Physically.
He ran a hand over his head. His long straggly hair had been cropped and replaced with a blond crew cut with streaks of grey running through it. A white scar in the corner of his mouth shone through the thin stubble, reminding him of the young lad he once was, just before he turned twenty. A young Swede of few words on a Norwegian oilrig, an oilrig that had suddenly exploded and unleashed full-scale panic in all but him, the Swede, who’d dragged a couple of colleagues from the distorted steel inferno with a muted contempt for death and saved their lives. A year later he had submitted his application to the Police Academy in Stockholm.
He carried a blue Adidas bag in his hand and headed down from Hornsgatan towards Långholmen. He walked quickly to keep warm. It was that inspiring time of year when the colour scheme delighted with different shades of grey. He buttoned his brown leather jacket right up under his chin. It was still a bit too big, but did the job in the icy cold winds. He’d inherited it from his grandfather, a tough old seal hunter on the island of Rödlöga whose shoulders were as wide as a doorframe.
He’d never match that.
But his grandfather was dead and the jacket was his and he wore it as well as he could.
He reached into the inside pocket, took out his mobile and tapped in a number. It didn’t ring for long.
‘Luna.’
‘Hi again, it’s Tom Stilton.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was just wondering if I could come over.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’
‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
Stilton ended the call and pulled out the piece of paper that he’d found stapled to an old oak tree on the edge of the Långholmen Park. He read the text again.
‘Sara la Kali.’
Why not, he thought.
Luna pulled a wire brush over one of the iron ribs on the front deck. The rust came and went. It came when she didn’t notice it and went again when she paid attention. What a Sisyphean task, she thought. The barge had been built in 1932, and although it was in good condition, it required constant maintenance. She stood up and glanced over at the Pålsund Bridge. A lone figure carrying a blue bag was making his way over the bridge, the wind forcing him to lean forwards slightly as he walked. It’s probably him, she thought. He’d called twice in quick succession and now he was on his way here. What an efficient man. Luna liked that. She put down the brush and flicked her thick mane of blonde hair with her somewhat grubby hand just as the man looked over at the barge. Luna waved at him. She didn’t really know how to begin – probably best just to be upfront about it. It was the first time she was doing this and she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the situation.
The man was soon at the gangway, a rather primitive construction made from wood and tar. He crossed over it in four steps and stood still on the deck.
Luna stepped forward.
‘Hi. Luna Johansson.’
‘Tom Stilton.’
He’s tall, she thought. She was six foot and this man was clearly taller, this man with a deep voice, worn face and a nice brown leather jacket. She was dressed in a pair of dirty green dungarees. Did he look a little dangerous? Maybe that was a good thing. There had been an attempted break-in a week ago and it could happen again.
‘Is this your boat?’ Stilton asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you live here alone?’
Luna had thought that she would be the one asking questions, but OK.
‘Yes.’
‘Can we take a look inside the cabin?’
‘In a sec. Do you have any references?’
‘I was homeless for five years, getting by selling Situation Stockholm, and this past year I’ve been living on Rödlöga.’
‘Are those your references?’
‘Are you worried about the rent?’
‘No. I’ll take an advance on that. Do you have a job?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What did you do before you were homeless?’
‘I was a police officer. At the National Crime Squad.’
This man was either a compulsive liar or very strange. Luna hadn’t quite made up her mind when Stilton said: ‘I come from a family of seal hunters.’
He was strange.
‘The cabin is this way,’ said Luna.
She gestured behind her and expected the man to go first. He thought otherwise, so there were a few seconds of nervous silence before Luna turned around and headed towards the stern.
Stilton followed her.
He studied the woman in front of him. She was tall, quite broad shouldered and although her overalls didn’t reveal much about her frame, he got the feeling that she was in good shape. When she tossed her head her blonde hair fell over onto one of her shoulders, partially revealing her neck. Not much, but enough for Stilton to see a tattoo snaking its way up to her ear.
‘So here it is.’
Luna moved away so that Stilton could take a step forward. He looked in and saw a wall-mounted bunk, a square table under a small round porthole, wooden bulkheads, nothing more.
‘It’s the largest cabin on here,’ she said. ‘Seven square metres.’
The cells at Kumla Prison are ten, Stilton thought.
‘Looks good,’ he said. ‘Can I lock this?’
Stilton nodded towards the cabin door.
‘No, but I can put a bolt on the door if you want.’
‘Yes, please. Where do you sleep?’
‘At the other end. My cabin has a lock.’
Stilton didn’t really know how to react to that and then Luna said: ‘You have access to the shower, lounge and kitchen. There’s only one fridge. You can use the two bottom shelves. We share the loo.’
‘OK. Three thousand a month?’
‘Well, yes, in principle.’
Stilton peered at Luna.
‘I’d consider reducing the rent in lieu of some renovation work on the boat.’
Stilton nodded. He was no handyman: he was busy enough fixing himself. But the offer was OK.
‘Will there be a contract?’ he asked.
‘Do we need one?’
‘You’re taking a month’s payment in advance. How do I know that the boat will still be here in a week?’
‘You don’t.’
‘No. So…?’
‘What difference would a contract make?’
‘Bugger all.’
‘Yep, so you may as well trust that I’m not going to screw you over.’
‘Apparently so.’
Stilton felt himself getting defensive and he didn’t enjoy being in this position. One of his major assets as an interrogator had been his ability to steer the dialogue in the direction he wanted until interviewees were pushed into a verbal corner that they could not escape.
Luna had certainly not ended up in that corner.
‘When do you want to move in?’ she asked.
‘Now, if that’s all right.’
Luna looked at his blue bag.
‘I have another bag at a friend’s house.’
‘What about the rent?’
Stilton pulled out a black wallet from his inside pocket, opened it and took out three thousand-kronor notes. There were a few more in there. Four months ago he’d sold a piece of land out on Rödlöga to an eager stockbroker from Gothenburg. His grandparents were probably turning in their graves when the sale went through, but Stilton needed money and it was his inheritance. He now had a pretty decent amount of money sitting in a savings account at Swedbank.
‘Thanks.’
Luna took the notes from him.
Stilton went into the cabin and pulled the door closed.
* * *
There was a lot that was different about this day. The sun, for example, was shining. And it hadn’t been for the past week. Now it had crept over the rooftops just to show it was still there. Soon it would soon be descending again.
But nevertheless.
&nbs
p; The beams of sunlight shone into Maria’s kitchen, casting a warm yellowy glow over the room. Things were different there too. Maria had been called to the Svea Court of Appeal to assist a colleague and neither of the people sitting at the kitchen table lived in the house. One of them was a daughter who’d flown the nest and was thinking about changing her surname, and the other was Sandra, the girl who had found her father hanging from the ceiling by a tow rope less than eighteen hours ago. She had woken late. Her face bore clear traces of shock and nightmares, but above all she seemed to have woken up to the realisation that she no longer had parents.
Olivia saw this realisation in her face as soon as she stepped into the kitchen. She gave Sandra a long, long hug. Silently. A few minutes later, she felt her thin jumper was soaked with Sandra’s tears. After a while Sandra freed herself from Olivia’s hug and asked to use the toilet. Olivia showed her where it was. Meanwhile she laid out whatever she could find in Maria’s fridge and before long they were each sitting with a bowl of cereal in front of them. Not many words had been exchanged across the table. Olivia waited. Sandra moved her spoon around the bowl.
‘Has Charlotte been in touch?’ she asked.
‘Yes, she’s on her way. She’s landing in half an hour and she’s coming straight here.’
‘Did you get the computer?’
‘It wasn’t there.’
Sandra looked up from the bowl.
‘In the office?’
‘No, I looked everywhere. Could he have taken it to work?’
‘I don’t know. He tends to keep it at home.’
‘OK. I can have a look at his work. What kind of computer is it?’
‘A MacBook Pro. It’s quite new. I put a little sticker on the inside, a pink heart… Why did he do it?’
‘Who?’
‘My dad!’
‘Commit suicide?’
‘Yes!?’
Sandra was suddenly staring straight into Olivia’s eyes. As if she thought that Olivia would have an answer.
‘I have no idea.’
‘But why do people commit suicide?’
Olivia saw that Sandra was steeling herself to talk, to put the horror into words, to try to comprehend the incomprehensible. A father taking his own life. Without any kind of warning, leaving his only child an orphan.
‘I don’t know, Sandra. I never knew your father. Was he sad about something?’
Olivia heard how foolish that sounded: ‘sad about something’. She wasn’t speaking to a child. Sandra was a teenager, about to enter adulthood in a way that no one should have to.
She deserved more respect.
Olivia pulled her chair towards Sandra.
‘Sandra… there are a thousand reasons why people commit suicide, but there is one thing that you can exclude. He did not take his life because of you. I don’t know why he did it, maybe the police investigation will tell us: there might be financial reasons or it might be something to do with your mother. I mean, she died…’
‘He’d got over my mum’s death. We both had. Once, about six months after she died, he came into my room and talked about his grief, how he was sometimes so sad that he didn’t know whether he could carry on living if it wasn’t for me. We held each other and got through it.’
This corroborated what Olivia’s intuition had told her. Sandra wasn’t a child.
‘Having said that, he was very sad about what happened with my grandfather,’ Sandra said.
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died a while ago. He was living in an old people’s home and died there. Dad said that they hadn’t taken proper care of him and that made him very sad. He didn’t really show it, but I saw it in his eyes.’
‘Was your grandfather old?’
‘He was eighty-three, and he was quite ill. We knew that he was going to die soon, so it wasn’t that…’
Sandra ate a spoonful of cereal. Olivia saw her hand shaking. I hope that Charlotte is a good person, she thought, who knows how to deal with Sandra. She should be, her sister died in the tsunami, so she’s faced crises of her own.
But you never know.
‘Where’s your father?’
Sandra spoke as she pushed her bowl away. Olivia was completely unprepared.
‘He died a few years ago. From cancer.’
‘Well, at least you still have your mum.’
‘Yes.’
Olivia could have ended the conversation there, with a half-truth. But she didn’t want that. She didn’t know how close she would get to Sandra in the future and she didn’t want her to stumble upon the real truth at a later date. She didn’t want to do what others had done to her.
So she started telling her what had happened.
It took quite a while. It was not a straightforward story. But when she’d finally recounted all the tragic things that had happened to her and her various parents, and answered several of Sandra’s questions, Sandra looked at her and said.
‘Poor you.’
As though it was Olivia who needed comforting.
The young women went out through the gate of the terraced house in Rotebro, off to collect Sandra’s scooter. The feeble November sunshine barely managed to dry up the small puddles on the road. It was pretty cold, but the wind was not nearly as severe as the night before. They walked quite slowly. From a distance they could have been mistaken for best friends, or sisters, one a little older than the other. They were neither, but the hours in Maria’s kitchen had created a connection between them, as though they shared the same fate.
Which they did to some extent.
Sandra’s mind was still filled with Olivia’s account of brutal murders and painful betrayals, allowing her to repress her own anguish.
For the moment anyway.
Very different thoughts were running through Olivia’s head. When they reached the underpass, she remembered what she’d wanted to ask.
‘Do you know someone called Alex Popovic?’
‘Not very well. I know who he is, one of Dad’s friends, a journalist. Why do you ask?’
‘He called your house when I was there looking for the computer.’
‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know, I ended the call pretty quickly.’
‘Did you tell him about my dad?’
‘Yes.’
They walked through the underpass. Olivia peered at the girl next to her. The night before she had walked this way on her way home, happy, looking forward to celebrating her exam result. Now her entire existence was crushed.
They emerged on the other side.
‘Where did you put your scooter?’
‘Over there, by the tree.’
Sandra walked ahead towards some trees where she’d left her scooter. But there was no scooter to be found.
‘It’s gone!’
Olivia caught up with her.
‘And this is where you left it?’
‘Yes.’
Olivia looked around and saw the severed lock on the ground, half-hidden by wet leaves.
‘It looks like it’s been stolen.’
‘Yes.’
Olivia thought that Sandra might break down again. But she didn’t. It was as if the missing scooter was just a part of the greater tragedy, that everything was connected.
‘It must have been that bloody man,’ Sandra said.
‘What man?’
‘The one I walked past.’
‘Where?’
‘In the underpass, on my way home. He was walking the other way and then he disappeared. I ran back to the scooter to get my bag with the key and he was gone. Imagine if he was hiding and saw me when I got to the scooter and then went back? He would have seen that it was just standing there. And then stolen it.’
‘Yes, maybe. You didn’t recognise him? From the area?’
‘No.’
‘But when he walked past you, was he coming from the direction of where your house is?’
‘Yes, what do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
Olivia got out her mobile.
‘I’m going to report the scooter missing.’
* * *
Mette Olsäter pulled out a small paper napkin and wiped under her nose – she could feel there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. She’d asked for a window to be opened in the cramped boardroom to keep the temperature down, as the thermostat wasn’t working properly. Her bulk and the inescapable tension would make her sweat, she knew that, and sweat undermines authority. She couldn’t be doing with that – she needed some authority for what she wanted to say. She looked at her watch, a thin black Rado watch that she’d been given by her husband when she turned fifty, and realised there was less than one minute to go. She took a last glance around her sparsely decorated office, one of the oldest at the National Crime Squad headquarters. Before, she’d had private photos on her desk and various pieces of pottery that she’d made in the windows. Now everything was gone. She’d reached a phase when she wanted to keep her work and her private life completely separate. She was approaching retirement.
She picked up her blue file and headed towards the open door. She knew there’d be questions over there, some more intelligent than others. She was able to foresee and prepare for most of them. The less intelligent ones. But the others, the intelligent questions, the ones that would come when she least expected them, and from where she could not predict, they worried her. They could stump her, or at least demand answers she couldn’t give. She could ill afford them. She knew that the people gathered in the room would meet for an evaluation afterwards, and that the outcome of this would determine the ongoing investigation. And maybe even her role in it. Sweden had been tasked with putting together a strategy for a coordinated international response to the explosive growth in online drug sales. Mette Olsäter had been put in charge of the project. Now she was about to present the strategy advocated by the Swedish police to sixteen foreign police representatives.
She pulled the door closed behind her and headed towards the boardroom. Just before she was about to go in she felt her mobile vibrating in her pocket. She pulled it out. Olivia had texted: ‘What time?’ Mette answered: ‘7.00 p.m.’
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