Hidden in Snow (The ?re Murders, #1)(87)
The question leaves Mira at a loss. She swallows several times, searches for the right words. “I don’t really know.”
“Surely we all get mad sometimes? Does he yell, throw things?”
“No . . .”
Hanna waits for her to go on, but Mira says nothing.
“It appears that someone has poisoned the Halvorssen family’s dog,” Daniel informs her. “Were you aware of that?”
Mira pushes her hands into the pockets of her sweater.
“Ludde’s dead?”
Daniel nods. “Could your husband be behind the poisoning?”
“Fredrik would never do such a thing!” Mira is very pale, with bright-red spots on her cheeks. “He’s not like that.”
“You do realize that your husband has a motive to harm Harald Halvorssen and his family?” Hanna says. “It’s essential that you tell us the truth.”
Mira lifts her chin and looks Hanna right in the eye.
“Fredrik would never do anything to Amanda. He was with me that night.”
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93
When Lena wakes up, the box of sleeping pills on the nightstand is the first thing she sees. The bottle of tranquilizers is beside it.
She contemplates the drugs with eyes so swollen from crying that her eyelids are throbbing—but the pain is nothing compared to the agony of losing Amanda.
It is tearing her apart from the inside.
She reaches for the box, weighs it in her hand. The word Imovane on the label doesn’t mean much to her.
The family doctor gave her the pills the other day. They are supposed to last for the next couple of weeks. One taken at bedtime should enable her to sleep. During the day she can take tranquilizers to help her get through.
We’ll start off with these, he said, gently patting her hand.
And then?
If you’re still having trouble sleeping, I can prescribe more, but these are pretty strong. I don’t want to give you too many—they can be addictive.
As if that matters.
Amanda is dead, what could be worse?
The doctor said she would need the medication during the difficult period leading up to the funeral.
The thought that her beautiful daughter will lie in the cold, damp earth is unbearable.
Lena squeezes the box hard, trying to dispel the image of Amanda in a dark coffin.
After a while she opens the box and takes out a blister pack containing eleven pills. They are supposed to help her sleep for eleven more nights.
She reaches for the bottle of tranquilizers and tips out the contents: seventeen pills.
She puts the box and the bottle back on the nightstand, next to the glass of tepid water.
She pulls up the covers. Eleven plus seventeen makes twenty-eight. She thinks she can get them down all at once in a few swallows.
That should be enough to send her to sleep forever.
The thought brings her some solace.
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94
Hanna is tired when she gets home in the evening. She has spent hours reading up on the investigation, making sure she is on top of everything. She, Daniel, and Anton have discussed Mira and Fredrik Bergfors at length. By seven o’clock she’d had enough.
She ought to make dinner, but instead she simply puts the kettle on for tea. Then she opens her computer, brings up the vehicle licensing authority’s website and enters the number of the Golf. She has been wondering all afternoon who drove Zuhra to the house and picked her up, but she didn’t want to use the police computer to carry out a search.
The information is on the screen in seconds. The registered owner is Kristina Risberg, and her address is Albins v?g 11 in Unders?ker.
Hanna goes into Google Maps and clicks on “street view.” The house is semidetached. All she needs to do is go over there and see if the Golf is parked outside; then she can move forward, find out what Zuhra is involved in.
The kettle switches itself off, and she makes herself a big cup of tea with milk and sugar before going back to the computer and trying to summarize what she knows so far.
Zuhra reacted strongly when Hanna asked if she could speak to her boss. The woman in Fj?ll-st?d’s office denied having anyone with Zuhra’s name among their employees.
But Lydia has confirmed that she uses Fj?ll-st?d; all the invoices come from them.
It doesn’t make sense.
Once again Hanna enters “Fj?ll-st?d” in the search box and opens up the page that shows the company’s financial position. Profits have been increasing steadily since 2016.
She didn’t think about that the last time she looked.
It strikes her now that the previous year, 2015, was the year a large number of immigrants came into the country because of the civil war in Syria. Sweden took more immigrants than anywhere else in Europe. Every municipal district was required to accommodate a percentage, and she knows that many came to ?re. One of the hotels, the Continental Inn, was converted into a refugee center when the situation became critical.
Could it be pure chance that the influx of immigrants and Fj?ll-st?d’s soaring profits coincided?
Maybe that was how it started. The cleaning company recruited new arrivals, because the state subsidized their employment in order to create entry-level jobs for those who spoke little or no Swedish, and lacked education.
Gradually the immigrants became more established, moved to different areas or found other, better-paid posts. By that stage Fj?ll-st?d had no doubt realized how lucrative a cheap workforce could be.