The Spring Tide (13 page)

Not a system.

But luck, yes there was luck, it could create money at any roulette table anywhere. Especially if you had placed the table’s maximum stake on Zero and the ball had landed there. Which it just had. That gave quite a sum to the gambler. In this case a company director who had had the pouches under his eyes cut away, and who was troubled by a big problem.

Bertil Magnuson pulled in the considerable payout and flipped some across to Abbas, as was customary. He pushed some more of his winnings across to the man next to him. Lars Örnhielm, generally known as Latte. One of the friends in Bertil’s entourage. With a sunbed tan and an Armani suit. Latte happily received the chips and immediately spread them out any old way across the table. Like a free-range hen, Abbas thought.

Then Bertil’s phone vibrated in his pocket.

He had forgotten to turn it off.

Bertil got up while pulling out the mobile, and pushed through away from the vultures behind the players’ backs to find a space further away.

But not so far away that Abbas couldn’t keep an eye on him, like the professional croupier he was. Who saw nothing, but observed everything. Full focus on the gaming table, but faceted eyes which would have made even a wasp envious.

So he saw how Magnuson, one of his regulars, held his mobile against his ear without uttering a word. But with an expression that revealed quite a lot about what he heard.

It was not something he liked.

Abbas found himself thinking about that conversation, later, when he slipped into the Riche bar. Not because it had been particularly long, but because immediately after that phone call Magnuson had left the casino. And left a small fortune on the table and an evidently confounded crony who hadn’t realised that Magnuson had left until he had used all his own chips. Then Latte had understood that he ought to go after him. But before doing that, he attempted to manage Magnuson’s capital in the best possible way, and lost it all in fifteen minutes.

A free-range hen.

Then he left.

It was the phone call that Abbas wondered about. Why had Magnuson disappeared straight after that? What was it all
about? Business? Perhaps, but Magnuson had been one of his regulars long enough for Abbas to know that he wasn’t
reckless
with money. Not stingy, but not somebody who just threw money around. Now he had just abandoned quite a hefty sum on the table.

And simply left.

Abbas ordered a glass of mineral water in the bar and went and stood a bit to the side. He was an observer, thirty-five years old, of Moroccan extraction, childhood in Marseille. In an earlier life he had supported himself as a street vendor of pirate-copy designer handbags. First in Marseille, then in Venice. Following a dramatic incident with a knife at the Ponte di Rialto, he had moved his business to Sweden. Then quite a lot of police water ran under quite different bridges, which ended with Abbas changing his beliefs and his profession, training as a croupier and becoming fascinated by Sufism.

Now he had a permanent job at Casino Cosmopol.

He was a non-committal sort of person, some people would have said, after a quick glance. Slender-limbed, smoothly shaved. He might occasionally apply a thin line of mascara to accentuate his eyes. Always dressed in nice-fitting clothes, always in discreet colours, perfectly tailored. From some distance they looked as if they had been painted directly onto his body.

‘Hi!’

The girl who had had her eye on Abbas for a while was blonde and very sober, and a bit lonely. He looked a bit lonely too, so she thought they could be lonely together.

‘How’s things?’

Abbas looked at the young girl, about nineteen? Perhaps twenty?

‘I am not here,’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘I am not here.’

‘You are not here?’

‘No.’

‘It looks as if you are here.’

The girl smiled a little, hesitantly, and Abbas smiled back. His teeth became extra white against his brown face, his quiet voice remarkably penetrating right through the loud bar music.

‘That’s only what you think,’ he said.

At this point the girl made a quick decision. Difficult guys were not her thing, and this one was definitely a difficult guy. He must be taking something, she thought, gave a little nod and went back to her lonely corner.

Abbas watched as she walked away and thought about Jolene Olsäter. She was about the same age and had Down syndrome.

Jolene would have known exactly what he meant.

The projector lamp went out in the confined room in the police headquarters on Bergsgatan. Rune Forss turned the ceiling light on. He and his AHP group had just looked at a screening of a mobile film that they had downloaded. The film had shown the assault on Vera Larsson in the caravan out in the Ingenting forest.

‘No direct images of the perpetrators’ faces.’

‘No.’

‘But the beginning of the film was interesting.’

‘When they were having sex?’

‘Yes.’

There were four of them in the room, including Janne Klinga. They had all reacted when the mobile camera had filmed through the oval window into the caravan and showed a naked man on top of a woman they assumed was Vera Larsson. The man’s face could just be seen in a quick blurred movement. Too quick to show anything that would make him recognisable.

‘We’ve got to get hold of that man.’

The others agreed with Rune Forss. Even though it was unlikely that the man himself had assaulted Vera Larsson, he was nevertheless of considerable interest. He must have been on the scene almost at the same time that the assault took place.

‘Send the film to the technical unit and ask them to work on his face, we might be able to get a sharper image of it.’

‘Do you think it’s another homeless person?’ Klinga wondered.

‘No idea.’

‘Was Vera Larsson a prostitute?’

‘Not as far as we are aware,’ said Forss. ‘But you never can know with those types.’

Seen from the perspective of a hospital series on TV the whole thing was properly choreographed. The yellow-green light, all the apparatuses, the quiet exchange of medical terms, the handling of small and large instruments by hands in rubber gloves.

An operation just like any other.

Seen from the inside, from the patient’s perspective, it looked rather different. For a start, the patient couldn’t look out, because her eyes were closed. And secondly there was no awareness of anything because the patient was anaesthetized.

But thirdly, that which we know so little about, there was a sensation of voices and an inner kaleidoscope of pictures, deep down inside where nobody knows where it is, until we are there ourselves.

Vera was in there.

So at the same time that the outer world was fully occupied with her body, and organs, and everything that was damaged, Vera herself was in a completely different place.

Alone.

With a bunch of keys and a hanged body.

And a chalk-white child who sat writing on the palm of her hand with a pen of sorrow… ‘is this how it was meant to be’ … ‘is this how it was meant to be’ …

Outside, far outside, lay the large Söder Hospital like a gigantic bunker of stone, white as a skeleton, with rows of lit-up windows. Not far from the car park stood a solitary man, with long hair, in the dark. He was looking at the windows trying to find one to concentrate on.

The one he chose suddenly went dark.

A sombre mood had settled over Glasblåsar park that morning, as if the wind had laid a mourning veil over the people. One-eyed Vera was dead. Their beloved Vera was dead. Her flame had been extinguished just after midnight as a result of her ruptured organs. The doctors had done what doctors do, clinically and professionally; when Vera’s heart became a thin line, the nurses had taken over.

Ad mortem.

Silently, they dropped into the park, one by one, nodded to each other, gave a little shudder and sank down on the benches. An editor from
Situation Sthlm
came too. Vera had been one of their sellers for many years. He said a few moving words about vulnerability, and about Vera having been a source of vivid warmth. They all nodded in agreement.

Then they descended into their own memories.

Their beloved Vera was dead. She who never managed to get there, to life. Who wrestled with those figments of her imagination and those grimy childhood memories and never succeeded in gaining control herself.

Now she was dead.

Now she would never again stand in the setting sun and release her sudden hoarse laugh, or throw herself into complicated discussions about the lack of care for those she called ‘the people who have gone astray’.

The sledgehammer was no more.

Jelle had slipped in at the edge of the park, unnoticed. He sat down on a bench at the far end. A clear indication of his dual needs: I am here, at a distance, stay away. He didn’t know why he had made his way here. Or he did know. Here were the only people who knew who Vera Larsson was. The murdered woman from northern Uppland. There were no others. No others who cared, or who mourned. Only the people sitting here, on the
benches round about.

A gathering of social casualties, of ragamuffins.

And him.

Who had loved her and seen her fall asleep and caressed her white scar and then left.

Like a cowardly rat.

Jelle got up again.

Finally, he had made up his mind. At first he had wandered around aimlessly hoping to stumble across a stairwell where he could shelter, or an open attic, anywhere he could be left in peace. But in the end he found himself back at his old shack beside Järla Lake. He was safe there. He wouldn’t be disturbed there.

He could get really drunk there.

Jelle never got drunk. He hadn’t touched spirits for years. Now he had some cash from the magazine and bought a
half-bottle
of vodka and four strong beers.

That ought to do it.

He sank down on the floor. A couple of thick roots had pushed up the planks and he felt the musty smell of damp soil. He had laid out some brown cardboard and covered that with newspapers here and there, that sufficed, at this time of year. In the winter he got cold as ice as soon as he fell asleep.

He looked at his hands. Emaciated, with thin long fingers. More like claws, he thought, when they grasped the first can of beer.

And the second.

Then he added to that with a few glugs of vodka. When the intoxication started to hit, he had already articulated the question five times, in a low voice.

‘Why the hell did I leave?’

And not found an answer. So he had reformulated the question, somewhat louder.

‘Why the hell didn’t I stay?’

A very similar question, five times again, and the same answer. No idea.

When the third beer and the fifth glug of vodka had settled in his body, he started crying.

Slow heavy tears that laboriously made their way down over his rough skin.

Jelle was crying.

You can cry because you have lost something, or because you haven’t been given something. You can cry for many reasons, trivial or deeply tragic, or for no reason at all. You just cry, because a sensation has swept past and lifted up a hatch to the past.

Jelle’s crying had an immediate cause. One-eyed Vera. But the tears had deeper sources than that, as he well knew. Sources that were about his divorced wife, about some vanished friends, but above all about the old woman on her deathbed. Mama. Who died six years ago. He had sat beside her deathbed, at the Radium Home. Her body, drugged with morphine, had rested peacefully under the thin covers, the hand he held was like a shrivelled bird’s claw. But he had felt how the hand had suddenly contracted a little and seen how his mother’s eyelids opened a slight gap into her pupils and heard how some words passed her narrow dried lips. He had leaned much closer to her face, closer than he had been for many, many years, and heard what she said. Every single word. Phrase for phrase.

Then she died.

And now he was lying here crying.

When the intoxication eventually led him into a mist of horrible memories, the first scream came. And when the images of smoke and fire and a bloody harpoon appeared again, he roared out loud.

He switched without effort between French and Portuguese. French in the left mobile, and Portuguese in the right one. He was sitting in his exclusive director’s office on the top floor on Sveavägen with a view of the churchyard with Palme’s grave.

An old object of hate in his circles.

Not the grave, but the man who was shot and ended up in the grave.

Olof Palme.

When he heard the news of the murder, Bertil Magnuson was sitting at the Alexandra nightclub with Latte and a couple of other jolly men from the same dark blue soil.

‘Champagne!’

Latte had called out, and champagne there was.

All night long.

Now it was twenty-five years later and the murder was still unsolved. Which hardly bothered Bertil. He was negotiating in the Congo. A landowner outside Walikale had demanded economic compensation on a level that was unreasonable. The company’s Portuguese local manager had problems. The company’s French agent wanted them to agree to the demands, but Bertil didn’t want to.

‘I’ll phone the military commander in Kinshasa.’

He phoned and booked a telephone meeting with yet another shady potentate. Reluctant landowners were a small problem for Bertil Magnuson. It always sorted itself out in the end.

With soft methods or with hard ones.

Unfortunately none of them were applicable to his real problem. The taped conversation.

He had found out that the call from Wendt couldn’t be traced. So that path was blocked. Thus he didn’t know whether Wendt had rung from abroad, or was in Sweden. But he assumed that Wendt wanted some sort of contact with him. Sooner or later. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in phoning at all. Would there?

Bertil tried to reason it out.

So he phoned K. Sedovic. A very reliable person. He asked him to check all the hotels and motels and hostels in the Stockholm area to see if there was any trace of Nils Wendt. If he was even in Sweden. A long shot, Bertil knew. And even if Wendt was in Sweden he wouldn’t necessarily be staying in a hotel or similar. Above all, not under his own name.

But what else could he do?

A pretty woman, Olivia thought. She had kept her figure, must have been successful as a female escort in younger years. Lived on her looks and her body. Olivia fast-forwarded the tape. She was sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop and looking at the interview that Eva Carlsén had sent a link to. With Jackie Berglund. It had taken place in a boutique in Östermalm. Weird & Wow on Sybillegatan. A typical boutique of its type, and for the area. Coquettish interior details combined with shockingly expensive designer clothes. A façade boutique, that was what Eva had called it, a façade for Jackie’s other business.

Red Velvet.

The interview had been recorded a couple of years earlier. It was Eva who was doing the interviewing, and it was clear that Jackie ran the boutique herself. Olivia searched online and quickly found it. And the same owner: Jackie Berglund.

That would be worth a visit, Olivia thought.

She looked at the rest of the interview. Eva had got Jackie to talk about her background as a female escort. It was nothing she was ashamed of, on the contrary, it had been a way for her to survive. She categorically denied that there had been any sexual services.

‘We were like geishas, sophisticated lady companions, we were invited to events and dinners to create a better atmosphere,
besides, we made contacts.’

She returned to how she made contacts a couple of times. When Eva tried to establish what sort of contacts this concerned, then Jackie’s answers were vague. Not to say dismissive. She thought it was private.

‘But were they business contacts?’ Eva asked.

‘What else would they be?’

‘Friend contacts.’

‘They were both.’

‘Do you still have those contacts today?’

‘Some of them.’

And thus it went on. It was clear what Eva was after, clear to Olivia at least. She wanted to establish whether contacts were the same as customers. Not customers in the boutique, but customers in the business that was using the boutique as a façade. Red Velvet.

Jackie’s escort service.

But Jackie was much too sharp to fall for that trap. She almost smiled when Eva pressed her a fourth time about her customers. The smile quickly vanished, however, when Eva asked a follow-up question.

‘Do you have a register of customers?’

‘For the boutique?’

‘No.’

‘Now I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘A register of customers for your other activity, as a supplier of call girls? Via Red Velvet.’

Olivia couldn’t believe she had dared ask that question. Her respect for Eva went up a few notches. And evidently nor could Jackie believe how someone had dared ask that question. She looked at Eva with an expression that suddenly came from another world altogether. A forbidden world. A look that reminded Olivia of Eva’s warning. A woman with that look wasn’t somebody you should go snooping on.

Especially if you were only twenty-three years old, and didn’t have anything concrete to go on.

Nothing at all.

And thought you were Sherlock Holmes.

Olivia couldn’t help but smile a little, at herself, right into her laptop. Suddenly she came to think about the German police that had created a Trojan that could get inside your laptop and record everything that went on in front of the camera.

She pulled the lid down a little.

It was well past midnight when he started to climb up the steps. The stone steps to the left of the Katarina garage. Harald Lindberg’s steps. From Katarinavägen up to Klevgränd, four flights of steps, in all 119 stone steps up and just as many down again, with a streetlight beside each landing.

It was raining, a heavy lukewarm summer rain, but that didn’t bother him.

He had made up his mind that the time had come.

Long ago, back in the Stone Age, he had had an athletic body. Muscular and 192 centimetres tall. There was nothing athletic about him nowadays. He knew that his physical condition was abysmal, that his muscles had almost withered away, that his body had been lying fallow for many years. That he was almost a wreck.

Almost.

Now he was going to change that.

He made his way up the stone steps, step by step, and it took him some time. It took six minutes up to Klevgränd and four minutes down again. And when he started to go up a second time, that was the end.

Absolutely.

He sank down on the first landing and felt how his heart pumped. He could almost hear it through his ribs. How it struggled like a jackhammer and couldn’t understand what this person was trying to do, and who he thought he was.

Or what he was capable of.

Not very much. Yet. Just now – nothing. Just now he was sitting, perspiring and panting and trying with great effort to press the right buttons on his mobile. In the end he managed it. In the end he found the film online.

The murder of Vera.

The film began by showing the back of a man who was copulating with a woman beneath him. Him and Vera. He started the film again. Could you see his face? Doubtful. But
nevertheless
. He knew that Forss and his henchmen would closely examine every frame. The man in the caravan must be of
considerable
interest to them. What would happen if they could identify him? At the scene of a murder? And Forss of all people?

Jelle didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like Forss. A piece of shit. But Forss could cause an awful lot of hassle if he thought that Jelle was involved in the murder of Vera.

And that could happen soon.

Jelle let the film roll on a little. When they started to beat up Vera, he clicked away and looked down over Katarinavägen. What cowardly bastards, he thought, they waited until I’d left. They didn’t dare come near when I was still there. They wanted to get at Vera when she was on her own.

Poor Vera.

He shook his head a little and rubbed his eyes. What feelings had he actually had for Vera? Before what happened had actually happened?

Sorrow.

From the very first second he met her and saw how her eyes clung, leechlike, onto his as if he was a rope ladder to life. And he wasn’t. He had climbed down quite a long way the last few years. Not all the way down, admittedly, not to where Vera was, but he wasn’t many rungs above her.