‘Don’t know him,’ the man at the second stall said, and turned his back on her.
Valter grasped Annika’s arm and pulled her away. ‘How about I give it a try? They might find it easier to talk to someone like them.’ He turned his collar up against the wind.
She blinked, taken aback. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You know, another immigrant.’
‘I think these guys are Kurds. You’re not Kurdish, are you?’
‘No, Iranian, but I can pass as all manner of things … Kurdish, Arabic, South American …’
‘With that accent? From the very smartest bit of Östermalm?’
He clenched his teeth and looked at the ground, visibly hurt.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean …’ She took a step back. ‘Go ahead, I’ll follow you.’
They walked back in among the stalls, passing the two men Annika had already spoken to and moving further in. Valter stopped a man selling knitted children’s clothes with garish patterns, and asked for Abdullah Mustafa. The man pointed at a man in a cap who was busy unloading boxes of French beans from the back of a Volvo van.
Valter walked up to him. ‘Abdullah Mustafa?’
The man in the cap put his box down and looked up.
‘My name’s Valter Wennergren,’ Valter said, in his drawling Stockholm accent, holding out his hand. ‘Sorry to disturb you when you’re working, I’m from the Evening Post newspaper and I was wondering if I could have a few words with you. Can I get you a cup of coffee?’
The man shook Valter’s hand, wary but not dismissive. ‘A few words about what?’
‘The same thing everyone else has been asking you about recently,’ Valter said. ‘That car you sold to a rich woman a hundred years ago.’
Amusement flashed across Abdullah Mustafa’s face, then he turned away. ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’
Annika watched Valter. He clearly wasn’t about to let Abdullah Mustafa go now that he’d found him.
‘I understand,’ Valter said. ‘It was such a long time ago.’
The man spun round and looked straight at him. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want to talk.’
Valter shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to talk. What are you afraid of?’
‘I’m not afraid.’
‘No?’
The men stared at each other for a moment.
‘I need to unload these,’ Abdullah Mustafa said, nodding towards the van.
‘I can wait,’ Valter said, taking a step back.
Abdullah Mustafa turned towards the boxes. A few minutes later he had finished. He closed the door and looked at Valter. ‘I need to get the van out of the way. I’ll see you at Kahramane in ten minutes,’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘Kahramane?’ Annika said, but Abdullah Mustafa had already driven off.
Valter gave her a slightly desperate look. ‘We can find it, can’t we? There can’t be that many places called Kahra … Kama …’
Annika took her mobile out, Googled ‘karamane’ and got 40,600 results. She added ‘skärholmen’ and got one: Welcome to Kahramane Restaurant on Bredholmsgatan, just outside the shopping centre!
‘It’s often a good idea to ask for the address,’ Annika said. ‘This way.’
Valter trudged after her as she headed back into the mall. They passed chemists, clothes stores and a hobby shop – a man tried to get them to sign up to a cheap and completely useless mobile operator – and then they were out the other side. In front of them was the Kahramane restaurant. Above the door a sign showed a beautiful sunset, and some Arabic or Kurdish writing, Annika couldn’t tell which. Valter pulled the door open, walked straight up to the counter and ordered a chicken shawarma with fries and all the trimmings.
‘We’ve only just eaten,’ Annika pointed out.
‘Yeah, salad,’ Valter snorted, popping a piece of chicken into his mouth.
They sat down at one of the little tables. There were a few men in the far corner, talking quietly with their heads close together, but otherwise the place was empty. A television on the wall above their heads was blaring out an Iraqi music channel. Beautiful men and women sang pop songs in an unfamiliar key – it was evidently some sort of chart run-down.
Valter had already managed to eat most of his chicken by the time Abdullah Mustafa came in. He greeted the staff behind the counter and got himself a cup of coffee without paying. ‘So what do you want to know?’ he said, glancing suspiciously at Annika.
‘This is my colleague,’ Valter said, nodding towards her. ‘We’d like to talk about the woman who bought your car.’
The man took his cap off, smoothed his hair down and took a seat opposite them. ‘There was nothing unusual about it. I put an advert in the paper saying I wanted to sell my Volvo 245. She rang up. She was actually the only person who called. It was pretty old, three hundred thousand kilometres on the clock – I have to drive a lot for work, get vegetables for the stall … She said her name was Harriet Johansson. She showed me her driving licence. It said Harriet Johansson and a couple of other names, but it checked out. It was her.’
Valter wasn’t taking any notes, and Annika wondered for a moment if she should get her pen and pad out, but decided against it.
‘Then there was loads of stuff in the papers when Viola Söderland disappeared,’ Valter said. ‘You didn’t recognize her as the woman who had bought your car?’
The man shook his head. ‘I don’t read the papers much, just the Metro occasionally. I didn’t really think about it.’
‘So she bought the car straight away?’
‘She took it for a test drive, then bought it. It was very quick. She paid cash, five thousand. I was very happy. It was a good car but the mileage was high, and it was pretty rusty.’
‘And when was this?’
‘In the summer, June. I wanted to get rid of it during the summer because the winter tyres were worn out.’
So Viola Söderland had bought the car three months before she disappeared, Annika thought.
‘I filled in the form about a change of ownership and she signed it, then said she’d post it. I didn’t think any more about it. I bought a new car, a Ford, but it was nowhere near as good as the Volvo so now I only drive Volvos.’
‘When was the next time you heard about the car?’ Valter asked. ‘When Anders Schyman contacted you?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘When the police called me.’
‘The police?’
‘The Finnish police. The car was left parked outside Kuusamo, on the Russian border, with the keys in the ignition.’
Annika wished she could write all this down: it was new.
Abdullah Mustafa nodded to himself. ‘It had been there for a fortnight. That was when I realized she hadn’t sent off the change-of-ownership form. The car was still mine.’
‘What happened to it?’
‘I got it back.’
Annika and Valter stared at him.
‘Have you still got it?’ Valter asked.
The man shuffled on his chair. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I sold it at once. I only got three thousand the second time, but that was still good. It didn’t have any winter tyres.’
‘What condition was it in? Had it been knocked about, dented?’
‘No, it was the same as when I sold it. Nice and clean, just rusty.’
Why hadn’t he mentioned this before? Or had he?
Annika hesitated. Should she intervene in the conversation? Ask if he’d seen the documentary about Viola? Or would she only spoil things?
‘When you got the car back,’ Valter said, ‘was it empty?’
‘Empty?’
‘Was there anything inside the car that wasn’t there when you sold it?’
The man seemed to slump. The chart show above their heads started from the beginning again.
‘It was empty. Well, almost empty. There was one thing. A case.’
Valter and Annika sat without speaking, waiting for him to
go on.
‘In the boot,’ Abdullah Mustafa said. ‘There was a compartment at the back of the car, under the floor, for storing the jack and spanners … It was in there, under a blanket.’
‘A case?’ Valter said.
‘A little one – a briefcase. Leather. Thin.’
Annika felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Anders Schyman hadn’t heard about this, she was sure. ‘Did you look inside it?’
The man hesitated. ‘There was nothing valuable. Just old stuff. I put it back inside.’
‘What did you do with the case?’
The man took a deep breath. ‘I thought she might have left it there by accident, Harriet Johansson, so I kept it. But she never called.’
‘Where is it now?’
He thought for a moment. ‘In the garage, I think.’
‘You’ve still got it?’
‘I don’t think I ever got rid of it.’
‘Could we take a look at it?’
The man peered at his watch. ‘I’ve got to take a delivery out to Botkyrka, but we should have time.’
*
Mum taught me to knit. First casting on, then pulling the wool through the back loop, one after another, until the row was finished and I could turn it round and start again. Plain knitting, ribbing, then crochet, it was completely magical, the way the long thread from the ball of wool could become something so completely different, and I was responsible for the change. I was the one creating it all.
It was almost like being God, I said.
Mum laughed at me. It was back when she still laughed – but then she stopped laughing, and I stopped being God.
*
‘Under the jack?’
Schyman looked suspiciously at the leather briefcase Annika Bengtzon had placed on his desk: light brown and dusty, smelling of engine oil.
‘It was Valter who persuaded Abdullah Mustafa to let us take it,’ she said.
He glanced through his glass wall: the trainee was sitting in Berit Hamrin’s place, his attention focused on his mobile phone. ‘And it’s been kept in a garage?’
‘For almost twenty years,’ Annika said.
‘What’s inside it?’
‘You’re welcome to open it and take a look,’ she said.
He clenched his fists, feeling his fingernails dig into his palms. Then he reached for the case, undid the brass lock and opened the lid. Carefully he put his hand inside and pulled out the first thing he found: a thin folder. His fingers were trembling as he opened it at the first page.
It was a wedding photograph.
God, it was her – it really was Viola, a smiling young woman with sixties hair and a short white wedding dress, the bridegroom in a trendy suit with impressive sideburns. He swallowed hard.
‘I presume that’s Viola and her husband,’ Annika Bengtzon said.
Schyman blew his nose. ‘Olof Söderland,’ he said, sounding choked. ‘They married young, both in their teens.’ He leafed through the album slowly, almost respectfully.
On the next page were studio pictures of two babies laughing at the camera: a blond boy in knitted dungarees and a red-haired girl with a bow in her hair and a lace dress.
He took a deep breath and coughed. ‘Henrik and Linda,’ he said.
Viola Söderland’s children had been born just a year apart – they must be around forty-five now.
He turned another page. More pictures of the two children, at the beach, next to Christmas trees, school photographs, the girl on a horse, the boy with swimming goggles standing on a podium, school graduation pictures. In all there were twenty or so photographs in the album.
‘The pictures were carefully chosen,’ Annika said.
He nodded. ‘She took the children with her when she left.’
He felt for the next item in the case, more confident now.
A pair of child’s shoes, white, with pink laces.
The girl’s, no doubt. She was the eldest: the first child’s first pair of shoes.
Next: a bundle of letters, tied with a red ribbon.
‘I read a few,’ Annika said. ‘They’re love letters from Olof to Viola when she was training to be a teacher.’
He ran his fingers over them, then put them down.
A plastic bag containing two locks of hair, one blond, the other ginger. He felt them through the plastic and they slipped out of his fingers. He looked at the items spread out on his desk. What would you rescue from a burning house?
‘There’s one more thing,’ the reporter said.
He turned the case upside down. A discoloured leather wallet fell onto the desk. He shook the briefcase, looked inside it, felt all round the lining. There was an internal pocket but it was empty.
He felt a pang of disappointment – was that all?
He picket up the wallet and sniffed it. What had he been expecting? A recent photograph and a note of her current address?
‘That must have been in water or a fire or something,’ Annika said.
He inspected the wallet. The leather was stained with something brown and dried-in, definitely a man’s. There was still money inside, five-kronor notes, with Gustav Vasa on one side and a capercaillie on the other, ten-kronor notes, with Gustav VI Adolf on them, a hundred-kronor note, with Gustav II Adolf, all long since obsolete, and all discoloured along the top edge. In another pocket a black sleeve contained a driving licence from the 1970s, with a red stamp to the value of thirty-five kronor, and a photograph of a handsome young man with shoulder-length hair. It had been issued in the name of Olof Söderland.
‘Viola was a widow,’ Schyman said. ‘Did you know that?’
Annika shook her head. Schyman looked at the picture of the young man, the bottom left corner covered with a red stamp that hid part of his chin.
‘Her husband died in a car crash when the children were small. This must be his wallet.’
‘She never remarried?’
Olof Söderland had a fringe and full lips. His eyes weren’t looking at the camera but at something to one side. Perhaps he had had his wallet in his inside pocket when he died.
‘No.’
‘You realize what this points to?’ Annika said. ‘All the things in this case that was left in that car?’
He closed the driving licence and put it back in the wallet, then gathered the things together and returned them to the briefcase.
‘This briefcase says several things,’ Schyman said, closing the brass lock. ‘Viola prepared for her flight and wasn’t planning to come back. She took her dearest memories with her and hid them in the car where no one would find them.’
Annika nodded. ‘True. But she didn’t take them with her when she abandoned the car.’
He put the case in the middle of the desk and didn’t respond.
‘She was planning to live, but I don’t think she succeeded,’ Annika added.
His whirring mind came to an abrupt halt. What if he had been wrong? What if everything had been a huge mistake, and she had been dead all along?
She shifted on her chair. ‘It’s difficult trying to work on this when I’m not being given all the facts.’
His mouth had dried. ‘What do you mean?’
Her eyes narrowed, the way they sometimes did. ‘You don’t have to tell me who the source was,’ she said, ‘just how you came to have the information.’
He shut his eyes and could see the man in front of him: his thin, dark-blond hair, his rather uneven front teeth, his bulging stomach. ‘I honestly don’t know his name,’ he said. ‘He never told me. He gave me the information on the condition that I never revealed I had got it from someone else.’
‘And you promised.’
He sighed. ‘I promised. And now I’m breaking that promise.’
‘And what did he tell you?’
‘Everything. The car, the coat lining, the Cayman Islands – the lot.’
‘And the picture from the petrol station?’
He looked at the floor. ‘And the p
icture from the petrol station,’ he conceded.
‘There’s someone standing to the right of the picture, in a pale jacket. Was that him?’
‘I don’t know. Possibly.’
‘Did you know that the car had been found at the Russian border?’ she said.
‘I did,’ Schyman said, ‘but I never got it confirmed. The car had been scrapped by the time I made the programme. Abdullah Mustafa claimed he didn’t know what had happened to it, so I left that detail out.’
‘He sold the car twice,’ Annika said. ‘He was terrified he’d done something wrong and was going to be thrown out of Sweden.’
He could feel her eyes drilling into him.
‘You realize you could have been the victim of a planted story,’ she said. It was a statement of fact.
‘There was a very active search for Viola Söderland in those first few years, wasn’t there?’ she went on. ‘After all, she owed the state loads of tax. Could the police have been getting close to the truth? Was there someone who didn’t like that? Could your television programme have been a way to get the authorities to look in the wrong place?’
The possibility had occurred to him – he wasn’t born yesterday. But the logical conclusion had reassured him: if someone wanted to stop the authorities looking for Viola Söderland, they would have tried to persuade him that she was dead, not that she was still alive.
Annika stood up and put her hand on the briefcase. ‘What are we going to do with this?’
He remained seated, clutching the arms of his chair with his hands. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think we should contact Viola’s children and ask if they want it. Unless we should give it to the police?’
Both options made his brain short-circuit, and he flew up from his chair. ‘Not the police, and not Viola’s children!’ he shouted. ‘All of this is their fault! They’re saying I made the programme to stop them getting their inheritance! Have you seen what they’ve said today? That I caused Linda to have a miscarriage – that I killed her baby!’
She was staring at him again, with those narrowed eyes. ‘I haven’t seen them make any statement anywhere,’ she said. ‘Maybe they aren’t behind this at all. Maybe it’s all the invention of that lunatic. His name’s Lars, by the way.’
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