Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘I thought it was a cleft-palate operation that had gone wrong,’ Alex said, bitterly recalling what Tony Svensson had said to Peder and Joar:

  It’s not somebody like me you’re looking for . . . I haven’t got a name . . . just a fucking ugly face.

  ‘That was what everybody who met him later thought,’ Fredrika said eagerly. ‘And the family let them think it, because they were ashamed of the real reason for the scar. The incident was never reported to the police; Karolina’s rapist had too many motives for keeping out of judicial hands.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Karolina was very impressed by Viggo’s bit of bravado?’ Alex guessed.

  ‘No he wasn’t, and that seems to have been one of the things that pushed him into helping Johanna with her plan. He never forgave Karolina’s family, or his own, for condemning what he’d done. Johanna was part of the Vinterman network as well, and she got her mother to join, too, because Marja had strong objections to her husband’s idea of starting up his voluntary work again. She felt the refugees had cost her so much personally that she never wanted to help them for free again. Ragnar tempted her with money and I’m sure Johanna had some strong arguments, too.’

  Fredrika swallowed.

  ‘Lots of people were damaged for life that midsummer eve.’

  ‘And Elsie and Sven knew this all along,’ Alex said dully.

  ‘We have to understand them,’ Fredrika said. ‘They’ve been fearing for their own lives since they found Jakob and Marja. The only thing they dared give us was their conviction that Jakob hadn’t done it himself. They hoped we’d find out the rest.’

  Alex paused.

  ‘Good God, what a betrayal on Marja’s part,’ he said in a voice that Fredrika had never heard him use before.

  ‘I don’t think so, Alex,’ she said. ‘I’m sure Johanna convinced her mother there was no risk in the project. Maybe she played on her feelings of guilt about the past, too.’

  ‘And when she realised the full ghastliness of it . . .’

  ‘. . . it was too late. But she tried anyway. We know she sent those threats to Jakob, and I think we can assume she sent them with the best of intentions. She was trying to save what could still be saved.’

  Alex stared out of the minibus window at the whirling snow. He thought ahead to the Ekerö house, where the sisters must be gearing up for their final battle.

  ‘She could have done more,’ he said sternly. ‘Then maybe she and Jakob would still be alive today.’

  ‘But they might not. She was a pawn in Johanna’s game, and she presumably wanted nothing better than to see her parents dead. She was just waiting for the right opportunity.’

  Initially Karolina could not be sure if it was her sister walking up the road towards the house. She leant up against the window, pressing her forehead to the cold glass to try to see better. When the figure turned in at the driveway, Karolina’s heart missed a beat. It really was her sister.

  She did not slow her steps as she walked. In fact she almost strode, very upright, with her long hair hanging loose down the back of her coat, across the garden and up the steps to the front door. Then Karolina heard her pause, and saw the door handle slowly press down. The door opened and Johanna stepped inside, tall and slender and covered in snow. As if she had known all along that Karolina was crouched on the floor by the big window, she slowly turned towards her.

  The bright ceiling light went on as Johanna flicked the switch on the wall.

  ‘Sitting here in the dark?’ she said, observing her sister and the gun.

  Karolina leapt to her feet, raising the weapon.

  ‘I need to know why,’ she said grimly, clutching the gun in her chilled hands.

  Not once on all those hunting trips with her father had she ever dreamt she would have to use her skills to defend her own life one day. Against her own sister.

  ‘Betrayal.’

  Karolina shook her head.

  ‘You’re sick. You’ve had your whole family wiped out and you have the gall to say you’re the one who feels betrayed.’

  Her sister’s face twitched.

  ‘I did everything for you after that goddamn midsummer’s eve,’ she hissed. ‘Everything. I even had the daisy tattoo done as an everlasting reminder of what you’d been through. And what did you do? Turned your back on me and turned Dad against me.’

  Karolina felt the tears prick her eyes.

  ‘You’ve never done anything for anyone but yourself, Johanna. And you turned Dad against you yourself.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ Johanna yelled with such force that Karolina flinched. ‘Just like the lie that you didn’t care about Måns or Viggo.’

  ‘We were so young,’ whispered Karolina impotently. ‘How can you still be blaming me for that?’

  ‘Viggo tried to take revenge for your sake,’ Johanna went on loudly. ‘And you thanked him by choosing his brother instead.’

  Mention of Viggo frightened Karolina. She had not realised he was mixed up in all that happened, but of course he must be. Bit by bit the truth dawned on her, and she felt her strength draining away as the picture became clear.

  ‘So now you understand,’ Johanna said gently. ‘I must say you impress me, Lina. You not only extricated yourself from that unpleasant state of affairs in Thailand, you also managed to get back to Sweden and find out the truth.’

  ‘Måns,’ whispered Karolina.

  ‘Quite right,’ smiled Johanna. ‘It was stupid of you – very stupid, in fact – not to realise who Måns would turn to when you rang and asked him for help. We were one step ahead of you the whole way. I wanted you for once in your life to experience what it was like for me, invisible to everything and everyone.’

  ‘But you never were invisible,’ protested Karolina. ‘You were the one everybody could see. Good grief, I spent half my childhood hearing that I ought to be more like you.’

  The air inside the house felt thick in the throat. Johanna was standing stock still, but for a repeated clenching and opening of her fists. She was seething with rage.

  ‘That’s exactly it. Half your childhood. Then things got better, didn’t they? But not for me. Nor for Viggo.’

  Fear and fatigue made Karolina start to cry.

  ‘I thought this was all about that wretched new network of smugglers,’ she said through her tears, the gun shaking in her hands. ‘Drawing Mum into all this. How could you?’

  Johanna’s face darkened still further at the sight of her sister’s tears.

  ‘I never intended forgiving any of you. Not ever. Believe me, everything that’s happened was going to happen sooner or later anyway. But when our fool of a father kept on sticking his nose in things that were none of his business, I have to admit it got more urgent than we’d originally planned. And it was so easy to pull the wool over Mum’s eyes, it was almost pathetic. She was completely convinced that only Dad was in danger.’

  The room closed in as Johanna spoke. Johanna, who had both her parents murdered without feeling the slightest remorse. Karolina still could not quite accept how deranged her sister must be. Her desire for explanation was still not satisfied.

  ‘I read all about it in the papers,’ Karolina said. ‘And talked to Elsie. Between you all, you’ve murdered so many people.’

  Johanna put her head on one side.

  ‘I do admit that more lives have been lost than we first calculated, but when people can’t stick to the simple rules of the game, it’s hard to be accountable for their actions. We expressly told them they weren’t to let on to anyone that they were going to Sweden, yet several of them still did precisely that. So we couldn’t send them home again.’

  ‘We? You and Viggo, you mean?’

  Johanna sneered, but said nothing.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ said Karolina. ‘That Mum and Dad would die and I’d rot in jail in Thailand?’

  ‘I think you deserve some credit after putting us to such trouble,’ Johanna said in a businesslike tone. ‘We had hoped y
ou’d be back home before we tackled Mum and Dad’s activities. But then we realised you’d sniffed out one of our most vital collaborators in Bangkok, and we had to take action.’

  ‘Just so you know, I didn’t realise how close I’d got.’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t really change anything, does it? You had to be dealt with on the spot, we decided that straight away. A challenge for us all, but a bit of imagination finds a solution to most things here in life. It was a piece of cake to shut down your email accounts, since you’d usefully provided Dad with your password and user name. Just think, he kept them in a notebook on his desk. So easy I was almost disappointed. And we had all the contacts we needed to make stuff happen in Bangkok. The mugging, shifting your gear to another hotel, putting the drugs in your room, tipping off the police so they mounted the raid.’

  Johanna stopped for a moment.

  ‘Everything has its price,’ she said. ‘No one can do what you lot did to me without paying for it.’

  Its price. Words piled up in Karolina’s head, but in the wrong order. She thought about Viggo again. Viggo, who had got into her parents’ flat, raised a gun and shot them in the head. At what point had they realised they were going to die? Did they ever get time to realise why?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a couple?’ Karolina asked feebly. ‘You and Viggo.’

  A hollow laugh echoed round the room.

  ‘What was there to tell, Lina? That I’d picked up the pieces you didn’t want? You and I have scarcely seen each other for years, so why should I confide in you?’

  There was nothing to say, nothing to add. It was all over, and this was the end. Everything has its price. So Karolina abandoned the topic, and asked:

  ‘Where is he now? Is he waiting for you somewhere?’

  ‘He’s in the garden,’ Johanna answered in such a cool voice that Karolina had to take her eyes off her and turn her head to the big window at the front of the house.

  And she saw his outline, out there in the falling snow. The man who had once loved her so much that he had committed a crime to take revenge for an injustice she had long since put behind her.

  ‘You’re never going to get away with this, the pair of you. You’ve deceived too many people, forced them into a chain of murders I refuse to believe they wanted to be part of.’

  ‘It’s very touching that the last thing you do in your life is to worry about how I’m going to get out of this awkward situation,’ Johanna said.

  If the light had not been on in the room, she would have seen what he had in his hands and possibly been the first to shoot. But in the event it was Viggo, surrounded by swirling snow and standing a few metres from the house with one of her father’s shotguns raised to his shoulder, who fired the first shot. The weight of her sorrow was the last thing she felt.

  The police were very close to the house when the shot rang out. It reverberated dully among the snow-laden trees and sent the adrenalin pumping round the officers’ blood.

  Damnation, thought Alex, sensing Joar’s eyes on him.

  The vehicles braked to a halt in the snow, the doors were wrenched open and the cold air streamed in. The squad left the minibus first and took up their positions round the house. Over the radio the detectives heard one of them say there appeared to be two people standing talking inside the house. Neither of them came out when the police ordered them to do so.

  Alex peered up towards the house with a growing sense of anticipation. That horrendous holiday home, cradle of so much unhappiness and tragedy. Unspoken tensions mingled with the cold evening air. Alex blinked and knew everyone else was thinking the same thing. If there were two people visible through the window, was there a third, the victim of the shot they had all heard?

  Johanna looked at her sister’s limp body. A pool of blood was slowly spreading out beneath her. Johanna reached out a hand and switched off the light.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to Viggo, stroking his arm.

  He stood numbly beside her.

  ‘It was the only right thing to do,’ Johanna said in a low voice. ‘And you know it.’

  She followed his look out of the window, to the flashing lights of the police vehicles and dark figures moving across the snow.

  ‘We won’t get anywhere,’ he said.

  She looked unsure, but not for long.

  ‘Well we’ve nowhere to go, anyway.’

  Slowly he turned towards her.

  ‘So what shall we do?’

  ‘We’ll do what has to be done.’

  She cautiously bent down and picked up the gun that Viggo had put aside. Blinded by his own naïvety and the belief that in Johanna he had found a woman who loved him, he did not react when she pointed the barrel of the gun in his direction.

  ‘You never loved me as much as you did her,’ Johanna said in an empty voice as she pulled the trigger and shot him in the chest.

  For a single second she stood still, staring at the wounded body. She did not care what happened now; she had achieved her goal. Wearily she tossed down the weapon and made herself run out onto the front steps in full view of the silent police officers.

  ‘Help me,’ she screamed. ‘Please help me! He shot my sister!’

  Ragnar Vinterman realised the game was up several hours before the police rang at his door. He felt nothing but relief when it came to it. So much had gone so completely and utterly wrong. People had had to pay with their lives for his, and other people’s, greed.

  The truth of the matter was that, at heart, Ragnar shared Jakob Ahlbin’s innocent view of the group of people known as refugees who found their way to Sweden. He had most certainly not felt he was exploiting people in real need when he first provided them with food and lodging for payment, or when he got the idea of expanding his venture into people smuggling. Initially, nothing could have been further from his mind. Everybody could pay the price he was asking, after all. It ought not to be a problem for any of the parties involved.

  But then Sven put his foot down and refused to continue the collaboration. At that point, Ragnar started to feel the first hint of doubt. Unlike Jakob, Sven could not be dismissed as emotional or irrational. Sven was a solid sort of person, but forced into criminal activity so he could provide the huge sums of money being milked out of him by his son. But he did not lack a sense of basic judgement, and that was what made Ragnar so unsure when Sven openly declared he had had enough.

  The problem was Marja and Johanna. Ragnar had wondered, certainly, how two women in Jakob’s own family had come to move so far from the fundamental values the family had once all shared. But if they saw nothing to object to in the operation, why should Ragnar?

  Just once, he had tried to discuss the matter with Marja, but she seemed troubled and embarrassed by his overture and evaded his questions. Her only proviso was that Jakob must not on any account find out what was going on. And he did not, until one of the hand-picked refugees Johanna called daisies broke the cardinal rule, and told a friend how he got to Sweden.

  That was when we lost our grip, Ragnar thought hopelessly. That was when we turned into murderers.

  The scheme was only in action for six months. It had been easy to create a network for generating money from hiding refugees, but harder to build up structures for bringing people to Sweden illegally, making them commit complex crimes, and then sending them home again. In actual fact they only sent three people back before they came to the conclusion they would have to dispose of the daisies some other way. People talked too much, it was as simple as that. And talk generated rumours, and that was not acceptable.

  He would never forget that evening when, about to retire to bed, he heard on the radio that a couple had been shot in their home at Odenplan. He had carried on hoping to the very last that it would not need to go that far. That Jakob would see reason. But as usual, Jakob did not allow himself to be frightened into silence, and then there was only one way it could end. And Marja . . . Johanna insisted she had to be taken out of the e
quation, too, because she would never keep quiet if they had Jakob killed.

  It would never fade, the memory of Johanna’s impassive face as she informed him they could leave the silencing of her parents to her. Nor did Ragnar think he would get an answer to the question that was causing his clergyman’s heart such torment: what must be missing from a person for them to be capable of killing their own maker?

  Then the bell rang and Ragnar went to open the door. The police would demand the names of the others involved in his operation. The woman who knew the document forger, the man who spoke Arabic, all those people making a living smuggling refugees.

  I shall give them everything, Ragnar decided. Because I have nothing more to hide.

  He opened the door without saying a word and handed himself meekly over to the police. And the parish had lost yet another of its faithful servants.

  The next call came just as Fredrika was about to go home. It was past nine o’clock, and Alex had rung in a final report that sounded so crazy she could hardly take it in. Johanna Ahlbin had handed herself over to the police, claiming to have shot Viggo in self-defence after he murdered Karolina. According to the doctors, Viggo was dead but Karolina would probably pull through.

  ‘We’re eagerly awaiting her statement,’ Alex said sarcastically, and urged Fredrika to go home.

  But Fredrika didn’t. First she sorted and filed away all her paperwork, then she realised someone ought to ring Peder and let him know how events had played out. He seemed cheerful.

  ‘We’re just having dinner,’ he said. ‘My brother’s here, too.’

  She thought he sounded in good spirits. Or possibly a touch embarrassed. Either way, she was glad for him. It would be a good thing for all concerned if Peder got his priorities in life sorted out.

  The wind had dropped and it had briefly stopped snowing as she pulled on her coat to walk home. Her mobile rang and she saw it was another call from Spencer’s home number, which she answered as she put on her hat with the other hand.