Silenced (36 page)

‘I’m truly sorry to have been so hard to get hold of,’ she said as they went to the interview room Fredrika had booked. ‘But believe me, I’ve had my reasons for not coming forward.’

‘And we’d very much like to hear them,’ said Alex, with a politeness in his voice that Fredrika could not remember hearing before.

They sat down at the table in the middle of the room. Fredrika and Alex on one side, Johanna Ahlbin on the other. Fredrika observed her with fascination. The high cheekbones, the large, enviably shapely mouth, the steely grey eyes. The beige top she was wearing was simply cut to fall straight from her broad shoulders. She had no jewellery except for a pair of plain pearl earrings.

Fredrika tried to interpret the young woman’s expression. All she was feeling and having to bear must have left some kind of mark. But however hard she scrutinised Johanna Ahlbin’s countenance, there was nothing to draw from it. Fredrika started to find the other woman’s composure unsettling.

There was something terribly wrong, she sensed it instinctively.

To her relief, Alex made a brusque start.

‘As you realise, we were very keen to get hold of you. So I suggest we start with that: where have you been these last . . .’

Alex frowned and stopped.

‘. . . seven days,’ he went on. ‘Where have you been since Tuesday the 26th of February?

Good, thought Fredrika. Now she’ll have to tell us where she was on the night of the murder.

But Johanna’s reply was so swift and short that it took them both unawares.

‘I’ve been in Spain.’

Alex couldn’t help staring.

‘In Spain?’ he echoed.

‘In Spain,’ Johanna confirmed. ‘I’ve got the travel documents to prove it.’

A moment’s silence.

‘And what were you doing there?’ asked Fredrika.

Silence fell again. Johanna seemed to be considering how to answer, and for the first time she seemed to be showing the effects of what had happened.

A façade, Fredrika suspected. She had been so focused on keeping up a façade that she had become utterly disconnected from her emotions.

‘The original plan was for me to go there on private business,’ she said hesitantly. ‘I’d already arranged the time off work and . . .’

She broke off and looked down at her hands. Long, narrow fingers with unpainted nails. No wedding or engagement ring.

‘I’m sure you’re aware of my father’s involvement in refugee issues?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Alex.

Johanna picked up the glass of water she had been given and took a few sips.

‘For years I felt very ambivalent about all that,’ she began her story. ‘But then something happened last autumn to change everything.’

She took a deep breath.

‘I went on a trip to Greece; we were going to seal a deal with an important client. I stayed on for a few days to make the most of the warm weather there before going back to the Swedish cold. And that was when I saw them.’

Fredrika and Alex waited in suspense.

‘The refugees would arrive by boat in the night,’ Johanna went on in a low voice. ‘I wasn’t sleeping very well just then, it happens sometimes when I’m stressed. One morning I thought I’d take a walk to the harbour in the village where I was staying, and I saw them.’

She blinked several times and attempted a smile before her face fell.

‘It was all so undignified, so degrading. And I thought – no, not thought – I
felt
how wrong I’d been all those years. How unfair I’d been on Dad.’

A dry laugh escaped her lips and she looked almost as if she might cry.

‘But you know how it is. Our parents are the last people we give in to, so I chose not to tell my father about my change of heart. I wanted to surprise him, show him I was in earnest. And I planned to show him that by doing some voluntary legal work for a migrant organisation based mainly in Spain. I was going to be there for five weeks in February and March.’

Five weeks, the period of time for which she had leave of absence from work.

Since she seemed to have come to a halt, Alex took up the thread.

‘But it didn’t work out,’ he said.

Johanna Ahlbin shook her head.

‘No, it didn’t. I got dragged into Karolina’s plans.’

Fredrika shifted uneasily in her seat, still with an overwhelming sense that they had not been given the full story.

‘So what happened, Johanna?’ she asked softly.

‘Everything was completely blown apart,’ she said, suddenly looking very tired. ‘Karolina . . .’

She broke off again, but composed herself to go on.

‘Karolina had very cleverly sold herself as the good, loyal daughter. The one who always took such an interest in what Dad was doing, but it was all totally fake, so I found I couldn’t even pretend to be interested in all that stuff.’

‘In what sense do you mean it was fake?’ asked Fredrika, remembering all the statements they had had about Karolina sharing her father’s outlook.

‘She put it on, year after year,’ Johanna replied with a dark look fixed on Fredrika. ‘Claimed she felt passionately about Dad’s campaigns and shared his underlying values. But none of it was true. In actual fact, the so-called help she gave Dad and his friends was simply that she gave the police anonymous tip-offs about where to find the migrants and how the smugglers operated. To get them here.’

The room suddenly felt very cold. Fredrika’s brain was racing as it tried to take in the picture being painted for her. Was this where police officer Viggo Tuvesson came into the investigation?

‘I tried, countless times, to tell Dad that Karolina wasn’t a scrap better than me. That she was actually a worse person, because she engaged in lies and deception. But he wouldn’t listen to what I told him. As usual.’

Johanna looked grimly resolute. Fredrika almost felt like asking why she wasn’t crying, but refrained. Perhaps the grief was all too private.

‘What about your mother, then?’ asked Alex, and instantly had Fredrika’s full attention.

‘She was somewhere in the middle,’ Johanna said rather evasively.

‘How do you mean?’

‘In the middle, between me and Dad.’

‘In terms of her views, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Karolina have against refugees?’ Fredrika put in, and then corrected herself. ‘I mean what
does
Karolina have against refugees?’

It was plain to see the effect on Johanna of this revelation, already released to the media, that Karolina was now definitely known to be alive.

She said nothing for a minute, and the words when they did come had all the more impact.

‘Because she was raped by one of the refugees Dad was hiding in the basement of our house at Ekerö.’

‘Raped?’ Alex repeated in a slightly sceptical tone. ‘We haven’t found any reports of a rape in our records.’

Johanna shook her head.

‘It was never reported. It couldn’t be, Mum and Dad said. It would have exposed their whole operation.’

‘So what
did
they do?’ Fredrika asked tentatively, not really sure she wanted to know.

‘They dealt with it the way they dealt with everything else,’ Johanna said sharply. ‘Within the family. And then Dad wound up his operation at the speed of light, you could say.’

Fredrika thought back to her visit to Ekerö, and could see that Alex was doing the same. The photographs on the walls, dated up to a certain midsummer in the early ’90s. Johanna fading from the pictures like a ghost. Why Johanna and not Karolina?

‘Can you put a date on the event you’ve just told us about?’ Alex asked, though he already knew what the answer would be.

‘Midsummer 1992.’

They both nodded, each jotting down a note. The picture was getting clearer, but it was still not in focus.

‘And what happened after that?’ asked Fredrika.

Slightly less weighed down by the burden of all she had to tell, Johanna appeared to relax a little.

‘The Ekerö house was anathema to us after that; none of us liked being there. It wasn’t just Dad’s hiding of fugitives that stopped, it was as if the whole family died. We were never there to celebrate midsummer again; we would just go for the odd week or weekend. Mum and Dad talked about selling it, but in the end they didn’t.’

‘And how was Karolina?’

For the first time in the interview, an angry look came into Johanna’s face.

‘She must have been feeling absolutely awful, as you’d expect, but it was as if she was pretending it hadn’t happened. Before all that, it was actually the other way round:
I
was the favourite and she was the one who always wanted not to be part of our family. After the rape I took her side, because I didn’t think any good that Dad’s activities did could ever outweigh what happened to her. So you can imagine how astonished I was to find that Karolina seemed to think it was all okay.’

‘You must have been terribly bitter,’ Alex prompted cautiously.

‘Dreadfully. And lonely. Suddenly it was as though it was my fault the family had split apart, mine and not Dad’s or Mum’s. Or Karolina’s, for that matter.’

‘What felt most frustrating?’ Fredrika asked.

‘What I was telling you before,’ Johanna said mutedly. ‘That although Karolina was changed by what happened, and openly admitted to me that she despised the migrants who came to Sweden, she pretended something else to Dad and Mum.’

And not just to them, Fredrika thought to herself, but to family friends and acquaintances as well.

‘So you distanced yourself from the family, so to speak?’

Johanna nodded.

‘Yes, that was the way it went. I couldn’t bear the hypocrisy. And I didn’t miss any of them, either. Not much, anyway. And definitely not after Dad started talking about taking in refugees again, and I was the only one in the family who seemed to mind.’

Fredrika and Alex exchanged looks, unsure how to proceed. Their impression of Karolina had changed radically in the course of less than an hour. But they were still far from through with this, they both knew that.

It was at that point Fredrika registered the tattoo on Johanna’s wrist, almost hidden by her watch. A flower. Or to be more precise, a daisy. Where had that motif featured recently? Then she recalled the dried flower, the sole ornament on one of the bedroom walls.

Johanna tracked Fredrika’s gaze and tried to conceal the tattoo by moving her watch strap. But Fredrika’s curiosity was already aroused.

‘What does the daisy mean?’ she asked bluntly.

‘It’s a reminder.’

Johanna’s voice was thick as she said it, her expression ambiguous.

‘Karolina’s got one, too,’ she added.

‘A reminder of what?’

‘Of our sisterhood.’

A sisterhood so charged that its symbol had to be hidden under a wristwatch, Fredrika reflected.

It was Alex who broke the silence.

‘Johanna, you’ve got to tell us the rest now. You said you were taking five weeks off work to go to Spain, but Karolina’s plans got in the way. What happened?’

As lithely as a ballet dancer, Johanna straightened her back.

‘You want to know why I identified a dead person as my sister although I knew it wasn’t her?’

‘We certainly do.’

‘I can give you a simple answer: because she asked me to.’

‘Who asked you to?’

‘Karolina.’

Another silence.

‘Why?’

Tears came into Johanna’s eyes for the first time in the encounter. Fredrika felt something akin to relief when she saw them.

‘Because she’d got herself into such a hellishly difficult situation that she literally needed to disappear off the face of the earth. That was how she put it, anyway.’

‘Did she give you any more details?’

‘No, but God knows I kept asking her to. Over and over again. But she wouldn’t answer, just said her past was catching up with her and she’d realised what she had to do. She explained her plan, the idea that she’d die without really dying. My job was to ring for an ambulance and then identify that druggie as my sister. And leave the country. So then I went to Spain.’

‘How did you know she was a drug addict, the woman who died in place of your sister?’

‘Karolina told me. And you could tell by the look of her. That she’d put herself through it.’

‘Was she still alive when you got to the flat?’

‘It didn’t look like it, but she must have been. The ambulance crew tried to save her.’

‘That must have scared you stiff.’

Johanna made no reply.

‘Why did you help her with such a spectacular stunt as staging her own death if she wasn’t prepared to tell you why?’ asked Alex.

A faint smile crept across Johanna’s impassive face.

‘The bond between sisters can be stretched to any length without breaking. It never occurred to me she could be referring to that midsummer episode when she said the past was catching up with the family. But once I realised it was, I stayed on longer in Spain.’

Uncertainty made Fredrika grip her pen even harder.

‘How do you mean?’

As if Fredrika had said something completely insane, Johanna leant across the table.

‘But how else could it all fit together? Why else would she have done what she did?’

The line between Alex’s eyebrows deepened to a crater.

‘What is it you think she did?’

‘I think she had Mum and Dad murdered. And now she’s going to come for me, as well. To punish us for not being there when her life was destroyed in the meadow outside our holiday house.’

‘Do you think she needs protection?’ asked Fredrika as the lift doors parted and they emerged into the team corridor.

‘Hard to say,’ muttered Alex. ‘Bloody hard to say.’

‘At least we know now that we were right, you and I,’ Fredrika said, almost gaily.

Alex looked at her.

‘About it all starting in the holiday house at Ekerö, like we said.’

Alex glanced at his watch. Time had flown, as usual. It was well past lunch and Peder would be off to the national CID to take part in the interview of Sven Ljung. From where he stood, Alex shouted to everyone to come to the Den and make it snappy. Nobody dared drag their feet at the sound of his order, though Fredrika headed for the staff room at a semi-jog to grab a sandwich on the way.