Présentation de l'éditeur
From the winner of the 2012 Stabilo Prize for Best Crime Writer of Southern Sweden, comes the second installment of the Frederika Bergman crime series.
Fifteen years ago: A teenage girl is viciously assaulted as she picks flowers in a field one night in midsummer. The crime is never reported.
Present day: A man with no identification on his person is killed in a hit-and-run. He is never reported missing. Across the city, a priest and his wife are found dead in an apparent suicide.
Fredrika Bergman is assigned to the case. What she and her colleagues discover is that a sinister evil, the roots of which date back decades, is the link behind these seemingly unrelated crimes. There’s a reason why none of them were ever reported, and it has to do with a shocking and horrendous cover-up unlike anything Fredrika could have possibly imagined.
Skillfully crafted and highly suspenseful,
Silenced is a gripping thriller in which the consequences of past tragedies continue to haunt the present, reaching further and deeper than anyone ever expected.
Extrait
Silenced
STOCKHOLM
Unaware that he would soon be dead, he delivered his final lecture with great enthusiasm and commitment. Friday had been a long day, but the hours had passed quickly. His audience was attentive, and it warmed Jakob Ahlbin’s heart that so many people besides himself were interested in the subject.
When he realized just a few days later that all was lost, he would briefly wonder if it had been his last lecture that did it. Whether he had been too open in the question-and-answer session, revealed that he was in possession of knowledge nobody wanted him to have. But he did not really think so. Up until the very moment of his death he was convinced it would have been impossible to ward off disaster. When he felt the pressure of the hard hunting pistol against his temple, everything was already over. But it did not stop him from feeling great regret that his life had to end there. He still had so much to give.
Over the years, Jakob had given more lectures than he could remember, and he knew he had put his talent as a fine speaker to good use. The content of his speech was usually much the same, as were the questions that followed it. The audience varied. Sometimes its members had been instructed to attend, sometimes they sought him out of their own accord. It made no difference to Jakob. He was at ease on the podium no matter what.
He generally began by showing the pictures of the boats. Perhaps it was a mean trick, but he knew that it always hit the spot. A dozen people in a boat that was far too small, week after week, increasingly exhausted and desperate. And like a faint mirage on the horizon there was Europe, like a dream or a flight of the imagination, something they were never meant to experience in real life.
“We think this is an unknown phenomenon for us,” he would start. “We think it belongs to another part of the world, something which has never happened to us and never will.”
The picture behind him quietly changed and a map of Europe came up on the screen.
“Memories are short sometimes,” he sighed. “We choose not to remember that not so many decades ago, Europe was in flames and people were fleeing in panic from one country to another. And we forget that barely a century ago, more than a million Swedes decided to leave this country for a new start in America.”
He ran his hand through his hair, stopped for a moment, and checked that his audience was listening. The picture behind him changed again, now showing Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, a still from the film of Vilhelm Moberg’s Emigrants series.
“A million people,” he repeated loudly. “Don’t for one minute be fooled into thinking Karl-Oskar and Kristina saw their trip to America as anything but a punishment. Don’t imagine they wouldn’t have stayed in Sweden if they could. Just think what it would take to force you to make a break like that, to leave your old life beh
