‘I simply don’t understand a thing about this whole situation,’ her friend Julia said one day.
The same friend who had often asked how Fredrika could bear to have sex with a man so much older.
‘There are a lot of things we don’t understand in life,’ Fredrika retorted with a sharp note in her voice, and they said no more about it.
There were lots of emails in her inbox. She could hardly bring herself to look at them; most of them were of no interest, anyway.
‘Time for the firearms refresher course,’ one of them said. ‘Anyone interested in sharing lifts?’
Firearms refresher course. As if everyone in the force automatically needed to be told about that.
Some of the emails were from the union rep, asking her to get involved in improving conditions for the civilian employees. The police union seemed on occasions to be running a virtual campaign to stop civilian employees feeling at home in the force, and Jusek thought now was the time to hit back. Fredrika could not summon up the energy to care, though she would have liked to.
I’ve made my journey, she thought lethargically. I’ve chosen to stay here. For now. And at the moment, I’m not up to worrying about how other people feel.
She shuffled aimlessly through the paperwork in front of her. She must at least summon the energy to do what was necessary. Alex had said the dead vicar and his wife at Odenplan were to take priority over the case of the man in the road at the university. He had, in fact, decided they would try to get the latter off their plate. It was simply not possible for them to deal with two murder enquiries at once with their limited resources.
But all the findings were still being sent through to Fredrika rather than anywhere else. She read a report from the forensics lab which confirmed that material on the man’s clothes showed the car had driven over him as well as running into him. There were traces of car paint on his jacket. They were working to identify the type of paint so they would be able to match it against a suspect vehicle, if one turned up.
She clicked on through her new emails. Still not a peep out of the national CID about the fingerprints. Frustrated, she picked up the phone.
‘I was just going to ring you,’ the woman at the other end said eagerly.
Fredrika was taken aback by her chirpy tone, so unlike two days before.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, trying not to sound equally excited.
She failed, but the woman did not seem to notice.
‘I ran the prints through our database, and he came up.’
The woman’s voice, carried with piercing clarity along the line, hit Fredrika with great force.
‘Really?’ she said in astonishment.
‘Yes it did,’ the woman said triumphantly. ‘Do you remember the armed robbery of the security van outside Forex in Uppsala last week?’
Fredrika’s heart gave a jolt. Forex.
‘Of course,’ she said quickly.
‘A weapon suspected of being used in the hold-up was found at the weekend by a man out walking his dog. That’s very peculiar, given how minutely everything else was planned. Anyway, they were able to get a set of prints off the gun.’
‘The unidentified man’s,’ Fredrika said tensely.
‘Exactly.’
She thanked the woman and hung up. The Forex robbery was the latest in a series of major armed hold-ups in and around Stockholm. She felt quite elated, as if she had achieved something important herself, just by making a phone call. This cleared up the confusion as to whose the case was; it would be entirely reasonable for it to go to the national CID, which was handling the robberies.
Fredrika was smiling as she knocked on Alex’s door.
When he heard how easily he could be rid of the hit-and-run case, Alex moved with unusual speed. And as soon as the case had been transferred to the national CID, Fredrika was able to focus more wholeheartedly on the Ahlbin case. It was nearly eleven, and she and Joar were due to see Agne Nilsson from the support group for former right-wing extremists. It felt strange to have Joar at her side. Not wrong, not at all, but different.
He knocked on her door just in time for them to go down and receive their visitor.
‘Ready,’ he asked.
He gave a polite smile, stiff and correct.
It gave nothing away, reflected Fredrika. It just sat there in the middle of his face, as if drawn on a mask.
She wondered what was behind the mask. He did not wear a ring, but maybe he had a partner? Had he got children? Did he live in a house or a flat? Did he have a car or come in by bus?
Fredrika did not feel curious, but that was largely because she was so good at reading other people. She did not need to wonder about things because they were generally written all over people, even if they were not aware of it or did not want to admit it.
‘Read and you’ll know,’ her mother used to say.
And that was so true, in Fredrika’s view.
Agne was at reception, looking lost. His appearance was not at all what Fredrika expected. He was short and stocky, pale with thinning hair. But his eyes – she caught herself staring at him intently – his eyes were hard and searching, bright and full of fiery energy.
Like a stubborn, unruly child, she thought as she shook his hand and introduced herself.
She saw that his eyes were automatically drawn to her stomach, but he made no comment. She was grateful. People seemed to assume, wrongly, that it was okay to touch a women expecting a baby in a way you would never think of touching her non-pregnant counterpart. A tender stroking of her stomach, with one hand or both. Fredrika felt a sense of panic on running into certain male colleagues in the corridor because she could feel their eyes boring into her. She had even considered raising the matter at a staff meeting, but could not find the right words.
They took Agne Nilsson to one of the visitor rooms with windows. The windowless interview rooms did not invite reasonable discussions. Nor was there any reason to treat members of the public not suspected of a crime the same way as criminals. So Joar went off to fetch coffee and Fredrika stood chatting to Agne Nilsson.
‘Perhaps you could tell us more about your group?’ said Joar when they were all seated with their coffee.
Agne Nilsson shifted in his chair, looking as though he did not really know where to begin.
‘It started two years ago,’ he said. ‘Jakob and I were good friends going back a lot longer than that. Grew up on the same block.’
He gave a sad smile and went on. The project had been Jakob Ahlbin’s idea, as these things so often were. It all started when he was confronted by a young man who stayed behind after one of his lectures. He was dressed like most other young men, but his hair – or lack of it – and a number of tattoos revealed his ideological home.
‘Don’t go thinking it’s that effing simple,’ he had told Jakob. ‘You stand there going on about what it’s like for those immigrants and how the rest of us should behave, but not all of us have a goddamn choice. You can be effing sure of that.’
It was the beginning of a long conversation. The lad was scared and unhappy. He had got into warped, right-wing circles at the tender age of fourteen, through his elder brother. Now he was nineteen, and about to leave school. His brother had left the movement some years before, moved away and found a job. He himself was stuck in Stockholm with useless school grades and nowhere to go, trapped in a circle of acquaintances he no longer felt he had anything in common with. And he had just met this girl. Nadima, from Syria.
‘It should be her family, not my mates, who’ve got problems with us being together,’ the boy had told Jakob. ‘But her dad’s as cool as anything about her meeting a Swedish guy. My mates, though, they’d kill us both if they knew.’