‘Dark? With black hair?’
‘Yes… yes? Is it someone you know?’
‘No, it was someone who was described in that investigation and I wondered whether it might be someone who wasn’t Swedish and that there weren’t many immigrants in those days, I thought.’
‘Oh right? But there were some?’
Wixell suddenly felt that she couldn’t really grasp what this young girl was doing. She thanked her for the lunch and left. Rather abruptly. Olivia still had a question left but she never had time to ask it:
‘Did that dark-haired girl hang around with Jackie Berglund?’
Olivia got up too and started to walk. In the direction of Stureplan. A mild wind was blowing from Nybroviken bay. Lightly dressed pedestrians streamed in every direction. Olivia went with the flow. Somewhere near the East Restaurant a thought came into her mind.
She was only a couple of blocks away.
From the boutique.
Weird & Wow.
There it was.
Jackie Berglund’s boutique on Sibyllegatan. Olivia looked at the shop for a while, from the other side of the street. She heard Eva Carlsén’s words ringing in her ears: don’t go nosing around Jackie Berglund.
I’m not going nosing. I’m just going to visit her boutique and look at what’s for sale. I’m a completely unknown person who will be entering as a customer. What’s the harm in that? Olivia reflected.
And stepped into the boutique.
The first thing she reacted to was the smell. She breathed in a heavy dose of half-sweet perfume.
The second thing was the boutique’s wares. They were nowhere near her sort of thing. Ornaments and bits and pieces that she would never think of having at home, and clothes that certainly wouldn’t suit her. With price tags that were really ridiculous, she thought, and leaned towards a dress. When she looked up, Jackie Berglund stood there right in front of her. Well made-up, dark hair, slightly above average height. Her intense blue eyes observed the young woman. Olivia suddenly remembered what those eyes had looked like when Eva Carlsén had asked about Red Velvet.
‘Can I help you?’
Olivia couldn’t think clearly, and didn’t know what to answer.
‘No, I’m just looking.’
‘Are you interested in home furnishing?’
‘No.’
Not a wise answer. Olivia immediately regretted her words.
‘You might like to look at the dresses here, new ones and vintage too,’ said Jackie.
‘Yes, right… umm…no, I don’t think they’re really my style.’
But she would have realised that the second I walked in, Olivia thought. She pottered around a few moments. Picked up some earrings and touched an old gramophone horn from the 1930s. Then she felt it was time to slip out.
‘But thank you very much!’
Olivia left the boutique.
That was when Jackie put two and two together. Or thought she had done. She phoned Carl Videung.
‘That Olivia Rönning who visited you, and asked about me, what did she look like?’
‘Dark hair.’
‘A bit of a squint?’
‘Yes.’
Jackie hung up and keyed in a new number.
* * *
Mink was not a morning person, more like a night person. The night was when Mink was in his element. It was then that he moved between the circles he did move in, and made sure he picked up something here which he could sell there. It might be a tip-off, or a white bag, or just a dog: last night he had rescued a tired Alsatian dog from an overdose victim in Kungsträdgården and taken him to a nurse in the suburbs, in Bandhagen, who had then broken down. She knew that her boyfriend did drugs, but she thought he had it under control. And he hadn’t.
The Alsatian was called Mona.
That too, Mink thought, and wondered if there was some political connection. Had the dog been named after the famous Social Democratic politician Mona Sahlin? He was sitting on the regional train on his way to Flemingsberg and had decided to have a talk with Acke.
At the school recreation centre.
Mink was not exactly a strategic genius.
Acke wasn’t at the school centre.
Mink asked the kids outside the building and soon discovered that nobody knew where Acke was.
‘Are you Acke’s dad?’
‘No, I’m his mentor.’
That was what Mink said. Mentor? Rather neat, he thought. Of course, he wasn’t entirely sure what it really implied, but it was somebody who knew a bit more than anybody else and Mink knew most things.
So mentor felt good.
On his way back to the station he suddenly caught sight of Acke. Or at least he saw a boy on his own who was kicking a football against a fence further down the street, and from the pictures on Vettan’s mobile he thought the boy could be Acke. Besides, he had seen Acke a few times with Vettan when he was younger.
‘Hi there, Acke!’
Acke turned round. Mink approached him with a smile.
‘Can I take a shot with the ball?’
Acke rolled the football across to the short man with the ponytail. He soon ducked when Mink kicked the ball – it veered off in all the directions that Mink hadn’t intended.
‘Perfect!’
Mink smiled. Acke looked if he could see the vanished ball.
‘D’you like football?’ said Mink.
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. Do you know who Zlatan is?’
Acke could hardly credit this weird guy. Who Zlatan was? Is the guy crazy?
‘Yes, of course. He plays for Milan.’
‘And before that he played for Spain and Holland, you know I worked with Zlatan early in his career, as his mentor, when he was in Malmö football club, I was the one who got him into Europe.’
‘Yeah, right…’
‘I suppose you could say I opened the E4 for Zlatan.’
Acke was ten years old and here was an adult man who talked about Zlatan and he couldn’t really follow what he was talking about.
‘Do you know Zlatan?’
‘You bet I do, if there’s anybody Zlatan rings if things go wrong, then it’s me. We’re buddies! Anyway, hello, my name is Mink.’
‘Hi.’
‘I know your mum, Ovette. Do you want a hamburger?’
Acke gobbled down a double cheeseburger at the Flemingsberg Kebab & Grill in the centre. Mink sat opposite him. He wondered how he should go about this. Ten year olds were not exactly his field, so he dived straight in.
‘Your mum says you’ve got lots of bruises and you blame football. I think you’re lying.’
At first Acke thought of getting up and leaving. Had his mum told this guy about his bruises? Why had she done that?
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘That you’re lying?’
‘I’m not lying!’
‘I’ve played top football for many years, that’s why I came into contact with Zlatan, I know what sort of injuries you can get on the field. Your bruises are not football injuries, you’ll have to think up something better.’
‘Mum believes me.’
‘Do you like lying to her?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you do it?’
Acke squirmed in his seat. He didn’t like lying to his mum but he didn’t dare tell her the truth.
‘OK Acke, let’s say like this, you can go on lying to Ovette, that’s fine by me, I used to lie to my mum, lots of times, but between us – you and me – those aren’t football injuries, are they?’
‘No.’
‘Been in a fight?’
‘Sort of.’
‘You can tell me,’ said Mink.
Acke hesitated a second or two. Then he pulled up his sleeve a bit.
‘This is what I am.’
Mink looked at the exposed arm. It said KF with a ring around on his arm. Drawn with a marker pen.
‘What does that mean?’
; Ten minutes later Mink left the hamburger bar to make a call. Acke waited inside.
Mink phoned Stilton.
‘Kid Fighters?’
‘Yes,’ said Mink. ‘That’s what they call themselves, the slightly older boys get tattoos with KF on their arms, with a ring round.
‘Where do they hang out?’
‘He wasn’t exactly sure, somewhere in Årsta, underground.’
‘The same place every time?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they’re there every evening?’
‘He thought so.’
‘Do you have any contact with UE?’
‘I think so. A number…’
Stilton knew that Mink never dropped a contact. A large part of his survival depended on that.
Mink followed Acke home. It felt best that way. When Ovette let them in, she got a big hug. From Acke, who immediately ran in to fetch his football clothes.
‘Are you going to play now?
‘Yes!’
Ovette looked at Mink who looked at Acke and got a wink back. Acke disappeared outside.
‘Is he going to football?’ Ovette asked.
She looked slightly worried.
‘Yes.’
Mink stepped uninvited into the kitchen.
‘But what did he say? Did you get anything out of him?’ Ovette wondered.
‘They weren’t football injuries. Are you going to work tonight?’
‘No.’
Ovette sank down opposite Mink. The cold light from the neon tube above the sink showed her face with unsentimental honesty. And that face had not worn well. For the first time, Mink saw what a tough life Vettan lived. In a purely physical sense. He had always met her before when she had make-up on, even at the café in town, now she had nothing on her face that could hide what it meant to earn her living the way she did.
‘Must you carry on with that shit?’
‘The street?’
‘Yes.’
Ovette opened the little airing window and lit a cigarette. Mink knew her very well, from the old days, and he knew some things about her life. Some but not all. He didn’t know why she sold herself on the street, but he assumed it was about money. Survival, and a never-ending illusion that tonight would be the last night. Or the next to last. Or just one more night and then that’s it.
But that night never arrived.
‘What else could I do?’
‘Get a job? Anything at all?’
‘Like you?’
Mink smiled a little and shrugged his shoulders. He was not exactly a brilliant role model when it came to that side of reality. He hadn’t had a job in that sense since he was in charge of the Katarina lift one season when he was young. Up and down for nine hours and then straight out into the bustle.
‘Have you got some coffee?’
‘Yes.’
While Ovette made a couple of cups of filter coffee, Mink tried to tell her as kindly as he could about Acke’s bruises. Without Ovette being hit too hard.
* * *
Stilton had been helped by Mink many years earlier to get into touch with UE, on police business. It was about a suspected infringement of an underground military area. UE stood for Urban Exploration, a loosely formed group of individuals who devoted their time to mapping underground places in urban environments. Tunnel systems. Abandoned factories. Rock shelters and air raid shelters. Abandoned environments, often forbidden to enter.
The activities of UE were not entirely legal.
Mink had sent a text message with the phone number of his UE contact and Stilton had rung up and asked for a meeting. He said he was going to do a report for Situation Sthlm about weird and hidden environments in the Greater Stockholm region. The guy knew about the magazine and liked it.
So it worked.
Their activities not being entirely legal, not surprisingly the two guys who turned up had hidden their faces with balaclava helmets when they met. Stilton had nothing against that. The meeting place had also been chosen with discretion in mind. A van parked down in Hammarby docks. One of the guys sat behind the wheel. The other one sat in the back. Stilton sat on the passenger seat. His general appearance wasn’t a problem, seeing as he was writing for Situation Sthlm, and neither of the guys reacted.
‘What do you want to know?’
Stilton explained what the report was going to be about. To show how incredibly many hidden spaces there were under a city like Stockholm, and that UE presumably were those that knew most about this, and were most familiar with the spaces themselves. Flattery and white lies. One of the guys laughed a little and wondered if it was about showing places where rough sleepers could find somewhere to sleep. Stilton joined in with the laughter and said that was a risk they must take. Then the two guys looked at each other, after which they pulled their balaclavas off, and one of them was a girl.
Well now, that was a little lesson about preconceived notions, Stilton thought.
‘Have you got a map?’ the girl asked.
Stilton had come equipped with a map. He pulled it out and opened it flat.
The girl and the guy devoted the next half hour to pointing out every manner of weird space hidden under the ground in the city region. Stilton acted sometimes fascinated, sometimes surprised. And it perhaps wasn’t all acting. He was actually genuinely surprised about some of the places. Both over the fact that they existed, and that this young couple knew about them. He came very close to being impressed.
‘Incredible,’ he said, more than once.
But after half an hour he felt it was time. He said that one of his homeless mates claimed that there was a really fantastic underground space in the Årsta area that hardly anyone knew about.
‘Do you?’
The girl and the guy smiled at each other. What they didn’t know about Stockholm’s underground spaces wasn’t worth knowing… and so on…
‘There is a space there,’ said the guy. ‘It’s called Wine and Spirits.’
The girl pulled the map towards her and pointed out the place.
‘There.’
‘Large?’ Stilton asked.
‘Gigantic. It was meant to be some sort of water treatment or sewage works in the beginning, but now it is just entirely empty. It reaches down several storeys underground.’
‘Have you been there?’
The couple looked at each other again. How much should they tell?
‘I won’t put in your names or take any pictures, nobody knows I’ve talked to you, it’s OK,’ said Stilton.
They weighed it over for a few seconds.
‘We have been there,’ said the girl.
‘How do you get down? Is it difficult?’
‘Yes and no,’ said the guy.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can either get in through the grid gates at the front and then down a very long tunnel through the rocks, it’s an old cable tunnel, and then there’s a steel door into the main cavern, that’s usually sealed… that is the simple way,’ said the guy.
‘And the hard one?’
The girl looked at the guy behind the wheel who looked at Stilton. Now they were talking secrets.
‘There is a narrow shaft, you can access it via a manhole on the street… here…’
The guy pointed at the map again.
‘There’s a narrow metal ladder attached to the wall under the grid, you have to climb down about fifteen metres in the shaft, then you come to an iron door and inside that is a passage…’
‘Which leads to the cavern?’
‘Yes, but it is…’
The guy became silent.
‘It is…?’
‘It’s a damn narrow passage.’
‘And long,’ said the girl. ‘And pitch black.’
‘OK.’
Stilton nodded. The girl folded up the map. The guy looked at Stilton.
‘You’re not going to try to get in that way?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Good, y
ou’d never get through.’
Mink phoned when Stilton was on his way from Hammarby docks.
‘Did you get hold of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they know anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘So there is a rock shelter there, in Årsta?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, now we know.’
‘We?’ thought Stilton, Mink was sounding a bit like in the old days. Did he think they were a team?
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Mink.
‘Check it out.’
Stilton hung up.
He would climb down the narrow shaft under the manhole with the help of the metal ladder on the wall. Fifteen metres down there would be an iron hatch in the rock wall. If he was lucky, it would be open. If he had even more luck, he would be able to squeeze through the hatch and crawl in. On his stomach. In a pitch black passage. It wouldn’t be possible to turn in the passage. If he couldn’t go forward any more, he would have to push himself back again.
If he didn’t get stuck.
That was one of his recurrent nightmares. Getting stuck. In various places in every dream, but always with the same scenario: he lay there stuck, jammed in, a locked position, and knew he would never get loose. That he would just fade away in a vice of terror.
Now he was going to put himself in precisely such a nightmare situation. Voluntarily. He would slither along inside an unknown rock passage that wasn’t much wider than a human body.
If he got stuck, he would be stuck for good.
Very slowly he started to climb down the metal ladder in the narrow shaft. Fat black spiders crept along the walls. Halfway down it occurred to him that the hatch might not be open. A sort of forbidden hope that he quickly pushed aside.
The hatch was open.
Or half open. Stilton pushed it further as much as he could with one foot, and managed to get the upper part of his body in through the hatch. He looked ahead, which was rather pointless. There was just a black hole that went in a few metres, and after that only black. When he lit his torch he saw that the passage bent slightly and disappeared.
He pushed his entire body through the opening and gasped. It was much narrower than he had anticipated. He lay on his stomach in the passage with his arms stretched out ahead and realised what a crazy idea it was. Then he thought about Vera. He turned the torch off and started to shuffle along.
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