Peder leafed through the sheets of paper in front of him.
‘That’s not right,’ he said. ‘He got another three emails in the last fortnight he was alive.’
‘Strange,’ said Alex. ‘We’d better ask him about that tomorrow.’
He made a note on his pad.
‘And there’s another strange thing,’ he said, ‘namely that no one else seemed to know about the threats. Not Sven Ljung, who found the bodies, and not Ragnar Vinterman, either. Why hadn’t Jakob confided in anyone?’
Joar put his head on one side.
‘It might not be that odd,’ he said softly. ‘Not if Jakob wasn’t taking the emails seriously. Maybe it had happened before when he was working on other cases.’
‘Are there any other threatening messages in his inbox?’ Alex asked Peder.
Peder shook his head.
‘No, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t had any. Just that he hadn’t saved them.’
Alex glanced at the time and decided to wind things up.
‘Okay,’ he summed up. ‘We still don’t know whether the threats are relevant for our purposes, but we definitely can’t discount this information until we’ve talked to the support group and, of course, Tony Svensson himself. I want a print-out of all telephone traffic to and from all the numbers Jakob Ahlbin used; see if we can find out if this Tony called him as well as emailing. Then we’ll go to the prosecutor and ask if we can bring him in for unlawful menace to start with. Is there anything else in this case we need to discuss just now?’
Peder hesitated but then raised his hand.
‘The fact that Job was mentioned in one of the last emails,’ he said, and told them his own thoughts on the matter.
He suddenly felt very stupid.
But Alex was paying attention.
‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘What do the rest of you think?’
Joar shifted in his seat.
‘Might be interesting, but not all that startling, It clearly hasn’t passed Tony Svensson by that he was emailing a clergyman,’ he said, making Peder feel hot and uncomfortable.
‘Assuming we can expect someone with Tony Svensson’s background to know who Job was,’ said Fredrika. ‘Isn’t that the most important thing to consider?’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Alex.
‘I mean exactly what I say, that the odds of someone like Tony Svensson casually throwing biblical names into his correspondence and making them fit his purposes so well don’t seem all that high.’
Alex looked faintly embarrassed.
‘I have to admit I didn’t know exactly who Job was until Peder gave us his story just now.’
Fredrika smiled and said nothing.
‘By the way, has anybody got anything new on Johanna, the daughter?’ Alex asked, to change the subject. ‘It seems more and more vital for us to find her asap. Especially in the light of our visit to the Ekerö house today.’
Nobody answered. None of them had anything new to impart.
Alex ran his eyes round the assembled company.
‘Anything else?’ he enquired.
Fredrika put her hand up.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I’ve got more on that hit-and-run victim,’ she said.
‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘Do tell us!’
‘It seems he was murdered,’ said Fredrika. ‘He wasn’t just run over, you see – the car was also backed over him.’
Alex groaned aloud with frustration.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Just what we need, another murder enquiry.’
His sense of the huge amount of work in front of him intensified. This was clearly a mess he was not going to untangle any time soon.
As she was leaving work, Fredrika tried to phone Spencer. He did not answer, which unsettled her. Her need to hear his voice more regularly was growing daily, especially as evening approached and the time left to her before the terrors of the night was short.
How did I end up here? she wondered, for what must be the thousandth time. How could all my dreams and plans lead me to this miserable crossroads in my life?
The answer was always the same, as it was this evening, too. It was decades since she had been guided by her innermost dreams. She had been navigating by makeshift solutions and setting her sights on second-rate choices.
I am what you turn into when you are robbed of freedom of choice, she thought wearily. I am a residual product, marked by that wretched bloody Accident.
So there it was in her mind again, the Accident. The most tangible cut-off point.
Early in life she had set herself the goal of becoming a violinist. Music was her family’s natural setting; Fredrika and her brother had practically grown up in the wings of a succession of major stages where they had waited with their father for the end of their mother’s latest concert or recital.
‘Can you see Mummy playing?’ their father would whisper, his eyes suffused with pride. ‘Can you see the way she lives for what she does?’
Then, Fredrika had been too young to reflect on what her father was saying, but later on in life she had started to question that phrase. Living for what you did, could that really be right?
And what dreams and visions did her father have? She was horrified to realise she had no concept of that at all. Perhaps he had had no greater wish than to follow his wife around the world and watch her dazzle one audience after another? Things had changed when the children started school, of course. Her mother accepted fewer engagements abroad, and for the first time, the children had a clearer idea of their father’s professional identity. He had a job that meant having to wear a suit, and he sold things. Successfully, it seemed. Because they were certainly well off.
Fredrika started violin lessons when she was just six. It was perhaps her first experience of what is described as love at first sight. She loved both the violin and her teacher, who must have thought her a good pupil, because he remained her teacher right up until the accursed Accident. And he had been at her side throughout her convalescence, offering encouragement and assuring her that it would still be possible to play as she had before.
But he was wrong, thought Fredrika, closing her eyes for a moment.
Many years had passed, but it was still so easy to conjure up the images in her mind. The car as it skidded, somersaulted and went flying. The hard ground, the skis tumbling out of the roof box. Her friend’s endless screaming when she saw her mother’s face smashed against the side window of the car. And the firemen’s desperate struggle: ‘The car could explode at any minute. We’ve got to get them out of there, and fast!’
Fredrika sometimes thought it would have been just as well if they had left her there in the car, since the life that came afterwards was not worth living. Her left arm had been badly injured and would never be the same again. They made so many attempts that her whole life came to revolve round the battle to restore her arm.
‘It won’t be up to the strain,’ said the doctor who finally delivered a verdict. ‘You’ll be able to play for a few hours a week, but several hours a day? Out of the question. You would be in the sort of pain that would be intolerable in the long term. And the wear and tear on your arm could easily make it entirely unusable.’
He had not understood what he was saying, of course. He lived under the illusion that she was grateful, and glad to have survived. That she was glad she had not died, as her friend’s brother had died. But she had no feelings of that kind.
Not then and not now, Fredrika thought dully, sitting on the sofa in the quiet of her flat.
She had never played the violin just for fun, but as a way of life, a way of earning a living. And since the Accident she had not played at all. At the very top of a cupboard, right at the back, the violin lay untuned in its case, waiting.
Fredrika stroked her stomach, where the baby lay resting.
‘If you ask me really nicely, maybe I’ll play a little something for you one day,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe.’