Spring Tide

by Börjlind, Cilla

  In an adjacent room sat or stood the greater part of Mette’s team and a young police trainee. Olivia Rönning. They could follow the interrogation on a screen. Several of them had note-pads in their hands.

  Olivia looked up at the screen.

  Mette switched on the recorder and said the date, time and names of those present. She looked at Eva Carlsén.

  ‘And you don’t require the presence of a lawyer?’

  ‘I can see no reason for it.’

  ‘All right. In 1987 you were questioned by the police in connection with enquiries about a murder that had taken place at the Hasslevikarna coves on Nordkoster. You were on the island when the murder took place, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the time you were called Eva Hansson, is that also correct?’

  ‘You know it is, you interrogated me about Nils’ disappearance back in 1984.’

  Eva was going to defend herself. She adopted a slightly aggressive tone. Mette picked up an old tourist photo from a plastic folder and pushed it across the table.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a man in the photo. One can’t really see his face, but you can see that birthmark there?’

  Mette pointed to the very specific birthmark on the man’s left thigh. Eva nodded.

  ‘I would be grateful if you answered instead of nodding.’

  ‘I can see that mark.’

  ‘The photo was taken in Mexico almost twenty-six years ago, by a tourist, who thought it was your then live-in partner Nils Wendt, who was missing at the time. Do you remember that I showed you this picture?’

  ‘It’s possible, I can’t remember.’

  ‘I wanted to see if you recognised the man in the photo as your partner.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You didn’t. You said that it most definitely was not Nils Wendt.’

  ‘And what are you getting at with that?’

  Mette put a newly taken autopsy photo of Wendt’s naked corpse in front of Eva.

  ‘This is a newly taken photo of Wendt’s body after his murder. Can you see the mark on his left thigh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The same mark as in the tourist photo, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘At the time of Wendt’s disappearance you had been living with him for four years. How could you claim that you didn’t recognise his extremely distinct birthmark on his left thigh?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know why you lied. Why did you lie?’

  ‘I didn’t lie! I must have made a mistake? Twenty-six years ago? Made a mistake? How should I know?’

  Eva brushed away a lock of hair with an irritated gesture. Mette looked at her.

  ‘You seem irritated.’

  ‘And what would you be in my situation?’

  ‘Careful to tell the truth.’

  Bosse Thyrén smiled a little and made a note on his pad. Olivia couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. She had met Eva twice and found her to be a forceful but friendly woman. Now she saw something completely different. A clearly tense woman who seemed unbalanced and vulnerable. Olivia started to feel herself becoming emotionally involved. She had promised herself to be professional. To try to see it like a police officer. Neutral. Like a future murder investigator.

  That was already going badly wrong.

  Mette put down a new tourist photo in front of Eva on the table. A photo from a bar in Santa Teresa. Brought back by Abbas el Fassi.

  ‘This photo comes from Santa Teresa in Costa Rica. The man in the picture is Nils Wendt, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you recognise the woman he has his arm round?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have never seen her before?’

  ‘No. I have never been in Costa Rica.’

  ‘But you might have seen a picture of her?’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  Mette pulled out the envelope they had found behind a shelf in Eva’s kitchen. She took six photos out of the envelope and spread them out in front of Eva.

  ‘Six photos, all showing Nils Wendt and the woman from the earlier photo, who you didn’t recognise. You see that it is the same woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We found these photos in your kitchen in Bromma.’

  Eva looked from Mette to Stilton and back to Mette again.

  ‘That’s a fucking dirty…’

  Eva shook her head. Mette waited until she had stopped.

  ‘Why did you say that you didn’t recognise the woman?’

  ‘I didn’t see that it was the same woman.’

  ‘As in the photos from your home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How have these six photos ended up in your house?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Who took them?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘But evidently you knew they were in your house?’

  Eva didn’t answer. Stilton noted how the rings of sweat under her arms expanded down the light blouse.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’ Mette asked.

  ‘No. Are we almost finished?’

  ‘That depends on you.’

  Mette pushed forward yet another photo. An old private photo, where a smiling Eva stood beside her younger brother Sverker. Eva reacted noticeably.

  ‘You don’t stop at anything,’ she said, in a much lower voice.

  ‘We’re just doing our job, Eva. When was this picture taken?’

  ‘In the mid 1980s.’

  ‘So it was before the murder on Nordkoster?’

  ‘Yes? What’s that got to do…’

  ‘You have a pair of very special earrings on… in the photo, haven’t you?’

  Mette pointed to Eva’s long beautiful earrings in the photo.’

  ‘I had a friend who was a silversmith, and she gave them to me for my twenty-fifth birthday.’

  ‘So they were made specially for you?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And only one pair was made?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Mette lifted up a little plastic bag with an earring in it.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’

  Eva looked at the earring.

  ‘It looks like one of them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where does it come from?’ Eva asked.

  ‘From the coat pocket of the woman who was murdered in the Hasslevikarna coves in 1987. How did it get there?’

  Olivia looked away from the screen. She thought it was starting to be hard to keep on watching. Mette’s way of calmly and deliberately hurting her victim.

  With a single aim.

  ‘You have no idea how it ended up in her coat pocket?’ Mette asked.

  ‘No.’

  Mette turned a little to one side and glanced at Stilton. An interrogator’s trick. The person being questioned should be made to feel that the interrogators knew more than they did. Mette looked at Eva again and then down at the old private photo.

  ‘Is that your brother standing next to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it true that he died from an overdose four years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sverker Hansson. Did he visit you at your summer house ever?’

  ‘On occasion.’

  ‘Was he there the same late summer when the murder took place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why are you lying?’

  ‘Was he?’

  Eva looked surprised. Was she acting? Stilton wondered. She must be.

  ‘We know that he was there,’ said Mette.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was there with a man called Alf Stein. They rented a cabin on the island. Is he someone you know? Alf Stein?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We have a tape recording where he confirms that they were there.’

  ‘Oh really, so they were there then.’ />
  ‘But that isn’t something you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t meet Alf Stein or your brother?’

  ‘It’s possible I… now you mention it… I remember that Sverker had a mate with him on some occasion…’

  ‘Alf Stein.’

  ‘I don’t know what he was called…’

  ‘But it was you who gave them the alibi for the murder.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You claimed that Sverker and his mate had stolen your boat and disappeared. The night before the murder. We believe it was the next night. After the murder. Wasn’t that the case?’

  Eva didn’t answer. Mette went on.

  ‘Alf Stein claims that you have paid money to him over the years. Have you done that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he is lying?’

  Eva wiped her forehead with her arm. She was close to the edge now. Both Mette and Stilton saw that. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. They all turned round. A uniformed woman opened, and held out a green folder. Stilton got up, took the folder and handed it across to Mette. She opened the folder, glanced at the top sheet and then closed it again.

  ‘What was that?’ Eva wondered out loud.

  Mette didn’t answer. Slowly, she leaned into the light from the table lamp.

  ‘Eva, was it you who killed Adelita Rivera?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘She’s the woman who can be seen with Nils Wendt in all the photos you have been shown. Was it you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’ll continue.’

  Mette lifted up the forged letter from Adelita.

  ‘This letter was sent from Sweden to Dan Nilsson in Costa Rica, Dan Nilsson was Nils Wendt’s alias there. I shall read it to you, it is written in Spanish but I shall translate it. “Dan! I’m sorry, but I don’t think we are right for each other, and now I have the opportunity to start a new life. I’m not coming back.” Underneath is a signature. Do you know who signed it?’

  Eva didn’t answer. She was staring at her clasped hands on her lap. Stilton watched her, expressionless. Mette went on with the same controlled voice.

  ‘It’s signed “Adelita”. She was called Adelita Rivera and was drowned at the Hasslevikarna coves five days before this was posted. Do you know who wrote it?’

  Eva didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up. Mette put the letter on the table. Stilton was watching Eva carefully.

  ‘The other day you were assaulted in your home, in the hall,’ said Mette. ‘Our technicians found traces of blood on your hall rug and checked these to see if they came from the perpetrators. In connection with that, you had to supply a DNA sample and that showed that the blood came from you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mette opened the green folder she had just received.

  ‘We have also done a DNA analysis of the saliva on the stamp on the letter from “Adelita” in 1987 and that has matched your DNA. From the hall. They were the same. It was you who licked the stamp. Did you write the letter too?’

  Everybody had an edge, an edge to the precipice. Sooner or later you get to that edge if you are pushed hard enough. Now Eva was there. At the edge. It took some seconds, perhaps almost a whole minute, but then it came. In a low voice.

  ‘Can we take a break?’

  ‘Soon. Was it you who wrote the letter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stilton leaned back. It was over. Mette leaned towards the tape recorder.

  ‘We shall take a short break.’

  * * *

  Forss and Klinga had interrogated Liam and Isse for a couple of hours. They had both grown up in the Hallonbergen suburb of Stockholm. Klinga had been landed with Liam. He knew more or less what he would hear. Even before what they already had on Liam’s criminal record. A whole lot of shit which escalated during his teens. When Liam ended by telling how his dad used to help to inject his big sister at the kitchen table, the picture was pretty clear.

  To Klinga.

  Damaged children. Wasn’t that what she had called them? That woman he’d seen on TV, on some current affairs programme.

  Liam was an extremely damaged child.

  Forss had established roughly the same topography around Isse. Originally from Ethiopia, abandoned and left to his own devices even before his voice broke. Damaged and demolished. Crammed full of aimless violence.

  Now it was about the cage fighting.

  It took a while before they got Liam and Isse to reveal what they knew, but it trickled out in the end. Names of the other boys who helped to arrange them and above all: when the next fight was to take place.

  And where.

  Out on Svartsjölandet, in an old closed-down cement factory. Now empty and fenced off.

  Except for some people.

  Forss had put a watch on the place several hours earlier. The strategy was to let the whole thing get going before they raided it. When the first little boys were shut in the cages and the cheers and jeers started up, it was quickly stopped. The police had cut off every possible escape route and went in with heavily armed officers. The police vans outside were soon filled to the brim.

  When Forss and Klinga came out of the factory, they were met by journalists and photographers.

  ‘When did you find out about the cage fighting?’

  ‘A while ago, via our undercover activities. It’s been a top priority recently.’

  Forss said straight to a camera.

  ‘Then why haven’t you raided them earlier?’

  ‘We wanted to be certain the right people were there.’

  ‘And were they now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  As Forss posed for another close up, Klinga walked away.

  * * *

  Some of the members of the team had left the room. Olivia was still there, with Bosse Thyrén and Lisa Hedqvist. They probably all felt the same thing. A sort of relief because an unsolved murder was about to be solved, mixed with various personal reflections. For Olivia, a lot of that was about motive.

  Why?

  Even though she had an idea what it might be.

  The trio in the interrogation room had been given coffee. The mood was low key. For two of them some relief, and somehow perhaps even for the third. Mette turned the tape recorder on again and looked at Eva Carlsén.

  ‘Why? Can you talk about it?’ she said.

  Mette had suddenly changed her voice. The impersonal interrogator voice had gone. The one that only had a single purpose, to get a confession. The new voice was from one person to another, in the hope of understanding why we commit the acts we do commit.

  Knowledge.

  ‘Why?’ said Eva.

  ‘Yes.’

  Eva raised her head a little. If she was going to tell them why, then she’d have to push herself through a whole lot of pain. Suppressed pain, sublimated. But she felt that she ought at least to present an explanation. Put words to what she had devoted a whole life to try to atone for.

  The murder of Adelita Rivera.

  ‘Where shall I begin?’

  ‘Wherever you want.’

  ‘The first thing that happened was that Nils disappeared. Then, in 1984, without a word. He just vanished. I thought he had been murdered, that something had happened down there in Kinshasa, you thought something like that too, right?’

  Eva looked at Mette.

  ‘That was one of our hypotheses, yes…’

  Eva nodded and stroked the back of one hand with the other. She was talking very quietly now, and frailly.

  ‘Anyhow he never turned up. I was desperate. I loved him and was totally crushed. Then suddenly you came and showed me those tourist photos from Mexico and I saw that it was Nils, and he was alive and had a nice tan and was in some holiday resort in Mexico and I was absolutely… I don’t know… I felt horribly cheated. I hadn’t heard a word, not a postcard, nothing. There he was in the sun, and I was here and mourning and was desperate and… there was something extr
emely degrading about it… as if he didn’t give a damn about me…’

  ‘Why didn’t you say that it was him when I showed you the photo? Then, in 1985?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was as if… I wanted to get hold of him, myself, wanted an explanation, wanted to understand why he did that to me. If it was something personal between us, that he wanted to hurt me or whatever it was he wanted. Then I realised what it was about.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When I saw those other photos.’

  ‘The ones we found in your house?’

  ‘Yes. I contacted a foreign agency, specialists at finding missing people, I told them where he’d last been seen, in Playa del Carmen in Mexico, you’d shown me those tourist photos from down there, and then they started looking and found him…’

  ‘There?’

  ‘Yes. And then they sent a whole pile of photos from there, of him and a young woman. Intimate photos, sex scenes, from bedrooms and hammocks and the beach and everything imaginable… you’ve seen them, it was terrible. It might sound… but I was incredibly hurt… not just deceived, cheated on. It was something about the whole way he had gone about it, as if I was just air, not somebody who existed, just something you could treat like… I don’t know… And then that day came along…’

  ‘…when the young woman suddenly turned up on Nordkoster?’

  ‘Yes. Pregnant. His baby. Came with her bulging belly and hadn’t a clue that I recognised her from the photos and I knew that she’d been sent there.’

  ‘By Nils?’

  ‘Yes? Why else would she turn up? And then I saw her sneaking around the back garden of our summer house in the evening, and I’d been drinking wine and became… I don’t know, I became furious. What was she doing there? At our house? Was she looking for something? And then…’

  Eva became silent.

  ‘Where were Sverker and Alf Stein then?’ said Mette.

  ‘They were in the house. I didn’t really want them staying with me but they’d been kicked out of the holiday cabins and they’d moved in…’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘We ran out into the garden and dragged that woman into the house and she started to fight and scream, and then Sverker proposed that they should cool her down a bit, he was high on drugs.’

  ‘So you took her to the Hasslevikarna coves?’

  ‘Yes, we wanted to get away from people.’