Peder leant forward.
‘What are we looking for, then?’ he asked tensely.
Tony Svensson clamped his mouth shut.
‘I’m not saying another word,’ he growled.
Peder hesitated.
‘Okay then, tell us something about what you had to do, instead.’
Tony Svensson was listening.
‘If you don’t want to tell us who your contact was, at least tell us what they wanted you to do.’
There was silence while Tony Svensson thought over what Peder had just proposed.
‘I had to stop sending emails,’ he said under his breath. ‘And it was no skin off my nose, because like I said, our problems were sorting themselves out. But then there was another thing.’
He hesitated.
‘I had to go round to the vicar’s and ring at his door. And hand over an envelope.’
‘Do you know what was in it?’
Tony Svensson shook his head. He looked despondent now.
‘No, but it was important that it was handed over on that particular day.’
‘And Jakob took it from you?’
‘Yes. He looked surprised to see it was me, but then he realised it wasn’t about Ronny Berg.’
Joar drummed his fingers lightly on the table.
‘Did he read the letter while you waited?’
Tony sneered.
‘Yeah, he did as it happens. He was fucking furious, and told me to tell the people who’d sent me that they ought to think twice before threatening him. He said he was going to burn the letter when I’d gone.’
‘What did you get for doing those things?’ asked Peder.
Tony Svensson looked him squarely in the eye.
‘I got to carry on living,’ he answered. ‘And if I’m lucky, and if I play my cards right, my daughter will as well.’
‘So they threatened to harm her if you didn’t do it?’ Peder said gently.
Tony Svensson nodded, his eyes strangely watery. Joar seemed to be thinking hard; then he sat up straight and threw back his shoulders.
‘They’ve got her,’ he said, sounding almost fascinated. ‘They took her as a guarantee that you’d carry out your part of the operation.’
Peder stared from Joar to Tony Svensson.
‘Is that right?’ he asked.
‘That’s right,’ he said darkly. ‘And I’ve no idea how they’re fucking well going to react to me coming in here again.’
When they had finished the interview with Tony Svensson, Peder and Joar requested a few minutes to confer before they let him go home again.
‘I don’t think he’s bluffing,’ said Peder as soon as the two of them were alone.
The intensity of the hatred he felt for his colleague was affecting his judgement. The only thing softening his feelings a touch was the events of the weekend, when his son was ill and he had spent Saturday evening and most of Sunday with Ylva.
‘It’s important for us to stick together when we need to,’ he told her when she got back from the hospital to find him in the kitchen, preparing dinner for them all.
As if they were a family. As if they actually belonged together.
Ylva agreed with him and for the first time in ages, they spent a peaceful evening together. He asked how things were going at work, and she said she was feeling much better now. He was glad to hear it, but could not bring himself to talk about his own situation. He had never been able to bear feeling inferior to her in any way, and this was no exception.
Joar’s voice brought him back to the present with a bump.
‘I don’t think he’s bluffing either, and I definitely think we need to take the threat scenario seriously, but . . .’
‘But what?’ demanded Peder.
‘I’m just not sure they’ve got his daughter as he claims.’
‘I am,’ Peder asserted, without much thought about what he was saying.
Which gave Joar the upper hand again.
‘Really? Think it through carefully, Peder. Why would they take such a risk – because it is, a huge one – as to grab his daughter at the start? They could scarcely let her go again afterwards, she’d be able to identify every single one of them. Which would mean they’d have to kill her, and then they’d be child murderers. There are plenty of hard men and ruffians who’d go a bloody long way to avoid that.’
‘But damn it, this lot don’t seem to be your normal ruffians.’
‘True. Which makes it all the more implausible. They’re too intelligent to take it out on a small child. I don’t doubt for a moment that they threatened to, though. But that’s another matter.’
‘So you mean Tony Svensson’s lying about his daughter being abducted so we’ll back off a bit?’
‘Exactly. And keep our distance from him in future.’
Peder thought about this.
‘Doesn’t really feel like an option. Keeping our distance, I mean.’
‘You’re right there,’ said Joar grimly. ‘So I suggest you go in and wind up the interview and get the paperwork out of the way while I go up to the department and get a snap decision out of them to have this guy followed when he walks out of here. I reckon he’ll go straight home to his daughter to check she’s okay. And then it wouldn’t surprise me if he rings some contact on the other side to let him know everything’s fine and he hasn’t given us any crucial information.’
Just for the moment, Peder felt quite serene. They already had Tony Svensson’s phone tapped. Perhaps by the end of the day they would have the names of some of the men who had been threatening him.
It happened more and more rarely these days, but just occasionally Spencer Lagergren and his wife Eva would both be at home in the middle of the day and would make lunch together. Spencer had no idea what had prompted Eva to suggest one of these lunches on this particular day, but he knew better than to go against her wishes.
He got back from work to be greeted by appetising aromas the minute he opened the front door.
‘You’ve already made a start,’ he remarked when he came out into the kitchen a few minutes later.
‘Of course,’ said Eva. ‘Couldn’t just hang around waiting for you.’
Spencer knew very well that the relationship he had with his wife was a mystery to his lover Fredrika Bergman, and sometimes he felt the same himself. The element of total absurdity that the relationship had acquired now he was expecting a baby with another woman was getting harder and harder to handle. But it had been impossible, of course, not to tell Eva about the undertaking he had made and the changes this was going to make to his life. At quite an early stage they had both taken to having other relationships outside their marriage, but it was ultimately only Spencer who had decided to keep seeing the same person for years. He knew it disturbed his wife, who had never been able to make any of her adventures on the side last long. But then it disturbed him that her lovers had been so many in number. And sometimes so young. As if there were any legitimate reason for him to have objections to her choice of male acquaintances.
‘We scarcely saw each other at the weekend,’ Eva said almost cheerfully, ‘so I thought it would be a good idea to have a bit of time to ourselves now, over lunch.’
Oven-baked lamb and potato was sizzling away and there was a big bowl of salad on the kitchen table. A thought flashed through his mind. Dare he eat any of this? Wasn’t she behaving rather strangely?
‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, I see,’ he said, going to the fridge to get some drinks.
‘Oh one has to sometimes, my dear,’ Eva said sternly. ‘Otherwise one might as well just bloody give up.’
Spencer tensed. In thirty years of marriage he had only ever heard his wife swear five times. But he made no comment.
‘Wouldn’t you say?’ she demanded.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, not sounding as though he believed – or even understood – what he was saying.
Her long fingers clasped the bottle of balsamic vinegar. Salad dress
ing was a must.
‘How was your weekend?’ she asked, thumping the vinegar bottle down onto the table.
It was enough of a statement for him to grasp that something was wrong. He slowly shut the fridge door and turned round. And saw her on the other side of the table.
She had always been beautiful. Slim and elegant. There was still nothing wrong with her appearance. Her thick hair was swept back from her face and up into a simple but classic arrangement. As usual, a stray lock of hair had escaped and fallen across her face. Her eyes were big and green, oceans in which the pupils were like desert islands. High cheekbones and full lips. In other words, she was a very attractive jailer.
Spencer suppressed a sigh. Because that was unfortunately exactly what she was, and had been these past thirty years. His jailer, the cross he had to bear.
He met her gaze and gave a start. His jailer was crying. Good grief, when had he last seen her cry? Five years ago when her father had his heart attack? Tough as old boots, he was over eighty-five now and still far too hale and hearty for Spencer to anticipate any brighter prospects. Though it was naïve, of course, to imagine that the old devil’s demise would bring him any kind of salvation. Fathers-in-law from hell always had a way of coming back.
‘You’ve got to keep me informed, Spencer,’ she said quietly. ‘You can’t just leave me outside.’
Spencer frowned and prepared to defend himself.
‘I’ve never kept anything from you,’ he said. ‘I told you about Fredrika and I told you about the baby.’
She gave a hollow laugh.
‘Good God, Spencer, you were out almost the whole weekend without telling me where you’d got to.’
I didn’t know you cared, he thought wearily.
Out loud he said, ‘It may have seemed like that, but it wasn’t how I meant it.’
He cleared his throat.
‘As I told you before, Fredrika hasn’t been well during her pregnancy, so . . .’
‘And how’s it going to be later on?’ Eva interrupted. ‘Have you thought about that? Are you going to have the baby alternate weekends or weeks, or what’s the plan? Will you be bringing it along when we go out to dinner with our friends, and if so, how are you going to introduce it?’
She shook her head and went to check the food in the oven.
‘I thought we’d talked about this,’ said Spencer, and could hear how feeble it sounded.
Eva slammed the oven door shut.
‘You may have talked about it,’ she said. ‘We haven’t.’
She paused before she went on.
‘If there is such a thing as we now.’
As he opened his mouth to reply, she waved her index finger at him to tell him to be quiet.
‘I’ve resigned myself to the fact that you and I have felt for a long time that we needed to have other partners for our own well-being,’ she said mutedly, and took a deep breath. ‘But for you to decide to go off and start a family with another woman . . .’
She clapped her hand to her mouth and for the first time for several years he felt the urge to hold her.
‘How could things turn out like this, Spencer?’ she wept. ‘How could we get trapped in this relationship where neither of us is happy and we can’t love each other?’
Her words hit home and his mouth went dry.
She clearly had no idea what her own father had done.
Do I need to care? thought Spencer. What could possibly be worse than this?
Fredrika Bergman wedged herself behind the steering wheel and set off for Danderyd Hospital. The case had been coming to the boil all weekend, and now it was Monday, it had positively exploded. Two more bodies, one directly linked to the deaths of the Reverend and Mrs Ahlbin. A suspected perpetrator who in Joar and Peder’s judgement was more to be seen as a star witness. A psychiatrist who was trying to convince the police his patient was incapable of taking his own life, though past experience showed how wrong his judgement had been on previous occasions. And two clergymen, Sven Ljung and Ragnar Vinterman, who both seemed to know Johanna Ahlbin but had presented them with entirely contradictory views of her.
Coming away from the Ljungs’ flat at the weekend, Fredrika and Alex compared notes, and found that Elsie had been by far the more forthcoming of the two. Sven had not said a word, for example, about their own son’s addiction and the fact that Karolina Ahlbin had been at his side for several years. Alex actually rang him later in the day to ask straight out why he had kept it from the police, and received the following reply: ‘Because I feel so ashamed of my failure as a parent. And now I feel even more ashamed because I’ve dragged Karolina’s name through the mud by not saying anything.’
Fredrika had found the name and contact details of their son, but had to lower her expectations when she saw that he was currently detained under the law in an institution for the treatment of addiction. According to Elsie he was in a clinic outside Stockholm, where he refused to cooperate with staff and had no contact with the outside world. It seemed that his latest overdose might have caused some brain damage, but the doctors could not be sure. Fredrika was obliged to rule him out as a potential star witness.
Danderyd Hospital was where Fredrika herself was to give birth later that spring, and she felt a frisson of excitement as she went in through the main entrance. The hospital smell promptly brought her down to earth again. What was it about care institutions that always smelled so off-putting? Almost as if death itself had crept into the ventilation system and was breathing on everybody in turn as they came in or out through the doors.
Fredrika’s mobile phone bleeped in her pocket, and she took it out. A message from her mother to say that she and Fredrika’s father had enjoyed meeting Spencer at the weekend.
Shamefaced, she slipped the phone back into her jacket pocket. Her mother was under no obligation to understand or accept her daughter’s lifestyle. But it was nice if she did, even so. Since the weekend everything had felt much simpler, but also infinitely more difficult. Her parents had not been wrong to question how she was actually going to manage on her own once the baby was born. Spencer would pull his weight financially, of course, but Fredrika knew she faced disappointment on the practical and emotional fronts. A man of almost sixty who had never been a father before was very likely not to be the stuff of which nests were built.
Fredrika had already spoken on the phone to Göran Ahlgren, the duty doctor when Karolina Ahlbin was admitted. Today he received her in his office. He was good-looking, Fredrika caught herself thinking, and found she was smiling a little too broadly. Unfortunately he returned a smile of the same sort and looked her up and down with his sharp, granite-blue eyes. She estimated him to be somewhere between fifty and fifty-five.
‘Karolina Ahlbin,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike to hide her initial flirtation. ‘You were here when she came into A&E.’
The doctor nodded.
‘Yes I was. But I’m afraid I have no information beyond what I told you on the phone.’
‘Some new facts have come to light which rather complicate matters,’ said Fredrika, frowning. ‘Far too many people who knew Karolina have been assuring us that she was never a drug addict in her whole life.’
Göran Ahlgren put up his hands.
‘I can only base my opinion on what I saw and documented myself,’ he said magnanimously. ‘And the case I was presented with was a young woman’s extremely ravaged body. Bearing all the wretched marks of long-term addiction.’
‘All right,’ said Fredrika, opening her handbag. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’
She took out two photographs.
‘Is this the woman who came in the ambulance and identified herself as Karolina Ahlbin’s sister?’
‘Yes,’ Göran Ahlgren confirmed without hesitation.
Relieved, Fredrika put the picture of Johanna Ahlbin back in her handbag.
‘And this one,’ she said, showing the other photo, ‘is this the addict who died of an overdose? I
dentified by her sister as Karolina Ahlbin?’
The doctor took the picture and recoiled.
‘Impossible,’ he mumbled.
‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika, trying not to show how expectant she felt.
Göran Ahlgren shook his head.
‘No,’ he said in bewilderment. ‘That is, I don’t know.’
‘What is it you don’t know?’ Fredrika asked abruptly, taking the photo as the doctor passed it back.
‘I mean I don’t feel sure, suddenly. The woman in the picture is quite like the one who died here, but . . .’
The doctor gave a sigh of resignation.
‘No, it’s not the same person,’ he admitted.
Fredrika’s grip on her notebook tightened.
‘Are you sure?’
‘No, I need to look into it in the course of the day. I’ve never experienced anything like it. We followed all the procedures that . . .’
Impatient and elated, Fredrika interrupted him.
‘The woman had no other injuries?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Any injuries that might point to an alternative cause of death?’
‘No,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve seen the autopsy report and there are no anomalies that didn’t fit the normal pathology of this woman.’
‘Normal pathology.’ The phrase made Fredrika shudder.
‘But the concrete cause of death was a heroin overdose?’
‘Yes, to put it in simple terms.’
‘And she had injected herself with it in her flat?’
Göran Ahlgren stared at her.
‘I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that she arrived here by ambulance and that it was her sister who found her in the flat. Where she got the drugs wasn’t relevant for her treatment here.’
Fredrika knew that to be true, but the police officers who were called to the hospital should have taken an interest. It was their job, not the hospital’s, to establish whether there were any grounds for suspecting a crime. She wondered how much effort had actually been put into investigating the circumstances of Karolina’s death.
‘Could anyone else have injected her with the drugs?’ Fredrika asked mistrustfully.
Silenced: A Novel Page 23
