Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  “So whose rug is it?” wondered Janne Lundin.

  Claes had no option but to admit it was his.

  “But how in God’s name did Gustavsson get hold of it? What, is it a flying carpet?” joked Lundin.

  Spirits were high and the atmosphere pleasant.

  “Gustavsson claims he found it on Besvärsgatan,” said Conny Larsson in his kindly northern dialect. “By a couple of trash bins, but Lord knows who’d dumped it there. Gustavsson had read about that rug trick that some low-lifes had been runnin’ in Stockholm…” He went into what the trick consisted of. “Gustavsson reckoned he’d give it a go with his assistant, as he calls Nilla Söder. You know, that junkie girl whose old lady worked the streets down by the harbor, though she’s dead now… her ma, that is.”

  “Where’s the rug now,” Jasinski butted in.

  “Benny’s taken it to forensics. It might’ve had blood on it,” said Conny Larsson.

  “Blood? Gustavsson’s not usually violent, is he? Just mouthy and thieves like a magpie… like most druggies,” said Jasinski.

  “Yeah, but there was still blood on the back,” Conny Larsson insisted.

  “That’s correct,” said Benny Grahn. “I’ll be takin’ a right close look at it. That unconscious guy you picked up and drove to the emergency room last Saturday mornin’ was lyin’ beside it, like. There’ll be DNA that’ll go to Linköping for analysis.”

  “Well, looks like you won’t be seein’ that rug again for a while,” said Conny Larsson to Claesson. “It’ll lie nicely in storage there. But rest assured. Johanna will be hovering over it like a hawk, she will, so you won’t be losin’ it again,” he grinned.

  Johanna Huaryd was a civilian employed to manage the different storerooms of confiscated and commandeered items.

  Claesson realized that things had been going on while he’d been away.

  What unconscious guy to the emergency room?

  But he let it go. He had his own case to work on.

  And then Martin Lerde gave some further details of the missing woman, one Tina Rosenkvist, resident of Bråbo. Said that the husband had reported her missing at around six on the Friday evening.

  Claesson listened with half an ear at first until he heard that the victim had been taken to hospital after having been seriously assaulted by an unknown man because of a rug.

  “We might well be treating the case as attempted murder,” said Lerde.

  Another rug? All that rug business seemed to have caught on in town recently.

  “It happened last Wednesday at around six p.m., at the home of a man who works at the same place as her, at the hospital,” said Peter Berg taking over, as he was the one who’d been dispatched to the scene. “This man had given her a lift back to his place, in Bråbo. You could say they’re almost neighbors, there’s just a few houses between them. What actually took place there in the kitchen we don’t really know, we’ve heard different stories, but they’d poured themselves some wine at least… According to the woman, it was someone who’d come in from the outside and tried to strangle her to make her tell him where some rug was. Who this someone is, we don’t know. She doesn’t remember so much. We questioned her at the hospital that evening, she was in overnight… I’ll get to that later.”

  He inhaled and looked at his papers before continuing.

  “So if it was the man whom she was visiting and in whose kitchen she was sitting sipping wine who assaulted her, we don’t know… but it seems unlikely. We’ve released him for the time being. He says that he was outside, that someone had called about a delivery of firewood that he was to sign for and that he went outside to wait for it. He claims that he wasn’t even aware that they’d ordered any wood, but figured his wife must’ve ordered it.

  “It sounds to me as if he’d got lured out… So, in other words, it could be an as-yet-unknown assailant who attacked her. The victim was unsure about it herself, she said. Her memory was shaky. She’d blacked out, you see, and I guess what had happened just before the attack just vanished from her memory. Or maybe she’s repressing it.” Berg shrugged. “It was a nasty experience, and she could’ve died. Well… and now she’s gone missing.”

  He surveyed the assembled officers, who were sitting still and attentive.

  “We have a witness who was driving past and who can confirm that the owner of the house really was standing in the stable yard waiting, possibly for the delivery of firewood that never came. But if it was before or after the attack, we of course can’t tell. The witness also saw a man pass quickly around the corner of the house,” he continued. “And a car that we can probably tie to him… a dark green Saab, but we’ve got no registration number or anything. Er, and the witness is someone we all know… Veronika Lundborg.”

  Peter Berg’s flicked a glance at Claesson, who nodded in acknowledgement that he knew of these events, even though Veronika only figured on the periphery.

  “Might it have been your rug that the assailant was after?” Berg said to him, smiling kindly.

  “Mine’s not the only rug in the world,” Claesson said. “Carl-Ivar Olsson had something going on with a fragment worth at least one and a half mill. Not the eight-figure jobs that the Economic Crime Authority has to deal with, but a hefty sum nonetheless.”

  “Who the hell would buy a rug for that kind of money?” Janne Lundin broke in.

  “There’s a lot we don’t understand,” answered Claesson. “But I want to hear the rest.”

  “So the woman, Tina Rosenkvist, blacked out on her neighbor’s kitchen floor and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where she was kept in overnight, until Thursday, that is. She had strangulation marks on her throat, but felt fine, considering. And then her husband apparently came to fetch her from the ward the next day, and that was not according to the agreed procedure. We’d agreed that she was to go to the women’s refuge for some counseling. The victim, the doctor, the nurse, and I decided that together. But you know how it is. People end up doing what they want to do, anyway, and so we’ll have to sort out all this mess later…” Peter Berg said, taking a deep breath. “Anyway, it seems her husband just strolled right into the ward the next day, on the Thursday, I mean.”

  “I guess the duty staff had been relieved by then,” said Jasinski dryly.

  “No doubt. Change-of-shift reporting is a well-known problem. They knew the husband on the ward, the woman usually works there. And you can imagine the frame of mind he was in… Wife found in another man’s house… unconscious, almost dead.”

  Berg looked out over the room once more.

  “What was going through his head is hard to know, but he can’t have been a happy camper. And he shouldn’t have been allowed to pick her up alone… This is hopeless. You know, however hard you try, things always go to hell.”

  Thus was his final point.

  Martin Lerde took over: “Anyway, the husband swears that he didn’t hurt a hair of his wife’s head. That he never turns violent, period. She just took off at some early hour that Friday morning before he woke up.”

  Lerde continued to describe how they’d dispatched a description of the wife to all the other local police districts. “Well, as you heard during the briefing – we just have to keep our eyes open.”

  Benny Grahn had been in Bråbo with two technicians, combing the home of the missing woman.

  “Second time in the same week we were in the area, searchin’ for physical evidence. Lex dublicata, or whatever it’s called… that things always come in pairs… well, anyway, there’s something shady goin’ on here,” said Grahn. “You can smell the cleanin’ fluid in parts of the house from miles off, like. Most suspect is one of the wardrobes… but it’s also in the hall an’ kitchen. Scrubbed clean, they are. The husband says that the wife, the missin’ woman that is, had given the house a thorough goin’ over the days before this happened. A spring cleanin’, like. I didn’t think that young families did stuff like that any more. We haven’t had time to go through the car yet.
”

  Louise Jasinski nodded at Roger Lindström, nicknamed Roggy, who was in charge of the canine unit. He addressed the room.

  “Well, we’ve covered a large area of about two miles radius in all directions.”

  And that was it. Rogge was more for a worker than a talker, as everyone knew.

  “And?” said Jasinski.

  “We haven’t found her. It’s as if she’s disappeared into thin air. Either that or he’s buried her deep down.”

  That was all they could get from him. Claes liked Roggy. Tough and a little prickly, like a juniper bush. A typical good person.

  “There are many more people left to question,” said Martin Lerde, taking the conch back. “Neighbors normally see and hear things, but in this case they seem not to have noticed anything. We’ll continue to work on it.”

  “That male colleague who she was with when the attempted strangulation took place… ?” wondered Claesson.

  “Has an alibi. First off, his own wife in the morning, who works, incidentally, in a carpet shop, and who was probably that psycho’s intended target. But she can’t make head nor tail of it, she says, and knows nothing about any rug. All she knew was that her husband had had a so-called ‘friend’ over to visit… she picked that up pretty quickly. She doesn’t seem that bright. Annelie Daun’s her name. Anyway, we’ve given her a security phone and an alarm pendant to wear. We haven’t yet reached the point where we judge her personal safety to be so at risk that she needs police protection or to be placed in a secure apartment.”

  Claesson and Özen looked at each other.

  “Carpets here, rugs there, could there be a link between them all?” wondered Louise Jasinski, raising her eyebrows.

  “I don’t know, but I want all the reports on my desk ASAP,” said Claesson, struck by a sense that the right hand had absolutely no idea what the left was doing. At the station, that is, this time.

  Berg, Lerde, and Grahn nodded obligingly.

  “Are Annelie Daun and her husband giving each other alibis somehow for the time of Tina Rosenkvist’s disappearance?” he asked.

  “They are,” said Peter Berg. “But we’ll have to see… we’re not done with them yet.”

  “Now we want to hear about Istanbul!” interjected Louise Jasinski.

  It was as if Claesson and Özen had both run out of oomph. They wanted to work, not talk. But Claesson gave a dutiful account of what they’d found out.

  “So how do they operate?” wondered Conny Larsson.

  “Like us, pretty much,” said Claesson. “It’s actually quite interesting how you can step into some place far away from your own domains and still feel at home. Anyway, we’ve got a lot to get to grips with here at home. We’ll have to see if it gives us anything. We’ll probably need a car today. Is it OK to take an unmarked one from the pool?”

  Jasinski nodded.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Maybe to Stockholm. We’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 51

  CLAESSON AND ÖZEN took a morning break with the others in the lunchroom. Claesson coffee, Özen tea.

  They then went up to Claesson’s office, and he closed the window that he’d left open slightly to clear the room of an entire week’s stuffiness.

  “What’s our best tactic now, do you reckon?” said Claesson. “Shall we go to Stockholm on the off chance and put the squeeze on that Öberg guy, or…”

  “Yeah, dunno,” said Özen, irresolutely. “What about the carpet shop girl?”

  “Good idea! We’ll go there first.”

  Claesson checked the time. Soon half past ten.

  “If we’re lucky she opens up at ten.”

  His jacket was too thin, he felt, as they stepped onto Slottsgatan. As they crossed Lilla Torget Square he saw some young women, still teenagers he guessed, shivering as they walked in the opposite direction. They had on tight jeans that ended above the ankles and no socks with their flat ballerina shoes. He assumed they were refusing to accept that the late spring and imminent summer had taken a pause. Like in the old nursery rhyme about the hepatica that stands alone in the grass, curtseys and says, “It’s spring at last!”

  They arrived and climbed the few steps on the corner and opened the door. The woman called Annelie Daun gave a little jump. They didn’t need to ask if they’d startled her.

  He introduced himself and Mustafa Özen in a calm and collected manner. She nodded and said that she remembered them both very well from the first time they came into the shop. She smiled stiffly, on her guard.

  “The thing is that my wife brought in a rug for repair here. Her name’s Veronika Lundborg,” he began.

  Annelie Daun launched immediately into an apology. “I… I’m really sorry,” she stammered, “but there’s been a hang-up at the repairer’s in Stockholm. He’s not finished with it yet, I’m afraid!”

  She clearly didn’t know what had happened. Claes waited a moment, giving her a chance to change her mind, to stop lying. He could see her face quickly changing color from a rather becoming pre-summer tan to a pinkish red, which spread far down her throat, clashing horribly with her light green top with its plunging neckline.

  “The rug’s currently at the police station,” he said at last, and studied her reaction.

  Her eyes widened, she swallowed and then her eyes began to flit about violently, unsure of where to attach themselves. On a loribaft, mahal, ingelas, kashan, or whatever these rugs and carpets might be called. She’d stuck small labels to them declaring their names and provenances, he noted. She was making improvements. She clearly had plans for the place.

  “Come on, the truth now,” he said at last.

  “God, I’ve been so stupid…”

  She sank down onto the chair behind the desk and, placing her elbows on the cherry-wood top, hid her face in her hands. She remained sitting like that for some time.

  Özen hung around by the door while Claesson went to sit on the probably antique armchair with its upholstered seat – an interesting weave decorated with tigers, lions and other felines – which was standing by the wall next to one of the windows.

  Annelie Daun began to collect herself, and slowly lifted her head.

  “It was probably a man who took the rug,” she said finally. “I think so, but I didn’t dare go to the police… and that was stupid, I realize that now… The truth always comes out eventually. But I thought it might come back. The rug, I mean. I was afraid that the shop would get a bad reputation, now that Carl-Ivar’s been murdered and everything! That’s bad enough… Although we have been quite busy since then.”

  Claesson looked at her inquiringly.

  “Business has actually been unusually good.” She shrugged. “Maybe because people are curious.”

  He asked her to account for what happened when the rug disappeared. And she told him how the rug was there rolled up in its plastic wrapping when the door had been opened, but she didn’t make it up from the basement in time, and when she did the rug was nowhere to be seen!

  She told him also that a man had turned up a few days earlier asking after Carl-Ivar, and that she’d seen the same man walking along the pavement when she was going to the post office to pick up Claes and Veronika’s rug.

  “A lovely Anatolian prayer mat,” she added and smiled. “You must get it back, of course!”

  He nodded. The boys back at the station should hear this. An expert opinion. Their rug was lovely. So there!

  “Maybe the man followed me when I went to the post office to pick it up,” she said, developing her line, and Claesson could tell she’d thought it through.

  She excused herself, snuffled, and, needing to blow her nose, dashed downstairs to the bathroom.

  But it was the wrong rug he’d grabbed, thought Claesson. So he dumped it in a dumpster that happened to belong to a house with a side entrance from Besvärsgatan. No one in the house had thrown away a rug, his colleagues had already ascertained that.

  Had it been the nearest dumpster?
Did the man live around there, or did he just happen to be walking past? There weren’t that many apartments in this particular quarter in the heart of town, mostly shops, he thought. Unless the man lived in one of the idyllic houses in Besväret, of course.

  They should do some door-knocking, he and Özen. But he balked at the thought. The time was long gone when he did that kind of groundwork. Time consuming, it was. But it wasn’t without its merits. Systematic work always paid off, he knew that in his guts. Maybe he could put Özen onto it, he thought, or ask Louise to give him a few more officers.

  When Annelie Daun returned, he asked her to describe the man while he took notes. About thirty-five, ordinary, a rather long body, short-legged in other words, bow-legged too, nice-looking, had a pleasant manner, perhaps there was something of the salesman about him, she said.

  Claesson sighed quietly to himself. How many people didn’t match this description?

  “He sounded as if he came from further north, from Norrköping,” she said then.

  That fleshed things out a bit.

  “He obviously took the wrong rug. Which one do you think he was after?” he asked, and fixed his hopefully penetrating blue eyes on her equally blue ones.

  Annelie Daun sat down again, and jammed her hands between her knees.

  “I haven’t got a clue, to be honest.”

  “The carpet dealer in Istanbul said that Olsson had bought a fine antique from him, the one that we found the photo of here in the shop the first day we came. A shabby old thing. Remember it?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Claesson took out the photocopy and showed her and she nodded in recognition.

  “Oh, that one, yes, of course.”

  “Do you think that the man who took… er… my rug was really after this one?”

  “But how should I know that? If he was, he must have expected someone to have brought it here from Istanbul. And it’s not here, I promise you… Carl-Ivar himself was probably going to take it home to his place, but he… Or…”