Third Voice

by Börjlind, Cilla

  ‘How are things?’

  Sandra didn’t answer. Olivia let the tea brew and lit a couple of candles on the table.

  ‘You don’t know any more about the computer?’ Sandra almost whispered.

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Imagine if I never get it back.’

  ‘Well, then I’m sure we can get you a new one.’

  ‘But what about all the photos?’

  ‘You had photos on it?’

  ‘Yes, loads. Imagine if I don’t get them back!’

  Olivia saw how the idea of the lost photographs was torturing Sandra. She understood her. Perhaps the photographs were the only thing she had left of what she once had. She realised how important it was to get hold of that computer. For several reasons. She poured the tea. Sandra didn’t touch her cup, she sat slouched down in the chair. They sat in silence for a while. Olivia was having a hard time finding a way to connect with this closed-off girl. She hardly knew her, after all. She didn’t really know what to talk about.

  ‘Shall I tell you about my mum?’

  Sandra said it without looking up from the table, almost breathless.

  ‘If you like.’

  Perhaps that’s why she came here, Olivia thought to herself. Maybe she needs to talk about it, about her mother, like I spoke about mine?

  ‘We were going to ride elephants, Dad had booked it at the hotel and I was really looking forward to it, but Mum didn’t fancy it. She wanted to go for a long walk along the beach instead, so she hugged me and off we went. Then that tsunami struck, while we were out. Dad was told about it when we got back with the elephants and we went to the hotel, but we couldn’t reach it. There were people everywhere running around and screaming. You couldn’t get there by car and Dad went absolutely crazy and we headed straight to the hotel but there wasn’t a hotel any more, everything was destroyed, everywhere. I was standing behind the car and didn’t really understand anything except that it was terrible. Everything was terrible, everyone was screaming and crying and I just wanted Mum to come…’

  Sandra stopped talking and picked up her cup. She held it in her hand for a while and then put it down again. Olivia put her arm around her.

  ‘But she didn’t come.’

  ‘No.’

  Olivia saw the little eight-year-old girl in front of her, in the middle of that awful chaos, without any chance of understanding what was happening, except that it was terrible and that her mother didn’t come.

  ‘Was your mother found?’

  ‘No. She’s in the sea.’

  Sandra scraped away at a little non-existent mark on the table and took a deep breath.

  ‘And now with Dad in heaven there’s only me left and I just don’t know how I’m going to cope without them.’

  ‘Is that how you feel? That you can’t cope?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sandra’s eyes went blank and a tear dropped down into the cup in front of her. She dried her face on her sleeve and looked at Olivia. The tears had dissolved her mascara and she looked very small and helpless. Olivia felt for her so much that her stomach cramped up. But how are you supposed to console someone who’s inconsolable? Should she say it as it was, that she still had her whole life in front of her and that it wouldn’t be quite so painful one day?

  ‘And everyone keeps telling me that I have my whole life in front of me,’ Sandra said. ‘That I’ll get through this, but it doesn’t help me now, does it?’

  ‘No, it probably doesn’t.’

  ‘You’re actually the only person who understands how I feel, I think.’

  Sandra rested her head on Olivia’s shoulder. Olivia put her arm around her and thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t spoken before she thought. The best thing she could do was listen, not spout a load of clichés.

  ‘Sometimes I think that if I’d filled up my tank, I wouldn’t have run out of petrol and I would have been home earlier and interrupted the murderer and Dad would still be alive. But I couldn’t be bothered and took a chance and got there too late.’

  Olivia reacted immediately. She took away her arm and turned her whole body towards Sandra to add power to her words.

  ‘That’s not true, Sandra. Even if you’d put petrol in your scooter you’d never have been able to prevent your father’s murder. His death has nothing to do with you bothering to do something or not. Do you understand?’

  Olivia saw Sandra flinch.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said and put her hand on Sandra’s. ‘I didn’t mean to sound harsh. But you mustn’t feel guilty about this. You have enough to deal with.’

  ‘I know, but these thoughts are racing through my head and I just don’t know what to do with them.’

  ‘But you’re going to see someone, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, I haven’t wanted to. I’ve talked a bit to Tomas, a priest we know, and that’s been good, I suppose.’

  ‘And you’ve got Charlotte too.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, but I can’t talk to her like I can talk to you. She’s always trying to find fun things to do to cheer me up, but I don’t want to be cheered up.’

  Olivia recognised that feeling all too well. Too many people around her had tried to cheer her up when things were at their darkest. She’d hated it. Mårten was the only one who’d understood, who’d kept the right distance, close enough to be there when she needed him. Without trying to cheer her up.

  Perhaps Sandra should meet Mårten?

  And he’s a former child psychologist.

  Sandra lifted her head a little and looked into Olivia’s eyes.

  ‘It feels like all I have is you.’

  Her head sank down on her shoulder again. Olivia felt the pit of her stomach tighten. All she has is me? What did she mean? What has she projected on me? Olivia knew that she’d become very personal during their conversation at home at Maria’s, that she’d told Sandra things that she hadn’t told anyone else, private things, in an attempt to comfort her and be truthful. Had Sandra read too much into it?

  ‘Can I sleep here?’

  Sandra said it with her head still resting on Olivia’s shoulder and Olivia didn’t have a chance of trying to think of a good reason to say no.

  ‘But we’ll have to ask Charlotte first,’ she said.

  Sandra called Charlotte and Charlotte wanted to speak to Olivia and asked whether it was all right for Sandra to stay the night.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘It’s not a problem for you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  So they drank up their tea and then Sandra said that she wanted to go to bed. Olivia folded down the covers of the large double bed and tucked Sandra in. Olivia lay down on the covers, fully clothed.

  ‘Do you want the light on?’ she asked.

  ‘No, unless you want it on.’

  Olivia turned off the bedside lamp. Sandra lay still on her side of the bed, and her voice came out of the darkness.

  ‘What happened to the cat? You never said.’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

  Sandra turned over. Olivia carried on lying on the bed, she was going to wait until Sandra had fallen asleep. Then she was going to sit in the kitchen and try to establish what she was going to do with Sandra.

  She listened to try to hear whether she’d fallen asleep. When her breaths got longer and more even she sat up on the edge of the bed.

  ‘I’m frightened.’

  Sandra’s voice was directed at the wall but it reached Olivia’s back. She turned around and stroked Sandra over the covers.

  ‘There’s nothing for you to be afraid of, Sandra. I promise. Sleep now,’ she said, as though she were a child.

  * * *

  It was almost half past eleven at night. Bosse and Lisa were sitting in a dark police car not far from the Riche restaurant. They’d spent a couple of hours watching Clas Hall. They’d found his name, address and lots of useful information in the drugs register, like his workplace, for example. He was a waiter at a big restaurant
in Stureplan. A good environment for him to push his drugs – 5-IT perhaps? But it wasn’t there they found him. They’d stopped outside his home address on Roslagsgatan and had hardly had time to turn off the engine before he came out through the front door.

  Then they’d tailed him. To a clothes shop, a 7-Eleven and then a bookshop. He’d spent quite a while in there. For a while they’d thought he’d seen them, gone out another way and left his car. But finally he came out. They took a couple more pictures. They’d done a good job of filling the memory card at this point.

  This wasn’t actually their department. They weren’t plain-clothes police officers, they were murder investigators, but Mette had asked them to take care of this and so they did.

  ‘What do you think is going on?’ Bosse said.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘With Mette. There’s some shit going on, right? Playing ping pong?’

  ‘She wants to lose weight.’

  ‘Playing ping-pong table? I think this is something else.’

  Lisa nodded. Both of them had noticed how Mette had changed. Small things, like needing support when she got up. She didn’t need that a few weeks ago. So something was wrong, though nothing either of them dared to ask her. Mette didn’t really encourage such conversations. She was caring when it came to others and that’s where it stopped.

  ‘There he is!’

  Lisa pointed through the large windows out onto the street. Clas Hall had gone inside the restaurant a while ago, sat down at a table and got up again shortly afterwards, probably to go to the toilet. Now he was coming back. But he didn’t return to his table, he just got his jacket and headed for a table further in. Lisa picked up some binoculars. She watched Hall sit down at the new table. There was a woman already sitting there.

  ‘He’s sitting down with some woman,’ Lisa said.

  ‘Is he hitting on her?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Overly red hair, overly large breasts, overly…’

  Bosse grabbed the binoculars. It took a few seconds before he could get the table in focus. Then he saw her.

  ‘It’s Gabriella Forsman,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘She’s an employee at Customs and Excise. She worked with Bengt Sahlmann.’

  Mette was on her way home after working some rather pointless overtime. She’d had a conference call with various police officers across Europe about this big drug operation. Everyone had had a little moan, about the budget, about bureaucracy, about everything that had nothing do with the matter in hand: shutting down the online retailers that were supplying drugs. Eventually Mette had managed to bring the call to an end. When she got out her mobile, she saw the text from Lisa and Bosse. Time to go back to the office.

  ‘Gabriella Forsman?!’

  Bosse was standing by the wall just inside Mette’s office. Lisa was sitting opposite Mette at her desk. All of them were equally baffled, and worked up. Drug dealer Clas Hall had met up with Customs Officer Gabriella Forsman. At a restaurant. It may have been just a normal date, maybe they hung out together, but there were interesting aspects to this.

  Gabriella Forsman could well be involved in the stash of drugs that had gone missing from Customs and Excise.

  ‘She was the one who reported them missing.’

  ‘A good way of detracting the attention from oneself.’

  Had she been the one supplying Clas Hall with the drugs that he’d apparently sold to that druggie Muriel? 5-IT? The exact same kind as had gone missing?

  That was one question.

  The other was even more interesting.

  If so, did Bengt Sahlmann know about it? Had he discovered that one of his colleagues was involved? And become a danger? To Clas Hall and Gabriella Forsman?

  ‘We’ve got some work to do tomorrow.’

  Mette pulled herself up out of the chair. Bosse was just about to help her when he saw Lisa’s discreet gesture: Don’t!

  * * *

  Olivia blew out the candles in the kitchen. She’d been sitting there quite a while, drinking cups of green tea, trying to process the situation. She felt torn. Her enthusiasm over the meeting with Jean Borell had been clouded by Sandra’s arrival. The meeting with Borell suited her police instinct. It was concrete: a theory and a murder.

  Sandra was about completely different things.

  She knew that she could handle the first issue, she was looking forward to it, but the other one was like quicksand to her.

  But when she finally crept into bed and felt the body that was lying right next to her, she realised the crux of the matter: this girl’s father has been murdered, perhaps by the man I’m going to meet the day after tomorrow.

  There’s a link.

  Chapter 15

  Her breasts were still heavy and full, she’d never needed to inflate them artificially. She felt his hands lifting them up, stroking them, her erect nipples sending signals all the way down into her crotch. She put her hands against the wall and braced herself. Her long, gold-painted nails dug into the wallpaper. She was pushing up against it. When he pressed himself inside her she felt how big he was, just like before, nothing had changed there. She held her forehead against the wall and stared down at the floor, moaning. She knew he could go on for a long time and he did. A long time. Right up until she felt a violent orgasm from her pelvis all the way up to her brain. He carried on. Her next orgasm was a bit calmer, it eased off just as he came. She let him pull out before she turned around.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘It’s me who should be thanking you, my dear.’

  He’d grown up just outside Oxford and spoke very proper English. But it wasn’t his English she was after, it was his sexual prowess. She’d had a little taster of it many years ago, and now she’d been able to enjoy it to the full. She pulled up her pants and invited him into the flat. He’d rung the doorbell half an hour earlier with a brown suitcase in his hand and she’d let him in without any small talk. They’d looked at each other for a while and then he moved his hand up her thigh. Now they’d done it.

  Now they could engage in some small talk.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m travelling a bit. It’s a few years ago since I was in your beautiful city.’

  ‘Rather too many years ago.’

  Jackie had missed him. His body. The rest didn’t interest her much. But he was nice and had helped her once upon a time, and her door was always open to him. She’d said it and she meant it.

  And he knew it.

  You could rely on Jackie Berglund. She was in fact ten years older than him, but he had nothing against mature women. They knew what they wanted and they got to it straight away.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’

  ‘Yes, please. A splash of gin if you’ve got any.’

  It was barely breakfast time, but Mickey Leigh was the way he was. He opted for steady yet balanced consumption. He got his gin and sat on the sofa.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘As long as you’ll have me.’

  Jackie deduced from this that Mickey was planning to stay with her. No problem. She had a large flat on Norr Mälarstrand with a spare bedroom. The idea of having free access to Mickey in one of them was enough to get her going again.

  ‘How is Red Velvet doing?’ Mickey wondered.

  ‘I’ve put that on hold, now I’m just running the interior design shop.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Well, not that long really, she thought. She’d made the decision just over a year ago, when she was called in for questioning about a murder on Nordkoster. She’d felt that the coppers were circling a little too closely around her, just as they had a few years earlier, when Tom Stilton got it into his head that she was involved in the murder of one of her escort girls, Jill Englund. If it hadn’t been for her relations wit
h Detective Chief Inspector Rune Forss it could have ended really badly. Well, relations wasn’t quite the word – more like control. But Forss had steered Stilton away from her and she hadn’t forgotten that.

  Mickey sipped his gin and put his hand on her thigh.

  That got her thinking about other things.

  * * *

  Olivia woke up late. She’d fallen asleep in the early hours of the morning, and when she turned her head, Sandra was gone.

  ‘Sandra!’

  She called out through the flat and leapt up. There was no answer. When she went into the kitchen she saw a yellow Post-it note on the kitchen table with a few words scribbled onto it: ‘I’m not as strong as you.’ Olivia rushed back into the bedroom and grabbed her mobile. She called Sandra and it went straight to voicemail. She asked Sandra to call her as soon as she heard her message. Then she rang Charlotte, who hadn’t heard anything from Sandra since the night before.

  ‘Please call me as soon as she gets in touch,’ Olivia said.

  ‘Will do.’

  Olivia got in the shower. She stood there for a long time, much longer than normal, and after a while she sat down and let the water carry on streaming over her body.

  ‘I’m not as strong as you.’

  Why had Sandra written that? She wasn’t planning to do anything stupid, was she?

  When she finally got out of the shower she called Mårten and told him what had happened, both the night before and about the note on the kitchen table.

  ‘She doesn’t seem very stable,’ he said.

  ‘No. What shall I do?’

  ‘There’s not much you can do right now, hopefully she’ll get in touch soon.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t?’

  ‘She will. She seems to feel a strong connection with you.’

  ‘Yes. Could you see yourself talking to her if the time comes?’

  ‘Absolutely, I’d be happy to. If she wants to.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Olivia ended the call. She didn’t like the word Mårten had used: ‘Hopefully.’ But what could he say? He couldn’t guarantee that Sandra was going to get in touch.