Peder could not make any sense of it. After all, unlike Fredrika, Joar was a regular police officer and a proper detective. The two of them should have worked well as a team. It was inexplicable to him why the powers that be had decided a few years back to recruit civilian investigators into the police. It was an affront to the collective competence of the force, as Peder saw it, and he was taken aback on his transfer to Alex’s group to find one of those civilians in it. Time had passed since then, and Fredrika no longer made such a fuss all the time. To start with she had questioned everything, and taken a disproportionately major role in some of the investigations. Peder felt pushed to the point where he needed to bring up Fredrika’s inadequacy in certain areas with Alex. But then she had got pregnant and that had turned her into another person.
He could not help a little grin as he thought of that pregnancy; there are plenty of rumours going round as to who the father is. An older, married man. Peder had laughed his head off the first time he heard it, and said he’d put money on it not being true. You would never catch Little Miss Prim making herself available to someone who belonged to someone else. Never. After a while he had started having second thoughts. It did not sound quite so out of the question as he had first thought. And it would explain why Fredrika was saying so little about the baby and the pregnancy. He couldn’t stop chuckling to himself. There was a whore in every Madonna, as his grandad used to say. Though his grandad had often wondered aloud what a Madonna was.
‘Have you got a minute?’ he asked as he knocked on the open door of Fredrika’s room.
She was sitting at her desk and gave a start, but smiled when she saw who it was.
‘Come in,’ she said.
Her unusual smile and long, dark hair often set Peder off on smutty flights of fancy, and it made no difference that she was expecting.
He came in and sat down opposite her.
‘Found anything?’ he asked nonchalantly.
‘Oh yes,’ said Fredrika, looking rather pleased with herself as she took a pile of photocopies out of a plastic folder. ‘I found out quite a lot about Jakob Ahlbin’s refugee activities. And some important stuff about him belonging to a support network for former right-wing extremists. The group’s still active, and is made up of police officers, social workers and people from various immigrant associations.’
She pushed the papers across to Peder.
‘Perfect,’ he said flatly, wondering why he had never heard of the support group. He would have liked to work on that sort of thing.
‘I’ve already been in touch with them,’ Fredrika went on, ‘and they’ve confirmed that Jakob Ahlbin was a member. He was one of the ones who took the initiative in setting up the group, in fact. It’s been going a couple of years.’
Peder gave a whistle.
‘And it upset a certain Mr Tony Svensson so much that he started firing off threatening letters. Or emails.’
‘Tony Svensson?’ asked Fredrika, confused. ‘Is that his name, the one who sent the emails?’
Peder nodded with satisfaction.
‘Yes it is, according to the technical boys and Comhem, the broadband service provider. We were able to trace the IP address most of the emails came from and he’s the registered owner of that.’
‘Weren’t there several people involved?’ asked Fredrika. ‘You said the emails had come from different IP addresses.’
‘The others were at a library out in Farsta and a Seven-Eleven shop in the Söder district. So there’s no specified owner as such. But it seems logical for this Tony Svensson to have sneaked out and sent emails from different places. The content of all the emails was the same, which seems to point to them all being sent by the same person.’
Fredrika gave a thoughtful nod.
‘I haven’t read them all yet. Could you let me have copies?’
‘Sure,’ said Peder.
‘What do we know about Tony Svensson? Is he known to the police?’
Peder’s face split into a broad grin.
‘Thought you’d never ask,’ he said triumphantly, settling into his seat to tell her all about what he had discovered. ‘Have you heard of an organisation called SP?’
Alex convened a meeting in the Den when he and Joar got back from Ekerö. He felt a warm glow as he listened to Peder’s account of the man who had issued the threats to Jakob Ahlbin. When Peder put his stupid behaviour on hold, he was a very skilful detective.
‘Tony Svensson was born and raised in Farsta,’ he reported. ‘He’s twenty-seven now, and had his first brush with the police when he was twelve. Shoplifting and vandalism. The Söder police and social services worked pretty closely together on his case until he turned eighteen. He’s had a couple of custodial sentences, the first one when he was seventeen and beat up his stepfather. Nearly killed him.’
‘Ah,’ said Alex with a resigned air. ‘Let me guess – the stepdad was beating up his mum?’
‘No,’ said Peder. ‘The stepdad refused to lend Tony 3,000 kronor for a holiday in Ibiza.’
‘Damn,’ Alex said, taken aback. ‘So he’s a right roughneck?’
‘Yep,’ said Peder. ‘The other assault was gang-related. He kicked another guy black and blue and rounded it off by smashing an empty wine bottle over his head. Then he used a bit of the broken glass to slash…’
‘Please,’ said Fredrika, whose face had drained of all colour, ‘can we leave the details for later?’
She looked self-conscious and put a protective hand on her stomach. Almost as if she expected someone to come rushing through the door and assault her or the baby with a broken bottle.
Peder moved on, a bit put out that he had not been able to give every gory detail.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘He was going to be done for aggravated rape, too, but the prosecutor had to drop it for lack of evidence because the girl refused to cooperate. As usual,’ he added.
‘Possibly frightened into keeping her mouth shut,’ Joar put in quietly, almost as if trying not to disturb anyone but still aware that he was doing so.
Peder clenched his fist under the table and went on as if Joar had not spoken.
‘What’s more, Tony Svensson’s been implicated in a series of thefts and break-ins and he’s also under suspicion of committing armed robbery. And to top it all, he’s a known right-wing extremist and long-term member of a neo-Nazi organisation called Sons of the People, the same lot who signed the emails to Jakob Ahlbin.’
He indicated that his lecture was over by putting down the pen he had been holding throughout.
‘Well done, Peder,’ Alex said automatically. ‘We’ve clearly got a good deal to go on here. Have we anything more concrete on the conflict between Jakob Ahlbin and this group?’
‘We’re looking at it now,’ Peder answered. ‘Maybe Fredrika can tell us where we stand?’
Fredrika sat up at the mention of her name and began as usual by opening her notebook. Alex had to suppress a smile that could have been misinterpreted as mocking. She was always so well prepared.
‘Jakob Ahlbin has drawn attention to himself in two particular contexts,’ she began, and went on to tell them about the refugee family allowed to take refuge in his church while the Migration Agency ruled on their case. ‘And then there’s the support group,’ she went on. ‘I’ve contacted the person who runs it, Agne Nilsson. He seemed very distressed by Jakob’s death and wanted to come here and talk to us tomorrow morning. I said that would be fine.’
‘Did you say anything about the threats Jakob had been sent? Was he aware of those?’ asked Alex.
‘Yes, he was,’ answered Fredrika. ‘But no one had taken them seriously. I mean, they knew their work antagonised various people. And anyway, Agne thought the emails had stopped.’
Alex looked surprised.
‘Why did he think that?’ asked Peder.
‘Because they talked about it last week, and Jakob said he hadn’t had any for over a week.’