‘We’re working on it,’ said the other man. ‘We’ll get back to you when we’ve got something.’
Peder was about to hang up when he remembered another thing Alex had asked him to do:
‘Keep an eye out for Marja Ahlbin in the investigation.’
‘But she’s dead, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, but it’s not impossible you’ll find some earlier contact between them.’
His mouth went dry as he said the words. Alex had told him that Marja was behind some of the threats to Jakob.
Marja and Sven, he thought. Was it your fault your families fell out?
As a little girl, Fredrika loved jigsaw puzzles. She had done her first thousand-piece jigsaw at the age of ten. As her grandfather put it, she had one heck of an eye for detail and a memory like an elephant.
‘Magic,’ her mother called it, and stroked her hair.
Alex gave Fredrika fifteen minutes to engage in a bit of magic before they went down to meet Johanna Ahlbin. The new information from the CID was duly incorporated into the investigation, which had now been in progress for a week and seemed to be approaching some kind of resolution.
‘It’s gone quickly,’ said Alex.
Fredrika could not contradict him. It had gone quickly, and it brought a sense of relief to have got as far as an interview with the elusive Johanna Ahlbin.
Why did you leave them in the lurch? Fredrika wondered. And what the hell did your mother have to do with it all?
This last point took her breath away. To the extent that she had felt obliged to ring the library again and ask what their procedures were. The librarian was adamant. Anybody borrowing a computer for internet use had to provide ID. That made it very improbable that it could have been anyone other than Marja who sent the email.
The technical division went through Marja’s phone lists again and found that at one of the two other critical times she had been in the vicinity of the Seven-Eleven store in question. Fredrika rang the store, but they had no way of checking who had been on a specific computer at any given time.
Circumstantial evidence, thought Fredrika. Sometimes that’s as good as it gets.
If she excluded Marja’s potential involvement in all that had happened, Johanna emerged as the most likely perpetrator. Her parents would have no hesitation in letting her into their home, and several of their informants had mentioned her problematic relationship with her father. And he somehow seemed to be the one all this was directed against. According to the supposed suicide note, it was Jakob and not Marja who fired the fatal shots. And it was Jakob who had been threatened, not Marja, though she might possibly have been the one issuing the threats.
A movement from the baby she was carrying interrupted her deliberations.
‘God, how you scared me,’ whispered Fredrika, running both hands over her stomach.
Her eyes filled and it was hard to breathe. There was too much happening all at once. The baby, work, Spencer. She took a gulp of water and felt her body absorb the liquid. Permanently stressed and worried. Never satisfied for more than the occasional day.
The baby obviously had to be her priority. Spencer could be, if he tried a bit harder. She scrunched up a bit of paper fiercely and threw it into the bin. But the blessed man never did, did he? And now he was off on some sudden mission he refused to let her in on.
So I shan’t give a damn about him for now, Fredrika decided, and went back to her notes.
She stared at the short list of questions she had drawn up for Johanna Ahlbin.
We were looking for her for several days, Fredrika thought, but we should have been looking for Karolina at the same time – or in fact even more urgently.
Where was Karolina now? Was she still in Thailand? And how did Thailand fit into the picture, anyway? At the Embassy, Karolina had said that she was the victim of some kind of plot, that she most definitely was not Therese Björk, and that she had never set foot in the hotel where her possessions had been found in the raid.
Fredrika gathered up her papers and prepared to go down to Johanna Ahlbin. Another thought flashed through her mind as she closed the door of her room behind her.
Why had nobody else known Karolina was away, and reacted to the news of her death in Stockholm? Elsie and Sven had not questioned the fact that she was apparently still in the country. Nor had Ragnar Vinterman, nor Jakob Ahlbin’s psychiatrist. Admittedly the police had not interviewed all that many of Karolina’s own friends and acquaintances. But even once her name and fate were all over the media, no one came forward and told the police that Karolina was in fact abroad and could not possibly be lying dead at the hospital.
Why had she left the country on the quiet? Fredrika wondered. And when, if ever, would she be back?
Sudden insight made the ground sway beneath her feet for a moment. There was one person, someone they had discounted, who might just be able to answer those questions. Someone the police had never contacted because it had been dismissed as fruitless, but that person had been very close to Karolina.
She pushed open the door of her room again and thudded back down into her desk chair. It only took her a minute to find the number she was looking for. She waited patiently for an answer as it rang, and rang.
The snow started to fall a few hours before lunch. With tired eyes she watched the heavens through the window. The heavens, the place where the God who had failed her so often was said to be.
I got nothing out of loving You, she thought sullenly, feeling not a shred of fear.
Few people thought of her as old, but judgements of that kind could not have been more wrong. She was old, tired and unhappy after years of difficulties and complications. In those first times of trial she had turned to church, and to the Lord who watched over them all, but in the end she had got so dreadfully tired of her prayers never being heard, so she stopped putting her hands together when it was time to pray in the services at church.
‘He never listens,’ she whispered in response to her husband, when he discreetly tried to correct her.
At first they had argued about it, because her husband refused to accept the hard words she directed at their Lord.
‘That’s blasphemy,’ he hissed in her ear. ‘And in church, what’s more!’
But what else could she do? The two sons she had borne, and initially seen as a blessing, had developed into a curse like a great bruise on her soul. She had expected them to grow up strong and be each other’s closest friend, but they had turned out as different as Cain and Abel. And she scarcely saw either of them these days. She scarcely missed the elder, who had done his younger brother such harm. But the younger one. He had always been a bit weaker, a bit more lost and a much kinder, better person than anyone else in the family; he had never really been able to cope with being perpetually in second place, overshadowed by his more successful brother.
I saw it too late, she thought as she watched the snow-flakes fall from the grey sky. And now there’s nothing I can do.
She was so deep in thought that she did not register his steps behind her.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘The devil himself,’ she said.
He gave a faint cough. His blue eyes sought out something else to look at, down in the street. They came to rest on a single car, parked by the pavement.
‘They’ve been parked there since yesterday,’ he said, so quietly that she could not initially make out what he had said.
‘Who?’ she eventually asked, puzzled.
A tired finger was pointing at her.
‘There’s something we need to talk about,’ he said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before the whole thing goes to hell.’
She looked at him for a long time.
‘I know,’ she said, feeling the tears welling up inside her. ‘I already know it all.’
The first thing that struck Alex and Fredrika was that Johanna looked quite unlike her pictures in the Ekerö house. They were both taken aback to see the tall, attractive woman with long, fair hair waiting for them at the appointed time in the big lobby of the police building. Above all they were surprised by how calm and collected she seemed, since these were qualities rarely revealed in photographs.