Silenced (7 page)

‘We all like to think we know our friends inside and out,’ he said in a controlled tone. ‘But there are a few basic facts in this particular case that can’t be ignored.’

To Fredrika’s surprise, Joar got up and started walking slowly round the room.

‘One. Jakob Ahlbin suffered from chronic depression. He’d had electric shock therapy for it, several times. Two. Jakob was on medication. We found pills and prescriptions in the flat. Three. A few days ago he was told that his elder daughter had died of an overdose.’

Joar paused.

‘Is it really out of the question for him to have gone mad with grief and shot his wife and himself to end their suffering?’

Elsie shook her head vigorously.

‘That’s not right!’ she cried. ‘None of it. For Lina, of all people, to have taken an overdose. I’ve known that girl since she was tiny and I can swear on the Bible she’s never been anywhere near any kind of addiction.’

Sven nodded again.

‘For people like us, who’ve known the family for decades, none of this makes any sense,’ he said.

‘But then all families have their problems and secrets, don’t they?’ Fredrika said.

‘Not that sort of secret,’ Elsie said with conviction. ‘If either of the girls had been on drugs, we would have known about it.’

Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, silently agreeing to change tack. The daughter was dead; there was no point discussing it further. And Jakob’s state of health would be better assessed by a doctor than an elderly couple who happened to be his acquaintances.

‘All right,’ said Fredrika. ‘If we disregard the most obvious line in this enquiry, namely that Jakob was the perpetrator, who else could have done it?’

There was silence.

‘Did Marja and Jakob have any enemies?’

Elsie and Sven looked at each other in surprise, as if the question had caught them unawares.

‘We’re all agreed that they’re dead,’ Joar said mildly. ‘But if it wasn’t Jakob, who was it? Were they involved in any kind of dispute, as far as you could tell?’

Elsie and Sven both shook their heads and looked down at the floor.

‘Not as far as we could tell,’ Elsie said wanly.

‘Jakob’s work with refugees made him quite a prominent figure, of course,’ said Fredrika. ‘Did that ever create problems for him?’

Sven straightened up instantly. Elsie tucked back a lock of grey hair that was hanging down over her pale cheek.

‘No, not that we ever heard,’ said Sven.

‘But it was an issue he felt very strongly about?’

‘Yes indeed. His own mother came from Finland, and then stayed here. I’m sure he saw himself as being of immigrant stock.’

‘And what did his work comprise, exactly?’ Joar asked with a frown, sitting back down in the armchair.

Elsie looked shifty, as though she did not know what to say.

‘Well, he was involved with all sorts of organisations and so on,’ she replied. ‘He gave lectures to lots of groups. Was very good at it, at getting his message across, just like when he was preaching.’

‘Men and women of the Church sometimes hide illegal migrants,’ Joar went on, with a lack of subtlety that surprised Fredrika. ‘Was he one of those?’

Sven took a gulp of coffee before he answered and Elsie said nothing.

‘Not as far as we were aware,’ came Sven’s reply at last. ‘But yes, there were rumours of that kind.’

Fredrika glanced at her watch and then at Joar. He gave a nod.

‘Well, thank you for letting us take up your time,’ he said, and put his visiting card on the table. ‘We shall probably need to come back and speak to you again, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re welcome to come whenever you need to,’ Elsie said quickly. ‘It’s important to us, being able to help.’

‘Thank you for that,’ said Fredrika, and followed Joar into the hall.

‘By the way, do you know where we can get hold of the couple’s other daughter, Johanna? We’ve done all we can to contact her, so she doesn’t hear about her parents’ death from the media,’ said Joar.

Elsie blinked, hesitated.

‘Johanna? She’ll be on one of her trips abroad, I imagine.’

‘You don’t happen to have her mobile phone number?’

Elsie pursed her lips and shook her head.

They had put on their coats and were on their way out when Elsie said: ‘Why didn’t they cancel?’

Fredrika stopped, half a metre from the door.

‘Pardon?’

‘If the girl had died of an overdose,’ Elsie said, her voice tense, ‘why didn’t they cancel the dinner party? I talked to Marja yesterday, and she sounded her usual calm, cheerful self. And Jakob was playing his clarinet in the background, the way he often did. Why were they behaving like that if they knew their own deaths were only hours away?’

BANGKOK, THAILAND

The darkness had wrapped Bangkok in a blanket of night by the time she gave up. She had been to no less than three internet cafés in the naïve hope that one of her two email addresses would work, but in vain. The system just kept telling her she had typed in either the wrong user name or the wrong password, and should try again.

She was dripping with sweat as she moved through the Bangkok streets. It was a coincidence, of course. Thai Airways’ failure to locate her booking must just have been caused by some internal blip in the airline’s system. The same applied to her email accounts, she told herself. There must be some major server problem. When she tried tomorrow, it would all be fine.

But she felt her stomach knotting, the pain radiating in all directions. She could not shake off her sense of unease. She had taken all the precautions the project demanded. Only a handful of people knew about her trip, and fewer still knew the real reason for it. Her father was one of them, of course. She did a mental calculation and concluded it must be about one in the afternoon in Sweden. Her hand was slippery with sweat as she felt in her pocket for the mobile phone she had equipped with a Thai SIM card the day she arrived.

The phone crackled, cars tooted and voices shouted to be heard above all the noise with which Bangkok city was vibrating. She pressed the phone to one ear and put her finger in the other to try to hear. The phone rang once and then an unknown woman’s voice informed her that the number no longer existed and there was no forwarding option.

She stopped abruptly in the middle of the pavement, heedless of people walking into her from in front and behind. Her heart was pounding and the sweat was pouring off her. She rang again. And again.

She glared distrustfully at the phone and tried ringing her mother instead. She was transferred straight to voicemail, but decided there was no point leaving a message because her mother virtually never used her mobile. She tried ringing her parents’ landline instead. She closed her eyes and imagined the telephone ringing in the library and hall simultaneously and her parents each leaping to a phone as usual. Her father generally got there first.

The phone echoed into emptiness. One ring, two, three rings. Then an anonymous female voice told her this number, too, no longer existed, and no forwarding number was available.

What on earth was going on?

She could not honestly remember an occasion on which she had felt truly afraid. But this time it was impossible to ward off the anxiety that was creeping over her. She racked her brains in vain for a rational explanation for her failure to get hold of her parents. It was not just that they were out, it was more than that. They were no longer subscribers. Why ever would her parents do that without telling her? She told herself to stay calm. She ought to get herself something to eat and drink, perhaps sleep for a while. It had been a long day and she had to decide what she was going to do about the trip home.

She gripped the mobile phone hard. Who else could she ring? If she restricted herself to people who already knew where she was, the list would not be very long. And anyway, she had not got their numbers; they were her father’s friends. As far as she knew, most of them were ex-directory to make sure they were not disturbed outside work. She felt tears prick her eyes. Her rucksack was heavy and her back was starting to ache. Worn out with worry, she set off back to the hotel.

There was in fact one more person she ought to be able to ring. Just to make sure everything was all right, just for some help to reach her parents. Yet she still hesitated. They had not been close for several years now, and from what she had heard, he was in considerably worse shape than he had been then. On the other hand, she did not have many options left. She made up her mind just as she stopped to buy something to eat from a stall selling chicken kebabs.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said, relieved to hear the familiar voice answer. ‘I need a bit of help.’

To herself she added:

‘I’m being cut off from the world.’

STOCKHOLM

Alex Recht assembled his team in the Den straight after lunch. Fredrika slipped in just as he was starting the meeting. Alex noted that she looked a bit brighter. He avoided catching Peder’s eye. He had still not told him why he had been summoned back to HQ, only sent a message via Ellen that he was to take a look at anything on the Ahlbin case that the public had rung in with. Since the couple’s identities had not yet been released in the media, the number of calls had been pretty sparse.

‘Right,’ Alex said briskly. ‘Where do we stand?’

Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, then Joar looked at Peder, who nodded mutely to Joar to present what they had found out in the course of the day. Joar rounded off with a report of the conversation with Sven and Elsie Ljung, who were convinced their friends had been murdered.

‘So they stuck to that when they talked to you, too?’ asked Alex, leaning back in his chair.

‘Yes,’ said Fredrika. ‘And they raised quite an important point, actually.’

Alex waited.

‘They went round to their friends’ place because they’d been invited to dinner. Why wasn’t the dinner called off if the couple had just heard their daughter had died?’

Alex sat up straight.

‘Very good objection,’ he said, but furrowed his brow. ‘Though according to the farewell note, only Jakob knew the terrible news. So in that case it wasn’t surprising that Marja sounded normal on the phone.’

‘But the Ljungs also queried the whole story of the daughter’s death,’ Joar elaborated. ‘And as regards whether Marja knew about her daughter or not, we can’t be sure.’

‘But it can’t be that difficult to check, can it?’ said Alex dubiously. ‘Whether the daughter’s dead, I mean.’

‘No, not at all,’ said Fredrika. ‘We’ve got copies of the doctor’s forms, confirmation of death and cause of death, from Danderyd Hospital. She apparently died from a drugs overdose, and it was clear from the paperwork that she’d been an addict for some years. The hospital called the police but there were no indications that the death was anything other than self-inflicted. So no further steps were taken. But we don’t know who actually broke the news to her parents. Their friends didn’t seem to know she was a drug addict.’

‘That bit about the Ljungs and Ahlbins not being so close any more is interesting,’ said Alex, changing tack. ‘Did they say why?’

Fredrika hesitated.

‘Not exactly,’ she said slowly. ‘There was something they didn’t really want to tell us, but I didn’t get a sense of it being particularly relevant to the case.’

Silence fell. Fredrika gave a discreet cough and their assistant Ellen Lind jotted something on her pad.

‘Okay then,’ said Alex. ‘Where shall we go from here? Speaking for myself, I shan’t be happy until we’ve interviewed more of the Ahlbins’ friends and acquaintances. It would be a shame if we couldn’t find anyone taking a contradictory view to the Ljungs on whether Jakob Ahlbin fired the gun and whether the daughter was on drugs.’

He shook his head irritably.

‘What more do we know about the daughter’s death?’ he said, frowning. ‘Anything strange there?’

‘We haven’t had time to go into it in detail,’ Joar put in. ‘But I was planning, sorry,
we
were planning to take a closer look this afternoon. If it seems worth our while.’

Alex tapped his pen gently on the table.

‘I’d like to suggest something else. Fredrika, how’s your afternoon looking?’

Fredrika blinked several times, almost as though she had been sleeping through the meeting.

‘I’m going to try to get some scraps of paper translated,’ she replied. ‘That thing I rang you about. I’ve nothing else on.’

‘Scraps of paper,’ echoed Peder suspiciously, mainly to have something to say.

‘The hit-and-run victim outside the university had various scraps of paper on him, scrunched into little balls. They’ve got things written on them in Arabic.’

‘Since we’re talking about that case,’ said Alex, his eyes on Fredrika, ‘is there anything at this stage to indicate it could have been a deliberate criminal act?’

‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘At least, not according to the doctor who did the preliminary report, but there’ll be a full autopsy later.’

Alex nodded.

‘But that’s hardly going to take all afternoon, knowing you. How about going into the Ahlbin daughter’s death a bit more and trying to write a summary of what happened, so we’re all clear on the sequence of events? Not because I think we’ll unearth anything revolutionary, but it would be good to know we’d checked it out thoroughly.’

Fredrika gave a cautious smile, hardly daring to look at Joar. Maybe he was like Peder, one of those who hated to be passed over. She had not had time to form any proper opinion of him, but her first impression had been a good one. Really good. A quick glance in his direction reassured her. He looked completely unperturbed. Yes, she was impressed.

‘I’ll be glad to follow up the daughter’s death,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stay very long this afternoon.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You can carry on tomorrow morning,’ Alex added quickly.

Peder tried to catch his eye across the table, wondering what was going on.

Alex felt anger bubbling up inside him, and swallowed several times.

‘Joar and I are going to pay a visit to the parish where the Ahlbins worked,’ he went on. ‘I had a call from the vicar there, earlier on today, and he was very keen to sound cooperative. We’ll interview him before we decide how to take it from there – see if there’s any reason to think anyone else was involved, or if we can assume Jakob was the sole perpetrator. And we’ll all offer up a prayer that we find their other daughter, Johanna, by the end of the day.’