He met her gaze and gave a start. His jailer was crying. Good grief, when had he last seen her cry? Five years ago when her father had his heart attack? Tough as old boots, he was over eighty-five now and still far too hale and hearty for Spencer to anticipate any brighter prospects. Though it was naïve, of course, to imagine that the old devil’s demise would bring him any kind of salvation. Fathers-in-law from hell always had a way of coming back.
‘You’ve got to keep me informed, Spencer,’ she said quietly. ‘You can’t just leave me outside.’
Spencer frowned and prepared to defend himself.
‘I’ve never kept anything from you,’ he said. ‘I told you about Fredrika and I told you about the baby.’
She gave a hollow laugh.
‘Good God, Spencer, you were out almost the whole weekend without telling me where you’d got to.’
I didn’t know you cared, he thought wearily.
Out loud he said, ‘It may have seemed like that, but it wasn’t how I meant it.’
He cleared his throat.
‘As I told you before, Fredrika hasn’t been well during her pregnancy, so…’
‘And how’s it going to be later on?’ Eva interrupted. ‘Have you thought about that? Are you going to have the baby alternate weekends or weeks, or what’s the plan? Will you be bringing it along when we go out to dinner with our friends, and if so, how are you going to introduce it?’
She shook her head and went to check the food in the oven.
‘I thought we’d talked about this,’ said Spencer, and could hear how feeble it sounded.
Eva slammed the oven door shut.
‘You may have talked about it,’ she said. ‘We haven’t.’
She paused before she went on.
‘If there is such a thing as we now.’
As he opened his mouth to reply, she waved her index finger at him to tell him to be quiet.
‘I’ve resigned myself to the fact that you and I have felt for a long time that we needed to have other partners for our own well-being,’ she said mutedly, and took a deep breath. ‘But for you to decide to go off and start a family with another woman…’
She clapped her hand to her mouth and for the first time for several years he felt the urge to hold her.
‘How could things turn out like this, Spencer?’ she wept. ‘How could we get trapped in this relationship where neither of us is happy and we can’t love each other?’
Her words hit home and his mouth went dry.
She clearly had no idea what her own father had done.
Do I need to care? thought Spencer. What could possibly be worse than this?
Fredrika Bergman wedged herself behind the steering wheel and set off for Danderyd Hospital. The case had been coming to the boil all weekend, and now it was Monday, it had positively exploded. Two more bodies, one directly linked to the deaths of the Reverend and Mrs Ahlbin. A suspected perpetrator who in Joar and Peder’s judgement was more to be seen as a star witness. A psychiatrist who was trying to convince the police his patient was incapable of taking his own life, though past experience showed how wrong his judgement had been on previous occasions. And two clergymen, Sven Ljung and Ragnar Vinterman, who both seemed to know Johanna Ahlbin but had presented them with entirely contradictory views of her.
Coming away from the Ljungs’ flat at the weekend, Fredrika and Alex compared notes, and found that Elsie had been by far the more forthcoming of the two. Sven had not said a word, for example, about their own son’s addiction and the fact that Karolina Ahlbin had been at his side for several years. Alex actually rang him later in the day to ask straight out why he had kept it from the police, and received the following reply: ‘Because I feel so ashamed of my failure as a parent. And now I feel even more ashamed because I’ve dragged Karolina’s name through the mud by not saying anything.’
Fredrika had found the name and contact details of their son, but had to lower her expectations when she saw that he was currently detained under the law in an institution for the treatment of addiction. According to Elsie he was in a clinic outside Stockholm, where he refused to cooperate with staff and had no contact with the outside world. It seemed that his latest overdose might have caused some brain damage, but the doctors could not be sure. Fredrika was obliged to rule him out as a potential star witness.
Danderyd Hospital was where Fredrika herself was to give birth later that spring, and she felt a frisson of excitement as she went in through the main entrance. The hospital smell promptly brought her down to earth again. What was it about care institutions that always smelled so off-putting? Almost as if death itself had crept into the ventilation system and was breathing on everybody in turn as they came in or out through the doors.
Fredrika’s mobile phone bleeped in her pocket, and she took it out. A message from her mother to say that she and Fredrika’s father had enjoyed meeting Spencer at the weekend.
Shamefaced, she slipped the phone back into her jacket pocket. Her mother was under no obligation to understand or accept her daughter’s lifestyle. But it was nice if she did, even so. Since the weekend everything had felt much simpler, but also infinitely more difficult. Her parents had not been wrong to question how she was actually going to manage on her own once the baby was born. Spencer would pull his weight financially, of course, but Fredrika knew she faced disappointment on the practical and emotional fronts. A man of almost sixty who had never been a father before was very likely not to be the stuff of which nests were built.
Fredrika had already spoken on the phone to Göran Ahlgren, the duty doctor when Karolina Ahlbin was admitted. Today he received her in his office. He was good-looking, Fredrika caught herself thinking, and found she was smiling a little too broadly. Unfortunately he returned a smile of the same sort and looked her up and down with his sharp, granite-blue eyes. She estimated him to be somewhere between fifty and fifty-five.
‘Karolina Ahlbin,’ she said, trying to sound businesslike to hide her initial flirtation. ‘You were here when she came into A&E.’
The doctor nodded.
‘Yes I was. But I’m afraid I have no information beyond what I told you on the phone.’
‘Some new facts have come to light which rather complicate matters,’ said Fredrika, frowning. ‘Far too many people who knew Karolina have been assuring us that she was never a drug addict in her whole life.’
Göran Ahlgren put up his hands.
‘I can only base my opinion on what I saw and documented myself,’ he said magnanimously. ‘And the case I was presented with was a young woman’s extremely ravaged body. Bearing all the wretched marks of long-term addiction.’
‘All right,’ said Fredrika, opening her handbag. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’
She took out two photographs.
‘Is this the woman who came in the ambulance and identified herself as Karolina Ahlbin’s sister?’
‘Yes,’ Göran Ahlgren confirmed without hesitation.
Relieved, Fredrika put the picture of Johanna Ahlbin back in her handbag.
‘And this one,’ she said, showing the other photo, ‘is this the addict who died of an overdose? Identified by her sister as Karolina Ahlbin?’
The doctor took the picture and recoiled.
‘Impossible,’ he mumbled.
‘Sorry?’ said Fredrika, trying not to show how expectant she felt.
Göran Ahlgren shook his head.
‘No,’ he said in bewilderment. ‘That is, I don’t know.’
‘What is it you don’t know?’ Fredrika asked abruptly, taking the photo as the doctor passed it back.
‘I mean I don’t feel sure, suddenly. The woman in the picture is quite like the one who died here, but…’
The doctor gave a sigh of resignation.