Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  First Secretary Andreas Blom greeted her with a cool handshake. His face was impassive as he asked her to sit down. When an assistant came by to ask if his guest wanted coffee, he waved her away and asked her to leave the door open. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a security guard patrolling the corridor, never far from the room where she was sitting.

  ‘I’m not sure what you think I can help you with,’ said Andreas Blom, leaning back in his seat.

  He kept his hands clasped in his lap and looked at her through half-closed eyes. As if he was highly practised in not expending too much energy.

  She cleared her throat several times, wished he would offer her a glass of water. But all he gave her was silence.

  ‘As I say, I’m in serious trouble,’ she began cautiously.

  And she told him the story she had decided on. Of the mugging, and what she referred to as ‘a mistake’ at the hotel, which meant all her luggage had disappeared.

  ‘I’ve got to get home,’ she said, starting to cry. ‘I can’t get in touch with my parents and a friend who was going to help me hasn’t rung back either. I need a new passport and to borrow a bit of money. I’ll repay it as soon as I get home – if only you’ll help me.’

  She let her tears flow freely, incapable of maintaining any façade. Only after a long silence did she raise her head and look at Andreas Blom. His face was immobile and he was still just sitting there.

  ‘Is that your version of events?’ he asked.

  She stared at him.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I asked if that’s the story you intend to tell the Thai authorities when they’re dealing with your case?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ he interrupted.

  She automatically repeated her forename and surname.

  ‘You’re really not making it easy for yourself,’ he said.

  His words were greeted with silence; she had no idea what he expected her to say.

  ‘What I can help you with, Therese, is the following: legal representation, and a named contact here at the Embassy. But if you don’t immediately hand yourself over to the Thai police, your situation will automatically get considerably worse. You have already made things bad enough for yourself by giving a false identity to a person in a position of authority.’

  She said nothing when he had finished. Thoughts were flapping round in her head like wild birds.

  ‘I don’t understand, I’m afraid,’ she whispered, though she was beginning to suspect the full extent of her problems. ‘And my name’s not Therese . . .’

  Andreas Blom took a piece of paper out of his desk and put it in front of her.

  ‘Is this a copy of a report you made to the police yesterday?’

  She quickly took out her own copy and compared them. It was the same document.

  ‘But that’s not your name,’ he said, pointing.

  ‘Yes it is,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Andreas Blom, ‘it isn’t. Because this is your name.’

  He passed over another sheet of paper.

  She stared at it without properly taking in what she was seeing. A copy of a passport with her photograph but a different personal identity number and another person’s name. Therese Björk, the passport holder was called.

  The room began to spin.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not me. Please, there has to be a way to sort this out . . .’

  ‘It can be sorted out very easily,’ said Andreas Blom firmly. ‘This is your passport and your identity. I’ve rung the Swedish police and the Swedish tax authorities to check. This is you, Therese. And this passport was found with all your other things in the hotel you were actually staying at, Hotel Nana. In the room you had left when the drug squad raided the hotel and found half a kilo of cocaine among your possessions.’

  She suddenly felt sick and was afraid she would throw up on the floor. What Andreas Blom said after that only got through to her intermittently. She had the greatest difficulty in joining the fragments together to make a whole.

  ‘Between you and me, you’ve got a good chance at the trial if you do the following. One: hand yourself in right away. Two: tell them who it was that tipped you off about the raid so you could get out of the hotel in time. Two very simple things.’

  He held two fingers up in the air to underline how simple it was.

  She shifted uneasily and could not stop her tears from flowing.

  ‘Why would I come here to you and not leave the country if I was guilty of everything you’ve told me?’ she said, looking him in the eye.

  He leant back in his chair again and gave a supercilious smile.

  ‘Because this is Thailand,’ he said, ‘and you know as well as I do that for you there’s no way out.’

  STOCKHOLM

  The night had brought new nightmares, variations on a theme. In these dreams she was no longer being hunted but was tied to a tree, surrounded by men in hoods who wanted to harm her. Fredrika Bergman had no idea at all where these absurd scenarios had come from. They did not remind her of anything she had experienced or ever heard of. And she hated being woken by her own screams, night after night, dripping with sweat and on the verge of tears. And tired. So horribly tired.

  But she still went to work. She simply could not sit at home.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Ellen Lind gravely when they ran into each other in the staff room.

  Fredrika did not even try to lie.

  ‘Pretty awful, I have to say,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sleeping terribly badly.’

  ‘Should you be here, then?’ asked Ellen. ‘Shouldn’t you be at home, resting?’

  Fredrika shook her head stubbornly.

  ‘No more than I already am,’ she said wearily. ‘I’d rather be here.’

  Ellen didn’t ask any more questions. She, like everyone else, wondered what Fredrika had thought it was going to be like. Expecting a baby, largely on your own, and then giving birth without the father there.

  Fredrika felt guilty because Ellen was always the one asking the questions and she never reciprocated. She never asked Ellen how she was, or about her children or how things were going with the love of her life. They had met on a package holiday the previous year, and Ellen had fallen head over heels in love.

  In love.

  Until she fell pregnant, she had always been more or less content with the arrangement she and Spencer had. His coming and going in her life did not worry her; after all, she sometimes behaved the same way. Finding one lover and leaving another. Losing that lover and going back to Spencer. The problem was only becoming obvious now that she wasn’t her former self any more, and always felt better when she was closer to him. Of course he came as often as he could, and these days he always answered the phone when she rang. But he still was not a permanent fixture in her daily life.

  ‘I simply don’t understand a thing about this whole situation,’ her friend Julia said one day.

  The same friend who had often asked how Fredrika could bear to have sex with a man so much older.

  ‘There are a lot of things we don’t understand in life,’ Fredrika retorted with a sharp note in her voice, and they said no more about it.

  There were lots of emails in her inbox. She could hardly bring herself to look at them; most of them were of no interest, anyway.

  ‘Time for the firearms refresher course,’ one of them said. ‘Anyone interested in sharing lifts?’

  Firearms refresher course. As if everyone in the force automatically needed to be told about that.

  Some of the emails were from the union rep, asking her to get involved in improving conditions for the civilian employees. The police union seemed on occasions to be running a virtual campaign to stop civilian employees feeling at home in the force, and Jusek thought now was the time to hit back. Fredrika could not summon up the energy to care, though she would have liked to.

  I’ve made my journey, she thought le
thargically. I’ve chosen to stay here. For now. And at the moment, I’m not up to worrying about how other people feel.

  She shuffled aimlessly through the paperwork in front of her. She must at least summon the energy to do what was necessary. Alex had said the dead vicar and his wife at Odenplan were to take priority over the case of the man in the road at the university. He had, in fact, decided they would try to get the latter off their plate. It was simply not possible for them to deal with two murder enquiries at once with their limited resources.

  But all the findings were still being sent through to Fredrika rather than anywhere else. She read a report from the forensics lab which confirmed that material on the man’s clothes showed the car had driven over him as well as running into him. There were traces of car paint on his jacket. They were working to identify the type of paint so they would be able to match it against a suspect vehicle, if one turned up.

  She clicked on through her new emails. Still not a peep out of the national CID about the fingerprints. Frustrated, she picked up the phone.

  ‘I was just going to ring you,’ the woman at the other end said eagerly.

  Fredrika was taken aback by her chirpy tone, so unlike two days before.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, trying not to sound equally excited.

  She failed, but the woman did not seem to notice.

  ‘I ran the prints through our database, and he came up.’

  The woman’s voice, carried with piercing clarity along the line, hit Fredrika with great force.

  ‘Really?’ she said in astonishment.

  ‘Yes it did,’ the woman said triumphantly. ‘Do you remember the armed robbery of the security van outside Forex in Uppsala last week?’

  Fredrika’s heart gave a jolt. Forex.

  ‘Of course,’ she said quickly.

  ‘A weapon suspected of being used in the hold-up was found at the weekend by a man out walking his dog. That’s very peculiar, given how minutely everything else was planned. Anyway, they were able to get a set of prints off the gun.’

  ‘The unidentified man’s,’ Fredrika said tensely.

  ‘Exactly.’

  She thanked the woman and hung up. The Forex robbery was the latest in a series of major armed hold-ups in and around Stockholm. She felt quite elated, as if she had achieved something important herself, just by making a phone call. This cleared up the confusion as to whose the case was; it would be entirely reasonable for it to go to the national CID, which was handling the robberies.

  Fredrika was smiling as she knocked on Alex’s door.

  When he heard how easily he could be rid of the hit-and-run case, Alex moved with unusual speed. And as soon as the case had been transferred to the national CID, Fredrika was able to focus more wholeheartedly on the Ahlbin case. It was nearly eleven, and she and Joar were due to see Agne Nilsson from the support group for former right-wing extremists. It felt strange to have Joar at her side. Not wrong, not at all, but different.

  He knocked on her door just in time for them to go down and receive their visitor.

  ‘Ready,’ he asked.

  He gave a polite smile, stiff and correct.

  It gave nothing away, reflected Fredrika. It just sat there in the middle of his face, as if drawn on a mask.

  She wondered what was behind the mask. He did not wear a ring, but maybe he had a partner? Had he got children? Did he live in a house or a flat? Did he have a car or come in by bus?

  Fredrika did not feel curious, but that was largely because she was so good at reading other people. She did not need to wonder about things because they were generally written all over people, even if they were not aware of it or did not want to admit it.

  ‘Read and you’ll know,’ her mother used to say.

  And that was so true, in Fredrika’s view.

  Agne was at reception, looking lost. His appearance was not at all what Fredrika expected. He was short and stocky, pale with thinning hair. But his eyes – she caught herself staring at him intently – his eyes were hard and searching, bright and full of fiery energy.

  Like a stubborn, unruly child, she thought as she shook his hand and introduced herself.

  She saw that his eyes were automatically drawn to her stomach, but he made no comment. She was grateful. People seemed to assume, wrongly, that it was okay to touch a women expecting a baby in a way you would never think of touching her non-pregnant counterpart. A tender stroking of her stomach, with one hand or both. Fredrika felt a sense of panic on running into certain male colleagues in the corridor because she could feel their eyes boring into her. She had even considered raising the matter at a staff meeting, but could not find the right words.

  They took Agne Nilsson to one of the visitor rooms with windows. The windowless interview rooms did not invite reasonable discussions. Nor was there any reason to treat members of the public not suspected of a crime the same way as criminals. So Joar went off to fetch coffee and Fredrika stood chatting to Agne Nilsson.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell us more about your group?’ said Joar when they were all seated with their coffee.

  Agne Nilsson shifted in his chair, looking as though he did not really know where to begin.

  ‘It started two years ago,’ he said. ‘Jakob and I were good friends going back a lot longer than that. Grew up on the same block.’

  He gave a sad smile and went on. The project had been Jakob Ahlbin’s idea, as these things so often were. It all started when he was confronted by a young man who stayed behind after one of his lectures. He was dressed like most other young men, but his hair – or lack of it – and a number of tattoos revealed his ideological home.

  ‘Don’t go thinking it’s that effing simple,’ he had told Jakob. ‘You stand there going on about what it’s like for those immigrants and how the rest of us should behave, but not all of us have a goddamn choice. You can be effing sure of that.’

  It was the beginning of a long conversation. The lad was scared and unhappy. He had got into warped, right-wing circles at the tender age of fourteen, through his elder brother. Now he was nineteen, and about to leave school. His brother had left the movement some years before, moved away and found a job. He himself was stuck in Stockholm with useless school grades and nowhere to go, trapped in a circle of acquaintances he no longer felt he had anything in common with. And he had just met this girl. Nadima, from Syria.

  ‘It should be her family, not my mates, who’ve got problems with us being together,’ the boy had told Jakob. ‘But her dad’s as cool as anything about her meeting a Swedish guy. My mates, though, they’d kill us both if they knew.’

  The boy had taken about as much as any young person could bear. Jakob could see it, and that was what made him want to act.

  ‘Give me a few days,’ Jakob said. ‘I know some people. I’ll ask around about what someone in your situation could do.’

  But it turned out he had not got a few days. The gang had got wind that one of its members was thinking of leaving and taking up with an immigrant girl, and one day when the two were coming back from a walk, they were waiting for them.

  Agne Nilsson’s eyes were glinting with moisture.

  ‘It really shook Jakob,’ he said huskily. ‘The fact that he hadn’t appreciated the urgency.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Joar, making Fredrika nervous.

  She did not want any grisly details, fearing they would be too much for her.

  ‘They raped her, one after another, and made the boy watch. Then they beat him pretty much to a pulp. He’s in a wheelchair now, and brain-damaged, too.’

  Fredrika felt like crying.

  ‘And the girl?’ she asked, trying to keep things professional.

  Agne Nilsson gave a smile for the first time since his arrival. It was thin but heartfelt.

  ‘She’s part of our network,’ he said. ‘Quite openly. Works her socks off. She’s the only one the local council has appointed to a full-time position. I think it’s been a way for her to m
ove on.’

  His words came as a relief to both Joar and Fredrika.

  ‘What was Jakob’s function in more concrete terms?’ asked Joar. ‘You said something about money from the council.’

  Agne Nilsson nodded, to show he knew what Joar was driving at.

  ‘As I say, Nadima’s the only one employed full-time. And paid by the council, but apart from that they prefer to work with more established groups. We others have found various other ways of getting involved, with some support from our employers. Jakob was the only one who didn’t, in fact; his work was almost entirely voluntary. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it was. His primary contribution was as our spokesman and our main “ear to the ground”, as the police like to say. Did you ever see Jakob giving a talk?’

  Fredrika and Joar shook their heads.

  Agne Nilsson blinked a few times. ‘It was fantastic,’ he said, beaming. ‘He could get anybody at all to start thinking along new lines. His thing was to present things his audiences had heard a hundred times before, but in a different way. And the energy he injected into it. He really got through to people.’

  He fiddled with one of his shirt buttons.

  ‘He should have been a politician,’ he said. ‘He was making his mark in that world, too.’

  I would have liked Jakob, Fredrika thought to herself.

  ‘And what about his condition?’ she asked. ‘Did that seem to affect him in any noticeable way?’

  ‘No . . . I don’t quite know how to put it,’ said Agne, pulling a face. ‘Of course there were times when it got the better of him, and he was quite frank in telling us about them. From what I understood, it was worse when he was younger.’

  ‘But you never talked about it in greater detail?’ Joar asked with surprise in his voice. ‘Even though you’d known each other so long.’

  ‘No,’ conceded Agne Nilsson. ‘We didn’t. Jakob used to say that dwelling on his condition didn’t make it any better, and I’m sure he was right to some extent. So he only referred to it in a very general way.’