‘No, not in her case,’ said Fredrika. ‘But her death is linked to another case, so…’
‘I shall make sure you have the paperwork you need by this afternoon,’ said the doctor.
Fredrika got the feeling he was rather keen to hang up.
‘Had she been a patient at the hospital before?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Göran Ahlgren. ‘Never.’
There was a knock at Fredrika’s door and Ellen Lind came in with some papers, which she put on the desk. They gave each other a nod and Ellen departed.
We should see more of each other outside work, thought Fredrika, and felt tired at the very prospect.
She hardly had the energy to socialise with her existing friends.
Göran Ahlgren cleared his throat to remind her he was still on the line.
‘Sorry,’ Fredrika said quickly. ‘I just had a couple more questions about how Karolina was identified. Did she have any ID documents on her?’
‘Yes she did. She had a wallet in her back pocket with a driving licence in it. Identification was made using the picture on the driving licence and confirmed by her sister, who came with her in the ambulance.’
Fredrika was struck almost dumb.
‘Sorry?’
‘Her sister. Just a moment, I’ve got the name here,’ said the doctor, leafing through some papers. ‘Yes, here we are. Her name was Johanna, Johanna Ahlbin. She was here to identify her sister.’
The thoughts were whirling round inside Fredrika’s head.
‘We haven’t been able to contact her sister,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she is?’
‘I didn’t speak to her for long,’ said Göran Ahlgren wearily. ‘But I remember she mentioned an imminent trip abroad. I believe she left over the weekend.’
Fredrika felt a growing sense of frustration. There had been no reference to the sister’s presence in any of the documentation she had received from the hospital or the police.
‘Did the police officers who were sent to the hospital speak to the sister?’
‘Only briefly,’ said the doctor. ‘There weren’t any obvious irregularities that needed looking into. I mean, the deceased came in with her sister, who filled us in on the background. And the identification was a straightforward matter, too.’
The fatigue that normally slowed Fredrika’s brain suddenly cleared away. She gripped her biro hard and stared straight ahead. So Johanna Ahlbin had been present when Karolina died. Then she had gone abroad and was not contactable. And two days ago her father’s grief had made him take his own life.
‘Who informed Karolina Ahlbin’s parents of her death?’ she asked, her voice unnecessarily stern.
If she had not known better, she would have said the doctor was smiling as he replied.
‘I can’t say for certain,’ he said. ‘But Johanna Ahlbin said she would do it.’
‘Do we know if she told anyone else about the death? Did she ring anyone while she was at the hospital?’
‘No,’ replied Göran Ahlgren, ‘not that I saw.’
Bewildered, Fredrika tried to get to grips with the story that was emerging.
‘What sort of mood did Johanna Ahlbin seem to be in while she was with you?’
The doctor paused, as if he did not understand the question.
‘She was upset, of course,’ he said. ‘But not in a particularly dramatic way.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Well, she wasn’t as distraught as a lot of relatives are when someone dies unexpectedly. I got the impression Karolina Ahlbin’s drug abuse was known to the family and had been a problem for a long time. That doesn’t necessarily mean the death was expected, of course, but it did mean the relatives were to some extent prepared for the possibility that this was how it might end.’
Not her father, Fredrika thought dully. He was entirely unprepared. He shot his wife and then himself.
She ended the call to the doctor, not at all clear about what she had discovered.
An odd family. Very odd, in fact.
A glance at the clock showed it would soon be time for the morning meeting in the Den. She reached for the papers Ellen had left on her desk. A copy of the follow-up report on the unidentified hit-and-run victim. She leafed through it quickly and saw there was nothing new in it. The pathologist performing the autopsy would send in a report later in the day.
Her thoughts went to the crumpled scraps of paper and the Arabic script she was having translated. They probably meant nothing, but still needed checking out.
The translator answered after the third ring.
‘It wasn’t the easiest handwriting to decipher,’ he said.
‘But you could make it out?’ Fredrika asked urgently.
‘Yes of course,’ said the translator, sounding almost offended.
Fredrika suppressed a sigh. It was always so easy to tread on people’s toes, to cross lines that were never evident from the outset.
‘We’ll take the straightforward part first,’ began the translator. ‘The pamphlet. It’s a prayer book. A collection of verses from the Koran, nothing strange about it at all. And there was nothing written in it, either. But then there are these bits of paper.’
Fredrika could hear rustling at the other end.
‘The first one has the names of two locations in Stockholm: the Globe and Enskede. Two Swedish words, but written down phonetically, in Arabic. That must be it, otherwise I’ve no idea what it means. And I’m an Arab myself, so I ought to know.’
He gave a laugh and Fredrika had to smile. The translator’s laugh died away.
‘The other one, the one you told me had a ring wrapped in it, says: ‘‘Farah Hajib, Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq’’.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Fredrika.
‘No idea,’ said the translator. ‘And it may mean nothing beyond the most obvious thing, namely that in Sadr City in Baghdad there lives a woman called Farah Hajib. Perhaps the ring’s hers?’
‘What sort of place is Sadr City?’
‘It’s a lesser-known district of Baghdad which is, or at any rate used to be, controlled wholly or in part by the Shiite grouping known as the Mehdi Army,’ explained the translator in a matter-of-fact way. ‘A real trouble spot, you could say. Many people had to flee from there because of the conflict between the Shiite and Sunni Muslims after the fall of Saddam’s regime.’
Pictures from the news reports of the inferno of internal antagonisms and clashes that was post-2003 Iraq resurfaced in Fredrika’s mind. Millions of people moving into the interior of the country and into neighbouring states. And added to those the very few, all things considered, who had made it all the way to Europe and to Sweden.
‘Maybe she’s here?’ said Fredrika. ‘As an asylum seeker?’
‘I’ll send up my translation in the internal post,’ said the translator, ‘so you can check with the Migration Agency. Though I suspect it will be hard to locate her with just a name. You can’t even be sure she has given the authorities here the same name.’
‘I know,’ said Fredrika, ‘but I still want to check. And how did you get on with the map? Could you decipher anything?’
‘Ah yes, the map. I’d forgotten that.’
There was more rustling.
‘The writing says: ‘‘8, Fyristorg’’.’
‘An address in Uppsala, then?’
‘It seems to be, yes. That’s all there was. But as I said, I’ll send this up and you can get back to me if you’ve got any questions.’
Fredrika thanked him for his help and decided her immediate priority was to check out the address in Uppsala, the city where she and Spencer had first met.
It was nearly ten and she only had a few minutes before the meeting. Time to banish Spencer from her thoughts so she could concentrate. She raised her eyebrows when she discovered what was at 8, Fyristorg.
It was the address of a Forex foreign exchange bureau.
Fredrika frowned and tried hard to think what had made her react so strongly to seeing the name Forex. Nothing came to mind, so she logged on to Vilma, the Migration Agency’s system, to see if she could find a Farah Hajib in their database. Maybe the woman was in Sweden. And maybe she was missing a ring.