Alex took out his mobile and rang Peder.
‘How are you two getting on? Have you let Tony Svensson go yet, or am I in time to ask him one more thing?’
When Fredrika got back from the hospital. Alex decided the two of them ought to pay a visit to Muhammad Abdullah’s widow out at Skärholmen.
‘Do you think she’ll want to see us?’ Fredrika asked uneasily. ‘She might be blaming us for her husband’s death.’
‘But it still feels like the right thing to do,’ said Alex. ‘And I’d be glad to have you with me, since you were there last time.’
For the second time in just a few days, they set off to Skärholmen. Alex felt under pressure.
‘Good idea to ask for that DNA sample,’ he said. ‘When do we get the preliminary result?’
‘We should know by this evening whether the dead woman was related to the Ahlbin couple, and that should really be all we need. If not, we’ll have to try to find some of Karolina’s DNA in her flat, so they’ve got something to match to their test sample. But I think we can be pretty sure the tests will prove it wasn’t Karolina who died.’
‘That’ll put the cat among the pigeons,’ Alex muttered.
‘I found the officers who went to the hospital at the time of Karolina’s death. They didn’t see any reason to mistrust her sister’s statement, so all they did was speak to the nursing staff and the ambulance crew. Since the autopsy didn’t show up anything odd, they didn’t pursue the matter.’
This was a highly questionable statement in many ways, as Alex and Fredrika both knew. It exasperated them that such a vital detail in the case had passed so many people by.
‘We need to issue their descriptions, both of them,’ said Fredrika, meaning Karolina and Johanna Ahlbin. ‘We know it was Johanna who came with the woman in the ambulance, and if she deliberately misidentified a stranger as her dead sister, then she’s got some explaining to do in this murder enquiry.’
Alex smiled.
‘And what’s our justification for issuing Karolina’s description?’
Fredrika laughed.
‘We’re worried about her?’
Alex found that he was laughing, too. For as long as there was such friction between Peder and Joar and for as long as Fredrika seemed stable and not desperately short of sleep, he preferred her company to the men’s. Maybe he was imagining it, but her pregnancy seemed to have brought a degree of harmony with it. Or perhaps it was just that she had too many other things to think about to be quite as spiky in the office.
Alex’s mobile rang. It was Peder.
‘Tony Svensson got very worked up when I confronted him with that new information,’ he blurted out. ‘He said he hadn’t fucking well rung any copper to grass up Ronny Berg.’
‘And you believe him?’ asked Alex, on tenterhooks.
‘Oh yes,’ came Peder’s reply. ‘But that doesn’t rule out them being in contact for some other reason.’
‘They did have contact, that’s for sure,’ said Alex. ‘Did you give him Viggo Tuvesson’s name? Ask if he knew him?’
‘No,’ said Peder. ‘I didn’t see there was any need to give away the name at present, while we know somebody’s threatening Tony, and don’t know what this Viggo is up to. I just asked if he had any contacts in the city police and he said he didn’t. Not in the Norrmalm district or anywhere else.’
‘Excellent,’ said Alex. ‘Excellent.’
He ended the call and turned to Fredrika.
‘Bother. It looks as if that cop is mixed up in something shady after all.’
Fredrika had been right: Muhammad Abdullah’s wife was not at all happy about their visit. This time there was no tea and biscuits, and the flat was full of people when they got there. It took Fredrika several minutes of diplomatic groundwork before the woman agreed to speak to them briefly in the kitchen, just the three of them.
Her body language signalled nothing but mistrust and animosity as she sat down at the kitchen table. Fredrika could see she had been crying, but she remained composed throughout the interview.
‘I told him to be careful, and not to talk to you,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘But he wouldn’t listen.’
‘What made you think he needed to be careful?’ Fredrika cautiously asked.
‘Yusuf never got here,’ she said, presumably referring to the man run over at the university. ‘We waited and waited but he never got in touch. Then I knew, I just knew there was something wrong with the so-called network that helped him get over here.’
‘Your husband had his own contacts for that sort of thing, didn’t he?’ Alex gently prompted.
‘Contacts, yes, but he was never part of the organisation himself,’ the widow said adamantly. ‘It would have been far too risky.’
‘Did he talk to any of his contacts about the new network?’ Fredrika asked.
The widow shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Never. Yusuf had told us it all had to be very secret. So when he went missing, we were really worried.’
‘Did you or your husband ever receive threats of any kind?’ asked Alex.
‘No,’ the widow said quietly. ‘Not as far as I know, anyway.’
Alex thought about this. Jakob Ahlbin was sent threats before he was murdered, and someone had perhaps even tried to bargain with him. But Muhammad Abdullah was shot practically on the open street, with no warning.
‘I’ve been through my husband’s emails and post,’ said the widow. ‘I didn’t find anything there.’
‘And his mobile?’
She shook her head.
‘He had it with him when he went out and I haven’t seen it since.’
This made Fredrika and Alex feel uneasy, because the police had not found a mobile on Muhammad Abdullah when they searched the body.
‘What made him go out last night?’ asked Fredrika.
‘Muhammad got a phone call,’ the widow said. ‘When we were watching TV. It only lasted about thirty seconds and then he said he had to go out and see to something.’
‘Did he tell you who had rung?’
‘No, but it wasn’t unusual. Sometimes one of his contacts would ring and he’d have to go and see them at short notice. I never asked about it. For the children’s sake it seemed better for only one of us to be involved.’
Fredrika could sympathise with that. But it did not bode well that the mobile had vanished. They could always look at the pattern of calls to and from that number, of course, but without the phone itself there was no way of telling if he had received messages or threats by text.
‘And when did you realise something was wrong?’
‘After a couple of hours. He wasn’t usually gone that long when he went to see his contacts.’
‘And you rang the police?’
‘Yes, but he hadn’t been gone long enough for them to take any action, they said. So after ten I went out to see if he’d taken the car when he went out, or gone on foot…’
Her voice fell away and she swallowed hard, several times.
‘But you didn’t find him?’ Fredrika said gently.
The widow shook her head.
‘But I must have been out there just about the time he died.’
As she went on, her words inflicted almost physical pain on them:
‘I was there when they found him this morning. He was lying face down in the snow. The first thought that came into my head was that he’d catch cold if he stayed there like that.’
The woman’s dark eyes were glittering with tears but she did not cry. Grief had so many faces and expressed itself in so many different ways. Sometimes it even made people beautiful.
Peder Rydh went over and over his notes from his latest interview with Tony Svensson. Thoughts came and went like stray guests in his head.
It seemed incontrovertible that Tony Svensson and Sons of the People had had a major clash with Jakob Ahlbin. It seemed equally clear that that conflict had been resolved, and that the person in dispute with Jakob Ahlbin when he died was Ronny Berg, now in Kronoberg Prison. But Ronny Berg had an alibi for the time of the double murder, which meant that, if he was behind it, he must have hired someone to carry it out. And that did not sound very plausible.