Silenced: A Novel

by Kristina Ohlsson

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Alex. ‘But we have to hope she’ll get in touch when she sees the news.’

  The elderly couple looked at each other and nodded. Yes, she was bound to get in touch, they seemed to be saying.

  ‘We’ve got a few more questions about your relationship with the Ahlbins,’ Alex said in a voice that was soft but unmistakably firm. ‘So we’d like to ask you those. Separately.’

  Neither Elsie nor Sven replied, so Alex went on.

  ‘If I talk to Sven here, then maybe Fredrika can talk to Elsie in one of the other rooms. Then we won’t have to bother messing around at the police station.’

  He was smiling, but the message was crystal clear. The couple looked confused and anxious, and he tried to reassure them by saying it was perfectly routine in the circumstances.

  Fredrika went with Elsie into the kitchen, closing the door behind them, and sat down at the little dining table. The baby was lying still, for now.

  You must be asleep, she thought, trying and failing to suppress a smile.

  ‘Your first?’ asked Elsie, nodding in the direction of Fredrika’s stomach.

  The smile turned to a grimace. She preferred not to talk about the baby to strangers at all.

  But she answered with a ‘Yes’ to avoid seeming rude.

  For a minute she feared the older woman was going to start talking about when she was pregnant herself, but luckily she did not have to listen to any stories of that kind.

  ‘Jakob and Marja Ahlbin,’ Fredrika said in a more demanding voice than she intended, to show that further enquiries about her unborn child were not welcome.

  Her interviewee looked tense and doubtful.

  ‘So how were things between the four of you recently?’

  Elsie seemed at a loss.

  ‘Much as they’d been for quite a while, I suppose,’ she said eventually. ‘Not as good as they had been, but still good enough for us to get together now and then.’

  ‘And why was that?’ asked Fredrika. ‘Things not being as warm between you, I mean.’

  Elsie looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Sven can really tell you more about that than I can,’ she said. ‘He and Jakob were the ones who had the disagreement.’

  ‘What did they disagree about?’

  The older woman said nothing.

  Fredrika softened.

  ‘You needn’t be afraid of telling me things that seem sensitive,’ she said, putting a hand on Elsie’s arm. ‘I promise to be as discreet as I possibly can.’

  Elsie still did not speak. The kitchen tap was dripping into the sink. Fredrika had to stop herself getting up and turning it off properly.

  ‘They fell out, some years ago,’ Elsie said in a feeble voice.

  ‘It was over Jacob’s . . . activities.’

  Fredrika waited.

  ‘The fact that he was hiding refugees,’ Elsie clarified. ‘Or planning to.’

  ‘And Sven objected to that?’

  ‘Hmm, it wasn’t that simple. It was more that Sven . . . well, he’s quite practical in his way of thinking, and I think he reckoned Jakob was taking far too great a risk. And not getting anything in return.’

  Fredrika frowned.

  ‘Surely there’s never been any money in hiding illegal migrants?’

  ‘No, and that was exactly what Sven felt was so unfair,’ Elsie said, her voice stronger now. ‘That Jakob intended opening house and home to people on the run without earning a penny for it himself. Sven reckoned a lot of the people who ended up here had significant resources. After all, it costs a fortune to escape to Sweden these days. And so Sven thought that, if they had that much, they probably had a little bit more. Jakob was livid. He called Sven selfish, and a fool.’

  With every justification, thought Fredrika. But she kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Then it was a year before we spoke to each other again,’ Elsie said, and had to clear her throat. ‘But we live so close and, I mean, you can’t help bumping into each other occasionally. Once we’d met like that a few times, we gradually started seeing each other again. It all felt fine. Not like before, but fine.’

  The kitchen was cold and a shiver ran through Fredrika’s body. She looked through her notes and one thing leapt out at her.

  ‘You said Jakob “intended opening house and home”?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that was surely something he was already doing, not intending to do?’

  Elsie looked nonplussed for a moment, but then shook her head firmly.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither of those things. It was something he had done in the past, and was thinking of starting again.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘Jakob and Marja had a lot to do with refugee groups in the ’70s and ’80s, and were involved in a network that gave shelter to people in need. One of the things they did was to hide people in the basement of their house out in Ekerö. They carried on with that into the ’90s, until 1992 I think. Then they decided to take a more hands-off approach. Until Jakob started thinking along new lines a few years ago. But it never came to anything.’

  Fredrika wondered if Elsie knew more than she was letting on. It was a bit suspicious that she kept saying ‘I think’, only to deliver some very concrete bit of information like a date.

  But curiosity got the upper hand and she pushed away the idea that something might be wrong.

  ‘Why did nothing come of his plans?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elsie said evasively. ‘But I think his ideas caused some division in the family. Marja wasn’t at all as committed to it as Jakob. And then we heard the Ekerö house had been transferred to their daughters’ names. Neither of them were involved in their dad’s activities as far as I know. Particularly not Johanna.’

  ‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘We understand she didn’t really share her father’s view on the issue.’

  Elsie lowered her voice.

  ‘Sven doesn’t really want me to say anything about this, he thinks things like that should be kept within the family, but I’ll tell you anyway, since the Ahlbin family scarcely exists any more. We were round at Jakob and Marja’s for dinner once, at about the time Jakob was talking about getting back into his old activities, and their daughters were there. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife when we started talking about asylum seekers and their plight.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Johanna got very, very worked up. I don’t remember exactly what sparked it off, probably a combination of things. She started crying and left the table. Jakob seemed shaken, too, but he was better at keeping things inside.’

  ‘And you got no sense of what the conflict was really about?’

  ‘No, not at all. It sounded like something from years before; I mean, Johanna only saw the family on rare occasions. I remember she shouted something like, “So you’re going to destroy everything again?” but I’ve no idea what she meant by it. How could I?’

  Elsie gave a strained laugh.

  ‘Anyway, that was when Sven fell out with Jakob,’ she said in conclusion.

  Fredrika crossed her legs, shifting her weight on the chair. It was going to be so nice the day the baby was born and her body was her own again.

  Then her eyes fell on Elsie’s hand, which was gripping a water glass. The hand was shaking and Elsie’s eye was twitching.

  She wants to tell me something, Fredrika realised, and decided to bide her time.

  Elsie did not speak, however, so Fredrika decided to help things along.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know any more?’ she asked under her breath.

  Elsie pursed her lips and shook her head. Her hand stopped trembling.

  ‘What about their other daughter, Karolina?’ Fredrika asked, resigning herself.

  Elsie’s eyes were swimming.

  ‘I still say what we said before. It’s impossible that she died of an overdose.’

  And yet she did, Fredrika thought. What th
e hell are we overlooking about her death?

  ‘But you weren’t that close in recent years,’ she ventured. ‘Maybe you missed the signs.’

  Elsie shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘We didn’t. You see, Karolina was going out with our younger son Måns for some years.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I know,’ Elsie said, ‘we didn’t tell you last time you were here. Mainly because it’s such a sensitive subject, and because we both had such high hopes of the relationship. And everything was so topsy-turvy that day you were here . . .’

  ‘I understand,’ said Fredrika, trying not to sound annoyed.

  The urge people had to be the ones to decide what was worth telling the police or not often caused far more havoc than they ever realised.

  ‘They weren’t together any more, your son and Karolina?’

  Elsie shook her head and began to weep.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘Karolina found it too much in the end, what with all his problems, and we could understand that only too well. But it was our dearest wish that she would turn out to be the solution for him. That she would be able to give him the strength to break free.’

  ‘Free from what?’

  ‘His addiction,’ Elsie sobbed. ‘That’s how I know Karolina wasn’t going through the same thing. But she carried all Måns’ problems like a cross through her life. Until the day it all got too much. Then she left him, moved out and got a flat of her own. I miss her as if she were my own child. We both do.’

  ‘And Måns?’

  ‘When it started getting serious between him and Karolina, he was much better, started work and stuck to the straight and narrow. But . . . once a man’s had that damned poison in his blood it’s as if he can never really be rid of it. He went downhill again, and today he’s just a shadow of who he was in those early days with Karolina. Unrecognisable.’

  Fredrika thought carefully, weighing her words.

  ‘Elsie,’ she said finally. ‘Whichever way we look at it, Karolina’s dead. Her own sister identified her.’

  ‘Well in that case you’d better think of her as Lazarus in the Bible, the one Jesus brought back to life,’ Elsie declared, fishing a handkerchief out of her pocket. ‘Because I know in my heart and soul that that girl can’t have died of an overdose.’

  Fredrika looked mistrustfully at Elsie. Felt doubtful, and tried to muster her thoughts. Elsie was keeping something else back, she felt it in every fibre of her being. And as if Job were not enough, the police now had a Lazarus to contend with.

  The little white tablet was disturbing him as badly as a fly in the night. He glared at it angrily and almost wished it would dissolve before his eyes.

  ‘You must take it tonight before you go to sleep,’ the man who spoke Arabic had said before he left. ‘Otherwise you’ll be too tired to carry out your task tomorrow.’

  They had left him in the new flat the evening before and then come back this afternoon to go through the next day’s schedule one more time. Somewhere in the midst of all his misery, he felt a great sense of relief. His journey was nearing its end and he would soon be a man without debts who could be reunited with his wife and even get in touch with the rest of his family to tell them he was all right. And with his friend, waiting for him in Uppsala.

  The knowledge that his friend was out there somewhere, worrying about where he had got to, made him uneasy. They had said he was not on any account to inform any friends or family members where he was going. And he had broken their rule. Made a promise and not kept it. Please let his friend not start trying to find him. It would be a disaster if someone suddenly started asking questions and gave away his hidden presence in the country. The punishment would be severe if they found out he had let them down, he knew that.

  His heart was pounding, keeping time with his growing anxiety. It was still only late afternoon; how would he hold out until tomorrow? He would have much preferred the project to be over and done with today, so tonight would be a night of liberation. But thoughts of that kind were unrealistic, he knew that now.

  They would come and drag him out at nine the next morning. He would be introduced to his accomplice, who would drive the get-away car. The two of them would go to the place where the robbery was to be committed. He read the note they had left on the coffee table. It said: ‘Västerås’, which meant nothing at all in Arabic. He wondered what it meant in Swedish.

  Once he had done the robbery, he and the driver would come back to Stockholm and meet up with the others not far from the giant golf ball he had seen from the other car. The Globe. Once he had handed over his haul, he would be a free man.

  ‘You’re doing this for your countrymen’s sake,’ they had told him. ‘Without this money, we wouldn’t be able to finance our work. The Swedish state doesn’t want to pay for our activities, so we take money from people who already have lots of it.’

  It was familiar, well-worn logic. You took from the rich and gave to the poor. When he was growing up he had kept hearing stories like that. Most of all from his grandfather, the only one in the family who had ever been to the USA. He told them incredible stories of how much money people had there and what they did with it. He told them about cars as wide as the Tigris and houses the size of Saddam’s palace, where ordinary people lived. About the university, which was open to all but cost a vast amount of money. And about huge oilfields not owned by the state.

  Grandfather should have seen me now, thought Ali. In a land almost as rich as America. Just a bit colder.

  He shivered and huddled up on the sofa. Not that he had seen any huge cars or palaces. But that made no difference, because like everybody else he knew, he was totally convinced: Sweden was the best possible country for making a new start.

  He glowered at the tablet and knew he would have to take it. He would never get to sleep otherwise. A good night’s sleep was a prerequisite for performing well the next day.

  For the sake of his wife and children. And his father and grandfather.

  As they left the flat to go to her parents’, Fredrika Bergman seriously considered cancelling the whole arrangement. But Spencer, well aware of her reluctance, took her gently by the arm and led her out onto the pavement and over to his car.

  And with that, their relationship entered a new phase.

  It had always been just the two of them. Alone in a glass bubble with no dinner parties or family lunches. Their mutual breathing space where they recharged themselves and refreshed their appetite for life. A breathing space that now had to accommodate both an unborn child and some parents-in-law. The latter was bizarre, of course, since Spencer, unlike Fredrika, already had a set of parents-in-law.

  ‘So when do I get to meet your parents, then?’ she asked as Spencer pulled up outside her childhood home.

  ‘Preferably never, if that’s all right with you,’ he replied casually, opening the car door.

  His arrogance made Fredrika roar with laughter.

  ‘You’re not getting hysterical now, are you?’ Spencer said anxiously.

  He walked round to open the door on her side. Fredrika beat him to it and pushed the door open just as he was coming round the bonnet.

  ‘Look,’ she said in mock triumph. ‘I can get out of the car all by myself.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point,’ muttered Spencer, who saw it as a matter of principle for a man to open the door for his female companion.

  Let him open the door for his other woman, Fredrika thought waspishly, but kept her mouth shut.

  She could see her mother through the kitchen window, which looked out on the road. The two of them were often told they were very alike. Fredrika waved. Her mother waved back, but to judge by her expression she was – despite having doubtless prepared herself – shocked to see her heavily pregnant daughter with a man the age of her own husband.

  ‘Okay?’ asked Fredrika, slipping her hand into Spencer’s.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he answered, holdi
ng her hand in a warm clasp. ‘Can hardly be any worse than other things I’ve experienced in this context.’

  Fredrika had no idea what he meant.

  Things got off to a bad start when she made the mistake of accepting a glass of wine she had not been offered.

  ‘Fredrika,’ her mother exclaimed in dismay. ‘You’re not drinking while you’re pregnant?’

  ‘Good grief, Mum,’ said Fredrika. ‘On the Continent, pregnant women have been drinking for millennia. The public health body in Britain has just changed its recommendations and says they can drink two glasses a week with no ill effects.’

  This did nothing to reassure her mother, who had little time for the British findings and looked at her daughter as if she were insane when she raised the glass to her lips and took a gulp.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said, with an appreciative smile at her father, who also looked extremely quizzical.

  ‘Being in the police hasn’t turned you into an alcoholic, has it, Fredrika?’ he asked with a troubled look.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ she cried, not knowing whether to laugh or weep.

  Her parents gave her long stares, but said no more.

  The seating arrangement reminded Fredrika of the way she used to set out her dolls when she was playing with her doll’s house as a child. Mummy and Daddy on one side of the table and Guests on the other.

  I’m a guest, she thought with fascination. In my own parents’ home.

  She tried to think when she had last introduced anyone to her parents. A long time ago, she realised. Ten years, to be precise. And the man in question had been called Elvis, which had amused her mother no end.

  ‘I understand you work at Uppsala University,’ she heard her father say.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Spencer. ‘It sounds absurd to admit it, but I’ve been teaching there for thirty-five years now.’

  He laughed loudly, not noticing the way Fredrika’s parents stiffened.

  They ought to have lots in common, really, thought Fredrika. Spencer’s only five years younger than Dad, after all.

  Again she felt the same desire to burst out laughing that had come over her in the car. She coughed discreetly. She asked her mother if she could pass the gravy, which went so well with this delicious roast. Complimented her father on his choice of wine, but then realised it was a mistake to draw attention back to the fact that she was drinking at all. Her father asked how work was going and she said it was all right. Her mother wanted to know if she was sleeping any better now and she said sometimes, but mostly not.