The receiver weighed heavily in her hand as she spoke to the switchboard operator. Elsie Ljung had taken it upon herself to come to the police out of working hours. Was there something she wanted to get off her chest?
She pulled herself together and went in to tell Alex.
‘Shall we go down together?’ he asked. ‘I’m okay to stay a bit longer.’
‘Don’t know,’ Fredrika said dubiously. ‘She apparently asked to speak to me on my own. I’ve got a feeling she might have something important to tell me.’
‘I’ll wait here then.’
With a slight nod, Fredrika came out of his room to go down and meet Elsie. A glance out of the window as she left showed thick snow coming down. The regal capital was clothed in white again. And a thought came into Fredrika’s mind: Nice not to be out on the roads tonight. They could be really treacherous.
Karolina felt she was only keeping the car on the road by pure strength of will. She had driven this route so many times, longing to get there and be enfolded in the warm walls of the house and all its memories. They were mixed memories, of course, some of them terrible ones that she would gladly have written out of history if she could. Her father had said it was impossible to try to change the past, but you could always improve your own way of relating to it. Bruises were an indication of where you’d been, not where you were going.
The memory of her father stung and smarted, bringing tears to her eyes. How had it all gone so wrong? How had they been forced to pay such a high price?
She thought she knew. Not precisely, but more or less. As her plane landed at Arlanda that morning, she suddenly knew that the disaster that had befallen her parents could not possibly be anything to do with her trip or her father’s special interest in migrant issues. The insight pulsed through her body as the wheels of the plane bounced along the tarmac.
This is personal, she thought.
The moment she understood that to be the case, she also realised who she was up against. Nothing is more of an asset in battle than knowing your opponent. And of all the opponents it could have been, there was none she felt she knew better.
Once again she rang the number from which she had tried, in blind panic and as ultimate proof of her utter naïvety, to get help in Bangkok. And again it rang and rang until it switched over to voicemail. But she knew – she sensed – her enemy at the other end, knew she was sitting there with her hand on the phone and not answering. Her voice was cold when she finally spoke:
‘I’ll meet you where it all started. Come alone.’
For the first time in his adult life, Alex did not want to go home. His chest tightened and he thought of his father, who had survived a heart attack a few years before.
‘It’s inherited, you know,’ he had warned his son. ‘Look after yourself, Alex, and listen to your body when it tries to tell you something.’
But work had to take priority in his mind over worries about his health. There had been a quick call from Lena, wondering when he would be home.
‘Later,’ muttered Alex, hanging up with that nagging feeling of things being all wrong, but still putting off the moment of truth.
The surveillance officers keeping watch on Viggo Tuvesson rang in straight afterwards. Tuvesson had left the flat and was on his way to Kungsholmen by car.
‘Maybe he’s coming into work,’ Alex said doubtfully, looking at the time, which was just after seven. ‘But don’t let him out of sight.’
A few minutes later they rang again. Viggo Tuvesson seemed to have no plans to come to HQ; he was heading out of town on Drottningholmsvägen.
Alex’s first thought was of Ragnar Vinterman.
‘He’s on his way to Bromma,’ he said excitedly. ‘Keep in touch with the team in Bromma and see if Vinterman’s on his way out, too.’
But Vinterman was still safely ensconced in his vicarage and the surveillance team there had nothing new to report.
It was worrying Alex that Johanna Ahlbin seemed to have disappeared off the police radar again. It might mean she had run into trouble herself, but Alex felt in his bones that something else lay behind it.
He looked at the piles of reports strewn around his desk like a broken-up jigsaw puzzle. A vicar who wanted to do everything right, but who had got on the wrong side of virtually his whole family. Two more men of the cloth who had found themselves with such severe financial problems that nothing was holy to them any more. A policeman so deep in the shit that it was hard to understand how he had been able to stay within the system for so long. And two sisters who both appeared to have lost everything one midsummer’s eve, fifteen years ago.
Alex found himself thinking back to his visit to the Ekerö house with Fredrika. The dated pictures, young Johanna choosing a different path, away from the family. Maybe along with her mother. Karolina, staying on in the happy family circle despite the violent attack she had suffered.
Or could it have been the other way round, Alex wondered, with Johanna as the rape victim, turning her back on the family as a result. And Karolina becoming her father’s favourite.
His pulse started to race. But who had carried out the actual murder? The crime scene investigation had given them not a single lead; all the prints and other traces led back to the couple themselves, to Elsie and Sven Ljung or to police officers and ambulance crew at the scene. And at the time of the murder, both Johanna and Karolina were verifiably out of the country.
Alex glanced through the crime scene report again, his brain revving fast. Could it simply be the case, after all, that Sven Ljung had let himself into the flat and murdered Jakob and Marja? Alex knew that was wrong before he even finished thinking it. His brain locked instead onto the most obvious name. The man who could have got away with the whole thing if only he had not been so careless as to use his work telephone when he was drawing up the plans for the appalling crimes he was prepared to commit.
The telephone on Alex’s desk rang so loudly that he almost cried out.
‘He’s not going to Bromma, either,’ surveillance reported.
‘Where is he heading, then?’
‘To Ekerö.’
And that gave Alex the last clue he needed, and he realised with horror where the Ahlbin sisters must be.
As if in a trance, he ended the call and rang the central command unit. He asked them to send all available radio cars to the Ahlbin family’s holiday home at Ekerö.
Looking back, there was no clear dividing line that evening between the time when Fredrika felt secure in her existence and the time when her whole life began to disintegrate. It was an irony of fate that she actually postponed the moment herself by not taking the first call that came through from Spencer’s home number.
I’ve been waiting all day, so now he can jolly well wait while I talk to Elsie Ljung, she decided angrily.
Alex rang her on her mobile just as she was getting a glass of water for herself and the visitor she had escorted to an interview room. He updated her on the situation in a few brisk sentences, warning her that they could be in for a very nasty end to the evening. There was no need for him to say it; Fredrika could imagine all too well how a confrontation between the two sisters might end.
‘Are you going out there?’ she asked.
‘I’m in the garage with Joar and a couple of CID officers,’ Alex replied. ‘We’re going with the flying squad. You concentrate on teasing out of Elsie how Viggo fits into all this. And try to get a handle on which sister it is we need to be most wary of.’
‘They both seem equally disturbed,’ mumbled Fredrika, sounding more casual than she meant to.