Silenced (3 page)

She had her hair cut short, with wayward curls sticking out in all directions. If she hadn’t had such a pretty face, she would have looked like a troll. Peder decided to chance it and grinned his cheekiest grin.

‘They look almost like cocks, don’t they?’ he said with a wink.

The probationer gave him a long look, then got to her feet and walked out. His colleagues on the next sofa pulled mocking faces.

‘Only you, Peder, could make such a cock-up of a chance like that,’ one of them said, shaking his head.

Peder said nothing but went on with his morning coffee and croissant in silence, his cheeks flushing.

Then Detective Superintendent Alex Recht stuck his head round the staff-room door.

‘Peder and Joar, meeting in the Lions’ Den in ten minutes.’

Peder looked around him surreptitiously and noted to his satisfaction that normal order had been restored. He could not get away from his reputation as the randiest male on the whole floor, but he was also the only one who had been promoted to DI when he was only thirty-two, and definitely the only one with a permanent place in Alex Recht’s special investigation team.

He rose from the sofa in a leisurely fashion, carrying his coffee cup. He left it on the draining board, despite the fact that the dishwasher was wide open and a bright red sign headed ‘Your mum doesn’t work here’ told him where everything should go.

In something that seemed as distant as another life, Fredrika Bergman had always been relieved when night came, when fatigue claimed her and she could finally get to bed. But that was then. Now she felt only anxiety as ten o’clock passed and the need for sleep made itself felt. Like a guerrilla she crouched before her enemy, ready to fight to the last drop of blood. She usually had little trouble emerging victorious. Her body and soul were so tightly strung that she lay awake well into the small hours. The exhaustion was almost like physical pain and the baby kicked impatiently to try to make its mother settle down. But it hardly ever succeeded.

The maternity clinic had referred her to a doctor, who thought he was reassuring her when he said she was not the only pregnant woman afflicted by terrible nightmares.

‘It’s the hormones,’ he explained. ‘And we often find it in women who are experiencing problems with loosening of the joints and getting a lot of pain, like you.’

Then he said he would like to sign her off sick, but at that point she got up, walked out and went to work. If she was not allowed to work, she was sure it would destroy her. And that would hardly keep the nightmares at bay.

A week later she was back at the doctor’s, sheepishly admitting she would like a certificate to reduce her working hours by twenty-five per cent. The doctor did as she asked, without further discussion.

Fredrika moved slowly through the short section of corridor in the plainclothes division that was the territory of Alex’s team. Her stomach looked as though a basketball had accidentally found its way under her clothes. Her breasts had nearly doubled in size.

‘Like the beautiful hills of southern France where they grow all that lovely wine,’ as Spencer Lagergren, the baby’s father, had said when they saw each other a few evenings earlier.

As if the painful joints and the nightmares were not enough, Spencer was a problem in himself. Fredrika’s parents, entirely unaware of the existence of their daughter’s lover even though they had been together for over ten years, had been dismayed when she told them just in time for Advent Sunday that she was pregnant. And that the father of the baby was a professor at Uppsala University, and married.

‘But Fredrika!’ her mother exclaimed. ‘How old
is
this man?’

‘He’s twenty-five years older than me and he’ll take his full share of the responsibility,’ said Fredrika, and almost believed it as she said it.

‘I see,’ her father said wearily. ‘And what does that mean, in the twenty-first century?’

That was a good question, thought Fredrika, suddenly feeling as tired as her father sounded.

What it meant in essence was simply that Spencer intended to acknowledge voluntarily that he was the father and to pay maintenance. And to see the baby as often as possible, but without leaving his wife, who had now also been let in on the secret that had hardly been a secret.

‘What did she say when you told her?’ Fredrika asked cautiously.

‘She said it would be nice to have children about the house,’ replied Spencer.

‘She said
that
?’ said Fredrika, hardly knowing if he was joking or not.

Spencer gave her a wry look.

‘What do you think?’

Then he had to go, and they had said no more on the subject.

At work, Fredrika’s pregnancy aroused more curiosity than she had hoped, and since nobody actually came out with any direct questions, there was inevitably a good deal of gossip and speculation. Who could be father to the baby of single, career-minded Fredrika Bergman? The only employee in the Criminal Investigation Department without police training behind her, who since her recruitment had managed to annoy every single one of her male colleagues, either by paying them too little attention or by questioning their competence.

It was a surprise, thought Fredrika as she stopped outside Alex’s closed door. That she, initially so sceptical about staying in her police job, seemed to have found her niche there in the end and stayed on beyond her probationary period.

I was on my way out from the very start, she thought, putting one hand on her belly for a moment. I wasn’t going to come back. Yet here I am.

She rapped hard on Alex’s door. She had noticed his hearing did not seem that good these days.

‘Come in,’ muttered her boss from the other side of the door.

He beamed when he saw who it was. He did that a lot these days, and certainly much more often than anyone else in the department.

Fredrika smiled back. Her smile lasted until she saw that his expression had changed and he was looking concerned again.

‘Are you getting much sleep?’

‘Oh, I get by,’ she replied evasively.

Alex nodded, almost to himself.

‘I’ve got a fairly simple case here that . . .’ he began, but stopped himself and tried again. ‘We’ve been asked to take a look at a hit-and-run incident out at the university. A foreign man was found dead in the middle of Frescativägen. He’d been run over and they haven’t been able to identify him. We need to put his prints through the system and see if it comes up with anything.’

‘And otherwise wait for someone to report him missing?’

‘Yes, and go over what’s been done already, so to speak. He had a few personal items on him; ask to see them. Go through the report, check that there doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious about the case. If there isn’t, close the file, and report back to me.’

A thought flashed through Fredrika’s mind so fast that she had no time to register it. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to retrieve it.

‘Okay, I think that’s all,’ Alex said slowly, looking at her contorted face. ‘We’ve got a group meeting in the Den about another case in a minute or two.’

‘See you there, then,’ said Fredrika, getting up.

She was back in the corridor before she realised she had forgotten to bring up the matter she went to see Alex about in the first place.

The curtains were closed in the meeting room known as the Lions’ Den, and the place was like an overheated sauna. Alex Recht threw back the curtains to see light flakes of snow falling from the dark sky. The TV weather girl had promised that morning that the bad weather would move away by evening. Alex had his own views on that subject. The weather had been capricious ever since the start of the new year: days of snow and temperatures below zero alternating with rain and gales, fit to make anyone curse.

‘Bloody weather,’ said Peder as he came into the Den.

‘Dreadful,’ Alex said curtly. ‘Is Joar on his way?’

Peder nodded but said nothing, and Joar came into the room. The group’s assistant Ellen Lind was right behind him, along with Fredrika.

The newly installed projector up on the ceiling whirred away quietly in the background and all Alex’s attention was focused on the computer as he tried to coax it into action. The group waited patiently; they knew better than to point out that any one of them would be better at the technical stuff than their boss.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ a gruff Alex said in the end, pushing the laptop aside. ‘As you may have noticed, this group hasn’t really been working as initially planned. We were brought together so we could be called on for particularly difficult cases, above all missing persons and particularly brutal violent crimes. And when Fredrika went down to part time, we were given Joar as back-up, for which we’re extremely grateful.’

Here, Alex looked at Joar, who met his eye without comment. There was something reserved and reticent about the young man that Alex found surprising. The contrast with the skilful but sometimes wayward Peder was striking. At first he had seen this as a positive thing, but within a couple of weeks he began to have his doubts. It was obvious Joar found Peder’s way of talking annoying and offensive, while Peder seemed frustrated by his new colleague’s calmness and flexibility. Pairing Joar with Fredrika Bergman would probably have been a better idea. But she was on reduced hours on doctor’s orders now, and hampered by this pregnancy that was taking so much out of her. Certificates referring to severe pain, sleep problems and nightmares crossed Alex’s desk, and when Fredrika did manage to come into the office, she looked so pale and weak that her colleagues were quite shocked.

‘It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that when it comes to the crunch, there aren’t enough of us and we need reinforcements, and in between times we’re often on loan to the Stockholm Police Homicide Department to help out with their cases. So the question has been asked: do we need to be a permanent group, or should we be dispersed among the Stockholm Police or the county CID instead?’

Peder was the one who looked most dismayed.

‘But, but . . .’

Alex held up a hand.

‘There’s been no formal decision yet,’ he said, ‘but I just wanted to let you all know that it’s on the cards.’

No one said a word, and the projector stopped whirring.

Alex fiddled with the papers he had in front of him on the desk.

‘Anyway, we’ve now got a case, well two actually, that our friends in the Norrmalm Police need a hand with. A couple in their sixties, Jakob and Marja Ahlbin, found dead yesterday evening in their flat by another couple who had been invited round for dinner. When nobody answered the door, and the other couple couldn’t get through on any of the phones either, they opened the door with their own key and found the pair dead in the bedroom. According to the preliminary police report, which is based mainly on a suicide note written by the dead husband, he shot his wife and then himself.’

The computer belatedly began to cooperate, and crime-scene pictures flashed up on the white screen behind Alex. Ellen and Joar each gave a start at the sight of the enlarged pictures of bodies with gunshot wounds, but Peder was spellbound.

He’s changed, Alex thought to himself. He wasn’t like that before.

‘According to the note, he had found out two days earlier that their elder daughter, Karolina, had died from a heroin overdose, and he saw no reason to carry on living. He himself was treated for serious and recurring bouts of depression all his adult life. Only this January he underwent ECT treatment, and he was on anti-depressants. A chronic sufferer, in fact.’

‘What’s ETC?’ asked Peder.

‘ECT,’ Alex corrected him. ‘Electroconvulsive therapy, it’s used in particularly difficult cases of depression. As a way of kick-starting the brain.’

‘Electric shocks,’ said Peder. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘As Alex said, in controlled form it has had very positive benefits for severely ill patients,’ Joar interjected in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘The patient is under anaesthetic during the actual treatment and the vast majority show striking improvement.’

Peder stared at Joar but said nothing. He turned to Alex.

‘Why have we been saddled with this case? It’s already solved, isn’t it?’

‘It might not be,’ replied Alex. ‘The two people who found the couple say it’s impossible to believe that the man murdered his wife and then shot himself. They did recognise the weapon, a 22-calibre hunting pistol, because the two men would often go hunting together, but they were adamant when questioned that it would be entirely out of character for him to be so crazed by grief as to act like that.’

‘So what do these friends think did happen, then?’ asked Fredrika, making her first contribution to the meeting.

‘They think they must have been murdered,’ said Alex, giving her a look. ‘Both of them apparently held positions in the Swedish Church: he was a vicar and she was a cantor. Jakob Ahlbin has been quite prominent in recent years in debates about immigration. These friends of the couple claim they were such fervent believers that suicide simply wouldn’t have been on the cards. And it seems incomprehensible to them for Jakob to have received the news of his daughter’s death and not passed it on to his wife.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Peder, still not convinced the case was worthy of their attention.

‘We’ll interview the two who found the couple again,’ Alex said firmly. ‘And we need to get hold of the Ahlbins’ younger daughter, Johanna, who has probably not been informed of her sister’s and parents’ deaths. That may prove tricky; no one’s managed to locate her yet. I dread the thought of the media releasing the names and pictures of the deceased before we find her.’

He looked at Joar and then at Peder.

‘I want you two as a team to interview the friends, once you’ve been to the scene of the crime. See if there seems any good reason to pursue this any further. Then divide your forces and interview other people if you need to. Find more people who knew them in the Church.’

As they were getting to their feet, Peder asked:

‘And what about the other case? You said there were two.’