Peder rang off with a lingering sense of achievement. Sven Ljung’s car seemed to be implicated in robberies as well as murders. The net was closing and Peder smiled.
It was afternoon in Bangkok by the time Fredrika got hold of Andreas Blom. He sounded troubled, to say the least, and expressed great concern at the information on the desk in front of him.
‘The really distressing thing,’ he said in his lilting Norrland accent, ‘is that she sat here insisting that her name was Karolina Mona Ahlbin. And that she needed a new passport because she’d been robbed in the street. But when I rang the Swedish tax authorities it turned out to be impossible that she was who she claimed to be, because the woman with that name and that personal identity number was deceased.’
‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that she was able to come out with another person’s name and ID number, just like that?’
‘Good Lord, I did what I could. And it’s not that unusual for people in her situation to use double identities.’
Fredrika’s brain attempted to rearrange itself into accepting the idea of Karolina Ahlbin as a drug addict after all. In spite of the irregularities where her passport was concerned, the evidence was pretty overwhelming.
‘What exactly – exactly – did she say her problem was?’ she asked slowly.
‘That she’d had all her valuables stolen, like money, passport and plane tickets, and that she’d had a problem in the hotel where she’d been staying, and all her things had somehow vanished from her hotel room. Though she kept quiet about the hotel part to start with and didn’t bring it up until I confronted her with our other information.’
‘Did you ring the hotel she claimed she’d been staying at? I don’t mean the one where her luggage and the drugs were seized.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Andreas Blom. ‘But only after she’d left. And they weren’t prepared to back up her story at all. They said she was lying and had come stumbling into their foyer saying she had been mugged and was a hotel guest. But none of the staff recognised her and she wasn’t in their computer system.’
‘All right,’ Fredrika said in a measured tone. ‘All right, let’s just see if we can tease this out…’
She broke off, realising this was really a matter to discuss with a colleague rather than a diplomat in Thailand. She took a breath and carried on anyway.
‘Why call the police if she was only hours from being declared wanted by them for drug offences?’
‘Pardon?’ said Andreas Blom.
‘The raid on the hotel where she was supposedly staying happened only hours after she left it. The time of her report of the mugging, according to what you faxed over, was more or less the same. Why would she contact the police and draw all that unnecessary attention to herself at such a critical juncture?’
‘But if she really was robbed,’ began Andreas Blom, ‘then she needed a new passport to get home on…’
‘Exactly. And she needed a copy of an official police report of a stolen passport before the Swedish Embassy could help her get a new one. But why go to the police just then and not earlier?’
Andreas Blom went quiet.
‘Yes, one might well ask,’ he conceded.
When Fredrika did not respond he went on:
‘It isn’t the Embassy’s business to take a view on the question of guilt; all we can do is offer a person in Karolina Ahlbin’s position good advice.’
‘I do realise that,’ Fredrika said quickly, though she suspected that Karolina Ahlbin had not received the support she deserved.
She ended the conversation courteously and went back to her notes. She shuffled through the papers faxed over from Bangkok. A copy of the passport found in the hotel room that was said to be Karolina Ahlbin’s. Therese Björk’s. With Karolina’s photograph in it. But how…?
Fredrika rang Andreas Blom a second time.
‘Sorry to bother you again. I just wanted to ask whether you’ve had a chance since then to take a closer look at the passport which you at the Embassy thought was Karolina’s, the one that was supposedly a Therese Björk’s?’
‘The Thai police have got it,’ replied Andreas Blom. ‘But we’ve been in contact with them since she disappeared and they’ve decided it’s a forgery.’
Fredrika thought about this. A young woman falsely declared dead in Stockholm who then turned up in Bangkok with a false passport, belonging to a person who had an officially registered ID in Sweden. Who would dare undertake such a plan?
Someone who knew Therese Björk was not going to notice or have any objections to her identity being used to muddy some drug dealing in Thailand.
A suspicion had been born and was growing stronger with every passing second. It took her less than two minutes to get Therese Björk’s personal details from the police address register. She learned that Therese was a year younger than Karolina Ahlbin and registered as living at her mother’s address.
Following a hunch, Fredrika tapped Therese’s personal identity number into the police database. She featured in a number of cases and had convictions for several minor crimes and misdemeanours. Fredrika moved on to the register of suspects. She came up there, too, suspected of assaulting a man she claimed was trying to rape her.
After a moment’s hesitation she lifted the receiver and rang the number. She would just have time before the morning meeting in the Den. Someone picked up after the fifth ring.
‘My name’s Fredrika Bergman,’ said Fredrika. ‘I wonder if I could ask a few questions about your daughter Therese?’
For the first time in decades, he felt he was acting decisively and proactively in the issue that had come to colour his entire adult life. Too many years had gone by already and his idea would probably turn out to have come far too late. But that was not the most important thing; Spencer Lagergren had made up his mind. And the journey he was now embarking on could only be made alone.
No one must know, he decided. At least, not until afterwards.
He drove from Uppsala towards Stockholm and on to Jönköping. It looked as though the cloud might break and let a bit of sun through. A beautiful winter’s day in early March. With some irony he noted that he had chosen a very attractive backdrop for his project.
His thoughts went involuntarily back to those early days with Eva. The sense of solidarity they had shared, the life’s work they had decided to make a reality, these had no counterpart in his later life. There had been occasions when he had almost wondered if he ever loved her, but they were very few in number. Of course he had loved her, and it would be absurd to maintain anything different. The problem was that it was a love built on the unhealthiest of foundations. He had confused passion and attraction in a way that could be described as unsuccessful at best and disastrous at worst. As if you could build lifelong love on physical desire. As if you could retain physical desire when the party was over and the daily grind set in, when the body that had been a land of exploration and adventure became the most familiar domestic territory.
He found it impossible to remember which of them had relaxed their hold on the other first. There was so much of their past that he had chosen to lock into that basement room marked Forgotten.
How could we do this to ourselves?
Most of the guilt indisputably lay at his father-in-law’s door. Father-in-law knew Spencer’s darkest secret, the secret so shameful that he had never admitted it to his parents or friends. The fact that he had discovered just before he got engaged that he had fathered the child another woman was expecting. That he had chosen to buy a house in another university town in another part of the country and shift his career from Lund to Uppsala. That he had let down the other woman even though there was still time to do the right thing, in favour of something that seemed more desirable.