Silenced (23 page)

Good grief. The Old Testament was full of unaccountably sadistic stories.

Job came through his tribulations pretty well, it turned out. He did allow himself to feel the merest hint of doubt about the reason for God’s ill deeds, but he apologised afterwards. And was paid back handsomely. God gave him twice as many cattle as he had had to start with, and a total of twenty new children to replace the ten he had let the Devil take from him.

All’s well that ends well, Fredrika thought caustically.

And once again repeated to herself the message Jakob had received.

. . .
there’s always time to change your mind and do the right thing
.

She racked her brains as to what that could mean in terms of what she had just learned of Job’s fate.

Jakob Ahlbin wasn’t like me, she thought. He didn’t need to look in the Bible to understand what the sender was trying to say. And the sender knew that, too.

She stood up and started pacing the room. The question was how familiar the sender was with the Bible. If you read the email carefully enough, you could interpret it as an offer to negotiate. A chance to change his mind. To do the right thing. Job doubted, but then he said sorry. And was repaid.

Fredrika stopped in mid-step.

They were leaving the option of a settlement open even in that very last message. And Jakob Ahlbin turned them down. He refused to heed their warning to stop looking.

But what had he been looking for? And how had they known that he did not want to bargain? Investigations had shown that Jakob Ahlbin had not answered any of those emails he received.

They must have contacted him by some other means as well.

Fredrika thought hard. And remembered that they had found Tony Svensson’s fingerprints on the front door.

Alex decided they would go and see Erik Sundelius first and then go on to Ragnar Vinterman’s.

Erik Sundelius, senior psychiatric consultant at Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm, saw them in his office. It was a small room but arranged so as to maximise space. Compact shelves along one wall were packed tight with books. On the wall behind the desk there was an enlarged photograph in brownish shades of dense traffic at a crossroads, cars queuing at a red light.

‘Mexico City,’ clarified the consultant, following Alex’s gaze. ‘Took it myself, a few years ago.’

‘Very nice,’ said Alex with an appreciative nod.

He wondered if this was the room where Sundelius saw his patients.

‘This is my office. My consulting room’s on the other side of the corridor,’ the doctor said, answering his unspoken question.

He sank into a chair.

‘But I have to admit my level of patient contact has been limited in recent years. Unfortunately.’

Alex took a look at him. His own experience of psychologists and psychiatrists was sporadic, and his perceptions of the way such a person should look were largely the result of his own bias, but in many respects Erik Sundelius did not look at all as he had expected. He looked more like a GP, with neatly combed hair and a side parting.

‘Jakob Ahlbin,’ Alex said gravely. ‘What can you tell us about him?’

The face of the man on the other side of the desk fell, and he looked first at Alex, then at Peder.

‘That he was the healthiest ill person I’ve ever met.’

Erik Sundelius leant forward and clasped his hands on his desk, apparently wondering how to continue.

‘He did have his bad spells,’ he said. ‘Very bad, in fact. Severe enough for him to be admitted for ECT treatment.’

Peder squirmed at the mention of the electric shock treatment, but to Alex’s relief he made no comment.

‘Over the past three years I thought I could detect a change,’ the consultant went on. ‘A weight seemed to have been taken off him, somehow. He was always very concerned about the plight of refugees, but I think the increasing demand for his lectures gave him a new way of doing his bit for the cause that meant so much to him. I went to hear him speak once. He was brilliant. He chose his battles carefully, and won those he had to.’

A slight smile crept over Alex’s face beneath that creased forehead.

‘Could you give me an example of one of those battles? I’m afraid this is an area in which we’re very short of information in the case.’

Erik Sundelius sighed.

‘Well, where shall I start? It goes without saying that his radical stance on migrant issues got him on the wrong side of some factions in society. But it also had repercussions for his family and professional relationships.’

Peder, who was making notes, raised his eyes from his pad.

Sven Ljung, Alex thought automatically. The man who found Jakob shot in the head.

‘The most worrying aspect, of course, was the impact his work had on his relationship with his younger daughter,’ said Erik Sundelius.

‘Johanna?’ Alex asked, surprised.

A tired nod from the psychiatrist.

‘Jakob took it very badly, not being able to get that relationship back on track.’

The photos in the Ekerö house. The younger daughter disappearing from the sequence of family pictures.

‘Johanna Ahlbin turned her back on her father when he took those refugees into his church?’ Alex asked.

‘No, before that, as I understand it. She didn’t share her father’s opinions on the subject at all, which inevitably led to conflict.’

‘Our information also indicates that Johanna distanced herself from her family because she wasn’t religious like they were,’ said Peder.

‘Yes, that was another problem,’ Erik Sundelius confirmed. ‘It made Jakob all the more glad that his elder daughter Karolina was a wholehearted supporter of the campaign to help refugees, and shared her parents’ faith, even if she wasn’t quite such a devotee as they were. Jakob often mentioned it in our sessions, the pleasure he took in how Karolina had turned out.’

Alex raised his eyebrows and was aware of Peder tensing up.

‘But I assume relations with Karolina must still have been rather a burden to someone with Jakob Ahlbin’s condition?’ he said.

The consultant frowned.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean her serious drug addiction.’

For a moment, Erik Sundelius looked as though he were about to burst out laughing, but then his face darkened.

‘Drug addict? Karolina?’

He shook his head.

‘Impossible.’

‘Unfortunately not,’ said Alex. ‘We’ve seen the autopsy report and the death certificate. The body bore all the signs of long-term narcotic abuse.’

Erik Sundelius looked from Alex to Peder, staring.

‘Sorry, do you mean she’s dead?’

The consultant clearly had not read the newspaper articles very thoroughly. Alex decided to take him through the case. He told him how the couple had been found, and about the suicide note supposedly written by Jakob Ahlbin, and the news of his daughter’s death that had apparently pushed him to kill his wife and himself.

Erik Sundelius listened in silence. When he did speak, his voice was strained, as though from anger or grief. Once again he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing.

‘Okay,’ he said, putting his hands on the desk. ‘Let me go through this bit by bit. First of all, can you let me see a copy of the note Jakob left?’

Alex nodded, taking the sheet of paper out of his bag.

Erik Sundelius read the typewritten message and looked at the handwritten signature. Then he pushed the note away as though it had burned him.

‘The signature’s Jakob’s. But as for the rest . . .’

Alex opened his mouth to say something, but the consultant held up his hand.

‘Let me finish,’ he said. ‘Jakob was my patient for many years. Believe me – this letter was
not
written by him. Nothing about it is right, neither the tone nor the content. Even if he took it into his head to do what the letter indicates, he wouldn’t express it like this. Who is it intended for? It’s not addressed to anyone. Johanna, say, or a good friend. Just empty words directed at anyone and everyone.’

He paused for breath.

‘As I said before, you have to believe me when I say this is not something Jakob has done. You’re making a terrible mistake to think so.’

‘You don’t think he could have done it even after hearing his daughter had died?’

Then Erik Sundelius could contain himself no longer. The laughter that had been showing itself in his face came bursting out.

‘Absurd,’ he guffawed. ‘The whole thing.’

He grabbed the letter again, and appeared to be trying to control himself.

‘If, and I mean
if
, Jakob had had news of Karolina’s death broken to him, there’s no way he would have kept it from his wife. And he would have come to me – he always did when anything happened to disturb his mental state. Always. I’d go so far as to say that his trust in me was infinite in that respect.’

‘You’re talking as though there’s every reason to question whether he heard the news of the death at all,’ commented Alex.

The consultant tossed the sheet of paper onto the desk.

‘That’s exactly what I’m doing,’ he said. ‘Karolina was here sometimes, with her father. And so was her mother.’

‘As a patient?’ said Alex, nonplussed.

‘No, no, no,’ said Erik Sundelius, glaring at him. ‘Absolutely not. Simply to support her father. She always kept herself informed about how he was and what treatment he was currently having. It seems unthinkable to me that I could have missed the fact she was on drugs over a period of ten years.’

Alex and Peder exchanged looks.

‘But,’ said Peder, ‘we’re afraid to say there aren’t really any grounds for disputing it. I mean, the girl’s verifiably dead. And there’s the autopsy report, signed by a doctor who one of our colleagues has been in contact with.’

‘Who identified her?’ asked Erik Sundelius, screwing up his eyes.

‘Her sister Johanna,’ replied Alex. ‘She found Karolina unconscious and rang for an ambulance. We really need to get hold of her, incidentally.’

Erik Sundelius was shaking his head again.

‘The whole thing’s baffling,’ he said. ‘You’re saying Johanna went round to Karolina’s . . .?’

He shook his head some more.

‘In all the years Jakob was seeing me here, Johanna only ever came with him once. And she was so young then that she had no choice, so to speak. She was here because she had to be. I could see it in her, straight away. And to go by what Jakob said, the sisters weren’t very close to each other, either. Which was also a source of great sadness to him.’

He hesitated.

‘I don’t know what sort of picture you’ve formed of Johanna, but the impression I got from what Jakob told me was that things weren’t quite right with her.’

There was a pause. Alex’s brain was working overtime on processing all this new information.

‘Did she suffer from depression, too?’

Erik Sundelius compressed his lips and looked as though the question had put him on the spot.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not depression. But I must stress that I only ever met Johanna once or twice in person. She wasn’t just standoffish, according to Jakob. She was full of anger and contempt that she openly showed to her family. The things he told me made her sound sick, disturbed.’

‘Maybe she had good reason for it?’ said Alex. ‘Her anger, I mean.’

Erik Sundelius shrugged.

‘Well if she did, then that reason wasn’t clear, even to Jakob. Anyway, the only thing I can say for sure is that his daughter’s lack of peace of mind troubled him deeply.’

Alex decided it was time to wind up the interview.

‘So to summarise, what you’re saying is . . .’

‘That I don’t for a moment subscribe to the theory that Jakob Ahlbin murdered his wife and then shot himself. Of course I can’t claim a person who is dead is really alive, but I can tell you straight off that she was not a drug addict.’

‘You sound very sure of all that,’ said Alex.

‘I am,’ Erik Sundelius said deliberately. ‘The question is, how sure are you of
your
conclusions?’

As he spoke, he turned his head and looked out of the window. Almost as if expecting to see Jakob Ahlbin coming along through the slushy snow.

Winter had chosen to arrive in several bursts. When the first snow came, early in the new year, he had assumed that was that. But it never was, of course.

He sighed, suddenly feeling very tired.

It was a matter of concern that Jakob had not understood the full extent of his problem until it was too late, but it was to some degree typical of him. He had sometimes felt the man had made a positive choice to live his life according to the meaning of his Christian name: Jakob, a controversial name of Hebrew origin, which some claimed to mean ‘may he protect’. It was an irony of fate that when he himself really needed help, nobody came to his rescue.

They had always hoped a solution could be found before the situation got out of hand. They had relied on him acting rationally, but he had not. Jakob was an emotional, impulsive person and once he realised he was onto something, he refused to deviate from his chosen course. As if by the Lord’s blessing they had found out about the threats directed at him by the organisation Sons of the People and had decided to build on that, to scare him off. But Jakob had scented out his quarry and would not be put off.

So then it ended the way it had to, he told himself afterwards. With a disaster that would have been all the greater if Jakob had been allowed to delve more deeply into what had come to his attention, which had initially pleased him so much.

‘This is a turning point. I’ve heard fantastic news!’ he had said, convinced he was talking to a friend.

But the friend was shaken and demanded to know more. Unfortunately Jakob had clammed up, possibly starting to sense that his friend was double-dealing. So the identity of his original source remained unknown to the circle. The only problem still left to deal with.

Then the telephone rang.

‘I’ve got a name,’ said the voice.

‘At last,’ he said, feeling a greater sense of relief than he cared to admit.

The voice at the other end said nothing for a few moments.