‘Hard to tell,’ Joar said honestly. ‘It looked more as though nobody had been there for a while. As if somebody had done a thorough tidy-up and then gone away.’
‘Hmm,’ said Alex thoughtfully.
The snow crunched under the wheels of the technicians’ vehicle as they pulled up alongside the other car. Ten minutes later, they were in the house.
The first thing Alex noted was that the house was warm. The second was that it was furnished in a pleasant, homely fashion not at all like the way Joar and Peder had described Mr and Mrs Ahlbin’s flat. It was clean and neat. The walls were hung with photographs of the family at various ages. There were home-woven runners on the tables and the windows had curtains of a fairly modern style.
They went round in silence, unsure what they were looking for. Alex went out into the kitchen, opened cupboards and drawers. There was a litre of milk in the fridge; the carton was unopened and two weeks beyond its use-by date. That meant it could not be all that long since someone had been there.
The house had two storeys. The two bedrooms upstairs each had a set of bunk beds in them. The landing between them was used as a TV room. On the ground floor were a kitchen and dining room, and a largish living room. There were bathrooms on each floor.
‘Two lots of bunk beds,’ Alex remarked. ‘That’s odd, isn’t it? Before the sisters took over the house you would have thought they were here as a family. It seems odd that Mr and Mrs Ahlbin slept in separate beds.’
Joar considered this.
‘Maybe it hasn’t always been like this?’ he said.
Alex heaved a sigh.
‘Well, let’s hope so,’ he said, heading back downstairs.
He wandered round the rooms, studying the photos. Something was disturbing him but he was not sure what. He looked again. Mum, Dad and two daughters sitting in the garden. It must be an old photograph, because the girls were little. More garden pictures, the girls older. Karolina and her parents, and one of Karolina on horseback.
Alex realised what it was that had disconcerted him.
‘Joar, come here,’ he called.
Joar’s feet thudded down the stairs.
‘Look at these pictures,’ said Alex, sweeping a hand over the living-room wall. ‘Look at them and tell me what you think.’
Joar studied the photos in silence, walking up and down in front of them.
‘Were you thinking of anything in particular?’ he asked uncertainly.
‘Johanna,’ Alex said resolutely. ‘Don’t you see? She suddenly disappears from the shots and only Karolina’s left. Looking the picture of health, I might add.’
‘But these photos go back a long time, surely?’ said Joar doubtfully.
‘They do,’ said Alex. ‘But the more recent ones look about five years old at most.’
They did another tour of the house. Karolina was in several of the pictures upstairs, including an enlargement of one with her parents that had pride of place on the TV set. Johanna was conspicuous by her absence.
‘Maybe they didn’t like her,’ said Alex, mostly to himself. ‘Maybe they had a major falling out over something.’
But that theory did not seem to fit, either. Johanna was part-owner of the house, after all. Why was she not in the photographs in her own home?
A technician stuck his head round the open front door.
‘There seems to be a way into a basement round the back,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to open that door, too?’
The lock turned out to be frozen solid and not at all as cooperative as the first one. The technician had to work at it for nearly twenty minutes before the door finally creaked open. Alex looked down and saw a short, steep set of steps leading down to a basement. He was about to ask for a torch when he saw the light switch on the wall, and turned on the light as he went down the steps. A light bulb flickered into life.
What it revealed was a fully furnished basement that had probably not been used for a very long time. The kitchen had clearly been fitted in the early 1980s and the air was thick with dust, but they could see all they needed to. A bed settee in one corner, with some armchairs and a coffee table. Three sets of bunk beds along the walls. A very basic bathroom with a smell of mould. Another small room, windowless, with a further set of bunk beds. There was no bed linen on the beds, but they all had blankets and pillows.
Alex gave a laugh.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he muttered. ‘It seems as though the rumours were right. If Jakob Ahlbin wasn’t hiding illegal migrants here, then I’d very much like to know what he did use this basement for.’
Joar looked about him.
‘Confirmation classes, maybe,’ he said drily.
Alex had to smile, but was soon grave again.
‘Gun cabinet,’ he said, nodding over to a tall metal cabinet standing in one corner of the room.
They went over and tried the doors. They were unlocked.
‘We need to check whether any of the family had firearms licences apart from Jakob,’ said Alex.
The siting of the gun cabinet gave Alex pause for thought. Why was it in the basement and not the main house, if the basement was used for concealing fugitives? Alex concluded it must have been moved at some stage, perhaps when the basement fell into disuse.
‘Is this where he got it?’ Joar said quietly.
‘Got what?’
‘The murder weapon,’ Joar clarified. ‘Was this where he got the hunting pistol for killing his wife and himself?’
‘Or where somebody else did?’ Alex said thoughtfully.
About an hour after the policemen left the house in Ekerö, another car turned into the driveway. It parked in the tyre tracks of the police cars. Two men climbed out into the snow.
‘Damn nuisance,’ said one of them, ‘them finding their way here before we did.’
The other one, a younger man, was more relaxed.
‘No damage done, I’m sure,’ he said gruffly.
‘No, but it was a bloody close call,’ hissed his companion, kicking the snow.
The younger man put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Everything’s going to plan,’ he insisted.
The other man gave a snort.
‘That’s not the impression I’m getting,’ he said. ‘Some of us have even left the country, you know. When will she be back, anyway?’
‘Soon,’ said the other man. ‘And then this will all be over.’
Fredrika Bergman was hard at work assembling information about Jakob Ahlbin’s work with refugee groups, and it was proving quite a task. Much of the material was not available electronically and she was obliged to go into the old paper archives in the library.
Jakob’s commitment to the refugee cause went back decades and had occasionally been a matter of dispute even within the Church. There had been particular trouble when Jakob actively championed a very sensitive asylum case, allowing the family to live in the church to avoid deportation.
‘The day the police cross the threshold of my church with weapons drawn is the day I lose my country,’ he was quoted as saying in one of the many newspaper articles the story generated.
The family stayed in the church for months and was finally given a residence permit.
It wasn’t so much Jakob Ahlbin’s views that courted controversy, more his actions. Jakob had not contented himself with writing articles and opinion pieces but had also campaigned for his cause in the streets and squares of various towns. He had even debated publicly with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
Jakob Ahlbin was in fact one of the few who had dared to engage in debate with the xenophobic groups that existed in Sweden, and unconfirmed sources also said he was part of a support group for young men in Stockholm – because the problem of right-wing extremists was an almost exclusively male one – who wanted to find a way out of whatever group or network they had joined. That fitted with the email messages telling Jakob to keep out of things that were none of his business, thought Fredrika. She pr
inted out the material on that subject, too. Peder would be glad to see what she had come up with.
Just after lunch she had the call from the pathologist who had completed the autopsy on the hit-and-run victim. The pathologist was quite curt, and as usual launched into phrases Fredrika did not understand. She hoped he was not going to go into too much detail; now she was pregnant she seemed much more sensitive to anything too specific about injuries and mangled bodies.
I’ve turned into a wimp, thought Fredrika, and had no idea what she could do about it.
‘He died as a direct result of extreme external violence that must have been caused by the impact of the vehicle, a car,’ said the pathologist. ‘The injuries are consistent with a very violent impact which threw him a distance of several metres.’
‘Was he run into from in front or behind?’ asked Fredrika.
‘In front,’ replied the pathologist. ‘But it could be that he heard the car coming and turned round. What ought to interest you more is that they didn’t just ram into him but also drove over him.’
Fredrika held her breath.
‘First we have the injuries that caused his death – the initial impact. On top of that he has injuries to his back, stomach and neck, which must have been inflicted directly afterwards, crush injuries. My guess would be that whoever it was simply backed over him as he lay there in the middle of the road.’
Queasiness came flooding over Fredrika and she had to steel herself to go on. That was just the sort of thing she did not want to hear.
She took a deep breath.
‘So what you mean in plain language is that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said the pathologist.
All of a sudden, Fredrika felt very tense. Now there was another murder enquiry for them to deal with. Damn.
Alex and Joar were back at HQ by early afternoon. To Peder’s irritation, Joar went straight to his room and did not offer him even the slightest update on the way. Peder rose resolutely from his desk chair and went in to see him.
‘How did it go at Ekerö?’ he asked, not bothering with any niceties.
He had his arms tightly folded across his chest and tried to look casual.
‘It went fine,’ said Joar after he had observed Peder in the doorway for a few moments.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Well, yes and no,’ replied Joar, starting to sort through some papers. ‘I don’t know that we were looking for anything in particular. But we found something, all right.’
Cheeks flushing bright red, Peder persisted: ‘Like what?’
‘Like a basement that seemed to fit the story of Jakob Ahlbin hiding illegal migrants.’
Peder nodded, suddenly unsure what to do next.
‘Fredrika and I dug up some important things, too,’ he said.
Joar smiled but did not look at Peder, and nor did he ask what they had found.
‘Good,’ was all he said. ‘I hope you’ll tell the rest of us all about it at the next session in the Den.’
Peder said nothing and left. He had never come across such a goddamn stuck-up workmate in all his life. He was more high and mighty than even Fredrika used to be. Peder still had vivid memories of the heavy weather he and Fredrika had made of working together at first. If only she could be a bit more relaxed, a bit less pretentious. No. She’d always been good-looking, but that was about all you could say in her favour.
Peder could not make any sense of it. After all, unlike Fredrika, Joar was a regular police officer and a proper detective. The two of them should have worked well as a team. It was inexplicable to him why the powers that be had decided a few years back to recruit civilian investigators into the police. It was an affront to the collective competence of the force, as Peder saw it, and he was taken aback on his transfer to Alex’s group to find one of those civilians in it. Time had passed since then, and Fredrika no longer made such a fuss all the time. To start with she had questioned everything, and taken a disproportionately major role in some of the investigations. Peder felt pushed to the point where he needed to bring up Fredrika’s inadequacy in certain areas with Alex. But then she had got pregnant and that had turned her into another person.
He could not help a little grin as he thought of that pregnancy; there are plenty of rumours going round as to who the father is. An older, married man. Peder had laughed his head off the first time he heard it, and said he’d put money on it not being true. You would never catch Little Miss Prim making herself available to someone who belonged to someone else. Never. After a while he had started having second thoughts. It did not sound quite so out of the question as he had first thought. And it would explain why Fredrika was saying so little about the baby and the pregnancy. He couldn’t stop chuckling to himself. There was a whore in every Madonna, as his grandad used to say. Though his grandad had often wondered aloud what a Madonna was.
‘Have you got a minute?’ he asked as he knocked on the open door of Fredrika’s room.
She was sitting at her desk and gave a start, but smiled when she saw who it was.
‘Come in,’ she said.
Her unusual smile and long, dark hair often set Peder off on smutty flights of fancy, and it made no difference that she was expecting.
He came in and sat down opposite her.
‘Found anything?’ he asked nonchalantly.
‘Oh yes,’ said Fredrika, looking rather pleased with herself as she took a pile of photocopies out of a plastic folder. ‘I found out quite a lot about Jakob Ahlbin’s refugee activities. And some important stuff about him belonging to a support network for former right-wing extremists. The group’s still active, and is made up of police officers, social workers and people from various immigrant associations.’
She pushed the papers across to Peder.
‘Perfect,’ he said flatly, wondering why he had never heard of the support group. He would have liked to work on that sort of thing.
‘I’ve already been in touch with them,’ Fredrika went on, ‘and they’ve confirmed that Jakob Ahlbin was a member. He was one of the ones who took the initiative in setting up the group, in fact. It’s been going a couple of years.’
Peder gave a whistle.
‘And it upset a certain Mr Tony Svensson so much that he started firing off threatening letters. Or emails.’
‘Tony Svensson?’ asked Fredrika, confused. ‘Is that his name, the one who sent the emails?’
Peder nodded with satisfaction.
‘Yes it is, according to the technical boys and Comhem, the broadband service provider. We were able to trace the IP address most of the emails came from and he’s the registered owner of that.’
‘Weren’t there several people involved?’ asked Fredrika. ‘You said the emails had come from different IP addresses.’
‘The others were at a library out in Farsta and a Seven-Eleven shop in the Söder district. So there’s no specified owner as such. But it seems logical for this Tony Svensson to have sneaked out and sent emails from different places. The content of all the emails was the same, which seems to point to them all being sent by the same person.’
Fredrika gave a thoughtful nod.
‘I haven’t read them all yet. Could you let me have copies?’
‘Sure,’ said Peder.
‘What do we know about Tony Svensson? Is he known to the police?’
Peder’s face split into a broad grin.
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he said triumphantly, settling into his seat to tell her all about what he had discovered. ‘Have you heard of an organisation called SP?’
Alex convened a meeting in the Den when he and Joar got back from Ekerö. He felt a warm glow as he listened to Peder’s account of the man who had issued the threats to Jakob Ahlbin. When Peder put his stupid behaviour on hold, he was a very skilful detective.
‘Tony Svensson was born and raised in Farsta,’ he reported. ‘He’s twenty-seven now, and had his
first brush with the police when he was twelve. Shoplifting and vandalism. The Söder police and social services worked pretty closely together on his case until he turned eighteen. He’s had a couple of custodial sentences, the first one when he was seventeen and beat up his stepfather. Nearly killed him.’
‘Ah,’ said Alex with a resigned air. ‘Let me guess – the stepdad was beating up his mum?’
‘No,’ said Peder. ‘The stepdad refused to lend Tony 3,000 kronor for a holiday in Ibiza.’
‘Damn,’ Alex said, taken aback. ‘So he’s a right roughneck?’
‘Yep,’ said Peder. ‘The other assault was gang-related. He kicked another guy black and blue and rounded it off by smashing an empty wine bottle over his head. Then he used a bit of the broken glass to slash . . .’
‘Please,’ said Fredrika, whose face had drained of all colour, ‘can we leave the details for later?’
She looked self-conscious and put a protective hand on her stomach. Almost as if she expected someone to come rushing through the door and assault her or the baby with a broken bottle.
Peder moved on, a bit put out that he had not been able to give every gory detail.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘He was going to be done for aggravated rape, too, but the prosecutor had to drop it for lack of evidence because the girl refused to cooperate. As usual,’ he added.
‘Possibly frightened into keeping her mouth shut,’ Joar put in quietly, almost as if trying not to disturb anyone but still aware that he was doing so.
Peder clenched his fist under the table and went on as if Joar had not spoken.
‘What’s more, Tony Svensson’s been implicated in a series of thefts and break-ins and he’s also under suspicion of committing armed robbery. And to top it all, he’s a known right-wing extremist and long-term member of a neo-Nazi organisation called Sons of the People, the same lot who signed the emails to Jakob Ahlbin.’
He indicated that his lecture was over by putting down the pen he had been holding throughout.
‘Well done, Peder,’ Alex said automatically. ‘We’ve clearly got a good deal to go on here. Have we anything more concrete on the conflict between Jakob Ahlbin and this group?’
Silenced: A Novel Page 11
