There was no doubt about it. A couple of nights previously, people had been murdered in the house where her mother grew up. Could it be her mother’s foster-parents who had been killed? The newspapers wrote that most of the dead were old people.
Her mother’s foster-parents would be more than ninety years of age now. Perhaps.
She shuddered at the thought. She seldom if ever thought about her parents. She even found it difficult to recall what her mother looked like. But now the past came unexpectedly rushing towards her.
Staffan entered the kitchen. As always, he made hardly a sound.
‘You make me jump when I don’t know you’re coming,’ she said.
‘Why are you up?’
‘I felt hungry.’
He looked at the papers lying on the table. She told him about the conclusion she’d reached and was becoming more and more convinced that what she suspected was in fact the truth.
‘But it’s pretty remote,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘It’s a very thin thread connecting you to that little village.’
‘Thin, but remarkable. You have to admit that.’
‘Maybe. But you have to get some sleep.’
She lay awake for ages before dozing off. That thin thread became stretched almost to the breaking point. She slept fitfully, and her sleep was broken by thoughts about her mother. She still found it hard to see traces of herself in her mother.
She dropped off to sleep eventually and woke up to find Staffan standing at the foot of the bed, hair damp from the shower, putting on his uniform. I’m your general, he used to tell her. Without a weapon in my hand, only a pen to cancel tickets.
She pretended to be still asleep and waited until the door closed behind him. Then she jumped up and switched on the computer in her study. She went through several search engines, looking for as much information as she could find. The events that had taken place in Hälsingland still seemed to be shrouded in uncertainty. The only thing that appeared clear was that the weapon used was probably a large knife or something similar.
I want to know more about this, she thought. At least I want to know if my mother’s foster-parents were among those murdered the other night. She searched until eight o’clock, when she put all thoughts about the mass murders aside to consider the day’s trial concerning two Iraqi citizens accused of smuggling people.
It was a further two hours before she had gathered together her papers, glanced through the preliminary investigation notes and taken her seat in court. Help me now, dear old Anker, to get through this day as well, she pleaded. Then she tapped her hammer lightly on the desk in front of her and asked the prosecuting counsel to open the proceedings.
There were high windows behind her back.
Just before she sat down, she had noticed that the sun was beginning to break through the thick clouds that had moved in over Sweden during the night.
6
By the time the trial was over two days later, Birgitta Roslin knew what her verdict would be. They were guilty, and the elder of the two men, Abdul ibn Yamed, who was the ringleader, would be sentenced to three years and two months in prison. His assistant, the younger man, Yassir al-Habi, would get one year. Both men would be deported on release.
The sentences given were similar to what had gone before. Many of the individuals smuggled into Sweden had been threatened and assaulted when it transpired that they were unable to pay what they owed for the forged immigration papers and the long journey. She had taken a particular dislike to the elder of the two men. He had appealed to her and the prosecutor with sentimental arguments, claiming that he never retained any of the money paid by the refugees but donated it all to charities in his homeland. During a break in proceedings the prosecuting counsel had stopped by for a cup of coffee and mentioned in passing that Abdul ibn Yamed drove around in a Mercedes worth almost a million kronor.
The trial had been strenuous. The days had been long, and she had no time to do more than eat and sleep and study her notes prior to returning to the bench. Her twin daughters phoned and invited her to Lund, but she didn’t have time. As soon as the case was over, she was faced with a complicated one involving Romanian credit card swindlers.
She had no time to keep abreast of what was happening in the little village in Hälsingland, missing the morning newspapers and the evening TV news bulletins.
The morning Roslin was due to start preparing for the trial of the swindlers from Romania, she discovered that she had a note in her diary about an appointment with her doctor for a routine annual check-up. She considered postponing it for a few weeks. Apart from feeling tired, being out of shape and occasionally suffering anxiety attacks, she couldn’t imagine there being anything wrong with her. She was a healthy person who led an unadventurous life and hardly ever even had a cold. But she didn’t cancel the appointment.
The doctor’s office was not far from the municipal theatre. She left her car on the side street where it was parked and walked to the surgery from the court. It was cold, fine weather with no wind at all. The snow that had fallen a few days earlier had melted away. She stopped by a shop window and contemplated a dress. But the price tag gave her a shock, and she moved on.
In the waiting room was a newspaper whose front page was laden with news about the mass murders in Hälsingland. She had barely got as far as picking it up when she was summoned by the doctor. He was an elderly man who reminded her of Judge Anker. Roslin had been his patient for ten years. He had been recommended by one of her legal colleagues. He asked her how she felt, if she’d had any pains, and having noted her responses he passed her on to a nurse who took a blood sample from one of Roslin’s fingertips. She then sat in the waiting room. Another patient had claimed the newspaper. Roslin closed her eyes and waited. She thought about her family, what each of them was doing, or at least where they were, at that very moment. Staffan was on a train heading for Hallsberg, he wouldn’t be home until late. David was working in AstraZeneca’s laboratory just outside Gothenburg. It was less certain where Anna was: the last time she had been in touch was a month ago, from Nepal. The twins were in Lund and wanted their mother to visit them. She dozed off and was woken up by the nurse shaking her by the shoulder.
‘You can go in to the doctor now.’
Surely I’m not so exhausted that I need to drop off in a doctor’s waiting room, Roslin thought as she returned to the doctor’s office and sat down.
Ten minutes later Birgitta Roslin was standing in the street outside, trying to come to terms with the fact that she wouldn’t be working for the next two weeks. The doctor had introduced sudden and unexpected disorder into her life. Her blood pressure was far too high, and coupled with her anxiety attacks caused the doctor to insist on two weeks’ leave from work.
She walked back to the court and spoke to Hans Mattsson, a chief judge and her immediate superior. They managed to work out between them a way of dealing with the two cases she was currently embroiled in. She spoke to her secretary, posted a few letters she had written, called at the chemist’s to pick up her new medication, then drove home. The lack of anything to do was paralysing.
She made lunch, then flopped down on the sofa with the newspaper. Not all the bodies in Hesjövallen had been named publicly. A detective by the name of Sundberg made a statement and urged the general public to contact the police with any information. There were still no leads, but the police were sure, no matter how hard it might be to believe, that they were looking for only the one killer.