‘Twenty-three.’
‘I see, then she won’t be familiar with The Wild Detectives.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Masturbation on a high literary level. Just a moment!’
Ronny disappeared into a cubby hole and returned with his black overcoat and a 500-kronor note. Stilton tried the coat on. It was a bit too short but it would have to do.
‘How’s Benseman?’
‘Poorly,’ answered Stilton.
‘Are his eyes OK?’
‘I think so.’
Benseman and Ronny Redlös had quite another relation than that between Stilton and Ronny. Benseman had read widely, Stilton hadn’t. On the other hand, Stilton wasn’t an alcoholic.
‘I heard that you’ve had a bit of contact with Abbas again,’ said Ronny.
‘How did you hear that?’
‘Can you take this with you for him?’
Ronny held out a thin book with paper covers.
‘He has waited for this for almost a year, I only got hold of it the other day, In Honour of Friends, Sufi poems translated by Eric Hermelin, the baron.’
Stilton took the book and read the front cover: Shaikh’Attar, From Tazkiratú-Awliyã I, and shoved the book into his inner pocket.
To repay a favour.
He had just got an overcoat and 500 kronor.
* * *
Marianne Boglund was on her way towards her whitewashed terraced house on the edge of Linköping, approaching the gate. It was almost seven in the evening and out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure leaning against a lamp post on the other side of the street. The light from the street light shone down upon a thin man with his hands in a rather too short black overcoat. Marianne hesitated for a moment and looked at the man who held up his hand in a greeting. It can’t be, she thought. Although she already knew who it was.
‘Tom?’
Stilton crossed the street without taking his eyes off Marianne. He stopped about two metres in front of her. Marianne didn’t stand on ceremony.
‘You look dreadful.’
‘You should have seen me this morning.’
‘No thanks. How are you?’
‘Fine. You mean…’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine… or better.’
They looked at each other a second or two. Neither of them felt like delving into Stilton’s health status. Especially not Marianne. And especially not out on the street outside her home.
‘What do you want?’
‘I need help.’
‘With money?’
‘Money?’
Stilton looked at Marianne in a way that made her wish she’d bitten her tongue. She had spoken very insensitively.
‘I need help with this.’
Stilton pulled out a little plastic bag with the hairslide from Nordkoster.
‘What is it?’
‘A hairslide, with a hair in it. I need help with DNA. Can we walk a little?’
Stilton pointed down the street. Marianne turned slightly towards the terraced house and saw how a man moved through a half-lit kitchen. Had he seen them?
‘It won’t take long.’
Stilton started to walk. Marianne stayed where she was. Just typical Tom, turning up as an unannounced wreck of a man and simply assuming that he is in command.
Again.
‘Tom.’
Stilton twisted round slightly.
‘Whatever you want, this is the wrong way to go about it.’
Stilton came to a halt. He looked at Marianne, lowered his head a little and then straightened up again.
‘Sorry. I’m out of practice.’
‘Yes, it shows.’
‘The social rules. I’m sorry. I really do need your help. You decide. We can talk here or later or…’
‘Why do you need DNA?’
‘To be able to compare with DNA from the beach case. On Nordkoster.’
Stilton knew that would hook her, and it did. Marianne had lived with Stilton during the entire investigation of the beach case. She knew very well how committed he had been and what it had cost him. And her. And now he was there again. In a physical condition that tore rather hard at a part of her soul, but which she pushed back. For many reasons.
‘Tell me.’
Marianne had started to walk without thinking about it. She fell in beside Stilton when he started to tell the story. How the hairslide had been found on the beach the same evening that the murder happened. How it had ended up in a little boy’s box of beach finds where he had suddenly discovered it a day or so ago and then given it to a young police student. Olivia Rönning.
‘Rönning?’
‘Yes.’
‘The daughter of…’
‘Yes.’
‘And now you want to check if they match, the hairslide and the DNA from the victim on Koster?’
‘Yes. Can you do it?’
‘No.’
‘Can’t do it or won’t do it?’
‘Take care of yourself.’
Marianne turned round and started to walk towards the terrace house again. Stilton watched as she walked away. Would she turn round? She didn’t. She never had done. When it was decided, it was decided, no loose ends. He knew that.
But he had tried.
‘Who was that?’
Marianne had been thinking about how she should answer that question all the way to the front door. She knew that Tord had seen them through the kitchen window. Seen them walk off down the street. She knew that this would demand special treatment.
‘Tom Stilton.’
‘Really? Him? What was he doing here?’
‘He wanted some help with some DNA.’
‘Hasn’t he left the police force?’
‘Yes.’
Marianne hung up her overcoat, on her own hook. Everyone in the family had a hook of their own. The children had theirs and Tord had his. The children were Tord’s from his previous marriage, Emilie and Jacob. She loved them. And Tord’s devotion to order, even in the hall. He was like that. Everything in its place, and no experimenting in bed. He was an administrator in charge of Linköping’s sports grounds. He was in good physical condition, in good mental balance, well-mannered… in many ways like a younger Stilton.
In many ways not.
The ways that had led her to throw herself head first into a morass of passion and chaos and finally, after eighteen years, led her to give up. And leave Stilton.
‘He wanted some private help,’ she said.
Tord still stood there by the threshold. She knew that he knew. On one level or another. What she and Stilton had had between them, she and Tord didn’t have. And that was enough to make Tord wonder. A little uncertain, she didn’t think it was jealousy. Their relationship was too stable for that. But he was wondering.
‘What do you mean, private?’
‘Does it matter?’
She felt that she was being a bit too defensive. That was stupid. She had nothing to defend. Nothing at all. Or did she? Had the meeting with Stilton affected her in a way that she hadn’t been prepared for? His dreadful physical condition? His focus? His total lack of emotion at the situation? Confronting her outside her own home? Possibly, but that was definitely not something that would reach her husband.
‘Tord, Tom decided to seek me out, I haven’t spoken to him for six years, he’s involved in something that I don’t care about, but I was obliged to hear him out.’
‘Why?
‘He’s gone now.’
‘OK. Well, I was just curious, you were on your way in and then the two of you went off. Shall we have a stir-fry for dinner?’
Stilton was sitting alone in the station café in Linköping. That was an environment in which he felt fairly comfortable. Mediocre coffee, no disapproving looks, you went in and drank your coffee and went out again. He was thinking about Marianne. And about himself. What had he expected? Six years had passed since they had last had contact with each other. Six years of uninterrupted decline
, on his part. In all respects. And her? She looked exactly the same as she did six years ago. At any rate in the half-light of that residential area. For some people, life just goes on, he thought, for others it slows down and for some it ceases completely. For him, things had started to move again. Slowly, jerkily, but more forwards than downwards.
That alone.
He really hoped that Marianne looked after what she had, whatever it was. She was worth it. In his really healthy moments he found himself thinking about how his behaviour during their last year together must have pained her. His worsening mental problems. How his abrupt changes of mood had slowly undermined what they had built up together, and in the end it all collapsed.
And now these healthy moments were no longer so healthy.
Stilton got up. He couldn’t remain sitting. He felt how the pressure in his chest spread out towards his arms and he had left his Stesolid pills in the caravan. Then his mobile rang.
‘Jelle.’
‘Hi, Tom, it’s Marianne.’
She was talking rather quietly.
‘How did you get hold of my number?’ said Stilton.
‘Olivia Rönning is on Eniro, which you aren’t, so I texted her and asked for your number. Is the hairslide DNA urgent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come over and give it to me.’
‘OK. Why have you changed your mind?’
Marianne ended the call.
* * *
Olivia was rather curious as to why Marianne Boglund wanted Stilton’s mobile number. Surely they didn’t have any contact? Or had he become interested anyway? In the hairslide? A bit perhaps, there in the caravan, enough to ask her if he could keep it. Jesus, she thought. He worked on this case for God knows how many years. Without solving it. Of course he’s bound to be interested. But would he really get in touch with his ex-wife? She remembered her meeting with Marianne Boglund at the college. The chilly distance she showed when Olivia asked about Stilton. Almost dismissive. And now she had asked for his phone number. Wonder why they got divorced? she thought. Was that also connected with the beach case?
Presumably it was thoughts like this churning over in her mind that led her to get on the bus out to Kummelnäs peninsula on Värmdö. Out to that dilapidated old mansion. Out to the Olsäters. She felt that there lots of answers out there that she wanted. Besides, she felt something more indefinable. Something to do with the house itself, the atmosphere, the mood out there. Something that she found herself almost longing to be part of again.
Without knowing why.
Mårten Olsäter was down in the music room. The cave-room. That was his hiding place. He loved his big uninhibited family and all their acquaintances and non-acquaintances who were always invading the house and needed food and entertainment and it was almost always Mårten who had to take charge of things. In the kitchen. He loved it.
But he needed to crawl away now and then.
That was why he had built up his cave-room down here, many years ago, and explained to everybody up above that down here was private. Then he had explained, in due course over the years, to children and grandchildren, what he meant by private.
A space that was his alone.
Nobody entered who wasn’t invited.
And considering what Mårten otherwise meant to his family, his wishes were respected. He got what he wanted.
A little cave-room in the cellar.
Here he could return to the past and sink into nostalgia and sentimentality. Here he could take a little dip into sorrow about everything that demanded sorrow. His private sorrow. About everything and everyone that had left a track of despair in the course of his life. And there were quite a lot of tracks.
They tend to have accumulated by the time you become a pensioner.
He handled that sorrow with care.
And on a few occasions he indulged in a wee sip, without Mette knowing. Less often now, in recent years, but now and then. To get in touch with what Abbas sought in Sufism. That which was round the corner.
That was never wrong.
On really good nights it happened that he sang duets with himself.
Then Kerouac crawled into the crack.
When Olivia suddenly found herself standing in front of the big wooden door and ringing the bell, she still didn’t really know why she was there.
She just was there.
‘Hello!’ said Mårten.
He opened the door wearing what a girl in Olivia’s generation would hardly recognise as Mah Jong clothes. An echo from the Sixties in Sweden. Unisex, velour. A bit of orange, a bit of red and a bit of anything at all, softly hanging around Mårten’s generous girth. He held a plate in his hand, a plate that Mette had made on her potter’s wheel.
‘Hi. I’m… is Mette here?’
‘No. Will you settle for me? Come in!’
Mårten vanished inside and Olivia followed him in. This time nobody had been banished to the upper reaches. The house was crawling with children and grandchildren. One of the children, Janis, lived in a smaller house in the grounds, with her husband and one child, and regarded her parental home as her own. A couple of other children, or grandchildren, Olivia assumed, rushed around in specially sewn-up fancy-dress costumes and squirted their water pistols. Mårten quickly waved Olivia over to a door across the hall. She just managed to duck away from some sprays of water before reaching the door. Mårten closed it behind her.
‘A bit chaotic here,’ he smiled.
‘Is it always like this?’
‘Chaotic?’
‘Well, I mean, so many people here?’
‘Always. We have five children and nine grandchildren. Plus Ellen.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘My mother. She is ninety-two and lives in the attic. I’ve just made some tortellini for her. Come along!’
Mårten took Olivia up some decidedly winding stairs, right up to the top of the house, to the attic.
‘We’ve furnished a room for her up here.’
Mårten opened the door to a light and beautiful little room, tastefully furnished. Totally different from the environment a couple of floors lower down. A white iron bed, a little table and a rocking chair. In the rocking chair sat a very old woman with chalk-white hair busying herself with a narrow, narrow piece of knitting which coiled several metres on the floor.
Ellen.
Olivia looked at the long narrow piece of knitting.
‘She thinks she is knitting a poem,’ Mårten whispered, ‘each stitch is a stanza.’
He turned towards Ellen.
‘This is Olivia.’
Ellen looked up from her knitting and gave a little smile.
‘Very good,’ she said.
Mårten went up to her and stroked her gently on the cheek.
‘Mama is a little demented,’ he whispered to Olivia.
Ellen went on knitting. Mårten put the plate down next to her.
‘I’ll ask Janis to come up and help you, mama.’
Ellen nodded. Mårten twisted round towards Olivia.
‘Would you like some wine?’
They ended up in one of the rooms downstairs. With a door that shut out most of the noise from the children.
And drank wine.
Olivia rarely drank wine. It was mainly if she was a guest somewhere, like at Maria’s.
Otherwise she stuck to beer. So after a couple of glasses of something that Mårten called an extremely keenly priced red wine, Olivia started to talk a little more than she had intended. Whether it was the setting or the wine or, quite simply, Mårten, she didn’t really know, but she talked about very private things. In a way she never had done with her mother, Maria. She talked about herself. About Arne. About losing her father and not being there when he died. About her never-ending guilty conscience for that.
‘Mum thinks that I want to become a police officer to soothe my guilty conscience,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so.’
Mårten had listen
ed, hardly said anything, for a long time. He was a good listener. Many years with noisy people had trained his ear for emotional situations and drilled his empathetic ability.
‘Why don’t you think so?’
‘We rarely do things to satisfy a guilt complex, but we do, however, often think we do it. Or blame it, because we don’t really know why we make our choices.’
‘So why did I want to join the police then?’
‘Perhaps because your dad was a policeman, but not because he died when you weren’t there. There’s a difference. One is inheritance and environment, the other is guilt. I don’t believe in the guilt bit.’
Nor do I, not really, Olivia thought. It’s only mum who does.
‘Have you been thinking about Tom then?’
Mårten changed direction. Perhaps because he felt that Olivia would feel better for it.
‘Why do you wonder that?’
‘Isn’t that why you came here?’
At this point, Olivia wondered whether Mårten was a sort of medium. If she had ended up in the hands of a paranormal phenomenon. He was spot on.
‘Yes, I have been thinking about him, quite a lot, and there are lots of things I can’t put together.’
‘How he ended up as a rough sleeper?’
‘Homeless.’
‘Semantics,’ Mårten smiled.
‘Yes, but, he was a detective chief inspector, a good one as I understand, and must have had a pretty good social net too, not least you, and still he ends up there. A homeless person. Without being a drug addict or something like that.’
‘What is “something like that”?’
‘I don’t know, but it must be an enormous step from the person he was to the person he is.’
‘Yes and no. In part he is the same as he was, on certain levels, on others not.’
‘Was it the divorce?’
‘That contributed, but by then he had already started to slide.’
Mårten sipped his wine. He pondered for a moment as to how far he should take this. He wasn’t going to reveal things about Tom in the wrong way, or in a way that perhaps could be misunderstood.
So he chose a middle road.
‘Tom came to a point where he just let go. Psychologically there is a terminology for this, but we’ll skip that, in concrete terms he was in a situation where he didn’t want to hang on.’
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