‘Sorry it took so long,’ the lady apologised.
‘No problem,’ Fredrika forced herself to say.
‘I’ve been through the lists for the time in question,’ the woman went on, and cleared her throat.
Fredrika waited tensely.
‘Though I’m not sure this can be the person you want,’ the librarian said doubtfully. ‘It seems to have been a middle-aged lady at the computer you asked about.’
‘Oh,’ Fredrika said hesitantly. ‘Have you got a name or date of birth?’
‘I’ve got both,’ the librarian said, with evident satisfaction. ‘The woman was born in January 1947 and her name is Marja. Marja Ahlbin.’
Fredrika rushed back into the Den and stopped Alex, who was the last person leaving the room.
‘It was Marja Ahlbin who’d booked the computer in Farsta that the email was sent from.’
‘Good God,’ exclaimed Alex.
Fredrika looked him straight in the eye.
‘What if we’ve misjudged the whole wretched thing,’ she said. ‘What if Jakob really did shoot his wife, but in self-defence, and then couldn’t live with what he’d done and wrote the suicide note?’
‘And where would Karolina’s death fit into that scenario?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fredrika admitted, starting a mental count of the number of times she had said those words in the past few days.
‘We don’t know a goddamn thing,’ snarled Alex. ‘And I’m getting mighty fed up with always being one step behind in this mess.’
‘And Marja’s possible involvement in the threats to Jakob?’
‘I haven’t the least bloody idea at the moment,’ Alex muttered.
Fredrika frowned.
‘I’ll check that out, too,’ she said, sounding as determined as Alex had done.
‘What?’ he asked, confused.
‘We know where the other emails that weren’t from Tony Svensson’s home computer were sent from,’ Fredrika replied. ‘A Seven-Eleven convenience store. I’ll check with Marja’s phone provider to see if her mobile was in use in or near either of those locations at the appropriate times.’
‘You do that,’ said Alex. ‘And try to come up with the answers double quick. We need plenty of data to back us up when we confront Johanna Ahlbin.’
‘I know,’ said Fredrika. ‘Because she’s the only one who can solve this case for us, that’s for sure. Or her sister.’
You seldom got a breakthrough early in an investigation, Peder Rydh had learned that over the years. But there was something very special about some of the cases he had worked on since he joined Alex’s group. Something that made them develop very quickly, and then explode into an orgy of loose threads and leftover pieces of puzzle.
I like it, he thought reflexively. Hell, I don’t think I could live without it.
He made sure he didn’t even glance in Joar’s direction as he went into his room and shut the door. Following Alex’s instructions, he rang his contact in the national CID to ask how close they were to an arrest, and said he would like to be present at the interviews when they took place.
‘We’re bringing him in after lunch,’ said his contact. ‘We’ve had surveillance on him since last night; he and his wife seem to be lurking in their flat.’
‘Neither of them been out since yesterday?’
‘Nope, doesn’t look like it.’
‘Well at least he’s not trying to flee the country.’
The CID man changed tack.
‘We’ve had the information on Sven Ljung’s private finances that we were waiting for,’ he said in a voice indicating there was more news to come.
Peder waited.
‘It looks as if our friend Sven had real problems in the financial department in recent years. The flat’s mortgaged up to the hilt – he remortgaged in December, in fact – and on top of all that he owes various loan companies a fair whack. He and his wife sold a holiday house two years ago and managed to make quite a packet, but that money seems to have disappeared.’
Peder listened attentively. Debts, Money. Always bloody money. Was it that simple this time, too?
‘But what do they live on, he and his wife?’
‘Their pensions, basically.’
‘Nothing to splash about, in other words,’ observed Peder.
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ said the other investigator. ‘And his wife’s got no assets to speak of, of course.’
‘But they did have that house,’ Peder reminded him.
‘They certainly did,’ chuckled the other man. ‘And they made a decent profit there, a million kronor. And that money’s all gone, too.’
That’s not all, Peder was thinking. We know where all the money’s gone, we just can’t remember at the moment.
‘We’re working on the hypothesis that Sven got into this whole robbery thing because his finances needed a boost and for no other reason,’ his colleague said.
‘And what about the murder of that Yusuf, up at the university?’
‘I suppose they wanted to get rid of their robber so they could brush it all under the carpet,’ came the simple answer.
Too simple.
‘Which “they” would that be?’ Peder asked dubiously.
The other man was starting to lose patience.
‘Well, of course we don’t think Sven Ljung set all this up on his own,’ he said in a slow, exaggerated way, as if talking to a child and not a trusted colleague.
‘Have you come up with names for any of the other people involved yet?’
‘We’re working on it,’ said the other man. ‘We’ll get back to you when we’ve got something.’
Peder was about to hang up when he remembered another thing Alex had asked him to do:
‘Keep an eye out for Marja Ahlbin in the investigation.’
‘But she’s dead, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but it’s not impossible you’ll find some earlier contact between them.’
His mouth went dry as he said the words. Alex had told him that Marja was behind some of the threats to Jakob.
Marja and Sven, he thought. Was it your fault your families fell out?
As a little girl, Fredrika loved jigsaw puzzles. She had done her first thousand-piece jigsaw at the age of ten. As her grandfather put it, she had one heck of an eye for detail and a memory like an elephant.
‘Magic,’ her mother called it, and stroked her hair.
Alex gave Fredrika fifteen minutes to engage in a bit of magic before they went down to meet Johanna Ahlbin. The new information from the CID was duly incorporated into the investigation, which had now been in progress for a week and seemed to be approaching some kind of resolution.
‘It’s gone quickly,’ said Alex.
Fredrika could not contradict him. It had gone quickly, and it brought a sense of relief to have got as far as an interview with the elusive Johanna Ahlbin.
Why did you leave them in the lurch? Fredrika wondered. And what the hell did your mother have to do with it all?
This last point took her breath away. To the extent that she had felt obliged to ring the library again and ask what their procedures were. The librarian was adamant. Anybody borrowing a computer for internet use had to provide ID. That made it very improbable that it could have been anyone other than Marja who sent the email.
The technical division went through Marja’s phone lists again and found that at one of the two other critical times she had been in the vicinity of the Seven-Eleven store in question. Fredrika rang the store, but they had no way of checking who had been on a specific computer at any given time.
Circumstantial evidence, thought Fredrika. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.
If she excluded Marja’s potential involvement in all that had happened, Johanna emerged as the most likely perpetrator. Her parents would have no hesitation in letting her into their home, and several of their informants had mentioned her problematic relationship with her father. And he somehow seem
ed to be the one all this was directed against. According to the supposed suicide note, it was Jakob and not Marja who fired the fatal shots. And it was Jakob who had been threatened, not Marja, though she might possibly have been the one issuing the threats.
A movement from the baby she was carrying interrupted her deliberations.
‘God, how you scared me,’ whispered Fredrika, running both hands over her stomach.
Her eyes filled and it was hard to breathe. There was too much happening all at once. The baby, work, Spencer. She took a gulp of water and felt her body absorb the liquid. Permanently stressed and worried. Never satisfied for more than the occasional day.
The baby obviously had to be her priority. Spencer could be, if he tried a bit harder. She scrunched up a bit of paper fiercely and threw it into the bin. But the blessed man never did, did he? And now he was off on some sudden mission he refused to let her in on.
So I shan’t give a damn about him for now, Fredrika decided, and went back to her notes.
She stared at the short list of questions she had drawn up for Johanna Ahlbin.
We were looking for her for several days, Fredrika thought, but we should have been looking for Karolina at the same time – or in fact even more urgently.
Where was Karolina now? Was she still in Thailand? And how did Thailand fit into the picture, anyway? At the Embassy, Karolina had said that she was the victim of some kind of plot, that she most definitely was not Therese Björk, and that she had never set foot in the hotel where her possessions had been found in the raid.
Fredrika gathered up her papers and prepared to go down to Johanna Ahlbin. Another thought flashed through her mind as she closed the door of her room behind her.
Why had nobody else known Karolina was away, and reacted to the news of her death in Stockholm? Elsie and Sven had not questioned the fact that she was apparently still in the country. Nor had Ragnar Vinterman, nor Jakob Ahlbin’s psychiatrist. Admittedly the police had not interviewed all that many of Karolina’s own friends and acquaintances. But even once her name and fate were all over the media, no one came forward and told the police that Karolina was in fact abroad and could not possibly be lying dead at the hospital.
Why had she left the country on the quiet? Fredrika wondered. And when, if ever, would she be back?
Sudden insight made the ground sway beneath her feet for a moment. There was one person, someone they had discounted, who might just be able to answer those questions. Someone the police had never contacted because it had been dismissed as fruitless, but that person had been very close to Karolina.
She pushed open the door of her room again and thudded back down into her desk chair. It only took her a minute to find the number she was looking for. She waited patiently for an answer as it rang, and rang.
The snow started to fall a few hours before lunch. With tired eyes she watched the heavens through the window. The heavens, the place where the God who had failed her so often was said to be.
I got nothing out of loving You, she thought sullenly, feeling not a shred of fear.
Few people thought of her as old, but judgements of that kind could not have been more wrong. She was old, tired and unhappy after years of difficulties and complications. In those first times of trial she had turned to church, and to the Lord who watched over them all, but in the end she had got so dreadfully tired of her prayers never being heard, so she stopped putting her hands together when it was time to pray in the services at church.
‘He never listens,’ she whispered in response to her husband, when he discreetly tried to correct her.
At first they had argued about it, because her husband refused to accept the hard words she directed at their Lord.
‘That’s blasphemy,’ he hissed in her ear. ‘And in church, what’s more!’
But what else could she do? The two sons she had borne, and initially seen as a blessing, had developed into a curse like a great bruise on her soul. She had expected them to grow up strong and be each other’s closest friend, but they had turned out as different as Cain and Abel. And she scarcely saw either of them these days. She scarcely missed the elder, who had done his younger brother such harm. But the younger one. He had always been a bit weaker, a bit more lost and a much kinder, better person than anyone else in the family; he had never really been able to cope with being perpetually in second place, overshadowed by his more successful brother.
I saw it too late, she thought as she watched the snow-flakes fall from the grey sky. And now there’s nothing I can do.
She was so deep in thought that she did not register his steps behind her.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘The devil himself,’ she said.
He gave a faint cough. His blue eyes sought out something else to look at, down in the street. They came to rest on a single car, parked by the pavement.
‘They’ve been parked there since yesterday,’ he said, so quietly that she could not initially make out what he had said.
‘Who?’ she eventually asked, puzzled.
A tired finger was pointing at her.
‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ he said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes to hell.’
She looked at him for a long time.
‘I know,’ she said, feeling the tears welling up inside her. ‘I already know it all.’
The first thing that struck Alex and Fredrika was that Johanna looked quite unlike her pictures in the Ekerö house. They were both taken aback to see the tall, attractive woman with long, fair hair waiting for them at the appointed time in the big lobby of the police building. Above all they were surprised by how calm and collected she seemed, since these were qualities rarely revealed in photographs.
Not exactly the image of a woman who has just lost her entire family, thought Fredrika.
The moment Johanna took their hands and said hello seemed almost unreal. So many days’ silence and suddenly here she was in front of them.
‘I’m truly sorry to have been so hard to get hold of,’ she said as they went to the interview room Fredrika had booked. ‘But believe me, I’ve had my reasons for not coming forward.’
‘And we’d very much like to hear them,’ said Alex, with a politeness in his voice that Fredrika could not remember hearing before.
They sat down at the table in the middle of the room. Fredrika and Alex on one side, Johanna Ahlbin on the other. Fredrika observed her with fascination. The high cheekbones, the large, enviably shapely mouth, the steely grey eyes. The beige top she was wearing was simply cut to fall straight from her broad shoulders. She had no jewellery except for a pair of plain pearl earrings.
Fredrika tried to interpret the young woman’s expression. All she was feeling and having to bear must have left some kind of mark. But however hard she scrutinised Johanna Ahlbin’s countenance, there was nothing to draw from it. Fredrika started to find the other woman’s composure unsettling.
There was something terribly wrong, she sensed it instinctively.
To her relief, Alex made a brusque start.
‘As you realise, we were very keen to get hold of you. So I suggest we start with that: where have you been these last . . .’
Alex frowned and stopped.
‘. . . seven days,’ he went on. ‘Where have you been since Tuesday the 26th of February?
Good, thought Fredrika. Now she’ll have to tell us where she was on the night of the murder.
But Johanna’s reply was so swift and short that it took them both unawares.
‘I’ve been in Spain.’
Alex couldn’t help staring.
‘In Spain?’ he echoed.
‘In Spain,’ Johanna confirmed. ‘I’ve got the travel documents to prove it.’
A moment’s silence.
‘And what were you doing there?’ asked Fredrika.
Silence fell again. Johanna seemed to be considering how to answer, and for the first time she seemed to be sho
wing the effects of what had happened.
A façade, Fredrika suspected. She had been so focused on keeping up a façade that she had become utterly disconnected from her emotions.
‘The original plan was for me to go there on private business,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I’d already arranged the time off work and . . .’
She broke off and looked down at her hands. Long, narrow fingers with unpainted nails. No wedding or engagement ring.
‘I’m sure you’re aware of my father’s involvement in refugee issues?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Alex.
Johanna picked up the glass of water she had been given and took a few sips.
‘For years I felt very ambivalent about all that,’ she began her story. ‘But then something happened last autumn to change everything.’
She took a deep breath.
‘I went on a trip to Greece; we were going to seal a deal with an important client. I stayed on for a few days to make the most of the warm weather there before going back to the Swedish cold. And that was when I saw them.’
Fredrika and Alex waited in suspense.
‘The refugees would arrive by boat in the night,’ Johanna went on in a low voice. ‘I wasn’t sleeping very well just then, it happens sometimes when I’m stressed. One morning I thought I’d take a walk to the harbour in the village where I was staying, and I saw them.’
She blinked several times and attempted a smile before her face fell.
‘It was all so undignified, so degrading. And I thought – no, not thought – I felt how wrong I’d been all those years. How unfair I’d been on Dad.’
A dry laugh escaped her lips and she looked almost as if she might cry.
‘But you know how it is. Our parents are the last people we give in to, so I chose not to tell my father about my change of heart. I wanted to surprise him, show him I was in earnest. And I planned to show him that by doing some voluntary legal work for a migrant organisation based mainly in Spain. I was going to be there for five weeks in February and March.’
Five weeks, the period of time for which she had leave of absence from work.
Silenced: A Novel Page 28