Silenced by Kristina Ohlsson

stayed at home all day?
    ‘Have you always lived this close to each other?’ asked Fredrika, referring to the proximity of the dead couple’s home to their own.
    Elsie and Sven exchanged glances.
    ‘Well yes,’ said Sven. ‘We have, actually. Our houses were near each other back in the days when we all lived out in Bromma, and then we all moved into town within a few years of each other. Once the children had left home. But it wasn’t something we planned, living this close to each other again. We laughed at the way fate takes a hand in things sometimes.’
    The corner of his mouth twitched, but the smile did not reach his dark eyes. It struck Fredrika that Sven must have been quite good-looking in his youth. Craggy features, a bit like Alex Recht, and grey hair that must once have been dark brown. He was tall and rather stately, his wife quite diminutive by comparison.
    ‘How did you get to know each other?’ asked Joar.
    Fredrika was finding that Joar’s voice often startled her. He had the knack of sounding so genuinely interested in everything. Yet so correct. Tedious bugger, she had heard Peder mutter on occasions. It was not a view she shared.
    ‘Through the church,’ Elsie said firmly. ‘Jakob was an assistant vicar in the local parish, you know, just like Sven, and Marja was in charge of church music. I was a lay reader myself.’
    ‘So you all worked in the same parish? How long for?’
    ‘Almost twenty years,’ said Sven with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Elsie and I worked in Karlstad before that, but we moved to the Stockholm area when the children started senior school.’
    ‘So your children were friends, too? asked Fredrika.
    ‘No,’ Elsie said hesitantly, looking away from her husband for some reason, ‘not really. Marja and Jakob’s two girls were a bit younger than our boys, so they didn’t go to school together. Of course we met on social occasions as families, and sometimes at church. But no, I wouldn’t say they were good friends.’
    Why not? thought Fredrika. The boys can’t have been that much older.
    She left it for the time being, but thought she could detect Elsie blushing.
    ‘What can you tell us about Jakob and Marja?’ asked Joar with a slight smile. ‘I know all this is terribly hard for you, and I know you’ve already had to tell other officers all this, before we were put on the case, but Fredrika and I would be very grateful if you had time to answer a few questions.’
    Elsie and Sven slowly nodded their assent. There was something about their body language that Fredrika found disturbing. Something awkward. Fredrika could not in her wildest dreams imagine the couple to be involved in what had happened, but they had been behaving as if they had something to hide even before she and Joar began their questioning.
    ‘Jakob and Marja’s relationship was a very solid one,’ Elsie declared. ‘A really good marriage. And they had two lovely girls. Both of them good at what they did, in their different ways.’
    Fredrika caught herself surreptitiously rolling her eyes. ‘A really good marriage.’ What did that actually mean?
    ‘Were they very young when they met each other?’ asked Joar.
    ‘Yes, they were,’ said Elsie. ‘He was seventeen and she was sixteen. It was considered a bit scandalous, back then. But once they got married and had children, everyone forgot about how it all started.’
    ‘But as I said, that was before we knew them,’ put in Sven. ‘We only know what Jakob and Marja told us.’
    ‘Were you close friends?’ Fredrika asked delicately.
    And she saw she’d scored a bull’s eye. Sven and Elsie fidgeted and looked uncomfortable.
    ‘We were close friends, of course we were,’ said Sven. ‘I mean, we had keys to each other’s flats, for example. For practical reasons, mainly, and because we always have done, what with living so near each other.’
    But, observed Fredrika. There was a ‘but’ trying to get out.
    She waited.
    It was