Mia tensed her muscles and closed the gap. By the time they reached the end of the path, she had caught up and felled him with a well-directed tackle. They both rolled over in the snow. Mia quickly got a firm hold of the man’s left arm as he lay facedown on the ground beneath her and she bent it up onto his back. Then she caught her breath.
Henrik came running up, pulled out a pair of handcuffs and locked the man’s arms behind his back. He forced him up onto his feet and showed his ID card before leading the man to the car.
Makda had also run after them but had given up in the playground. When she saw her brother come back between the police officers in handcuffs, she slapped her hands over her mouth and shook her head. She went up to her brother and shouted loudly and accusingly at him in Tigrin as she gripped his neck.
Mia pulled her away.
“We’re just going to talk with him,” said Mia in a calming voice and led her away to the swings.
“He needs to come with us to the station. Don’t worry.”
Mia stopped, put both her hands on Makda’s shoulders and looked her in the eye.
“Now listen to me. We will be talking with you, too, about what has happened. About what was done to you. I’ll send a woman who knows your language and who you can talk with privately.”
Makda couldn’t understand what the woman police officer had said. But she could see in the woman’s eyes that it was something good. She nodded. Mia smiled and left the playground. Makda didn’t know where she should go. So she just stayed there.
Anxious.
And completely lost.
*
They had hardly sat down in the station before Yusef Abrham claimed, in poor English, that he didn’t know a word of Swedish. Henrik Levin and Mia Bolander had struggled for more than forty minutes to get hold of an interpreter. When the interpreter finally came, Yusef claimed he couldn’t talk because he had a throat infection. That was when Mia lost her temper. She threw the threatening letters down onto the table and let fly a long harangue with expletives that the interpreter then repeated in Tigrin but without the same anger. Yusef just glared at her, scornfully.
After a few more expletives from Mia, he sighed loudly and finally started to talk about Hans Juhlén. About how Hans had abused his sister. One cold January evening Juhlén had come to the apartment and asked to be let in to speak with Makda about her residence permit.
“She was alone at home, she didn’t want to let him in, but he had forced his way in and raped her in the hall,” said Yusef. “And when I came home, she was in her room sobbing. I wanted to help her, but she told me not to say anything to anybody about what had happened.”
He rolled his eyes and said that his sister’s naive hope of getting a residence permit meant that she continued to open the door every time Hans Juhlén rang the bell.
Yusef had kept his word about keeping the sexual encounters secret, but his suspicion that Juhlén had lied about his sister’s residence permit had been gnawing at him.
“Juhlén seemed to be an idiot, and you shouldn’t trust idiots.”
When three months had passed and Makda still hadn’t received a positive answer from the Migration Board, Yusef decided to use the same blackmail techniques as Juhlén. But instead of sex, he used money. One time he hid and documented Juhlén’s visit and his degrading act with his cell phone. Afterwards, he sat down and wrote the first threatening letter and mailed it to Juhlén’s wife. A couple of weeks later he was contacted by Kerstin Juhlén. She had beseeched him to withdraw the threat, but Yusef refused.
“He abused my sister, so I felt I could abuse him. And if his wife didn’t pay, I would leak the photos to the media!”
Kerstin realized he was serious and a day later she delivered the money.
“But I didn’t say anything to Makda—I kept the money for myself. So Makda knows nothing of my blackmail scheme. If my sister wanted to fuck him for nothing, then she could just go ahead.”
“So you wrote the threatening letters yourself?” Henrik asked.
“Yes.”
“So you do know Swedish?”
Yusef smirked.
After that, he answered all the questions in fluent Swedish.
Yusef had been living in Sweden for a year and a half and had learned the language fairly quickly. He was born in Eritrea and grew up there, but had left the country on account of the troubles with Ethiopia.
“We were lucky,” he said. “Lucky that we could make our way here. That we survived the whole journey. That we didn’t end up in a ghost container.”
“What do you mean by ghost container?” said Henrik.
“It’s one of the common ways of traveling to a new country these days and it isn’t safe. Especially not for illegal refugees. You know, many die on the way. Sometimes they all die. That’s happened in Afghanistan, Ireland, Thailand. Even here.”
“Here?” said Henrik.
“Yes.”
“In Sweden?”
“Yes.”
“That’s strange. Wouldn’t we know if that were the case?” asked Mia.
“You don’t see everything that happens. Anyway...my parents are going to come here too,” said Yusef.
“When?” said Henrik.
“Next year I think. It’s dangerous to stay in Eritrea.”
“Indeed,” said Henrik. “But back to the threatening letters. Have you told anybody about them?”
Yusef shook his head no.
“You know you have committed a crime?” said Mia.
“It is only a letter, not a real threat.”
“Oh yes, it is. And making threats against people is a very serious crime in this country. You will probably end up in prison for it,” said Mia.
“It was worth it,” he said.
Yusef didn’t protest when the policemen took him away to a cell. He walked slowly and seemed relaxed, as if he were relieved at having told the truth.
*
Ola S?derstr?m stared at the computer screen, the only source of light in the room. He was going through the files he had found on Hans Juhlén’s computer. Now and then you could hear the muffled sound of the lift going from floor to floor. The ceiling fans hissed and the hard drive made an angry buzzing sound as he hunted down the deleted files. But then it went silent. Ola had gone through everything.
Now we’ll see, he thought. He knew there must be something interesting somewhere. There always was. In every computer. But you had to look in the right place. Computers hid more than people knew, and often you had to search through the files several times to uncover everything, or use special software.
He started by looking through Hans Juhlén’s cookie folder to see which sites he had visited. Headlines from the national newspapers showed up, and Ola glanced at the articles about the Migration Board. Most of them were about the board’s illegal contracts with landlords and other suppliers of housing. A series of reports questioned whether management knew about the principle of public access to official records, and one journalist had investigated the government procurement processes at the board and for which Juhlén was ultimately responsible. The board was severely criticized and had often been asked why it took so long to improve their routines when it came to finding and paying for accommodations for asylum seekers. Hans was quoted as saying that there was “a difference between buying a photocopier and buying accommodation.”
Juhlén was under pressure, Ola thought, and he moved ahead with the cookie folder. Four sites turned up about ships, and another one was about transport containers. Then he came upon a long list of sites with pornographic content, mainly featuring dark-skinned women.