‘Good,’ said Agne Nilsson, looking straight at them. ‘Because not a single bloody one of us believes Jakob could have done it: shot his wife and himself.’
Joar put his head on one side.
‘Sometimes people aren’t at all what they claim to be,’ he said mildly.
Just after 1 p.m. the news burst onto the website of one of the evening papers: ‘Gunshot vicar and wife: police suspect link to right-wing extremists’.
‘Damn and blast!’ roared Alex Recht, thumping his fist on the desk. ‘How the hell did that get out?’
In actual fact, there was no need to ask – things always leaked out at the preliminary enquiry stage. But Alex felt he had tried extra hard to stop it happening this time. And the truth was, very few people knew about their new line of enquiry.
‘The media are besieging us with calls,’ Ellen popped her head round the door to say. ‘What can we give them?’
‘Nothing,’ bellowed Alex. ‘Nothing at the moment. Have we managed to get hold of Johanna Ahlbin yet?’
Ellen shook her head.
‘No.’
‘And why not?’ groaned Alex. ‘Where the heck has the wretched girl got to?’
He hardly dared look at the computer screen from which pictures of Jakob Ahlbin were now staring back at him. It was all out there now, and there was no way of breaking the news to his younger daughter in person. The only things the journalists had missed out on were the names and pictures of the two daughters.
At least we tried, Alex thought wearily.
Ellen had been putting all her effort into trying to locate Johanna. The girl’s employer and colleagues had provided them with the names and numbers of friends who might know her whereabouts, but no one could tell them where she was, how she was or how much she already knew.
‘It’s too bloody awful,’ Alex said under his breath. ‘Having to hear news like that from the media.’
‘But we did try,’ said Ellen, looking unhappy.
‘Yes, I suppose we did,’ said Alex, turning away from the computer.
‘Oh by the way, here’s something the assistant in the technical section sent over,’ said Ellen, putting a plastic folder on his desk. ‘Print-outs of lecture material they found on Jakob’s hard drive.’
‘Anything useful?’
‘No, I don’t think so. But the name on the notepad could be of interest. Though I don’t really know, of course.’
‘Notepad?’ muttered Alex, looking through the sheets of paper from the folder.
He found it right at the back. An unobtrusive little fawn jotter with just one word on it, ‘Muhammad’, and then a mobile number.
‘Where was this found?’ asked Alex.
‘In a locked drawer in his desk. It was underneath a pen tray.’
Something he had hidden away, concluded Alex.
Perhaps Muhammad was an illegal migrant he knew personally, or someone who had sought him out for some other reason.
‘Have we checked the phone number against our database?’
‘I just did,’ she said, looking pleased with herself. ‘And something came up, in fact, related to a passport reported missing. The man’s complete name and address were there.’
She handed him another slip of paper. Alex gave her a smile in return.
‘No criminal record,’ Ellen added, and then had to go because her mobile was ringing.
Alex wondered what he ought to do next. He looked at the name and number on the slip, and then at the plastic folder with all the other material. And then he looked at the report of the lost passport, which Ellen had printed out. All these passports that ‘vanished’. Without them, the stream of illegal migrants would have a hard time, Alex knew that.
We’ve turned Europe into a fortress as impregnable as Fort Knox, he thought grimly. At the price of losing control of the people who are going in and out of our country. Shameful for all concerned.
He gazed out of the window. Clear blue sky and brilliant sunshine, and the weekend only a few hours away. He blinked. There was no way he could face a whole weekend at home with Lena behaving like a stranger. She had become so inaccessible. For reasons he couldn’t put into words, he felt he could not talk to her about what had happened or the way the whole situation was affecting him.
Why not? wondered Alex. We’ve always been able to talk about everything.
Perhaps he ought to give it a try. Perhaps. But either way, he was definitely going to try to put in a few hours’ work over the weekend.
At first it looked as though the week was going to end as badly as it had begun. Peder Rydh was instructed to go through all the phone lists the police had had from Telia and from Jakob Ahlbin’s mobile supplier, while Joar got to go down with Fredrika to talk to Agne Nilsson. Peder felt as though he was going to blow sky high with frustration, but then he heard he was to be one of those interviewing Tony Svensson that afternoon, and calmed down. As he went through the lists, he even felt a bit exhilarated.
Every time he had to deal with material from phone tapping or surveillance, he was amazed at the vast number of calls people made every day. Often you could work out some sort of pattern, of course, like married couples who sometimes rang each other twice a day and sometimes not at all. But there were lots of other numbers and contacts to analyse. Contacts that could seem highly interesting in terms of timing, but which on closer examination turned out to be the local pizzeria, for example.
In the case of Jakob Ahlbin’s phone and any contact he might have had with Tony Svensson, it proved quite simple. Peder grinned and punched the air as he found a match.
Tony Svensson had rung Jakob Ahlbin on three occasions, and each time it was a very short call, making Peder assume he had got through to Jakob’s answering machine. They would never be able to recreate the actual content, but the very fact that Svensson had rung Ahlbin was proof enough.
He hurried out of his office and over to Alex’s. But he hovered uncertainly in the doorway; his boss looked even grumpier than usual. Peder gave a discreet cough.
‘Yes?’ said Alex severely, but softened when he saw who it was. ‘Oh, come on in.’
Somewhat heartened, Peder went in and showed Alex the telephone lists.
‘Good,’ said Alex, ‘good. Draw up an application to the prosecutor double quick; I want this bloke brought in for unlawful menace before the end of the day. Particularly now this crap’s all over the media.’
A warm feeling spread through Peder’s body. So he wasn’t being left entirely out in the cold. But with the warmth came the stress. Who had leaked the right-wing angle to the media?
He was heading for the door when Alex said: ‘Er, you haven’t got a minute, have you?’
It had been too good to be true, of course. Even before he sat down, he knew what Alex had on his mind. But the way he chose to express it came as a complete surprise.
‘In this workplace, as long as I’m in charge,’ he said, ‘a croissant is a croissant. And nothing else,’ he said, emphasising every syllable.
I’m gonna die, thought Peder. I’m gonna die of shame and I damn well deserve it, too.
He scarcely dared look at Alex, who went on relentlessly.
‘And when one of my staff – for private or other reasons – is in such a state that he can’t tell the difference between a pastry and something else, then I expect the person in question to get to grips with it and sort himself out.’
He stopped and fixed Peder with a look.
‘Understood?’
‘Understood,’ whispered Peder.
And wondered how on earth he could carry on doing his job.
They met in the living room of the older man. It was their third meeting in swift succession, and neither of them felt particularly comfortable in the company of the other. But there was no way round it, in view of recent events.
‘We knew it would generate a lot of attention,’ said the younger man. ‘It was hardly a surprise to any of us that a vicar committing suicide would be big news.’