Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  Bottle of wine in hand, she rang the bell.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE EVENING WAS MILD.

  Claesson had just spoken to Louise Jasinski, who’d found out from the Swedish bank that Carl-Ivar had paid for their stay at the Arkadia with his Visa card. He’d checked out the same day as his wife returned home. He no longer needed a double room, presumably, and the Arkadia had no single rooms going just then, she told Claesson.

  “Where the hell did he go then?” he said to Mustafa Özen once he’d hung up.

  Özen shrugged. “Istanbul’s a big city.”

  No more needed to be said.

  “That guy, Lennart Ahl,” continued Claesson, “who’d called his widow Birgitta, hasn’t been tracked down yet. Maybe it was a bluff… Louise says hi, by the way.”

  They were standing outside the hotel waiting for Merve Turpan. They were going to have a bite to eat together. Unfortunately Fuat Karaoğlu was unable to join them, and had apologized repeatedly, but he had family reasons, he said; nothing strange about that, Claesson thought.

  Shortly afterwards they heard a car door slam and saw Merve walking toward them. But not alone. A young man with a curly mop of hair that made him look happy accompanied her.

  So she needs a chaperone when she meets the Swedish strangers, thought Claesson. Maybe he was her boyfriend. He noticed that Mustafa Özen had stiffened.

  They walked a couple of blocks, no further, until they came to a car-free alley where they sat down at a round plastic table covered with a table cloth. They’d learned that the man’s name was Cem and that he was a forensic technician. A chemist originally, actually, he told them. He’d been put on the case of the dead carpet dealer.

  “A lot of blood,” he said. “We think the knife is at the bottom of the sea. The cuts in his skin were so sharp that the coroner thinks that it was a very sharp knife. And a knife that completely destroyed his insides… You have heard the Wasp knife theory, yes?”

  Claesson and Özen nodded. Özen had grown almost embarrassingly reserved, thought Claesson, and then told them about the call he’d just had. About the hotel that had been paid for with a Visa card from a Swedish bank.

  “The question is where he went then.”

  “If we’re lucky, he checked in at another hotel,” said Claesson. “And if we’re luckier, it won’t be some dodgy backstreet dive but a hotel that keeps tabs on guests and registers, and that will want paying and to be rid of whatever personal effects he left behind. They’ll get in touch sooner or later,” he said reassuringly and refilled his beer glass.

  They’d just eaten meze, which was a selection of small appetizers. There were many varieties to choose from. Özen had placed their orders, his too, which turned out to be currant dolmas filled with some kind of rice mixture, some cookie-like titbits made from ground beans and a garlic yogurt. It was really quite tasty. This they were to follow with broiled fish and a salad that consisted of chopped tomatoes, flat-leaf parsley, and onion.

  “Delicious and very typical!” Özen explained in Swedish. “Usually with a little lemon juice squeezed over the salad and a few drops of oil.”

  Merve went to the ladies’ room and Cem stepped a few paces away to enjoy a cigarette. “Can you cook?” Claesson took the opportunity to ask Özen.

  “Well, yes, I can actually,” he said without a hint of modesty.

  “Then we’ve almost got a complete national cooking team down at the station. First there’s Gotte, even if he is going to be quitting soon, and Lennie Ludvigsson, who wins one cooking competition after the other, and now you… and… well…”

  He shrugged and looked down at the table but couldn’t quite erase his smug expression. Özen noticed.

  “You, too?”

  “Veronika’s not so keen on cooking so I’ve taken over. But I enjoy it,” said Claesson with a delighted look.

  Merve and Cem returned to their seats. Merve told them that Superintendent Fuat Karaoğlu’s wife was seriously ill and he was devoting as much time as he could to looking after her and that’s why he couldn’t make it.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” said Claesson. “I hope she gets better soon.”

  “That’s unlikely, I’m afraid,” said Merve. “She’s been sick for a long time. There’s something wrong with her entire body, she can hardly move.”

  Claesson downed a large swig of his cool beer, which was called Efes and which tasted good. He felt how the alcohol went straight to his head and made his face tighten out of sheer fatigue. He’d sleep like a log, that was for sure. Instead of lying there staring at the ceiling as he’d first thought. And with no kids whining and circling his bed.

  He wondered how Veronika was. He didn’t want a bad conscience.

  “What do you think’s going on?” asked Merve suddenly.

  Özen said nothing. Claesson shrugged his shoulders.

  “No idea. We can only guess. Valuable rugs, revenge or vengeance for something that we haven’t yet figured out? Or was it simply the wrong person who got himself murdered? Istanbul’s a big city… it’s easy to get in someone’s way… If we manage to solve this, then all well and good. All we can do is try,” he said. “Anyway, it’s nice to be here. Skål, as we say in Sweden!”

  They raised their glasses. Merve was drinking water. There was a glint in Mustafa Özen’s eyes – mainly when he looked at Merve, Claesson observed with a smile.

  Her cell phone rang, and she answered it with her head bowed. Her voice was now tender, now cross. Her boyfriend? wondered Claesson.

  She ended the call and looked up. “My mother,” she said with an ironic smile. “She wanted to know if I was having a nice evening.”

  “And are you?” asked Claesson.

  “Absolutely.” She smiled at her Swedish guests and the atmosphere around the table lifted even more.

  “So we’ll pick you up tomorrow,” she said when it was time to go their separate ways. “First stop, the Arkadia and then the Grand Bazaar and the carpet dealer there. OK?”

  “Sure,” said Claesson. “Am I right in thinking that we need to be at the coroner’s at two o’clock for the identification? That’s what I told the wife when I spoke to her, at least. We’ll have to work out the transportation somehow.”

  “Give me her cell phone number and I’ll do it,” said Merve Turpan.

  “Alright, but I’m not sure how much English she speaks,” said Claesson.

  “Call me, and I’ll talk to the widow,” said Özen, writing down his number and handing it over to Merve, who grinned even more broadly at him.

  They decided to walk home, he and Özen. The dark night sky hovered above them.

  It wasn’t silent, but not far from it.

  CHAPTER 38

  JOHAN AND LOTTA, thought Annelie as she drove home from Gabbi’s. How did they fit in with their father’s death?

  She pictured Johan’s face. Things were less tricky with him; he was innocuous. Or was it just that he was conformable?

  She hadn’t hung around with Johan that much when she was growing up. She didn’t know him so well. Not like Lotta. And she was made of tougher stuff, but even so not as pompous as at least Annelie’s mother, Lotta’s aunt, said she was. Lotta was more insecure, but it had taken Annelie many years to realize it. Pompous was otherwise the worst thing you could be in small-town Oskarshamn. How Lotta could have become both conceited and pompous with parents like hers.…

  Annelie thought about all the discussions she and Christoffer had had about this. It skipped a generation, he thought with his doctor’s brain. What’s more, Lotta had gotten worse when she’d made “a good catch” and moved to upper class Stockholm. It wasn’t only her aunt who said that, thought Annelie, but herself and Christoffer, too.

  Naturally, all Lotta wanted was to fit in. Who didn’t? Annelie watched how she really struggled and adapted her taste in furniture and clothes and her ideas about schools for the kids because she thought that was the only way to be good enough. Going one’
s own way took strength. Or folly.

  During the year that she and Christoffer had spent in Stockholm, they’d tried to have a meal together, the four of them, but it never really worked. Despite the fact that Christoffer came from an important family. Annelie knew why, and it had nothing to do with pride or background. Magnus knew, too, no doubt. She and Magnus never talked about it, of course. They could see it in each other’s eyes, and let it go.

  She sighed gently while the car radio played a serenade to the full moon. She was filled with unabashed satisfaction.

  But enough was enough, she thought a moment later. The time had finally come when Magnus no longer burned in her breast. Not as much. Only a bit.

  He had changed. Or was it she who had changed?

  She’d watched Magnus, the eternal summertime boy, and seen how he’d followed in his parents’ footsteps, placidly and securely at first, with an air of self-certainty. But then his posture had become more forced, ever since his parents took off abroad with money and securities and the taxman hot on their heels.

  It wasn’t Magnus’s fault. But she suddenly glimpsed the once-veiled trait of unreliability. He was still witty and vain. And she still had a weakness for him, or perhaps it was more for the feeling of being in love than him.

  Anyway, a long, tedious dinner it had been in Lotta and Magnus’s fancy apartment during her and Christoffer’s year in Stockholm. Their rooms were on Sibyllegatan, and had high ceilings and mullion windows framed by long, heavy curtains and gorgeous carpets on the floors. They were very exclusive, finely patterned and densely knotted. Big, too, and certainly not cheap. And all procured through Carl-Ivar, naturally.

  He’d come in useful there, alright!

  She felt a stab of pity for Carl-Ivar, thinking of him now like this. Kind Carl-Ivar, who’d done what he could to make everyone happy.

  That evening she’d consistently avoided Magnus’s eye.

  The polite and slightly pale children went obediently to bed after having kissed their parents goodnight. Annelie had asked if she could read them a bedtime story, she needed to get away, but no, it would only disrupt their routine, said Lotta, so that was the end of that. They’d then eaten some sumptuous food, she could hardly recall what, the atmosphere was tense, and their culinary efforts thus in vain. They’d clinked glasses of vintage wine and said nothing but pleasantries to each other.

  And then contact between them had petered out. Because, of course, all parties involved had made sure of it. Had she been younger, she would have fought to the bitter end. She remembered with a blush her eager attempts to make friends with Lotta when they were little, and even later as teenagers. How she’d looked up to Lotta, who was pretty and a year her senior, and who lived in very auspicious conditions like a lush plant thriving in a greenhouse.

  Even when Lotta paired up with Magnus, Annelie had looked up to her, despite the physical nausea that the jealousy caused her. There were few people that she’d put so much energy into as Lotta. Except for her mother. Energy that she could have been invested in something else.

  Now the whole family was in Istanbul to pay their last respects to Carl-Ivar. She just had to make do with placing a rose on his coffin at his funeral. Perhaps even give him one last bun from Nilsson’s.

  She smiled at the thought of placing a vanilla whirl on his coffin lid.

  She shifted gears and drove up the final incline, slowed down and turned the steering wheel so the wheels could roll with habitual ease onto the drive.

  The red Passat was there, but the house was dark. Christoffer was not waiting up for her and had no doubt gone to bed.

  The door was locked. She dug her key out of her bag, stepped inside and thought how rare it was for them to lock the door when someone was in.

  She hung up her bag on the rough wrought iron coat hook in the kitchen vestibule, draping her coat over it to hide its bulkiness. She walked into the kitchen, turned on the light, and froze.

  Where had the kitchen rug gone?

  The pine boards lay gray-varnished and bare. She frowned, anxiety squirming in her stomach as she wandered barefoot around the house. Christoffer wasn’t at home, but his car was there. He had biked somewhere?

  She got undressed, put her robe on and went into the bathroom to wash her face and dab a few blobs of face cream on her forehead and cheeks. As she did so, she heard the sound of an engine and a car rolling up the drive.

  She walked out onto the landing and looked down. A police car was just dropping Christoffer off. What on earth had he been up to?

  He walked in through the door just as she entered the kitchen. They met each other on the bare kitchen floor. His face was ashen.

  “Annelie, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  CHAPTER 39

  IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT, and the night sky was speckled with stars.

  Conny Larsson and Jessika Granlund were driving their patrol car at a snail’s pace along Kyrkoallén down toward Södra Långgatan. They’d done a quick round of the cemetery after a person living in one of the apartments across the street called to report a blood-curdling scream coming from within, but there hadn’t been a soul there. It was dark, of course, but they’d driven around and shone their spotlight over parts of the cemetery and up toward the park, but everywhere was just as deserted. The screamer was probably long gone.

  Before they reached Slottsgatan they saw a swaying figure staggering up the hill on the other side of Södra Långgatan, occasionally leaning against the walls of houses for support.

  “Stop,” Larsson said to Granlund, and she pulled over to the pavement.

  They were alone on the road without another vehicle in sight. The exceedingly unsteady pedestrian was clearly having the greatest difficulty making progress.

  “I know him,” said Conny Larsson.

  “You do?”

  Jessika Granlund sighed. She hadn’t worked more than two months in Oskarshamn and hardly knew anyone. She wasn’t from the area, but from Nybro. And she wasn’t intending to stay here any longer than necessary. Not if nothing radical happened, whatever that could be. If she fell in love, that sort of thing. If…

  She’d turned off the engine and was sitting waiting for orders from Larsson, with her eye on the heavily inebriated man as he struggled on. She felt sorry for him. And of course Conny knew who he was; everyone here knew everyone else, just like at home in Nybro. The man must have been a big shot of some kind, judging by his clothes. Sure, his coat was all creased and wrinkled, but he certainly wasn’t dressed like a tramp.

  “So who is he?” she said at last to keep some kind of conversation going. She was exhausted.

  “I’m just sittin’ here wonderin’ if we should give him a hand…but.…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, he lives just round the corner on Besvärsgatan, so he ain’t got that far to go. He’ll be alright.”

  “So do you want me to drive off?”

  “Just give it a bit longer.”

  Jessika found it particularly pointless to do nothing but sit there watching. It would be better to drag him home, and get it over and done with.

  Now the poor drunkard had come to a stop, supporting himself again with one hand against a wall, stooped forward. And then a wave seemed to surge through his body. He vomited. Copiously, too.

  “Ah, hell,” said Conny Larsson. “No way is he getting’ into the car now… He’s been at the pub in the A Petersson building, I bet. It’s a long climb for someone so drunk. Wonder if he’ll make it in to work tomorrow.”

  “He works?”

  “Mm. A doctor, as a matter of fact.”

  “You’re kidding me! It should be against the law for someone like him to have responsibility for others!”

  “Yeah, but he’s sober a lot of the time and they say he’s pretty good. Name’s Göran Bladh.”

  “But still!”

  She was agitated. Her chubby face had completely knotted itself up. She lifted her hat and ran her f
ingers through her hair, which was cut about half an inch short over her entire head. Conny gave her a sideways glance and saw moons and stars and other studs in her earlobes. They were probably the most feminine thing about her, to his mind.

  Bladh was off again, making it to the corner of Östra Torggatan, where he swung around and reeled out of sight of Larsson and Granlund.

  Jessika Granlund started the car and drove off in the opposite direction, turning after a short distance onto the back end of Slottsgatan, as the one-way system dictated.

  As they approached the police station, they saw Bladh lurching over the street ahead. He’d not even made it past the Post Hotel.

  “Now he’s just got to clear the local newspaper offices and he’s pretty much home free,” said Larsson.

  “Really,” said Jessika Granlund, still unconvinced that a person in Bladh’s condition would have a hope of finding his way home, but then there was only one block to go.

  Besvärsgatan was in front of the police station, behind the clinic.

  “Well, he’s givin’ it a damn good go,” grinned Larsson. “Alright. Now I could do with a bit of grub.”

  It was daybreak, and Nilla Söder wriggled out of her temporary accommodation, a sleeping bag in the basement of a block of apartments on Bäckgatan, feeling extremely rank and unrested. She ought to have been used to it by now, but she still found it unpleasant. As if her body refused to accustom itself to it.

  She tugged at Andreas lying beside her and finally roused him.

  The newspaper deliverer hadn’t seen them, but then he wasn’t normally bothered by them either. She and Andreas were like the ducks in the park, things you fed if you had the time and inclination or otherwise ignored. Though that was preferable to being shouted and screamed at or having dogs or the police set onto them.

  She shoved her hand into her pocket and felt around. It was still there. Andreas knew nothing, and she wasn’t that sure if she should tell him that she’d been given a whole hundred kronor note by some lady the day before. The lady must have been feeling guilty about something giving so much like that, but that didn’t stop Nilla thanking her at once and taking it. Otherwise it was mostly a little loose change, a twenty at best.