Elsie appeared to droop.
‘Not really, but, well, how shall I put it, I suppose we grew apart. It doesn’t just happen when you’re young, it can happen in later life, too.’
Sven nodded eagerly, almost too eagerly, as though Elsie had said something really brilliant, though not necessarily true.
‘We’ve found ourselves in different circles these last few years,’ he said, looking almost cheerful as he spoke, as if the words were coming much more easily than he had thought they might. ‘And after Elsie and I gave up work, church wasn’t quite such a hub for us any longer.’
‘But they’d invited you to dinner yesterday?’ Fredrika enquired.
‘Oh yes. We still saw each other socially sometimes.’
This steered the conversation naturally round to what had actually happened the evening before. They had rung the doorbell repeatedly, knocked and then hammered on the door. Waited and then knocked again. Tried ringing the house phone and then Jakob and Marja’s mobiles. And got no answer anywhere.
‘I started to have this feeling,’ Elsie said, her voice trembling. ‘A sort of premonition that something awful had happened. I can’t explain why I had that feeling and insisted we let ourselves into the flat with our key. Sven thought I was being silly and we ought to just go back home and wait. But I wouldn’t, and said if he went home I’d go in and look by myself.’
Elsie had won the debate on the landing and unlocked the front door with the key she had in her handbag.
‘Why did you have their spare key with you?’ asked Fredrika.
Sven sighed.
‘Because I think keys are valuables you should always keep with you,’ Elsie replied almost angrily, glaring at Sven.
‘So you always carry all your keys with you?’ asked Joar with a disarming laugh.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Elsie.
‘Our house keys, our younger son’s house keys, the boat keys,’ muttered Sven, shaking his head.
Joar leant forward in his armchair and said: ‘What did you think when you found them?’
It went very quiet.
‘We thought somebody had shot them,’ whispered Elsie. ‘We ran out of the flat and rang the police straight away.’
‘But now you know the police found a farewell note,’ ventured Fredrika.
For the first time in the interview, Elsie looked on the verge of tears.
‘Jakob’s been struggling with his condition as long as we’ve known him,’ she said in a high-pitched voice. ‘But he’d never have done anything as crazy as shooting himself and Marja. Never.’
Sven nodded in agreement.
‘Jacob was a man of the Church and would never have betrayed his God like that.’
Joar stroked his coffee cup.
‘We all like to think we know our friends inside and out,’ he said in a controlled tone. ‘But there are a few basic facts in this particular case that can’t be ignored.’
To Fredrika’s surprise, Joar got up and started walking slowly round the room.
‘One. Jakob Ahlbin suffered from chronic depression. He’d had electric shock therapy for it, several times. Two. Jakob was on medication. We found pills and prescriptions in the flat. Three. A few days ago he was told that his elder daughter had died of an overdose.’
Joar paused.
‘Is it really out of the question for him to have gone mad with grief and shot his wife and himself to end their suffering?’
Elsie shook her head vigorously.
‘That’s not right!’ she cried. ‘None of it. For Lina, of all people, to have taken an overdose. I’ve known that girl since she was tiny and I can swear on the Bible she’s never been anywhere near any kind of addiction.’
Sven nodded again.
‘For people like us, who’ve known the family for decades, none of this makes any sense,’ he said.
‘But then all families have their problems and secrets, don’t they?’ Fredrika said.
‘Not that sort of secret,’ Elsie said with conviction. ‘If either of the girls had been on drugs, we would have known about it.’
Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, silently agreeing to change tack. The daughter was dead; there was no point discussing it further. And Jakob’s state of health would be better assessed by a doctor than an elderly couple who happened to be his acquaintances.
‘All right,’ said Fredrika. ‘If we disregard the most obvious line in this enquiry, namely that Jakob was the perpetrator, who else could have done it?’
There was silence.
‘Did Marja and Jakob have any enemies?’
Elsie and Sven looked at each other in surprise, as if the question had caught them unawares.
‘We’re all agreed that they’re dead,’ Joar said mildly. ‘But if it wasn’t Jakob, who was it? Were they involved in any kind of dispute, as far as you could tell?’
Elsie and Sven both shook their heads and looked down at the floor.
‘Not as far as we could tell,’ Elsie said wanly.
‘Jakob’s work with refugees made him quite a prominent figure, of course,’ said Fredrika. ‘Did that ever create problems for him?’
Sven straightened up instantly. Elsie tucked back a lock of grey hair that was hanging down over her pale cheek.
‘No, not that we ever heard,’ said Sven.
‘But it was an issue he felt very strongly about?’
‘Yes indeed. His own mother came from Finland, and then stayed here. I’m sure he saw himself as being of immigrant stock.’
‘And what did his work comprise, exactly?’ Joar asked with a frown, sitting back down in the armchair.
Elsie looked shifty, as though she did not know what to say.
‘Well, he was involved with all sorts of organisations and so on,’ she replied. ‘He gave lectures to lots of groups. Was very good at it, at getting his message across, just like when he was preaching.’
‘Men and women of the Church sometimes hide illegal migrants,’ Joar went on, with a lack of subtlety that surprised Fredrika. ‘Was he one of those?’
Sven took a gulp of coffee before he answered and Elsie said nothing.
‘Not as far as we were aware,’ came Sven’s reply at last. ‘But yes, there were rumours of that kind.’
Fredrika glanced at her watch and then at Joar. He gave a nod.
‘Well, thank you for letting us take up your time,’ he said, and put his visiting card on the table. ‘We shall probably need to come back and speak to you again, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re welcome to come whenever you need to,’ Elsie said quickly. ‘It’s important to us, being able to help.’
‘Thank you for that,’ said Fredrika, and followed Joar into the hall.
‘By the way, do you know where we can get hold of the couple’s other daughter, Johanna? We’ve done all we can to contact her, so she doesn’t hear about her parents’ death from the media,’ said Joar.
Elsie blinked, hesitated.
‘Johanna? She’ll be on one of her trips abroad, I imagine.’
‘You don’t happen to have her mobile phone number?’
Elsie pursed her lips and shook her head.
They had put on their coats and were on their way out when Elsie said: ‘Why didn’t they cancel?’
Fredrika stopped, half a metre from the door.
‘Pardon?’
‘If the girl had died of an overdose,’ Elsie said, her voice tense, ‘why didn’t they cancel the dinner party? I talked to Marja yesterday, and she sounded her usual calm, cheerful self. And Jakob was playing his clarinet in the background, the way he often did. Why were they behaving like that if they knew their own deaths were only hours away?’
BANGKOK, THAILAND
The darkness had wrapped Bangkok in a blanket of night by the time she gave up. She had been to no less than three internet cafés in the naïve hope that one of her two email addresses would work, but in vain. The system just kept telling her she had typed in either the wrong user name or the wrong password, and should try again.
She was dripping with sweat as she moved through the Bangkok streets. It was a coincidence, of course. Thai Airways’ failure to locate her booking must just have been caused by some internal blip in the airline’s system. The same applied to her email accounts, she told herself. There must be some major server problem. When she tried tomorrow, it would all be fine.