Silenced by Kristina Ohlsson

Author:Kristina Ohlsson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781847379627
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2012-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

A memory from another time and place found its way to the surface. The obligatory session with a psychologist when he applied to work abroad.

Psychologist: What’s the very worst thing that could happen to you today?

Alex: Today?

Psychologist: Today.

Alex: [Silence.]

Psychologist: Don’t think so much, give me something spontaneous.

Alex: Losing my wife Lena, that would definitely be the worst thing.

Psychologist: I see from your form that you’ve got two children aged fourteen and twelve.

Alex: That’s right, and I don’t want to lose them, either.

Psychologist: But it wasn’t them who came spontaneously to mind when I asked my question.

Alex: No, it wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my kids. Just that I love them in a different way.

Psychologist: Try to explain.

Alex: Children are something you borrow. You know that from the word go. They’re never intended to stay at home with you for ever. The whole aim of my presence in their lives is to get them ready to manage on their own. But it’s not like that with Lena. She’s ‘mine’ in an entirely different way. And I’m hers. We shall always be together.

Psychologist: Always? Is that the way you feel today?

Alex (forcefully): That’s the way I’ve always felt. For as long as I’ve known her. We shall always be together.

Psychologist: Does the thought of that make you feel secure or stressed?

Alex: Secure. If I woke up tomorrow and she wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be able to go on. She’s my best friend and the only woman I’ve loved unconditionally.

Alex swallowed hard. Why the hell was it so hard to work out what was wrong? It had been the same story yesterday. She turned away when he tried to look her in the eye, and flinched when he touched her. Gave that loud, joyless laugh and went to bed incomprehensibly early.

He hoped a few hours’ work might distract his thoughts.

A deserted corridor met his eye as he stepped out of the lift on their floor. He plodded to his office and sank down in the desk chair. Rifled aimlessly through the piles of paper.

The case had popped up on the first newspaper website the day before, and he noted that the news had spread this morning to all the major daily papers. Damn all these leaks from within the force. It made no difference how closed a circle you worked in; there was always someone who happened to hear something not intended for his or her ears.

Matters were not helped by the prosecutor’s decision the previous evening that they had to let Tony Svensson go, in view of what Ronny Berg had told Peder about the background to the Jakob Ahlbin affair.

‘There’s no technical evidence, no motive and scarcely enough to prosecute him for unlawful menace either,’ summarised the weary prosecutor. ‘Unless you can come up with confirmation that he sent the messages from the other computers, too.’

‘Could it not just simply be that he sent them from different computers so he could claim they weren’t from him? That he

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