Third Voice

by Börjlind, Cilla

  ‘Anything you need help with?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Tom is coming.’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. How are you getting there?’

  ‘By train.’

  ‘Well, let me know when you arrive.’

  ‘I will. Say hi to Mårten and Jolene.’

  Abbas ended the call. The conversation was short, but there was sweat running down his forehead. He hated keeping things from Mette. And Mårten. People who meant more to him than his own parents. Who had ultimate faith in him.

  It was tough.

  But he was in no state to say more than he had.

  He picked up the newspaper on the glass table.

  It was about the past.

  Stilton packed his blue bag. It was the only one he had. As he didn’t know how long he’d be gone there was no point planning. Some toiletries, a couple of tops, a mobile charger. Light luggage. He was making his way down the gangway when Mette called. She was quick to get to the point, even by Mette’s standards.

  ‘What are you going to do in Marseille?’

  ‘Have you talked to Abbas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That it was about the past.’

  ‘Well, then you know more than me.’

  ‘You’re lying!’

  Stilton turned around and saw Luna standing by the railings. She waved. He waved back. It crossed his mind that it might be the last time they saw each other. Like in a film, the man leaving from the quayside and the women standing by the railings, waving. Then he dies in a foreign country.

  ‘Hello?! Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes. No, I’m not lying. Abbas has asked me to accompany him to Marseille. He hasn’t said why.’

  ‘And you haven’t asked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘God, you’re so childish!’

  This is where I should say ‘We’re men,’ Stilton thought, but he realised that might well be a little too childish.

  ‘Something has happened, I don’t know what, and he wants me to go with him and so I will. You know what he’s done for me.’

  Mette knew very well what Abbas had done for Stilton. It was Abbas who’d been there during his years on the streets when Stilton was close to death. It was Abbas who took him to various shelters and made sure he came out again, even though Stilton tried to keep him at a distance.

  So she didn’t have much to counter with.

  ‘So it’s your turn to take care of him now?’ she asked.

  Abbas isn’t someone you ‘take care of’, Stilton thought.

  ‘I don’t know. Are you worried?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stilton.

  ‘Thanks. That was reassuring.’

  ‘Mette. It’s a complete waste of time to fear the worst. Just deal with crises when they arise. Who was always telling me that?’

  ‘OK. Promise me that you’ll call as soon as you get there!’

  Stilton ended the call. When he turned around, he saw that the barge was enveloped by thick November fog.

  Luna was gone.

  * * *

  Olivia was sitting with Bosse Thyrén up at the National Crime Squad headquarters. She liked him. He had a groomed beard and bright eyes, and he didn’t offer her any disgusting coffee or talk shit. He was concise. So she told him about her visit to the Sahlmanns’ house on the night that he hanged himself. About the missing laptop. About the shadow that she’d seen at their gate, but that she hadn’t thought it had any significance. But perhaps now it did?

  ‘You’re not sure whether it was a person?’

  ‘No. But if it was it’s hardly going to have been the murderer? By that time he or she ought to have been long gone.’

  ‘Yes. But you never know.’

  ‘No.’

  She also told him about the man Sandra had walked past in the underpass, a man who didn’t live in the neighbourhood.

  ‘But you’d better ask Sandra about that. Have you told her?’

  ‘Lisa’s on her way there. Are we going to find your fingerprints in the house?’

  ‘No. I was wearing mittens.’

  ‘Mittens?’

  ‘Then again, I did sit on the sofa for a while, so there might be a hair or something there. Does that make any difference? You know I was in the house after all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. But you know what the technicians are like.’

  ‘Yes. Are we done?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Olivia got up.

  ‘I like Rivera,’ Bosse said. ‘It suits you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Olivia left the building with mixed feelings. There was something about the atmosphere in there that enticed her, all those people dedicating their lives to protecting and helping others. Why didn’t she want to do that? Of course she did, in one way, but not right now. It was too soon.

  So she walked to Customs and Excise on Alströmergatan.

  Bengt Sahlmann’s workplace.

  After a bit of back and forth in the main entrance, she was shown to the department where he worked. Or had worked, rather. As she went in, she was greeted by someone she presumed was a receptionist.

  ‘My name is Olivia Rivera and Bengt Sahlmann’s daughter has asked me to see whether their laptop is here. In his office. She needs it for her school projects.’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to Gabriella Forsman.’

  Olivia was shown into a corridor and to Gabriella Forsman’s office. Olivia paused in the doorway. The woman sitting in the chair was not really someone she’d expected to see at Customs and Excise. Some people, men in particular, would have seen a very voluptuous woman with gorgeous reddish hair and a strikingly beautiful face. Olivia saw hair that was too red, breasts that were too large, exaggerated red lips and a skin-tight dress in a bizarre shade of orange.

  Like a copy of the secretary in Mad Men, she thought.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said in a low, husky voice.

  Olivia repeated the reason for her visit, which resulted in an emotional outburst of considerable magnitude from Gabriella Forsman. Her face had already started twitching as soon as Olivia mentioned Sahlmann’s name. When she mentioned his daughter, Gabriella urgently reached for some more tissues.

  This woman is really going for it, Olivia thought.

  ‘We’re all very shocked,’ Gabriella said, trying to regain composure. ‘It’s just so awful, you can’t really believe it’s happened! Suddenly he’s just gone! You sit here and have a coffee together talking about this and that and then suddenly he’s no longer there. It’s awful, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Did you work together for long?’

  ‘For four years. He was the nicest man in the world and he’d already suffered that catastrophe with his wife dying in the tsunami and then this happens.’

  Olivia observed as Gabriella drench a few more tissues.

  ‘His laptop,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Yes, of course. Please excuse me, everything is just so up and down. You were wondering whether he had a laptop here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not that I know of, but we can go and have a look.’

  Gabriella stood up. She was tall, and her slim body elegantly balanced on a pair of red-leather high heels. Olivia wouldn’t even have been able to squeeze her little toe into them. They went to the adjacent office together, which was somewhat larger.

  ‘This is Bengt’s office.’

  Olivia looked at the orderly desk. There was a desktop computer on it. But no laptop and no bag made of cork. She had a look over on the shelves by the wall and the small table by the armchair.

  ‘Did he ever bring his own private laptop to the office? As far as you are aware?’

  ‘No. He had a computer here, it was that one he used for work.’

  Olivia nodded. The laptop wasn’t here. At least she could tell Sandra that, and that she’d tried. Whatever help that mig
ht be. She looked at Sahlmann’s desk one more time. Next to the computer there was a file with ‘Internal Inquiry’ written on it.

  ‘What was Bengt working on at the moment?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, the usual.’

  ‘Was he working on an internal inquiry?’

  Olivia nodded at the file next to the computer and Forsman followed her gaze.

  ‘Oh that. Well, a large stash of drugs has disappeared here and he was working on that.’

  ‘What do you mean “disappeared”?’

  ‘I’d better not talk about that, if you don’t mind.’

  Forsman looked rather troubled. Olivia nodded and left the room ahead of her. Suddenly Gabriella grabbed her arm, carefully, and lowered her voice.

  ‘Do you know something about why he killed himself? We’re all so shocked here and everyone’s sitting around making speculations and no one knows anything. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, I know that he felt down about his father’s death, he was quite depressed for a while, but it can’t be that, can it? You don’t commit suicide because your elderly father dies? When you have a seventeen-year-old daughter to look after. Right?’

  Suddenly Gabriella was fighting back the tears again, her eyes and nose streaming, and Olivia felt that she’d had enough.

  ‘Bengt Sahlmann didn’t commit suicide,’ she said. ‘He was murdered.’

  * * *

  His wheeled suitcase stood ready packed in the hallway. He held his passport in his hand and the tickets were in the inside pocket of his jacket. He was basically ready to go when Stilton rang the doorbell.

  ‘Come in.’

  Stilton went in and put his blue bag on the floor. Abbas looked at it.

  ‘I’m assuming it’s going to be quite a short trip,’ Stilton said.

  ‘Yes. Maybe.’

  Stilton followed Abbas into the flat. He’d been here a few times. Each time he’d been struck by the simple harmony in the rooms. Each ornament chosen with care, in terms of functionality, colour and design. The Tibetan tapestry on the wall, the wooden chairs, the simple rug. And each time he’d wondered where Abbas, the boy who grew up in a social cul-de-sac in Marseille’s poorest neighbourhood, had got his incredible feel for aesthetics. His own home, the one he’d shared with his wife Marianne, had looked like the definition of normality.

  This was something else entirely.

  ‘I’m just going to take out the rubbish.’

  Abbas walked past him with a couple of grey rubbish bags towards the front door. Stilton nodded. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of cold water. He drank it quite slowly. ‘Yes. Maybe’ meant that this quite short trip could become something rather different. In the worst-case scenario. Stilton didn’t have time for that. He put the empty glass down and turned around. The kitchen was just next door to the bedroom. He went a bit closer. He’d never been in there before, the door had always been closed. Now it was open. He stood in the doorway and a large framed circus poster on a cold white wall caught his eye. It was the only decoration in the room, right opposite the low bed. A very beautiful and decorative circus poster. When he heard Abbas’s footsteps he turned around.

  ‘Nice poster.’

  ‘Yes. Shall we go?’

  Mette and Bosse were on their way into Customs and Excise. Mette had prepared a strategy to try to elicit as much information as possible about the missing stash of drugs before disclosing that Sahlmann had been murdered. They went up to his former department and headed straight for the receptionist. Mette showed her police ID.

  ‘We’re looking for staff in Bengt Sahlmann’s department.’

  ‘They’re in a crisis meeting unfortunately.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there, but…’

  Mette went straight over to the door she was pointing at. Bosse followed her. Mette opened the door and stepped inside. There were nine people sitting in the room, including Gabriella Forsman. They were all trying to maintain composure. An older man turned to face Mette.

  ‘I’m sorry, but what is this about? We’re in the middle of a meeting here.’

  ‘A meeting about what?’

  ‘May I ask who you are?’

  ‘We’re from the National Crime Squad. Mette Olsäter.’

  Mette showed her police ID again.

  ‘What kind of a crisis meeting is this?’ she asked.

  ‘One of our colleagues has been murdered.’

  Mette needed a few seconds to digest this information before she said: ‘Who has been murdered?’

  ‘Bengt Sahlmann. You didn’t know?’

  ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘I told them,’ Gabriella Forsman said and stood up, as if she knew she needed to make herself heard.

  ‘And how did you find out about it?’

  Mette stared straight at Gabriella, silently insinuating things. Though hard to interpret, they certainly didn’t seem pleasant.

  ‘A family friend was here a while ago asking for Bengt’s laptop. She told me.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Female.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘It… her name… I can’t really remember, it sounded a bit Italian.’

  ‘Olivia Rivera?’

  ‘That’s it!’

  Mette turned on her heels, forcing Bosse to jump out of her way.

  ‘Take over,’ she hissed.

  Bosse nodded just as Mette slammed the door behind her.

  Olivia was down in the laundry room, stuffing in the last bits of dirty washing when Mette called.

  ‘Are you at home?’

  ‘I’m down in the laundry room.’

  ‘I was planning to drop by.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘It’s about Bengt Sahlmann.’

  ‘OK, I’ll be upstairs in five minutes.’

  Olivia put the washing on and went back up to the flat. Bengt Sahlmann? Intriguing. Mette had probably already had some news she wanted to share with her. About the perpetrator? Not likely, not that soon. Olivia felt the curiosity bubbling up inside her. It reached boiling point when the doorbell rang. Olivia opened the door and there was Mette.

  ‘Hi,’ Olivia just about managed to utter.

  ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Mette snapped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who do you think you bloody are?’

  Olivia was visibly shocked as she stepped into the hallway. Mette followed her in without even closing the door. Her built-up anger burst out right into Olivia’s face.

  ‘How can you be such a fool?!’

  ‘What are you talking…’

  ‘I’m talking about that fact that half of Customs and Excise knew that Sahlmann was murdered before we’d even got there! All thanks to you!’

  ‘But I just said…’

  ‘You’ve messed up our entire strategy there! Don’t you get it? If there are people involved in the murder, you’ve given them an amazing chance to cover their tracks. So thanks for that!’

  ‘But I didn’t think that…’

  ‘No! Precisely! You didn’t think at all! How many more people have you blabbed to?’

  ‘I didn’t blab, I just…’

  ‘What were you doing there anyway?!’

  ‘Checking whether Sahlmann’s computer was there.’

  ‘What were you going to do with it?’

  ‘Give it to Sandra.’

  ‘Take the victim’s computer and give it to a relative? In the middle of a murder investigation? Didn’t you learn a bloody thing during your training?’

  ‘OK, that’s enough now!’

  Suddenly it all got too much for Olivia. The first attack had taken her aback, but now she felt that there were things welling up inside her that had been festering since the day before. Since Mette had belittled her for not wanting to carry on with her police career.

  ‘Have you forgotten who told you it could be murder?’ she said, pulling t
he door closed to prevent half her neighbours finding out the same information about Sahlmann from Mette as Olivia had shared with ‘half of Customs and Excise’. When she turned around, Mette was gone. She’d gone into the kitchen to get some water to soothe her throat after her outburst.

  She drank straight from the tap.

  ‘Mette.’

  Mette carried on drinking.

  ‘Mette!’

  Mette turned off the tap and turned around. The women glared at each other. One of them was very tall and had just about regained her composure; the other was just about to lose hers.

  She started.

  ‘It was wrong of me to talk about it,’ Olivia said. ‘It was reckless, I’m sorry. Now I think you should apologise.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For attacking me as though I was a piece of shit.’

  Mette smiled, far from sincerely.

  ‘Dear girl,’ she said. ‘You know how much I care about you. I know who you are. But if you ever trample on one of my murder investigations again and mess up like you did today, my patience will run out.’

  ‘So you’re giving me another chance?’

  ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘I’m pissed off. OK, I made a mistake, but this whole outburst is actually only about me not wanting to join the police, which actually has bugger all to do with you. I’ll do as I please.’

  ‘You made that pretty clear today. From now on I think you should focus on your history of art and not meddle in my work.’

  ‘I think you should go now.’

  ‘Thanks for the water.’

  Mette walked past Olivia and out into the hall. When she slammed the door closed, Olivia sank down into a chair. Her anger subsided quickly. She knew that what she’d done was wrong, pure thoughtlessness. She knew that Mette was right in principle. She’d behaved very unprofessionally, and now she had seriously fallen out with one of the few people whom she respected.

  Then Sandra called.

  She was angry and upset, having been told that her father was murdered and then been asked loads of questions about that awful night. Olivia had to snap out of her mood.

  ‘Was it Lisa Hedqvist who spoke to you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. She was nice, but those questions were really tough.’

  ‘What did she want to know?’

  ‘All kinds of things. If I’d seen anyone on my way home and stuff…’