Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  The first stop was on the European side and was called Paşa. Buildings flowed uninterruptedly into each other as Istanbul sprawled into its various suburbs. Next to Paşa was a village called Beşiktaş, he read on the map, a name he actually recognized. Beşiktaş was one of Turkey’s better football teams, and played in black and white striped jerseys.

  They continued on under the Bosporus Bridge, which linked the European and the Asian sides of Istanbul. A shoe-shiner had come on board and was offering his services, but Claesson’s sports shoes were suited for neither polish nor buffer. Magnificent buildings could be seen on either side of the Bosporus: palaces, mosques, forts, towers. There was nothing for it but to gape.

  A man bearing a round tray came up to him, squeezing himself between the rail and the bench Claesson was sitting on.

  “Tea?”

  Claesson looked at him and nodded, and dug into his pants pocket for a lira. He was a young man, barely twenty. Black, neatly cut hair, slightly sad brown eyes. His face was pale; he clearly hadn’t seen much of the sun recently, thought Claesson. Or perhaps he’d been sleeping badly? Bad conscience? The young tea-seller was called Ilyas Bank, Claesson told himself. It was a name he remembered.

  One week ago tomorrow, the man who had just received the lira note and who was now handing him his tea had just had the surprise of his life. Here, on this very seat, thought Claesson, he found a dead man. Or half dead, with a body still warm and blood pumping copiously out of his gut.

  Claesson watched Ilyas Bank as he returned seemingly indifferently to the after-saloon with his tray.

  As they approached Yeniköy, it struck him that Olsson might simply have taken the ferry because he enjoyed the boat ride, nothing more. It was pleasant and soothing. He could see the city spread itself out, all the beautiful buildings.

  All the beautiful yalis, he thought. “They are very, very beautiful,” as Merve Turpan would have said.

  They really were quite beautiful, these tall, ornate nineteenth-century wood-built, multi-story villas. They stood there huddled together, reflected in the sea, with windows and verandas overlooking the waters of the Bosporus.

  The quay was bathed in sunlight, and the heat smote him, but no pretty Turkish woman came to greet him as he disembarked.

  By three o’clock, they were all assembled once again at the police station, and a fairly weary troop they made. The plane would be leaving inexorably for home the next day. The morning flight. Claesson reminded Özen of this in Swedish.

  “And we’re not rescheduling again, OK?”

  Karaoğlu wasn’t present, but had conveyed via Merve his wish to invite them all to try some Ottoman fare that evening at a restaurant that Karaoğlu himself particularly liked.

  “Unfortunately they don’t serve alcohol, just so you know,” said Merve with a look that anticipated their disappointment. “During the Ottoman era, most people here were Muslims, and Muslims don’t drink. At least not the devout ones.”

  “That doesn’t matter in the slightest,” said Claesson, and asked her to thank Karaoğlu for the invitation.

  Mohammed knew what he was doing. If you’re going to keep a large, unruly population in check, you couldn’t allow them to get drunk.

  Merve left them, so Özen and Claesson could return to speaking Swedish.

  “We can start with the hotel that Olsson was staying at when he died…the Galata New Hotel,” said Özen. “There were fewer than ten other Swedes there at the time of the murder, but it’s unlikely they’ve got anything to do with it.”

  He placed another sheet of paper in front of Claesson listing the names and birthdates of the guests and details of where they lived.

  “Have you managed to get all this from Sweden?”

  “Yep!” said Özen, not without a modicum of pride.

  Claesson skimmed through the list. Every one of them was born between 1937 and 1955.

  “They stayed one night and were in a group that was then going on to Uzbekistan, or so the owner thought. And she was right,” said Özen. “I’ve spoken to the tour operator. The hotel owner, that older woman we met, gave me the number of the travel agency.” He thumbed through his papers and pulled out a new sheet. “This is it, and it’s in Stockholm, as you can see. I started by going onto the net to check it out. They arrange tour packages for small groups to special places around the world. It really made me want to travel! They’re doing the Silk Road from Istanbul to Beijing, they said at the Stockholm office, and they’ll be away for a month. A long trip by train and bus and sometimes plane over Central Asia and the whole of China, and they won’t be home for another three weeks from today.”

  “And you don’t think that any of them got round to committing a murder on the way?” said Claesson.

  Özen shook his head.

  “I asked Stockholm to contact the Swedish guide, which they did, and apparently they’re somewhere in China now. I spoke to the guide and she said that of course the group didn’t all stick together the whole time in Istanbul, these kinds of trip attract typical individualists, but there was no way, she said, that one of them would have had time to hop on a ferry through the Bosporus.”

  “Then let’s put them to one side for the time being,” said Claesson. “They’ll probably be casting suspicious looks at each other for the rest of their trip,” he added mirthfully.

  “At the other hotel, opposite the Galata, there were two Swedish guests staying at the time of Olsson’s visit and death,” continued Özen, handing Claesson yet another sheet of paper.

  “Karl Öberg and Bengt-Ove Nordin,” Claesson read aloud. “Have you gotten around to checking them out?”

  “No. We’ll have to do it when we come home.”

  It was as if they’d both run out of steam.

  “Let’s call it a day,” said Claesson. “This is as far as we can get. We’ll keep in touch with Istanbul… I’ll leave that to you,” he said with a grin at Özen, who was staring at the table.

  They returned to their hotel to stretch out for a while. Claesson was grateful for the jacket he’d brought. It had smoothed itself out on a hanger and would be perfect for their farewell dinner that evening.

  One thing was sure, he thought before dropping off. This was a place he’d be coming back to.

  CHAPTER 46

  IT WAS APPROACHING FOUR P.M. on this slow day, and Martin Lerde was sitting in the Oskarshamn police station with a man in front of him who was claiming that his wife was missing. He’d have preferred to have gone home. It was Friday. Beer and something nice to eat in solitude, some movies and then sleeping late in the morning. Not bad! Even though it could’ve been better. A soft body to cozy up to on the sofa.…

  Martin had already had two jokers today on the line, people with totally absurd stories. One of them was about a green fluorescent glow from a man who then disappeared in a puff of smoke, like Christ ascending to heaven. When the caller heard that Lerde was a mite skeptical about the story’s veracity, he elaborated with dangerous light rays from outer space that he had to warn everyone in Oskarshamn about. If not the entire nation.

  The other caller went on in great detail about a neighbor who was spraying an odorless gas through his keyhole. Last week, there was one who’d seen snakes crawl up out of his toilet bowl. It must be horrible to live with delusions like these, thought Lerde. Nonetheless, he’d reckoned he was done for the day.

  But now there was this missing wife. That was a little more tangible. Simpler to deal with, to be honest. At least there was an investigative procedure for missing persons.

  His wife had never just taken off like that before, protested the husband.

  It didn’t help matters that Martin Lerde was finding it difficult to keep his mind as active as it should be. His ambition was always to be a cut above everyone else, but he’d had far too little sleep for that recently.

  His girl didn’t want him, and Lerde felt he could sympathize with the concerned husband’s emotional frame of mind, at leas
t at first. His life was simply slip-sliding away, although this interpretation he kept to himself. He knew the signs. The greasy countenance, the lusterless hair, the stooped shoulders. Not even his pumped-up biceps helped.

  There was, however, something about the man’s manner that irritated Martin Lerde. And since he was tired, it got on his nerves even more. The officious tone and the offensive body language, combined with the man’s inflated humility. Or feigned humility, more like. The wad of snus under his upper lip looked as if it had melded with his body in despair.

  It wasn’t that Martin was a moralist, but he didn’t think it appropriate for a man to sit there with a bulbous swelling under his nose when his wife, who’d given him two kids, had just run off. Not if he really loved her. She should be worth more, he thought, and listened with half an ear to how the man had awakened that morning, Friday that is, at a quarter past eight to be exact, and found the other side of the bed empty. He couldn’t find her anywhere. He’d looked in the garden and searched the garage and woodshed. She wasn’t even anywhere in Bråbo, he claimed. Nor in Kulltorp, Bjälebo, or Saxtorp, either. Nor in Applekulla, but there were only a handful of farms there so he’d driven right through. He’d even driven to Krokshult to look for her.

  “I’ve not been able to do anything worthwhile all day,” he moaned.

  Apparently, looking for a missing wife was something the man didn’t consider “worthwhile,” Lerde thought disdainfully.

  “Did you knock on people’s doors and asked them if they’d seen her, or how did you go about looking for her?” he wondered.

  “Nah, I mostly just drove around, you know? Should I have done that? Knocked on doors, I mean? Isn’t that the job of the police?”

  “And the kids?”

  “They’re with my mother. We’d planned a cozy evening together, the missus and me, yesterday. And so then I asked them to say with Mom while I went around in the car looking… This is such a goddam embarrassment!”

  “So did you have… a nice, cozy evening?”

  The man’s face got stuck in neutral for a moment. Lerde registered that and placed it in a pigeonhole in his well-furnished brain.

  “Sure we did. But that was last night. It was this morning, wasn’t it, when I couldn’t find her.”

  “No fight?”

  “Nah. What would we have fought about?”

  Martin gave a little shrug.

  “People do. And it was this morning when you discovered her missing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What time was it you said you discovered it?”

  “Around nine, I’d reckon.”

  He’d just said a quarter past eight, thought Lerde.

  “Reckon? What, didn’t you check the time?”

  The man grew befuddled.

  “Er, I usually wake up earlier. Around six. I start work early, you see, around seven, but I’d told the boys that I’d be home a little later.”

  “So, what, you’d taken half the day off?”

  “Yeah. I’m self-employed, see… I’ve got a lot of work going, plumbing, pipes, and stuff…”

  “You said you’d taken time off. What were you going to do?”

  “Er, it was really just so that we’d get a bit of time to ourselves, the missus and me.”

  “On a Friday afternoon?”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “So on the Thursday you were working as normal.”

  “Yeah… No, not really.”

  “No?”

  “I picked the missus up a little earlier.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “So you picked her up there, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you checked there? Asked anyone if they’ve seen her?”

  The man who’d given his name as Pär – with a pretentious ä rather than the usual e – suddenly fell silent.

  “Would you like me to repeat the question?” wondered Martin Lerde.

  “No! I haven’t asked there,” he said irritably.

  That stung, thought Martin sitting up, suddenly smelling one hell of a rat.

  He glanced at the name of the missing wife again. Tina Rosenkvist. And he noted again that they lived in Bråbo.

  Hadn’t something happened there just the other day?

  Uh-oh.

  CHAPTER 47

  BIRGITTA WAS SITTING in the funeral director’s office. He was a polite, gentle man whom she knew a little from before. One of his daughters had gone to the same school as Lotta, but that was not something they took up now. She’d called him as soon as the office opened. Sure, he could see her, despite its being a Saturday. No problem.

  Johan was with her. Lotta had such a backlog of work to do in Stockholm that it would’ve been difficult for her to join them. Birgitta didn’t have the heart to say that it really didn’t matter. In actual fact, she’d have preferred to sit there alone and decide everything herself without having to take the children and their various opinions into account. Although it was mostly Lotta who gave them.

  In some peculiar way she got closer to Carl-Ivar when she wasn’t surrounded by people, she thought as she sat there on her upholstered chair. She longed to be left in peace. To be alone.

  Brochures in which funeral assistance was couched in words like empathy and dignity lay in small piles at one end of the table.

  She felt, strangely enough, strong. Or was she just numb and refusing to connect with her feelings? She didn’t think she needed that much support right now.

  The funeral was set for a Friday, a mere fortnight away, which the man in the dark gray suit considered reasonable. That would be three weeks after they’d found Carl-Ivar dead in Istanbul. His funeral was to be held in the chapel in the Western Cemetery, and followed by coffee in the Parish Hall by the Old Churchyard.

  Johan didn’t say much, just hemmed and hawed mostly. But when they got to the choice of coffin, a folder showing the different models available having been placed in front of them, he cleared his throat and placed his index finger on a plain yet elegant design. But it was one of the cheaper kinds made of fiberboard rather than solid wood.

  Oh, dear, thought Birgitta, what will people think?

  “But why that one?” she asked in a whisper so the funeral director wouldn’t hear.

  “I’ll leave you two alone to browse in your own time,” he said considerately and left the room.

  “It’s only going to be incinerated anyway,” said Johan. “Dad would think it too much to have one of these,” he said, turning pages to get to the solid wood coffins.

  The younger generation had a completely different take on life, she thought. And maybe that was a good thing. She could also tell that Johan wasn’t suffering any bad conscience toward Carl-Ivar. Nor any kind of ambivalence that needed compensating for with an extravagant funeral. Johan and his father had always got on well together.

  That his body was to be cremated was beyond all discussion. It was one of the few things that Carl-Ivar had actually expressed any desire about. “When I die, I want to be cremated, and that’s that!” They could both hear his voice.

  It finally came round to the obituary. Perhaps his death should have been announced earlier, but the very idea was distressing; and anyway, there had been so much uncertainty.

  Burying someone who’d been stabbed to death was a very different thing to interring a husband who’d died of disease or old age.

  The funeral director told them that it was by no means too late to publish an obituary. It was actually quite common for it to take time. But he said nothing about what all three in the room already knew: that most people were aware of what had happened anyway, with or without an announcement in the paper. You just had to open the newspaper. The murder had become something of a serial.

  And that’s exactly why an obituary is even more important, thought Birgitta determinedly. Simply because it would make the loss of Carl-Ivar more serious and tangible. It would give him red
ress, somehow, for all the speculations being made, above all, by the tabloid press. There was much more to it than just violent murder, blood, flashing knife blades, and mysterious circumstances in a far-away land. Than things that teased the imagination, but did nothing to call to mind the reliable, and in a way scarcely exciting person that Carl-Ivar had been. He really had been a typical, run-of-the-mill “Svensson,” even though he was an Olsson, and she’d been satisfied with that.

  She broke her reverie when an unpleasant chill passed through her. It wasn’t quite true, she thought, but no one need know.

  She started to browse listlessly through all the symbols that were available nowadays for decorating obituaries.

  “What do you think?” she said turning to Johan, who shrugged.

  “A carpet, maybe,” he said at last, and she couldn’t tell if he was pulling her leg or not.

  But the undertaker took him seriously, he’d heard worse, and bent over the pages of the file to help them look – by which time she was already imagining an Oriental carpet hovering in the air with its fringes wafting out in both directions.

  She smiled. On a carpet like that Carl-Ivar could fly wherever he wanted, she thought. Perhaps even all the way up to heaven for some well-deserved peace. Oh yes, she’d comprehended more than he’d realized…

  But there was no carpet.

  “I am terribly sorry,” said the funeral director. “Maybe I can see to it that the newspapers arrange one for you.”

  But Birgitta and Johan thought it was just too much trouble. They finally chose a simple filled cross.

  “Everyone recognizes that,” she said. “Clear and dignified.”

  On the car ride home with half an almond ring in a pastry bag beside her, she began to wonder what to do with the carpet shop. And no less urgently: what she would do with Annelie. She liked the girl and the shop was doing well at the moment. Disasters created publicity.

  She hadn’t spoken to Annelie since coming home from Istanbul. She couldn’t really bring herself to do it yet. She could wait before making up her mind, at least until after the estate inventory deeds had been drawn up. The children had to have their say. She wondered how she’d make ends meet now. It had been Carl-Ivar who’d looked after all that, and a widow’s and nurse’s pension didn’t stretch that far. But now at least she had the consolation of a backup. Thank God for the black cloth bag… She smiled to herself, and couldn’t help seeing it as compensation, of sorts, for all of Carl-Ivar’s escapades down there in Turkey.