Spring Tide

by Börjlind, Cilla

  Both Mette and Stilton smiled a little. One of them inwardly and the other more obviously. That was Mette.

  ‘You’ve learnt something at the breakfast table.’

  Olivia, too, smiled a little and looked down at what Mårten possibly thought was soup. It looked good. Everybody tucked in, although Stilton only took one spoonful while the others took five. His stomach was still suffering the after-effects of the beating. Mette hadn’t yet dared ask about the bandage around his head.

  They ate.

  The soup contained meat and vegetables and strong spices and they drank some red wine with it, while Mette told about Wendt’s earlier life. How he and Bertil Magnuson had started the then Magnuson Wendt Mining company and quickly become successful internationally.

  ‘By dealing with a shitload of dictators in Africa to exploit their natural resources! They didn’t give a fuck about apartheid and Mobutu and you name it!’

  Mårten had suddenly exploded. He hated both the old and the new MWM. He had spent a large part of his left-radical years demonstrating and printing pamphlets about the company’s ruthless exploitation of impoverished countries and the environmental pollution that resulted.

  ‘The bastards!’

  ‘Mårten.’

  Mette laid a hand on her indignant husband’s arm. He was after all of an age when a stroke could result from the next outburst. Mårten shrugged his shoulders slightly and looked at Olivia.

  ‘Do you want to have a look at Kerouac?’

  Olivia looked at Mette and Stilton out of the corner of her eye but didn’t get much support. Mårten was already on his way out of the kitchen. She got up and followed him. When Mårten turned round in the door to see if Olivia was with him, he got a special look from Mette.

  He left the room.

  Stilton knew exactly what it meant. The look. He nodded towards the cellar under the kitchen floor.

  ‘Does he still smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  Mette’s answer was so quick and short that Stilton understood. End of that. He couldn’t care less. He never had done. He knew that Mårten used to smoke a joint now and then down in his music room. And Mette knew that he knew and that they were the only people in the world who knew. Apart from the joint-smoker himself.

  And thus it would remain.

  Mette and Stilton looked at each other. After a few seconds Stilton felt he must ask what he had wanted to ask ever since she caught up with him out on the road.

  ‘How are things with Abbas?’

  ‘Fine. He misses you.’

  Silence again. Stilton traced the edge of his water glass with a finger. He had said no to wine. Now he was thinking about Abbas and he found it rather painful.

  ‘You can say hello from me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  And then Mette dared ask.

  ‘What have you done to your head?’

  She nodded towards Stilton’s bandage and he didn’t feel like evading the issue so he told her about the beating-up in Årsta.

  ‘Unconscious?’

  And about the cage fighting.

  ‘Children fighting in cages!’

  And about his private hunt for the people who murdered Vera Larsson and their link with the cage fighting. When he had finished, Mette was noticeably agitated.

  ‘But that’s just dreadful! We must put a stop to it! Have you told the people in charge of the case?’

  ‘Rune Forss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They looked at each other for a few seconds.

  ‘But for Christ’s sake, Tom, that was more than six years ago.’

  ‘Do you think I’ve forgotten?’

  ‘No, I don’t think that, or I don’t know, but if you want to help us find the people who killed the woman in the caravan then I think you must swallow that and talk to Forss! Now! There are children getting hurt! Otherwise I’ll do it!’

  Stilton didn’t answer. He could, however, hear how heavy bass tones from the cellar were beginning to come up through the kitchen floor.

  * * *

  Linn sat alone down in the beautiful yacht. A Bavaria 31 Cruiser. It was moored at their private jetty in the sound quite near the Stocksund Bridge. She liked sitting there in the evenings. The boat rocking a little with the waves, and she could look out over the water. On the other side lay Bockholmen with its lovely old inn. On the right she could see the cars driving over the bridge. A bit further up she saw the Cedergren Tower sticking up above the trees and just now she saw Bertil up by the house, on his way down to the jetty with a little glass in his hand. With something brown in it.

  Good.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Bertil sat down on a wooden bollard next to the yacht. He sipped his drink and looked at Linn.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘A bit of everything, I have been rather absent lately…’

  ‘Yes. Is your bladder better?’

  Bladder? He hadn’t felt anything down there for a while…

  ‘It seems to have settled down,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good. Have you heard anything about Nils’ murder?’

  ‘No. Or rather, yes, the police were in touch.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘They wanted to know if Nils had been in touch with me.’

  ‘Really? What… but he hadn’t, surely?’

  ‘No. I haven’t heard a sound from him… since he walked out of the office in Kinshasa.’

  ‘Twenty-seven years ago,’ said Linn.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now he’s been murdered. Disappeared for twenty-seven years and then suddenly murdered, here, in Stockholm. It is strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘Unfathomable.’

  ‘And where has he been all those years?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  And if anybody did know, Bertil would have given his right hand to get in touch with them. That question had been at the top of his agenda for a long time. Where the hell had Wendt holed up? The tape was in some unknown location, which could be anywhere at all on earth. A rather large area to search.

  Bertil leaned back slightly and downed his drink.

  ‘Have you started smoking again?’

  The question came out of the blue and Bertil had no time to duck.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Linn immediately noticed the piercing undertone. He was ready to attack if she were to go on. She dropped it.

  Perhaps he had been more affected by the murder of Nils than he wanted to show.

  * * *

  ‘There he is!’

  Mårten pointed at the whitewashed stone wall in the cellar. Olivia followed his finger and saw how a large cellar spider crawled out of a crack in the wall.

  ‘Is that Kerouac?’

  ‘Yes. A genuine cellar spider, not an ordinary house spider, he is eight years old.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  Olivia looked at Kerouac’s subcutaneous nerves which were vibrating slightly. The spider that might possibly be suffering from arthritis. She noticed how it moved rather carefully across the wall, with long black legs and a body that was just over one centimetre in diameter.

  ‘He loves music, but he is fussy about it, it took me a few years to learn his taste, I’ll show you!’

  Mårten moved his finger along the other wall. It was covered from floor to ceiling with vinyl records, large and small. Mårten was an aficionado. A vinyl fan with one of Sweden’s most original collections. Now he pulled out a 45-rpm by Little Gerhard, an old rock king from a forgotten age, and placed the B-side on a gramophone.

  One of those with an arm and a needle.

  It didn’t take many chords before Kerouac had stopped his slow crawl across the wall. When Little Gerhard’s voice reached full volume, the spider changed direction and crept
towards the crack again.

  ‘But now look at this!’

  Mårten was like an enthralled child. He quickly pulled out a CD from the much smaller collection on the short wall. He lifted the needle off the vinyl record and pushed the CD into a modern player.

  ‘Watch this now! And listen!’

  It was Gram Parsons. A country guy who had left some immortal traces behind him when he died from an overdose. Now the sound of ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ flowed out of Mårten’s well-rigged stereo system. Olivia stared at Kerouac. Suddenly the spider had stopped, some way away from the crack. It twisted its fat black body almost 180 degrees and started to move out across the wall again.

  ‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

  Mårten looked at Olivia and smiled. She wasn’t really sure whether she had ended up in a lunatic asylum or in Detective Chief Inspector Mette Olsäter’s house. She nodded and asked if Mårten was a potter.

  ‘No, that’s Mette’s.’

  Olivia had nodded towards the door where they had just passed a room with a large kiln. She turned towards Mårten.

  ‘And what do you do then? What area do you work in?’

  ‘I’m a pensioner.’

  ‘Yes, right, and before you became a pensioner?’

  Stilton and Mette stood in the hall when Mårten and Olivia came up from the cellar. Mette glanced at them, leaned a little towards Stilton and lowered her voice.

  ‘You know you’ve always got a place to sleep here.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And think about what I said.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Rune Forss. You or me.’

  Stilton didn’t answer her. Mårten and Olivia came up. Stilton nodded goodbye to Mårten and went out through the front door. Mette gave Olivia a small hug and whispered:

  ‘Thanks for bringing Tom with you.’

  ‘It was him who brought me.’

  ‘Without you, he would never have come here.’

  Olivia smiled a little. Mette gave her her card, with her phone number. Olivia thanked her and followed after Stilton. When Mette had closed the door, she turned and looked at Mårten. He pulled her towards him. He knew exactly how tense the situation had been. He stroked her hair.

  ‘Tom was communicating,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Both sat in silence on the bus into the city. Occupied with their own thoughts. Stilton mainly thinking about the meeting with the Olsäters. It was the first time he had met them for almost four years. He was amazed at how easy it had been. How little they had needed to say. How quickly it felt natural.

  The next step was Abbas.

  Then he thought about that face in the mirror in the hall. That wasn’t his. That had been a shock.

  Olivia thought about the dilapidated mansion.

  In the cellar. About Kerouac. You must be a bit weird if you socialise with a spider? Yes, she thought, you must. Definitely. Or perhaps more of an original? Mårten was a man with a fascinating background, she thought. Down in the cellar he had told her a little about it. He had been a child psychologist before he retired. For many years he had struggled hard to introduce new ideas in Sweden, and had partly succeeded. For a long period he had also worked with Skå-Gustav Jonsson and participated in a number of projects for vulnerable children. And been a political left-wing activist.

  She liked Mårten.

  And Mette.

  And their remarkable, cosy house.

  ‘You fell out with Mink,’ Stilton suddenly said.

  ‘Fell out…’ Olivia looked out through the bus window. ‘He made a pass at me,’ she said.

  Stilton nodded slightly.

  ‘He suffers from inferio-mega,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Megalomania undermined by an inferiority complex. God on clay feet.’

  ‘OK. I think he’s creepy.’

  Stilton gave a little smile.

  They separated at the Slussen bus terminal. Olivia was going to walk home to Skånegatan. Stilton was going to the Katarina garage.

  ‘Aren’t you going to the caravan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you going to do there? At Kararina garage?’

  Stilton didn’t answer.

  ‘I can walk that way, via Mosebacke.’

  Stilton had to put up with that. During the short walk to the Katarina garage, Olivia spoke about her visit to Jackie Berglund’s boutique and the bastards in the lift. She deliberately didn’t mention the cat.

  When she had finished, Stilton looked her straight in the eye.

  ‘Are you going to drop that now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  For ten seconds. Then she couldn’t help asking.

  ‘What made you leave the police force? Was it connected with the death of Jill Engberg?’

  ‘No.’

  They stopped beside the wooden steps up to Mosebacke. Suddenly Stilton went off. Towards the steps on the other side of the garage. The stone steps.

  Olivia watched him go.

  The MHP-team sat in a partially blacked-out room on Bergsgatan and watched a film that had been downloaded from Trashkick. A film in which Tom Stilton had his clothes ripped off until he was naked, was sprayed across his back, beaten up and thrown against a rock face. It was decidedly quiet in the room when the film ended. Everyone knew who Stilton was. Or had been. Now they saw a beaten-up wreck. Forss turned a light on and broke the silence.

  ‘That was roughly what one might expect,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  Klinga looked at Forss.

  ‘Stilton lost it completely in 2005, broke down in the middle of an investigation, about Jill Engberg, a prossy. I had to take over the case. He just disappeared. Resigned and disappeared. And now he has ended up there.’

  Forss nodded towards the screen, got up and took his jacket off the hook.

  ‘But we ought to interrogate him, surely?’ said Klinga. ‘He has evidently been badly beaten up too.’

  ‘Absolutely. When we find him. See you tomorrow.’

  * * *

  Mårten and Mette had gone to bed. Their son Jimi could take care of the dishes. They were both exhausted and they turned the bedside lamps off straight away, but didn’t fall asleep. Mårten turned slightly towards Mette.

  ‘You didn’t think I was very subtle, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘On the contrary, I was reading Tom all the time, when you and Olivia were talking about Koster, he was there, present, he listened, took part, but I saw that he’d never break into the conversation by himself, so I invited him in.’

  ‘You took a risk.’

  ‘No.’

  Mette smiled a little and kissed Mårten on the neck, gently. Mårten regretted that he hadn’t swallowed a Viagra a couple of hours ago. They each turned in a different direction.

  He thought about sex.

  She thought about an empty suitcase on Nordkoster.

  * * *

  Olivia thought about her cat. She lay in bed and missed the warm animal by her feet. His purring, his bumping against her legs. The white mask on the wall looked down at her. The moonlight glistened in the white teeth. Now it’s just you and me, she thought, and you’re a bloody wooden mask! Olivia jumped out of bed, lifted down the wooden mask, threw it in under her bed and crept in under the covers again. Voodoo? she suddenly thought. Now he’s lying under the bed and staring up and cooking up something nasty. But voodoo is Haitian, the mask is from Africa and Elvis is dead.

  And Kerouac is a fucking spider!

  14

  Joyously happy! I’m joyously happy!

  Not.

  Olivia stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her young aged face. Twenty-three yesterday and at least fifty today, she thought. Swollen and patchy looking, with eyes marbled with thin red streaks. She wrapped herself in her white dressing gown and felt how her breasts were tender and her tummy was tight. That’s
just all I need, she thought, and crawled into bed again.

  * * *

  Up on the roof of one of the police buildings on Bergsgatan there are a number of exercise areas, cages shaped like wedges of cake. That’s where remand prisoners are taken to get some fresh air. This particular morning they were all empty, except one. A little grey sparrow sat on the cement floor. In comparison there was all the more activity in C-building.

  ‘The suitcase was empty?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mette.

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘She gave it to the guy who runs the cabin camp, Axel Nordeman.’

  Mette sat right at the back of the room. Various members of her team were reporting back. The tone in the room was low-key but intense. The information about the suitcase was interesting. Everything about Nils Wendt’s visit to Nordkoster was interesting. Why was he there? Who did he meet? Why did he leave an empty suitcase behind? Mette had sent a couple of police officers to the island before she went to bed the previous evening. They would get hold of the suitcase and knock on some doors.

  ‘Do we know when he came to Nordkoster?’ Lisa Hedqvist wondered.

  ‘Not yet, we’ll get a report from the guys there sometime today. But we do know where Olivia saw him the first time, up there near the Hasslevikarna coves on the north side of the island, she didn’t know exactly when, she had got lost herself, but she reckoned it was sometime around nine in the evening.’

  ‘Then he visited her in her cabin about an hour later, is that right?’

  ‘More like a couple of hours, sometime before midnight,’ Mette said. ‘What we know more precisely is that he took a boat taxi from the West Jetty at almost exactly midnight and was taken to Strömstad. That’s where the tracks end.’

  ‘Not quite.’

  Bosse Thyrén got up. He had done a thorough job since Mette phoned him the evening before.

  ‘Dan Nilsson booked a ticket for the 04.35 train from Strömstad on Monday morning, then he took the express from Göteborg at 07.45 and arrived at the Central Station in Stockholm at 10.50. I’ve checked the railway booking system. At Central he rented a car from Avis at about a quarter past eleven and just before twelve he checked in at the Hotel Oden on Karlbergsvägen. As Dan Nilsson. The technicians are going through the room there.’