Silenced (27 page)

The new way used established travel routes, always via Bangkok or Istanbul. And always by air, never the overland route. That had given her pause for thought, because smuggling people in on flights was much more risky. But on the other hand, the new network only seemed to be taking on a very small number of clients. None of the people she approached had personal knowledge of anyone who had gone that way, it was all just hearsay. She had already been to Istanbul twice, and Bangkok had seemed a good place to round off the trip. So in one last attempt to contact someone working for the new operator, she went there. Made an extensive search, but without results. Or at least, without any results she had been aware of. But that might well be the answer to the riddle: she had got too close without knowing it.

She was weak with fatigue, paralysed by grief. She took her pen and paper with her and lay down in the little bedroom. The air was still and heavy, and outside it was almost unbearably hot. But her body seemed to have switched off and refused to react. She curled into a ball on the bed and shut her eyes. When she was little, that had always been her best trick for shutting out all the bad things.

Her protector, the people trafficker, had been surprised to see her again so soon.

‘I need your help,’ she said, and that made him listen.

She would pay when she got back to Sweden. When she tried to get at her bank details and have money transferred to Bangkok, she was informed that her accounts were closed and she could not possibly be the person she said she was. So payment would have to wait, and her protector accepted that. Maybe he saw her as a part of an exciting project, because he seemed positively elated at the prospect of helping her.

And as for her, she had only one thought in her head – getting home. At any price. Because although she believed the catastrophe that had befallen her was related to her own investigations, she was beginning to suspect that the full picture was less simple than that. The truth might lie closer to her and her family and be much more personal.

She dropped off, and did not wake again until it was dark outside.

And her nightmare just went on and on.

STOCKHOLM

He waited for them at the agreed place, a few hundred metres from the Globe. The giant golf ball was fabulously illuminated in the darkness. He was one big smile; his heart was pumping wildly and the adrenalin made him see everything so vividly that evening. He had reached his goal at last, his journey was over and now he could make his final payment. He stared up into the clear, starlit night, his head aching with the relief. Happiness hurt when it was this big.

A black car of a type he did not recognise pulled up alongside the pavement where he was standing. A window slid down and the person inside gestured to him to put his haul in the boot and get into the back, right-hand seat. He immediately complied. Opening the car door, he found the woman who had met him at the station sitting in the other back seat. Her face was impassive as he climbed in.

They drove through a cold, wintry Stockholm bathed in moonlight. He was virtually sure they were driving north this time. The spoils lay in their protective black sack in the boot. They must really trust him, since they hadn’t even bothered to check he wasn’t trying to swindle them.

The trust was mutual by this stage, so he felt no unease as they made the short journey. They took a turning off the main road into what looked like some kind of park. Despite the gleam of the moonlight, the night was too dark for him to be able to see properly. They indicated to him to get out, and he did so. The passenger who was sitting beside the driver did so, too. It was the man with the disfigured face. They kept the engine running.

The man’s instructions were wordless; he merely pointed down towards the darkness of the park. Ali followed the pointing finger with his eyes and thought he could see someone standing there, down amongst the trees. Someone waving. The person stepped forward from the shadows. It was the man who spoke Arabic.

He wondered why the meeting had to take place in a deserted park in the middle of the night. Perhaps because their agreement was too sensitive to be dealt with when other people were around. He set off resolutely towards the Arabic speaker. The disfigured man was two steps behind him.

‘I gather it went well today,’ the Arabic speaker said when he reached him.

He smiled at Ali, who beamed back at him.

‘It all went fantastically well,’ he confirmed with the eagerness of a five-year-old keen to impress.

‘You’re a good shot,’ the man said. ‘Lots of other people would have missed a target that was moving so fast.’

Ali could not help feeling proud.

‘I have many years of training behind me, I’m afraid.’

The man gave a satisfied nod.

‘Yes we know, and that was why we chose you.’

He seemed to be wondering what to say next.

‘Come with me,’ he went on, bowing his head in the direction of the woods, where a lake could be seen glittering through the mass of tree trunks.

Ali felt a sudden stab of doubt.

‘Come along,’ said the man. ‘There’s just one more little detail to be taken care of.’

He gave such a warm smile that Ali’s mind was immediately put at rest.

‘When can I see my family again?’ he asked as he went after the man into a clearing.

‘Very, very soon,’ said the man, and turned round.

A second later, a shot rang out. And Ali’s journey was over.

MONDAY 3 MARCH 2008

The corridor was full of bustling activity when Fredrika Bergman got into work on the Monday. Ellen Lind gave her a wide grin as they met, just outside her room.

‘You look radiant! Are you sleeping better now?’

Fredrika nodded and returned the smile happily, feeling almost embarrassed without knowing why. She did not really know why she was sleeping better, either. Perhaps the effect of Saturday’s family dinner had been more positive than she had predicted. And perhaps playing her violin was helping. Now that she had started, she could not stop. The memory was in her fingers and although she made some mistakes, she found she could play piece after piece.

Alex, by contrast, looked as though he had not slept particularly well as he opened the meeting in the Den a short time later and ran through what had come to light over the weekend.

He’s sinking, Fredrika thought anxiously. And we’re not lifting a finger to help him.

Peder and Joar had chosen seats as far away from each other as they could and were both staring fixedly straight ahead. The group had gone from tight-knit to unravelling in just a few days. Fredrika noted with some relief that for once the conflict did not centre on her.

‘I’ve checked out what Ragnar Vinterman told us about Erik Sundelius: the official warnings from his professional body and the prosecution for manslaughter. And it’s all correct,’ said Peder. ‘The question is how it’s significant, in the context.’

‘Need it be significant at all?’ Fredrika asked. ‘Need it be significant in this particular case that Jakob Ahlbin’s psychiatrist treated two
other
patients negligently, resulting in their suicide? We still don’t think Jakob killed either himself, or his wife.’

‘No,’ said Alex deliberately. ‘No, we don’t. On the other hand, we don’t know exactly what we think
did
happen, either.’

Fredrika looked doubtful.

‘I’ve been thinking a bit about the Ahlbin sisters,’ she said. ‘And I’m starting to wonder if we’ve made a mistake in separating the two oddities, so to speak.’

The others looked blank, and Fredrika made haste to explain.

‘We keep talking as though the obscure elements in the case have nothing to do with each other. Jakob Ahlbin seems to have shot his wife and then himself, but we still don’t believe it. Johanna Ahlbin seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth, but we don’t know for sure. And there are various reasons for suspecting irregularities in the matter of Karolina Ahlbin’s death, but there, too, we don’t know exactly what may have gone wrong.’

Fredrika paused for breath.

‘What if they’re all interconnected? That’s all I wanted to say.’

With his chin propped in one hand, Alex looked ten years older than he really was.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘I’m pretty sure nobody here has been imagining things
aren’t
interconnected, the problem is that we can’t quite see how. What thoughts did you have?’

‘I thought it might not have been Karolina who died,’ said Fredrika, squirming a little. ‘I know it sounds mad, of course.’

‘But she was identified by her own sister,’ said Peder, frowning. ‘And she had her driving licence on her.’

‘But how hard is it to get hold of a fake driving licence if you need to?’ asked Fredrika. ‘And what are the odds of a doctor finding out it isn’t genuine? Karolina Ahlbin was identified by a sister whom we haven’t seen hide or hair of since. And if Karolina’s still alive, we know we haven’t seen her either. And that’s the crucial problem, as I see it. Why aren’t they getting in touch, even though the story’s all over the media?’

No one said anything. They had all seen that morning’s papers – full of whole-page articles telling the Ahlbin family’s story. This time the journalists had managed to find pictures of the two girls, too.

‘WHERE IS JOHANNA AHLBIN?’ shrieked one of the headlines, suggesting something could have happened to her, too.

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Alex said to Fredrika, ‘and of course – you may be right. But there could be less dramatic explanations for these anomolies. Karolina Ahlbin hasn’t been in touch for the simple reason that she’s dead, and Johanna because she hasn’t found out what’s happened yet. But I agree – if she hasn’t come forward by the middle of the week we’ll have to take other steps.’

‘You don’t think anything could have happened to her, do you?’ asked Joar.

‘Either that or it’s like Fredrika says, and she’s got reasons of her own to keep away from the police.’

He turned to Fredrika.

‘Over to something else,’ he said. ‘You made a very good point about the content of the emails and the fact that Tony Svensson could have been contacted by whoever wrote the emails that weren’t sent from his own computer. I had a word with the prosecutor and we can bring him in again. I want Joar and Peder to interview him together.’

He raised his eyes, and there was anger in them.

‘Together,’ he said. ‘Understood?’

The two men nodded.

‘Fredrika’s tackling the library in Farsta,’ Alex went on. ‘And I want us to keep chipping away at the circumstances surrounding Karolina’s death. See if anyone’s shown an interest in the body; there’ll have to be a funeral and so on. Maybe she had some bloke we haven’t heard about yet. Get back in touch with the hospital and keep damn well digging.’

Fredrika nodded and looked happy with that.

Alex looked around him distractedly.

‘I think that’s it for now,’ he said.

‘But what about the officer?’ Peder objected. ‘The one with the Norrmalm Police, that Tony Svensson was in touch with?’

‘I’ll deal with that myself,’ said Alex. ‘We’ll have another meeting here at four o’clock this afternoon.’

They were interrupted by a vigorous knock, and a detective from the Stockholm CID put his head round the door.

‘I’ve just got some information to pass on about Muhammad Abdullah, who you and Fredrika went to see in Skärholmen last week,’ he said, his eyes on Alex.

‘Oh yes?’ said Alex, none too pleased by the interruption.

‘He’s dead,’ the detective said. ‘He had to go out on some sort of business yesterday, and he didn’t come back. His wife alerted the police last night but she didn’t get any help until this morning. He was found shot in the head in a car park not far from where they live.’

Fredrika felt dismay and sorrow. The man had been pleasant and cooperative, despite feeling under threat. And now he was gone.

Alex swallowed.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said quietly.

‘And that’s not all,’ said the visitor. ‘Yesterday evening, a jogger came across a dead body that had been dumped in the water at Brunnsviken, where the jogging track follows the shoreline. The man hasn’t been identified, but initial indications are that he was shot with the same weapon as Muhammad Abdullah.’

It had been a long and trying night for Alex, lying sleepless beside his wife, hour after hour. Thoughts of Lena seared him like fire. He had promised himself to try and talk to her over the weekend, but had not been up to it. Or had not dared.

What if she’s ill, what if it’s Alzheimer’s, he thought dully. What the hell will I do then?’

The fear of it paralysed him. He wished she would tell him what was wrong, since he was too weak to make the first move.

Fredrika came charging in, stomach first. She was back up to speed now, with only a month to go until her due date.

‘I just wanted to tell you I’m off to the hospital now.’

‘Sounds like a good start,’ said Alex.

‘I rang Farsta Library, too,’ she went on, ‘and they promised to get back to me. They haven’t got the data stored on computer so they were going to look it up in their log book.’

A man from the technical division knocked on the door behind Fredrika.

‘Yes?’ Alex demanded.

‘We spotted something when we were checking out the Ahlbins’ telephone subscription,’ said the technician.

‘Uhuh?’

‘Notice that they wanted to cancel their landline subscription was sent in writing to Telia a week before the murders, with a request for the subscription to end on Tuesday the 26th of February, that’s to say, the day they died.’

‘Who signed the letter?’ asked Alex.

‘Jakob Ahlbin himself. And he also rang and cancelled his mobile contract the day he died.’

‘And his wife’s mobile?’

The technician cleared his throat.

‘That was active until last Wednesday morning, and then the contract was terminated. We don’t know who by.’

‘Has anyone rung it?’ asked Alex.

The technician nodded.

‘In the time since we’ve had it here, the mobile operator has only registered two incoming calls: one from an unidentified number in Bangkok and one from a parishioner who clearly didn’t know she was dead.’