‘Are you sure you don’t know any more?’ she asked under her breath.
Elsie pursed her lips and shook her head. Her hand stopped trembling.
‘What about their other daughter, Karolina?’ Fredrika asked, resigning herself.
Elsie’s eyes were swimming.
‘I still say what we said before. It’s impossible that she died of an overdose.’
And yet she did, Fredrika thought. What the hell are we overlooking about her death?
‘But you weren’t that close in recent years,’ she ventured. ‘Maybe you missed the signs.’
Elsie shook her head.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘We didn’t. You see, Karolina was going out with our younger son Måns for some years.’
‘But…’
‘I know,’ Elsie said, ‘we didn’t tell you last time you were here. Mainly because it’s such a sensitive subject, and because we both had such high hopes of the relationship. And everything was so topsy-turvy that day you were here…’
‘I understand,’ said Fredrika, trying not to sound annoyed.
The urge people had to be the ones to decide what was worth telling the police or not often caused far more havoc than they ever realised.
‘They weren’t together any more, your son and Karolina?’
Elsie shook her head and began to weep.
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘Karolina found it too much in the end, what with all his problems, and we could understand that only too well. But it was our dearest wish that she would turn out to be the solution for him. That she would be able to give him the strength to break free.’
‘Free from what?’
‘His addiction,’ Elsie sobbed. ‘That’s how I know Karolina wasn’t going through the same thing. But she carried all Måns’ problems like a cross through her life. Until the day it all got too much. Then she left him, moved out and got a flat of her own. I miss her as if she were my own child. We both do.’
‘And Måns?’
‘When it started getting serious between him and Karolina, he was much better, started work and stuck to the straight and narrow. But… once a man’s had that damned poison in his blood it’s as if he can never really be rid of it. He went downhill again, and today he’s just a shadow of who he was in those early days with Karolina. Unrecognisable.’
Fredrika thought carefully, weighing her words.
‘Elsie,’ she said finally. ‘Whichever way we look at it, Karolina’s dead. Her own sister identified her.’
‘Well in that case you’d better think of her as Lazarus in the Bible, the one Jesus brought back to life,’ Elsie declared, fishing a handkerchief out of her pocket. ‘Because I know in my heart and soul that that girl can’t have died of an overdose.’
Fredrika looked mistrustfully at Elsie. Felt doubtful, and tried to muster her thoughts. Elsie was keeping something else back, she felt it in every fibre of her being. And as if Job were not enough, the police now had a Lazarus to contend with.
The little white tablet was disturbing him as badly as a fly in the night. He glared at it angrily and almost wished it would dissolve before his eyes.
‘You must take it tonight before you go to sleep,’ the man who spoke Arabic had said before he left. ‘Otherwise you’ll be too tired to carry out your task tomorrow.’
They had left him in the new flat the evening before and then come back this afternoon to go through the next day’s schedule one more time. Somewhere in the midst of all his misery, he felt a great sense of relief. His journey was nearing its end and he would soon be a man without debts who could be reunited with his wife and even get in touch with the rest of his family to tell them he was all right. And with his friend, waiting for him in Uppsala.
The knowledge that his friend was out there somewhere, worrying about where he had got to, made him uneasy. They had said he was not on any account to inform any friends or family members where he was going. And he had broken their rule. Made a promise and not kept it. Please let his friend not start trying to find him. It would be a disaster if someone suddenly started asking questions and gave away his hidden presence in the country. The punishment would be severe if they found out he had let them down, he knew that.
His heart was pounding, keeping time with his growing anxiety. It was still only late afternoon; how would he hold out until tomorrow? He would have much preferred the project to be over and done with today, so tonight would be a night of liberation. But thoughts of that kind were unrealistic, he knew that now.
They would come and drag him out at nine the next morning. He would be introduced to his accomplice, who would drive the get-away car. The two of them would go to the place where the robbery was to be committed. He read the note they had left on the coffee table. It said: ‘Västerås’, which meant nothing at all in Arabic. He wondered what it meant in Swedish.
Once he had done the robbery, he and the driver would come back to Stockholm and meet up with the others not far from the giant golf ball he had seen from the other car. The Globe. Once he had handed over his haul, he would be a free man.
‘You’re doing this for your countrymen’s sake,’ they had told him. ‘Without this money, we wouldn’t be able to finance our work. The Swedish state doesn’t want to pay for our activities, so we take money from people who already have lots of it.’
It was familiar, well-worn logic. You took from the rich and gave to the poor. When he was growing up he had kept hearing stories like that. Most of all from his grandfather, the only one in the family who had ever been to the USA. He told them incredible stories of how much money people had there and what they did with it. He told them about cars as wide as the Tigris and houses the size of Saddam’s palace, where ordinary people lived. About the university, which was open to all but cost a vast amount of money. And about huge oilfields not owned by the state.
Grandfather should have seen me now, thought Ali. In a land almost as rich as America. Just a bit colder.
He shivered and huddled up on the sofa. Not that he had seen any huge cars or palaces. But that made no difference, because like everybody else he knew, he was totally convinced: Sweden was the best possible country for making a new start.
He glowered at the tablet and knew he would have to take it. He would never get to sleep otherwise. A good night’s sleep was a prerequisite for performing well the next day.
For the sake of his wife and children. And his father and grandfather.
As they left the flat to go to her parents’, Fredrika Bergman seriously considered cancelling the whole arrangement. But Spencer, well aware of her reluctance, took her gently by the arm and led her out onto the pavement and over to his car.
And with that, their relationship entered a new phase.
It had always been just the two of them. Alone in a glass bubble with no dinner parties or family lunches. Their mutual breathing space where they recharged themselves and refreshed their appetite for life. A breathing space that now had to accommodate both an unborn child and some parents-in-law. The latter was bizarre, of course, since Spencer, unlike Fredrika, already had a set of parents-in-law.
‘So when do I get to meet your parents, then?’ she asked as Spencer pulled up outside her childhood home.
‘Preferably never, if that’s all right with you,’ he replied casually, opening the car door.
His arrogance made Fredrika roar with laughter.
‘You’re not getting hysterical now, are you?’ Spencer said anxiously.
He walked round to open the door on her side. Fredrika beat him to it and pushed the door open just as he was coming round the bonnet.
‘Look,’ she said in mock triumph. ‘I can get out of the car all by myself.’
‘That’s hardly the point,’ muttered Spencer, who saw it as a matter of principle for a man to open the door for his female companion.