He cleared his throat.
‘We mostly talked about work when we met. That felt right for us both.’
‘But the threats Jakob received, did you know about those?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Agne. ‘Several of us had them around the same time.’
Fredrika stopped dead in the middle of her note taking.
‘Sorry?’
Agne Nilsson gave a firm nod.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘that was what happened. And it wasn’t just that recent clutch of them, it had happened before as well.’
‘From the same sender?’ asked Joar.
‘No, but with the same aim, so to speak. Other times when people thought we’d interfered with things that were none of our business.’
Joar took out the copies of the emails sent to Jakob.
‘Do you recognise these?’
‘I certainly do,’ said Agne. ‘I had some almost the same, as I told you. But mine didn’t say ‘‘fucking priest’’, they said ‘‘sodding socialist’’.’
He gave a wan smile.
‘Weren’t you ever frightened?’ put in Fredrika.
‘No, why should I be?’ said Agne Nilsson as if it was not a question he had anticipated. ‘Nothing ever came of those threats. And they weren’t exactly unexpected. We always knew that our activities would be bound to annoy and provoke some people.’
‘But whoever wrote these sounds more than just annoyed,’ said Joar, indicating the sheaf of papers in his hand.
‘Yes, but this was in the context of the latest case we’d been working on. A young man looking for a way out of the Sons of the People. We knew it was going to be damned difficult. And if the emails hadn’t dried up we were planning to go to the police. That’s to say, there are police officers in our group who we can talk to, but I mean making a formal report – that was what we hadn’t got round to.’
Fredrika suppressed a sigh. She hoped they wouldn’t take so long over it the next time.
‘What do you mean when you say the emails dried up?’ asked Joar, frowning. ‘Jakob was getting them virtually right up to the day he died.’
Agne held up his hands.
‘I really can’t explain it,’ he said. ‘I spoke to Jakob last week and at that point none of us had had any more emails. I didn’t get any after that, so I didn’t raise the matter with him. And he didn’t say anything, either.’
He looked uncomfortable.
‘Though I have to say we hadn’t exchanged that many words over the past ten days. He had lots of lecturing commitments and I was pretty busy, too.’
‘Can we have copies of the emails you received?’ asked Joar.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Agne Nilsson.
‘Do you know a Tony Svensson?’ was Joar’s next question.
Agne Nilsson’s face darkened.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said again. ‘So does every social worker and police officer on the estate where he lives.’
‘Did you know he was the one sending your group members the emails? Well, sending Jakob’s, at any rate?’
Agne Nilsson shook his head mutely.
‘What I mean is, we knew he was part of their organisation. But I didn’t know he was the actual one sending the threats. They were only signed SP, you know.’
Joar seemed to be thinking.
‘So what happened?’ he asked after a while. ‘About the boy who was trying to leave Sons of the People, I mean?’
‘It was one hell of a mess, to put it bluntly,’ said Agne. ‘His name’s Ronny Berg, by the way. But I wasn’t in on the end of the case; Jakob took charge of it himself in the latter stages. And he hadn’t had time to tell us how it all turned out before he died. But I gathered there was a question mark over the boy’s real reasons for trying to get out.’
Fredrika leant forward with interest and knew she must look ridiculous as she found her bump was in the way and had to straighten up again.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It seemed he wasn’t trying to leave the organisation for ideological reasons but because he had fallen out with one of the other members. But as I say, I don’t know all that much about it. One of my fellow group members might know more; I could ask around.’
Joar nodded.
‘Yes, please do,’ he said.
And as he was gathering up his papers, Fredrika suggested tentatively: ‘You might need protection, Agne. Until we know how all this fits together. If it fits together.’
Agne Nilsson did not immediately respond, but then he said quietly: ‘So you think it might not be suicide after all?’
‘Yes,’ said Joar. ‘But we can’t be sure.’
‘Good,’ said Agne Nilsson, looking straight at them. ‘Because not a single bloody one of us believes Jakob could have done it: shot his wife and himself.’
Joar put his head on one side.
‘Sometimes people aren’t at all what they claim to be,’ he said mildly.
Just after 1 p.m. the news burst onto the website of one of the evening papers: ‘Gunshot vicar and wife: police suspect link to right-wing extremists’.
‘Damn and blast!’ roared Alex Recht, thumping his fist on the desk. ‘How the hell did that get out?’
In actual fact, there was no need to ask – things always leaked out at the preliminary enquiry stage. But Alex felt he had tried extra hard to stop it happening this time. And the truth was, very few people knew about their new line of enquiry.
‘The media are besieging us with calls,’ Ellen popped her head round the door to say. ‘What can we give them?’
‘Nothing,’ bellowed Alex. ‘Nothing at the moment. Have we managed to get hold of Johanna Ahlbin yet?’
Ellen shook her head.
‘No.’
‘And why not?’ groaned Alex. ‘Where the heck has the wretched girl got to?’
He hardly dared look at the computer screen from which pictures of Jakob Ahlbin were now staring back at him. It was all out there now, and there was no way of breaking the news to his younger daughter in person. The only things the journalists had missed out on were the names and pictures of the two daughters.
At least we tried, Alex thought wearily.
Ellen had been putting all her effort into trying to locate Johanna. The girl’s employer and colleagues had provided them with the names and numbers of friends who might know her whereabouts, but no one could tell them where she was, how she was or how much she already knew.
‘It’s too bloody awful,’ Alex said under his breath. ‘Having to hear news like that from the media.’
‘But we did try,’ said Ellen, looking unhappy.
‘Yes, I suppose we did,’ said Alex, turning away from the computer.
‘Oh by the way, here’s something the assistant in the technical section sent over,’ said Ellen, putting a plastic folder on his desk. ‘Print-outs of lecture material they found on Jakob’s hard drive.’
‘Anything useful?’
‘No, I don’t think so. But the name on the notepad could be of interest. Though I don’t really know, of course.’
‘Notepad?’ muttered Alex, looking through the sheets of paper from the folder.
He found it right at the back. An unobtrusive little fawn jotter with just one word on it, ‘Muhammad’, and then a mobile number.
‘Where was this found?’ asked Alex.
‘In a locked drawer in his desk. It was underneath a pen tray.’
Something he had hidden away, concluded Alex.
Perhaps Muhammad was an illegal migrant he knew personally, or someone who had sought him out for some other reason.
‘Have we checked the phone number against our database?’
‘I just did,’ she said, looking pleased with herself. ‘And something came up, in fact, related to a passport reported missing. The man’s complete name and address were there.’
She handed him another slip of paper. Alex gave her a smile in return.
‘No criminal record,’ Ell
en added, and then had to go because her mobile was ringing.
Alex wondered what he ought to do next. He looked at the name and number on the slip, and then at the plastic folder with all the other material. And then he looked at the report of the lost passport, which Ellen had printed out. All these passports that ‘vanished’. Without them, the stream of illegal migrants would have a hard time, Alex knew that.
We’ve turned Europe into a fortress as impregnable as Fort Knox, he thought grimly. At the price of losing control of the people who are going in and out of our country. Shameful for all concerned.
He gazed out of the window. Clear blue sky and brilliant sunshine, and the weekend only a few hours away. He blinked. There was no way he could face a whole weekend at home with Lena behaving like a stranger. She had become so inaccessible. For reasons he couldn’t put into words, he felt he could not talk to her about what had happened or the way the whole situation was affecting him.
Why not? wondered Alex. We’ve always been able to talk about everything.
Perhaps he ought to give it a try. Perhaps. But either way, he was definitely going to try to put in a few hours’ work over the weekend.
At first it looked as though the week was going to end as badly as it had begun. Peder Rydh was instructed to go through all the phone lists the police had had from Telia and from Jakob Ahlbin’s mobile supplier, while Joar got to go down with Fredrika to talk to Agne Nilsson. Peder felt as though he was going to blow sky high with frustration, but then he heard he was to be one of those interviewing Tony Svensson that afternoon, and calmed down. As he went through the lists, he even felt a bit exhilarated.
Every time he had to deal with material from phone tapping or surveillance, he was amazed at the vast number of calls people made every day. Often you could work out some sort of pattern, of course, like married couples who sometimes rang each other twice a day and sometimes not at all. But there were lots of other numbers and contacts to analyse. Contacts that could seem highly interesting in terms of timing, but which on closer examination turned out to be the local pizzeria, for example.
In the case of Jakob Ahlbin’s phone and any contact he might have had with Tony Svensson, it proved quite simple. Peder grinned and punched the air as he found a match.
Tony Svensson had rung Jakob Ahlbin on three occasions, and each time it was a very short call, making Peder assume he had got through to Jakob’s answering machine. They would never be able to recreate the actual content, but the very fact that Svensson had rung Ahlbin was proof enough.
He hurried out of his office and over to Alex’s. But he hovered uncertainly in the doorway; his boss looked even grumpier than usual. Peder gave a discreet cough.
‘Yes?’ said Alex severely, but softened when he saw who it was. ‘Oh, come on in.’
Somewhat heartened, Peder went in and showed Alex the telephone lists.
‘Good,’ said Alex, ‘good. Draw up an application to the prosecutor double quick; I want this bloke brought in for unlawful menace before the end of the day. Particularly now this crap’s all over the media.’
A warm feeling spread through Peder’s body. So he wasn’t being left entirely out in the cold. But with the warmth came the stress. Who had leaked the right-wing angle to the media?
He was heading for the door when Alex said: ‘Er, you haven’t got a minute, have you?’
It had been too good to be true, of course. Even before he sat down, he knew what Alex had on his mind. But the way he chose to express it came as a complete surprise.
‘In this workplace, as long as I’m in charge,’ he said, ‘a croissant is a croissant. And nothing else,’ he said, emphasising every syllable.
I’m gonna die, thought Peder. I’m gonna die of shame and I damn well deserve it, too.
He scarcely dared look at Alex, who went on relentlessly.
‘And when one of my staff – for private or other reasons – is in such a state that he can’t tell the difference between a pastry and something else, then I expect the person in question to get to grips with it and sort himself out.’
He stopped and fixed Peder with a look.
‘Understood?’
‘Understood,’ whispered Peder.
And wondered how on earth he could carry on doing his job.
They met in the living room of the older man. It was their third meeting in swift succession, and neither of them felt particularly comfortable in the company of the other. But there was no way round it, in view of recent events.
‘We knew it would generate a lot of attention,’ said the younger man. ‘It was hardly a surprise to any of us that a vicar committing suicide would be big news.’
There was no point contradicting him. Planning and setting the stage for an operation like that was one thing. Carrying it through was something else entirely. Holding your nerve and staying calm was vital.
The older man spoke.
‘There are a number of unfortunate circumstances that we need to be wary of,’ he said firmly. ‘The media reporting, for one thing. I wasn’t expecting to see articles with names and photos of the deceased until tomorrow morning at the earliest.’
‘No, I don’t think any of us were.’
‘Damn the police. Every investigation leaks like a blessed sieve.’
There was a pause.
‘This makes rather a mess of the timetable,’ sighed the older man. Particularly for our friend abroad. When do we expect her back?’
‘Monday, we thought.’
‘Does that seem credible? I mean, if the news is already out?’
‘Most of it can be explained away,’ the younger man said in a matter-of-fact tone.
He looked awful when he attempted a smile. A series of operations to correct his injury had only achieved half of what had been hoped for. And now he had decided to settle for looking this way. The crooked smile had become his trademark.
The older man got up and went over to the window.
‘I’m not very happy about the defection we had before all this happened. It disturbs me, I have to say. The fact that there’s someone out there who knows too much. I hope you’re right – that we can still consider him our friend. Things look bad for us otherwise.’
‘You know he hasn’t had his share yet,’ said the younger one. ‘That should keep him in line. And he was deep in the shit himself when he backed out. He could never shop us and keep in the clear himself.’
It was an argument that seemed to reassure the older man, who briskly moved on to the next point on the agenda.
‘I understand there was a problem with our latest daisy,’ he said, taking a seat in the wing-back chair by the bookshelf full of dictionaries and encyclopedias.
The younger man’s face hardened. For the first time since his arrival he looked visibly worried, and his words confirmed the fact.
‘That’s more of a problem. Unfortunately we weren’t able to pick our flower before he spread the good news, as it were, to some of his friends. Or one, at any rate. Who then got in touch with the vicar.’
The older man knitted his brow.
‘Have we any way of assessing the scale of the damage?’ he asked.
‘Yes, we’re pretty sure we can. And as I say, he didn’t let on to many people. Unfortunately, we haven’t got his friend’s name. But I’m on the case.’
The men fell silent. It was almost as if the sound had been absorbed by the bookshelves covering almost the full length of the walls and the expensive rugs on the floor. It was the older man who found his voice first.
‘And the next daisy?’
The younger man’s deformed smile appeared again.
‘He’s paying on Sunday.’
‘Good,’ said the older one. ‘Good.’
And he added:
‘Will this one live?’
Silence again.
‘Probably not. He seems to have blabbed, too, broken the rules.’
The other man paled.
‘This was
n’t the way we envisaged things going. We can’t have any more failures like this. Maybe we need to suspend the operation for the time being?’
The younger man did not seem capable of seeing that disaster could be imminent.
‘Let’s wait and see how our friend on the other side of the law plays his cards during the day today.’
The older man pursed his lips.
‘It shouldn’t be a problem. He knows what will happen if he makes the mistake of betraying us.’
His stomach hurt as he said the words, almost as if they made him afraid of himself.
STOCKHOLM
Tony Svensson was a creature of habit. His world basically revolved round three places: network HQ, the car repair shop, and his home. They opted for the repair shop.
It was all achieved without too much fuss. He spat and swore as the police cars screeched to a halt outside where he worked, but once he appreciated the seriousness of the situation, he stopped resisting. The officers who were there to pick him up said he even smiled as the cold metal of the cuffs closed round his wrists. As if the feeling rekindled memories from a time he had almost forgotten.
The prosecutor agreed that there was sufficient proof for suspecting Tony Svensson of unlawful menace. The emails and phone lists were more than enough. It remained to be seen whether they could get a prosecution out of it; it depended how cooperative Agne Nilsson was. Unlike Jakob Ahlbin, he was still alive and able to testify about the threats. If he was willing. Not many people dared to testify against groups like Tony Svensson’s.
Peder and Joar were to conduct the interview. The energy which interviewing normally injected into Peder failed to materialise when he had to work with Joar. He glanced sideways at his colleague as they stood in silence in the lift. A pink shirt under his jacket. As if that was the sort of thing you could wear in the force. Another of those signs.
There’s something weird about that guy, thought Peder. And I shall damn well find out what it is, even if I have to drag it out of him.
Silenced: A Novel Page 14