Alex sighed and kneaded his face with his hands.
‘But why Marja?’
Nobody responded.
‘Why do you also kill the wife of the man you’re trying to silence? And the argument that the murderer was taken by surprise to find her at home doesn’t hold water, because he could just have taken care of Jakob some other time.’
‘Maybe it was urgent?’ Peder said. ‘And if you want it to look like suicide, there aren’t that many places besides the victim’s own home to choose from.’
‘What about the suicide note?’ asked Fredrika. ‘How did it look? Do we think it was written in advance, or what?’
‘It was printed out from Jakob’s computer,’ replied Joar. ‘The document had been saved onto the hard disk and it was dated the same day, and saved at about the time of the murder, according to the computer.’
‘Let’s sketch ourselves a profile of the murderer,’ said Alex with a degree of excitement in his voice. ‘Someone stages the Karolina death on the Thursday. Someone goes out to Ekerö and gets into the house unnoticed to fetch the murder weapon. Someone goes round to Jakob and Marja’s flat on the Tuesday with a plan all worked out, and shoots them both in the head after first forcing Jakob to sign his own suicide note. What conclusions can we draw from all that?’
Before anyone could say anything, he started answering his own question:
‘One. The murderer knows the Ahlbin family extremely well. Two. The murderer has some level of access to the Ahlbins’ flat and their daughters’ house; he’s patently been able to get into both without any visible damage to the front doors, and it’s only in the latter case that someone could have let him or her in voluntarily. Three.’
Alex paused.
‘Three. The murderer must have known the family for some time, since he or she was able to play on both Jakob’s state of health and the fact that Karolina was the daughter he was closest to.’
He stopped.
‘Four,’ said Fredrika. ‘The murderer thought – or at least had reason to think – that Karolina Ahlbin wouldn’t come forward and reveal that she wasn’t really dead.’
The others looked at her.
‘Quite right,’ Alex said slowly, with a nod of approval, but Peder just looked confused.
‘Why didn’t they just kill her?’ queried Alex. ‘If it was vital for her to disappear, and I think we can assume it was, why not get her out of the way permanently?’
Fredrika went pale.
‘Maybe they did. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard from her.’
Joar shook his head.
‘No, that doesn’t make sense. Why go to the bother of killing her twice? Why not do away with her straight away and then use her actual death to explain why Jakob killed his wife and then himself? To my way of thinking, it seems much more plausible that she was in on the plot.’
‘Because there was no opportunity, or because she’s part of the set-up,’ Alex declared. ‘Nothing else fits.’
‘In view of her good relations with her father,’ said Fredrika with her head on one side and a hand resting on her stomach, ‘perhaps the most likely answer is that they couldn’t get hold of her when they needed to kill her.’
‘True,’ said Alex. ‘But that still leaves us with the question: where was she then, and where is she now? Have we talked to many of her friends?’
‘We haven’t had time yet,’ said Peder, sounding tired. ‘We haven’t been treating it as a priority, because we thought she was dead, plain and simple. And it’s been quite hard to track them down; we haven’t had access to her phone records or emails. And she’s got no formal place of work, either, has she?’
‘If we tell the media we’re looking for her and issue a description, we’re going to look like idiots,’ said Alex, thinking hard about what best to do next. ‘But I wouldn’t mind betting it’ll leak out anyway.’
‘Not if we keep a tight lid on things,’ objected Joar.
‘If it doesn’t leak out from here, it will from the hospital,’ Alex said wryly. ‘There’s not a chance it won’t be out by the end of the evening.’
Fredrika leant forward.
‘So let’s pre-empt them,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘We hold a press conference,’ she said. ‘Then we’re first with the news. Classic media logic. If you want ownership of how a story’s presented and followed up, you have to be the one to break it.’
Alex looked in Ellen’s direction. It was going to be a long working day.
‘Can you get together with the information department and write a press release? Meanwhile, I’ll try to get some support for this among the higher echelons.’
He looked at his watch again.
‘Say we’ll hold it two hours from now, at six. Until then let’s all try to make sure nothing leaks out.’
Media training was evidently increasingly popular these days, but any opportunities of that kind had unfortunately passed Alex Recht by. So he felt pretty lost when he took his place on the platform for the meeting with the press.
He made a short statement of which the gist was: the police had received new information to prove beyond doubt that it was not Jakob and Marja Ahlbin’s daughter who had died the Thursday before they were found shot dead in their flat. It would therefore be appreciated if anyone with any information about the current whereabouts of either Karolina or Johanna Ahlbin could come forward. Neither of them was suspected of any crime; the police merely wanted their help in order to reach a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding their parents’ deaths.
‘But what about Johanna?’ asked one of the reporters. ‘How can you not suspect her of any crime? She must have known it wasn’t her sister that she came to hospital with and identified.’
Alex took a sip of water even though he was not in the least thirsty.
‘That’s just the kind of point we need the opportunity to clarify,’ he said, trying to sound authoritative. ‘We need to know exactly what the circumstances were that led to an unknown woman being identified as Karolina Ahlbin a week ago.’
Fredrika was standing right at the back, observing her boss throughout the short press conference. On the whole she thought he made a pretty good job of it.
Just as Alex was winding up the conference, her mobile vibrated in her jacket pocket. She quickly left the room so she could speak undisturbed.
A faint hope of it being Spencer crept over her from nowhere. They had not been in touch with each other that day and she was missing him.
To hell with that, she thought wearily. Missing Spencer was like wishing for a white Christmas. If it happens, it happens, but it’s not worth getting your hopes up.
When she was able to answer the phone, it wasn’t Spencer, of course, but a colleague from the national CID. He introduced himself as one of the investigators working on the series of security van robberies to which the man Yusuf, run over at the university, could be linked.
‘We’ve found something that I thought you’d like to know about,’ he said.
Fredrika was all ears.
‘When the case came to us we did another scene-of-crime investigation,’ he said, ‘and we found a mobile phone with the dead man’s prints on. It was almost twenty-five metres from the body, so it was probably flung out of his jacket pocket when the car initially rammed into him.’
There was a crackle on the line; reception was not very good just where Fredrika happened to be standing.
‘We took all the information off it and got hold of details of the calls made to and from it, from the phone company. It had only been used a few times, and in all cases the incoming calls were from unregistered pay-as-you-go accounts.’
‘Yes?’
There was a sound of paper rustling.
‘Sven Ljung,’ he said eventually.
‘Sven Ljung?’ Fredrika echoed in astonishment.
‘Yes, he’s the listed subscriber to the phone which the hit-and-run victim’s mobile had been in touch with. It was Ljung he rang; two short calls.’