She had invited Olivia for dinner.
* * *
Stilton arranged his things in the cabin. It didn’t take long. A few clothes in the tiny wardrobe and a tattered portrait of One-eyed Vera on the narrow shelf by the bedside lamp. It was as close to home as he could get in his situation. He didn’t care. Just over a year ago he was living in a borrowed caravan that burned down – some kind of arson attack. Now he lived in a cabin on an old barge. A bit more cramped, but untainted by broken memories.
It suited him perfectly.
He left the barge without bumping into Luna. He thought he’d go and see Abbas. He knew that Abbas seldom started work at the casino before eight o’clock. Stilton wanted to begin some private investigations into the shit that had happened before he became homeless, and he might need Abbas’s help.
They had a pretty special relationship, based on mutual respect. Stilton had once taken care of Abbas when the young Frenchman had been arrested for counterfeit sales of this and that, and was close to attacking a fellow inmate with a knife when his back was against the wall. Stilton made a connection with him, found a way into his closed world and saw something that no one else saw back then.
A good person.
Damaged and closed, with baggage that Stilton could only guess at, but still. He organised a special programme for Abbas with two supervisors he trusted. Mette and Mårten Olsäter.
Over time, it turned out that Stilton’s evaluation of Abbas had been right. He was a good person. So good in fact that he was eventually considered family by the Olsäters, decided to train as a croupier and began studying Sufism. He never forgot what Stilton had done for him.
During the years that Stilton was homeless, Abbas was given the chance to repay some of his debt of gratitude.
And now Stilton was ringing at his door on Dalagatan.
No answer.
He’s probably with Ronny Redlös, thought Stilton, with his phone turned off. Or maybe he’s in the bath with his earphones on listening to music. Abbas often had baths. Stilton did not. He rang the doorbell again. As the sound faded away he leant against the door. What was that? A dull whirring noise could be heard inside the flat. Was he hoovering? Stilton knocked on the door a couple of times, hard. The whirring noise continued. Stilton concluded that Abbas el Fassi, who was rather anal about tidiness, was hoovering with his earphones on. And he might well be doing that for quite some time.
Stilton stepped out onto Dalagatan and started walking towards Odengatan. It was that time of year again when people didn’t look at each other. That cold and harsh time when it was dark almost all day, before the snow came to brighten things up a bit. Everyone he passed was looking down, channelling their bodies to somewhere warm.
Stilton didn’t care about the weather, not in that way.
People who’ve grown up on the flat islands in Stockholm’s archipelago have a different relationship to the weather than people in the city. Out there, the weather is a matter of life and death. When storms lash in at thirty metres a second from the open sea, you can’t just glide into a posh restaurant like Sturehof to complain about how bloody cold it is!
So Stilton walked towards Odenplan not paying any atten-tion to what was blowing around him. He’d stood outside underground stations selling Situation Stockholm in far worse conditions than this. With one major difference. Back then he was totally drained, absent, without a single relevant feeling in his body.
Now it was quite the opposite.
He was extremely fired up. Focused. He had a task. He was going to deal with Rune Forss, the detective chief inspector who had manipulated him out of the police.
A very unpleasant man.
The pressure rising inside Stilton forced him to clench his teeth until his cheeks were straining. He stopped outside the Hellmans toyshop on Odengatan and watched his reflection in the window. He’d never done that when he was homeless. Never. The first time he saw himself in a mirror, after five years on the streets, at home with the Olsäters, he’d had quite a shock. Not now though. He saw himself as the person he had restored.
On Rödlöga.
For the past year he’d lived alone out there in the house he’d inherited from his mother – her parents’ old fisherman’s cottage. Before that he hadn’t been there since he went off the rails in 2005. Abbas had come out to visit him a couple of times and he’d gone into the city to meet Mette and Mårten a couple of times too. Mette was one of his oldest colleagues from the squad, the only one there for whom he had total respect, which had over time resulted in a close personal relationship as well. And subsequently also with her husband Mårten, a slightly eccentric child psychologist.
But the visits to the city were short lived, as he longed to get back out to the island again. Back to isolation. In the beginning he spent time getting the house in order. It was a simple house, wooden panelling on the walls and a stone floor, a tiled roof that had withstood the worst of the weather. It had been standing there for more than a hundred years and Stilton intended to ensure that it would remain there throughout his lifetime.
Once he’d got the house in order he started to clear the land.
Several years had passed since anyone had tended to the plot and many trees had fallen down during storms. It suited him perfectly. He got to work with his grandfather’s old bow saw, cut, stacked and then started chopping. Every morning he went out to his chopping block, grabbed a new piece of wood and took up his axe. Hour after hour, until his arms were like putty. Afterwards he went to lie down on the bed just next to the kitchen and checked his arms and legs for ticks.
Then he read.
The Manhattan series. Whodunnits from the fifties. The only books there’d ever been at his grandparents’ house. His grandfather had loved them. Peter Cheney, James Hadley Chase, Mickey Spillane. He’d read them over and over again when he was young, when he lived out there with the old folks, smuggling the well-thumbed paperbacks to the outhouse to lose himself in the hard-boiled stories. He still recalled many of the heroes’ names. Lemmy Caution. Slim Callaghan. Mike Hammer. Sometimes he’d wondered how much his juvenile fascination with these crime stories and coppers had influenced his choice of profession.
He read the books again, until he fell asleep.
When he woke, he ate whatever he’d been able to get hold of – either from the small island shop or from the Vaxholm boat deliveries, depending on the time of year.
Always food that was easy to prepare.
Then he’d sit down and look out through the hand-blown windowpanes. At the sea, the stars and the lights on far-off ships. He had no dreams about the sea, or a life at sea – he wanted firm ground under his feet. But he enjoyed sitting by the window.
He was biding his time.
As his physical strength returned, through wood chopping and fishing and long walks over the island, his brain also started working again.
For better or for worse.
He did some serious soul-searching. It was quite painful. He forced himself to recall the names of all those he had betrayed during his years in the force. People he’d abandoned, cut ties with, treated like shit. People who had loved him, tried to support him, been there for him. People who had eventually given up hope.
It took its toll.
But it led him onwards.
First into shame. That took a couple of months to process. But when he finally realised that the first step forward was to respect himself more, for the person he now was, the pressure eased a little. He was who he was and he dealt with it as best he could. And he would try to draw new self-respect from that.
That’s when he started feeling a sense of rage.
Not immediately. He still wasn’t up to it, but he began mulling over certain things. ‘Lost years.’ He’d lost a number of years in his life. Why? He knew what had sparked it, he knew there weren’t any medical explanations, but was that the whole truth?
That’s when he came closer to rage.
He got
closer to Rune Forss.
Stilton peered at himself in the toyshop window again. An older man in a stiff coat came and stood next to him.
‘You don’t have a poo bag, do you?’
‘Poo bag?’
‘Little Wiffin has pooed on the pavement and I forgot to bring a bag.’
Stilton looked down and saw an odd-looking ball of fur circling around the man’s legs.
‘Sorry, I haven’t got a poo bag.’
‘All right, sorry to bother you.’
The man pulled Wiffin away. Stilton turned back to face the shop window. He had no trouble connecting to what was taking place inside him. It had been going on for quite some time now and had recently escalated. A kind of frenzied need to get back. And assume a place in the world again.
Make up for lost time.
Yet he didn’t quite know how. He’d dedicated a great deal of deep thought to the matter. Where should he go? What was he going to do with his life? He had given it up once and now he’d got it back again.
Or reclaimed it.
What was he going to do with it?
He’d spent the majority of his adult life working in the police, successfully. He had a good moral compass, a sense of right and wrong, perhaps even more clearly now than before his years on the streets. But he couldn’t possibly imagine returning to that police environment.
He needed to go in another direction.
But he first had to deal with Rune Forss.
It was the first step towards the closure he was looking for.
He looked past his reflection into the toyshop. He saw electric train sets and puzzles and large boxes of Lego and caught himself missing children.
Children playing.
With him.
Children who were his.
He’d never have any, he was sure of that. That time was over. When the time had been right, during his marriage to Marianne Boglund, he’d been consumed by murder investigations and made it quite clear that he wasn’t ready to have children. That was probably one of the reasons for the divorce.
But there were others.
He pulled himself away from the toyshop and walked towards Odenplan. He glanced over at the Tennstopet restaurant on the other side of the road. It was crowded in there, away from the cold and desolation. That sense of community had never appealed to him. He got out his mobile and called Mette Olsäter. She answered after a couple of rings.
‘Hi, it’s Tom.’
‘Hi! Are you in the city?’
‘Yes. I want to deal with Rune Forss.’
‘Really? Oh!’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘No. But I can’t speak at the moment. I’ve just been asked to join the steering committee for an international drug operation and I need to email out a million things. Can we meet up tomorrow?’
‘I could come and see you at home this evening?’
‘That’s not very convenient.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve invited Olivia for dinner.’
‘So?’
There was silence at the other end of the line and Stilton knew exactly what it was about. Olivia had blamed Stilton for a load of shit that happened in connection with the Nordkoster case. Her mother’s murder. With some justification, he knew that. He’d buried his head in the sand and hadn’t dared to tell her the truth about some things. When he eventually did she was furious, and she probably still was.
Again with some justification.
So he understood what Mette meant.
‘So when can we see each other tomorrow then?’ he said.
‘Eleven.’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
‘At the office?’
‘Yes, I don’t have time to traipse all over the city. Have you heard from Abbas, by the way?’
‘No, why?’
‘I’ve tried ringing him so many times, but he’s not answering.’
‘He’s hoovering.’
‘Hoovering?’
‘Or he might be in the other world, the world yonder.’
Abbas had once tried to explain to Stilton what Sufism was about. Stilton had listened. When Abbas began talking about a world yonder, Stilton suggested that they should play a game of backgammon.
And that was that.
‘But I can give him a ring,’ he said.
‘Thanks. Bye.’
Stilton ended the call.
He folded up the collar on his leather jacket and walked towards Odenplan. He fancied a sausage and thought that there was a sausage stall there.
There wasn’t.
* * *
Olivia sat in the beautifully aged kitchen relishing Mårten’s latest stew experiment. She’d really longed to come here, to the semi-chaotic, green and white, dilapidated old mansion out in Kummelnäs on the island of Värmdö, with children and grandchildren milling around. It was a long time since she’d been here last. The wounds had not yet healed then, and she’d still had that long journey ahead of her. Yet it all came flooding back as soon, as she stepped through the gate. It was here in this house that everything had been revealed, just over a year ago. Both Mette and Mårten had been there, but it wasn’t them who had shocked her. It was Tom Stilton. He wasn’t here now – if he had been she would have left.
She put a warm, delicious-smelling spoonful into her mouth.
‘Tom seems to be back on his feet again,’ Mette suddenly remarked while topping up Olivia’s glass with red wine.
‘Oh, really. What a delicious stew, Mårten! What spices did you use? Lots of garlic?’
‘Yes,’ Mårten said. ‘And some cayenne and garam masala.’
‘He’s been living out on Rödlöga for almost a year now,’ Mette continued.
‘Are we going to talk about Tom Stilton?’
Olivia sounded a bit blunter than she’d intended and regretted it. She knew that Mette only meant well, but she didn’t want to talk about him. And Mårten could see that right away.
‘Tell us about your trip,’ he said.
She was happy to. A couple of glasses of wine later, Mette and Mårten had been updated about most things that had happened during her trip.
The exception being Ramón.
When she’d finished Mårten looked at her.
‘So are you going to change your surname?’
‘Yes, but I haven’t dealt with the formalities yet.’
‘And where are you going to apply for a job then?’
It was Mette who asked and Olivia had been dreading that question. She knew it was coming, of course, she also knew that Mette wasn’t Maria, who’d just said ‘good’. Mette was a detective chief inspector at the National Crime Squad.
‘Nowhere,’ Olivia replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know if I want to join the police. Not the way I feel now anyway.’
‘But you’ve just completed your training!’
‘Yes.’
‘But why don’t you want to join?’
Mårten saw how upset Mette was and Olivia felt the mood around the table change. But she’d made a decision and she was standing by it.
‘I want to do other things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Study history of art.’
‘Are you just going waste all that training?’
‘Mette.’ Mårten put his hand on Mette’s arm. ‘That’s up to her,’ he said.
‘Sure.’ Mette spoke directly to Mårten without looking at Olivia. ‘But I thought she was passionate about this. That she wanted to do something. Make a difference. Accomplish something. Apparently I was wrong.’
‘That’s not very nice,’ Olivia said. Mette was about to answer, but Olivia went on: ‘You have no reason whatsoever to sit there and judge me. You have no idea what I want and what I can achieve. There are plenty of people who make a difference and who aren’t in the police. I thought you were a bit more broad-minded.’
Mårten looked at Mette. It
was quite a while since anyone had dared to speak to her like that to her face. Particularly a young person. His respect for Olivia grew immensely, but he made sure not to let his wife know that. Mette watched Olivia for a few seconds, her hand moving up and down her wine glass while Olivia’s words sank in.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You’re right. It’s just that I got so disappointed. I know how skilled you are, and what kind of person you are. We need people like you. It feels like a waste. You could have become an amazing murder investigator.’
‘I haven’t said that I’ll never join the police. I might change my mind.’
‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed.’
Mette raised her glass to Olivia and both of them had a sip of wine. Mårten felt that a ceasefire had been reached.
A ceasefire of sorts.
Mette wasn’t going to let this go.
‘One of our neighbours hanged himself yesterday,’ Olivia said, mostly to change the subject. ‘Out in Rotebro.’
‘Bengt Sahlmann,’ Mette said.
‘Yes. Did you know him?’
‘Not personally, but I know who he was. He worked at Customs and Excise. We were in touch when they did a major drug crackdown a while ago. I just heard the news this morning. He was a good person.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Maria did. I used to babysit his daughter Sandra ages ago. She was the one who found him.’
‘Awful.’
Mårten got up and started clearing the table. He wanted to give the ladies a chance to reach some neutral ground. And Olivia wanted that too. Mette meant a lot to her, both professionally and as a friend. She didn’t want there to be tension between them, so she said something that she thought would catch Mette’s attention.
‘But I do think there’s something weird about his suicide,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Many things.’
Olivia saw Mette topping up her glass and pulling her chair up a bit closer.
‘Tell me.’
It caught her attention straight away.
‘The first thing that struck me was that he knew that Sandra was on her way home. He knew that she was going to find him. Hanging from the ceiling. His only child. Isn’t that a bit odd?’
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