Silenced (6 page)

Finally his father had given in. A career in the police was a kind of calling, after all.

‘I’ve chosen this because I can’t see myself making a better job of anything else,’ Alex had said.

And with these words he had finally won the battle.

The telephone on his desk rang. It made him feel warm inside to hear his wife Lena’s voice, even though it had started to make him feel a bit uneasy of late. There was something worrying her, but she was not saying what.

‘Are you going to be late tonight?’ she asked.

‘Probably not.’

‘You won’t forget your physio appointment?’

‘Of course not,’ he said peevishly.

They talked about what to have for dinner and what they really thought of their daughter’s new boyfriend, who looked like a hard rocker and talked like a politician. ‘A bloody disaster,’ was Alex’s succinct verdict, and that made Lena laugh.

Her laugh was still echoing in his head even after they had hung up.

Alex looked down at his scarred hands. They had got badly burnt in that insane case of the missing girl the previous summer. Little children were abducted from around the capital and later found murdered. The hunt for the perpetrator had taken less than a week all told, but it had been more intense than anything else in his whole career. The fire in the murderer’s flat was like a bizarre grand finale to an equally bizarre case.

Alex flexed his fingers. The doctors had promised him full mobility if he just gave it time, and they had been right. Alex remembered nothing of the fire itself, and he was glad of it. He had never been on sick leave for so long before, and just a few weeks after his return to work, he and Lena had gone to South America to visit their son.

He chuckled, as he always did when he thought about the trip. Good grief, what a mess the police force was over there.

The phone rang again. To his great surprise it was Margareta Berlin, head of HR.

‘Alex, we’ve got to talk about Peder Rydh,’ she said flatly.

‘Oh yes?’ said Alex hesitantly. ‘What’s up?’

‘Croissants.’

Although he had been in Sweden for a number of days, he hadn’t yet seen the country at all. He had taken the airport bus from Arlanda into the centre of Stockholm as instructed, and waited in the bus station on a seat outside a newsagent’s shop.

He had had to wait half an hour before the woman came. She did not look at all as he had expected. She was much shorter and darker than he had imagined Swedish women to be, and she was wearing a man’s suit, with trousers instead of a skirt. He was suddenly unsure of what to say.

‘Ali?’ asked the woman.

He nodded.

The woman glanced over her shoulder, then took a mobile phone from her bag and gave it to him. Such relief washed over him that it almost made him cry. Handing over the phone was the signal he had been waiting for, the receipt for having found the right place.

He stuffed the phone into his pocket with clumsy fingers, feeling for his passport in his shirt pocket with his other hand. The woman gave a distinct nod as he passed it to her, and leafed quickly though it.

Then she gestured to him to go with her.

She took him through the bus station, which was called the City Terminal, out onto a street full of cars. Just to the left of the entrance, alongside the pavement, were more bicycles than Ali had ever seen at a bus station. Swedish people must cycle all the time.

The woman urged him to keep up and when they reached her car she directed him to get into the passenger seat. He watched with fascination as she took her place at the wheel and started the car. It was much colder than he had expected, but the car was still warm.

They drove through the city in silence. Ali assumed she spoke no Arabic, and he had no English. He stared out of the window, taking in everything he saw. All these bridges and stretches of water everywhere. Low buildings and much less noise than he was used to in cities. He wondered where all the street vendors plied their trade.

Fifteen minutes later, the woman parked in an empty street and indicated that he was to get out of the car. They went into one of the low-rise buildings and up the stairs to the second floor. It took three keys and a succession of locks before she got the door open. She went into the flat first; he followed, head bowed.

The place smelled of cleaning products with an underlying hint of stale cigarette smoke. Ali could smell fresh paint, too. The flat was not large, and he assumed he would get a larger flat later on, when his family came to join him. He felt a pang at the thought of his wife and children. He hoped they were all right and would be able to manage until he got his residence permit. His contact had promised it would not take long; he would get the permit as soon as he had fulfilled his side of the bargain with those who had financed his escape.

The woman showed him the small bedroom and living room. The fridge was fully stocked with food and there were plates, saucepans and other utensils in the kitchen cupboards. Ali had scarcely ever cooked a meal before, but that was the least of his problems. The woman gave him a folded sheet of paper and then turned on her heel and left the flat. He had not seen her since.

Three days had now passed.

Anxiety was making his skin crawl. For what must have been the hundredth time he took out the piece of paper the woman had left him and read the short text in Arabic.

Ali, this is your home for your first weeks in Sweden. Hope you had a good journey and will soon settle into the flat. We have tried to make sure you have everything you need. Please stay indoors until we contact you again.

Ali sighed and shut his eyes. Of course he would not leave the flat – he was locked in, after all. Tears burned the insides of his eyelids, though he had not cried since he was a little boy. The flat had no telephone and the mobile phone the woman had given him did not seem to work. The TV set only showed channels he did not understand; Al-Jazeera was not on offer. Nor did there seem to be a computer. The windows would not open and the fan in the kitchen did not work. He had smoked quite a few packets of cigarettes and did not really know what he would do when they ran out.

Other things were running out, too. He had drunk all the milk, and the juice. He had eaten nearly all the bread in the freezer because he had not felt like doing any proper cooking. The plastic-wrapped burgers in the fridge had acquired a grey coating and when he started peeling some potatoes to cook, he found they were green.

Ali rested his head against the window, drumming on the glass with his long fingers.

It’s got to be over soon, he thought. They’ve got to come back so I can keep my side of the agreement.

The call from Alex took Fredrika by surprise. He explained in a few succinct phrases that Peder had been recalled to HQ and he, Alex, wanted her to go with Joar to interview the elderly couple who had found the Reverend Ahlbin and his wife.

They were sitting in a sort of circle. Four large armchairs round a little wooden octagonal table. Fredrika, Joar, and the man and woman who had found their friends shot dead the evening before: Elsie and Sven Ljung, both children of the mid-1940s and retired for several years. Fredrika reflected on how different people’s appearances could be. Elsie and Sven really did look like pensioners, even though they had barely reached state pension age. Maybe that was what happened when you stopped working and stayed at home all day?

‘Have you always lived this close to each other?’ asked Fredrika, referring to the proximity of the dead couple’s home to their own.

Elsie and Sven exchanged glances.

‘Well yes,’ said Sven. ‘We have, actually. Our houses were near each other back in the days when we all lived out in Bromma, and then we all moved into town within a few years of each other. Once the children had left home. But it wasn’t something we planned, living this close to each other again. We laughed at the way fate takes a hand in things sometimes.’

The corner of his mouth twitched, but the smile did not reach his dark eyes. It struck Fredrika that Sven must have been quite good-looking in his youth. Craggy features, a bit like Alex Recht, and grey hair that must once have been dark brown. He was tall and rather stately, his wife quite diminutive by comparison.

‘How did you get to know each other?’ asked Joar.

Fredrika was finding that Joar’s voice often startled her. He had the knack of sounding so genuinely interested in everything. Yet so correct. Tedious bugger, she had heard Peder mutter on occasions. It was not a view she shared.

‘Through the church,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘Jakob was an assistant vicar in the local parish, you know, just like Sven, and Marja was in charge of church music. I was a lay reader myself.’

‘So you all worked in the same parish? How long for?’

‘Almost twenty years,’ said Sven with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Elsie and I worked in Karlstad before that, but we moved to the Stockholm area when the children started senior school.’

‘So your children were friends, too? asked Fredrika.

‘No,’ Elsie said hesitantly, looking away from her husband for some reason, ‘not really. Marja and Jakob’s two girls were a bit younger than our boys, so they didn’t go to school together. Of course we met on social occasions as families, and sometimes at church. But no, I wouldn’t say they were good friends.’

Why not? thought Fredrika. The boys can’t have been that much older.

She left it for the time being, but thought she could detect Elsie blushing.

‘What can you tell us about Jakob and Marja?’ asked Joar with a slight smile. ‘I know all this is terribly hard for you, and I know you’ve already had to tell other officers all this, before we were put on the case, but Fredrika and I would be very grateful if you had time to answer a few questions.’

Elsie and Sven slowly nodded their assent. There was something about their body language that Fredrika found disturbing. Something awkward. Fredrika could not in her wildest dreams imagine the couple to be involved in what had happened, but they had been behaving as if they had something to hide even before she and Joar began their questioning.

‘Jakob and Marja’s relationship was a very solid one,’ Elsie declared. ‘A really good marriage. And they had two lovely girls. Both of them good at what they did, in their different ways.’

Fredrika caught herself surreptitiously rolling her eyes. ‘A really good marriage.’ What did that actually mean?

‘Were they very young when they met each other?’ asked Joar.

‘Yes, they were,’ said Elsie. ‘He was seventeen and she was sixteen. It was considered a bit scandalous, back then. But once they got married and had children, everyone forgot about how it all started.’

‘But as I said, that was before we knew them,’ put in Sven. ‘We only know what Jakob and Marja told us.’

‘Were you close friends?’ Fredrika asked delicately.

And she saw she’d scored a bull’s eye. Sven and Elsie fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.

‘We were close friends, of course we were,’ said Sven. ‘I mean, we had keys to each other’s flats, for example. For practical reasons, mainly, and because we always have done, what with living so near each other.’

But, observed Fredrika. There was a ‘but’ trying to get out.

She waited.

It was Elsie who came out with it.

‘But we were closer before,’ she said in an undertone.

‘Any particular reason for that?’ Joar asked lightly.

Elsie appeared to droop.

‘Not really, but, well, how shall I put it, I suppose we grew apart. It doesn’t just happen when you’re young, it can happen in later life, too.’

Sven nodded eagerly, almost too eagerly, as though Elsie had said something really brilliant, though not necessarily true.

‘We’ve found ourselves in different circles these last few years,’ he said, looking almost cheerful as he spoke, as if the words were coming much more easily than he had thought they might. ‘And after Elsie and I gave up work, church wasn’t quite such a hub for us any longer.’

‘But they’d invited you to dinner yesterday?’ Fredrika enquired.

‘Oh yes. We still saw each other socially sometimes.’

This steered the conversation naturally round to what had actually happened the evening before. They had rung the doorbell repeatedly, knocked and then hammered on the door. Waited and then knocked again. Tried ringing the house phone and then Jakob and Marja’s mobiles. And got no answer anywhere.

‘I started to have this feeling,’ Elsie said, her voice trembling. ‘A sort of premonition that something awful had happened. I can’t explain why I had that feeling and insisted we let ourselves into the flat with our key. Sven thought I was being silly and we ought to just go back home and wait. But I wouldn’t, and said if he went home I’d go in and look by myself.’

Elsie had won the debate on the landing and unlocked the front door with the key she had in her handbag.

‘Why did you have their spare key with you?’ asked Fredrika.

Sven sighed.

‘Because I think keys are valuables you should always keep with you,’ Elsie replied almost angrily, glaring at Sven.

‘So you always carry all your keys with you?’ asked Joar with a disarming laugh.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Elsie.

‘Our house keys, our younger son’s house keys, the boat keys,’ muttered Sven, shaking his head.

Joar leant forward in his armchair and said: ‘What did you think when you found them?’

It went very quiet.

‘We thought somebody had shot them,’ whispered Elsie. ‘We ran out of the flat and rang the police straight away.’

‘But now you know the police found a farewell note,’ ventured Fredrika.

For the first time in the interview, Elsie looked on the verge of tears.

‘Jakob’s been struggling with his condition as long as we’ve known him,’ she said in a high-pitched voice. ‘But he’d never have done anything as crazy as shooting himself and Marja.
Never
.’

Sven nodded in agreement.

‘Jacob was a man of the Church and would never have betrayed his God like that.’

Joar stroked his coffee cup.