“What should we make of this,” asked Claesson as they drove back. “Nothing,” he answered himself. “You can turn it into anything from drugs to carpet fraud to human trafficking to sheer bad luck!”
Özen didn’t reply, just ran his hand uneasily over his neck.
“My God, we’re going to know a lot about rugs after this,” he continued. “Though perhaps you don’t care about God?”
“No, not really,” said Özen.
Claesson looked askance at him. Özen was driving. Claesson had been expecting a more detailed presentation of his confessional affiliation, but Özen said no more. He was presumably a Muslim, he thought. Or secular, like himself.
He glanced at his watch. A quarter to three. They ought to drive over to the widow and talk to her, but Claesson wanted to go home. They’d have time to talk to her in Istanbul, he said, making excuses for his laziness, or rather his disinclination. He wanted to go back to his family, especially given their current situation. He and Özen would have to go through Ludvigsson and Jönsson’s report again carefully on the plane. A victim’s closest circle of family and friends was always important in a murder inquiry, and was often where you’d eventually find the guilty party, but a better alibi than his wife’s was hard to find. Birgitta Olsson had been seen in Oskarshamn on the day of the murder by none other than Claesson’s own wife, and they’d had a chat.
“I don’t think we’ll have time to go and see the widow,” he said aloud.
Again Özen said nothing. If he carries on like this, it’s going to be a long trip, thought Claesson.
Özen parked the car in the police station’s underground lot. They went up to get the tape transcribed immediately so that they could take it with them to Istanbul. Claesson flirted with one of the civilian secretaries.
Their hotel voucher and tickets lay on their desks. “It’s settled, it’s you. Not the Nats or Kalmar. Have a nice trip! Louise,” a note said.
Claesson saw that they’d be flying from Copenhagen and would have to take the Öresund train from Kalmar just after seven. It would mean an early start. They were to be picked up at half past five by a car that would take them to Kalmar. He raised his eyebrows and saw a sleepless night ahead of him. An early rise and a flight.
He didn’t like it when planes shuddered – he got scared quite frankly – and long flights were always bumpy. He just hoped there weren’t going to be problems with the train. They had a margin of error, he could see that from their itinerary, but not oceans of time if there were serious delays, which were a little too frequent for comfort.
He stuffed the documents into his briefcase as a rush of travel fever surged through him.
Claesson had printed out some information on Istanbul from the net and had bought a book on Turkey, which he also packed. He was intending to educate himself on the plane. He’d already learned from carpet dealer Karlgren that the word kiosk had been borrowed from Turkish. But there were more words he’d have to get straight in his mind, such as sultan, harem, divan, Ottoman, and Byzantine. Some of them weren’t even Turkish. Maybe Persian or Arabic. Whatever they were, they certainly evoked images of foreign far-away lands in the Orient. Even the word Orient tasted nice on his tongue. Date palms swaying lazily in the breeze, the smell of aromatic spices and incense. He pictured himself sitting on a rug, leaning against gaily-patterned cushions, puffing on a hookah as the dusk fell and the blistering heat of the day turned into a pleasant coolness. He could sense the tranquility.
He took the steps down, feeling elevated by the adventure that awaited him.
CHAPTER 20
ANNELIE DAUN LEFT the front door ajar for a while to let in a little fresh air. She dropped her shoulders, rolled her head, and felt a calm spread through her. She’d lock up in half an hour.
But yet her heart had started to beat that little bit faster. She was keyed up. There were so many questions, so many mysteries.
That nice Detective Inspector Claesson would do everything he could to catch the guilty party, she was sure of it. Even though it was all the way down in Turkey where the murder had taken place. Birgitta and the family would be traveling to Istanbul tomorrow, she’d learned. In one way, she’d have liked to have gone with them, but that, of course, was out of the question. Carl-Ivar hadn’t been like a father to her, but close to it. Like an absent-minded but secure figure in the background.
She stared out of the window. Her thoughts were sluggish and slushy, and far from elevating. Although there was no reason to do so, she felt somehow dragged into things against her will. Felt guilty in a way that she’d often felt as a child and that she’d put a lot of energy into not feeling. Not every fault and mistake was her fault. It was very self-obsessed to think so.
But now here she was, slipping into that same rut again, that she was always to blame when things went wrong. She could hear her mother’s admonitions: “You know your mother can’t cope, Annelie. Why do you do things like this?”
And it had almost always been her mother herself who’d cause trouble. Of course sometimes it was Annelie, dropping a glass on the floor or forgetting to do the shopping on the way home from school – and then her mother would be all over her, pecking at her relentlessly. If she was sober, that is. There was no off button on her. If she was drunk, she’d just get querulous until she fell into a stupor.
During her childhood years, Annelie had spent a great deal of time thinking about which was worse, finding her mother drunk as a skunk, as the neighbor downstairs said, or sober and angry.
Whatever, she’d always be blamed, both for what she might have done and what her mother had done, or forgotten to do. Like the laundry, or the shopping and cooking, for instance. Other mothers did all that. But not hers. Only sometimes.
Christoffer had something of her mother’s talents in him, she’d found herself thinking all the more frequently. He sighed over money or over her being too slow and in need of pulling her weight. “It’s not easy to take care of everything on my own. Our finances and all that,” he said, looking distraught at her as if she’d be able to vomit money.
And yet she could see that he enjoyed it. He who has money has power, it was as simple as that! He could spend it how he liked, she had no right to ask him why he’d bought a new computer. But he’d gladly feel entitled to ask her as soon as she came in through the door with a shopping bag. He did it even when she’d just been to H&M and the money was hers from the carpet shop. “Was that really necessary?” he’d wonder critically. “You know that we have to tighten our belts.”
He spoke to her as if to a child.
It’s none of your damn business what I do, she wanted to say. I’ll buy what I like. But she said nothing. It was exactly the same with her mother. No statistics in the world had told her that it paid off to answer back. It just made things worse.
Carl-Ivar.
She was convinced that something had happened in front of her eyes that she wasn’t getting. A strong feeling, like an unpleasant undercurrent, or like lies and cheating. Secrets. But about what? She wished she could pick up the phone and call the police and tell them something.
The murk that growled inside her wasn’t only to do with Carl-Ivar’s death, she knew that. Her own life was teetering, but she was managing for the moment to ignore it. Carl-Ivar’s tragic death was timely, in a way, as it had given her something else to think about.
Although why had he been so broody?
But that was as far as she could get in her reveries, as the door swung open and in came Magnus Öberg.
She smiled in surprise.
“Hi, there!” he said, as undaunted as always. “Lotta and I are at Birgitta’s. The kids are back in Stockholm with my parents. We’re going to Istanbul tomorrow afternoon. Just thought I’d check in…”
She hadn’t seen him since last Easter, when he and Lotta and the kids had been in Oskarshamn. Magnus has stopped by to see his father-in-law in the carpet shop, but she hadn’t really had a chance to chat with
him. Carl-Ivar had monopolized him completely.
She’d found it a little touching that Carl-Ivar had been so keen to show off to his strange son-in-law from Stockholm. He didn’t have to do that, she thought. He was better than that.
“Well, hello!” she said, embracing him lightly so that her chest only barely brushed his own. She caught a whiff of his aftershave, and even knew that it was called Paul Smith. He ran an index finger over her neck. She shivered and tilted her head forwards.
How little it took, sometimes!
He hadn’t changed, the summer boy from Klintemåla. The sea watered hair and the freckly nose. The eternal summers of childhood.
Why does hindsight make these summers seem so lovely? Because it wasn’t true, at least not all of it. She could remember a good many boring times, too, when she’d been alone with her mother in the apartment and had to make do with what she could. Sometimes she’d bike to nearby Gunnarsö to look for friends. Though a lot of the time she was left alone while others went with their parents to vacation cottages by the sea or on driving trips or on formal vacation tours.
Magnus didn’t have freckles any more, he’d grown out of them. He was the city boy who spoke a posher dialect than they, and who came down every summer with his rich parents to stay in the wedding cake. By winter, he and his family lived in a world far away from hers. The wealthy, simple, happy, and carefree life in Stockholm, she imagined.
But come the summers, and she and Magnus would share the same shoreline rocks and jetties. Birgitta and Carl-Ivar were kind and took pity on her. She’d heard someone say that once, a lady friend of Birgitta. She’d had plate-like feet that she’d squeeze into narrow, pointed shoes, that’s what she could remember of her. Because she’d almost died when she heard it and just stood staring at the ground.
She and Lotta had to share the bunk beds, and Johan moved onto the wooden settee in the main room, which wasn’t that big. And then all the summer visitors and sparkling waves and brackish water in the nose – long days sunbathing and swimming. They’d go fishing, too, and sailing, and in time they started making out. She’d fallen in love for the first time, and shortly afterwards really, unrequitedly in love.
The first big love of her life, the one who she’d cried her pillow soggy over, was now standing in front of her. It had been fairly obvious from the word go that Lotta would grab him for herself. She was a year older, no little girl like herself, and both prettier and more self-confident. It was a meeting of equals. She watched it happening and was powerless to do anything about it. Watched how Lotta sucked Magnus into her sphere. She’d seen Lotta do it before with others, but this time it was so patent. And terrible and unstoppable.
But that was all over now, she told herself reassuringly. Gone.
Magnus had a look around, smiling in the same way he always did, lifting one corner of his mouth higher than the other. Crooked, but very charming. Meanwhile his eyes darted over the walls, taking in the rugs.
“So how’s business?”
The candidness of the question made her start, but he wasn’t being serious, was he? She was about to say that he’d have to ask Carl-Ivar, but, of course, she couldn’t. If nothing else, an estate inventory would be taken sooner or later, if he was that interested in the actual figures.
“I’m sure it’s OK,” she evaded.
Her heart started to pound. Damn the thing, she thought, but at the same time, the sensation was really quite delicious. It was like she’d come alive again. It was the same the time before, when they’d met last Easter, but it had had to stop at glances. And last summer when Birgitta and Carl-Ivar had a party in Klintemåla and everyone was in the cottage, she’d felt Magnus’s eyes following her and their tangible warmth, which had never actually left them. It was as if nothing had disappeared or drifted away since the summer days in Klintemåla when they were teenagers.
“Carl-Ivar told me he was working on some big deals,” said Magnus, making it sound as if he was really just keeping the conversation going.
“Is that so? So you and Carl-Ivar talked about the rug business?” she said, smiling.
“It happened… I’ve started to teach myself a little on the side, you could say. It was something we had in common, my father-in-law and I. He’d promised to procure some fine samples for me. Special items, if you know what I mean. I even gave him money. Incidentally, do you know anything about that?”
Now the smile was not so much crooked as broad. She decided to think quietly. It was a little odd for Carl-Ivar not to have said a word about this, but then he naturally wasn’t obliged to tell her anything. No doubt these slightly bigger deals he managed on the side. After all, she was only a kind of helping hand in the shop.
So she said, “I’ve actually got no idea. It was nothing he’d mentioned to me, at least. The rugs that we have are here in the shop… or down in the basement.”
Magnus held his sunglasses by one earpiece, spinning them in his hand while he continued to go around inspecting the rugs even more closely. The air thickened. Annelie swallowed. She took in his self-confidence and his open posture that she recognized so well. Not even when his parents went bankrupt, when the wedding cake was sold and everything went down the tubes for the well-heeled Stockholm family, did he lose his composure. He was born to own the world, whatever the weather.
“So how are things with you?” he wondered, pinning her with his eyes.
“Just fine.”
“You’ve turned out so incredibly pretty, Annelie, do you know that? You’ve always been pretty, but now your beauty is quite simply unsurpassed.”
He came straight for her, his forehead bowed. Like a bull, she thought. He came closer, smiling and affectionate, and placing a finger under her chin, pushed her head up half an inch or so. “You should hold your head like this. A little more erect. You’re worth it. A little more self-confidence, please!”
She could feel her cheeks turn a violent red and her throat start to burn. He was a bastard at being candid, at drawing her into him.
They stood still, his eyes gazing deeply into hers.
“Damn it all, Annelie, I miss you so much sometimes. Can’t you give me a little smile?”
His voice was at once soft and cocky, and betrayed a yearning, but still he was in total command of the situation. She smiled back at him and shuddered with pleasure. Why could she not stop wanting this? A single fingertip against her skin and then nothing was as it should be.
“Can’t you lock up?” he whispered. “And then we can go down…”
She nodded, closed the door, locked it, and was then half way down the steel stairway.
By the time her back landed against a pile of Iranian carpets of the highest quality, she’d stopped thinking. She just existed.
But way back in the furthest reaches of her mind, another thought echoed.
We’ll deal with that later, she thought. Not now.
CHAPTER 21
IT HAD GOTTEN BUMPY over the Alps, but not bad enough to interrupt the majority of passengers who were sleeping, eating, or drinking, apparently quite unperturbed. Except for Claesson, who’d been sitting as tense as a coiled spring, staring straight ahead and doing what he could to keep a grip on his self-control. In particular he’d been keeping a close eye on the behavior of the cabin crew. As long as they weren’t flapping around like headless chickens or casting anxious glances, then everything was OK.
He wasn’t of course the only one who had an apprehensive relationship with traveling through the air. Human beings belonged on the ground, it was simple as that, not up in the air or on the moon, that’s what he believed.
But now they’d passed the most turbulent area, the co-pilot announced. The plane glided forwards as if on rails.
He sat thinking. Özen was sleeping deeply beside him, head lolled to one side, mouth open, and, thankfully, not dribbling. Özen wasn’t afraid of flying.
They’d talked about Carl-Ivar Olsson over a beer at the airport. Once on board, t
hey’d gone through the few documents they had from Istanbul and their own police station. It was stressful to have to make a good impression in a strange place. He wanted something to give the Turks, although really he didn’t want to stay one day more than he had to. He was quite happy to go to Turkey and Istanbul, quite happy to collaborate across borders, but he’d rather it not get too convoluted or take too long. He wanted to go back home as soon as he could and with at least a little light shed on the case, because he didn’t dare to hope that they’d solve it down there. It was easier to meet relatives in the knowledge that they’d done what they could.
So just who was this Olsson? He caught himself getting almost irritated by the man, but he figured that was more to do with the way his death had cut into his parental leave. Besides, people with irreproachable backgrounds made him slightly nervous. Consummate decency in a person always seemed unlikely.
No, that was wrong, he corrected himself, realizing how occupationally damaged he’d become. Most citizens were honest and the country safe, even though these days people didn’t dare leave home with the door unlocked. Not like before, when he was growing up. He’d heard people go on about it ad nauseam, and thought the same thoughts himself. More and more people were installing alarms and locking the front door, even when they were at home. Otherwise, some lowlife would come and rob you blind while you were watching television in another room. The fifties were idyllic, said everyone who’d been around back then. You could trust each other. But there was nothing wrong with the sixties either, the decade of his own early memories.
He returned to Olsson. They’d struck his wife and children and their families off the list of possible suspects for the time being, since they’d been in Sweden at the time of the murder. And Annelie Daun, the niece who looked after the shop, had also been eliminated. Peter Berg and Martin Lerde had been with her mother, Olsson’s sister, a well-known alcoholic in Oskarshamn. She’d been quite sober at the time, but had been completely ignorant of the fact that her brother had been in Turkey. Or so she claimed.
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