What can you tell us about Jakob and Marja?’ asked Joar with a slight smile. ‘I know all this is terribly hard for you, and I know you’ve already had to tell other officers all this, before we were put on the case, but Fredrika and I would be very grateful if you had time to answer a few questions.’

  Elsie and Sven slowly nodded their assent. There was something about their body language that Fredrika found disturbing. Something awkward. Fredrika could not in her wildest dreams imagine the couple to be involved in what had happened, but they had been behaving as if they had something to hide even before she and Joar began their questioning.

  ‘Jakob and Marja’s relationship was a very solid one,’ Elsie declared. ‘A really good marriage. And they had two lovely girls. Both of them good at what they did, in their different ways.’

  Fredrika caught herself surreptitiously rolling her eyes. ‘A really good marriage.’ What did that actually mean?

  ‘Were they very young when they met each other?’ asked Joar.

  ‘Yes, they were,’ said Elsie. ‘He was seventeen and she was sixteen. It was considered a bit scandalous, back then. But once they got marr
ied and had children, everyone forgot about how it all started.’

  ‘But as I said, that was before we knew them,’ put in Sven. ‘We only know what Jakob and Marja told us.’

  ‘Were you close friends?’ Fredrika asked delicately.

  And she saw she’d scored a bull’s eye. Sven and Elsie fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

  ‘We were close friends, of course we were,’ said Sven. ‘I mean, we had keys to each other’s flats, for example. For practical reasons, mainly, and because we always have done, what with living so near each other.’

  But, observed Fredrika. There was a ‘but’ trying to get out.

  She waited.

  It was Elsie who came out with it.

  ‘But we were closer before,’ she said in an undertone.

  ‘Any particular reason for that?’ Joar asked lightly.

  Elsie appeared to droop.

  ‘Not really, but, well, how shall I put it, I suppose we grew apart. It doesn’t just happen when you’re young, it can happen in later life, too.’

  Sven nodded eagerly, almost too eagerly, as though Elsie had said something really brilliant, though not necessarily true.

  ‘We’ve found ourselves in different circles these last few years,’ he said, looking almost cheerful as he spoke, as if the words were coming much more easily than he had thought they might. ‘And after Elsie and I gave up work, church wasn’t quite such a hub for us any longer.’

  ‘But they’d invited you to dinner yesterday?’ Fredrika enquired.

  ‘Oh yes. We still saw each other socially sometimes.’

  This steered the conversation naturally round to what had actually happened the evening before. They had rung the doorbell repeatedly, knocked and then hammered on the door. Waited and then knocked again. Tried ringing the house phone and then Jakob and Marja’s mobiles. And got no answer anywhere.

  ‘I started to have this feeling,’ Elsie said, her voice trembling. ‘A sort of premonition that something awful had happened. I can’t explain why I had that feeling and insisted we let ourselves into the flat with our key. Sven thought I was being silly and we ought to just go back home and wait. But I wouldn’t, and said if he went home I’d go in and look by myself.’

  Elsie had won the debate on the landing and unlocked the front door with the key she had in her handbag.

  ‘Why did you have their spare key with you?’ asked Fredrika.

  Sven sighed.

  ‘Because I think keys are valuables you should always keep with you,’ Elsie replied almost angrily, glaring at Sven.

  ‘So you always carry all your keys with you?’ asked Joar with a disarming laugh.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Our house keys, our younger son’s house keys, the boat keys,’ muttered Sven, shaking his head.

  Joar leant forward in his armchair and said: ‘What did you think when you found them?’

  It went very quiet.

  ‘We thought somebody had shot them,’ whispered Elsie. ‘We ran out of the flat and rang the police straight away.’

  ‘But now you know the police found a farewell note,’ ventured Fredrika.

  For the first time in the interview, Elsie looked on the verge of tears.

  ‘Jakob’s been struggling with his condition as long as we’ve known him,’ she said in a high-pitched voice. ‘But he’d never have done anything as crazy as shooting himself and Marja. Never.’

  Sven nodded in agreement.

  ‘Jacob was a man of the Church and would never have betrayed his God like that.’

  Joar stroked his coffee cup.

  ‘We all like to think we know our friends inside and out,’ he said in a controlled tone. ‘But there are a few basic facts in this particular case that can’t be ignored.’

  To Fredrika’s surprise, Joar got up and started walking slowly round the room.

  ‘One. Jakob Ahlbin suffered from chronic depression. He’d had electric shock therapy for it, several times. Two. Jakob was on medication. We found pills and prescriptions in the flat. Three. A few days ago he was told that his elder daughter had died of an overdose.’

  Joar paused.

  ‘Is it really out of the question for him to have gone mad with grief and shot his wife and himself to end their suffering?’

  Elsie shook her head vigorously.

  ‘That’s not right!’ she cried. ‘None of it. For Lina, of all people, to have taken an overdose. I’ve known that girl since she was tiny and I can swear on the Bible she’s never been anywhere near any kind of addiction.’

  Sven nodded again.

  ‘For people like us, who’ve known the family for decades, none of this makes any sense,’ he said.

  ‘But then all families have their problems and secrets, don’t they?’ Fredrika said.

  ‘Not that sort of secret,’ Elsie said with conviction. ‘If either of the girls had been on drugs, we would have known about it.’

  Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, silently agreeing to change tack. The daughter was dead; there was no point discussing it further. And Jakob’s state of health would be better assessed by a doctor than an elderly couple who happened to be his acquaintances.

  ‘All right,’ said Fredrika. ‘If we disregard the most obvious line in this enquiry, namely that Jakob was the perpetrator, who else could have done it?’

  There was silence.

  ‘Did Marja and Jakob have any enemies?’

  Elsie and Sven looked at each other in surprise, as if the question had caught them unawares.

  ‘We’re all agreed that they’re dead,’ Joar said mildly. ‘But if it wasn’t Jakob, who was it? Were they involved in any kind of dispute, as far as you could tell?’

  Elsie and Sven both shook their heads and looked down at the floor.

  ‘Not as far as we could tell,’ Elsie said wanly.

  ‘Jakob’s work with refugees made him quite a prominent figure, of course,’ said Fredrika. ‘Did that ever create problems for him?’

  Sven straightened up instantly. Elsie tucked back a lock of grey hair that was hanging down over her pale cheek.

  ‘No, not that we ever heard,’ said Sven.

  ‘But it was an issue he felt very strongly about?’

  ‘Yes indeed. His own mother came from Finland, and then stayed here. I’m sure he saw himself as being of immigrant stock.’

  ‘And what did his work comprise, exactly?’ Joar asked with a frown, sitting back down in the armchair.

  Elsie looked shifty, as though she did not know what to say.

  ‘Well, he was involved with all sorts of organisations and so on,’ she replied. ‘He gave lectures to lots of groups. Was very good at it, at getting his message across, just like when he was preaching.’

  ‘Men and women of the Church sometimes hide illegal migrants,’ Joar went on, with a lack of subtlety that surprised Fredrika. ‘Was he one of those?’

  Sven took a gulp of coffee before he answered and Elsie said nothing.

  ‘Not as far as we were aware,’ came Sven’s reply at last. ‘But yes, there were rumours of that kind.’

  Fredrika glanced at her watch and then at Joar. He gave a nod.

  ‘Well, thank you for letting us take up your time,’ he said, and put his visiting card on the table. ‘We shall probably need to come back and speak to you again, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come whenever you need to,’ Elsie said quickly. ‘It’s important to us, being able to help.’

  ‘Thank you for that,’ said Fredrika, and followed Joar into the hall.

  ‘By the way, do you know where we can get hold of the couple’s other daughter, Johanna? We’ve done all we can to contact her, so she doesn’t hear about her parents’ death from the media,’ said Joar.

  Elsie blinked, hesitated.

  ‘Johanna? She’ll be on one of her trips abroad, I imagine.’

  ‘You don’t happen to have her mobile phone number?’

  Elsie pur
sed her lips and shook her head.

  They had put on their coats and were on their way out when Elsie said: ‘Why didn’t they cancel?’

  Fredrika stopped, half a metre from the door.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘If the girl had died of an overdose,’ Elsie said, her voice tense, ‘why didn’t they cancel the dinner party? I talked to Marja yesterday, and she sounded her usual calm, cheerful self. And Jakob was playing his clarinet in the background, the way he often did. Why were they behaving like that if they knew their own deaths were only hours away?’

  BANGKOK, THAILAND

  The darkness had wrapped Bangkok in a blanket of night by the time she gave up. She had been to no less than three internet cafés in the naïve hope that one of her two email addresses would work, but in vain. The system just kept telling her she had typed in either the wrong user name or the wrong password, and should try again.

  She was dripping with sweat as she moved through the Bangkok streets. It was a coincidence, of course. Thai Airways’ failure to locate her booking must just have been caused by some internal blip in the airline’s system. The same applied to her email accounts, she told herself. There must be some major server problem. When she tried tomorrow, it would all be fine.

  But she felt her stomach knotting, the pain radiating in all directions. She could not shake off her sense of unease. She had taken all the precautions the project demanded. Only a handful of people knew about her trip, and fewer still knew the real reason for it. Her father was one of them, of course. She did a mental calculation and concluded it must be about one in the afternoon in Sweden. Her hand was slippery with sweat as she felt in her pocket for the mobile phone she had equipped with a Thai SIM card the day she arrived.

  The phone crackled, cars tooted and voices shouted to be heard above all the noise with which Bangkok city was vibrating. She pressed the phone to one ear and put her finger in the other to try to hear. The phone rang once and then an unknown woman’s voice informed her that the number no longer existed and there was no forwarding option.

  She stopped abruptly in the middle of the pavement, heedless of people walking into her from in front and behind. Her heart was pounding and the sweat was pouring off her. She rang again. And again.