Alex registered that Joar had stopped writing.
‘Did you know her well?’ he asked.
‘Not as an adult, better when she was younger,’ said Ragnar. ‘But I heard reports from Jakob every so often on how she was living. On her addiction and her attempts to get free of it.’
He shook his head.
‘Jakob didn’t realise what her problem was until a few years ago,’ he went on. ‘I mean, she’d always demanded so much of herself, and when she couldn’t really reach that standard in her student years she started taking various kinds of drugs. At first to enhance her performance, but later on the addiction was yet another problem she had to deal with.’
‘But her mother, Marja, she must have been aware of the problem, too?’ Alex said dubiously.
‘Of course,’ said Ragnar. ‘But the girl was much closer to her father, so he was the only one with the full picture. And since they had other problems in their life, he chose not to pass on to his wife all the details of what was happening to their daughter.’
‘But she must have noticed something,’ said Joar. ‘As I understand it, the girl had been severely addicted for a number of years.’
‘That’s right,’ said Ragnar, a sharpness coming into his voice. ‘But with a bit of determination, things can be glossed over well enough, especially if the mother can’t cope with the truth, even if she chose to see it.’
‘You mean she chose to shut her eyes to aspects of her daughter’s state?’ said Alex.
‘Yes, I do,’ Ragnar said firmly. ‘And I don’t know if it’s all that surprising really. They had had problems for many years with Jakob’s condition, and suddenly their daughter was another problem. I suppose it was all too much for Marja. That’s how it is sometimes.’
Alex, himself the father of two children, was not sure that he agreed with the clergyman, but then he had no experience of what it was like to live with someone suffering from severe depression. There certainly was a natural limit to how much misery any one person could bear. Ragnar Vinterman was right in that respect.
‘He got the news on Sunday evening,’ Ragnar went on. ‘He rang me just afterwards and sounded shocked, desperate.’
‘Who broke it to him?’ asked Alex.
Ragnar looked momentarily confused.
‘I don’t actually know. Does it matter?’
‘Probably not,’ said Alex, but he still wanted to know.
Joar shifted uneasily.
‘But he said nothing to his wife?’ he asked.
Ragnar bit his lower lip and shook his head.
‘Not a word. And he begged me not to say anything, either. He said he needed to try to understand the implications himself before he told Marja. I saw no reason not to do as he asked, and gave him until Wednesday, until today.’
‘Until today?’ echoed Alex.
The vicar inclined his head in assent.
‘Marja was coming to a parish meeting here today, and if Jakob still hadn’t told her, I was going to do it myself. I mean, she had to know.’
The thoughts went round and round in Alex’s head. A picture was slowly taking shape.
‘Did you speak to him again later, or was that the last time you were in touch?’
‘We spoke once more after that,’ said Ragnar, sounding strained again. ‘Yesterday. He sounded oddly relieved on the phone, said he was going to tell Marja all about it in the evening. Said everything would be all right.’
The vicar took a deep breath. Alex did not expect him to start crying, and nor did he.
‘Everything would be all right,’ repeated the vicar, his voice thick. ‘I should have realised, should have done something. But I didn’t. I didn’t do a thing.’
‘That’s very common,’ Joar said in such a matter-of-fact voice that both Alex and the vicar stared at him.
Joar put down his pen and pushed away his notepad.
‘We think we’re going to be rational and understanding in all situations, but unfortunately human beings don’t work like that. We aren’t mind readers, in fact the only thing we are good at is “realising” afterwards, when all the facts are at hand, what we should have done. And then we hold ourselves responsible. When there’s no need.’
He shook his head.
‘Believe me, you lacked vital information that, with hindsight, you’ve convinced yourself you had all along.’
Alex looked at his younger colleague in astonishment.
There’s so much we don’t know about each other, he thought.
‘Some of Marja and Jakob’s other friends say it’s out of the question for Jakob to have shot his wife and himself,’ he said, moving the conversation on.
Ragnar Vinterman appeared to hesitate.
‘You mean Elsie and Sven?’ he said gently. ‘It’s a long time since they were really good friends with Marja and Jakob, and there was a lot they didn’t know.’
Like the daughter’s drug habit, Alex thought to himself.
‘Why was that?’ asked Joar. ‘Why weren’t they such good friends any more?’
‘Oh, they were still good friends,’ said Ragnar. ‘Just not as close, from what Jakob said. Why? Well, I hardly know. They fell out over something a few years ago, and it was never quite the same after that. Then Elsie and Sven retired early, and when they left the parish they had even less contact with Jakob and Marja.’
Joar was making notes again.
‘And what about their other daughter, Johanna? Did she have problems as well?’ asked Alex.
The vicar shook his head.
‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘I only ever heard good things about her. On the other hand,’ he added uncertainly, ‘I suppose I did hear rather less about her. She made it clear at quite an early stage that she wasn’t as interested in the Church as the rest of the family, wasn’t a believer, and that created a certain distance.’
‘Do you know what she’s doing now?’ Alex asked curiously.
‘She’s a lawyer,’ replied Ragnar. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know any more than that.’
‘So you don’t know where we can get hold of her?’ asked Joar.
‘No, unfortunately not.’
They sat in silence for a while. Alex drank some coffee and mulled over what they had discovered. Most of it now seemed quite logical. Jakob had not cancelled the dinner date because it might have made Marja wonder what was going on. And the reason he had sounded so relieved on the phone was in all likelihood the classic one: he had decided to end their lives and thus found peace.
The only question mark was the daughter Johanna. Had she really drifted so far apart from her family that Jakob felt it legitimate to rob her of her parents? They really did need to get hold of her, and fast.
He decided to ask one last question.
‘Say we pretend we don’t think Jakob was disturbed enough to take his own life and his wife’s, who else could it have been? Can you think of any possible alternative perpetrator?’
Ragnar frowned.
‘You mean someone Jakob and Marja had such a violent disagreement with that they were murdered?’
Alex nodded.
‘No idea. None at all.’
‘Jakob did a lot of campaigning on refugee issues…’ began Joar.
‘Yes, that might have landed him in trouble, of course,’ said Ragnar. ‘I don’t know anything about it, though.’
With that, the meeting was over. The men ate the last of the buns and drank up their coffee, chatting about the snow, which was causing various disruptions. Then they shook hands and parted.
‘I’m afraid his assessment may be correct,’ Alex said thoughtfully in the car on the way back to Kungsholmen. ‘But we must get hold of the daughter first and check that story against hers. And we must talk to the doctor in charge of Jakob’s treatment.’
But by the time Alex and Joar left work some hours later, they still had not located either of them. And although Alex had thought he had everything under control, a sneaking suspicion was beginning to grow that this might not be the case.