Peder Rydh tried to keep his anger in check as Joar and Alex set off for the Ahlbin sisters’ house at Ekerö. Alex had left him the job of going through the emails that had come to light and working with the technical section to try to establish who had sent them. Fredrika had been entrusted with finding out as much as possible about Jakob’s activities with refugee organizations. Even that seemed more exciting than poring over lousy emails.
Peder took out his mobile and tried ringing his brother, Jimmy. There was no answer and Peder threw the phone onto his desk. Of course he hadn’t answered; everything else was going down the pan, so why not that, too?
A sense of guilt set in almost immediately. He should be glad Jimmy was not answering his phone, because it meant he was too busy doing something he enjoyed more.
“Jimmy’s lucky having a big brother who cares about him so much,” said the carers at the assisted living unit whenever Peder went there.
It sometimes seemed as if the unit was the only place on earth where Peder still made a good impression and felt welcome. Jimmy had lived there since he turned twenty, and seemed happy. It made his world the size he could handle and he was surrounded by people like himself who could not manage on their own.
“You have to remember that in spite of any setbacks, you’re still living an enormously privileged life,” his mother would say.
Peder knew what she meant, but it still bothered him to hear her say it. Fredrika Bergman, for example, hadn’t got a sibling who had suffered brain damage at the age of five in a stupid game that went wrong; did that mean she was less duty bound than Peder to make the most of herself and her life?
Sometimes when he was sitting with one of his little boys on his lap, he would think about how incredibly fragile life was. Indelible images from childhood reminded him of the accident with the swing that had destroyed his brother’s life and underlined how easily something could be irrevocably lost if you were not careful.
Careful. Trustworthy. Aware.
God knew when he had last been any of those things.
His mother, who functioned more or less as a nanny to the twins, had started watching him with a worried look when he got home late smelling of beer or went for drinks after work three evenings in a row. Something had happened to him to make him less considerate and more neglectful. It had happened when the boys were born and Ylva was sucked into that goddamn postnatal depression that went on and on.
But now it was as if he was the one who couldn’t get his health back on track, not her. When they first separated he had felt strong and responsible. He had broken out of an impossible situation and done something radical to improve his life.
But it all gone to hell in a handcart.
As usual he just gritted his teeth. At least at work he had other things to think about.
He went through the checklist he had put together of all the threats sent to Jakob Ahlbin’s church email account in the past two weeks. The tone grew more hostile as time went on, and the threats seemed to have started after the clergyman intervened in some dispute that the sender felt was none of his business. The emails were not signed with a name, but with the initials SP. The initials also featured in the email address used to issue the threats.
Peder frowned. He was not sure what SP stood for.
He read the emails again. The first was dated January 20.
Dear Reverend Scumbag, we advise you to back off while you still can. SP
Back off from what? wondered Peder.
The next email had come a few days later, January 24:
We damn well mean it, Vicar. Keep away from our people, now and forever. SP
So SP was some kind of group, Peder could work out that much. But what else? The rest of the threatening emails did not offer any more contextual clues, but Peder saw that the tone had hardened. An email from the last day of January read:
If you don’t give a toss about our friends, we don’t give a toss about yours. We’re going to make it hell for you. An eye for an eye, you fucking priest. SP
Hardly well written. But the message was clear. Peder wondered what Jakob Ahlbin himself had thought. He had not reported any of the threats as far as Peder could see. Did that mean he had not taken them seriously? Or that he had other reasons for keeping the messages from the police?
The last two emails had arrived in the final week of Jakob’s life. On February 20, the person had written:
You ought to listen to us, Vicar. You’ve got the trials of Job ahead of you if you don’t stop your activities right away.
And then the last one, on February 22:
Don’t forget how it all ended for Job; there’s always time to change your mind and do the right thing. Stop looking.
Peder pondered. Stop looking for what? The name Job sounded familiar, but he could not place it. He was assuming it must be biblical. A quick Internet search confirmed it.
Job was apparently the man God tested more than any other to show the devil how far he could push those who lived righteously.
Job lost everyone, Peder noted grimly. But he himself survived.
He reached for the telephone receiver and rang the technical division to see if they had come up with any names for the sender of the anonymous emails.
• • •
It took no more than half an hour to drive out of Stockholm to Ekerö. The roads were clear in the middle of the day, not clogged with rush-hour traffic.
“What do you think?” asked Joar, noncommittally.
“I don’t think anything,” Alex said firmly. “I prefer to know. And I know too little in this case to be able to say anything. But it’s a cause for concern that Jakob received such serious threats just before he was found dead.”
Alex did not need to spell out why it was a cause for concern. The problem was clear. If it turned out that there was proof Jakob had not been the perpetrator, they were in deep trouble with the investigation. Forensics had been through the flat with a fine-tooth comb without finding a shred of evidence that anyone else had been there at the time of the shootings. In his heart of hearts, Alex hoped Jakob would turn out to have done it. Otherwise things were going to get hellishly complicated.
They parked in the driveway and got out of the car. The sky was cloudless and the snow frozen hard. The best kind of winter weather and not the sort of conditions you spontaneously linked with death and misfortune.
The snow lay pristine in front of the house and all round it.
“No one’s been here for a while,” said Joar.
Alex said nothing. For no particular reason, his thoughts went to Peder. Maybe he had been too hard on him; the case had been his from the start. But colleagues in this business had to expect a severe reprimand to result from improper behavior. It was irrelevant that he was having a rotten time at home; you could not bring private problems to work with you. Especially if you were a police officer.
“We’ll go in as soon as the technicians get here,” Alex said out loud, to stop the thoughts chasing round in his head. “I think they were just behind us on the road.”
They had been granted a search warrant by the prosecutor because a criminal act was suspected. Finding a key to the house had been harder. Elsie and Sven Ljung may have had a spare key to Jakob and Maria’s flat at Odenplan, but they did not have one to the house, and the daughters obviously could not be asked. In the end they had asked permission to go into the Ahlbins’ and Karolina’s town flats to look for the key, but could not find anything. So the technicians were coming to help them force entry through the front door with minimal damage.
“What did Karolina’s place look like?” Alex asked Joar, who had been in on the search.
Joar initially did not seem to know quite how to answer.
“I certainly wouldn’t say it looked like the home of a drug addict,” he said finally. “We took some pictures; you can see them later.”
“Did it look as if someone had gone in and cleaned it up afterward?” he asked, thinking of Johanna, who might have done something of the kind after her sister’s demise.
“Hard to tell,” Joar said honestly. “It looked more as though nobody had been there for a while. As if somebody had done a thorough tidy-up and then gone away.”
“Hmm,” said Alex thoughtfully.
The snow crunched under the wheels of the technicians’ vehicle as they pulled up alongside the other car. Ten minutes later, they were in the house.
The first thing Alex noted was that the house was warm. The second was that it was furnished in a pleasant, homely fashion not at all like the way Joar and Peder had described Mr. and Mrs. Ahlbin’s flat. It was clean and neat. The walls were hung with photographs of the family at various ages. There were home-woven runners on the tables and the windows had curtains of a fairly modern style.
They went round in silence, unsure what they were looking for. Alex went out into the kitchen, opened cupboards and drawers. There was a liter of milk in the fridge; the carton was unopened and two weeks beyond its use-by date. That meant it could not be all that long since someone had been there.
The house had two stories. The two bedrooms upstairs each had a set of bunk beds in them. The landing between them was used as a TV room. On the ground floor were a kitchen and dining room, and a largish living room. There were bathrooms on each floor.
“Two lots of bunk beds,” Alex remarked. “That’s odd, isn’t it? Before the sisters took over the house, you would have thought they were here as a family. It seems odd that Mr. and Mrs. Ahlbin slept in separate beds.”
Joar considered this.
“Maybe it hasn’t always been like this?” he said.
Alex heaved a sigh.
“Well, let’s hope so,” he said, heading back downstairs.
He wandered round the rooms, studying the photos. Something was disturbing him but he was not sure what. He looked again. Mum, Dad, and two daughters sitting in the garden. It must be an old photograph, because the girls were little. More garden pictures, the girls older. Karolina and her parents, and one of Karolina on horseback.
Alex realized what it was that had disconcerted him.
“Joar, come here,” he called.
Joar’s feet thudded down the stairs.
“Look at these pictures,” said Alex, sweeping a hand over the living room wall. “Look at them and tell me what you think.”
Joar studied the photos in silence, walking up and down in front of them.
“Were you thinking of anything in particular?” he asked uncertainly.
“Johanna,” Alex said resolutely. “Don’t you see? She suddenly disappears from the shots and only Karolina’s left. Looking the picture of health, I might add.”
“But these photos go back a long time, surely?” said Joar doubtfully.
“They do,” said Alex. “But the more recent ones look about five years old at most.”
They did another tour of the house. Karolina was in several of the pictures upstairs, including an enlargement of one with her parents that had pride of place on the TV set. Johanna was conspicuous by her absence.
“Maybe they didn’t like her,” said Alex, mostly to himself. “Maybe they had a major falling-out over something.”
But that theory did not seem to fit, either. Johanna was part owner of the house, after all. Why was she not in the photographs in her own home?
A technician stuck his head round the open front door.
“There seems to be a way into a basement round the back,” he said. “Do you want me to open that door, too?”
The lock turned out to be frozen solid and not at all as cooperative as the first one. The technician had to work at it for nearly twenty minutes before the door finally creaked open. Alex looked down and saw a short, steep set of steps leading down to a basement. He was about to ask for a torch when he saw the light switch on the wall and turned on the light as he went down the steps. A lightbulb flickered into life.
What it revealed was a fully furnished basement that had probably not been used for a very long time. The kitchen had clearly been fitted in the early 1980s and the air was thick with dust, but they could see all they needed to. A bed settee in one corner, with some armchairs and a coffee table. Three sets of bunk beds along the walls. A very basic bathroom with a smell of mold. Another small room, windowless, with a further set of bunk beds. There was no bed linen on the beds, but they all had blankets and pillows.
Alex gave a laugh.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “It seems as though the rumors were right. If Jakob Ahlbin wasn’t hiding illegal migrants here, then I’d very much like to know what he did use this basement for.”
Joar looked about him.
“Confirmation classes, maybe,” he said drily.
Alex had to smile, but was soon grave again.
“Gun cabinet,” he said, nodding over to a tall metal cabinet standing in one corner of the room.
They went over and tried the doors. They were unlocked.
“We need to check whether any of the family had firearms licenses apart from Jakob,” said Alex.
The siting of the gun cabinet gave Alex pause for thought. Why was it in the basement and not the main house, if the basement was used for concealing fugitives? Alex concluded it must have been moved at some stage, perhaps when the basement fell into disuse.
“Is this where he got it?” Joar said quietly.
“Got what?”
“The murder weapon,” Joar clarified. “Was this where he got the hunting pistol for killing his wife and himself?”
“Or where somebody else did?” Alex said thoughtfully.
• • •
About an hour after the policemen left the house in Ekerö, another car turned into the driveway. It parked in the tire tracks of the police cars. Two men climbed out into the snow.
“Damn nuisance,” said one of them, “them finding their way here before we did.”
The other one, a younger man, was more relaxed.
“No damage done, I’m sure,” he said gruffly.
“No, but it was a bloody close call,” hissed his companion, kicking the snow.
The younger man put a hand on his shoulder.
“Everything’s going to plan,” he insisted.
The other man gave a snort.
“That’s not the impression I’m getting,” he said. “Some of us have even left the country, you know. When will she be back, anyway?”
“Soon,” said the other man. “And then this will all be over.”
Fredrika Bergman was hard at work assembling information about Jakob Ahlbin’s work with refugee groups, and it was proving quite a task. Much of the material was not available electronically and she was obliged to go into the old paper archives in the library.
Jakob’s commitment to the refugee cause went back decades and had occasionally been a matter of dispute even within the church. There had been particular trouble when Jakob actively championed a very sensitive asylum case, allowing the family to live in the church to avoid deportation.
“The day the police cross the threshold of my church with weapons drawn is the day I lose my country,” he was quoted as saying in one of the many newspaper articles the story generated.
The family stayed in the church for months and was finally given a residence permit.
It wasn’t so much Jakob Ahlbin’s views that courted controversy, more his actions. Jakob had not contented himself with writing articles and opinion pieces but had also campaigned for his cause in the streets and squares of various towns. He had even debated publicly with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
Jakob Ahlbin was in fact one of the few who had dared to engage in debate with the xenophobic groups that existed in Sweden, and unconfirmed sources also said he was part of a support group for young men in Stockholm—because the problem of right-wing extremists was an almost exclusively male one—who wanted to find a way out of whatever group or network they had joined. That fitted with the e-mail messages telling Jakob to keep out of things that were none of his business, thought Fredrika. She printed out the material on that subject, too. Peder would be glad to see what she had come up with.
Just after lunch she had the call from the pathologist who had completed the autopsy on the hit-and-run victim. The pathologist was quite curt, and as usual launched into phrases Fredrika did not understand. She hoped he was not going to go into too much detail; now she was pregnant she seemed much more sensitive to anything too specific about injuries and mangled bodies.
I’ve turned into a wimp, thought Fredrika, and had no idea what she could do about it.
“He died as a direct result of extreme external violence that must have been caused by the impact of the vehicle, a car,” said the pathologist. “The injuries are consistent with a very violent impact which threw him a distance of several meters.”
“Was he run into from in front or behind?” asked Fredrika.
“In front,” replied the pathologist. “But it could be that he heard the car coming and turned round. What ought to interest you more is that they didn’t just ram into him but also drove over him.”
Fredrika held her breath.
“First we have the injuries that caused his death—the initial impact. On top of that he has injuries to his back, stomach, and neck, which must have been inflicted directly afterward, crush injuries. My guess would be that whoever it was simply backed over him as he lay there in the middle of the road.”
Queasiness came flooding over Fredrika and she had to steel herself to go on. That was just the sort of thing she did not want to hear.
She took a deep breath.
“So what you mean in plain language is that it couldn’t possibly have been an accident.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” said the pathologist.
All of a sudden Fredrika felt very tense. Now there was another murder inquiry for them to deal with. Damn.
• • •
Alex and Joar were back at HQ by early afternoon. To Peder’s irritation, Joar went straight to his office and did not offer him even the slightest update on the way. Peder rose resolutely from his desk chair and went in to see him.
“How did it go at Ekerö?” he asked, not bothering with any niceties.
He had his arms tightly folded across his chest and tried to look casual.
“It went fine,” said Joar after he had observed Peder in the doorway for a few seconds.
“Did you find anything?”
“Well, yes and no,” replied Joar, starting to sort through some papers. “I don’t know that we were looking for anything in particular. But we found something, all right.”
Cheeks flushing bright red, Peder persisted: “Like what?”
“Like a basement that seemed to fit the story of Jakob Ahlbin hiding illegal migrants.”
Peder nodded, suddenly unsure what to do next.
“Fredrika and I dug up some important things, too,” he said.
Joar smiled but did not look at Peder, and nor did he ask what they had found.
“Good,” was all he said. “I hope you’ll tell the rest of us all about it at the next session in the Den.”
Peder said nothing and left. He had never come across such a goddamn stuck-up workmate in all his life. He was more high-and-mighty than even Fredrika used to be. Peder still had vivid memories of the heavy weather he and Fredrika had made of working together at first. If only she could be a bit more relaxed, a bit less pretentious. No. She’d always been good-looking, but that was about all you could say in her favor.
Peder could not make any sense of it. After all, unlike Fredrika, Joar was a regular police officer and a proper detective. The two of them should have worked well as a team. It was inexplicable to him why the powers that be had decided a few years back to recruit civilian investigators into the police. It was an affront to the collective competence of the force, as Peder saw it, and he was taken aback on his transfer to Alex’s group to find one of those civilians in it. Time had passed since then, and Fredrika no longer made such a fuss about details. To start with, she had questioned everything, and taken a disproportionately major role in some of the investigations. Peder felt pushed to the point where he needed to bring up Fredrika’s inadequacy in certain areas with Alex. But then she had got pregnant and that had turned her into another person.
He could not help a little grin as he thought of that pregnancy; there were plenty of rumors going round as to who the father was. An older, married man. Peder had laughed his head off the first time he heard it, and said he’d put money on it not being true. You would never catch Little Miss Prim making herself available to someone who belonged to someone else. Never. After a while he had started having second thoughts. It did not sound quite so out of the question as he had first thought. And it would explain why Fredrika was saying so little about the baby and the pregnancy. He couldn’t stop chuckling to himself. There was a whore in every Madonna, as his granddad used to say.
“Have you got a minute?” he asked as he knocked on the open door of Fredrika’s room.
She was sitting at her desk and gave a start, but smiled when she saw who it was.
“Come in,” she said.
Her unusual smile and long, dark hair often set Peder off on smutty flights of fancy, and it made no difference that she was expecting.
He came in and sat down opposite her.
“Found anything?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Oh yes,” said Fredrika, looking rather pleased with herself as she took a pile of photocopies out of a plastic folder. “I found out quite a lot about Jakob Ahlbin’s refugee activities. And some important stuff about him belonging to a support network for former right-wing extremists. The group’s still active, and is made up of police officers, social workers, and people from various immigrant associations.”
She pushed the papers across to Peder.
“Perfect,” he said flatly, wondering why he had never heard of the support group. He would have liked to work on that sort of thing.
“I’ve already been in touch with them,” Fredrika went on, “and they’ve confirmed that Jakob Ahlbin was a member. He was among those who took the initiative in setting up the group, in fact. It’s been going a couple of years.”
Peder gave a whistle.
“And it upset a certain Mr. Tony Svensson so much that he started firing off threatening letters. Or emails.”
“Tony Svensson?” asked Fredrika, confused. “Is that his name, the one who sent the emails?”
Peder nodded with satisfaction.
“Yes, it is, according to the technical boys and Comhem, the broadband service provider. We were able to trace the IP address most of the emails came from and he’s the registered owner of that.”
“Weren’t there several people involved?” asked Fredrika. “You said the emails had come from different IP addresses.”
“The others were at a library out in Farsta and a 7-Eleven shop in the Söder district. So there’s no specified owner as such for those. But it seems logical for this Tony Svensson to have sneaked out and sent emails from different places. The content of all the emails was the same, which seems to point to them all being sent by the same person.”
Fredrika gave a thoughtful nod.
“I haven’t read them all yet. Could you let me have copies?”
“Sure,” said Peder.
“What do we know about Tony Svensson? Is he known to the police?”
Peder’s face split into a broad grin.
“Thought you’d never ask,” he said triumphantly, settling into his seat to tell her all about what he had discovered. “Have you heard of an organization called SP?”
• • •
Alex convened a meeting in the Den when he and Joar got back from Ekerö. He felt a warm glow as he listened to Peder’s account of the man who had issued the threats to Jakob Ahlbin. When Peder put his stupid behavior on hold, he was a very skillful detective.
“Tony Svensson was born and raised in Farsta,” he reported. “He’s twenty-seven now, and had his first brush with the police when he was twelve. Shoplifting and vandalism. The Söder police and social services worked pretty closely together on his case until he turned eighteen. He’s had a couple of custodial sentences, the first one when he was seventeen and beat up his stepfather. Nearly killed him.”
“Ah,” said Alex with a resigned air. “Let me guess—the stepdad was beating up his mum?”
“No,” said Peder. “The stepdad refused to lend Tony three thousand kronor for a holiday in Ibiza.”
“Damn,” Alex said, taken aback. “So he’s a right roughneck?”
“Yep,” said Peder. “The other assault was gang-related. He kicked another guy black and blue and rounded it off by smashing an empty wine bottle over his head. Then he used a bit of the broken glass to slash—”
“Please,” said Fredrika, whose face had drained of all color, “can we leave the details for later?”
She looked self-conscious and put a protective hand on her stomach. Almost as if she expected someone to come rushing through the door and assault her or the baby with a broken bottle.
Peder moved on, a bit put out that he had not been able to give every gory detail.
“Okay,” he said. “He was going to be done for aggravated rape, too, but the prosecutor had to drop it for lack of evidence because the girl refused to cooperate. As usual,” he added.
“Possibly frightened into keeping her mouth shut,” Joar put in quietly, almost as if trying not to disturb anyone but still aware that he was doing so.
Peder clenched his fist under the table and went on as if Joar had not spoken.
“What’s more, Tony Svensson’s been implicated in a series of thefts and break-ins and he’s also under suspicion of committing armed robbery. And to top it all, he’s a known right-wing extremist and long-term member of a neo-Nazi organization called Sons of the People, the same lot who signed the emails to Jakob Ahlbin.”
He indicated that his lecture was over by putting down the pen he had been holding throughout.
“Well done, Peder,” Alex said automatically. “We’ve clearly got a good deal to go on here. Have we anything more concrete on the conflict between Jakob Ahlbin and this group?”
“We’re looking at it now,” Peder answered. “Maybe Fredrika can tell us where we stand?”
Fredrika sat up at the mention of her name and began as usual by opening her notebook. Alex had to suppress a smile that could have been misinterpreted as mocking. She was always so well prepared.
“Jakob Ahlbin has drawn attention to himself in two particular contexts,” she began, and went on to tell them about the refugee family allowed to take refuge in his church while the migration agency ruled on their case. “And then there’s the support group,” she went on. “I’ve contacted the person who runs it, Agne Nilsson. He seemed very distressed by Jakob’s death and wanted to come here and talk to us tomorrow morning. I said that would be fine.”
“Did you say anything about the threats Jakob had been sent? Was he aware of those?” asked Alex.
“Yes, he was,” answered Fredrika. “But no one had taken them seriously. I mean, they knew their work antagonized various people. And anyway, Agne thought the emails had stopped.”
Alex looked surprised.
“Why did he think that?” asked Peder.
“Because they talked about it last week, and Jakob said he hadn’t had any for over a week.”
Peder leafed through the sheets of paper in front of him.
“That’s not right,” he said. “He got another three emails in the last fortnight he was alive.”
“Strange,” said Alex. “We’d better ask Agne about that tomorrow.”
He made a note on his pad.
“And there’s another strange thing,” he said. “Namely that no one else seemed to know about the threats. Not Sven Ljung, who found the bodies, and not Ragnar Vinterman, either. Why hadn’t Jakob confided in anyone?”
Joar put his head on one side.
“It might not be that odd,” he said softly. “Not if Jakob wasn’t taking the emails seriously. Maybe it had happened before when he was working on other cases.”
“Are there any other threatening messages in his inbox?” Alex asked Peder.
Peder shook his head.
“No, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t had any. Just that he hadn’t saved them.”
Alex glanced at the time and decided to wind things up.
“Okay,” he summed up. “We still don’t know whether the threats are relevant for our purposes, but we definitely can’t discount this information until we’ve talked to the support group and, of course, Tony Svensson himself. I want a printout of all telephone traffic to and from all the numbers Jakob Ahlbin used; see if we can find out if this Tony called him as well as emailing. Then we’ll go to the prosecutor and ask if we can bring him in for unlawful menace to start with. Is there anything else in this case we need to discuss just now?”
Peder hesitated but then raised his hand.
“The fact that Job was mentioned in one of the last emails,” he said, and told them his own thoughts on the matter.
He suddenly felt very stupid.
But Alex was paying attention.
“Interesting,” he said. “What do the rest of you think?”
Joar shifted in his seat.
“Might be interesting, but not all that startling. It clearly hasn’t passed Tony Svensson by that he was emailing a clergyman,” he said, making Peder feel hot and uncomfortable.
“Assuming we can expect someone with Tony Svensson’s background to know who Job was,” said Fredrika. “Isn’t that the most important thing to consider?”
“How do you mean?” asked Alex.
“I mean exactly what I say, that the odds of someone like Tony Svensson casually throwing biblical names into his correspondence and making them fit his purposes so well don’t seem all that high.”
Alex looked faintly embarrassed.
“I have to admit I didn’t know exactly who Job was until Peder gave us his story just now.”
Fredrika smiled and said nothing.
“By the way, has anybody got anything new on Johanna, the daughter?” Alex asked, to change the subject. “It seems more and more vital for us to find her ASAP. Especially in the light of our visit to the Ekerö house today.”
Nobody answered. None of them had anything new to impart.
Alex ran his eyes round the assembled company.
“Anything else?” he inquired.
Fredrika put her hand up.
“Yes?”
“Well, I’ve got more on that hit-and-run victim,” she said.
“Ah,” said Alex. “Do tell us!”
“It seems he was murdered,” said Fredrika. “He wasn’t just run over, you see—the car was also backed over him.”
Alex groaned aloud with frustration.
“Damn,” he said. “Just what we need, another murder inquiry.”
His sense of the huge amount of work in front of him intensified. This was clearly a mess he was not going to untangle anytime soon.
As she was leaving work, Fredrika tried to phone Spencer. He did not answer, which unsettled her. Her need to hear his voice more regularly was growing daily, especially as evening approached and the time left to her before the terrors of the night was short.
How did I end up here? she wondered, for what must be the thousandth time. How could all my dreams and plans lead me to this miserable crossroads in my life?
The answer was always the same, as it was this evening, too. It was decades since she had been guided by her innermost dreams. She had been navigating by makeshift solutions and setting her sights on second-rate choices.
I am what you turn into when you are robbed of freedom of choice, she thought wearily. I am a residual product, marked by that wretched bloody Accident.
So there it was in her mind again, the Accident. The most tangible cutoff point.
Early in life she had set herself the goal of becoming a violinist. Music was her family’s natural setting; Fredrika and her brother had practically grown up in the wings of a succession of major stages where they had waited with their father for the end of their mother’s latest concert or recital.
“Can you see Mummy playing?” their father would whisper, his eyes suffused with pride. “Can you see the way she lives for what she does?”
Then, Fredrika had been too young to reflect on what her father was saying, but later on in life she had started to question that phrase. Living for what you did, could that really be right?
And what dreams and visions did her father have? She was horrified to realize she had no concept of that at all. Perhaps he had had no greater wish than to follow his wife around the world and watch her dazzle one audience after another? Things had changed when the children started school, of course. Her mother accepted fewer engagements abroad, and for the first time the children had a clearer idea of their father’s professional identity. He had a job that meant having to wear a suit, and he sold things. Successfully, it seemed. Because they were certainly well off.
Fredrika started violin lessons when she was just six. It was perhaps her first experience of what is described as love at first sight. She loved both the violin and her teacher, who must have thought her a good pupil, because he remained her teacher right up until the accursed Accident. And he had been at her side throughout her convalescence, offering encouragement and assuring her that it would still be possible to play as she had before.
But he was wrong, thought Fredrika, closing her eyes for a moment.
Many years had passed, but it was still so easy to conjure up the images in her mind. The car as it skidded, somersaulted, and went flying. The hard ground, the skis tumbling out of the roof box. Her friend’s endless screaming when she saw her mother’s face smashed against the side window of the car. And the firemen’s desperate struggle: “The car could explode at any minute. We’ve got to get them out of there, and fast!”
Fredrika sometimes thought it would have been just as well if they had left her there in the car, since the life that came afterward was not worth living. Her left arm had been badly injured and would never be the same again. They made so many attempts that her whole life came to revolve round the battle to restore her arm.
“It won’t be up to the strain,” said the doctor who finally delivered a verdict. “You’ll be able to play for a few hours a week, but several hours a day? Out of the question. You would be in the sort of pain that would be intolerable in the long term. And the wear and tear on your arm could easily make it entirely unusable.”
He had not understood what he was saying, of course. He lived under the illusion that she was grateful, and glad to have survived. That she was glad she had not died, as her friend’s brother had died. But she had no feelings of that kind.
Not then and not now, Fredrika thought dully, sitting on the sofa in the quiet of her flat.
She had never played the violin only for enjoyment, but as a way of life, a way of earning a living. And since the Accident she had not played at all. At the very top of a cupboard, right at the back, the violin lay untuned in its case, waiting.
Fredrika stroked her stomach, where the baby lay resting.
“If you ask me really nicely, maybe I’ll play a little something for you one day,” she whispered. “Maybe.”
• • •
It was six o’clock by the time Alex got home. His wife met him at the door. There was a strong aroma of garlic.
“Italian tonight.” She smiled as he kissed her. “I’ve got out a bottle of wine.”
“Are we celebrating something?” Alex asked in surprise.
They seldom had wine during the week.
“No, I just thought we deserved a little treat,” Lena replied. “And I got home from work a bit early today.”
“I see. Why was that?”
“Oh, no special reason, but I had the chance, so I thought I’d come home and make something nice for dinner.”
She gave a slightly shrill laugh from the kitchen, where she was making a salad.
Alex went though the day’s post. They had a card from their son in South America.
“Great postcard,” he called out.
“Yes, I saw it,” Lena responded. “It’s so nice to hear from him, isn’t it?”
And she laughed that laugh again.
Alex went out to the kitchen and observed her as she stood with her back turned. She had always been the more openhearted and attractive of the two of them. She could have had whomever she wanted, but she had chosen Alex. Even though he had gray streaks in his dark hair from an early age and deep lines on his face. For some reason he had always found it a bit unsettling that he was somehow more of a chosen one in the relationship than she was. Over the years he had at times felt incredibly jealous when other men got too close to her or he felt inadequate in some way. This jealousy had been a problem for both of them and a source of shame for him. What was wrong with him, not trusting Lena, who had given him such a fantastic home and two wonderful children?
As time passed he felt more secure. That was partly thanks to his job. His profession helped him develop a good sense of intuition, and that almost always helped him get the better of the demons that taunted him with fancies that his wife was deceiving him behind his back.
His intuition brought him certainty. Certainty when everything was all right, and also when it was not. And this time it was not.
The feeling had been creeping over him for several weeks now. She was talking differently, waving her arms about in a way he could not recall seeing earlier. She would go on at length about subjects that were unfamiliar to both of them. About places she wanted to visit and people she wished she had stayed in touch with. And then there was that laugh, which had changed so rapidly from deep and intense to shrill and superficial.
Watching her from the back, he even thought her posture had changed. She seemed stiffer somehow. And she gave a little shudder when he took hold of her, laughed her new laugh, and pulled away. Sometimes her mobile rang and she went into another room to answer it.
“Can I help with anything?” he asked her back.
“You can open the wine,” she answered, trying to sound happy and relaxed.
Trying. That was the thing. She was trying to be herself, as if playing some strange theatrical role that had unexpectedly landed in her lap. Alex’s stomach hurt as fear clutched his insides and the demons awoke once more.
We ought to be able to talk about this, he thought. Why aren’t we doing it?
“Did you have a good day at work?” she asked him when they had been sitting in silence for a while.
“Yes,” Alex said gently. “It was fine. Lots on.”
Normally she would have picked up the thread and asked more. But not anymore. Now she only seemed to ask things she didn’t really seem to care about.
“How was yours?” he asked.
“That was fine, too,” she said, opening the oven to check whatever it was she had cooked.
The smell was amazing, but Alex did not feel hungry. He asked her a few more questions about work, as always, and she gave him brief answers, her head turned away.
When they sat down to eat the delicious dinner and drink the good wine, he had to force himself to swallow as he chewed.
“Skål,” she said.
“Skål.”
When he raised his head to catch her eye, he could have sworn it looked as though she was starting to cry.