Silenced by Kristina Ohlsson

on.
    ‘Are there any suspicious circumstances?’ he asked.
    ‘No, not in her case,’ said Fredrika. ‘But her death is linked to another case, so . . .’
    ‘I shall make sure you have the paperwork you need by this afternoon,’ said the doctor.
    Fredrika got the feeling he was rather keen to hang up.
    ‘Had she been a patient at the hospital before?’ she asked.
    ‘No,’ said Göran Ahlgren. ‘Never.’
    There was a knock at Fredrika’s door and Ellen Lind came in with some papers, which she put on the desk. They gave each other a nod and Ellen departed.
    We should see more of each other outside work, thought Fredrika, and felt tired at the very prospect.
    She hardly had the energy to socialise with her existing friends.
    Göran Ahlgren cleared his throat to remind her he was still on the line.
    ‘Sorry,’ Fredrika said quickly. ‘I just had a couple more questions about how Karolina was identified. Did she have any ID documents on her?’
    ‘Yes she did. She had a wallet in her back pocket with a driving licence in it. Identification was made using the picture on the driving licence and confirmed by her sister, who came with her in the ambulance.’
    Fredrika was struck almost dumb.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Her sister. Just a moment, I’ve got the name here,’ said the doctor, leafing through some papers. ‘Yes, here we are. Her name was Johanna, Johanna Ahlbin. She was here to identify her sister.’
    The thoughts were whirling round inside Fredrika’s head.
    ‘We haven’t been able to contact her sister,’ she said. ‘Do you know where she is?’
    ‘I didn’t speak to her for long,’ said Göran Ahlgren wearily. ‘But I remember she mentioned an imminent trip abroad. I believe she left over the weekend.’
    Fredrika felt a growing sense of frustration. There had been no reference to the sister’s presence in any of the documentation she had received from the hospital or the police.
    ‘Did the police officers who were sent to the hospital speak to the sister?’
    ‘Only briefly,’ said the doctor. ‘There weren’t any obvious irregularities that needed looking into. I mean, the deceased came in with her sister, who filled us in on the background. And the identification was a straightforward matter, too.’
    The fatigue that normally slowed Fredrika’s brain suddenly cleared away. She gripped her biro hard and stared straight ahead. So Johanna Ahlbin had been present when Karolina died. Then she had gone abroad and was not contactable. And two days ago her father’s grief had made him take his own life.
    ‘Who informed Karolina Ahlbin’s parents of her death?’ she asked, her voice unnecessarily stern.
    If she had not known better, she would have said the doctor was smiling as he replied.
    ‘I can’t say for certain,’ he said. ‘But Johanna Ahlbin said she would do it.’
    ‘Do we know if she told anyone else about the death? Did she ring anyone while she was at the hospital?’
    ‘No,’ replied Göran Ahlgren, ‘not that I saw.’
    Bewildered, Fredrika tried to get to grips with the story that was emerging.
    ‘What sort of mood did Johanna Ahlbin seem to be in while she was with you?’
    The doctor paused, as if he did not understand the question.
    ‘She was upset, of course,’ he said. ‘But not in a particularly dramatic way.’
    ‘Meaning what?’
    ‘Well, she wasn’t as distraught as a lot of relatives are when someone dies unexpectedly. I got the impression Karolina Ahlbin’s drug abuse was known to the family and had been a problem for a long time. That doesn’t necessarily mean the death was expected, of course, but it did mean the relatives were to some extent prepared for the possibility that this was how it might end.’
    Not her father, Fredrika thought dully. He was entirely unprepared. He shot his wife and then himself.
    She ended the call to the doctor, not at all clear about what she had discovered.
    An odd family. Very odd, in fact.
    A glance at the clock