‘We left the door open so we’d hear you coming,’ she said.
They went with her into the living room, where her husband was waiting. They both looked tired and unhappy.
‘Let me assure you we won’t stay any longer than strictly necessary,’ said Alex, taking a seat in one of the armchairs round the coffee table.
‘We do want to help,’ sighed Sven Ljung, dramatically flinging his arms wide. ‘And it’s all over the media now, as well. Have you found Johanna?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Alex. ‘But we have to hope she’ll get in touch when she sees the news.’
The elderly couple looked at each other and nodded. Yes, she was bound to get in touch, they seemed to be saying.
‘We’ve got a few more questions about your relationship with the Ahlbins,’ Alex said in a voice that was soft but unmistakably firm. ‘So we’d like to ask you those. Separately.’
Neither Elsie nor Sven replied, so Alex went on.
‘If I talk to Sven here, then maybe Fredrika can talk to Elsie in one of the other rooms. Then we won’t have to bother messing around at the police station.’
He was smiling, but the message was crystal clear. The couple looked confused and anxious, and he tried to reassure them by saying it was perfectly routine in the circumstances.
Fredrika went with Elsie into the kitchen, closing the door behind them, and sat down at the little dining table. The baby was lying still, for now.
You must be asleep, she thought, trying and failing to suppress a smile.
‘Your first?’ asked Elsie, nodding in the direction of Fredrika’s stomach.
The smile turned to a grimace. She preferred not to talk about the baby to strangers at all.
But she answered with a ‘Yes’ to avoid seeming rude.
For a minute she feared the older woman was going to start talking about when she was pregnant herself, but luckily she did not have to listen to any stories of that kind.
‘Jakob and Marja Ahlbin,’ Fredrika said in a more demanding voice than she intended, to show that further enquiries about her unborn child were not welcome.
Her interviewee looked tense and doubtful.
‘So how were things between the four of you recently?’
Elsie seemed at a loss.
‘Much as they’d been for quite a while, I suppose,’ she said eventually. ‘Not as good as they had been, but still good enough for us to get together now and then.’
‘And why was that?’ asked Fredrika. ‘Things not being as warm between you, I mean.’
Elsie looked uncomfortable.
‘Sven can really tell you more about that than I can,’ she said. ‘He and Jakob were the ones who had the disagreement.’
‘What did they disagree about?’
The older woman said nothing.
Fredrika softened.
‘You needn’t be afraid of telling me things that seem sensitive,’ she said, putting a hand on Elsie’s arm. ‘I promise to be as discreet as I possibly can.’
Elsie still did not speak. The kitchen tap was dripping into the sink. Fredrika had to stop herself getting up and turning it off properly.
‘They fell out, some years ago,’ Elsie said in a feeble voice.
‘It was over Jacob’s… activities.’
Fredrika waited.
‘The fact that he was hiding refugees,’ Elsie clarified. ‘Or planning to.’
‘And Sven objected to that?’
‘Hmm, it wasn’t that simple. It was more that Sven… well, he’s quite practical in his way of thinking, and I think he reckoned Jakob was taking far too great a risk. And not getting anything in return.’
Fredrika frowned.
‘Surely there’s never been any money in hiding illegal migrants?’
‘No, and that was exactly what Sven felt was so unfair,’ Elsie said, her voice stronger now. ‘That Jakob intended opening house and home to people on the run without earning a penny for it himself. Sven reckoned a lot of the people who ended up here had significant resources. After all, it costs a fortune to escape to Sweden these days. And so Sven thought that, if they had that much, they probably had a little bit more. Jakob was livid. He called Sven selfish, and a fool.’
With every justification, thought Fredrika. But she kept her mouth shut.
‘Then it was a year before we spoke to each other again,’ Elsie said, and had to clear her throat. ‘But we live so close and, I mean, you can’t help bumping into each other occasionally. Once we’d met like that a few times, we gradually started seeing each other again. It all felt fine. Not like before, but fine.’
The kitchen was cold and a shiver ran through Fredrika’s body. She looked through her notes and one thing leapt out at her.
‘You said Jakob “intended opening house and home”?’ she enquired.
‘Yes.’
‘But that was surely something he was already doing, not intending to do?’
Elsie looked nonplussed for a moment, but then shook her head firmly.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Neither of those things. It was something he had done in the past, and was thinking of starting again.’
‘I don’t quite follow.’
‘Jakob and Marja had a lot to do with refugee groups in the ’70s and ’80s, and were involved in a network that gave shelter to people in need. One of the things they did was to hide people in the basement of their house out in Ekerö. They carried on with that into the ’90s, until 1992 I think. Then they decided to take a more hands-off approach. Until Jakob started thinking along new lines a few years ago. But it never came to anything.’
Fredrika wondered if Elsie knew more than she was letting on. It was a bit suspicious that she kept saying ‘I think’, only to deliver some very concrete bit of information like a date.
But curiosity got the upper hand and she pushed away the idea that something might be wrong.
‘Why did nothing come of his plans?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elsie said evasively. ‘But I think his ideas caused some division in the family. Marja wasn’t at all as committed to it as Jakob. And then we heard the Ekerö house had been transferred to their daughters’ names. Neither of them were involved in their dad’s activities as far as I know. Particularly not Johanna.’
‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘We understand she didn’t really share her father’s view on the issue.’
Elsie lowered her voice.
‘Sven doesn’t really want me to say anything about this, he thinks things like that should be kept within the family, but I’ll tell you anyway, since the Ahlbin family scarcely exists any more. We were round at Jakob and Marja’s for dinner once, at about the time Jakob was talking about getting back into his old activities, and their daughters were there. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife when we started talking about asylum seekers and their plight.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Johanna got very, very worked up. I don’t remember exactly what sparked it off, probably a combination of things. She started crying and left the table. Jakob seemed shaken, too, but he was better at keeping things inside.’
‘And you got no sense of what the conflict was really about?’
‘No, not at all. It sounded like something from years before; I mean, Johanna only saw the family on rare occasions. I remember she shouted something like, “So you’re going to destroy everything again?” but I’ve no idea what she meant by it. How could I?’
Elsie gave a strained laugh.
‘Anyway, that was when Sven fell out with Jakob,’ she said in conclusion.
Fredrika crossed her legs, shifting her weight on the chair. It was going to be so nice the day the baby was born and her body was her own again.
Then her eyes fell on Elsie’s hand, which was gripping a water glass. The hand was shaking and Elsie’s eye was twitching.
She wants to tell me something, Fredrika realised, and decided to bide her time.
Elsie did not speak, however, so Fredrika decided to help things along.