Spring Tide

by Börjlind, Cilla

  ‘Hello! Have you cut your hair?’

  ‘Marianne’s been in touch, there was no match.’

  Olivia saw how a neighbour slipped by with a sweeping glance at the man beside her door. She stepped to one side and gestured to Stilton to come in. Then Olivia closed the door.

  ‘No match?’

  ‘No.’

  Olivia went ahead of him into the kitchen. Stilton followed her without taking off his overcoat.

  ‘So the hair didn’t come from the victim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It could come from one of the perpetrators.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Jackie Berglund,’ said Olivia.

  ‘Drop it.’

  ‘But why not? Why couldn’t it be hers? She has dark hair, she was on the island when the murder took place and she had a bloody useless explanation for why she vanished shortly afterwards. Didn’t she?’

  ‘I’ll use your shower,’ said Stilton.

  Olivia didn’t know what to say, so she pointed towards the bathroom door across the hall. She was still speechless when he disappeared inside. Using somebody else’s shower is decidedly intimate, for some people, for others it’s neither here nor there. For Olivia it took a while to accept the thought of Stilton standing in there and rinsing off whatever it was he was rinsing off.

  Then she started to think about Jackie Berglund.

  Black thoughts.

  ‘Forget Jackie Berglund,’ said Stilton.

  ‘Why should I?’

  He had taken a long cool shower, thought about Olivia’s fixation about Jackie Berglund and decided to let her in on some things. Olivia had got dressed and was giving him coffee at the kitchen table.

  ‘It was like this,’ he started. ‘In 2005 a young pregnant girl called Jill Engberg was murdered and I was in put in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘I already know that.’

  ‘I’m only starting from the beginning. Jill was a call girl. We soon established that she worked for Jackie Berglund in Red Velvet. The circumstances surrounding the murder made us believe that Jill’s murderer could be one of Jackie’s customers. I pushed that line pretty hard, but it came to a halt.’

  ‘What sort of halt?’

  ‘Some things happened.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Stilton became silent and Olivia waited.

  ‘What happened?’ she finally said.

  ‘Well several things happened, at the same time. I had a breakdown and ended up in a psychosis, for one, was on sick leave a while, and when I came back I’d been removed from the case.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Officially because I wasn’t considered as being in a condition to handle a murder enquiry just then, which might have been true.’

  ‘And unofficially?’

  ‘There were people who, I believe, wanted me away from the Jill case.’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘Because I’d got too close to Jackie Berglund’s escort business.’

  ‘Her customers, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who took over the case?’

  ‘Rune Forss. A policeman who…’

  ‘I know who he is,’ said Olivia. ‘But he didn’t solve the murder of Jill. I read about that in a…’

  ‘No, he didn’t solve it.’

  ‘But you must certainly have been struck by the same thought as me? When you were working on the Jill case?’

  ‘That there were similarities with Nordkoster?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sure, I was… Jill was pregnant too,’ Stilton went on, ‘like the victim on the beach, and Jackie cropped up in both investigations, perhaps the victim was a call girl? We didn’t know anything about her after all. So my idea was that there might have been a link, that it might have been the same perpetrator with the same motive.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘Murder a prostitute who had blackmailed him on account of the pregnancy. That was why I took DNA from Jill’s fetus and compared it with the DNA from the beach woman’s child. There was no match.’

  ‘That doesn’t exclude Jackie Berglund from being involved.’

  ‘No, and I had a hypothesis about her that I followed quite a while, she had been on Nordkoster with two Norwegians on a luxury yacht, and I thought that they might have been a quartet from the beginning, with the victim being the fourth person, and then something went wrong between them and three of them murdered the fourth.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘It didn’t lead anywhere, I couldn’t prove that any of them had been on the beach, or had any contact with the victim, as to whose identity we had no clue.’

  ‘Now perhaps you can show that Jackie had been on the beach?’

  ‘Via the hairslide?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stilton looked at Olivia. She didn’t give up, he became all the more impressed by her tenacity, curiosity, her ability to…

  ‘The earring?’

  Olivia interrupted Stilton’s thoughts.

  ‘You said that you found an earring in the victim’s coat pocket, on the beach, which presumably wasn’t hers. Isn’t that right? You thought it was a bit strange.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were there fingerprints on it?’

  ‘Only the victim’s. Do you want to see it?’

  ‘Have you got it?’

  ‘Yes, in the caravan.’

  Stilton pulled out the big cardboard box from under one of the bunks in the caravan. Olivia sat on the other one. He opened the box and lifted up a plastic bag with a small beautiful earring in it.

  ‘This is what it looks like.’

  Stilton handed the earring across to Olivia.

  ‘Why have you got it here?’ she asked.

  ‘It ended up among my things when I gathered everything together at the office when I was removed from the case, it lay in a drawer I emptied.’

  Olivia held the earring in her hand. It was a rather special design. Almost like a rosette which became a heart, with a little pearl hanging at the bottom, and a blue stone in the middle. Very beautiful. They reminded her of something. Surely she had seen a similar earring before?

  Not so very long ago?

  ‘Can I borrow this until tomorrow?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because… I’ve seen something similar quite recently.’

  In a shop? she suddenly thought.

  A shop on Sibyllegatan?

  * * *

  Mette Olsäter sat with some of her team in the investigation room at Polhemsgatan. A couple of them had celebrated the Midsummer holiday, a couple of others had kept on working. Now they had listened to Mette’s interrogation of Bertil Magnuson. For the third time. They all felt the same: he’s lying about the telephone calls. Partly it was an empirical feeling. Experienced interrogators who could weigh every sliding nuance in the tone of the person being interrogated. But also something more concrete. Why should Nils Wendt phone Bertil Magnuson four times and not say anything? As Magnuson claimed. Wendt must have understood that Magnuson would not in his wildest imagination ever think that it was Nils Wendt, missing for twenty-seven years, who wasn’t saying a word on the other end. And what then would be the point of the calls? On Wendt’s part?

  ‘He wasn’t silent.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what did he say?’

  ‘Something that Magnuson didn’t want to reveal.’

  ‘And what could that be about?’

  ‘The past.’

  At this point, Mette cut in on her colleagues’ reasoning. She assumed that Wendt really had been missing for twenty-seven years and suddenly turned up in Stockholm and phoned his former business partner. And the only thing that connected them today was yesterday.

  ‘So if we hypothetically say that Magnuson is behind the murder of Wendt, then the motive must lie in those four conversations,’ she said.

  ‘Blackmail?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

 
‘And what did Wendt have that he could blackmail Magnuson with? Today?’ Lisa wondered.

  ‘Something that happened then.’

  ‘And who can know about it? Besides Magnuson?’

  ‘Wendt’s sister in Geneva?’

  ‘Doubtful.’

  ‘His ex-wife?’ Bosse wondered.

  ‘Or Erik Grandén,’ said Mette.

  ‘The politician?’

  ‘He was on the board of Magnuson Wendt Mining when Wendt disappeared.’

  ‘Shall I get in touch with him?’ Lisa wondered.

  ‘Yes, do.’

  Olivia sat on the underground train. The whole way in to town from the caravan, she had been pondering Stilton’s information. She wasn’t sure what he had meant. More than that it wasn’t a good idea to get too close to Jackie Berglund. When he himself had done so, it ended with him being removed from the case. But she wasn’t a police officer. Yet. She wasn’t part of any official investigation. Nobody could remove her. Threaten, absolutely, and kill her cat under the bonnet of a car. But no more. She was free to do what she wanted, she thought.

  And she wanted to do just that.

  Get close to Jackie Berglund, cat murderer. Try to get something from Jackie that you could use for a DNA test. To see if it was Jackie’s hair that Gardman had found on the beach.

  And how could that be arranged?

  She could hardly walk into Jackie’s boutique again. She must have help. Then she had an idea. Which would necessitate her doing something repulsive.

  Exceedingly repulsive.

  * * *

  It was a shabby two-room flat on Söderarmsvägen in Kärrtorp, on the second floor. No name on the door, almost no furniture in the rooms. Wearing only underwear, Mink stood beside the window sticking steel needles in his flesh. It didn’t happen often. Almost never. He was on less heavy stuff nowadays. But sometimes he had to have a real blowout. He looked around him in the pad. He was still really pissed off about what happened out at the caravan. ‘Not even with a bargepole.’ That fucking bitch blew him off like he was a nobody. A loser, someone you could imagine standing in their back garden jerking off into a flowerpot.

  It felt fucking awful.

  But what do you need to support a fallen ego? In less than ten minutes, Mink was out on the track again. His fluttering brain had already constructed several explanations for the humiliation. From the fact that the girl had had absolutely no clue as to whom she was talking to – Mink the Man – to that she was an idiot quite simply. Besides, she was cross-eyed. A pathetic cunt who thought she could get the better of Mink!

  Now it felt much better.

  When the doorbell rang, he was right back on the level of his own ego again. His legs almost trotted away by themselves. High? So what? He was a guy on the move. A trickster who had his entire toolbox under control. He almost wrenched open the door.

  The pathetic cunt?

  Mink stared at Olivia.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Mink continued to stare.

  ‘I just wanted to apologize,’ she went on. ‘I was dreadfully rude the other evening, quite out of order, out by the caravan, and I really didn’t mean it, but I was so shocked over what they had done to Stilton, and it was nothing personal, I promise.

  I was just bloody stupid. Really. Sorry.’

  ‘What the fuck d’you want?’

  Olivia thought she had already expressed that very clearly, so she went on according to plan.

  ‘Is this the flat you own? Worth five million?’

  ‘At least.’

  She had thought through her strategy very carefully. She had a pretty good idea how this joke of a man should be handled. You just had to find an opening.

  ‘I’m sort of looking for a flat, she said. How many rooms are there?’

  Mink turned round and went inside the flat. He left the door open and Olivia took that as a form of invitation. And stepped in. Into the virtually empty two-room flat. Shabby. With wallpaper partly hanging loose. Five million? At least?

  ‘Stilton sends his regards by the way, he…’

  Mink had disappeared. Sneaked out through the bedroom window? she thought. Suddenly he turned up again.

  ‘Are you still here?’

  He had wrapped himself in some form of dressing gown and held a carton of milk in his hand which he drank from.

  ‘What the fuck d’you want?’

  It wasn’t going to be that easy.

  So Olivia dived straight in.

  ‘I need help. I must get hold of some DNA material from a person that I don’t dare let see me, and then I remembered what you had told me.’

  ‘What the fuck was that?’

  ‘How you had helped Stilton with lots of difficult cases, a bit like his right hand, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘And then I thought that perhaps you’ve some experience of this, you seem to know about most things?’

  Mink gulped down some more milk.

  ‘But perhaps you don’t do this sort of thing any longer?’ said Olivia.

  ‘I do most things.’

  He’s taken the bait, Olivia thought. Now I’ll pull the line in.

  ‘Would you dare do something like this?’

  ‘What d’you mean, dare? What the fuck d’you mean? What fucking thing is it?’

  Ah, well and truly hooked.

  Olivia came walking along from the underground station at Östermalmstorg with an exceedingly merry gentleman by her side, Mink the Man, a man who was afraid of nothing.

  ‘Some years ago I was on my way up K2, you know the fourth summit of the Himalayas, it was Göran Kropp and me and some sherpas, ice-cold winds, minus 32… pretty tough.’

  ‘Did you get to the top?’

  ‘They got up. I was forced to take care of an Englishman who had broken his foot, I carried him on my back all the way down to base camp. He was nobility, by the way, I’ve got a standing invitation to visit his mansion in New Hampshire.’

  ‘Isn’t that in the US?’

  ‘What did you say the name of the shop was?’

  ‘Weird & Wow. It’s over there, on Sibyllegatan.’

  Olivia stopped some distance from the shop. She described what Jackie looked like and what she needed.

  ‘A hair, like, that’s what you want?’

  ‘Or saliva.’

  ‘Or a contact lens, that’s how we nailed the guy in Halmstad, he had vacuumed the entire flat after he’d killed his wife and then we found a contact lens in the bag from the vacuum cleaner and took DNA from it and then we had him.’

  ‘I don’t know if Jackie Berglund uses contact lenses.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to improvise.’

  Mink skipped off towards Weird & Wow.

  His idea of improvisation is subject to discussion. He went right into the shop, saw Jackie Berglund stand with her back to him next to a dressing table with a female customer and went straight up to her and pulled out a little wisp of hair. Jackie screamed, turning round towards Mink who then looked extremely surprised.

  ‘But WHAT THE FUCK? Sorry! I thought it was that bitch Nettan!’

  ‘Who?’

  Mink waved his arms around as druggies tend to do. It came naturally to him.

  ‘Fucking sorry! My apologies lady! She’s got the same hair colour and she nicked a bag of coke and ran this way! Has she been in here?’

  ‘Get out!’

  Jackie grabbed Mink’s jacket and dragged him to the door. Mink wasn’t slow to slip out. With one fist tightly holding a wisp of hair. Jackie turned to the slightly shocked customer.

  ‘Junkies! They hang out over in Humlegård Park and come past sometimes and try to steal and make a mess. I’m so sorry about that.’

  ‘It’s all right. Did he steal anything?’

  ‘No.’

  Which could be up for debate.

  Erik Grandén was just going through his diary for the next few days. Seven countries in as many days. H
e loved travelling. Flying. Always being on the move. Not strictly an essential part of his job at the Foreign Ministry, but nobody had objected so far. He was always accessible via Twitter. Then Lisa Hedqvist phoned, and wanted to meet him.

  ‘Can’t be fitted in.’

  He really didn’t have time for a meeting. His arrogant tone made it clear that he had much more important things to do than talk with young woman police officers. So Lisa would have to do it over the phone.

  ‘It’s about the company called Magnuson Wendt Mining.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You were on the board…’

  ‘Then. It’s twenty-seven years ago. Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes. Was there a controversy within the board at that time?’

  ‘Concerning what?’

  ‘I don’t know, were there differences between Nils Wendt and Bertil Magnuson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘None that I know about.’

  ‘But you do know that Nils Wendt has just been murdered here in Stockholm?’

  ‘That was an extremely stupid question. Are we done now?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  Lisa Hedqvist hung up.

  Grandén was still holding his phone in his hand.

  He didn’t like this.

  * * *

  It had been a lot easier that she had expected. All the way to the caravan she had massaged a battery of arguments and tried to think up every possible objection so she could parry it, and then he simply said:

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Here!’

  Olivia handed over the little plastic bag with Jackie Berglund’s pulled-out wisp of hair. Stilton put it in his pocket. Olivia didn’t dare ask why he just said that. OK? Was it because he was on board? Or was he just being kind to her? Why should he?

  ‘That’s really great!’ she said, nevertheless. ‘When do you think that she…’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Stilton had no idea whether his ex-wife would help again. He didn’t even know if she was interested. When Olivia had left, he phoned her.

  She was interested.

  ‘You want me to match the wisp of hair against that hair from the hairslide?’

  ‘Yes. It could be from one of the perpetrators.’

  ‘Does Mette know about this?’ said Marianne.