The Spring Tide (10 page)

But he refrained from other activities.

She knew her husband well enough to know that.

They were still in love with each other and had a good sex life. Not that frequent, but fully satisfactory when it finally went bang.

‘Satisfactory’, she thought. What a word for sex. And smiled, just when Bertil looked at her. He was looking good today. A tie in a muted purple, simple black suit, elegant, his hand-sewn Italian number. The only thing she didn’t like was the shirt. All blue with a white collar. That was more or less the ugliest item of clothing she could imagine. For several years she had waged quite a campaign against that sort of shirt.

Without success.

Some things were deeper than scars. For Bertil, it was a blue shirt with a white collar. It was a sort of archetypical emblem for him. It signalled a belonging that she herself felt very alien to.

Timeless class.

So he thought.

Absolutely ridiculous, in her opinion. And ugly.

Bertil received his award directly from the King’s hand. He bowed slightly here and there, glanced at Linn and gave her a wink. Hope his bladder stays under control, she thought. This is not exactly a good moment to go looking for the toilet.

‘Champagne!’

A number of rented white jackets sailed around with trays full of well-chilled Grande Cuvée. Linn and Bertil each took a glass and raised them.

That was when it rang.

Or, rather, vibrated. The mobile in Bertil’s pocket.

He withdrew a little with his champagne glass, fished up his mobile answered it.

‘Magnuson.’

A dialogue could be heard in the mobile. Fairly short, but – for Magnuson – shocking. An excerpt from a recorded conversation.

The dialogue was cut off.

Bertil lowered the mobile after a couple of seconds, with a decidedly numb arm. He knew exactly when that conversation had taken place and he knew exactly who the voices belonged to.

Nils Wendt and Bertil Magnuson.

The last line had been his own.

What he hadn’t known, was that the conversation had been recorded.

‘A toast! Bertil!’

The King raised his glass to Bertil. With supreme effort he raised his own and forced his mouth into a sort of smile.

A desperate smile.

Linn reacted immediately. His bladder? She quickly took a couple of steps and smiled.

‘If the King can excuse us, I must kidnap my husband a few minutes.’

‘But of course, of course.’

The King did not stand on ceremony. Especially when faced with a cerise beauty like Linn Magnuson.

So the cerise beauty took her obviously preoccupied husband aside.

‘Bladder?’ she whispered.

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘Come along.’

Just like an efficient wife should behave when her husband goes down, she took command and led him to a not too distant toilet where he sneaked in like a shadow of his old self.

Linn waited outside.

Which was probably lucky, for a very simple reason.

Bertil did not empty his bladder.

He bent down over the toilet bowl and vomited. The dainty sandwiches as well as the champagne and his breakfast toast with marmalade all came up.

The big player had shrunk.

The passenger on the seat next to her explained how unfortunate it was that the seats were so close together, considering how germs fly hither and thither through the air. Olivia agreed. She also did her best to smother her mouth and nose when she couldn’t help releasing a hefty sneeze, and tried to turn away as best she could. And she wasn’t very successful. Sometime around Linköping, the passenger moved to another seat.

Olivia remained where she was, on the X2000 express. She had a pain in her chest and felt that her forehead was alarmingly hot. She had spent an hour on her mobile and perhaps another thirty minutes making notes. Then her thoughts had turned to the conversation in Strömstad and to Jackie Berglund… ‘Sailing’s not exactly my thing.’ And what was your thing then, Jackie? she wondered. To be rented out on a fancy yacht to be fucked by Norwegians? While a young woman was buried in the sand fifteen minutes away from your orgies. Or what?

Or what? Suddenly an entirely different thought popped up inside Olivia’s feverish head.

What did she know about the drowned woman?

She suddenly realised how much she had been coloured by the fact that nobody knew anything. About the ‘poor’ victim. And how that had created an image of a helpless young woman who was subjected to horrifyingly evil treatment.

What if it wasn’t like that at all?

Nobody knew anything about the victim after all.

Not even her name.

What if she had been rented out too? A call girl.

But she was pregnant!

Calm down now, Olivia, there are limits.

Or are there? At college they had had a lesson about porn sites. About how they were organised, how hard it was to trace them, how hard it was to… pregnant women! Here and there, not infrequently, among the billions of porn films that were churned out, there were special sites for ‘Looking for a bit of kinky stuff?’ and ‘Fucking pregnant women?’

She remembered that she had found that even more
repulsive
that the rest. Sex with donkeys or dinosaurs, fine, that was just ridiculous. But buying sex with women in the final stage of pregnancy?

There was a market for it, unfortunately.

That was a reality.

What if the victim on the beach had been one of Jackie’s mates? Rented out precisely on account of her being pregnant. And then something went wrong on that fancy yacht and ended with the murder.

Then again! … and now her feverish imagination was in
overdrive
… then again perhaps one of the Norwegians was the father of the child and she refused to have an abortion? She and Jackie might have had sex with those Norwegians on other occasions and then the victim had got preggers and tried to blackmail the Norwegian and then it all blew up and they killed her?

At that point, her mobile rang.

It was her mum. She wanted to invite Olivia to dinner.

‘This evening?’

‘Yes. Have you got anything else on?’

‘Just now I’m sitting on a train from Göteborg and…’

‘When do you arrive?’

‘At about five-ish, then I need to…’

‘But you don’t sound too good? Are you ill?’

‘I’ve got a bit of a…’

‘Have you got a fever?’

‘Perhaps, I haven’t…’

‘Is your throat swollen?’

‘A bit.’

In five seconds, Maria’s worried questions had taken Olivia all the way back to when she was five. She was ill and her mum was worried about her.

‘What time?’

‘Seven,’ said Maria.

The esplanade on Strandgatan is very beautiful. Seen from the water, it is an impressive mixture of old architecture stretching
out along the tree-lined street. Specially if you raise your eyes and look up at the roofs. All those eccentric towers and corners and brickwork. A respectable face to the world.

What hides behind that face is another matter.

The beauty of the street was hardly foremost in Bertil Magnuson’s mind as he walked along the quay. At a safe distance from anyone he called Pigge and Mygge and Tusse. His slightly concerned wife had dropped him off at Nybroplan at the beginning of Strandgatan after he had firmly reassured her that everything was okay now. It had just been a bit too much with the ceremony and the king and those chanting demonstrators outside.

‘I’m all right now,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. I need to think about a contract that we’re going to negotiate on Wednesday, I want to walk a little.’

He often did that when he needed to think something through, so Linn dropped him off and drove on.

Bertil was decidedly overwrought as he walked along. He had immediately understood who lay behind that taped conversation on his mobile.

Nils Wendt.

At one time a very close friend. A musketeer. One of the three who stuck together through thick and thin at the Stockholm School of Economics back in the Sixties. The third was Erik Grandén, now a very senior man at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The trio had seen themselves as modern versions of Dumas’ heroes. They even had the same motto as the musketeers.

That was as far as their imagination would stretch.

But they were convinced that they would astound the world. At any rate, parts of it.

And they succeeded.

Grandén became a political wunderkind and chairman of the youth section of the Moderate Alliance party when he was only
twenty-six. Magnuson himself and Wendt started MWM – Magnuson Wendt Mining. This soon became a bold and successful prospecting company in Sweden as well as abroad.

Then things started going a bit wrong.

Not for the company. That expanded, globally and
financially
and was floated on the Stock Exchange after a few years. But things started to go wrong for Wendt. Or the relationship between Bertil and Wendt. That went wrong. And it ended with Wendt disappearing from the picture. And ‘Wendt’ was changed to ‘World’ – Magnuson World Mining.

And now Wendt was back.

With an extremely unpleasant conversation between him and Bertil. A conversation that Bertil had had no idea had been recorded, but which he immediately understood the scope of. If it were to become public then Bertil Magnuson’s time as a big player was over.

On every level.

He glanced up at Grevegatan. He had been born just near there, at an impeccable address. He could hear the Hedvig Eleanora church bells from his nursery. He was born into an industrial family. His father and uncle had founded the firm. Adolf and Viktor. The Magnuson Brothers. They had built up a small but strong mining company, had an excellent nose for minerals and gone from small local
quarries
to international mining. Over the years, they had put the family company on the world map and provided Bertil with a springboard of a share portfolio out into the business world.

Bertil had his own ideas. He had bold visions. He helped to manage the family company but at the same time saw that there were completely different markets to exploit apart from the traditional ones. The ones the brothers upheld.

Exotic markets.

Difficult markets.

Which meant wheeling and dealing with all manner of
autocratic
potentates. People with whom the brothers would never have mixed. But times change and fathers and brothers die. As soon as Adolf and Viktor were buried, Bertil started a subsidiary.

With the help of Nils Wendt.

The extremely gifted Wendt. One of the musketeers. A genius when it came to prospecting and mineral analyses and market structures. All the things that Bertil was less good at. Together, they became industrial pioneers in numerous parts of the world. Asia. Australia. And above all: Africa. Until things went wrong and Wendt suddenly vanished, because of something extremely unpleasant that Bertil had repressed since then. Sublimated. Transformed into a non-event.

But Nils Wendt hadn’t done that.

Evidently.

Because it must have been Nils who had phoned and played that recorded conversation. There was no other possible explanation.

Bertil was convinced of that.

When he had walked as far at the bridge over to Djurgården, he had silently formulated his first question: what the hell was Wendt after? And his second question: more money? And just as he was about to formulate his third question: where is he?, his mobile rang again.

Bertil held it in front of him, or down by his thigh, people were coming and going all around him, many of them with dogs, it was that sort of pathway. He pressed the answer button and put the phone to his ear.

Without saying anything.

Silence.

‘Hello?’

It was Erik Grandén. The busy tweeter who had hoped to find a barber in Brussels. Bertil immediately recognised his voice.

‘Hello, Erik.’

‘Congratulations on your award!’

‘Thank you.’

‘How was the king? On good form?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nice, nice. Having an after-party now?’

‘No, I… we’ll do that this evening. Did you find a barber?’

‘Not yet, the one I wanted was busy. Strange. But I’ve been tipped off about a salon that I hope I can find time to call in at before the morning plane. I’ll be in touch over the weekend! Say hello to Linn!’

‘Thanks. Bye.’

Bertil hung up and thought about Erik. Grandén. The third musketeer. A big player too, in his own field. With a gigantic contact web in Sweden as well as abroad.

‘Put him on the board.’

It was actually Bertil’s mother who had said that, after his father had died, when Bertil described his friend Erik’s tentacles which reach out everywhere.

‘But he doesn’t know anything about mining,’ Bertil said.

‘You don’t either. What you can do is to surround yourself with people who do know. The right people. You are good at that. Put him on the board.’

The second time she said it, Bertil realised that it was an absolutely brilliant idea. Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? You don’t see the wood for the trees. Erik had been too close, both as a friend and a musketeer. Of course Erik should sit on the board of MWM.

And so it became.

Erik found himself on the board. A bit of a case of helping a friend, on Erik’s part, to start with. But since, over the years, he had bought quite a hefty number of shares in the company, he could just as well take a little responsibility for it too. He could always pull a few strings that Bertil couldn’t get at. He was, after all, Erik Grandén.

And so it went on, for many years, until Erik had advanced to such a high level in the political world that a post on the board became rather sensitive. In a private company. One which, besides, was subject to rather a lot of criticism in the media.