Spring Tide

by Börjlind, Cilla

If only her dad had been alive, what could he have told her?

  She pulled out her mobile.

  Åke Gustafsson and a middle-aged woman stood out on the neatly tended lawn outside the Police College. The woman was from Romania and was in charge of the college’s catering. She offered Åke a cigarette.

  ‘Not many people smoke nowadays,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It must be because of cancer.’

  ‘Quite likely.’

  And then they smoked.

  Halfway through his cigarette, Åke’s mobile started ringing.

  ‘This is Olivia Rönning, hi. Well, I’ve chosen that case at Nordkoster, and I’d like…’

  ‘I thought you might,’ Åke interposed, ‘your dad was involved in that…’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not why.’

  Olivia wanted to keep them separate. This was about her and now. It had nothing to do with her dad. At any rate not as far as her tutor was concerned. She had chosen a project and she was going to do it in her own way. That’s what she was like.

  ‘I’ve chosen it because I think it’s interesting,’ she said.

  ‘But pretty difficult.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I called you. I’d like to look at the real murder investigation paperwork, where is it?’

  ‘Probably in the central archives in Göteborg.’

  ‘Oh really? That’s a pity.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have been able to look anyway.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s an unsolved murder and it’s still within the limitation period. Nobody is given access to an open investigation if you’re not a member of the investigation team.’

  ‘Yeah, right… so what do I do now? How can I get some more information?’

  There was silence at the other end.

  Olivia sat at the wheel with her mobile against her ear. What’s he thinking? She saw a female traffic warden approaching who looked as if she meant business. The car was parked in a space reserved for disabled drivers. Not a good idea. She started the engine just as she heard Åke’s voice again.

  ‘You could try speaking to the person who was in charge of the investigation team,’ he said.

  ‘He’s called Tom Stilton.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘At police headquarters?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But you could ask Olsäter, Mette Olsäter, she’s a detective superintendent. They worked together quite a lot, she might know.’

  ‘And where can I find her, then?’

  ‘At the national crime squad, in C-building.’

  ‘Thanks!’

  Olivia pulled away right under the nose of the traffic warden.

  * * *

  ‘Situation Stockholm! Latest issue! Read about Princess Victoria and support the homeless!’

  One-eyed Vera’s voice had no difficulty in reaching out over the hordes of affluent residents of the chic Sofo district in southern Stockholm who were going into the market hall complex to stuff their bags full with a mixture of junk food and luxury. She had the appearance of someone perfectly suited to perform at the National Theatre. Like the actress Margaretha Krook when she was in her prime, although Vera looked rather shabbier. But she had that same sharp gaze, a commanding presence and a charisma that you couldn’t help but notice.

  Her copies were selling.

  Half of her bundle was already gone.

  Arvo Pärt hadn’t been as successful. He wasn’t selling anything. He stood leaning against a wall a little distance away. This wasn’t his day, and he didn’t want to be alone. He looked at Vera out of the corner of his eye. He admired her strength. He knew a lot about her dark nights, most of the people in her circle did. Yet now she was standing there as if she owned the world. Homeless. Unless you counted a decrepit old grey caravan from the 1960s as home.

  But Vera did.

  ‘I’m not homeless.’

  Which is what she told a customer who bought a magazine and wanted to peep into the world of the dregs of society. Social porn?

  ‘I’m in between homes.’

  Which was partly true. She was on the council’s special ‘Housing First’ list, a political project to give the impression they were improving the situation for the city’s homeless. If she was lucky, she’d be allocated a flat in the autumn, they’d told her. A trial flat. If she behaved well, she might be able to keep it.

  Vera intended to behave well.

  She always did behave well. Almost always. She had her caravan and a disability pension of just over 5,000 kronor a month. She scraped by with that but it only covered the most basic essentials. To get the rest, she had to go rummaging in skips.

  And she was doing OK.

  ‘Situation Stockholm!’

  Now she’d sold three more copies.

  ‘Are you really going to stand here?’

  The question came from Jelle. He seemed to turn up from nowhere with his five copies and had now parked himself quite close to Vera.

  ‘Yeah? What about it?’

  ‘That’s Benseman’s pitch.’

  Every seller had their own spot in the city. It was written on the plastic card that hung around their necks, and had their name too. On Benseman’s card it had said ‘Benseman/Söder Market Hall’.

  ‘Benseman’s not going to be here for a while,’ said Vera.

  ‘It’s his pitch. Have you been allocated it temporarily?’

  ‘No, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, what are you doing here?’

  Jelle didn’t answer. Vera took a step in his direction.

  ‘Anything against me standing here?’

  ‘It’s a good pitch.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can we share it?’ said Jelle.

  Vera gave a slight smile and looked at Jelle. The sort of look that he backed away from as quick as he could. Like now. He looked down at the ground. Vera came right up to him, leant over and tried to catch his eye from below. About as easy as catching a trout with your hand. Hopeless. Jelle just twisted away. Vera let out that hoarse laugh which immediately caused four families with little kids to swerve away with their designer pushchairs.

  ‘Jelle!’ she laughed.

  Pärt moved away from the wall. Was there trouble brewing? He knew Vera was a temperamental woman. Jelle was more of an unknown factor. It was said that he came from the archipelago, far out somewhere. Rödlöga, somebody had said? His father had hunted seals! But there was so much talk, and there was so little substance to it. And now the supposed seal hunter was standing outside the market hall having an argument with Vera.

  Or whatever it was they were doing.

  ‘What’s the row about?’

  ‘We’re not having a row,’ said Vera. ‘Jelle and me, we never have a row. I just say how it is, and he stares at the ground. Don’t you?’

  Vera turned towards Jelle but he had already moved off. Now he was fifteen metres away. He wasn’t going to argue with Vera about Benseman’s pitch. Really he didn’t give a damn about where Vera sold her magazines. She could decide that herself.

  He was fifty-six years old, and really he didn’t give a damn about anything.

  * * *

  Olivia steered her car through the late summer’s evening, on her way to Söder. It had been an intense day. A poor start, Ulf Molin had pestered her as usual, but then she’d found that murder case. And things were suddenly going very nicely. For several reasons. Private and otherwise.

  The hours she had spent at the National Library had left their mark.

  Weird how things turn out, she thought. It wasn’t at all how she had planned things. She would soon be on summer holiday after a tough and intense spell. At college on weekdays, and working weekends at the Kronoberg remand centre. After that she was going to take things easy. She’d managed to save a bit of money so that she could stay afloat awhile. A cheap last-minute
charter flight was the rough idea. Besides, she hadn’t had any sex for almost a year. She was going to do something about that too.

  And then this comes along?

  Perhaps she should skip the murder-case project after all? It was voluntary, right? Then Lenni phoned.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Lenni was her best mate from her final years at school. A girl who drifted around and desperately tried to find something to cling on to so she wouldn’t sink. As always, she wanted to go out in town, see what was happening, afraid to miss out. Now she’d got together with four other mates so that she wouldn’t miss Jakob, the guy she was interested in just now. She had read on Facebook that he was going to the Strand at Hornstull this evening.

  ‘You’ve got to come along! It’ll be great! We’re going to meet at Lollo’s at eight o’clock and…’

  ‘Lenni…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Can’t make it, I’ve got to… it’s some college work, I need to sort it this evening.’

  ‘But Jakob’s mate Erik is going and he’s been asking about you several times! And he’s dead handsome! Absolutely perfect for you!’

  ‘Yeah but I can’t make it.’

  ‘Livia, how can you be such a pain in the arse? You really need to get laid if you’re going to get back into form!’

  ‘Another time.’

  ‘That’s what you always say nowadays! OK then, but don’t blame me if you miss out!’

  ‘Promise. Hope it works out with Jakob!’

  ‘Yeah, keep your fingers crossed! Hugs and kisses!’

  Olivia didn’t have time to say hugs before Lenni had hung up. Lenni was already on her way somewhere else, somewhere with a bit of action.

  But why had she really said no? She had been thinking herself about guys just before Lenni phoned. Had she really become as deadly boring as Lenni claimed? College project work?

  Why had she gone and said that?

  Olivia put some fresh cat food in the bowl and emptied the litter tray. Then she sank down beside her laptop. What she really would have liked was a bath, but there was something wrong with the drains which meant that the water ran out over the floor when she let the plug out of the bath and she simply couldn’t deal with that just now. She’d do something about it tomorrow. Put it on her things-to-do-tomorrow list. A list that she had neatly pushed ahead of her most of the spring.

  Instead she opened Google Earth.

  Nordkoster.

  She was still fascinated by the possibility of sitting at home in front of a screen and just hovering down almost to the window level of buildings and dwellings all over the world. She always felt spy-vibes when she was doing it. Almost like a peeping Tom.

  But now they were a different sort of vibes, she noticed. The more she zoomed in on the island, the landscape, the small roads, the houses, the closer she got to her goal, the stronger the vibes became. And then she got there.

  Hasslevikarna.

  The coves on the northern part of the island.

  Almost like a little bay, she thought. She tried to get as close as possible. And that was pretty detailed. She could see the sand dunes above, and the beach. The beach where the pregnant woman had been buried. There it was in front of her, on the screen.

  Grey, grainy.

  She immediately started imagining where. Where had the woman been buried?

  Was it there?

  Or there?

  Where did they find the coat?

  And where had that little boy been sitting when he saw it all? Was it over there by the rocks on the west side of the beach? Or on the east side? Up by the trees?

  She suddenly noticed how irritated she had become because she couldn’t get any closer. All the way down. Almost with her feet on the beach.

  To be there.

  But she couldn’t. This was the best she could do. She turned off her computer. Now she was going to treat herself to a beer. A beer like Ulf had gone on about a couple of times. But she was going to have a beer on her own, at home, without having to rub shoulders with her classmates in the pub.

  On her own.

  Olivia liked being single. It was entirely her own choice. She had never had any problem with boys, on the contrary. Throughout her childhood and teens she received confirmation that she was attractive. First, all those cute photos of her as a little girl, and Arne’s mass of holiday videos starring little Olivia. Then there were all those admiring glances as she stepped out into the big world. For a while she amused herself by wearing sunglasses and observing all the boys she met beneath them. How their gaze would seek her out wherever she went and wouldn’t let go until she had passed. She soon tired of that. She knew who she was and what she had. In that respect. It gave her a sense of security.

  She didn’t have to go out hunting.

  Like Lenni.

  Olivia had her mum and her little flat. Two rooms painted white, with wooden floors. It wasn’t hers for real, she rented it from a cousin who was working for the Swedish Export Council in South Africa. He’d be there two years. Meanwhile, she was living here. Amidst his furniture.

  She just had to put up with that.

  And she had Elvis, of course. The cat that had been left after an intense relationship with a sexy Jamaican. A guy she had bumped into at Nova Bar on Skånegatan, first she’d felt surprisingly horny and then she’d fallen in love with him.

  The version she told him was the opposite way round.

  For almost a whole year they had travelled and laughed and shagged and then he had met a girl he knew from ‘back home’, as he put it. And she was allergic to cats. So the cat stayed on at Skånegatan. She had named it Elvis after the Jamaican moved out. He had called it Ras Tafari, after Haile Selassie’s name in the 1930s.

  Elvis was more to her taste.

  Now she loved the cat almost as much as her Mustang.

  She finished her beer.

  It was good.

  When she was about to open a second beer she happened to notice the alcohol content and realised it was much stronger than the first, and that she hadn’t had any lunch. Nor dinner for that matter. When she got going, food became low priority. Now she felt she ought to give her stomach something to work on, to counter the slight spinning sensation in her brain. Should she nip down and get a pizza?

  No.

  The slight spinning sensation was actually quite nice.

  She took the second can with her into the tiny bedroom and sank down on top of the bedspread. A thin long greyish-white wooden mask hung on the wall opposite her. One of her cousin’s African art objects. She still hadn’t made up her mind if she liked it or not. There were nights when she woke up from some cold dream and saw the moonlight reflected from the mask’s white mouth. That wasn’t exactly pleasant. Olivia let her gaze wander up towards the ceiling and suddenly realised: she hadn’t checked her phone for several hours! That was not like her. Her mobile was a part of Olivia’s outfit. She never felt fully dressed if she didn’t have her phone in a pocket. Now she grabbed it and unlocked it. Checked her emails, messages and calendar and ended up on the Swedish TV site. A bit of news before she slid away, that would do nicely!

  ‘But what are you going to do then?’

  ‘I can’t stand here and reveal our plans.’

  The person who couldn’t stand there and reveal anything on the evening news was called Rune Forss, a chief inspector with the Stockholm police, fifty-something she guessed. He had been tasked with dealing with the repeated assaults on rough sleepers. A task that hardly made Forss jump for joy, she thought. He seemed to belong to the old school. That part of the old school where they thought that lots of people only had themselves to blame. For one thing or another. Particularly when it came to the mischief-makers, and even more particularly when it came to folk who couldn’t pull their socks up and get a job and behave like everybody else.

  They only had themselves to blame, to a very large extent.

  That definitely wasn’t an attitude that they
taught at the police college, but everyone knew it existed. Amongst some people. Some of Olivia’s fellow students had already been infected by the same jargon.

  ‘Are you going to go undercover among the rough sleepers?’

  ‘Undercover?’

  ‘Yes, be like a rough sleeper, blend in among them. So you can catch the perpetrators.’

  When Rune Forss finally understood what he was being asked, he seemed to have difficulty in suppressing a smile.

  ‘No.’

  Olivia turned her mobile off.

  * * *

  If it had been a heart-warming story, then one of those homeless people would have been sitting on a simple chair at the bedside of the badly wounded man. Her hands would have smoothed the man’s blankets and tried to give him a sliver of fragile hope. But in the true story, the one that is true to what actually happened, the staff at the hospital reception had phoned security the very moment One-eyed Vera had cut across the hall on her way to the lifts. The security staff had caught up with her in a corridor not far from Benseman’s room.

  ‘You are not allowed in here!’

  ‘Why not? I’m just going to visit a mate who…’

  ‘Come along with us!’

  And Vera was then removed from the premises.

  Which is a euphemistic way of saying that the security people marched off with a protesting Vera, past staring people, right through the entrance hall and more or less threw her out on to the street. They did this in an unnecessarily brutal and deeply embarrassing manner, despite the fact that she reeled off all her human rights. Or her own version of them.

  Out she went.

  Into the summer night.

  And that marked the start of her long walk to her caravan in the woods in Solna.

  Alone.

  On a night when violent young men were at large and Chief Inspector Rune Forss had fallen asleep comfortably on his stomach.

  2

  The woman who had just popped a large forkful of marzipan cream layer cake into her mouth had red-painted lips, a lot of fuzzy grey hair and ‘volume’. That’s how her husband had put it on one occasion: ‘My wife has volume.’ Which meant that she was quite wide. A fact that sometimes pained her, sometimes didn’t. During periods of the first instance, she would try to shrink the volume, with hardly noticeable results. During the latter she just liked being who she was. Now she was sitting in her spacious office in C-building at the National Crime Squad and surreptitiously eating a cream layer cake, half-listening to a news bulletin on the radio. A company called MWM, Magnuson World Mining, had just been named Swedish Company of the Year Abroad.