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brighter. He avoided catching Peder’s eye. He had still not told him why he had been summoned back to HQ, only sent a message via Ellen that he was to take a look at anything on the Ahlbin case that the public had rung in with. Since the couple’s identities had not yet been released in the media, the number of calls had been pretty sparse.
    ‘Right,’ Alex said briskly. ‘Where do we stand?’
    Fredrika and Joar looked at each other, then Joar looked at Peder, who nodded mutely to Joar to present what they had found out in the course of the day. Joar rounded off with a report of the conversation with Sven and Elsie Ljung, who were convinced their friends had been murdered.
    ‘So they stuck to that when they talked to you, too?’ asked Alex, leaning back in his chair.
    ‘Yes,’ said Fredrika. ‘And they raised quite an important point, actually.’
    Alex waited.
    ‘They went round to their friends’ place because they’d been invited to dinner. Why wasn’t the dinner called off if the couple had just heard their daughter had died?’
    Alex sat up straight.
    ‘Very good objection,’ he said, but furrowed his brow. ‘Though according to the farewell note, only Jakob knew the terrible news. So in that case it wasn’t surprising that Marja sounded normal on the phone.’
    ‘But the Ljungs also queried the whole story of the daughter’s death,’ Joar elaborated. ‘And as regards whether Marja knew about her daughter or not, we can’t be sure.’
    ‘But it can’t be that difficult to check, can it?’ said Alex dubiously. ‘Whether the daughter’s dead, I mean.’
    ‘No, not at all,’ said Fredrika. ‘We’ve got copies of the doctor’s forms, confirmation of death and cause of death, from Danderyd Hospital. She apparently died from a drugs overdose, and it was clear from the paperwork that she’d been an addict for some years. The hospital called the police but there were no indications that the death was anything other than self-inflicted. So no further steps were taken. But we don’t know who actually broke the news to her parents. Their friends didn’t seem to know she was a drug addict.’
    ‘That bit about the Ljungs and Ahlbins not being so close any more is interesting,’ said Alex, changing tack. ‘Did they say why?’
    Fredrika hesitated.
    ‘Not exactly,’ she said slowly. ‘There was something they didn’t really want to tell us, but I didn’t get a sense of it being particularly relevant to the case.’
    Silence fell. Fredrika gave a discreet cough and their assistant Ellen Lind jotted something on her pad.
    ‘Okay then,’ said Alex. ‘Where shall we go from here? Speaking for myself, I shan’t be happy until we’ve interviewed more of the Ahlbins’ friends and acquaintances. It would be a shame if we couldn’t find anyone taking a contradictory view to the Ljungs on whether Jakob Ahlbin fired the gun and whether the daughter was on drugs.’
    He shook his head irritably.
    ‘What more do we know about the daughter’s death?’ he said, frowning. ‘Anything strange there?’
    ‘We haven’t had time to go into it in detail,’ Joar put in. ‘But I was planning, sorry, we were planning to take a closer look this afternoon. If it seems worth our while.’
    Alex tapped his pen gently on the table.
    ‘I’d like to suggest something else. Fredrika, how’s your afternoon looking?’
    Fredrika blinked several times, almost as though she had been sleeping through the meeting.
    ‘I’m going to try to get some scraps of paper translated,’ she replied. ‘That thing I rang you about. I’ve nothing else on.’
    ‘Scraps of paper,’ echoed Peder suspiciously, mainly to have something to say.
    ‘The hit-and-run victim outside the university had various scraps of paper on him, scrunched into little balls. They’ve got things written on them in Arabic.’
    ‘Since we’re talking about that case,’ said Alex, his eyes on Fredrika, ‘is there anything at this stage to