Silenced (17 page)

He knocked on her door just in time for them to go down and receive their visitor.

‘Ready,’ he asked.

He gave a polite smile, stiff and correct.

It gave nothing away, reflected Fredrika. It just sat there in the middle of his face, as if drawn on a mask.

She wondered what was behind the mask. He did not wear a ring, but maybe he had a partner? Had he got children? Did he live in a house or a flat? Did he have a car or come in by bus?

Fredrika did not feel curious, but that was largely because she was so good at reading other people. She did not need to wonder about things because they were generally written all over people, even if they were not aware of it or did not want to admit it.

‘Read and you’ll know,’ her mother used to say.

And that was so true, in Fredrika’s view.

Agne was at reception, looking lost. His appearance was not at all what Fredrika expected. He was short and stocky, pale with thinning hair. But his eyes – she caught herself staring at him intently – his eyes were hard and searching, bright and full of fiery energy.

Like a stubborn, unruly child, she thought as she shook his hand and introduced herself.

She saw that his eyes were automatically drawn to her stomach, but he made no comment. She was grateful. People seemed to assume, wrongly, that it was okay to touch a women expecting a baby in a way you would never think of touching her non-pregnant counterpart. A tender stroking of her stomach, with one hand or both. Fredrika felt a sense of panic on running into certain male colleagues in the corridor because she could feel their eyes boring into her. She had even considered raising the matter at a staff meeting, but could not find the right words.

They took Agne Nilsson to one of the visitor rooms with windows. The windowless interview rooms did not invite reasonable discussions. Nor was there any reason to treat members of the public not suspected of a crime the same way as criminals. So Joar went off to fetch coffee and Fredrika stood chatting to Agne Nilsson.

‘Perhaps you could tell us more about your group?’ said Joar when they were all seated with their coffee.

Agne Nilsson shifted in his chair, looking as though he did not really know where to begin.

‘It started two years ago,’ he said. ‘Jakob and I were good friends going back a lot longer than that. Grew up on the same block.’

He gave a sad smile and went on. The project had been Jakob Ahlbin’s idea, as these things so often were. It all started when he was confronted by a young man who stayed behind after one of his lectures. He was dressed like most other young men, but his hair – or lack of it – and a number of tattoos revealed his ideological home.

‘Don’t go thinking it’s that effing simple,’ he had told Jakob. ‘You stand there going on about what it’s like for those immigrants and how the rest of us should behave, but not all of us have a goddamn choice. You can be effing sure of that.’

It was the beginning of a long conversation. The lad was scared and unhappy. He had got into warped, right-wing circles at the tender age of fourteen, through his elder brother. Now he was nineteen, and about to leave school. His brother had left the movement some years before, moved away and found a job. He himself was stuck in Stockholm with useless school grades and nowhere to go, trapped in a circle of acquaintances he no longer felt he had anything in common with. And he had just met this girl. Nadima, from Syria.

‘It should be her family, not my mates, who’ve got problems with us being together,’ the boy had told Jakob. ‘But her dad’s as cool as anything about her meeting a Swedish guy. My mates, though, they’d kill us both if they knew.’

The boy had taken about as much as any young person could bear. Jakob could see it, and that was what made him want to act.

‘Give me a few days,’ Jakob said. ‘I know some people. I’ll ask around about what someone in your situation could do.’

But it turned out he had not got a few days. The gang had got wind that one of its members was thinking of leaving and taking up with an immigrant girl, and one day when the two were coming back from a walk, they were waiting for them.

Agne Nilsson’s eyes were glinting with moisture.

‘It really shook Jakob,’ he said huskily. ‘The fact that he hadn’t appreciated the urgency.’

‘What happened?’ asked Joar, making Fredrika nervous.

She did not want any grisly details, fearing they would be too much for her.

‘They raped her, one after another, and made the boy watch. Then they beat him pretty much to a pulp. He’s in a wheelchair now, and brain-damaged, too.’

Fredrika felt like crying.

‘And the girl?’ she asked, trying to keep things professional.

Agne Nilsson gave a smile for the first time since his arrival. It was thin but heartfelt.

‘She’s part of our network,’ he said. ‘Quite openly. Works her socks off. She’s the only one the local council has appointed to a full-time position. I think it’s been a way for her to move on.’

His words came as a relief to both Joar and Fredrika.

‘What was Jakob’s function in more concrete terms?’ asked Joar. ‘You said something about money from the council.’

Agne Nilsson nodded, to show he knew what Joar was driving at.

‘As I say, Nadima’s the only one employed full-time. And paid by the council, but apart from that they prefer to work with more established groups. We others have found various other ways of getting involved, with some support from our employers. Jakob was the only one who didn’t, in fact; his work was almost entirely voluntary. Don’t ask me why, but that’s the way it was. His primary contribution was as our spokesman and our main “ear to the ground”, as the police like to say. Did you ever see Jakob giving a talk?’

Fredrika and Joar shook their heads.

Agne Nilsson blinked a few times. ‘It was fantastic,’ he said, beaming. ‘He could get anybody at all to start thinking along new lines. His thing was to present things his audiences had heard a hundred times before, but in a different way. And the energy he injected into it. He really got through to people.’

He fiddled with one of his shirt buttons.

‘He should have been a politician,’ he said. ‘He was making his mark in that world, too.’

I would have liked Jakob, Fredrika thought to herself.

‘And what about his condition?’ she asked. ‘Did that seem to affect him in any noticeable way?’

‘No . . . I don’t quite know how to put it,’ said Agne, pulling a face. ‘Of course there were times when it got the better of him, and he was quite frank in telling us about them. From what I understood, it was worse when he was younger.’

‘But you never talked about it in greater detail?’ Joar asked with surprise in his voice. ‘Even though you’d known each other so long.’

‘No,’ conceded Agne Nilsson. ‘We didn’t. Jakob used to say that dwelling on his condition didn’t make it any better, and I’m sure he was right to some extent. So he only referred to it in a very general way.’

He cleared his throat.

‘We mostly talked about work when we met. That felt right for us both.’

‘But the threats Jakob received, did you know about those?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Agne. ‘Several of us had them around the same time.’

Fredrika stopped dead in the middle of her note taking.

‘Sorry?’

Agne Nilsson gave a firm nod.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘that was what happened. And it wasn’t just that recent clutch of them, it had happened before as well.’

‘From the same sender?’ asked Joar.

‘No, but with the same aim, so to speak. Other times when people thought we’d interfered with things that were none of our business.’

Joar took out the copies of the emails sent to Jakob.

‘Do you recognise these?’

‘I certainly do,’ said Agne. ‘I had some almost the same, as I told you. But mine didn’t say ‘‘fucking priest’’, they said ‘‘sodding socialist’’.’

He gave a wan smile.

‘Weren’t you ever frightened?’ put in Fredrika.

‘No, why should I be?’ said Agne Nilsson as if it was not a question he had anticipated. ‘Nothing ever came of those threats. And they weren’t exactly unexpected. We always knew that our activities would be bound to annoy and provoke some people.’

‘But whoever wrote these sounds more than just annoyed,’ said Joar, indicating the sheaf of papers in his hand.

‘Yes, but this was in the context of the latest case we’d been working on. A young man looking for a way out of the Sons of the People. We knew it was going to be damned difficult. And if the emails hadn’t dried up we were planning to go to the police. That’s to say, there are police officers in our group who we can talk to, but I mean making a formal report – that was what we hadn’t got round to.’

Fredrika suppressed a sigh. She hoped they wouldn’t take so long over it the next time.

‘What do you mean when you say the emails dried up?’ asked Joar, frowning. ‘Jakob was getting them virtually right up to the day he died.’

Agne held up his hands.

‘I really can’t explain it,’ he said. ‘I spoke to Jakob last week and at that point none of us had had any more emails. I didn’t get any after that, so I didn’t raise the matter with him. And he didn’t say anything, either.’

He looked uncomfortable.

‘Though I have to say we hadn’t exchanged that many words over the past ten days. He had lots of lecturing commitments and I was pretty busy, too.’

‘Can we have copies of the emails you received?’ asked Joar.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Agne Nilsson.

‘Do you know a Tony Svensson?’ was Joar’s next question.

Agne Nilsson’s face darkened.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said again. ‘So does every social worker and police officer on the estate where he lives.’

‘Did you know he was the one sending your group members the emails? Well, sending Jakob’s, at any rate?’

Agne Nilsson shook his head mutely.

‘What I mean is, we knew he was part of their organisation. But I didn’t know he was the actual one sending the threats. They were only signed SP, you know.’

Joar seemed to be thinking.

‘So what happened?’ he asked after a while. ‘About the boy who was trying to leave Sons of the People, I mean?’

‘It was one hell of a mess, to put it bluntly,’ said Agne. ‘His name’s Ronny Berg, by the way. But I wasn’t in on the end of the case; Jakob took charge of it himself in the latter stages. And he hadn’t had time to tell us how it all turned out before he died. But I gathered there was a question mark over the boy’s real reasons for trying to get out.’

Fredrika leant forward with interest and knew she must look ridiculous as she found her bump was in the way and had to straighten up again.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It seemed he wasn’t trying to leave the organisation for ideological reasons but because he had fallen out with one of the other members. But as I say, I don’t know all that much about it. One of my fellow group members might know more; I could ask around.’

Joar nodded.

‘Yes, please do,’ he said.

And as he was gathering up his papers, Fredrika suggested tentatively: ‘You might need protection, Agne. Until we know how all this fits together.
If
it fits together.’

Agne Nilsson did not immediately respond, but then he said quietly: ‘So you think it might not be suicide after all?’

‘Yes,’ said Joar. ‘But we can’t be sure.’

‘Good,’ said Agne Nilsson, looking straight at them. ‘Because not a single bloody one of us believes Jakob could have done it: shot his wife and himself.’

Joar put his head on one side.

‘Sometimes people aren’t at all what they claim to be,’ he said mildly.

Just after 1 p.m. the news burst onto the website of one of the evening papers: ‘Gunshot vicar and wife: police suspect link to right-wing extremists’.

‘Damn and blast!’ roared Alex Recht, thumping his fist on the desk. ‘How the hell did that get out?’

In actual fact, there was no need to ask – things always leaked out at the preliminary enquiry stage. But Alex felt he had tried extra hard to stop it happening this time. And the truth was, very few people knew about their new line of enquiry.

‘The media are besieging us with calls,’ Ellen popped her head round the door to say. ‘What can we give them?’

‘Nothing,’ bellowed Alex. ‘Nothing at the moment. Have we managed to get hold of Johanna Ahlbin yet?’

Ellen shook her head.

‘No.’

‘And why not?’ groaned Alex. ‘Where the heck has the wretched girl got to?’

He hardly dared look at the computer screen from which pictures of Jakob Ahlbin were now staring back at him. It was all out there now, and there was no way of breaking the news to his younger daughter in person. The only things the journalists had missed out on were the names and pictures of the two daughters.

At least we tried, Alex thought wearily.

Ellen had been putting all her effort into trying to locate Johanna. The girl’s employer and colleagues had provided them with the names and numbers of friends who might know her whereabouts, but no one could tell them where she was, how she was or how much she already knew.

‘It’s too bloody awful,’ Alex said under his breath. ‘Having to hear news like that from the media.’

‘But we did try,’ said Ellen, looking unhappy.

‘Yes, I suppose we did,’ said Alex, turning away from the computer.

‘Oh by the way, here’s something the assistant in the technical section sent over,’ said Ellen, putting a plastic folder on his desk. ‘Print-outs of lecture material they found on Jakob’s hard drive.’

‘Anything useful?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But the name on the notepad could be of interest. Though I don’t really know, of course.’

‘Notepad?’ muttered Alex, looking through the sheets of paper from the folder.

He found it right at the back. An unobtrusive little fawn jotter with just one word on it, ‘Muhammad’, and then a mobile number.

‘Where was this found?’ asked Alex.

‘In a locked drawer in his desk. It was underneath a pen tray.’

Something he had hidden away, concluded Alex.

Perhaps Muhammad was an illegal migrant he knew personally, or someone who had sought him out for some other reason.