Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  Fredrika frowned and tried hard to think what had made her react so strongly to seeing the name Forex. Nothing came to mind, so she logged on to Vilma, the Migration Agency’s system, to see if she could find a Farah Hajib in their database. Maybe the woman was in Sweden. And maybe she was missing a ring.

  When he heard the key in the lock, he felt such a surge of relief that he almost burst into tears. The night had felt interminable and the flat was very cold. The lovely frost patterns on the outsides of the windows were the only aesthetically appealing things in this drab, temporary home.

  Ali was not feeling good. He had had stomach ache and diarrhoea for several days. The air in the flat was thick with cigarette smoke because none of the windows opened, and he sometimes found himself trying not to breathe in too often. He was also feeling the effects of prolonged insomnia. It had only taken a couple of sleepless nights for his senses to start feeling distorted by fatigue. Now, he forgot a thought before he had even finished thinking it, and sometimes felt he was asleep even though he was awake.

  This was not the life he had paid for. Even if he had paid a good deal less than many other people.

  He met them in the hall, wanting to show that he was glad to see them, even so.

  It was early in the day, not much after nine-thirty.

  It was the same woman who had met him at the bus station. She had a man with her. He was short and very blond. It was hard to assess his age, but he looked about sixty. Ali’s spirits fell. He had hoped for someone who spoke Arabic. To his surprise, the man opened his mouth and greeted him in his own language.

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Ali,’ he said softly. ‘How have you been getting on in this flat?’

  Ali swallowed and cleared his throat several times. It was so long since he had had anyone to talk to.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said, his voice scratchy.

  He swallowed again and hoped they could not tell that he was lying. It would be a disaster if they thought he was being insolent. The very worst thing would be if they sent him home. That would put him and his family back to square one.

  The man and woman went further into the flat and Ali trailed after them. They sat down in the living room. The woman put a few unopened packets of cigarettes on the coffee table and nodded to Ali. He smiled and tried to express his gratitude. He had had nothing to smoke all night, which had only increased the stress levels in his body.

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered in Arabic. ‘Thank you.’

  The fair-haired man said something to the woman and she laughed.

  ‘We hope you didn’t think we had deserted you,’ said the man, leaning back on the sofa with a troubled look. ‘It’s just that we have to leave a few days between visits, as I’m sure you understand.’

  When Ali did not reply at once, the man added: ‘It was for your own sake, too, you know.’

  Ali took the first drag at a cigarette, feeling the nicotine start to soothe him.

  ‘It was no problem at all,’ he said quickly, putting the cigarette to his mouth again. ‘I’ve been fine.’

  The man nodded and looked reassured. The woman picked up the briefcase she had with her and put it on her knee. The lock flew open with a quiet click and she opened it.

  ‘We’ve come to discuss the final part of your payment for setting you up here in Sweden,’ the man said with authority. ‘So you can get your residence permit and bring your family over, start a new life. And so you can move to your new home, learn Swedish and look for a job.’

  Ali nodded eagerly. He had been waiting for this ever since he got off the plane.

  The woman passed him a plastic wallet with some papers in it.

  ‘This is the house in Enskede we thought you and your family could have,’ said the man, encouraging Ali to take out the papers. ‘We thought you might like to see it.’

  The pictures showed an anonymous little house joined to some others. The house was white and the lawn in front was very green. There were curtains at the windows. Ali could not help smiling. His family would love living there.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  Ali nodded. The man spoke Arabic well, better than many other foreigners Ali had encountered since the outbreak of the Iraq War. He wondered if he would be able to speak Swedish that well one day. The feeling of hope warmed his chest. Only those who did not make an effort risked losing everything.

  The woman reached for the document wallet and Ali handed it back quickly.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, shifting impatiently in the armchair.

  His eyes were stinging with fatigue and hunger was making the pains in his stomach even worse.

  The man smiled his warm smile again.

  ‘How much did you tell them, back home in Iraq?’

  Ali sighed.

  ‘Not much. Just that you had a different sort of payment system from the other networks. That we paid less money and the rest was based on . . .’

  He groped for the right words.

  ‘. . . favours on both sides.’

  The man’s smile got even broader.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said in the most approving of tones, as if Ali had done something first rate. ‘Favours on both sides, that’s exactly it.’

  He gave a little cough and his troubled look returned.

  ‘As I hope you realise, we’re doing this because we wish you and your countrymen well. But everything costs money. The house costs money, the false passport that got you here cost money. And remember, in our system, on no account must you apply for your residence permit yourself. We have contacts who see to all that for you.’

  That was the very part of their arrangement that sounded so amazing and made Ali accept their very unusual terms: he was not to tell a single person, even his family, where he was going. Nor was he to say who his contacts were, prior to his departure. And he must swear on his honour that he had never been in Sweden before and did not know anyone there.

  The first of these conditions was the only one that had really given Ali any trouble: not being able to tell his family anything. He had had to slip away from his marital home like a thief in the night, and set out on his trip to Europe and Sweden all alone. He had, however, broken the third condition. He did in fact have a friend in Sweden, in a town called Uppsala, and he had alerted that friend in the most unobtrusive of ways to his arrival. The friend was no doubt already waiting for him to get in touch, though he had explained it would be a while before they were free to meet.

  The other refugee smugglers seemed to hold the men in their charge in contempt. They cost between five and ten times more, and their terms were downright miserable. There was no question of a residence permit with them, and Ali was very well aware of the prospects. The Swedish Migration Agency had initially granted permits to just about every asylum seeker from Iraq, but was now turning down seventy per cent of all applications. If you were turned down, then you could appeal, but it could take years before you got a final decision. And if you lost, you had to go underground to stop the authorities throwing you out.

  He could imagine nothing worse. The very thought of being separated from his wife Nadia for that long made it difficult for him to breathe.

  So he nodded eagerly to this man who spoke of favours on both sides and the need to finance his residence permit.

  ‘What is it you want me to do?’ he asked again.

  The man observed Ali in silence for a long time. Then he leant forward and told Ali what he had to do.

  Once upon a time, everything had all been very different. Alex Recht had been a new, young member of the police force and had soon established himself as one of the promising names. After just a few years in uniform he had been brought into the CID, and there he had stayed. He was usually pretty sure he was happy there.

  The idea of putting him at the head of a special investigation group with a hand-picked team from the Stockholm Police had not been his. He had in fact been rather sceptical about the whole thing. He pictured a future in w
hich huge, unwieldy investigations would land on his desk and there would never be enough people to deal with them, while between cases they would be twiddling their thumbs. He had been proved right, and that was still the position. After the summer’s wide-ranging investigation of Lillian Sebastiansson’s disappearance and murder, the flow of cases had been very uneven. The opening line was always the same: ‘Alex, could your group take a look at this?’

  Sometimes the case proved to be as aberrant as it first appeared, but often there turned out to be no logical reason for Alex and his special team to take it on.

  Alex currently had two cases on his plate: the case of the shooting of the Ahlbins, and the case of the unidentified hit-and-run victim in Frescativägen, up at the university. By the time he opened the meeting in the Den, Alex had already made his mind up. Unless Fredrika had come up with anything persuasive on the latter, they would hand it over to their colleagues in the Norrmalm Police.

  Alex gave a bitter sigh. He was convinced that the furrow across his brow would soon be a permanent fixture. And he was not so sure he enjoyed his job any more.

  ‘Right, we’re all here,’ he said loudly, so everyone would sit down.

  They were few in number, as usual. Fredrika, Joar and Ellen. Peder was missing, but Alex passed no comment.

  ‘But Peder . . .’ began Ellen.

  ‘He’ll be in later,’ Alex said, with evident irritation.

  Then he and Joar listened attentively while Fredrika told them what her call to the hospital had yielded.

  ‘So it was Karolina’s sister who identified her?’ Joar said in surprise.

  ‘Not just identified,’ said Fredrika. ‘She came with her in the ambulance and was there while they tried to resuscitate her. I’ve spoken to the officers who talked to her at the hospital. She seemed quite in control and told them very matter-of-factly about all her sister’s problems. She told the officers it was a relief that her sister had found peace.’

  Alex stroked his chin. His fingers ached a bit, but the physiotherapy was gradually achieving the desired effect.

  ‘So what does all this tell us?’ he said slowly, leaning back in his chair. ‘Karolina dies in the hospital on the Thursday. Her father doesn’t get the news until Sunday, possibly from the other daughter Johanna, according to the hospital doctor. But the mother is told nothing. And Johanna goes underground.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What have we managed to find out from Johanna Ahlbin’s workplace? Where is the woman?’

  ‘She’s on leave of absence at the moment,’ replied Joar. ‘I finally managed to track down the company where she works and spoke to somebody in authority, who told me she was on a period of leave. She’s been gone a fortnight and isn’t expected back for another three weeks.’

  ‘So she was already on leave of absence when her sister died?’ said Fredrika.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joar. ‘But the employer couldn’t tell me why she’d been granted it. Private reasons, it sounded like. They weren’t even sure if she was in the country.’

  ‘What employer grants five weeks’ leave of absence without going into the whys and wherefores?’ asked Fredrika.

  ‘This one obviously does,’ said Joar with a dubious expression. ‘I explained to her boss why we were looking for her, and that it was urgent. But he still couldn’t tell me any more.’

  ‘We haven’t got an email address, have we?’ Ellen put in.

  ‘We can’t break bad news like this by email,’ Alex said in dismay.

  ‘No, but we could tell her we needed to speak to her,’ said Ellen.

  ‘They gave me her work email address,’ said Joar. ‘But there’s no guarantee she’ll be checking that while she’s on leave. Her work mobile’s switched off.’

  No one said anything. Alex turned over in his mind what he had heard, wanting his thoughts to fall into place so a clearer picture emerged.

  ‘There’s still something not right here,’ he said emphatically. ‘Why on earth would she break news as dramatic as her sister’s death to her father and then leave the country? Without exchanging a word on the subject with her mum?’

  Joar nodded, mainly to himself.

  ‘It sounds odd, even when we take into account that the family knew about her sister’s drug abuse so the death was not entirely unexpected.’

  ‘Which leads us to another strange thing,’ Fredrika went on. ‘How could anyone in their circle of acquaintances still have been oblivious to Karolina’s addiction? She’d been heavily into drugs for a long time.’

  ‘I think Ragnar Vinterman gave us a clue to that,’ said Alex. ‘Karolina’s addiction was something they chose not to talk about out loud.’

  ‘But if they’d had time to get used to the fact that she might die, that makes her father’s reaction very strange,’ said Joar, steering the discussion back to the same old track. ‘According to Ragnar Vinterman, Karolina’s drug habit had been wearing her parents down for a long time, and we’ve also learnt that Johanna wasn’t exactly distraught when her sister died.’

  ‘Perhaps they weren’t that close?’ suggested Fredrika. ‘Do we know anything about their relationship?’

  ‘Or Johanna’s relationship with her parents, for that matter,’ Alex added. ‘Why did she go off directly after breaking the news? She knew how unstable her father could be. Just because you keep your distance from your family, as we’ve heard that she did, it doesn’t mean you behave completely irresponsibly towards them.’

  They were all absorbed in their thoughts. Alex drummed his fingers impatiently on the desk.

  ‘But we mustn’t confuse one thing with another,’ he said sternly. ‘The fact that their family relationships were rather odd is neither here nor there in this case, really. I don’t see that any of the points we’ve been discussing change anything crucial.’

  The others nodded in agreement. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex could see Fredrika fiddling with some other sheets of paper she had in front of her. He had almost overlooked the unidentified man.

  ‘We’ll email Johanna Ahlbin at the address we’ve got,’ he said. ‘And we’ll ask her employer to approach some of her colleagues, see if she was friendly with any of them outside work, in case they know where she is at the moment. And Joar and I will go to that other house, the one registered in the sisters’ names, and see if we can turn up anything useful there. What do we know about the place, Fredrika?’

  Fredrika put aside the sheaf of papers she was holding and shuffled through another one.

  ‘The house is out at Ekerö,’ she told them. ‘It’s been in Marja Ahlbin’s family for a long time: it was originally bought by her maternal grandparents in the 1930s. Ownership was transferred to Marja in 1967, and then to Karolina and Johanna four years ago.’

  ‘Have they got equal shares in it?’ asked Joar.

  Fredrika nodded.

  ‘Yes, according to the registry Johanna and Karolina Ahlbin own half each.’

  ‘And Marja’s parents?’ said Alex. ‘They’re no longer with us, I hope, because otherwise we’ve forgotten to let them know that their daughter’s been shot in the head by her own husband.’

  Fredrika’s vigorous nodding confirmed this.

  ‘Yes, Jakob’s and Marja’s parents have all been dead for some years,’ she said. ‘Jakob had a brother, too, but he emigrated to America. Marja had no brothers or sisters.’

  ‘Is this house out at Ekerö a big place?’ asked Joar, looking thoughtful.

  ‘I printed out a map,’ said Fredrika, showing them. ‘The house is at the far end of a little road. It’s got a lot of ground with it and the property as a whole is valued at two and a half million kronor.’

  Alex whistled.

  ‘So I assume the house goes to Johanna now Karolina’s dead?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Fredrika. ‘But I don’t know if it could be called a windfall. There’s still a big mortgage to pay off.’

  ‘Why was it transferred to their names so
soon?’ asked Joar. ‘Why would you put assets like that in the hands of a drug addict?’

  ‘We’d better take a closer look at the conveyancing,’ said Fredrika.

  ‘Let’s look at the actual house first,’ declared Alex. ‘Then we can go into the paperwork.’

  He glanced over at Fredrika to check she had not taken exception to his rather authoritarian tone. They had had a few communication problems of that nature when she first joined the group.

  But Fredrika did not look in the least bit ruffled.

  Alex went on.

  ‘How are you getting on with our unidentified man?’

  Fredrika briefly summarised her results. The fact that the man had written various place names and addresses on scraps of paper, and wrapped a ring in another bit of paper with a woman’s name on it. The woman did not seem to be in Sweden, or at least, there was no asylum seeker from Sadr City in Baghdad registered under that name in the database.

  ‘There isn’t necessarily anything strange about it being a Forex bureau,’ Alex said tentatively. ‘He may just have had money to change, or something like that.’

  ‘But why do it in Uppsala?’ wondered Fredrika.

  ‘Because he lived there?’ suggested Joar with a smile.

  A faint smile crept across Fredrika’s otherwise sombre, earnest face. It had struck Alex on numerous occasions that she was actually rather beautiful.

  ‘So what was he doing on the main road outside Stockholm University in the middle of the night?’ she went on. ‘I get the feeling our man lived here, not in Uppsala.’

  Alex pulled himself upright.

  ‘Is there anything at all to underline suspicions that he was killed deliberately?’ he asked bluntly.

  ‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘Not as things stand. But I’m still waiting for the CID to get back to me about the fingerprint check, and I haven’t had the autopsy report yet, either.’

  ‘All right,’ said Alex, ‘wait for those two reports, and then we’ll decide how we’re going to continue the investigation. If we’re going to continue the investigation,’ he added.