Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  She decided to change the subject.

  ‘You’ve got to let us meet him, now.’

  Firm but with a note of entreaty. Asking to be part of her daughter’s life again.

  Fredrika felt shocked.

  ‘Your dad and I are trying, trying really hard in fact, to reconcile ourselves to the situation you’ve faced us with. We’re trying to understand the way you must have thought about this and planned it out. But we feel dreadfully excluded, Fredrika. Not only have you had a secret relationship with a man for over a decade, but now you’re expecting his baby as well.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can say,’ sighed Fredrika.

  ‘No, but I do,’ he mother said briskly. ‘Bring him round. Tomorrow.’

  Fredrika weighed this in her mind and concluded that she could no longer keep Spencer and her family apart.

  ‘I’ll talk to Spencer when he gets here this evening,’ she promised. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Then she sat on the settee for a long time, brooding on the fateful question that had been haunting her for so long. What was the point, really, of falling in love with a man twenty years older than her who, married or not, would be leaving her long before she finished living her own life?

  Alongside the darkness, fatigue and boredom came a soft call from a room she thought she had locked years before.

  Play me, whispered a voice. Play.

  She could not really explain afterwards what impulse it was that finally prompted her to get up, go into the hall and get out her violin for the first time since sentence was passed on her after the Accident. But suddenly there she was with the instrument, feeling the weight of it in her hands, so familiar and so infernally missed.

  This was all I wanted to be.

  By the time Spencer arrived a few hours later, the instrument lay in its case again. Newly tuned and played.

  They came for him late in the evening. It was a procedure not unlike some he remembered from his past. Strangers arrived in the darkness with keys to a door only he should have been able to open. He lay stiffly between the sheets in the bed, with nowhere to go. Then he heard the man’s voice, the Swedish one who spoke such good Arabic.

  ‘Good evening, Ali,’ said the voice. ‘Are you awake?’

  Of course he was awake. How much had he actually slept since he left Iraq? He guessed it did not amount to more than ten hours all told.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said, climbing out of bed.

  They came into the room, all of them at once. The woman was not with them this time, but the man had two other men with him, strangers to Ali. He felt embarrassed standing there in his underpants. And socks. His feet were always so cold. He had stopped worrying about the smoky smell in the flat. The fresh pungency of newly painted walls that had met him when he first stepped into it was long gone.

  ‘Get your clothes on,’ said the man with a smile. ‘You’re going to stay somewhere else until Sunday.’

  Relief spread through his body. He was going to get out of here – at last. Feel the coolness on his cheeks, breathe the fresh air. But the news also came as a surprise. No one had said anything about a change of accommodation.

  He looked at his watch as he was pulling on his jeans and jersey; it was nearly midnight. The men moved around the flat like restless spirits. He could hear them in the kitchen, opening cupboards and the fridge. The food was all gone. He fervently hoped there would be more to eat at the new place.

  They went down the stairs. The Arabic-speaking man went first, then Ali and the others brought up the rear. Out onto the pavement. Ali looked up and got snowflakes in his eyes. So much rain of that kind in this part of the world.

  It was a bigger car this time, more like a minibus. Ali was to sit right at the back between the two strangers. The men put the bag he had been given in the boot. One man had a long overcoat on and reminded Ali of someone he had seen in a film. The other had a rather gruesome look. His face was strangely deformed. As if someone had slashed it down the middle with a knife and then sewed it back together. The man sensed Ali looking at him and turned his head slowly to meet his stare. Ali instinctively averted his eyes.

  They drove through an estate where all the blocks of flats were the same. Then out onto a main road where the cars were going faster. Ali looked out to the right, then to the left. And suddenly, on the right. In the distance, but clearly visible. Something that looked like a gigantic golf ball, lit up like a temple.

  ‘The Globe,’ said the man beside him.

  Ali looked straight ahead instead. How often did you travel in a car and not know where you were going?

  Night closed the car in its embrace. His eyelids felt heavy.

  Sometime, he thought wearily. Sometime I shall reach the end of this never-ending journey.

  BANGKOK, THAILAND

  They could not force her to hand herself over to the police. But nor could they offer her any protection. Advising her to contact the local police straight away, they threw her out into the street. She ran for her life, heading randomly down Sukhumvit. The exertion proved too much. With no food or drink inside her and the temperature nearing forty degrees Celsius, she only got a few blocks before she had to stop, trying to get her bearings. Her sense of direction had deserted her; she had no idea which direction she had run in.

  Someone, she thought dully, someone – it did not matter who – should be able to vouch for who I am.

  All her plans were in tatters. It was no longer a question of picking and choosing between friends and acquaintances and weighing up which of them she could confide in. Now she just needed all the help she could get.

  Her knees gave way and she sank down onto the pavement. She tried to squeeze out one last drop of rational thought.

  Think, think, think, she urged herself. What’s my main problem right now?

  Her lack of money was acute, but manageable. The lack of contact details for her nearest and dearest now that she had no access to her mobile phone or email was harder. But there were other ways of getting hold of telephone numbers, and she could open new email accounts.

  The priority had to be getting hold of her father. There was a risk that he, too, might be in danger.

  Her eyes misted as she thought of her father. Why wasn’t he answering his phone? And her mother? Where had they both got to?

  She counted her currency, and found she had enough baht for half an hour’s internet use and a couple of international calls.

  Then that’s it, I’ll have nothing left, she thought, fighting to keep down the rising wave of panic that was threatening to overwhelm her.

  The café owner was a kindly man who served coffee on the house once you were at your computer. She worked fast and efficiently. Found the telephone numbers of a handful of people she trusted and noted them down. Went to the hotmail homepage and opened a new email account. On consideration she decided not to use her own name in her new email address and opted for a more cryptic pseudonym. Her fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, writing a brief, concise email to her father. She sent it to both of his email addresses, the private one and the church one. She felt ambivalent about contacting the friend who had not got back to her. Was it a mistake to discount him at this point? The thoughts swarmed like eager wasps in her tired head. She wrote him a few words:

  Need urgent help. Contact Swedish Embassy in Bangkok and ask to fax them my personal ID and a print-out of my passport record.

  When she had finished her emails, she felt an impulse that she could not explain when she looked back. She went to the website of one of the Swedish evening papers. Maybe to feel closer to her own country for a moment, maybe to feel less like a fugitive.

  But she felt neither of those things, because when the page came up it told her that her parents had been found shot dead three days before, and that the police could not discount the theory that they had been killed by someone else. Mechanically, convinced that nothing she was reading could be true, she clicked her way through various articl
es. ‘Possible suicide’, ‘history of mental problems’, ‘devastated by daughter’s death’. Her brain stopped working. She quickly switched to the homepage of another newspaper. And then another. Ragnar Vinterman was quoted in several of the pieces. He was dismayed and upset, said the Church had lost one of its leading figures.

  The scream trying to find its way out got stuck somewhere in her throat, refused to leave her body. But she felt as if she were suffocating, and the headlines smashed into her like the front of a truck that had failed to stop at the lights and ploughed across the carriageway to crash head-on into a much smaller vehicle. An all-pervading sense of horror made her shiver with cold despite the heat.

  Look after me, she entreated in silent desperation. Deliver me from this nightmare.

  Disconnected words came to her, forming prayers she had said with her parents as a child, making her want to get down on her knees by the computer.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered to herself, feeling her cheeks flaming and her eyes misting. ‘Oh God, don’t start crying or you’ll never stop.’

  Her acute need to breathe drove her out into the street to inhale the intolerable, overheated city air.

  She was back in the café a minute later. Sat down at the computer. The café owner looked uneasy but did not say anything. She read two more articles. ‘Jakob Ahlbin is said to have been told of his daughter’s death at the weekend . . .’ She shook her head. Impossible. Things like this just didn’t happen. Losing your entire family in one go.

  On trembling legs she went over to the café owner and asked to borrow a telephone. At once. Emergency. Please hurry. He passed the receiver to her across the bar and insisted on helping her make the call.

  She gave him the number, one digit at a time. The number she had not rung for so long but would still never forget.

  Sister, sister dearest . . .

  It rang and rang, and no one answered. Then the answering machine message cut in, the voice that reminded her of everything that felt so incredibly distant right now. And that was it. The tears flowed. Among all the thoughts swirling around in her head, there was only one that passed her by. The one that told her she had not read the newspaper properly, not grasped who was supposed to have died. When the beep went and she had to leave her message, she was sobbing.

  ‘Oh please, please answer if you can hear this.’

  SATURDAY 1 MARCH 2008

  STOCKHOLM

  The realisation that age was creeping up on him came with the night and woke him early. He had never been pursued by thoughts like that before, so he had no idea how to deal with them. It started when his wife pointed out that the lines on his brow had deepened into furrows. And that his grey hairs were getting whiter. A glance in the mirror confirmed her judgement. The ageing process was accelerating. And ageing was accompanied by fear.

  He had always been very sure of himself. Sure about everything. First about where his studies were leading him. Then his choice of career. And then his choice of wife. Or had she chosen him? They still bickered about it good-naturedly when things were going well between them. But that was increasingly rarely.

  Thinking about his wife temporarily banished his worry about getting old. Maybe that said something about the scale of his anxiety about their marital problems. They had met around midsummer, just before they both turned twenty. Two young, ambitious people with their lives ahead of them, imagining they shared everything. His interests were hers, and her values were his. They had a solid platform to stand on. He reminded himself of that over the years, when he could not think of a single rational reason for his choice of companion in life.

  Although their relationship had hit the rocks, they still occasionally laughed out loud together. But the boundary between laughter and tears was a fragile one and sent them into silence again. And then they were back to square one.

  The problems first started around the time he got to know his father-in-law. Or maybe it was only then that he really got to know his own wife properly. Either way, the conclusion was the same: he should never have accepted that blessed loan. Never.

  For although in their youth they felt they had so much in common, there were naturally some things on which they could not agree. And very often, as in this case, it was to do with money. Or his lack of it, and his wife’s demand to live in accordance with her station in life and be provided for by her husband, even though she planned to go out to work. Money was something he’d never had, or indeed missed. Not when he was a child growing up, nor as a young man. But then it seemed as though lack of money was going to be his misfortune and the woman he thought he loved would choose someone else.

  Father-in-law, however, was well aware both of his daughter’s sense of priorities and of his son-in-law’s financial embarrassment and proposed a simple solution to a major dilemma: his son-in-law could borrow money to buy a house and that would sort everything out.

  It sounded a great idea. The money was discreetly transferred to his account, and, equally unobtrusively, a repayment schedule drawn up. Not a word was said to the bride. It turned out that in signing the promissory note, he was also mortgaging his whole life. The promissory note was accompanied by a strict prenuptual agreement. When love faded and the first crisis was a reality, his father-in-law had a very serious conversation with him. There could be no question of divorce. If there were, he would immediately have to repay his loan, and would also not be entitled to his share of the property afterwards. When he said he was prepared to accept that, his father-in-law fired the salvo he turned out to have had ready from the outset.

  ‘I know your secret,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t any.’

  A single word:

  ‘Josefine.’

  And that was the end of the discussion.

  He gave a deep inward sigh. Why did all these wretched thoughts occur to him in the night? At the hour when any human creature had to let slip poorly hidden thoughts if they were to sleep soundly.

  He looked at the woman asleep at his side, as if she were his wife. But she was not. Not while he still clung to his old fears. But she was carrying his child, and for that reason he would do everything right. Or at least as right as he could. Love was already there and it almost choked him to think of how much he loved her, and for how long he had done so, yet how rarely he had let her know it. As if he had been afraid it would all shatter if he expressed how much she meant to him. And if they had not met and things had not gone the way they did, he would never have endured it. That much was perfectly plain to him.

  But the future? Impossible to say. Impossible.

  Someone once said there was nothing so lonely as being in a couple with the wrong person. Few people knew that better than the man robbed of his night-time repose. With his head and his soul burdened by the dark thoughts of the night, he lay by the side of the woman he saw as the great love of his life and delicately kissed her shoulder.

  There was some light in Spencer Lagergren’s life after all. And love. Her name was Fredrika Bergman.

  A memory from another time and place found its way to the surface. The obligatory session with a psychologist when he applied to work abroad.

  Psychologist: What’s the very worst thing that could happen to you today?

  Alex: Today?

  Psychologist: Today.

  Alex: [Silence.]

  Psychologist: Don’t think so much, give me something spontaneous.

  Alex: Losing my wife Lena, that would definitely be the worst thing.

  Psychologist: I see from your form that you’ve got two children aged fourteen and twelve.

  Alex: That’s right, and I don’t want to lose them, either.

  Psychologist: But it wasn’t them who came spontaneously to mind when I asked my question.

  Alex: No, it wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my kids. Just that I love them in a different way.

  Psychologist: Try to explain.

  Alex: Children are something you borrow. You k
now that from the word go. They’re never intended to stay at home with you for ever. The whole aim of my presence in their lives is to get them ready to manage on their own. But it’s not like that with Lena. She’s ‘mine’ in an entirely different way. And I’m hers. We shall always be together.

  Psychologist: Always? Is that the way you feel today?

  Alex (forcefully): That’s the way I’ve always felt. For as long as I’ve known her. We shall always be together.

  Psychologist: Does the thought of that make you feel secure or stressed?

  Alex: Secure. If I woke up tomorrow and she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to go on. She’s my best friend and the only woman I’ve loved unconditionally.

  Alex swallowed hard. Why the hell was it so hard to work out what was wrong? It had been the same story yesterday. She turned away when he tried to look her in the eye, and flinched when he touched her. Gave that loud, joyless laugh and went to bed incomprehensibly early.

  He hoped a few hours’ work might distract his thoughts.

  A deserted corridor met his eye as he stepped out of the lift on their floor. He plodded to his office and sank down in the desk chair. Rifled aimlessly through the piles of paper.

  The case had popped up on the first newspaper website the day before, and he noted that the news had spread this morning to all the major daily papers. Damn all these leaks from within the force. It made no difference how closed a circle you worked in; there was always someone who happened to hear something not intended for his or her ears.

  Matters were not helped by the prosecutor’s decision the previous evening that they had to let Tony Svensson go, in view of what Ronny Berg had told Peder about the background to the Jakob Ahlbin affair.

  ‘There’s no technical evidence, no motive and scarcely enough to prosecute him for unlawful menace either,’ summarised the weary prosecutor. ‘Unless you can come up with confirmation that he sent the messages from the other computers, too.’