Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  She glowed inside, and smiled broadly. She asked the man to lie where he was and went over to the counter.

  “You can go in and dress it,” she said to the assistant nurse as a kind of revenge for her desertion.

  She then walked into the office and clicked up the right patient records on the computer to dictate into, turned on the microphone and let her mouth go as she stared out the window.

  And then came the diagnosis code. This always put the brake on things just when you’d worked up some speed. She flipped through the quick reference guide and found “wound in forehead” and dictated it in. She also needed a supplementary diagnosis giving the cause of the wound. She thumbed backwards in the thicker directory toward W. Naturally there was no entry for “walked into a door,” but she found “tripped up” and entered that, even though it was not quite accurate. And then it was the treatment code, which was “Revision of wound and suturing.”

  Then she rose and walked over to the counter again.

  By now, the commotion had become almost tumultuous. She heard both Christoffer’s and Rosie’s name swish past and couldn’t help giving herself a little squeeze of thrill, unforgivable though it was. She wasn’t even ashamed of doing so. She could picture Christoffer Daun’s ingratiating figure, forever flying after affirmation.

  That man really did need a little guidance from a mature, sensible man like Ronny, no doubt about it, she thought. He’d had the perfect clinical supervisor.

  “He’s a real sweetie,” she heard one of the women say with a grin. “Wants to be loved by everyone and he’s got an almost morbid way of bonding with the patients.”

  “But only the women. He’ll get what’s coming to him sooner or later,” said another. “Like that doctor in Skåne, the one who sexually exploited them.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Daun knows where to draw the line, alright,” said the secretary, suddenly appearing.

  “But surely he’s not the type to try to strangle someone? He’s not that highly strung, is he?” asked the nurse.

  “You never can tell with some people…” interjected Gunnel.

  And no more was said.

  At that moment both the ambulance and Ronny Alexandersson arrived, shortly followed by two police officers.

  The gurney was rolled out unhurriedly and into one of the more spacious examination rooms. The patient wasn’t in any danger.

  Ronny had called the medico-legal expert in Linköping, who’d advised him what to think about. A&E stocked pre-prepared forensic examination boxes containing cotton swabs, measuring tape, a comb, wooden picks for whittling away with under nails and whatnot, and checklists for taking samples and swabs, and body templates on which to draw the wounds. The ones on her throat were immediately obvious.

  Gunnel had already prepared the table and even had the camera ready for documenting the visible wounds. She really was organized, after all, thought Fresia, feeling generous.

  “You might as well stay here with me,” said Ronny with a nod at Fresia. “Four eyes see more than two.”

  One of the police officers held out some brown paper bags in which they were to place Tina’s clothes for dispatch to technical analysis. They’d produced a white hospital gown for her to wear instead.

  “Where have you got the guy who did this to her?” wondered Ronny.

  “We’re grillin’ him down at the station,” said the policeman, who was around thirty and spoke a broad local brogue.

  That was all he said. Ronny nodded. The other officer was a short, blonde woman with a ponytail. The two officers were keen to talk to Tina after she’d been examined, and wondered if they could do it somewhere in the hospital.

  “It’s OK for you to stay here,” said Gunnel. “You can have a cup of coffee while you’re waiting.”

  They walked into the examination room. Tina didn’t say much but looked relieved to see Ronny. She said that she didn’t remember much and cried when she said it. “It’s so horrible not being able to remember! That things happen that you know nothing about!”

  “You lose your memory just before you black out. I doubt you were out for very long,” he said comfortingly and then said little more about it.

  Retrograde amnesia, thought Fresia. A godsend sometimes, you had to admit.

  Calmly and methodically, Ronny began the examination from top to bottom. Took hairs and placed them in a paper envelope, pressed with his fingertips over the scalp. He found a tender lump of roughly an inch’s diameter on the left-hand side. The outer ear was uninjured. He dabbed cotton swabs over the skin of her face, over her cheeks and forehead, and then ran a swab over the inside of her cheek. He examined the eyes, lifted the eyelids.

  “Can you write that she has petechia,” he said to Fresia, who’d taken on the role of secretary. Tiny hemorrhages in the conjunctiva were a classic sign of strangulation or attempted strangulation. The veins were compressed and the blood clogged upwards.

  Fresia took photographs, the camera acting as a shield between her and Rosie. Or rather, between her and the blood-red swellings and fingernail marks that Rosie had around her throat. Fresia made notes and took more pictures. Some of the marks would become more visible after a couple of days. They’d have to take a look at her again and get some fresh shots.

  He scrutinized body part after body part. Arms, torso, legs. He scraped her nails with a wooden pick. Mostly with negative results. No signs of physical violence, therefore, other than on the head, throat, and arms, but that was bad enough.

  Her pants hadn’t been removed, not as far as Tina knew. Nor did she have any memory of a rape. She hardly remembered what the man had looked like, she repeated. If the man had been a stranger or not. Or if she’d gotten things mixed up. That it had been…

  Christoffer Daun?

  They arranged a meeting with a counselor, and the police wondered if Tina Rosenkvist could stay behind at the hospital overnight, mostly because they didn’t want to send her home, just to be on the safe side.

  “Husband?” wondered Ronny.

  “We don’t know yet. She wasn’t found in their own house.”

  Ronny and Fresia nodded. This was a real mess. But it wasn’t their concern.

  CHAPTER 36

  ANNELIE DAUN HELD HER WEIGHT against the door handle so that no one would hear the heavy fire door to the attic as it shut, and then glided quietly down the stairs. She wanted to get out quickly and jump into her car and drive off somewhere so that she could go through the contents burning away in her bag undisturbed. Immediately, if possible. Anyway, she didn’t want to wait until after her evening with Gabbi.

  She slammed the car door shut and backed out in a wide arc, threw the car into first, then squinted at the gentle sunset that was painting the asphalt gold as she drove away from the deserted street. But she’d be back.

  Her mother and Carl-Ivar, well, well, well! she thought. The strong ties of sibling love. A common umbilical cord. Understanding, but hate too, could thrive in that shared soil. Her mother must’ve known, she realized. She’d been closer to her brother than Annelie had realized. As for herself, sibling love would be forever deprived her. She had neither brother nor sister, and so had no appreciation of what she was missing out on.

  She then stopped thinking about her mother and herself, and her thoughts returned to the attic instead. A sequence of images scrolled past: her discovering the large chest, her pulling off the blanket and finding what she was after, and her realizing, even before her fingers had grabbed the rim of the lid and exposed the chest’s contents, that what she was about to see would haunt her mind for days, weeks, perhaps longer.

  So this was where he fetched his rugs and carpets from! Her flesh goose-pimpled. A broad grin crossed her face as she drove ahead in the sparse evening traffic.

  But the gray file that lay on top was, on the other hand, a total surprise. It must have been there for a long time. The sides were of a gray marbled cardboard and were held together by a black rubber band that had lost
its elasticity and lay curled over the card like a desiccated grass snake on a country road on a hot summer’s day.

  Did her mother know?

  Obviously she knew that Carl-Ivar had a storage compartment in the attic, but maybe she just thought that he collected junk up there, window dressings and left-over carpets that he didn’t want to throw out but that didn’t go in his and Birgitta’s well-ordered house.

  She was struck by an image of the desirable items being unrolled. The desire to get her hands on them burned through her body. The eyes, the stomach, the heart all wanted the same thing: to own them. For their beauty – the harmonic colors and balanced patterns – but also for their economic value.

  Which was not to be sniffed at, that much she knew.

  She’d never had much money, but still enough to get by and she didn’t ask for more than that. But things were different now. She’d at last set her mind on something in life. She wanted to be a carpet dealer and needed some start-up capital.

  If Carl-Ivar had rented the storage in her mother’s name, then the attic space was arguably her mother’s.

  If that was the case.

  Annelie believed it was. The policemen who’d come to the shop to requisition the files hadn’t asked about any extra storerooms. So they hadn’t found any bank statements or receipts that suggested Carl-Ivar rented an attic space somewhere. Otherwise, that would have been the kind of thing that was written off as a business cost. But property that no one knew about couldn’t, of course, be included in the estate.

  This was her chance. She’d just have to interrogate her mother. One way out would be to include her in her plans. They could be in cahoots with each other and split the profits.

  No sooner had she thought the idea than she rejected it. It would never work. She pictured her mother threatening to tell Birgitta, or the cousins, or the police, as soon as something got in her way and she didn’t get what she wanted. And what her mother wanted could change from one moment to the next. She was as capricious as a Swedish summer.

  Annelie had passed the Kristineberg tenements on her right, and then the houses. Then the residences dwindled away as the forest took over. On the left was the sea. She drove into the car park before the bridge over to Gunnarsö beach campsite and parked.

  Now, she thought as she opened the bag to extract the gray-marbled file. Easy does it, she urged herself. She opened it slowly and reverentially. She had a strong hunch that it would bring her closer to the truth.

  Inside were letters and photographs, all neatly organized. Carl-Ivar had archived them chronologically with the oldest letters at the back. The photographs were dated on their backs, and contained within three envelopes.

  The file must be at least thirty years old. A treasure that had been kept locked away like a valuable pearl in its oyster shell, which she had now prized open. She wondered what Carl-Ivar would have said if he knew that she was to be the one to uncover his secret.

  She was overcome by tenderness. She wanted to believe that he wouldn’t have minded. Perhaps it was just her way of justifying her escapades to herself, but sooner or later someone would have exposed him. So why not her? He could have set fire to everything if he’d wanted to take all his secrets with him to the grave.

  But he hadn’t.

  This was a big responsibility, she realized as she thumbed through the letters and opened the envelopes. It was all up to her now.

  The languishing dusk that fell in through the windscreen was still bright enough for her to see without having to switch on the overhead light. It was a quarter to seven, and it would take her no more than just a couple of minutes to drive to Gabriella’s. She didn’t have loads of time, but enough to get a general picture. She held the letters and photographs by the corners, pinching them carefully between thumb and forefinger. She should have been wearing cotton gloves, she thought, like people who work with delicate material – or who perhaps didn’t want to leave any traces of themselves behind.

  Every letter was in English. She had a whole life in her hands. An unreal life at some strange place far away with another woman and another child. A girl.

  The photographs were both color and monochrome, and most were taken in bright sunlight that gave sharp shadows and squinty eyes. Outdoor restaurants or cafés, palms and other exotic trees that indicated southern climates.

  She picked out one of the photographs and looked at it more closely. It was a black-and-white outdoor shot, probably taken by an amateur, and only faintly sepia-tinted. Annelie’s eyes flicked from Carl-Ivar to the woman beside him and back again at Carl-Ivar. Her heart melted to see him so young-looking. Memories of him from her childhood came flooding back.

  She didn’t possess any photo albums of her own that could help her remember. Her mother hadn’t managed to put one together, either, but she did have one or two photographs that she kept in a grubby old envelope. Annelie rarely looked at them. Gabbi would let her flick through her well-filled family album, in which she made a sporadic appearance, and they could get all nostalgic together. But otherwise, photos of herself mostly depressed her. Therefore she’d never bought a camera. She didn’t want to pin down time, and until now had never seen the good or point of it. Christoffer had a camera, of course, and took lots of photos, but she didn’t look that often at those photos, either.

  In this photo, Carl-Ivar was around thirty, she reckoned. His posture was less stiff, and he looked content. Or was it proud? He was slimmer and had thick hair, flaxen and combed back so that his forehead shone. He was wearing light pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and on his feet were a pair of sandals of some ancient model that he’d always still worn in the summer. His forearms seemed heavily tanned.

  As a child she’d found him funny and easy-going. Does everyone get so melancholy with age? Or was that her own childhood haunting her? That the difference between her own meager existence and his unfettered adult life was so sharp. Or was he only happy because of the woman at his side?

  She took a closer look at her. She was short and slim, with dark, pinned-up hair. Her face was a soft oval and her eyebrows heavy and dark. Long earrings dangled at her earlobes, the kind that Birgitta would never dream of wearing. She looked more closely and thought they were of some delicate filigree design.

  The woman was looking straight into the camera with friendly eyes, even if the mouth was serious and made it difficult to determine her frame of mind. A Mona Lisa smile.

  But the two of them belonged together, enjoyed each other’s company – there was no doubt about that. Even more warmth spread through her. She could feel a kind of lapping inside, like little waves slapping against her hull, as she browsed on. Oh, Carl-Ivar, she thought. You certainly seized life with both hands. And really got yourself into a pickle.

  She felt envious and yet energized, not only because she’d revealed something hidden, but also because of the knowledge that Carl-Ivar had dared. And that he seemed both proud and happy with his other life. But there was cowardice there, too. He’d never had the courage to go the whole way, and had lived with the constant ambivalence.

  Her mind spun as the twilight descended. She had to get going. She flipped through a little more quickly and noticed that the woman was in many of the photographs, and that she didn’t change much over the years despite having changed her look by wearing her graying hair shorter.

  And then there was the girl. First came the baby shots, then an increasingly mature woman who was not the spit of her mother, except for the dark hair. The years passed and the woman started to outgrow her mother. Did she look like Carl-Ivar? It was hard to tell.

  Annelie tried to work out how old the girl could be with the help of the dates on the photographs, and figured she must be a few years younger than herself. She could even, not without a certain pleasure, see a likeness. The dimple in the chin that Carl-Ivar, her mother, and she had, but not the cousins. The family feature.

  She skimmed a few letters and encountered affect
ionate words that were unfamiliar to her and that made her blush. But they were beautiful. “My beloved, magnificent Swede, like a…” Here was mentioned a plant or animal, probably, the name of which Annelie didn’t recognize. A poetic language blossomed on the pages. Love like honey, as smooth as apricots or like balmy breezes and kisses that tasted of pine kernels and that had the sweetness of fresh grapes. The letters had been written by a woman with a different mode of expression than the more barren, Nordic style. It was romantic and beautiful. And so intimate. Long sentences, properly punctuated, light years from the choppy phrases of emails and lol-speak.

  Annelie got a little teary-eyed.

  The woman was called Tülüp, and the daughter Ayla.

  But she had to close the file, which she placed back in the bag, not wanting it to lie in the dampness of the car. She started up and reversed a few feet, and then drove onto Amerikavägen and southwards toward Mysingsö.

  As she passed by the renovated fisherman’s cottages and houses that were built straight onto the gray granite, she realized that she’d just gotten two new relatives. An aunt by marriage and a real life cousin.

  If things were as she assumed. What whetted her curiosity was how the letters from Carl-Ivar had been written. Had he been just as affectionately loving and open about his feelings as Tülüp?

  The shadows had lengthened, and the trees stood lusciously against the darkened sea. Her dashboard clock told her that she wasn’t going to be so many minutes late.

  But what do I do now? she wondered.

  Wait and see, was the obvious answer. She wasn’t going to call Birgitta, at least. Not yet. She was fond of her, after all.

  It was Carl-Ivar’s lie, but the truth didn’t only affect him. His weakness had controlled him. Perhaps he had unwittingly exploited the human ability of growing accustomed to most things. Birgitta to the blindness, and himself to the deceit.

  She arrived and parked on the street, jumped out and walked past the bikes that crowded the garden path.