“So you have never seen the letters? Never touched them?”
“No, no, no! I haven’t. I haven’t.”
“Okay. But now you are not telling the truth again. The fact is, we have analyzed the letters and found fingerprints on them.”
“Oh yes?”
“And they are your fingerprints.”
Kerstin started looking around nervously.
“May I say what I believe is the truth?” said Henrik. “I don’t think you’ve bought clothes with that money. I think you have taken the money and given it to the person who sent the threatening letters. There were ten threatening letters and you have withdrawn a large sum of money ten times.”
“No... I haven’t...”
“Now you disappoint me, Kerstin. Tell the truth now. Tell us what really happened.”
Ramstedt got up, adjusted his jacket and went to pick up his pen by the door. Behind Henrik’s back he tried, with the help of body language, to get Kerstin to not say another word. But her shoulders were already sunk.
She swallowed.
And started telling her story.
All of it.
*
Henrik lingered in the interview room and stared for a minute. The interview was over, but he was still thinking. He replayed the sequence in his head. When Kerstin’s lip started to tremble. When she dried the tears on her cheeks. When she described what her husband had done.
“I don’t think I ever really knew him. He was always absent in some way. He always has been... I knew that something was wrong. I knew it when he wanted me to have a pillow or something over my face when we had sex. He insisted, otherwise he would feel sick to his stomach, he said.”
She sobbed.
“That was at the beginning, when we were just married. He did such strange things. I could wake up in the middle of the night and he’d be just laying there, staring at my breasts. And when he saw I’d woken up, he’d shout at me that I was a stupid fucking cunt and then he pushed in his...his...”
Kerstin couldn’t get the words out. She wiped the snot from her nose on her sleeve.
“He pushed his penis so far down my throat that I’d choke and couldn’t breathe. When he was finished, he said I was disgusting, that he had to go and wash himself after having been with his ugly wife.”
Kerstin cried for a while, then eventually calmed down. She was silent for a while, then she started to carry on again.
“He never really wanted to sleep with me. But I thought it would get better. I told myself someday everything would get better, that it was all simply too much for him, his work I mean, and that I should feel sorry for him. But then he started to have sex with other women...and girls. He started... They must have been afraid, they must have been afraid of him. I just don’t understand how he could, I...”
She cried straight out.
“He told me once how one woman screamed when he raped her on the floor. How the panic in her eyes grew when he penetrated her. How he laughed when she started to bleed from her behind. And then he’d... She was bleeding...and he...down her throat...”
Kerstin covered her face with her hands and put her head on the table.
“Oh God...” she cried.
Henrik could still hear her crying although he was now alone in the room. He looked out of the window and stared at the pale gray light. Then he got up. In half an hour, he had to be in the conference room with the team. He had to compose himself.
*
Henrik Levin walked slowly up the flights of stairs at the police headquarters and continued down the long and empty corridor on floor three to the conference room. He didn’t look at the mail cubbies or the paintings, nor did he look in through the open office doors. He kept his gaze directed downward toward the floor and a little in front of him.
Gunnar ?hrn noted Henrik’s expression and asked if he wanted to delay the briefing for an hour. But Henrik insisted on reviewing with the team the most important parts of his last interview with Kerstin. He remained standing in front of the table and his colleagues.
“Threatening letters were directed at Hans Juhlén,” he began. “Hans Juhlén had sexually abused several female asylum seekers, and in return they were promised permanent residence permits. But they were never granted said permits. On one occasion he treated a young girl extremely badly, and she decided to tell her brother about him. When the first letter arrived, Kerstin realized it was written by the brother. She knew because Hans Juhlén was in the habit of boasting about his so-called conquests. About how naive the girls were. About how they had cried when he had forced them to have sex.”
Anneli Lindgren felt so uncomfortable hearing this information she was squirming by the time Henrik took a short break. Then he continued.
“Kerstin made sure that Hans never saw the letters. It was she who had opened them first. She had considered going to the police to bring an end to the rapes. The only right decision would have been to get divorced, but she didn’t know who she would be without her husband. Who would look after her? She didn’t have any money of her own, no way to support herself. And if the story got out, it would be the end of her husband’s career and then she, too, wouldn’t have any money to live on. Besides, everybody would scorn her for having been married to a rapist. So she had decided to hide the letters and pay. For silence,” said Henrik.
“How can you protect somebody who treats you so badly?” said Mia.
“I don’t know. Hans Juhlén was really a nasty bastard. According to Kerstin, he more or less bullied her. It all started twenty years ago when he found out that she could never have a child. He reminded her of that every day. He crushed her.”
“And she let him do it?”
“Yes.”
“But didn’t he discover that the money had been withdrawn from the account?” said Gunnar.
“Oh yes. He had asked her about the withdrawals, but Kerstin lied and said they were for purchases for their home or for a bill or a repair that must be paid. He had gotten angry, a big argument followed and he hit her. But she never changed her story. And after a while, even though her excuses never made sense, he lost interest in it and in his wife. In any event she says he stopped asking her about it,” said Henrik.
“Who did the threatening letters come from?” said Mia.
“A Yusef Abrham from Ethiopia. He lives in Hageby and he shares a flat with his sister. That was why Kerstin always withdrew the money there. We’ll talk to him straight after this meeting. Is it okay if I...” Henrik pointed at an empty chair.
“Of course, sit down,” said Gunnar, who was used to Henrik’s tactfulness. Even so, Gunnar added: “You don’t need to ask permission to do that, surely?”
“No, you can just bloody well sit down,” said Mia.
Henrik pulled out the chair and sat down. He immediately opened a bottle of mineral water and poured half the contents into a glass and drank it. The bubbles tickled his palate.
Jana Berzelius had been sitting in silence, observing, at the short end of the table.
She crossed her legs and said, “Has Kerstin confessed to anything else?”
Henrik shook his head.
“We still don’t have anything concrete that links her to the murder, which means I must let her go.”
“Kerstin did of course have every reason to want to see her husband dead, given how he had treated her. They might well have argued and she pulled out a gun and shot him,” she said.
“But the gun? Where would she have gotten that from? And after shooting him, would she have given it to a child who climbed out through the window? And who would that child have been?” said Henrik.
“I don’t know. Think of something yourself then!” Mia hissed.
Henrik gave her a tired look.
“Okay, now let’s calm down. Jana’s right, we have to release Kerstin, at least for now,” said Gunnar.
“What about Lasse Johansson?” said Jana.
“He’s of no interest any longer, his alibi has been confirmed by several people.”
“So at the moment all we have is the boy and this Yusef Abrham?”