Silenced (33 page)

An hour later she was at the airport with the stolen passport in her pocket, feeling her pulse rate rise as she approached security and passport control. The airport was crawling with uniformed police and Karolina had to make a real effort to avoid eye contact with any of them. When she was finally waiting at her gate, her pulse slowed a bit at last and sorrow washed over her again.

I’ve lost everything, she thought emptily. My identity and my life, my freedom. And above all – my family. I’ve nothing and nobody to go home to. May the Devil take whoever did this.

Sinking into her airline seat half an hour later and fastening her seatbelt, she felt too exhausted even to cry. Her escape had become cold and mute.

And she was beyond all salvation.

I have become a non-person. I have become the sort of person who feels nothing.

She leant her head on the backrest and thought one last thought before sleep claimed her: God help me when I find out who did this. Because I can’t be answerable for what I might do.

At another airport in a different part of the world, considerably nearer to Sweden, Johanna Ahlbin prepared to board a plane home to Stockholm, unaware that her sister was heading to the same destination on a different plane.

Her yearning for home intensified when she shut her eyes and pictured her beloved. The one who was always at her side, the one who had sworn never to leave her. He thought he was the stronger of the two of them, but in fact he was exactly as inferior as he had to be.

Her love for him was strong and solid, in spite of everything.

The only man she had ever let near her, the only one scarred enough to keep her secret without being terrified by it.

My darling prince of peace, she thought.

And she reached a decision, just as she heard the loudspeakers announce that all passengers were to fasten their safety belts and switch off their mobile phones.

She would ring the police straight away and tell them she was on her way home. Once through to the switchboard, she asked for the man who had spoken at the press conference she had seen on TV earlier in the day.

‘Alex Recht,’ she said. ‘Can you put me through to him at once? My name is Johanna Ahlbin. I think he’s been waiting for my call.’

TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2008

It was almost as if Alex Recht sensed the moment he woke up that this was the day he would later look back on as the one that changed his life. At least that was how he would remember it, when everything was over and he was left alone: the certainty he felt in his body and mind the moment he opened his eyes, ten minutes before the alarm clock rang.

He got up quietly and crept out to the kitchen to make the first cup of coffee of the day. He could not even bring himself to look at Lena as he left the room. The very sight of her unyielding back was painful to him. When he got back from work the day before she had been so tired that she could scarcely say a word to him. She said her head ached and went to bed before eight, just a few minutes after he came through the door.

But now it was morning and work drew him on like a mirage in the desert. The memory of the call from Johanna Ahlbin, put through by the exchange just after seven the previous evening, made his heart beat faster. She had been very brief, apologised for not getting in touch. And he had had some apologies of his own. For the fact that she had heard the news of her parents’ death via the media. For the fact that they had not got hold of her in time. She assured him that she knew they had done their best and that it was partly her own fault. Which had enabled him to resume a rather sterner tone when he informed her that the police wanted to interview her as soon as possible.

‘I’ll come in tomorrow,’ she promised.

And now it was tomorrow.

He had just put on his coat when he realised Lena was there behind him in the hall. He gave a start.

‘You scared me,’ he muttered.

She smiled, but her eyes were as lifeless as a stretch of frozen water.

‘Sorry,’ she said feebly.

Clearing her throat, she went on:

‘We’ve got to talk, Alexander.’

Had he not already known there was something awfully wrong, he would have known it then. Lena had only ever called him Alexander once before, and that was the very first time they met.

He knew instinctively that he did not want to hear what she had to say.

‘We’ll do it this evening,’ he said, opened the front door and went out onto the doorstep.

‘This evening’s fine,’ she said in a muffled voice.

He closed the door behind him without saying goodbye, and went to the car. And on the other side of the door, just as he turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine, Lena sank to the floor and started sobbing, and could not stop for a long time. In that moment at least, there was no justice for either of them.

Fredrika Bergman started to worry something was wrong, and anxiety took up permanent residence inside her mind. She was still sleeping well at nights, but sleep was bringing her neither the harmony nor the rationality she had expected, just more energy for brooding. Spencer had answered when she phoned him the previous evening, but sounded distracted and said little, beyond the unexpected news that he was going away and would not be back until Wednesday evening. He would not be able to see her before then, or to talk on the telephone. He had scarcely touched on where he was going, and had ended the call rather abruptly by wishing her a good night, saying they would speak again soon.

Naturally her pregnancy was making her emotions more volatile than usual, but Spencer’s change in behaviour unsettled her for other reasons, too. Perhaps it had been a mistake to take him round to her parents’ after all? He would hardly have suggested it himself. But on the other hand, the weekend dinner date had had a more or less miraculous effect on her mother, whose comments about the baby and its father were now exclusively positive whenever Fredrika spoke to her.

Was it perhaps the need to dampen down her anxiety that sent her off to work early that morning? At any rate, by half past seven she was already there. The team’s corridor was deserted, but she could tell that both Peder and Joar were in. She decided to go and see Peder.

‘Anything from the national CID on Sven Ljung yet?’

‘No, they’re waiting until they’ve got in some of the other information they’re trying to assemble.’

‘What are they waiting for?’

Peder sighed.

‘Bank account transactions, for example. It’s always worth checking if there’s money tied up in these things.

Fredrika went to her office, and Joar came in after her.

‘Interesting email from our friend Lazarus yesterday,’ he said, meaning Karolina Ahlbin. ‘Particularly in the light of the fact that her sister finally made herself known later on in the evening.’

‘Certainly is,’ agreed Fredrika, taking off her coat and leaning forward to switch on her computer.

‘Though it could be an attempt to put us off the track. Karolina trying to look innocent.’

‘The question is what she’d be trying to look innocent
of
, and to
whom
,’ said Fredrika.

‘Drug offences,’ supplied Joar.

‘What?’

‘New information’s come in by fax from the Swedish Embassy in Bangkok after our press conference. They’re six hours ahead of us over there.’

Fredrika took the sheet of paper Joar held out to her and read it with growing surprise.

‘Has anybody rung this Andreas Blom, who apparently interviewed her when she went to the Embassy for help?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Joar. ‘We left it until you got here.’

‘I’ll ring straight away,’ said Fredrika, reaching for the phone even as she spoke.

She glanced over the fax again as she waited for an answer. Karolina Ahlbin was evidently known to the Thai police as ‘Therese Björk’.

Maybe she preferred Therese to Lazarus, Fredrika thought exasperatedly.

Peder was given a special dispensation to postpone his session with the psychologist for a few more days. He ended the call to HR boss Margareta Berlin with a feeling of relief. She sounded more reasonable now, but he had no time to stop and analyse whether it was because he sounded different himself.

Ylva texted to say that his son was much better. He felt another surge of relief and replied that he was glad to hear it. He had scarcely put down his mobile before it bleeped again.

Why not come over and eat with me and the boys tonight, if you’ve got time? The boys are asking for you. Ylva
.

Without thinking he fired off a reply:

Good idea! Will try to be there by six latest!

He regretted sending the message the instant it had gone. How the hell could he promise to be anywhere by six – he hadn’t the faintest idea how the Ahlbin case might develop in the course of the day.

Damn. His veneer of feigned cool cracked to reveal the disintegration underneath. And he thought those most forbidden of words: Nothing’s ever going to work in the long run. Not with any woman. I’ve got to make my mind up.

It was unclear to him at that moment quite what it was he had to make up his mind about. But he knew it was not a healthy sign that he viewed dinner with his own family as an imposition, an inconvenient duty. As if work was the only soul mate he wanted in his life.

Furious for no reason, he grabbed the phone again and rang one of his contacts in the CID who was dealing with the double murder on Sunday night.

‘Anything new on the Haga Park murder?’ he asked.

‘No, not a thing. So we thought we’d release the victim’s picture to the media and hope somebody recognised him.’

‘No match for the prints either?’

‘Not a whiff. But we might have something else. Or in fact – we
have
got something else.’

Peder was listening.

‘Sven Ljung’s car was found just outside Märsta by a woman out for an early morning walk.’

‘Bingo!’ cried Peder, with more enthusiasm in his voice than he had first intended.

‘Don’t get too bloody carried away,’ said the other detective. ‘The car was set on fire and it’d been burning a fair while by the time we got there.’

Peder’s spirits plummeted. A burnt-out car would mean very few clues.

‘Well, at least it means we know there must be some link to the case, or cases,’ he said determinedly. ‘Otherwise the person who took it would hardly have bothered to set fire to it.’

‘Probably not,’ his CID colleague agreed. ‘And there’s another thing we’ve found out.’

‘What’s that?’ Peder asked.

‘That it was very probably used as a get-away car after the security van jobs, not just the one in Uppsala but also the one the media reported in Västerås at the weekend. In the Uppsala case we’ve nothing more to go on than some witness statements that it was a silver metallic car, but in Västerås we got bits of the registration number, and they tallied with Ljung’s.’

Peder rang off with a lingering sense of achievement. Sven Ljung’s car seemed to be implicated in robberies as well as murders. The net was closing and Peder smiled.

It was afternoon in Bangkok by the time Fredrika got hold of Andreas Blom. He sounded troubled, to say the least, and expressed great concern at the information on the desk in front of him.

‘The really distressing thing,’ he said in his lilting Norrland accent, ‘is that she sat here insisting that her name was Karolina Mona Ahlbin. And that she needed a new passport because she’d been robbed in the street. But when I rang the Swedish tax authorities it turned out to be impossible that she was who she claimed to be, because the woman with that name and that personal identity number was deceased.’

‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that she was able to come out with another person’s name and ID number, just like that?’

‘Good Lord, I did what I could. And it’s not that unusual for people in her situation to use double identities.’

Fredrika’s brain attempted to rearrange itself into accepting the idea of Karolina Ahlbin as a drug addict after all. In spite of the irregularities where her passport was concerned, the evidence was pretty overwhelming.

‘What exactly –
exactly
– did she say her problem was?’ she asked slowly.

‘That she’d had all her valuables stolen, like money, passport and plane tickets, and that she’d had a problem in the hotel where she’d been staying, and all her things had somehow vanished from her hotel room. Though she kept quiet about the hotel part to start with and didn’t bring it up until I confronted her with our other information.’

‘Did you ring the hotel she claimed she’d been staying at? I don’t mean the one where her luggage and the drugs were seized.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Andreas Blom. ‘But only after she’d left. And they weren’t prepared to back up her story at all. They said she was lying and had come stumbling into their foyer saying she had been mugged and was a hotel guest. But none of the staff recognised her and she wasn’t in their computer system.’

‘All right,’ Fredrika said in a measured tone. ‘All right, let’s just see if we can tease this out . . .’

She broke off, realising this was really a matter to discuss with a colleague rather than a diplomat in Thailand. She took a breath and carried on anyway.

‘Why call the police if she was only hours from being declared wanted by them for drug offences?’

‘Pardon?’ said Andreas Blom.

‘The raid on the hotel where she was supposedly staying happened only hours after she left it. The time of her report of the mugging, according to what you faxed over, was more or less the same. Why would she contact the police and draw all that unnecessary attention to herself at such a critical juncture?’

‘But if she really was robbed,’ began Andreas Blom, ‘then she needed a new passport to get home on . . .’

‘Exactly. And she needed a copy of an official police report of a stolen passport before the Swedish Embassy could help her get a new one. But why go to the police just then and not earlier?’

Andreas Blom went quiet.

‘Yes, one might well ask,’ he conceded.