‘Okay, I think that’s all,’ Alex said slowly, looking at her contorted face. ‘We’ve got a group meeting in the Den about another case in a minute or two.’
‘See you there, then,’ said Fredrika, getting up.
She was back in the corridor before she realised she had forgotten to bring up the matter she went to see Alex about in the first place.
The curtains were closed in the meeting room known as the Lions’ Den, and the place was like an overheated sauna. Alex Recht threw back the curtains to see light flakes of snow falling from the dark sky. The TV weather girl had promised that morning that the bad weather would move away by evening. Alex had his own views on that subject. The weather had been capricious ever since the start of the new year: days of snow and temperatures below zero alternating with rain and gales, fit to make anyone curse.
‘Bloody weather,’ said Peder as he came into the Den.
‘Dreadful,’ Alex said curtly. ‘Is Joar on his way?’
Peder nodded but said nothing, and Joar came into the room. The group’s assistant Ellen Lind was right behind him, along with Fredrika.
The newly installed projector up on the ceiling whirred away quietly in the background and all Alex’s attention was focused on the computer as he tried to coax it into action. The group waited patiently; they knew better than to point out that any one of them would be better at the technical stuff than their boss.
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ a gruff Alex said in the end, pushing the laptop aside. ‘As you may have noticed, this group hasn’t really been working as initially planned. We were brought together so we could be called on for particularly difficult cases, above all missing persons and particularly brutal violent crimes. And when Fredrika went down to part time, we were given Joar as back-up, for which we’re extremely grateful.’
Here, Alex looked at Joar, who met his eye without comment. There was something reserved and reticent about the young man that Alex found surprising. The contrast with the skilful but sometimes wayward Peder was striking. At first he had seen this as a positive thing, but within a couple of weeks he began to have his doubts. It was obvious Joar found Peder’s way of talking annoying and offensive, while Peder seemed frustrated by his new colleague’s calmness and flexibility. Pairing Joar with Fredrika Bergman would probably have been a better idea. But she was on reduced hours on doctor’s orders now, and hampered by this pregnancy that was taking so much out of her. Certificates referring to severe pain, sleep problems and nightmares crossed Alex’s desk, and when Fredrika did manage to come into the office, she looked so pale and weak that her colleagues were quite shocked.
‘It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that when it comes to the crunch, there aren’t enough of us and we need reinforcements, and in between times we’re often on loan to the Stockholm Police Homicide Department to help out with their cases. So the question has been asked: do we need to be a permanent group, or should we be dispersed among the Stockholm Police or the county CID instead?’
Peder was the one who looked most dismayed.
‘But, but…’
Alex held up a hand.
‘There’s been no formal decision yet,’ he said, ‘but I just wanted to let you all know that it’s on the cards.’
No one said a word, and the projector stopped whirring.
Alex fiddled with the papers he had in front of him on the desk.
‘Anyway, we’ve now got a case, well two actually, that our friends in the Norrmalm Police need a hand with. A couple in their sixties, Jakob and Marja Ahlbin, found dead yesterday evening in their flat by another couple who had been invited round for dinner. When nobody answered the door, and the other couple couldn’t get through on any of the phones either, they opened the door with their own key and found the pair dead in the bedroom. According to the preliminary police report, which is based mainly on a suicide note written by the dead husband, he shot his wife and then himself.’
The computer belatedly began to cooperate, and crime-scene pictures flashed up on the white screen behind Alex. Ellen and Joar each gave a start at the sight of the enlarged pictures of bodies with gunshot wounds, but Peder was spellbound.
He’s changed, Alex thought to himself. He wasn’t like that before.
‘According to the note, he had found out two days earlier that their elder daughter, Karolina, had died from a heroin overdose, and he saw no reason to carry on living. He himself was treated for serious and recurring bouts of depression all his adult life. Only this January he underwent ECT treatment, and he was on anti-depressants. A chronic sufferer, in fact.’
‘What’s ETC?’ asked Peder.
‘ECT,’ Alex corrected him. ‘Electroconvulsive therapy, it’s used in particularly difficult cases of depression. As a way of kick-starting the brain.’
‘Electric shocks,’ said Peder. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’
‘As Alex said, in controlled form it has had very positive benefits for severely ill patients,’ Joar interjected in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘The patient is under anaesthetic during the actual treatment and the vast majority show striking improvement.’
Peder stared at Joar but said nothing. He turned to Alex.
‘Why have we been saddled with this case? It’s already solved, isn’t it?’
‘It might not be,’ replied Alex. ‘The two people who found the couple say it’s impossible to believe that the man murdered his wife and then shot himself. They did recognise the weapon, a 22-calibre hunting pistol, because the two men would often go hunting together, but they were adamant when questioned that it would be entirely out of character for him to be so crazed by grief as to act like that.’
‘So what do these friends think did happen, then?’ asked Fredrika, making her first contribution to the meeting.
‘They think they must have been murdered,’ said Alex, giving her a look. ‘Both of them apparently held positions in the Swedish Church: he was a vicar and she was a cantor. Jakob Ahlbin has been quite prominent in recent years in debates about immigration. These friends of the couple claim they were such fervent believers that suicide simply wouldn’t have been on the cards. And it seems incomprehensible to them for Jakob to have received the news of his daughter’s death and not passed it on to his wife.’
‘So what do we do?’ asked Peder, still not convinced the case was worthy of their attention.
‘We’ll interview the two who found the couple again,’ Alex said firmly. ‘And we need to get hold of the Ahlbins’ younger daughter, Johanna, who has probably not been informed of her sister’s and parents’ deaths. That may prove tricky; no one’s managed to locate her yet. I dread the thought of the media releasing the names and pictures of the deceased before we find her.’
He looked at Joar and then at Peder.
‘I want you two as a team to interview the friends, once you’ve been to the scene of the crime. See if there seems any good reason to pursue this any further. Then divide your forces and interview other people if you need to. Find more people who knew them in the Church.’
As they were getting to their feet, Peder asked:
‘And what about the other case? You said there were two.’
Alex frowned.
‘The other one I’ve already allocated to Fredrika,’ he said. ‘Just a routine thing, an unidentified man found dead near the university this morning. He seems to have been in the middle of the road after dark and was run over by someone who didn’t dare to stop and hand himself over to the police. And don’t forget what I said.’
Peder and Joar waited.
‘Make sure you find the daughter double-quick. Nobody should have to get the news that their parents have died from the tabloid press.’
BANGKOK, THAILAND
The sun was just disappearing behind the skyscrapers when she realised she had a problem. It had been an incredibly hot day with temperatures way above normal, and she had been feeling hot and sticky since early that morning. She had had a long succession of meetings in stuffy rooms with no air conditioning and a picture had started to emerge. Or perhaps it was more of a suspicion. She could not decide which, but the follow-up work when she got home would undoubtedly answer all her questions.