Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  “That’s what we’re wondering.”

  “I’ve never seen her before,” said Birgitta Olsson. She looked Claesson straight in the eye. “But she could be anyone just standing there waiting for the ferry.”

  She suddenly sounded tired and flat.

  They stretched their legs and had some tea brought into the office.

  The son, Johan Olsson, was called in, but had nothing much to bring to the investigation. He’d hardly even known that his father had been in Istanbul. He lived his own life, but described his relationship with both parents as good.

  “But we all do our own thing,” he said.

  The daughter, Lotta Öberg, knew just as little about what her father had been up to, she claimed. She had a job and two kids and lived in Stockholm, a hectic life, it seemed. She knew that her parents had been in Istanbul and that her mother had left for home some days before her father, as was the plan, since mother and daughter had spoken to each other on the phone.

  “How often do you do that?”

  “Often enough… Maybe every other day, it varies.”

  As usual, thought Claesson. Mother and daughter keeping the social wheels turning. He thought about Veronika and Cecilia, who called each other frequently.

  But that wasn’t how he was going to do things, he’d promised himself. He was going to have his own channels open to his girls! And what’s more, he was the only one in his family who saw to their own senile mother, but then that was because she lived in Oskarshamn. He’d have to go and see her to tell her about Nora, and resolved to do so as soon as he got home. Even if she never took in what he said. He’d hold her by the arm, or perhaps even by the hand, to help her gather her wits. Say: “Mom, it’s Claes. You’ve got a new grandchild. It’s a little girl and her name’s Nora.” He had no idea what would sink in, but he wanted to tell her anyway. For his own sake, perhaps.

  The son-in-law Magnus Öberg was even briefer, curt even, in his answers. He hadn’t even been at home in Stockholm when Carl-Ivar was found dead on the Bosporus ferry. He was away on business in Germany, as his wife had previously testified.

  “Is that so?” said Claesson. “So there’s not much you can help us with then, is there,” he said, dismissing him with a nod.

  But just as the man stood up to leave the office, Claesson cleared his throat.

  “You know, I was just wondering where in Germany you were.”

  Magnus Öberg looked confused.

  “Here and there, Lübeck and Munich among other places,” he said. “Does it matter?”

  “We’re just a little pedantic in circumstances like this, but if you could somehow confirm that you were at these places in Germany, and state whom you met and when, and report to the police station in Oskarshamn, we’d be very grateful.”

  If he stiffened or not it was hard to tell. Perhaps he’d turned pale thinking of all the hard work that would entail.

  “Er, of course. No problem. What kind of things are you after?”

  “Any airplane tickets…”

  “But I drove down.”

  “OK, so the names of people you met, and…”

  “I understand. I’ll sort out what you need when I return home.”

  “Good,” said Claesson. “We’ll be checking this, of course, with your employer. Purely routine,” he said in the same neutral tone.

  “That’ll be easy,” said Magnus Öberg, looking a little more confident. “I work for myself.”

  CHAPTER 43

  “I GUESS WE’RE PRETTY MUCH done here,” said Claesson, straightening his back.

  It was past six o’clock. He was tired. His longing for home really ached now that he had the time to think about it.

  Mustafa Özen nodded. Claesson noticed how he tried hard not to look disappointed, although his head drooped like a miserable dog’s.

  Özen had put on a smart t-shirt today, too. Not quite the same relaxed style back home in Oskarshamn, but then so what? thought Claesson.

  “It’d be nice, of course, to see more of the city, but that’s not why we’re here,” he continued in a neutral tone.

  “Otherwise, a trip along the Bosporus wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” he continued dreamily just to torture poor love-struck Özen, whose eyes suddenly brightened. They’d talked earlier about following in Olsson’s footsteps, but things don’t always turn out as you’d like. You had to be flexible – a prestige word for modern people.

  “Don’t we have to take that trip?” said Özen. “Don’t we have to do it for the sake of the investigation? We can’t just go home without seeing the scene of the crime for ourselves, can we?”

  He was eager. Wagging his tail like a puppy.

  “But it probably wouldn’t give us anything. The Istanbul people have already done the necessary work. And thoroughly, to boot,” said Claesson.

  Özen’s eyes immediately went dead.

  “They might even be offended if we go tramping around there. As if the job they’d done wasn’t good enough.”

  Özen was by now really glum.

  “Do you think you can check tomorrow’s flights?”

  “Sure,” said Özen dully, and slunk away to look for Merve to ask if he could borrow her computer. Claesson prepared himself for a long wait.

  He went out into the corridor to listen to the buzz and din of the city outside the open window.

  A while later, Özen returned with a suggested itinerary.

  Departure 8:50 a.m. from Atatürk airport. Up at the crack of dawn, in other words. They’d get home nice and early.

  “Let me know when it’s all booked,” said Claesson, waving away Özen and Merve, who were both looking equally glum.

  Just then, a skinny police officer in a light-blue uniform shirt appeared holding a piece of paper. After a moment’s hesitation, he finally decided to address Özen in Turkish.

  “Well, what do you know!” said Özen. “They’ve found Olsson’s passport.”

  “Where?”

  “A hotel’s reported it, as far as I can tell.”

  Claesson stood silently staring at the floor. He’d have to brush his disappointment under the carpet. He might not be taking the morning flight, after all.

  “OK, then,” he said when he’d pulled himself together sufficiently. “I suppose we’d better go there.”

  “It’s on the other side of the Golden Horn,” said Merve.

  “So what do we do now?” wondered Özen, all at a loss.

  “About what?”

  “About the tickets.”

  “Pah. Cancel them,” said Claesson.

  Özen nodded contentedly and flashed a toothy grin.

  They crowded into a police car to go to the hotel that had been sitting on the passport. It wasn’t one of the larger or more famous ones, said Merve, who was accompanying them.

  This was turning out well, after all, thought Claesson. If they could get this over and done with by this evening he could take a later plane tomorrow. Things would work themselves out.

  They were heading for the Galata Bridge to cross over to Beyoğlu. The Golden Horn was heaving with large, dull-green waves. The wind had picked up but the sky was still clear, even if the sun was setting.

  Merve and the officer behind the wheel were unsure where the street they needed lay. The car trundled down yet another narrow alley, creeping forwards as they tried to read the signs.

  “By the way, we’re not far from one of the more famous hotels, the Pera Palas,” said Merve. “It was built during the age of the Orient Express and is fantastic. A bit run down, but they’re renovating like mad and will be ready soon. It’s got an Agatha Christie suite that you can see if you like. They say she sat there writing. Atatürk also stayed there.”

  Claesson nodded.

  “Some people make a lot of money from murder,” she grinned. “Maybe we should settle for that instead of investigating real ones. It doesn’t pay as well.”

  “Well, all you need to do is know how to write,�
� said Claesson. “People have always been fascinated by cold-blooded murder, disasters, and crazy people. They can’t seem to get enough.”

  “No,” said Özen. “And neither can we.”

  The police car pulled up. The hotel was called the Galata New Hotel and was about as new as it was large. They stepped out. By now the air was cool and refreshing.

  The little hotel foyer was empty. They walked over to the dark-stained counter and ringed the bell. They could hear a voice somewhere in the background, as if someone was talking on the phone.

  The foyer was the hotel’s public face. It gave a good impression, thought Claesson. It was the kind of hotel that he liked to stay at himself. He didn’t feel comfortable in the grandiose and luxurious ones; they just made him feel dim-witted and lost.

  He walked round. There was a little table in a corner with a desktop computer on it for the hotel guests to surf on. The service was free, a sign in English announced. He opened a door straight ahead of him an inch and peeked into a glazed conservatory that served as a breakfast room and that lay facing a small courtyard, which also looked pleasant. He shut the door, looked around the vestibule again, and noted that the rugs in it were quite beautiful. His knowledge of carpets was extremely rudimentary, but he found himself inspecting them rather than just stepping on them nonetheless. He was able to conclude without blinking that two of the rugs were knotted, no doubt in classical Turkish patterns, and that the third, the smallest, was a woven so-called kelim. Its colors were bright, with a lot of red. He liked it the best.

  The telephone voice from within the hotel had gone quiet and a woman appeared behind the counter and said something in Turkish.

  “How can I help you?” she asked in English.

  She was in her sixties and looked charming. Her hair was thick and earlobe length in that cold, gray color that many dark-haired people go. She was wearing black pants and a warm red, long-sleeved top that went right up to her throat.

  While Merve told her who they were, the woman pulled her sleeves up with nails the color of blood. Gold bangles decorated with large charms clanked around both wrists. Merve asked her to speak English, if that wasn’t too awkward for her. It wasn’t.

  She was the one who’d called the police, she told them. She turned around and took out a plastic bag from a cabinet behind the counter. Its contents consisted of Carl-Ivar Olsson’s passport and a key ring. But no cell phone.

  “We did not empty Mr. Olsson’s room until yesterday. He was meant to check out the day before. We did not know here he had gone, but we let it go for one day. Maybe he will show up, we thought. We were not full, so it did not matter.”

  Her smile had faded, and her brown eyes were studying them seriously. Claesson thought that she sounded more acquainted with her guest than one might normally expect.

  “Usually, we give the passport back after the first night, but this time we did not do it,” she continued. “Mr. Olsson did not leave his room key with reception… with me, that is, or with my brother. He took the key with him and he came and went as he pleased. He usually does this… He would of course be given his passport back when he checked out.”

  Her eyes drifted again from Özen to Merve before finally landing on Claesson.

  “Something serious has happened, I understand,” she said quietly at last.

  “Yes. Mr. Olsson is dead. Murdered,” said Claesson, without going into the difference between murder and manslaughter, and that it was impossible for them to say how they would treat the case.

  “Oh!” she ejaculated, pressing a hand, fingers splayed, to her breast. Her pupils seemed to shrink.

  “That is terrible.” She collected herself. “We have his luggage here behind the counter,” she said. “We tidied them all away so that we could clean the room. But maybe that was stupid? We waited for twenty-four hours and thought that he was delayed… It happens. We tried to reach him on his cell phone, but he did not answer. We left a message.”

  “So Olsson stayed here before?” asked Claesson.

  “Oh, yes. Many times.”

  “How many times, roughly.”

  She turned her torso and stared at the end wall while counting.

  “I cannot say, but he stayed here once a year even during the time when my parents ran the hotel. They are dead, I am afraid, so I cannot ask them. It was over twenty years ago when they passed the hotel on to me and my brother, and Mr. Olsson always came for all these years. Sometimes more than once a year. He almost became a friend of the family.”

  “Did he stay on his own?”

  “Oh, yes. He was always here on his own.”

  “He never had his wife with him?”

  “I did not know, he was married? That is not the kind of question we ask our guests.”

  “Do you have any idea what he did when he was here?” asked Claesson.

  “We never inquire what our guests do,” she said proudly. “Mr. Olsson always paid and was a good guest, and that is all that counts. He would often pay for his whole stay upon checking in, even.”

  “How did he pay?”

  “With a card, I presume. I can check.”

  “And how long did he intend to stay this time?”

  She turned toward the computer, tapped some keys.

  “A week.”

  Claesson nodded. His wife said that he was going to be staying four days longer than her. Had he been planning to call and say that something had come up so he could stretch out his visit?

  He turned to Özen and asked him in Swedish to make a note that they’d have to ask the wife if this was something he used to do a lot.

  They were shown his room, which was now ready for the next guest. A nice room, Claesson thought. A tiny writing desk and a robust, dark wood bedside table, burgundy curtains, and a TV mounted on the wall at the end of the bed, which was wide and covered with a shiny bedspread decorated with tulips. There were also discreet tulips on the walls. There were a lot of tulips in Turkey in general, as this was the tulip’s country of origin, he’d learned. He’d seen them flowering freshly and abundantly in parks and on the banks of ditches. In fact, the entire road from the airport was lined with tall tulips of different colors.

  But the room wasn’t exactly a goldmine for a forensic team. No other guest had stayed in the room since Olsson, and that was all well and good. But the cleaner had done a thorough job and the sheets had been taken to the laundry along with the towels.

  They went through his suitcase.

  “There’s something fishy here,” said Claesson, once he’d looked through the contents. “There’s no toiletry bag.”

  Merve went out to her colleague in the car and asked him to cordon off the room anyway. The elegant woman who called herself hotel director had little choice but to consent. Merve would make sure that they’d send a forensic technician, she promised Claesson. He asked her to go through the guest list as well.

  “And look for what?”

  He shrugged.

  “Anything. If you find someone from Sweden, or Scandinavia, it’d be good. Or perhaps a German.”

  “A German?” asked Özen. “Why a German?”

  “I don’t know. It just came out, but I guess it’s wrong,” said Claesson with a smile at Merve, who was writing away in her notebook. She had charisma, he thought. Her ears stuck out slightly. They looked appealing and were emphasized by the way she wore her thick black hair in a ponytail.

  But what had Olsson been up to during his solitary days in Istanbul? Looking at carpets?

  Nah, thought Claesson.

  The photo of the quayside in Yeniköy, with all those sumptuous villas reflected in the rippling waters, was burned on his retina. The photo that one of the crew had taken to test out his new phone camera. The photo in which Olsson seemed to be standing waiting for the ferry. With a woman by his side.

  She could be any old passenger awaiting the ferry, too. But she could, on the other hand, be someone completely different.

  CHAPTE
R 44

  VERONIKA POPPED HER BREAST back into her bra and burped Nora over her shoulder. A wet splodge of excess breast milk landed on her top. She laid her baby daughter in the bassinet and went upstairs to get changed.

  She checked the time. She’d have to hurry to the preschool.

  As she arrived and was about to go in to pick up Klara, her cell phone rang. It was Cecilia.

  “Hi,” she said. “Can I call you back in minute? I’m just about to pick up Klara.”

  She hung up before Cecilia had time to open her mouth. It worried her, but only afterwards.

  Was it something important? After all, it had sounded like it, hadn’t it?

  As soon as she’d enticed Klara away from her friends, who were about to sit down to eat, and they were outside the Bumble Bee preschool, she dialed Cecilia back. Veronika pushed the stroller with one hand while Klara walked sulkily alongside. Cecilia didn’t answer.

  They crossed Kolbergavägen and went into Coop supermarket. Klara had forgotten all about the preschool by now, and cheerily helped Veronika with the groceries. She enjoyed it and loved to do the big weekly shopping with Claes. Veronika just took some milk and bread for lunch, as she couldn’t be bothered to carry home any more than that. Just didn’t feel like it. She hoped that Claes would call and say that he was on his way home.

  She tried giving Cecilia a call again when they left the shop. No reply. They walked home. Klara was whining a bit, she was hungry, but Nora was asleep. That kid was incredible.

  Veronika couldn’t get Cecilia out of her mind. Tried calling again. She had to get hold of her. What had she wanted?

  Veronika knew that she easily got distressed when she couldn’t reach her daughter. The indescribable anxiety when she couldn’t get hold of Cecilia that time came flooding back. Then she was lying unconscious and injured and no one knew where she was. Experiences like that left you marked for life. On the other hand, Cecilia usually just called for a chat. Relax, she told herself.