The officers laughed politely and Inspector Colander blushed. Tord Tordsson turned to Toff Toffsson, fumbling in the top pocket of his uniform for his billfold. He passed him a ten-Kroner note.
‘Toffsson, take this and nip down to the shops and get in a couple of cartons of Umbongo, will you? For our lady guest.’
Mma Ontoaste thought perhaps her snakebite might ache if she were about to be offered a carton of Umbongo. This was an undeniably less useful quirk, it was true, but it would always be welcome. She quickly explained that Umbongo was from the Congo, of course, while she was from Botswana, where they ordinarily drank bush tea, except that today, after such an adventure, she was very keen to try some of the local akvavit or the flaggpunsch that she had heard so much about.
‘Wait a minute,’ said one of the officers, shouldering his way to the front of the group. It was Nog Noggsson, secretary of the Ingmar Bergman Film Club, and a man who had always been against allowing anybody not from Scandinavia to do almost anything. He was a bulky man of about 60, with messy white hair, a lined handsome face and dark eyes. He was wearing an anorak.
‘We cannot allow you into the conference room to watch the film. I am sorry but there are rules.’
Lemmingsson explained the situation with the film.
‘I am still against it,’ said Nogbad confrontationally. ‘This is the sort of erosion of values that has let in the far Right to our country and led directly – directly – to the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme.’
The police officers shifted from foot to foot and looked askance.
‘Oh, bollocks,’ said one after a pause. ‘Sweden’s fine. Much better than most other countries, even if we never managed to solve that case.’
‘Yeah, shut up, you windbag,’ chimed in another. ‘Always going on and on about all this stuff that never happens anyway. Listening to you, anyone would think we had one of the highest crime rates in the world and all we ever did was murder one another.’
‘Yeah. Just because it rains now and again and can get dark early at night.’
It was decided that they should ignore Nog Noggsson and that Mma Ontoaste and Tom Hurst could have honorary membership of the Ingmar Bergman Film Club, so long as they were not actually watching an Ingmar Bergman film, which Mma Ontoaste thought did not really go far enough but Tom Hurst accepted on the grounds that he would probably never be in such a situation again.
Lemm Lemmingsson had done well to find two extra chairs and to arrange the room so that Mma Ontoaste sat towards the back of the room with Burt Colander on her right and Tord Tordsson on her left. Tom Hurst was given a seat on the right with an obstructed view of the television. Refreshments in the form of beer and pickled herrings were handed out, the lights were turned down, and the film was just about to begin, when Tordsson asked after Knut Knutsson.
‘Has anyone seen Knut Knutsson?’ he asked. Lemmingsson went off to see if he was in his office but returned a few minutes later with a confused look on his face.
‘It is true Knut Knutsson may be a well-thought-of police officer from Stockholm, but he is not in his office even though his music was playing on a radio.’
‘A radio?’ asked Mma Ontoaste.
‘Yes. An old one with a coat-hanger for an aerial.’
Tom Hurst, in the gloom at the end of the line, saw Mma Ontoaste’s expression quiver.
‘Oh, well,’ said Tordsson. ‘That is his loss. Let’s watch this film that Inspector Colander has found.’
The film began. Although Mma Ontoaste enjoyed it, from the very beginning it was not clear that the film would meet with unanimous approval from the members of the Ingmar Bergman Film Club.
‘Oh, that would never happen,’ said one.
‘No,’ agreed another. ‘It seems most unlikely.’
‘What are they all so angry about?’ asked Tofsson.
‘And why has he not finished painting his face? If you are going to paint your face blue, I think you must do the job properly.’
‘When will Sean Connery arrive, do you know?’
Tom Hurst could not tell with which side the Film Club would sympathise: the outlaws in the Highlands or the better-dressed Englishmen. Nog Noggsson voiced the Film Club’s until that moment unspoken fears.
‘A Society that lives apart, with rules of its own, that consciously rejects the norms of Society, and indeed threatens the status quo of that Society with ribaldry and song and men in tartan skirts might be the most dangerous thing Sweden could face in the future, especially if some of the members of that Society turned out to be Scotch.’
There was a mumbling of agreement.
‘How would we organise ourselves to defeat such a conspiracy?’
No one could offer any sensible answer and after the film the lights went up. There was applause, but also much shaking of heads.
‘I just do not think it could happen.’
‘It could never happen here, at any rate.’
‘It was somewhat implausible, I think.’
Tom Hurst was the first to notice that Mma Ontoaste and Inspector Colander were no longer in their seats. No one had seen them leave but they must have gone together. Tom felt a stab of panic that he had missed something. Could they be investigating while he had just been watching a film? What kind of detective would that make him?
‘Perhaps he has taken her to that pizza joint on Hamngatan that he is always going to?’ suggested Tord Tordsson, quite put out that it had been Colander and not he who had made the first move on Mma Ontoaste.
‘I think he has been banned from there,’ said Lemmingsson. ‘He was always drinking too much and being sick outside the door.’
‘Oh yes, I remember,’ said Tordsson. ‘But this is typical of Colander. He is always going off on his own at the end of his cases. It is as if he needs to prove that he is a maverick, when I believe that the charm of his work lies in the dreary day-to-day stuff.’
‘I agree,’ chipped in Son Sonsson. ‘It is counter-intuitive, I suppose, but I think the moments when he springs into action spoil the cases he works on.’
‘But how else would he end them?’ asked Tom Hurst. ‘It would not be very satisfying if you all finally worked out who the criminal was while you were sitting in this room and then all went out and arrested them, would it?’
‘I agree with this man from England,’ said Nogg Noggsson. ‘Colander has to do something physical at the end, even if all through the case you think of him as the sort of person who, if he had been a dog, kind owners should have had him put down because he is in such ill health.’
‘It is his relationship with women that is the most unusual thing about him, I think,’ said Lemmingsson. ‘He sort of bores them into submission.’
This caused some confusion among the police officers.
‘Well, we all do that,’ muttered one.
There seemed nothing more to say to that.
‘Well, let’s go and find them anyway,’ suggested Tordsson. They found Inspector Colander and Mma Ontoaste after making a few enquiries at the pizzeria on Hamngatan, which, it turned out, Colander had been banned from, but was allowed to take pizzas away so long as he promised to behave and not to vomit too close to the front door. He and Mma Ontoaste had ordered and paid for two jumbo Hawaiians with extra pineapple and twelve bottles of beer and they had got into his car and driven down the hill towards the beach. The police officers, of whom there were by now at least 15, followed the route on foot, drawn by the sound of music and laughter.
When they found the woman from Botswana and the Swedish police inspector, no one spoke for a few minutes. All the officers stood shoulder to shoulder and stared out to sea. Below them Colander had parked the car by the beach, with the headlights pointing outwards, and in the full beam he and Mma Ontoaste were dancing to some music that none of the men recognised that was playing from the car’s stereo. Eventually the song came to a stop and Colander and Ontoaste sensed their audience. They turned and faced the ring of men
standing on the quayside and it was only then that the police officers noticed that the two people on the beach were naked.
‘Colander!’ shouted Tordsson, snatching a megaphone from the back seat of Colander’s car and bellowing into it. ‘You are fired!’
* * *
The next morning Tom Hurst woke up with a headache and a sore neck. He had slept awkwardly on the sofa in ex-Inspector Colander’s sitting room and he had been kept awake by the laughing and other noises coming from across the hallway in the bedroom.
In the kitchen Mma Ontoaste was making coffee.
‘Oh, good morning Rra. I hope you slept well?’ she asked.
‘How could you?’ asked Hurst.
‘I know. I am trying coffee and he is trying bush tea.’
‘That’s not what I am talking about and you know it,’ said the Lecturer. ‘I am talking about you and Inspector Colander.’
‘Ah. Burt. We knew each other in College; did you know that, Rra? We were in the same year. He is a bit older than me, of course, since he was a postgraduate student.’
‘I know all that!’ snapped Tom. How could he forget? They had spent the entire previous evening poring over the many photos that Colander had kept of his years at Cuff College. To begin with, it had been interesting to see the Dean, then a mere Junior Fellow, and Wikipedia in their youth, but Ontoaste and Colander had gone on and on about all the people they remembered. The worst of it was that Tom was sleeping in the sitting room, where all this was going on, so that he could not say goodnight and slip away. And all the time that awful song they kept playing, ‘Seasons in the Sun’.
Still. It gave Tom something to go on. His first thought was that the Dean should have told him that Mma Ontoaste and Colander knew each other. Why didn’t he? Tom could not decide whether their knowing each other was just one of those strange coincidences or merely a detail the Dean considered insignificant. He would have to find out.
At this stage he was looking for reasons why they had been drawn to Sweden. The answer would probably lie in IKEA, of course, as it usually did, but it was as well to have some sort of establishing framework for this avenue of enquiry.
‘But what about Mr JPS Spagatoni?’ asked Tom, returning to Mma Ontoaste, who was now eating some cheese from the fridge. ‘Aren’t you married to him? Isn’t he in hospital?’
‘Ah, that good man. Well. Yes. I am married to him and he is in hospital but the chances are that he is dead by now and anyway, there is an old Botswana saying: north of Suez there aren’t no Ten Commandments. Is there any beer left in that bottle?’
Tom absently passed her the bottle. She pressed the spout to her lips and chugged it back. A huge beery belch erupted a second later. Then ex-Inspector Colander emerged from the bedroom like a bear from his cave. He was wearing a pair of tight pale-blue briefs that made Tom look away and he was scratching his grey-haired chest and groaning horribly.
The flat felt suddenly very small.
The trip to IKEA was accomplished in virtual silence. Tom felt very uncomfortable and opted to sit in the back like the child that Mma Ontoaste and Inspector Colander would never have. Colander had suggested the Malmö branch of IKEA, on the road between Trelleborg and Lund, on the Cederströmsgatan and they came off into the car park at about midday.
‘Just in time for meatballs!’
The Malmö IKEA is like any IKEA anywhere in the world and Tom Hurst, who up until that moment had been feeling like a stranger in a foreign land, knew where he was from the moment they went up the stairs to the restaurant and collected their lunch. Tom paid the bill, but Mma Ontoaste and ex-Inspector Colander each tried to intercept the receipt for their expenses. Colander, playing the role of the gentleman, yielded. As they took their seats, he started expounding his theory of food and detective fiction.
‘Food for the detective is very important, you see, Tom. It is the easiest way to get a readership to identify with, or at least empathise with, someone who might otherwise be a slightly leaden character. Take me, for example. In most of my cases I have behaved repellently – the business of wiping my body on curtains is just one instance – but everybody knows I drink a lot of coffee and everybody drinks coffee too, and so—’
He ended his speech with a charming shrug.
‘And my bush-tea habit, Rra, is famous throughout the land, even though it tastes like hog piss.’
‘You have to have something, Tom, if you want to get on in this game. Swedish meatballs would be as good as anything.’
Tom speared a meatball and found that it was good.
‘Oh yes, Rra. Food matters almost as much as having a sidekick. A sidekick is best if the readership can identify with them, so you have to choose carefully when you are picking a sidekick. When I think about poor old Mma Pollosopresso—’
And here, remembering that good lady, still under Botswana skies, Mma Ontoaste started to cry. Colander patted her hand and took over the conversation.
‘Ideally you are after someone to whom you can talk about the case, so that you needn’t go through so much tiring exposition, and then they get to know the case almost as well as you do, but importantly they must come to slightly less intelligent or insightful conclusions that your own. I use Lemmingsson for this but, to tell you the truth, I think people like my exposition. I am one of the few detectives not afraid to bore people, you see?’
Tom nodded. Mma Ontoaste was recovering herself.
‘Music too matters for some of us,’ continued Colander. ‘I like opera, of course, even though I do not appear to know very much about it.’
‘I don’t like the music bit, Rra,’ said Mma Ontoaste, wiping away some of the tomato juice round her lips. ‘It never works because few writers are good enough to capture in writing the feeling that music creates. You can only do this through atmosphere. I like to talk about the sky, of course, and I love to repeat myself.’
This is interesting, thought Tom, but he had finished his meatballs and was suddenly anxious to get to the bedding department.
‘What do you think you will do now, Rra, that you lost your job?’ asked Mma Ontoaste with a caring look in her eyes. Colander took a long sip of beer as if he were even then only just making his mind up.
‘If you had asked me last week I would have had only two choices: the suicide or the sauna. Now though, someone has come into my life and I think I want to change. To move away from all this Nordic gloom—’
Mma Ontoaste began blushing. She and Colander obviously had a lot in common and were enjoying each other’s company. Tom would have left them to it, but he knew he would need the Inspector’s Swedish when it came to tracking down the mysa måne duvet. After his third cup of coffee the ex-police officer finally hauled himself out from behind the table and they followed Tom along the yellow line, first through the bookcase section, then into the chairs and tables section, to storage and secondary storage and then the children’s section.
All the while Mma Ontoaste cooed with excitement at what she saw. They lost her in the cookware section and instead pressed on through floors, pets, kitchens, kitchen decoration, furniture care, lighting, secondary storage again, and then on to sofas and armchairs, the summer tableware section and the textiles, and then to the beds and mattresses section where they finally found the bedlinen area.
‘What do you hope to find here, Tom, may I ask?’ asked a ruminative Colander.
Tom Hurst had not really thought about this too much. Once he had found the price tag back in Gaborone – it felt like a lifetime ago now – he had just followed his first instinct without giving it too much thought. The flight over to London and then on to Stockholm had been taken up with trying to keep Mma Ontoaste from squashing him in the competing excitements of the window and what the hostesses were doing up and down the aisles. Now, though, as he stood and surveyed all that was on offer in the bedlinen department of the Malmö IKEA, he could not think of a single thing that a duvet might tell him about who had stuck a spear in a woman in a li
brary back in Oxford.
‘Perhaps we will know it when we see it?’ he ventured. Just then Mma Ontoaste pushed a huge trolley full of various pots and pans through the gateway and into the department.
‘My God,’ said Colander. ‘And we have not been to the Marketplace yet.’
Without really knowing what they were looking for then, the three detectives began the last stages of their search for the elusive mysa måne.
Five minutes later they had given up.
‘Let’s ask someone,’ suggested Mma Ontoaste. Colander and Tom exchanged a glance.
‘All right,’ they agreed and walked off in the wrong direction, consciously keeping an eye on Mma Ontoaste as she sought out an assistant. Men, she thought, would, in real life, make terrible detectives. They are always so frightened of asking questions.
She found an assistant by a computer and asked her to look up the mysa måne. As she had predicted, Colander and Tom looked over the assistant’s shoulder at the screen.
‘It costs 179 Kroner,’ added Tom, as the assistant drew her first blank. After another couple of failed attempts the girl – no more than 25 years old – told them that there were none left in the store.
‘What about Helsingborg?’ asked Colander.
The woman tapped away.
‘No. None there. In fact there are none in Sweden.’
None in Sweden? This was a blow.
‘Well,’ began Tom with a falter in his voice. ‘Where are there some?’
The woman’s fingers flew over the keyboard of the computer.
‘They are very popular items. There seems to have been a run on them in the last week and there is only one left for sale anywhere in the world,’ she said.
‘Where?’ asked Tom.
‘Edinburgh. In Scotland.’
All three detectives looked at each other. They knew the score by now. Edinburgh. Scotland.
‘Let’s go,’ all three said together and, as one, they turned and marched out of the store, following the yellow line back through the beds and mattresses section, the textiles section, and the summer tableware section, back through the sofas and armchairs section, the secondary storage, lighting, furniture care, kitchen decoration, kitchens, pets, floors, cookware, children’s, secondary storage, primary storage, chairs and tables, bookcases and finally out into the car park.
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