The lock turned out to be frozen solid and not at all as cooperative as the first one. The technician had to work at it for nearly twenty minutes before the door finally creaked open. Alex looked down and saw a short, steep set of steps leading down to a basement. He was about to ask for a torch when he saw the light switch on the wall, and turned on the light as he went down the steps. A light bulb flickered into life.
What it revealed was a fully furnished basement that had probably not been used for a very long time. The kitchen had clearly been fitted in the early 1980s and the air was thick with dust, but they could see all they needed to. A bed settee in one corner, with some armchairs and a coffee table. Three sets of bunk beds along the walls. A very basic bathroom with a smell of mould. Another small room, windowless, with a further set of bunk beds. There was no bed linen on the beds, but they all had blankets and pillows.
Alex gave a laugh.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he muttered. ‘It seems as though the rumours were right. If Jakob Ahlbin wasn’t hiding illegal migrants here, then I’d very much like to know what he did use this basement for.’
Joar looked about him.
‘Confirmation classes, maybe,’ he said drily.
Alex had to smile, but was soon grave again.
‘Gun cabinet,’ he said, nodding over to a tall metal cabinet standing in one corner of the room.
They went over and tried the doors. They were unlocked.
‘We need to check whether any of the family had firearms licences apart from Jakob,’ said Alex.
The siting of the gun cabinet gave Alex pause for thought. Why was it in the basement and not the main house, if the basement was used for concealing fugitives? Alex concluded it must have been moved at some stage, perhaps when the basement fell into disuse.
‘Is this where he got it?’ Joar said quietly.
‘Got what?’
‘The murder weapon,’ Joar clarified. ‘Was this where he got the hunting pistol for killing his wife and himself?’
‘Or where somebody else did?’ Alex said thoughtfully.
About an hour after the policemen left the house in Ekerö, another car turned into the driveway. It parked in the tyre tracks of the police cars. Two men climbed out into the snow.
‘Damn nuisance,’ said one of them, ‘them finding their way here before we did.’
The other one, a younger man, was more relaxed.
‘No damage done, I’m sure,’ he said gruffly.
‘No, but it was a bloody close call,’ hissed his companion, kicking the snow.
The younger man put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Everything’s going to plan,’ he insisted.
The other man gave a snort.
‘That’s not the impression I’m getting,’ he said. ‘Some of us have even left the country, you know. When will she be back, anyway?’
‘Soon,’ said the other man. ‘And then this will all be over.’
Fredrika Bergman was hard at work assembling information about Jakob Ahlbin’s work with refugee groups, and it was proving quite a task. Much of the material was not available electronically and she was obliged to go into the old paper archives in the library.
Jakob’s commitment to the refugee cause went back decades and had occasionally been a matter of dispute even within the Church. There had been particular trouble when Jakob actively championed a very sensitive asylum case, allowing the family to live in the church to avoid deportation.
‘The day the police cross the threshold of my church with weapons drawn is the day I lose my country,’ he was quoted as saying in one of the many newspaper articles the story generated.
The family stayed in the church for months and was finally given a residence permit.
It wasn’t so much Jakob Ahlbin’s views that courted controversy, more his actions. Jakob had not contented himself with writing articles and opinion pieces but had also campaigned for his cause in the streets and squares of various towns. He had even debated publicly with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
Jakob Ahlbin was in fact one of the few who had dared to engage in debate with the xenophobic groups that existed in Sweden, and unconfirmed sources also said he was part of a support group for young men in Stockholm – because the problem of right-wing extremists was an almost exclusively male one – who wanted to find a way out of whatever group or network they had joined. That fitted with the email messages telling Jakob to keep out of things that were none of his business, thought Fredrika. She printed out the material on that subject, too. Peder would be glad to see what she had come up with.
Just after lunch she had the call from the pathologist who had completed the autopsy on the hit-and-run victim. The pathologist was quite curt, and as usual launched into phrases Fredrika did not understand. She hoped he was not going to go into too much detail; now she was pregnant she seemed much more sensitive to anything too specific about injuries and mangled bodies.
I’ve turned into a wimp, thought Fredrika, and had no idea what she could do about it.
‘He died as a direct result of extreme external violence that must have been caused by the impact of the vehicle, a car,’ said the pathologist. ‘The injuries are consistent with a very violent impact which threw him a distance of several metres.’
‘Was he run into from in front or behind?’ asked Fredrika.
‘In front,’ replied the pathologist. ‘But it could be that he heard the car coming and turned round. What ought to interest you more is that they didn’t just ram into him but also drove over him.’
Fredrika held her breath.
‘First we have the injuries that caused his death – the initial impact. On top of that he has injuries to his back, stomach and neck, which must have been inflicted directly afterwards, crush injuries. My guess would be that whoever it was simply backed over him as he lay there in the middle of the road.’
Queasiness came flooding over Fredrika and she had to steel herself to go on. That was just the sort of thing she did not want to hear.
She took a deep breath.
‘So what you mean in plain language is that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ said the pathologist.
All of a sudden, Fredrika felt very tense. Now there was another murder enquiry for them to deal with. Damn.
Alex and Joar were back at HQ by early afternoon. To Peder’s irritation, Joar went straight to his room and did not offer him even the slightest update on the way. Peder rose resolutely from his desk chair and went in to see him.
‘How did it go at Ekerö?’ he asked, not bothering with any niceties.
He had his arms tightly folded across his chest and tried to look casual.
‘It went fine,’ said Joar after he had observed Peder in the doorway for a few moments.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Well, yes and no,’ replied Joar, starting to sort through some papers. ‘I don’t know that we were looking for anything in particular. But we found something, all right.’
Cheeks flushing bright red, Peder persisted: ‘Like what?’
‘Like a basement that seemed to fit the story of Jakob Ahlbin hiding illegal migrants.’
Peder nodded, suddenly unsure what to do next.
‘Fredrika and I dug up some important things, too,’ he said.
Joar smiled but did not look at Peder, and nor did he ask what they had found.
‘Good,’ was all he said. ‘I hope you’ll tell the rest of us all about it at the next session in the Den.’
Peder said nothing and left. He had never come across such a goddamn stuck-up workmate in all his life. He was more high and mighty than even Fredrika used to be. Peder still had vivid memories of the heavy weather he and Fredrika had made of working together at first. If only she could be a bit more relaxed, a bit less pretentious. No. She’d always been good-looking, but that was about all you could say in her favour.