Silenced (16 page)

‘There are some basic rules, my lad,’ his father had said when he was a child. ‘You don’t fight and you don’t steal. Simple, eh?’

His father had died by the time Iraq collapsed as a state and a nation, and everyday life turned to chaos. Perhaps even he would have understood that it had now become impossible to stick to the rules. Not because things were better before, but because things had been calmer and ostensibly safer. But only ostensibly. Many people knew how it felt to hear the cars pull up in front of your house early in the morning and have your private home violated and invaded by unknown armed men sent by the government to bring in a citizen for interrogation. Some of them were never heard of again. Others were returned to their families in a state that bore witness to such appalling atrocities that even their closest family had no words for them.

Iraq was different now. The unforeseen violence came from another direction and created even greater insecurity. Money had grown important in a way it had not been before, and suddenly kidnapping was part of daily life, along with theft and arson and armed robbery.

Was that the sort of person he had turned into, as well? With a bag containing a gun and a balaclava beside his bed, there was every justification for the comparison.

We couldn’t go on, thought Ali. Forgive me, Father, for what I’m going to do, but we couldn’t go on.

Then he reached out a trembling hand for his eighth cigarette of the day. Soon it would all be over and a better future would be secured.

BANGKOK, THAILAND

The Swedish Embassy opened at ten and she was there waiting. It had been a long and wretched night. In the end she had had to check into a cheap youth hostel on the outskirts of Bangkok and had spent the night anxiously awake. The money she had with her, what little the mugger had not taken, was not enough to pay her bill. She asked the man at reception where the nearest cashpoint machine was and implied she would soon be back with a handful of notes. He told her it was three blocks away, and she was able to leave the hostel without creating a scene.

The Embassy was housed in a tall building just next to the Landmark Hotel on Sukhumvit, occupying two whole floors. Her relief at seeing the Swedish flag on the door was so great that tears came to her eyes.

She had planned her story carefully. She must not on any account say why she had come to Thailand, but that was a minor problem as she saw it. She was a tourist, plain and simple. Like all the other hundreds of thousands of Swedes who came here every year. And the fact that she had been robbed of all her means could not be unheard of, either. In her trouser pocket she had the copy of the police report to substantiate her story. The rest of what had happened to her – the fact that someone had cancelled her flight home, closed her email accounts and checked her out of the hotel – was something she had decided not to tell them. It would provoke far too many questions that she was not prepared to answer.

The loss of all her work material was hard to bear. The full weight of it had hit home in the night. Even her camera with all the pictures was gone. She swallowed to keep the tears at bay. Soon she would be home and then she could start to sort out this mess. At least she hoped so, with all her heart.

Maybe she should have foreseen that it would never work. That whoever had already taken such pains to take apart her life bit by bit naturally had not overlooked the possibility that she would turn to the Embassy. But she had not thought that far ahead, and did not notice the hard stare of the receptionist which followed her as she was shown in to see a member of the diplomatic staff.

First Secretary Andreas Blom greeted her with a cool handshake. His face was impassive as he asked her to sit down. When an assistant came by to ask if his guest wanted coffee, he waved her away and asked her to leave the door open. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a security guard patrolling the corridor, never far from the room where she was sitting.

‘I’m not sure what you think I can help you with,’ said Andreas Blom, leaning back in his seat.

He kept his hands clasped in his lap and looked at her through half-closed eyes. As if he was highly practised in not expending too much energy.

She cleared her throat several times, wished he would offer her a glass of water. But all he gave her was silence.

‘As I say, I’m in serious trouble,’ she began cautiously.

And she told him the story she had decided on. Of the mugging, and what she referred to as ‘a mistake’ at the hotel, which meant all her luggage had disappeared.

‘I’ve got to get home,’ she said, starting to cry. ‘I can’t get in touch with my parents and a friend who was going to help me hasn’t rung back either. I need a new passport and to borrow a bit of money. I’ll repay it as soon as I get home – if only you’ll help me.’

She let her tears flow freely, incapable of maintaining any façade. Only after a long silence did she raise her head and look at Andreas Blom. His face was immobile and he was still just sitting there.

‘Is that your version of events?’ he asked.

She stared at him.

‘Pardon?’

‘I asked if that’s the story you intend to tell the Thai authorities when they’re dealing with your case?’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘What did you say your name was?’ he interrupted.

She automatically repeated her forename and surname.

‘You’re really not making it easy for yourself,’ he said.

His words were greeted with silence; she had no idea what he expected her to say.

‘What I can help you with, Therese, is the following: legal representation, and a named contact here at the Embassy. But if you don’t immediately hand yourself over to the Thai police, your situation will automatically get considerably worse. You have already made things bad enough for yourself by giving a false identity to a person in a position of authority.’

She said nothing when he had finished. Thoughts were flapping round in her head like wild birds.

‘I don’t understand, I’m afraid,’ she whispered, though she was beginning to suspect the full extent of her problems. ‘And my name’s not Therese . . .’

Andreas Blom took a piece of paper out of his desk and put it in front of her.

‘Is this a copy of a report you made to the police yesterday?’

She quickly took out her own copy and compared them. It was the same document.

‘But that’s not your name,’ he said, pointing.

‘Yes it is,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Andreas Blom, ‘it isn’t. Because this is your name.’

He passed over another sheet of paper.

She stared at it without properly taking in what she was seeing. A copy of a passport with her photograph but a different personal identity number and another person’s name. Therese Björk, the passport holder was called.

The room began to spin.

‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not me. Please, there has to be a way to sort this out . . .’

‘It can be sorted out very easily,’ said Andreas Blom firmly. ‘This is your passport and your identity. I’ve rung the Swedish police and the Swedish tax authorities to check. This is you, Therese. And this passport was found with all your other things in the hotel you were
actually
staying at, Hotel Nana. In the room you had left when the drug squad raided the hotel and found half a kilo of cocaine among your possessions.’

She suddenly felt sick and was afraid she would throw up on the floor. What Andreas Blom said after that only got through to her intermittently. She had the greatest difficulty in joining the fragments together to make a whole.

‘Between you and me, you’ve got a good chance at the trial if you do the following. One: hand yourself in right away. Two: tell them who it was that tipped you off about the raid so you could get out of the hotel in time. Two very simple things.’

He held two fingers up in the air to underline how simple it was.

She shifted uneasily and could not stop her tears from flowing.

‘Why would I come here to you and not leave the country if I was guilty of everything you’ve told me?’ she said, looking him in the eye.

He leant back in his chair again and gave a supercilious smile.

‘Because this is Thailand,’ he said, ‘and you know as well as I do that for you there’s no way out.’

STOCKHOLM

The night had brought new nightmares, variations on a theme. In these dreams she was no longer being hunted but was tied to a tree, surrounded by men in hoods who wanted to harm her. Fredrika Bergman had no idea at all where these absurd scenarios had come from. They did not remind her of anything she had experienced or ever heard of. And she hated being woken by her own screams, night after night, dripping with sweat and on the verge of tears. And tired. So horribly tired.

But she still went to work. She simply could not sit at home.

‘How are you?’ asked Ellen Lind gravely when they ran into each other in the staff room.

Fredrika did not even try to lie.

‘Pretty awful, I have to say,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sleeping terribly badly.’

‘Should you be here, then?’ asked Ellen. ‘Shouldn’t you be at home, resting?’

Fredrika shook her head stubbornly.

‘No more than I already am,’ she said wearily. ‘I’d rather be here.’

Ellen didn’t ask any more questions. She, like everyone else, wondered what Fredrika had thought it was going to be like. Expecting a baby, largely on your own, and then giving birth without the father there.

Fredrika felt guilty because Ellen was always the one asking the questions and she never reciprocated. She never asked Ellen how she was, or about her children or how things were going with the love of her life. They had met on a package holiday the previous year, and Ellen had fallen head over heels in love.

In love.

Until she fell pregnant, she had always been more or less content with the arrangement she and Spencer had. His coming and going in her life did not worry her; after all, she sometimes behaved the same way. Finding one lover and leaving another. Losing that lover and going back to Spencer. The problem was only becoming obvious now that she wasn’t her former self any more, and always felt better when she was closer to him. Of course he came as often as he could, and these days he always answered the phone when she rang. But he still was not a permanent fixture in her daily life.

‘I simply don’t understand a thing about this whole situation,’ her friend Julia said one day.

The same friend who had often asked how Fredrika could bear to have sex with a man so much older.

‘There are a lot of things we don’t understand in life,’ Fredrika retorted with a sharp note in her voice, and they said no more about it.

There were lots of emails in her inbox. She could hardly bring herself to look at them; most of them were of no interest, anyway.

‘Time for the firearms refresher course,’ one of them said. ‘Anyone interested in sharing lifts?’

Firearms refresher course. As if everyone in the force automatically needed to be told about that.

Some of the emails were from the union rep, asking her to get involved in improving conditions for the civilian employees. The police union seemed on occasions to be running a virtual campaign to stop civilian employees feeling at home in the force, and Jusek thought now was the time to hit back. Fredrika could not summon up the energy to care, though she would have liked to.

I’ve made my journey, she thought lethargically. I’ve chosen to stay here. For now. And at the moment, I’m not up to worrying about how other people feel.

She shuffled aimlessly through the paperwork in front of her. She must at least summon the energy to do what was necessary. Alex had said the dead vicar and his wife at Odenplan were to take priority over the case of the man in the road at the university. He had, in fact, decided they would try to get the latter off their plate. It was simply not possible for them to deal with two murder enquiries at once with their limited resources.

But all the findings were still being sent through to Fredrika rather than anywhere else. She read a report from the forensics lab which confirmed that material on the man’s clothes showed the car had driven over him as well as running into him. There were traces of car paint on his jacket. They were working to identify the type of paint so they would be able to match it against a suspect vehicle, if one turned up.

She clicked on through her new emails. Still not a peep out of the national CID about the fingerprints. Frustrated, she picked up the phone.

‘I was just going to ring you,’ the woman at the other end said eagerly.

Fredrika was taken aback by her chirpy tone, so unlike two days before.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, trying not to sound equally excited.

She failed, but the woman did not seem to notice.

‘I ran the prints through our database, and he came up.’

The woman’s voice, carried with piercing clarity along the line, hit Fredrika with great force.

‘Really?’ she said in astonishment.

‘Yes it did,’ the woman said triumphantly. ‘Do you remember the armed robbery of the security van outside Forex in Uppsala last week?’

Fredrika’s heart gave a jolt.
Forex
.

‘Of course,’ she said quickly.

‘A weapon suspected of being used in the hold-up was found at the weekend by a man out walking his dog. That’s very peculiar, given how minutely everything else was planned. Anyway, they were able to get a set of prints off the gun.’

‘The unidentified man’s,’ Fredrika said tensely.

‘Exactly.’

She thanked the woman and hung up. The Forex robbery was the latest in a series of major armed hold-ups in and around Stockholm. She felt quite elated, as if she had achieved something important herself, just by making a phone call. This cleared up the confusion as to whose the case was; it would be entirely reasonable for it to go to the national CID, which was handling the robberies.

Fredrika was smiling as she knocked on Alex’s door.

When he heard how easily he could be rid of the hit-and-run case, Alex moved with unusual speed. And as soon as the case had been transferred to the national CID, Fredrika was able to focus more wholeheartedly on the Ahlbin case. It was nearly eleven, and she and Joar were due to see Agne Nilsson from the support group for former right-wing extremists. It felt strange to have Joar at her side. Not wrong, not at all, but different.