Alex muttered something inaudible and gave her a hard stare.
‘Shouldn’t you go home now?’
She shook her head.
‘No, I’m fine. I’ll stay a bit longer.’
Peder was fiddling with his watch and looking worried.
‘Do you need to get home?’ Alex asked him.
Peder looked dejected.
‘Well I was supposed to be eating with Ylva and the boys tonight, but . . .’
‘Go!’ Alex bellowed, making his younger colleague jump. ‘Go home and eat. I’ll ring if I need you back.’
Light feet bore Peder out of the room and he shut the door behind him.
Two seconds later he opened it again.
‘Thanks.’
‘Do we think we can now say for certain why Jakob Ahlbin died?’ Joar asked rhetorically.
‘No,’ said Fredrika, just as Alex said ‘Yes’.
They looked at each other in surprise.
‘He was murdered to keep him quiet, just as you thought,’ Alex said irritably and glared, but Fredrika shook her head. ‘The only question is who did it.’
‘But what about Marja?’ she objected. ‘Why did she have to die as well? I mean, we’re also working on the hypothesis that she was part of Vinterman’s network.’
Alex looked bedraggled. In conjunction with the CID he had had to apply for immediate surveillance of Ragnar Vinterman, to make sure he did not try to get away if and when he found out Sven Ljung had been arrested.
‘Maybe Marja’s death wasn’t intentional,’ Alex said sternly.
Fredrika pursed her lips and said nothing.
‘OK, let’s go back over this,’ Joar suggested firmly. ‘Who do we think had a motive for murdering Jakob, or Jakob and Marja?’
‘Either the Vinterman network or one of the daughters,’ said Fredrika.
‘You mean Karolina?’ said Alex.
‘No, I mean either of them. I’m keeping an open mind until we’ve heard the other version.’
‘All right . . .’ began Alex, but was interrupted by Ellen’s knock at the door.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but there’s an urgent fax from the Thai police.’
Alex read it with a look of concern.
‘Damn. The Thai authorities are pretty sure Karolina Ahlbin left Bangkok yesterday evening on a direct flight to Stockholm. She was travelling on someone else’s passport. They got some information when they raided a known people smuggler who operates out of Bangkok.’
Anxiety spread through the room.
‘What does that mean for us?’ Fredrika asked quietly.
‘That if they’re right, she’s already back in Sweden,’ Alex said dully. ‘And that whatever her role in all this has been, she’s no doubt extremely worked up. Heaven help Johanna when she finds her.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Joar under his breath.
‘But where will she go?’ Fredrika asked agitatedly. ‘She’s more or less on the run, wanted for serious crimes.’
Alex gave her a long look.
‘We’ve no choice now, we’ll have to sound the alert and issue her description. For her own sake, if nothing else.’
Time had finally caught up with them, and that was all there was to it. And she knew Sven would try until the very last minute to avoid shouldering the responsibility he would have to take. So Elsie stood up resolutely from the kitchen table where she had been sitting since the police took Sven away, and went into the hall.
I should have done the right thing ages ago, she thought grimly. But they say it’s never too late to put right what you once did wrong.
As she struggled into her heavy winter coat, her eye fell on one of the family photos hanging on the wall. It had amazed her that the police had been in their flat three times, and failed to recognise Viggo in the picture. But then, Viggo had been a different man then, a man with an undamaged face.
Elsie felt like weeping.
His role must be clear to them now, she realised, as she pulled on her woolly hat. Even if they didn’t know precisely what he did, they must know that he had a part in all these horrors.
She stroked the picture with trembling fingers. Once upon a time they’d been a proper family, a unit in which everyone cared about everyone else and wanted what was best for them. But it seemed so long ago, now. They had long since lost Måns to his addiction, and as for Viggo . . . She let out a heavy sigh. He had always chosen the more difficult path. It had surprised them that he wanted to join the police, but they were also baffled by his reluctance to let the doctors try to do something about the scar that so disfigured his face.
‘It’s my trademark,’ he told them when the matter first came up between them.
‘Says who?’ Elsie asked doubtfully.
‘The one I love,’ he replied, and then turned away and got on with something else.
It had been hopeless trying to get any more out of him. He refused to say who he had met, and was adamant that he had no intention of letting his parents meet her. Months went by and became years. They heard no more about her, and assumed it had ended.
But Elsie knew her son and over time a suspicion started to take root. With a pounding heart she had posted herself near the front entrance to his block of flats last summer, and her suspicions were confirmed when he emerged hand in hand with a woman Elsie would have recognised from half a mile away.
‘Nothing ever comes free with that woman,’ she had tried telling her son. ‘Don’t go thinking she’s who she pretends to be. Her mind is sick, Viggo. As sick as they come.’
But he refused to listen and said he had a right to go his own way. What was a modern-day mother supposed to say to that?
Elsie resolutely put her keys in her handbag and opened the front door. She hoped the police hadn’t all gone home for the day. Above all she hoped that the woman detective, the pregnant one, would still be there. She seemed to understand things even without Elsie saying them.
I thought I was looking after them, sparing them from the worst, she thought wearily. When in fact I was just paving the way for our downfall.
She stepped onto the landing and raised her eyes.
She heard herself gasp to see who was standing there.
‘You?’ she just had time to say before surprisingly strong arms bundled her back into the flat.
The snow that had fallen in the course of the afternoon made the road surface slippery, and if he had given it a thought, he might have pulled over and spent the night at a hotel. But his thoughts were locked onto the one thing that felt worth dwelling on just then – the fact that he was going to seek out his father-in-law, thump his fist on the table and be rid of that tyranny at last – and he kept driving. He knew the country roads of Småland; they changed little over the years. He passed through villages and small towns and felt tears come to his eyes as memories he had thought gone for ever forced their way to the surface, punching through his soul.
I’ve been a fool.
He had made two important calls before setting off from Uppsala. The first was to his employer, saying he would not be in for a few days. The other was to Eva, to tell her that he would be leaving her when he got back from his trip. He had been surprised by her silence, and her closing remark had stunned him:
‘Aren’t you going to miss me at all, Spencer?’
Miss.
The word made his heart almost break.
I’ve missed more in these past years than you could ever imagine, he thought as he hung up.
But in the warm bubble of the car he was missing nothing and no one.
‘You’re at a crossroads and have to decide which way to go,’ his father said, when he moved from Lund all those years ago. ‘I can’t really make out what it looks like from where you’re standing and you don’t seem to want to tell me, but there’s one thing I want you to know – the day you need somebody to talk to, I’m here to listen.’
A whole lifetime had gone by since Spencer rebuffed his
father, and he had still to discover the full extent of the damage it had done.
I was greedy, he admitted to himself. I wanted everything and my reward was less than half. Because I deserved no more.
At one point in the slow hours of the drive, his thoughts went to Fredrika Bergman. She pretended she did not like him opening the car door for her, though it was a damn lie that she would accept anything else. What would everyday life with her be like? Did they really want to become fixtures in each other’s lives, or would they discover what so many other people in their situation do when they finally get the chance to move in together? That living with each other was only an attractive proposition as long as it remained unattainable? People were good at fooling themselves that way. They never missed what they already had, which meant they didn’t appreciate it, either.
Spencer felt slightly nervous at the thought. Maybe Fredrika, being so honest, would declare that she didn’t want him near her in the way he was now planning.
What the devil will I do then? Spencer wondered listlessly. Where the hell do I go then?
Perhaps it was the weight of all his brooding that made him careless, and he lost control of the car. It took him a few seconds to realise it had lost traction on the snowy, icy road surface, and the skid took him onto the other side of the carriageway. A moment later, the crunching shriek of colliding vehicles resounded along the forest road beneath a black night sky from which the snow just kept on falling. Witnesses saw them meet, buckle and be thrown off the road, where they crashed into the hard trunks of trees that had been standing along the roadside for many, many years.
Then came silence.
When it got to six o’clock, Fredrika went to the staff room to heat up a pie. Alex came in after her and it struck her that he seemed reluctant to go home.
‘We can’t get hold of Johanna Ahlbin,’ he complained exasperatedly.
‘Not even on that new mobile number she gave us?’
‘No.’
The microwave pinged and Fredrika took out her dinner.
‘Might be just as well to send a radio car to her flat to check everything’s okay,’ suggested Fredrika.
‘I’d already thought of that,’ said Alex. ‘They just reported back that there was no answer when they rang the doorbell and the place seemed to be in darkness. They rang at a few neighbours’ doors, but no one had seen or heard anything.’
Alex took a seat opposite Fredrika as she sat down to eat.
‘Why wouldn’t Sven Ljung give us the names of the other people in the Vinterman circle?’ he said, thinking aloud.
Fredrika chewed and swallowed. The pie had gone rubbery in the microwave and tasted disgusting.
‘Either because he’s scared, or for reasons of personal loyalty.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Alex. ‘It could easily be that he’s trying to protect someone, and hasn’t been scared into keeping his mouth shut at all.’
‘His son Viggo, for example,’ said Fredrika. ‘A father shielding his son, that’s pretty classic.’
Alex nodded, his head seeming heavy.
‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘You know, I talked to that Viggo and he didn’t breathe a word about being the Ljungs’ son or growing up virtually next door to Jakob and Marja Ahlbin and playing with their daughters. He even claimed he’d never met them.’
Fredrika quietly set down her knife and fork.
‘We definitely know Karolina “played” a great deal with their son Måns,’ she began.
‘Yes?’ said Alex.
‘Do we know how much the girls had to do with Viggo?’
Alex was slow to answer.
‘Not sure,’ he eventually responded. ‘I don’t think technical has managed to get through his phone lists today; they didn’t come in until later.’
Another bit of pie was forced down Fredrika’s throat.
‘I think we’re going to find something there,’ she said. ‘I reckon this whole thing is a lot better thought through and structured than we can see as yet. I checked when Viggo changed his surname, for example, and he did it the year he went to police training college.’
‘Good grief,’ exclaimed Alex. ‘Could he have been in on it from the word go, when they started taking money for hiding illegal migrants in 2004?’
‘Of course he could,’ said Fredrika. ‘And to avoid attracting attention if his father got caught, he made sure to keep his distance from the family by changing his name.’
‘Which clearly worked pretty well,’ Alex muttered.
‘Not at all,’ Fredrika contradicted him. “We’re sitting here now, knowing it failed.’
Alex gave a lopsided smile.
‘But we couldn’t be any further from arresting the damned man if we tried.’
‘Can we put surveillance on him?’
Her boss’s smile grew broader.
‘They’ve been on him for the past hour,’ he said. ‘He’s sitting tight in his flat, apparently.’
‘Awaiting instructions, perhaps?’
‘Could well be,’ Alex agreed.
He answered after the second ring.
‘I’m setting off now,’ she said.
‘Okay. You want me to come with you?’
She went quiet.
‘Not yet,’ she said eventually, but with such hesitation in her voice that he knew straight away he wouldn’t be able to stop himself going after her.
He felt frightened for her, the way he always did when she was reckless.
‘It could be dangerous,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ she said in the same muted tone.
‘Take care of yourself.’
‘Always.’
They lapsed into silence and the stress of it all made him grind his teeth. He had to ask.
‘Did you go round to Mum’s?’
He heard her stop in mid-step.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
Another pause.
‘She wasn’t in.’
‘Damn. So she’s one step ahead after all . . .’
She interrupted him, and said firmly:
‘We’ll just have to hope for the best.’
‘And prepare for the worst,’ he finished.
He sat looking out of the window for a long time after she rang off. His jaws were clenched as he came to his decision. He was much better equipped for physical combat than she could ever be, that was what made them such a successful team. She was the strategist, drawing up the guidelines for their work, while he made sure any problems that arose were dealt with and got out of the way. Time after time.
He took the decision on pure impulse. He was not just going to stay in his flat while the one he loved fought for her life in the theatre of war, where she had suffered such injury all that time ago and learned to view every stranger with the greatest caution and suspicion.
Fredrika was just putting things away and finishing for the day when the call came through from the switchboard. An Elsie Ljung was down at reception looking for her. She was very agitated and said it was urgent.
Fredrika had decided that it really was time to go home and devote some time to herself and her unborn child. She had started feeling that something was not quite right when she and Alex were chatting in the staff room. The baby seemed to be keeping still in a new way, as if summoning up the strength for something imminent.
‘You’re not thinking of coming out now, are you?’ she murmured to herself.
But her uneasiness about the baby was still overshadowed by her worry at not being able to reach Spencer. The phone just rang unanswered whenever she tried. The exhaustion in her body and mind were inhibiting her efforts to come up with a logical explanation. He had been so terribly secretive before he left, not like himself at all.
The receiver weighed heavily in her hand as she spoke to the switchboard operator. Elsie Ljung had taken it upon herself to come to the police out of working hours. Was there something she wanted to get off her chest?
‘Shall we go down together?’ he asked. ‘I’m okay to stay a bit longer.’
‘Don’t know,’ Fredrika said dubiously. ‘She apparently asked to speak to me on my own. I’ve got a feeling she might have something important to tell me.’
‘I’ll wait here then.’
With a slight nod, Fredrika came out of his room to go down and meet Elsie. A glance out of the window as she left showed thick snow coming down. The regal capital was clothed in white again. And a thought came into Fredrika’s mind: Nice not to be out on the roads tonight. They could be really treacherous.
Karolina felt she was only keeping the car on the road by pure strength of will. She had driven this route so many times, longing to get there and be enfolded in the warm walls of the house and all its memories. They were mixed memories, of course, some of them terrible ones that she would gladly have written out of history if she could. Her father had said it was impossible to try to change the past, but you could always improve your own way of relating to it. Bruises were an indication of where you’d been, not where you were going.
The memory of her father stung and smarted, bringing tears to her eyes. How had it all gone so wrong? How had they been forced to pay such a high price?
She thought she knew. Not precisely, but more or less. As her plane landed at Arlanda that morning, she suddenly knew that the disaster that had befallen her parents could not possibly be anything to do with her trip or her father’s special interest in migrant issues. The insight pulsed through her body as the wheels of the plane bounced along the tarmac.
This is personal, she thought.
The moment she understood that to be the case, she also realised who she was up against. Nothing is more of an asset in battle than knowing your opponent. And of all the opponents it could have been, there was none she felt she knew better.
Once again she rang the number from which she had tried, in blind panic and as ultimate proof of her utter naïvety, to get help in Bangkok. And again it rang and rang until it switched over to voicemail. But she knew – she sensed – her enemy at the other end, knew she was sitting there with her hand on the phone and not answering. Her voice was cold when she finally spoke:
Silenced: A Novel Page 31