Spring Tide

by Börjlind, Cilla

Carlsén handed over a ring binder and looked at Olivia.

  ‘Why are you so interested in Jackie Berglund?’

  ‘She’s mentioned in an old murder case that I’m studying, a student project, a woman who was murdered on Nordkoster.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘1987.’

  Carlsén reacted visibly.

  ‘You know about that?’ Olivia asked.

  ‘Yes, I do indeed, it was terrible, I had a summer cottage there.’

  ‘What, on Nordkoster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you there when it happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really! That’s amazing. Tell me! I’ve been there and met that Betty Nordeman who…’

  ‘The woman with the holiday cabins?’

  Carlsén smiled a little.

  ‘Yes! And she was also there then and told me a lot about weird people who had stayed in the cabins and talked about all sorts of things. But tell me!’

  Carlsén looked out across the water.

  ‘I was actually there to empty my cottage, I was going to sell it, I was only there for the weekend, then I heard a helicopter in the evening and saw that it was an air ambulance and I thought that somebody had fallen in from some boat or other, but then of course the police came the morning after and they talked with everybody on the island and… yes, it was all rather unpleasant… but you’ve been assigned that as a student project? Are the police going to start investigating again?’

  ‘No, not at all. It seems to be totally cold as far as they are concerned. I can’t even get hold of the guy who was in charge of the investigation. But I became a bit curious about Jackie Berglund.’

  ‘Was she there? When it happened?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was she doing there?’

  Olivia told about how Jackie had been on the island at the time of the murder and that the police had interrogated her but it hadn’t led to anything. Carlsén gave a little nod.

  ‘She might have been involved in this and that… I did an interview with her too, a couple of years ago, I can send you the file if you want.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be fantastic.’

  Olivia tore a bit of paper from her block, wrote down her mail address and reached across.

  ‘Thanks. Just be a bit careful,’ said Carlsén.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If you’re going to go nosing around Jackie Berglund, she surrounds herself with some very tough types.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Carlsén was just getting up.

  ‘And what are you working on? Now?’ asked Olivia.

  ‘I’m writing a series of articles about juvenile violence, or as it manifests itself in those online films, youths who beat up homeless people and post the films on Internet sites.’

  ‘I’ve seen those… nasty.’

  ‘Yes. There was a new one there this morning.’

  ‘Just as repulsive?’

  ‘No, this one was even worse.’

  * * *

  Jelle had gone over and over his visit to the caravan all night, in his head, and not until around dawn had he finally slept a while. In his shack. Now he was sitting at New Community and trying to shock his body into life with the help of a mediocre cup of coffee, black as pitch. He had decided that he couldn’t just sneak off. That wasn’t going to work. He would seek out Vera at the Ring, or wherever she might be selling her magazines, and apologise.

  He couldn’t do much more than that.

  Just as he was about to get up, his mobile chirped. Text. He clicked to open it. The spelling was atrocious, but the content was crystal clear and the signature was short: Pärt.

  Jelle had a lot of time to think before he reached the outer edge of the Ingenting forest. His imagination had fluttered off to the most distant ice-cold cavities. Some of the way, he had run, now he hurried between the trees and the rocks, panting, and that was when he saw him. Over by the caravan: Rune Forss.

  The policeman.

  He had had dealings with Forss before, and knew exactly what type he was. Now Forss was standing next to the cordoned-off caravan smoking a cigarette. Jelle sneaked in behind a tree and tried to calm down. His heart had fluttered around inside his chest at every possible pace the last thirty minutes, the sweat was running down inside his jacket. Then he saw a hand waving some way away between some bushes.

  Pärt.

  Jelle went up to Pärt. He had sat there on a rock and had cried himself into a mess. A mix of saliva and snot on his chin. He had taken his jumper off. His naked torso was covered with tattoos of china plates, front and back, with blue and red decoration. He wiped his despairing face with his sweater. Pärt was the one who had found her and called the police, and he had still been there when the police arrived and One-eyed Vera was carried into an ambulance and driven off with sirens sounding.

  ‘She was alive?’

  ‘I think so… yes…’

  Jelle stared at the ground and flopped down. She was alive at least. Pärt told him he had been questioned by the police. They had estimated that the assault must have taken place many hours earlier, some time during the night. Jelle realised when it must have happened. When he himself had left the caravan and disappeared.

  For no reason.

  Sneaked off like a rat.

  Suddenly he vomited.

  The man who stepped out of the caravan was called Janne Klinga and was a member of Rune Forss’ team investigating the assaults on homeless people. AHP as it was known internally. Klinga went up to Forss who stood there smoking.

  ‘Same perpetrators?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘If the woman dies, then this will become a murder investigation.’

  ‘Yes… then we can’t be called AHP any longer, it would have to be changed to MHP, and I’ve just got used to the name… that would be irritating.’

  Klinga gave him a quick glance. He didn’t particularly like Forss.

  * * *

  On her way home from the meeting with Carlsén, Olivia had phoned Lenni and suggested they should get together. She felt she had neglected her friend too long.

  Now she was sitting at Blue Lotus. A little pavement café fairly near where she lived. She drank red tea and thought about Carlsén. They had immediately hit it off with each other, she felt. As happens sometimes, with some women. Quite a different matter than the meeting with that cold Marianne Boglund. Carlsén was open and interested.

  The file she had been given lay open in front of her on the little table. Jackie Berglund had a section all for herself. While waiting for Lenni, Olivia started to read.

  A great deal of material.

  You have climbed up quite high in the world since you ‘escorted’ those Norwegians on Nordkoster, Olivia thought, when she studied what Jackie’s business consisted of today. The selection of female escorts from Red Velvet was comprehensive. Yet, as Eva pointed out in a footnote, probably the most lucrative part of the business wasn’t visible. That took place via completely different channels.

  With completely different customers.

  Customers in high places, Olivia assumed. And where she was now, this particular moment, she would have given a great deal to get a look at Jackie’s list of customers. What names would she find there? Any she recognised?

  She felt like someone out of the Famous Five.

  But there weren’t five of her. She was alone, twenty-three years old, a student at the police college and was expected to have grown out of that world. But she knew that she wasn’t just making things up. She had a concrete murder case, unsolved, with a concrete corpse and a concrete mystery to solve. A mystery that her own father had wrestled with once upon a time. She was just about to open a chocolate energy bar when Lenni turned up.

  ‘Hi, gorgeous, sorry I’m late!’

  Lenni bent down and hugged Olivia. She was wearing a thin yellow and very low-cut summer dress and smelt strongly of Madame. Her favourite perfume.
Her long blonde hair was newly washed and her mouth glowed bright red. Lenni always went a bit over the top, but she was the best and most loyal friend Olivia had.

  ‘And what are you doing? Writing a thesis?’

  ‘No, it’s that college student project, you know.’

  Lenni sighed loudly.

  ‘Aren’t you going to finish that soon, feels like you’ve been working on that for ages.’

  ‘No I haven’t, but it is quite a big case so it takes…’

  ‘What are you drinking?’

  In her usual style, Lenni cut her off when she thought the subject of conversation was getting boring. Like now. Olivia informed her as to what she had in her cup. Lenni disappeared inside the café to order. When she came out again, Olivia had put away the material about Jackie Berglund and was ready for a total update on Lenni’s life.

  Which she got. With all the details. Even the ones she didn’t want. She got to see pictures of Jakob with clothes, and without, and hear about the crazy boss at Lenni’s job. Which for the time being was in a DVD shop. Olivia laughed at Lenni’s hilarious and razor-sharp comments on her own life and adventures and those of others. Lenni had a priceless talent for getting Olivia to relax and slowly return to something that resembled the life of an ordinary twenty-three year old. She came close to regretting that she hadn’t been with them that evening at the Strand. I must be getting a bit boring, she thought. First, completely absorbed by the Police College, and now by that beach case.

  So she and Lenni decided they’d have a DVD evening this evening. Just the two of them. Watch a horror film, drink beer and guzzle cheese puffs. And everything would be like in the old days.

  Before Jackie Berglund.

  * * *

  The roulette ball whirled round slower and slower. Finally landing on the zero. That could demolish any watertight system at all. If there were any such systems.

  Some people claimed there were, and even believed it.

  But not Abbas, not for a second. Abbas el Fassi was the croupier at the table and had seen most things in the way of systems pass by. Here, at Casino Cosmopol in Stockholm, and at some other casinos around the world. He knew that a system didn’t exist that could create a fortune at the roulette table. There was luck, and there was cheating.

  Not a system.

  But luck, yes there was luck, it could create money at any roulette table anywhere. Especially if you had placed the table’s maximum stake on Zero and the ball had landed there. Which it just had. That gave quite a sum to the gambler. In this case a company director who had had the pouches under his eyes cut away, and who was troubled by a big problem.

  Bertil Magnuson pulled in the considerable payout and flipped some across to Abbas, as was customary. He pushed some more of his winnings across to the man next to him. Lars Örnhielm, generally known as Latte. One of the friends in Bertil’s entourage. With a sunbed tan and an Armani suit. Latte happily received the chips and immediately spread them out any old way across the table. Like a free-range hen, Abbas thought.

  Then Bertil’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

  He had forgotten to turn it off.

  Bertil got up while pulling out the mobile, and pushed through away from the vultures behind the players’ backs to find a space further away.

  But not so far away that Abbas couldn’t keep an eye on him, like the professional croupier he was. Who saw nothing, but observed everything. Full focus on the gaming table, but faceted eyes which would have made even a wasp envious.

  So he saw how Magnuson, one of his regulars, held his mobile against his ear without uttering a word. But with an expression that revealed quite a lot about what he heard.

  It was not something he liked.

  Abbas found himself thinking about that conversation, later, when he slipped into the Riche bar. Not because it had been particularly long, but because immediately after that phone call Magnuson had left the casino. And left a small fortune on the table and an evidently confounded crony who hadn’t realised that Magnuson had left until he had used all his own chips. Then Latte had understood that he ought to go after him. But before doing that, he attempted to manage Magnuson’s capital in the best possible way, and lost it all in fifteen minutes.

  A free-range hen.

  Then he left.

  It was the phone call that Abbas wondered about. Why had Magnuson disappeared straight after that? What was it all about? Business? Perhaps, but Magnuson had been one of his regulars long enough for Abbas to know that he wasn’t reckless with money. Not stingy, but not somebody who just threw money around. Now he had just abandoned quite a hefty sum on the table.

  And simply left.

  Abbas ordered a glass of mineral water in the bar and went and stood a bit to the side. He was an observer, thirty-five years old, of Moroccan extraction, childhood in Marseille. In an earlier life he had supported himself as a street vendor of pirate-copy designer handbags. First in Marseille, then in Venice. Following a dramatic incident with a knife at the Ponte di Rialto, he had moved his business to Sweden. Then quite a lot of police water ran under quite different bridges, which ended with Abbas changing his beliefs and his profession, training as a croupier and becoming fascinated by Sufism.

  Now he had a permanent job at Casino Cosmopol.

  He was a non-committal sort of person, some people would have said, after a quick glance. Slender-limbed, smoothly shaved. He might occasionally apply a thin line of mascara to accentuate his eyes. Always dressed in nice-fitting clothes, always in discreet colours, perfectly tailored. From some distance they looked as if they had been painted directly onto his body.

  ‘Hi!’

  The girl who had had her eye on Abbas for a while was blonde and very sober, and a bit lonely. He looked a bit lonely too, so she thought they could be lonely together.

  ‘How’s things?’

  Abbas looked at the young girl, about nineteen? Perhaps twenty?

  ‘I am not here,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I am not here.’

  ‘You are not here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It looks as if you are here.’

  The girl smiled a little, hesitantly, and Abbas smiled back. His teeth became extra white against his brown face, his quiet voice remarkably penetrating right through the loud bar music.

  ‘That’s only what you think,’ he said.

  At this point the girl made a quick decision. Difficult guys were not her thing, and this one was definitely a difficult guy. He must be taking something, she thought, gave a little nod and went back to her lonely corner.

  Abbas watched as she walked away and thought about Jolene Olsäter. She was about the same age and had Down syndrome.

  Jolene would have known exactly what he meant.

  * * *

  The projector lamp went out in the confined room in the police headquarters on Bergsgatan. Rune Forss turned the ceiling light on. He and his AHP group had just looked at a screening of a mobile film that they had downloaded. The film had shown the assault on Vera Larsson in the caravan out in the Ingenting forest.

  ‘No direct images of the perpetrators’ faces.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But the beginning of the film was interesting.’

  ‘When they were having sex?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There were four of them in the room, including Janne Klinga. They had all reacted when the mobile camera had filmed through the oval window into the caravan and showed a naked man on top of a woman they assumed was Vera Larsson. The man’s face could just be seen in a quick blurred movement. Too quick to show anything that would make him recognisable.

  ‘We’ve got to get hold of that man.’

  The others agreed with Rune Forss. Even though it was unlikely that the man himself had assaulted Vera Larsson, he was nevertheless of considerable interest. He must have been on the scene almost at the same time that the assault took place.

  ‘Send the film to
the technical unit and ask them to work on his face, we might be able to get a sharper image of it.’

  ‘Do you think it’s another homeless person?’ Klinga wondered.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Was Vera Larsson a prostitute?’

  ‘Not as far as we are aware,’ said Forss. ‘But you never can know with those types.’

  * * *

  Seen from the perspective of a hospital series on TV the whole thing was properly choreographed. The yellow-green light, all the apparatuses, the quiet exchange of medical terms, the handling of small and large instruments by hands in rubber gloves.

  An operation just like any other.

  Seen from the inside, from the patient’s perspective, it looked rather different. For a start, the patient couldn’t look out, because her eyes were closed. And secondly there was no awareness of anything because the patient was anaesthetized.

  But thirdly, that which we know so little about, there was a sensation of voices and an inner kaleidoscope of pictures, deep down inside where nobody knows where it is, until we are there ourselves.

  Vera was in there.

  So at the same time that the outer world was fully occupied with her body, and organs, and everything that was damaged, Vera herself was in a completely different place.

  Alone.

  With a bunch of keys and a hanged body.

  And a chalk-white child who sat writing on the palm of her hand with a pen of sorrow… ‘is this how it was meant to be’ … ‘is this how it was meant to be’ …

  Outside, far outside, lay the large Söder Hospital like a gigantic bunker of stone, white as a skeleton, with rows of lit-up windows. Not far from the car park stood a solitary man, with long hair, in the dark. He was looking at the windows trying to find one to concentrate on.

  The one he chose suddenly went dark.

  8

  A sombre mood had settled over Glasblåsar park that morning, as if the wind had laid a mourning veil over the people. One-eyed Vera was dead. Their beloved Vera was dead. Her flame had been extinguished just after midnight as a result of her ruptured organs. The doctors had done what doctors do, clinically and professionally; when Vera’s heart became a thin line, the nurses had taken over.