Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  So no one in his immediate family, unless they’d hired an assassin, of course, but that was a highly improbably theory.

  They’d have to draw up a list of everyone who’d had some kind of link with Turkey, they agreed.

  The next question was whether the killer had been out to get Olsson personally or something he possessed – money or a valuable rug? Had a carpet deal gone wrong? Was someone in desperate need of money? In debt? There was a lot of digging to do here, no doubt about it.

  Was the murder committed on impulse? It didn’t seem so to judge by what they read. The risk of discovery on the crowded ferry was obvious, but still there was something audacious about the whole thing. Either it was a case of perfect timing or a well-planned murder by a cold-blooded killer who’d been shadowing Olsson and who’d struck when the risk of discovery was minimal. At the end of the day, it was a pretty exciting case!

  But why Istanbul?

  Drugs are what immediately come to mind, said Özen, and there might be something in that, Claesson thought. Drug running was always a dirty business. If they understood the report from Istanbul right, the intention hadn’t been to warn, frighten, or injure Olsson but quite obviously to kill him. It was murder, in other words, rather than manslaughter.

  Annelie Daun in the carpet shop had nothing to gain from the dealer’s death, as far as they could tell at this point. She’d probably go on the dole, although that wouldn’t be so bad for her since she had a relatively stable life with a husband able to provide for her.

  They suspected that Olsson had had an unusually big carpet deal in the works. The paper copy they found in the file suggested it. Claesson had still not quite digested the fact that someone would be prepared to pay millions for a moth-eaten rug, even if it was six hundred years old. For whom was Olsson going to acquire this extremely special rug, if that was what he was up to? Had he gotten hold of it before getting himself killed? And if so, who had it now? How had the financial transaction taken place? Was Olsson just a middleman, a carpet courier who’d carry the rug through customs into Sweden while the millions took another route and into other people’s accounts? Olsson would have been getting something out of the deal. Few people are outright idealists.

  His colleagues back at home had been assigned to the bank accounts, both private and business, but things like that took time.

  The likelihood that Olson was honesty incarnate was greater than his being a narcotics mule or dodgy carpet seller, Claesson finally concluded. Most people were, after all, sound-minded, as Veronika liked to say, although at times she found it hard to believe from her hospital perspective.

  He could picture different scenarios. How Olsson was sitting on the ferry with an overly stuffed wallet. There were just two problems with this: his wallet wasn’t missing or emptied, and rarely were pickpockets prepared to kill.

  Otherwise it would’ve been much easier to pocket the money and toss the wallet overboard, he thought, squinting as he watched the episode play out against his eyelids. Olsson, sitting in peace and quiet on the boat as it slowly disgorges its passengers. The killer creeping up on him. Like a flash, he pulls out his knife and rams it deep into his stomach, placing a hand over Olsson’s mouth to muffle his screams. The grunt that Olsson still manages to force out being drowned out by the engines that are revving up as the boat slows down, ready for docking. The blood flowing, Olsson slumping down unconscious. The killer throwing the knife into the sea and joining the rest of the passengers, walking calmly along the gangway to swiftly disappear in the crowd on the quayside.

  But what had he been after?

  The airline attendant rolled her cart ahead of her, collecting trash. She took the empty tomato juice can and smiled cheerily. What a crap job! Confined and hassled and constantly having to put on that genial smile.

  The flight was still smooth. One and a half hours left. And there was Özen, sleeping like a log. And now snoring as well.

  Claesson took his book on Turkey out of the seat pocket in front of him. The cover was adorned with a picture of a large mosque bordered by four minarets, which looked like rockets aimed at a bright blue sky. He opened the book and found a simple map that he studied carefully.

  Özen had said that Turkey was roughly the size of Sweden, Norway, and half of Denmark combined. It had everything from the well-known summer tourist paradises to snowy mountains and ski lifts.

  First was a thick chapter on Turkey’s history, which seemed unusually long, pretty much as long as human history itself. People had lived in Turkey since the Stone Age, and tribes of various kinds had migrated in from the east, subjugating the ones already settled, and established new communities. He read on about the Fertile Crescent, which looped from Mesopotamia, the land between the Euphrates and the Tigris, down to Egypt.

  Mesopotamia! He tasted the name. Wasn’t that where Ur lay? The city from where the patriarch Abraham journeyed to the land of Canaan, according to the Book of Genesis. Claesson knew his biblical history, having had a very engaged teacher as a young boy.

  Constantinople was founded in the fourteenth century on a site called Byzantium, which was a Greek colony. The city was long known as New Rome. In 1926, it changed its name once more to Istanbul.

  Mongol hordes invaded the country in the 1200s, and many Christians converted to Islam when it turned out that the Mongols gave the Muslims tax breaks. Rebellious Turks took the country back, however, and the Ottoman Empire began to emerge. The country took part in the First World War on the German side. In 1915, under the shadow of the war, over a million Armenians were slaughtered, and according to the book, this was still a dark stain on Turkish history. The world war led to the collapse of the empire, and it was carved up between the victors. As part of the agreement, there was a massive exchange deal: over one million Greeks in Anatolia were swapped for half the number of Muslims, who were sent from Greece to Turkey. This was less than a hundred years ago, thought Claesson. Quite recent, actually!

  But an army officer called Mustafa Kemal drove out the occupying Greek army after a war of liberation, then expelled the remaining foreign forces and declared Turkey a republic in 1923. Ankara became its new capital instead of Constantinople, and Kemal its new president. He adopted the name Kemal Atatürk, which means “the father of the nation.” They were about to land at Atatürk’s airport.

  The country was ravaged. Atatürk carried out great and sweeping reforms. He looked askance to the West, toward the European lifestyle, and wanted to break ties with Islam as part of the country’s modernization. Turkey was secularized, the road network was developed, industry, too, in an attempt to woo foreign investors. Atatürk wanted to prevent the emergence of the kind of fundamentalism that existed in neighboring Iran. The price had been, apart from genocide and gaping class differences, the persecution of different ethnic groups, including the Kurds. The military had always had a strong influence in Turkey.

  The land was now being democratized, and a great deal of effort was being put into qualifying Turkey for accession to the EU.

  Then the plane began its descent.

  Claesson had always hated packing. The advantage of this was that he always traveled light. Veronika said that he was the best packer she’d ever met, in that sense.

  He’d learned it from his father. Just put everything you intend to take with you on the bed and then discard half of it! Mustafa Özen seemed to have done the same. The upshot was that they didn’t have to wait by baggage claim but could march straight through customs with their respective carry-ons.

  Atatürk International Airport was large and modern. Everything proceeded according to plan, and outside stood a man with a sign. Oskarshamn, the printed letters said.

  The young police officer in the dark blue jacket and light blue shirt who’d been sent to collect them looked inquisitively at the two Swedes, paying particular attention to Mustafa, who introduced them in Turkish.

  In the car toward Istanbul, Claesson took out his cell phone and ca
lled home. No one answered. He called Veronika’s cell phone.

  “We’ve just landed.”

  “Was it a difficult journey?”

  “Not at all. We’re now on our way into Istanbul.”

  “Is it hot?”

  “Oh yes, but not baking… How are things?”

  The nagging conscience.

  “It’s going just fine.”

  The easing conscience.

  “Kiss the girls for me.”

  “Do I also get a kiss?”

  “You’re my girl, too.”

  He hung up and felt at once a little embarrassed, wondering what Mustafa Özen had made of it all. But what the hell.

  Özen sat up front so that he could keep chatting with his Turkish colleague. Claesson saw green water in the mist on his right – whether it was the product of heated air or exhaust fumes he couldn’t tell. Probably both. People were walking along the beach or having picnics. Cargo ships lay alongside each other, riding at anchor. That must be the Marmara Sea, he guessed.

  They’d arrived in Istanbul.

  CHAPTER 22

  ANNELIE DAUN HELD the post office slip in her hand, turned the “back soon” sign to face outwards, and stepped out onto the sunny stone steps and locked the shop. She had to pick up a package and she had a good idea which rug it contained. It wouldn’t be too heavy for her to carry.

  It was a gorgeous Anatolian prayer mat, if she wasn’t mistaken. It could, of course, be another rug that Carl-Ivar had sent out for repair, or one that he’d bought in Turkey and asked to have sent home because it was heavy and cumbersome, but items like that were usually delivered by courier.

  After a few steps down Frejagatan as she took the pavement toward Lilla Torget Square, she had a feeling that she was being followed. She looked back and saw a slim man in his forties. He was some way behind her. They were virtually the only two on the pavement.

  When the man noticed her looking at him, he dropped his eyes to the asphalt, took out a cell phone and put it to his ear. She recognized him. He’d come into the shop late last week and asked for Carl-Ivar. Just another carpet junkie, she’d thought.

  He’d spoken the dialect of the neighboring county, and had asked her if she was sure that Carl-Ivar was still in Turkey. What he wanted with him he didn’t say. Just that he and Carl-Ivar had agreed that he’d show up in his shop when he was in the neighborhood.

  Did he know that Carl-Ivar was dead? she wondered. Of course he did, it was all over the papers.

  She’d been insistent and asked if he’d come on account of a rug, and he’d said he had, naturally, but he didn’t go into which. She’d even asked if she should ask Carl-Ivar to call as soon as she’d gotten in touch with him, but it wasn’t necessary. He was obviously in no hurry.

  This had happened last Saturday, before she knew that Carl-Ivar had died that same day. Perhaps he’d even been alive just then?

  The idea slammed into her there on the pavement, her throat thickened and she gave a sob.

  Here come the tears, she thought. At last. There’d been extremely little of that. A drop in the car, but she didn’t want to cry at home, she had enough on her plate keeping Christoffer on edge. She even quite enjoyed it. She’d seen him look at her and wonder if she’d found that red piece of paper. But she said nothing, that was the punishment. Did he think she was stupid? She’d figured out some time ago what kind of man he was. If nothing else, she remembered how he’d snared her once many moons ago.

  The tears stopped, she swallowed and remained standing with the slip in her hand as though waiting for the man in order to ask him if he’d wanted anything from the shop. But he turned on his heel and started to walk in the opposite direction, still with his phone pressed against his ear.

  With a nagging sense of discomfort prowling inside her, she continued on to Lilla Torget Square, following the row of planted trees arrayed in holes in the asphalt along the left-hand side of the pedestrian precinct. Deep in thought.

  But once she’d picked up the rug that had been in for repair in Stockholm for one of Christoffer’s colleagues, the one named Veronika, and carried it back to the shop, her unease had lifted, leaving only numb grief behind. As soon as she’d shut the door behind her in the shop, she intended to let the tears come.

  The phone rang. Veronika Lundborg snatched up the receiver before the ringing could wake up Klara. The back door stood open, letting in yet another beautiful day. It was Cecilia.

  “How are you, sweetheart?” she said, hearing how she was twittering a little over-zealously, sounding almost like one of the birds outside. Nothing new there, in other words.

  “Good,” said Cecilia, for once.

  Veronika skipped a beat.

  “That’s great!” she burst out. “Has something special happened?”

  “Nah… well, yeah, I guess… I’ve started going to the gym.”

  “Wow! So where do you go? You used to go a lot to the gym out in Orup, didn’t you…” She almost bit her tongue. Why drag up Orup? Cecilia had left rehab. A new phase of her life had started, a return to normality. A normal, everyday life, eventually.

  “Been going to Gerda,” said Cecilia with in an unusually nuanced tone, albeit with a little of the monotone left.

  “That’s great!”

  Veronika knew the place. A popular gym wedged in among old university departments and professors’ houses in central Lund, not so far from the hospital, in fact. It was on Gerdagatan and so was called Gerda Gym. Its regulars were an eclectic mix: fat, thin, young, old, fit, not so fit, and pure rehab cases, apparently.

  “What got you back into that?”

  “I’ve got to do something,” said Cecilia. “I was speaking to someone at the reception desk who thought I should start going to physical therapy. They’re good at helping you move on… if you know what I mean. I’ve just come from there.”

  “Really?”

  “I want to meet people, I told the physical therapist. She said I had good balance… I could take normal aerobics classes… but I should take it easy at first, perhaps. So I’m going to start gently with some light core classes.”

  “That’s great! What fun!”

  Veronika could hear how she was repeating herself like a parrot. This was big. A turning point.

  She could picture it now, her daughter being greeted by the agreeable bustle of a locker room, with lines for the showers and then lots of people all sweating together. Just what her eldest daughter needed to bring herself out of her shell.

  She asked if Cecilia wanted to come home to Oskarshamn. Claes was away.

  “Nah,” she said. “Not now. Later, maybe.”

  Veronika’s first reaction was to feel affronted at this, as she’d more or less expected Cecilia to come running. But then she realized, once she’d given it a little thought, that it was actually news to rejoice about. Her daughter was growing independent again.

  Veronika had popped into the local Coop corner shop on the way home from preschool and bought some fresh rolls. Sinful. You were supposed to eat whole wheat, she knew that, but the rolls’ white fluffiness was just so yummy. Anyway, she was feeling just a tiny little bit sorry for herself, and she didn’t know how long Claes would be away for, so surely she was entitled to treat herself?

  Ugh! Why all these excuses? You could always find reason to sin if you wanted to, she thought, putting on some fresh coffee.

  Her mood had swung. Maybe Cecilia wouldn’t be calling any more today, she thought hopefully, looking out through the kitchen window. The weather had held out for a week now. Perhaps it would even feel empty without her daughter’s calls?

  Then Else-Britt Ek called from work, but not for an idle chat. She was off the next day and was wondering if Veronika and the girls wanted to come over in the evening for a bite to eat, given that her husband was away. They could sleep over if they wanted to.

  Else-Britt lived on a farm run by her husband out in Applekulla. It was an old family estate that lay along a
narrow, winding road not far from Bråbo and Bjälebo. Pretty as a picture!

  They decided that Veronika would drive over herself with the kids. It was light long into the evenings now, and Klara would have time to brush the horses and perhaps even take a little ride on one of the ponies.

  Veronika stood by the kitchen window, looking out at the apple tree. The blossom in bud, pinky white and stubby, ready to burst.

  She lifted Nora up in her carrier and pulled the kitchen door closed, shutting in the rumble of the dishwasher, then walked into the sunlit sitting room.

  CHAPTER 23

  ‘SWEDISH GENERAL CONSULATE’ the shiny plaque by the gate read. Ilyas Bank had gone past late the previous night and checked out the opening hours. Then the tall iron gates had been locked. Above them hung the Swedish national emblem, a large yellow crown, and underneath a blue field containing three smaller crowns. His stomach panged with respect even then, but he knew he had to go there.

  So here he was, having passed through the big black gates just over half an hour ago – at exactly nine o’clock. The consulate had a nice, central location, right at the end of the long commercial street called Istiklal Caddesi, right beside the Tünel, whose carriages would whisk him underground down the hillside so that he didn’t miss yet another ferry tour.

  He’d be given a hard time by Ergün no matter what happened. Ergün would be at him, smiling and nonchalant, but unrelenting. There was no way he could tell Ergün that he was thinking of taking off. They weren’t allowed to travel anywhere now. The police had said that they had to be contactable, both of them.