‘What did you say it was called, did you say…?’
‘Vongole.’
‘Is that a vegetable?’
But she didn’t have time to choose a shop today. She had just fetched her car from its MOT test in Lännersta and had turned in to shop at the huge ICA Maxi in Nacka. Now she was rushing from the car park towards the glassed-in entrance and realised that she probably didn’t have a five-kronor coin so she would have to settle for a plastic basket. She had a fifty-kronor note in her pocket but there wasn’t time to change that. A few metres in front of the entrance stood a tall thin man with a magazine in his hand. One of those homeless people who earned a meagre living by selling Situation Stockholm. The man had some scabs on his face, his long hair was matted and shone with grease, and judging by his clothes he had spent the last few weeks very close to the ground. Olivia glanced at the man. It said ‘Jelle’ on the ID-card around his neck. She passed by quickly. Sometimes she bought a magazine, but not today. Not when she was in such a hurry. She continued through the rotating doors and got a few metres inside the lobby – then she stopped abruptly. Slowly, she turned round and looked at the man standing out there for a moment. Without really knowing why, she walked out again, went and stood a couple of metres away from the man and looked at him. He turned towards her and moved forward a step or two.
‘Situation Stockholm?’
Olivia dug into her pocket, got hold of the fifty-kronor note and held it up while scanning the man’s face. He took the note and handed over change and a magazine.
‘Thanks.’
Olivia took the magazine and put together her question in her mouth.
‘Are you Tom Stilton?’
‘What of it? Yes?’
‘It says “Jelle” on that.’
‘Tom Jesper Stilton.’
‘Okay.’
‘What of it?’
Olivia quickly walked past the man and in through the revolving doors again. She stopped at the same place as before, caught up with her shocked breathing, and turned round. The man outside was just putting his magazines in a shabby backpack and starting to leave. Olivia reacted. Slowly. She walked out again, and went after the man. He was walking quite fast. She had to almost half run the last bit to catch up with him. The man didn’t stop. Olivia cut in front of him.
‘What’s the matter? D’you want some more magazines?’ he said.
‘No. My name is Olivia Rönning and I’m a student at the Police College. I want to talk to you. About the beach case. The one on Nordkoster.’
The man’s weatherworn face didn’t show any reaction at all. He just turned round and walked straight out into the street. A car had to brake suddenly and the driver with his hair back-combed made an obscene gesture. The man continued to walk. Olivia stayed where she was. A long time. Such a long time that she saw him disappear round a concrete corner some way away, and she stood so still and erect that an elderly gentleman felt obliged to hesitantly address her.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
Olivia was feeling everything other than all right.
She sank down in her car and tried to pull herself together. The car was in the big car park beside the hypermarket where she had just met the man who had been in charge of the murder investigation on Nordkoster for sixteen years.
Former Detective Chief Inspector Tom Stilton.
‘Jelle’?
How the hell could he get from Jesper to Jelle?
According to her tutor one of the best murder investigators in Sweden, with one of the most rapid careers in Swedish police history. And today he was selling Situation Sthlm. Someone who slept rough. In dreadful physical condition. So dreadful that Olivia had had to make a big effort to convince herself that it really was him.
But it was.
She had seen quite a number of pictures of Stilton when she had ploughed through the newspaper articles at the National Library about the beach case, and seen an old photo of him at Gunnar’s in Strömstad. She had been somewhat fascinated by his intense expression, and noted that he looked attractive as well as distinct.
He didn’t any more.
His physical decline had drained his appearance of all personality. Even his eyes seemed to have died. His thin body unwillingly supported a long-haired head which definitely did not match.
Yet it was Stilton.
She had reacted instinctively, at first, when she passed him, a fleeting sensation had swept past and formed an image when she stopped inside the doors: Tom Stilton? It isn’t possible. It is… and then she had gone out again and studied his face.
Nose. Eyebrows. The clearly visible scar under one corner of his mouth.
It was him.
And now he had disappeared.
Olivia twisted a little in her seat. Next to her lay a notebook with a large number of written questions and thoughts about the beach case. All written down, ready to be answered by the man who had been in charge of the murder investigation.
Tom Stilton.
A shabby rough sleeper.
The rough sleeper himself was now sitting beside Järla Lake. His backpack still on his back. He sat here sometimes, not so far from his wooden shack. Some thick bushes, some water trickling under an old wooden bridge, relative silence.
He pulled a branch off a bush next to him, stripped the leaves off and stretched it down as far as he could reach. Far down where he stirred it around in the murky water.
He was disturbed.
Not because he had been recognised, he had to live with that. He was indeed Tom Jesper Stilton and had no plans to change his name. But because of what she had said, the girl who had cut in front of him and looked confounded.
Olivia Rönning.
He knew the name. Very well.
‘I want to talk to you. About the beach case. The one on Nordkoster.’
There are eternities, and there are eternities. And there are aeons. An eternity of eternities. That was approximately the distance that Stilton felt to his former life. Yet just one phrase was needed for that aeon to shrink to the size of a tick and begin its greedy penetration.
The beach case.
It sounded so trifling, he thought. A beach and a case. So harmless. But he himself had never called it the beach case. He thought it degraded one of the most repulsive murders he had investigated. It sounded like a newspaper headline. He himself had always referred to the case as Nordkoster. Concrete. What a policeman would say.
And unsolved.
And as for why was Olivia Rönning was interested in Nordkoster, that wasn’t his problem. She came from another world. But she had planted a tick in his mental body. She had made an incision in what he was now, and let the past in, and that disturbed him. He didn’t want to be disturbed. Not by the past, and definitely not by what had disturbed him sufficiently for almost eighteen years.
Jelle pulled the branch up out of the water.
* * *
The light summer rain poured down on the demonstrators who had gathered together on the pavement opposite MWM’s head office on Sveavägen. Their banners with various slogans: LEAVE THE CONGO NOW!, PLUNDERERS!, STOP CHILD LABOUR! A little group of policemen stood some way away.
Over by Olof Palmes gata an elderly man was leaning against a façade. He watched the demonstrators, registered their banners and read one of their pamphlets.
MWM’s coltan mining destroys irreplaceable natural habitats. In the face of greed, gorillas are threatened with extinction when their food sources disappear! They are also killed and sold as bushmeat! Stop MWM’s unscrupulous rape of nature!
The pamphlet was illustrated with horrible pictures of dead gorillas, fastened to poles like bleeding Christ figures.
The man lowered the pamphlet. He slowly raised his eyes to look up at the façade across the street, right up to the very top floor, where the head office lay. Where the owner and managing director Bertil Magnuson had his office. The man’s gaze fastened on that. He knew that Bertil was in the room. H
e had seen him arrive in the brightly polished Jaguar and sneak in through the entrance.
You have aged, Bertil, Nils Wendt thought. He felt the pocket with the cassette tape.
* * *
In the city there was still a bit of the working day left, although it was gradually coming to an end. For Ovette Andersson, the working day had only just begun. Her workplace, the pavement area between Riksbanken and the Academy of Fine Arts, was in effect active day and night. The cars had already started to crawl along on the lookout for what the Law on Prostitution termed ‘sex-sellers’. As opposed to ‘sex-buyers’. As if it was about a formal business transaction with sex products.
It wasn’t long before the first car crept up beside Ovette and the window was lowered. When the formalities had been dealt with, and Ovette climbed into the car, she pushed away the last thought of Acke. He was doing his soccer training. He was having a good time. He would soon get some new soccer boots. She pulled the car door shut.
* * *
It was almost seven in the evening when Olivia stepped into her flat. Elvis lay stretched out like a Playboy centrefold on the hall mat with his legs spread in all directions: he demanded tender attention. Olivia lifted him up and sank her face into her beloved cat’s soft fur. He smelt faintly of the food he had eaten that morning. Now he took up position across her shoulder, his favourite place, and started to chew a little on her hair.
With the cat on her shoulders she took a cold juice out of the fridge and sank down at the kitchen table. On the way home from Nacka, she had sorted the experience with Stilton. She had found him, at last, and he was a rough sleeper. Fine. She assumed there were reasons for that and they were not her concern. But he was still an important source for the beach case. A totally uninterested source, obviously, but…? Sure, she could drop the case, it was not a compulsory assignment after all, but that wasn’t really how she was made.
The opposite.
The meeting with Stilton had given the case a new dimension, for her, and her easily courted imagination. Had Stilton’s fall from a feted detective chief inspector to a physical wreck anything to do with the beach case? Had he come across something six years earlier that led to his leaving the police force? Even though he left for private reasons?
‘Not only.’
Åke Gustafsson had admitted that when she’d phoned him again and pressed him a little.
‘What else was it then?’
‘There was a conflict about an investigation.’
‘The beach case?’
‘I don’t know, I’d started at the college then, I only heard about it in passing.’
‘So it was also a reason for his leaving?’
‘Possibly.’
Olivia’s imagination didn’t need more than that. ‘Possibly.’ That he had left the force because there had been a conflict around something that might have been connected with the beach case? Or another case that had some link? What was Stilton doing when he left the force? Could she find out?
She made up her mind. She wasn’t going to drop Stilton. She’d hunt him down whatever it took. Or in more concrete terms, she would go to the editorial office of Situation Sthlm and find out all she could about Stilton.
And then contact him again.
Somewhat better prepared.
* * *
Those stone steps were where they met again. It was late, just after one in the morning, by chance. Stilton was on the way down for the fourth time when Mink was on the way up.
They met on the second landing.
‘Hi there.’
‘Toothache?’
‘Sit down.’
Stilton pointed to a step. Mink reacted immediately. Both at the rather sharp tone and the fact that Stilton didn’t just walk on. Did he want to talk? Mink looked at the step Stilton had pointed to and wondered when the most recent dog poo had landed there. He sat down. Stilton sat next to him. So close that Mink couldn’t help but notice a not entirely pleasant smell of rubbish and ammonia.
And a great deal of sweat.
‘How are you doing, Tom?’ he asked with his squeaky voice.
‘They’ve killed Vera.’
‘Was she the one in the caravan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know who did it?’
‘No, do you?’
‘Why should I know?’
‘In the old days, you knew before most people as soon as there was some shit going on. Have you lost your touch?’
A comment like that would have led to a headbutt and a broken nose for in theory anyone except Stilton. You didn’t headbutt Stilton. So Mink swallowed and observed the tall rough sleeper with the strong odour next to him. Some years ago the roles had been decidedly switched. When Mink had been a few notches further down on the social scale and Stilton definitely a few notches higher up.
Now things were as they were. Mink gave his ponytail a little tug.
‘Do you want some assistance?’
‘Yes,’ said Stilton.
‘OK. And what are you going to do? If you get hold of them?’
‘Say hello from Vera.’
Stilton got up. Two steps down, he turned and looked back up.
‘I’ll be here at night, at around this time. Get in touch.’
He continued on his way down. Mink remained sitting. Rather surprised. There was something new about Stilton, changed, something in the way he moved, and in his gaze.
It was firm again.
Back in place.
The last few years it had slipped away as soon as you tried to catch it. Now it had landed right in Mink’s eyes and not deviated a millimetre.
Jelle had Tom Stilton’s gaze again.
What had happened?
Stilton himself was satisfied with the meeting on the stone steps. He knew Mink, and was well aware of his capabilities. One of Mink’s few talents was to snap up information. A comment here, an overheard conversation there, being always on the move in totally different circles and catching tiny scraps which he put together into a pattern. A name. An event. Under different circumstances, he could have become a brilliant current-affairs analyst.
Under rather different circumstances.
But Mink had made good use of his talent. Not least since he first came in contact with the then Detective Chief Inspector Tom Stilton. Stilton had quickly understood how he could utilize Mink’s absorbing ability and unscrupulous snitching.
‘I don’t snitch!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Do you see me as some miserable snitch?’
Stilton could still recall the conversation. Mink had been furiously indignant.
‘I see you as an informant. How do you see yourself?’ said Stilton.
‘Informant is OK. Two professionals who exchange experiences is better.’
‘And what is your profession?’
‘A tightrope walker.’
At this point Stilton realised that Mink was perhaps a rather more complex snitch than the others he made use of, and perhaps worth taking a bit of little extra care of.
A tightrope walker.
An hour or so later, Stilton made his way through the Ingenting forest carrying a cardboard box, the sort removal men use. He had forgotten the meeting with Mink. He was totally concentrated upon the dirty grey caravan. On being able to cope with an encounter with it. He had made up his mind to move there.
For the time being.
He knew that the police had finished there and that the council wanted to get rid of the caravan. But Vera’s murder clogged up the paperwork a little. So the caravan was still there.
And as long as it was there, Stilton was going to live in it.
If he could manage that.
It wasn’t that easy. First. Just seeing the bunk where they had made love put him off balance. But he put the cardboard box down on the floor and sat on the bunk on the opposite side. It was at least dry inside. A lamp, mattre
sses, with a new tube and a bit of maintenance he would surely get the Calor gas burners to work again. He couldn’t give a shit about the ant tracks. He looked around. The police had taken most of what Vera had kept in the caravan. Including a drawing of a harpoon that he had once done. Here, at this table, when Vera wanted to know what his childhood had been like.
‘Involved a harpoon?’
‘Roughly.’
He had told her a little about Rödlöga, a cluster of islets in the outer archipelago north of Stockholm. About growing up with a granny with personal memories of the seal hunts in former days and of plundering wrecked ships. And Vera had hung on his every word.
‘It sounds like a good childhood. Right?’
‘It was good.’
She didn’t need to know any more than that. Nobody else knew any more, except Mette and Mårten Olsäter, and his ex-wife. But it stopped with them.
Not even Abbas el Fassi knew.
Now, Rune Forss would presumably be sitting in some neon yellow police room and looking at a drawing of a harpoon and wondering if it had any connection with Vera Larsson’s murder. Stilton smiled somewhere inside. Forss was an idiot. He would never solve Vera’s murder. He would tick off his hours and put his reports together and then he would squeeze his fat fingers into a bowling ball.
That was where he put his commitment.
Stilton stretched out on the berth and then sat up again.
It wasn’t that easy to just take over her caravan. She was still there, he could feel it. And see it. There were still traces of the blood that had been wiped off the floor. He got up and smashed a hand into the wall.
And looked at the traces of blood again.
He had never thought in terms of vengeance. As a murder investigator he had always kept his distance in relation to victim as well as perpetrator. At the very most, he had on a few occasions been moved by how it could affect close family members. Ordinary people going about their lives who suddenly were struck by a lightning bolt straight to the heart. He could still remember once one early morning when he had to wake a single mother and tell her that her only son had confessed to murdering three people.
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