‘You have entered the wrong password. Please try again.’
She tried three more times. Each time the same message. She swallowed hard.
Something’s going wrong. Really wrong.
And another part of her mind threw up the thought: should she, in fact, be scared?
STOCKHOLM
Peder and Joar drove in silence through Kungsholmen, over St Erik’s Bridge and on towards Odenplan where the elderly couple had been found dead. Peder was at the wheel, racing to every red light. A suspicion had planted itself in the back of his mind after the croissant incident in the staff room. Joar had not even cracked a smile when Peder came out with his funny cock joke. That was bad. Clearly a sign. Peder had got better at observing those over the years. Signs. Signs that a colleague was of the other persuasion. Batting for the other side. Gay.
Not that he had anything against it. Absolutely not. Just as long as he didn’t try it on with him. Then he’d see him in hell.
He squinted sideways at Joar’s profile. His colleague’s face was remarkably finely drawn, almost like a painting. A face like a mask. The eyes were ice-blue, the pupils never dilated. The lips were a little too red, the eyelashes implausibly long. Peder screwed up his eyes to get a better look. If Joar wore make-up, he could take his own car in future.
The traffic lights turned from green to red and Peder had to put his foot down to get through. He did not need to look at Joar to know his colleague disapproved.
‘Hard to know whether to stop or speed up when it’s like that,’ said Peder, mainly to have something to say.
‘Mmm,’ responded Joar, looking the other way. ‘What was the name of the street?’
‘Dalagatan. They lived on the top floor. Big flat, apparently.’
‘Are the bodies still there?’
‘No, and forensics are supposed to be finished now, so we can go in.’
They said nothing as Peder parked the car. He fished out the parking permit and slunk after his colleague into the building. Joar ignored the lift and set off up the five flights of stairs to the couple’s flat. Peder followed, wondering why the hell they weren’t taking the lift when it was so many floors up.
The stairwell was freshly decorated, the walls white and shiny. The steps were marble, the window frames painted brown. The lift shaft in the middle was an old-fashioned, wrought-iron affair. Peder’s thoughts went to the woman from whom he had separated, Ylva. She hated confined spaces. Peder had once tried to seduce her in his parents’ guest cloakroom during a boring family dinner, but Ylva found making love in such a small space so stressful that her skin came up in bumps and she couldn’t breathe properly.
They had laughed over that story countless times.
But not this past eighteen months, Peder observed bitterly. There hadn’t been much bloody laughing at all.
There was no sign of forced entry to the couple’s front door. The label on the letterbox simply said ‘Ahlbin’. Joar rang the bell and a uniformed police officer opened the door. He and a crime-scene technician were the only ones there.
‘All right if we come in?’ asked Peder.
The officer nodded.
‘They’re just doing the windows, then they’ll be finished on the forensic side.’
Peder and Joar advanced into the flat.
‘Was it rented?’ asked Joar.
The officer shook his head.
‘Owner-occupied. They’d lived here since 1999.’
Peder gave a whistle as he went round the flat. It was spacious and had high ceilings. All the rooms had beautiful stucco work and the expanses of white wall were sparingly hung with paintings and photographs.
Peder thought Fredrika would have loved this flat, though he had not the least idea how her own home was decorated.
Why was that? Why didn’t people go round to each other’s places nowadays? The fact that he had never been to Fredrika’s was not very surprising, but with other colleagues it was harder to understand. He hated the lonely evenings in the flat where he had moved the previous autumn. Although he was buying rather than renting, he hadn’t done any work on it. His mother made curtains and bought cushions and tablecloths, but when he showed no sign of wanting to help she lost interest. He could hardly blame her.
The couple’s flat had windows looking out in three directions and there were four main rooms. The kitchen and living-room area was open plan. A sliding wall divided the living room and library. Then there was a guest bedroom and the bedroom where the two bodies had been found.
Peder and Joar stopped at the door and surveyed the room. They had both seen the crime-scene report written by the officers who were first to arrive. The initial assessment would presumably hold good even once forensics had finished their job. Jakob Ahlbin had shot his wife in the back of the head. She must have been standing with her back to the doorway, where Jakob had presumably been. So she had first fallen headlong onto the bed but subsequently slipped onto the floor. Then her husband had walked round the bed, lain down on it and shot himself in the temple. The farewell letter had been on the bedside table.
There was nothing in the room to indicate any sort of struggle before either of them died. No furniture seemed to have been moved; nothing was broken or smashed. The woman was in her dressing gown when they found her. The indications were that she had started getting ready for the guests they were expecting about an hour later.
‘Do we have a more exact time of death?’ asked Peder.
‘Their friends found them at seven and the pathologist estimated they’d been dead scarcely two hours. So they must have died at about five.’
‘Has anyone interviewed the neighbours?’ asked Joar. ‘The shots must have echoed through the building.’
The officer standing just behind them nodded.
‘Yes, we’ve talked to everyone who was at home, and they heard the shots. But it all happened so fast and the residents here are all fairly elderly and couldn’t be sure exactly where the sound was coming from. One of them even rang the police, but when the patrol car turned up, no one could say for sure which flat the shots had come from, and there was no other disturbance. Nobody had noticed anyone coming or going just afterwards. So the patrol car moved on.’
‘So sound travels in the building? Since people were confident enough to say fairly definitely that nobody came or went?’ Joar asked tentatively.
‘Yes, that must be right,’ replied the uniformed officer.
Just then there was the sound of furniture scraping the floor in the flat below.
‘There, what did I say, sound travels here,’ said the officer, rather more self-assured now.
‘Were they in the whole time?’ Peder asked.
‘Who?’
‘The neighbours you interviewed, the ones who live below here.’
The officer took a surreptitious look at his notebook.
‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t get back until eight last night, unfortunately. And there’s only one other flat on this floor, and the people who live there weren’t at home either.’
‘So none of the nearest neighbours were in when the shots were fired?’ Peder observed.
‘No, that more or less sums it up.’
Joar said nothing, just walked around the room, frowning. He glanced occasionally at Peder and the uniformed officer, but held his tongue.
There’s something shady about him, thought Peder. Apart from the fact that he’s gay, he’s got something else to hide.
‘This mark,’ Joar said suddenly, breaking into Peder’s thoughts. ‘Do we know anything about that?’
He indicated a streak of pale grey arcing across the wall at the head of the bed, just behind the lamp on the bedside table.
‘No,’ said the officer. ‘But it could have been there for ages, couldn’t it?’
‘Of course,’ said Joar. ‘Or it could have been caused by the lamp being knocked sideways off the table onto the floor. If that’s what happened.’