The Spring Tide (15 page)

The opposite.

The meeting with Stilton had given the case a new dimension, for her, and her easily courted imagination. Had Stilton’s fall from a feted detective chief inspector to a physical wreck anything to do with the beach case? Had he come across something six years earlier that led to his leaving the police force? Even though he left for private reasons?

‘Not only.’

Åke Gustafsson had admitted that when she’d phoned him again and pressed him a little.

‘What else was it then?’

‘There was a conflict about an investigation.’

‘The beach case?’

‘I don’t know, I’d started at the college then, I only heard about it in passing.’

‘So it was also a reason for his leaving?’

‘Possibly.’

Olivia’s imagination didn’t need more than that. ‘Possibly.’ That he had left the force because there had been a conflict around something that might have been connected with the
beach case? Or another case that had some link? What was Stilton doing when he left the force? Could she find out?

She made up her mind. She wasn’t going to drop Stilton. She’d hunt him down whatever it took. Or in more concrete terms, she would go to the editorial office of
Situation Sthlm
and find out all she could about Stilton.

And then contact him again.

Somewhat better prepared.

Those stone steps were where they met again. It was late, just after one in the morning, by chance. Stilton was on the way down for the fourth time when Mink was on the way up.

They met on the second landing.

‘Hi there.’

‘Toothache?’

‘Sit down.’

Stilton pointed to a step. Mink reacted immediately. Both at the rather sharp tone and the fact that Stilton didn’t just walk on. Did he want to talk? Mink looked at the step Stilton had pointed to and wondered when the most recent dog poo had landed there. He sat down. Stilton sat next to him. So close that Mink couldn’t help but notice a not entirely pleasant smell of rubbish and ammonia.

And a great deal of sweat.

‘How are you doing, Tom?’ he asked with his squeaky voice.

‘They’ve killed Vera.’

‘Was she the one in the caravan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who did it?’

‘No, do you?’

‘Why should I know?’

‘In the old days, you knew before most people as soon as there was some shit going on. Have you lost your touch?’

A comment like that would have led to a headbutt and a broken nose for in theory anyone except Stilton. You didn’t headbutt Stilton. So Mink swallowed and observed the tall rough sleeper with the strong odour next to him. Some years ago the roles had been decidedly switched. When Mink had been a few notches further down on the social scale and Stilton definitely a few notches higher up.

Now things were as they were. Mink gave his ponytail a little tug.

‘Do you want some assistance?’

‘Yes,’ said Stilton.

‘OK. And what are you going to do? If you get hold of them?’

‘Say hello from Vera.’

Stilton got up. Two steps down, he turned and looked back up.

‘I’ll be here at night, at around this time. Get in touch.’

He continued on his way down. Mink remained sitting. Rather surprised. There was something new about Stilton, changed, something in the way he moved, and in his gaze.

It was firm again.

Back in place.

The last few years it had slipped away as soon as you tried to catch it. Now it had landed right in Mink’s eyes and not deviated a millimetre.

Jelle had Tom Stilton’s gaze again.

What had happened?

Stilton himself was satisfied with the meeting on the stone steps. He knew Mink, and was well aware of his capabilities. One of Mink’s few talents was to snap up information. A comment
here, an overheard conversation there, being always on the move in totally different circles and catching tiny scraps which he put together into a pattern. A name. An event. Under different circumstances, he could have become a brilliant
current-affairs
analyst.

Under rather different circumstances.

But Mink had made good use of his talent. Not least since he first came in contact with the then Detective Chief Inspector Tom Stilton. Stilton had quickly understood how he could utilize Mink’s absorbing ability and unscrupulous snitching.

‘I don’t snitch!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Do you see me as some miserable snitch?’

Stilton could still recall the conversation. Mink had been furiously indignant.

‘I see you as an informant. How do you see yourself?’ said Stilton.

‘Informant is OK. Two professionals who exchange experiences is better.’

‘And what is your profession?’

‘A tightrope walker.’

At this point Stilton realised that Mink was perhaps a rather more complex snitch than the others he made use of, and perhaps worth taking a bit of little extra care of.

A tightrope walker.

An hour or so later, Stilton made his way through the Ingenting forest carrying a cardboard box, the sort removal men use. He had forgotten the meeting with Mink. He was totally concentrated upon the dirty grey caravan. On being able to cope with an encounter with it. He had made up his mind to move there.

For the time being.

He knew that the police had finished there and that the council wanted to get rid of the caravan. But Vera’s murder
clogged up the paperwork a little. So the caravan was still there.

And as long as it was there, Stilton was going to live in it.

If he could manage that.

It wasn’t that easy. First. Just seeing the bunk where they had made love put him off balance. But he put the cardboard box down on the floor and sat on the bunk on the opposite side. It was at least dry inside. A lamp, mattresses, with a new tube and a bit of maintenance he would surely get the Calor gas burners to work again. He couldn’t give a shit about the ant tracks. He looked around. The police had taken most of what Vera had kept in the caravan. Including a drawing of a harpoon that he had once done. Here, at this table, when Vera wanted to know what his childhood had been like.

‘Involved a harpoon?’

‘Roughly.’

He had told her a little about Rödlöga, a cluster of islets in the outer archipelago north of Stockholm. About growing up with a granny with personal memories of the seal hunts in former days and of plundering wrecked ships. And Vera had hung on his every word.

‘It sounds like a good childhood. Right?’

‘It was good.’

She didn’t need to know any more than that. Nobody else knew any more, except Mette and Mårten Olsäter, and his ex-wife. But it stopped with them.

Not even Abbas el Fassi knew.

Now, Rune Forss would presumably be sitting in some neon yellow police room and looking at a drawing of a harpoon and wondering if it had any connection with Vera Larsson’s murder. Stilton smiled somewhere inside. Forss was an idiot. He would never solve Vera’s murder. He would tick off his hours and put his reports together and then he would squeeze his fat fingers into a bowling ball.

That was where he put his commitment.

Stilton stretched out on the berth and then sat up again.

It wasn’t that easy to just take over her caravan. She was still there, he could feel it. And see it. There were still traces of the blood that had been wiped off the floor. He got up and smashed a hand into the wall.

And looked at the traces of blood again.

He had never thought in terms of vengeance. As a murder investigator he had always kept his distance in relation to victim as well as perpetrator. At the very most, he had on a few
occasions
been moved by how it could affect close family members. Ordinary people going about their lives who suddenly were struck by a lightning bolt straight to the heart. He could still remember once one early morning when he had to wake a single mother and tell her that her only son had confessed to murdering three people.

‘My son?’

‘You have a son called Lage Svensson?’

‘Yes. What did you say he’d done?’

That sort of conversation. It could stick in Stilton’s mind for a while.

But never revenge.

Until now. With Vera. This was different.

He sank down on the bunk again and looked up at the filthy ceiling. There was a smattering from the rain falling on the half-broken plexiglass dome. He slowly started to let in some of what he usually kept out.

How had he ended up here?

With ant tracks and a wiped-up pool of blood and a body – his – that was more than halfway to becoming a total wreck?

In a caravan?

He knew what had set it off six years ago, he would never forget that. His mother’s last words. But, nevertheless, he was still amazed at how fast it had happened. To let go of things.
How easy it had been once he had made up his mind. How quickly he had drained himself. Deliberately. Let go of everything that he could let go of, and a bit more besides, and actively striven to sink. And he’d noticed how easily one thing led to another. How there was nothing to prevent him from abstaining. From turning himself off. From cutting away. How easy it had been to slide into a life where he was totally without responsibility, totally vegetative.

Into a vacuum.

He had reflected inside this – his vacuum – many times, cut away from everybody else’s existence. He had reflected upon primary elements such as life and death, about the very meaning of life. He had seen things in outline, tried to find an anchor, a purpose, something on which to hang his life. But he hadn’t found anything. Not a single nail. Not even a drawing pin. The fall from a position in normal accepted life, down to a hole among those who were despised, had simply left him empty handed.

Mentally as well as physically.

For a time he had tried to see his existence as a form of freedom. Free from social obligations, from responsibility, from everything.

A free man!

Self-deception like some of the homeless people devoted themselves to. He pretty soon abandoned that. He was not a free man, and he knew it.

He was, however, a man in his own right.

A wreck in a caravan, a lot of people would think. With good reason. But a wreck who had learnt that a person who stands right at the bottom at least has solid ground under his feet. And that was more than a lot of people could boast of. Other more high-flying people.

Stilton sat up. Would it be like this in Vera’s caravan too? A hell of a lot of brooding? That was what he wanted to get away
from in the wooden shack. He dug a little in his backpack and fished out a little bottle of pills which he put on the table.

An escape bottle.

Very early on in his falling journey he had learnt how you solve certain problems. You flee from them. You fill a glass with water, take a couple of Stesolids and you have an escape dose.

It isn’t harder than that.

‘You’re like Ben the Fibber.’

‘Who?’

Stilton remembered the conversation. He had been sitting with an old jailbird in Mosebacke Square and feeling pretty bad, and in the end he had fished out his bottle of pills and then the guy had looked at him and shaken his head.

‘You’re like Ben the Fibber.’

‘Who?’

‘He was always running away, as soon as things got difficult, he swallowed something white and lay down on the floor and just soaked up Tom Waits, in those days he was still a bar drunk, but what did that help? He died on that same floor thirty years later and a week went by before anyone reacted. Tom Waits didn’t. That’s what it looks like. You run away, and if you run far enough then nobody will find you until the stench leaks out through the letterbox. What’s the point of that?’

Stilton hadn’t said a word. Why should he answer a question like that? He didn’t even have answers for himself. If you have lost it, then you have lost it, and then you flee to manage to survive.

Stilton pulled the bottle of pills towards him.

Why should he give a damn about Ben the Fibber?

Little Acke wasn’t at his football practice, as Ovette thought. Far from it.

And far from home too.

He had been fetched by some older boys and now he sat
half-crouched
against a rock wall. His eyes were riveted on what was happening not far away. This was the second time he was with them. Here. In a gigantic underground cavern that had originally been intended for a sewage works, somewhere in the Årsta area.

Deep, deep underground.

They had rigged up coloured spotlights at the front. The lamps shone across the rock facing in shades of blue and green and red. The sounds from what they were doing could be clearly heard over where Acke was. They weren’t nice sounds. He reacted instinctively by putting his hands over his ears, but he quickly took them down again. He knew you weren’t meant to cover your ears.

Acke was frightened.

He pulled out a lighter and clicked it a few times.

Soon it would be his turn.

He thought about the money. If it went well he would get a bit of money, that’s what they’d promised. If it didn’t go well, he wouldn’t get anything. He wanted the money. He knew how things were at home. There was never any money, except for things they absolutely must have. Never for anything else. Something that his mum and him could do together. Like many of his mates did with their parents. The big theme park or something like that. There was never any money for that.

His mum said.

Acke wanted to give the money to her. He had already worked out how he’d explain it. He’d found one of those scratch lottery tickets and it had given a win of 100 kronor.

That was what he would get if it went well this evening.

He would give it to his mum.

A couple of steel reflections hit his eyes.

The two figures were crouching behind a parked van.

It was just after twelve, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a district with small houses in Bromma. A father had just passed on the pavement opposite wheeling a buggy in front of him. The headphones from his mobile were pressed into his ears and the conversation was about work. Taking paternity leave was one thing, but dropping his work was quite another. Luckily, nowadays you could combine the two. So with nearly all his attention on his work and a lot less focus on the baby in the pram, they rolled past and disappeared.

The two figures looked at each other.

The street was empty again.

They quickly nipped in through the hedge at the back of the house. The garden was full of apple trees and large lilac bushes that hid their presence quite well. They broke in through the kitchen door quietly and effectively, and vanished inside.

Half an hour later a taxi stopped outside a small yellow house in Bromma. Eva Carlsén climbed out. She looked towards her house and reminded herself that she must get a new tiled roof. And new drainpipes. That was her job now. Before, it had been her husband, Anders, who looked after such things. After their divorce she had to deal with it all.

All the practical things.

Keeping the house in good condition and looking after the garden.

And all the other stuff.

She walked in through the gate. Suddenly the anger seared like a razor blade through her heart. Quickly and effectively it slit open the wound again. Abandoned! Dropped! Dumped! They swelled up with such force that she simply had to come to a halt. She almost lost her balance. Hell! she thought. She hated it. Not having control of herself. She was a person with logical
thoughts and she hated things she couldn’t control. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself down. He isn’t worth it, she thought. Like a mantra.

She continued towards the house.

Two pairs of eyes followed her, from the gate and right up to the front door. When she disappeared out of their vision, they slipped away from the curtains.

Eva opened her handbag to pull out the door key. Suddenly she saw something move in the neighbour’s house. Monika, of course she would be standing there spying. Monika had always liked Anders. Very much. She had laughed at his jokes across the fence with a glow in her eyes. She could hardly manage to hide her malicious pleasure when she heard about the divorce.

Eve got the key out, put it in the lock and opened the door. Now she would throw herself into the shower. Wash away all those destructive feelings so that she could focus on what she ought to be focusing on. Her series of articles. She took a couple of steps into the hall and turned towards the coat hooks to hang up her thin jacket.

Suddenly she was knocked down.

From behind.

The sellers’ meeting was just coming to an end and everybody wanted to start on their way into town to start flogging their copies. Olivia had to step to one side in the doorway and let out an illustrious flock of homeless people with bundles of
magazines
in their hands, and chattering away for all they were worth. Last of all came Muriel tripping along. She had fired herself up with a whole constellation of drugs at breakfast and felt fantastic. She didn’t have any magazines. She wasn’t a seller. You had to fill certain criteria to be allowed to sell
Situation Sthlm
. Among them, that you were entitled to welfare benefits
as a citizen of the country. Or had established contacts with the social services, probation officers or psychiatric services. Muriel didn’t have any of that. She was just happy when she wasn’t a wreck. In between she tried to get hold of drugs. Now she was the last to come tripping out and that gave Olivia a chance to slip in. She went straight up to the reception and asked for Jelle.

‘Jelle? No, I don’t know where he is, he wasn’t at the meeting today.’

The man in reception looked at Olivia.

‘Does he live anywhere?’ she asked.

‘No, he’s homeless.’

‘But he usually turns up here, right?’

‘Yes, when he collects magazines.’

‘Does he have a mobile?’

‘I think so, unless it’s been nicked.’

‘Have you got a number for him?’

‘I don’t want to hand that out.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know if he wants me to.’

Olivia respected that. Even a homeless person has the right to some integrity. She gave her own mobile number and asked the guy to give it to Stilton if he turned up.

‘You could ask in the mobile-phone shop at Hornstull.’

That was Bo Fast speaking. He was sitting in a corner and had overheard the conversation. Olivia turned towards Fast.

‘He’s a bit matey with the people who work there,’ he said.

‘OK, right. Thanks.’

‘Have you ever met Jelle?’

‘Once.’

‘He’s a bit special…’

‘In what way d’you mean?’

‘Special.’

OK, Olivia thought, he’s special. Compared to what? Other homeless people? His past? What did he mean? She would have
liked to have asked rather a lot but she didn’t exactly see Bo Fast as a fast-flowing source of information. She would have to wait until Stilton got in touch with her, if he ever did.

Which she doubted.

The ambulance medics put a mask over Eva Carlsén’s mouth and carried her into the ambulance. With some promptness. She was bleeding heavily from the back of her head. If her neighbour, Monika, hadn’t seen the door open in the middle of the day and got curious, it might have ended very nastily. The ambulance disappeared with sirens on just as a policeman pulled out a pen and notebook and turned towards Monika.

No, she hadn’t seen any unknown people in the district, no special cars, and no, she hadn’t heard anything unusual either.

The police officers inside the house made some more usual discoveries. The entire house seemed to have been searched. Emptied drawers and wardrobes where they had raked out the entire contents, knocked-over chests of drawers and broken china.

Pure destruction.

‘Break-in?’ One policeman said to the other.

Stilton needed some more magazines. He had sold all of the copies he had bought the day before, including the copy Olivia Rönning had bought. Now he bought another ten, across the counter.

‘Jelle!’

‘Yes?’

It was the guy in the reception who was calling out.

‘A girl was here asking about your mobile number…’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘She left a mobile number…’

Stilton was given a piece of paper with a number and he saw that it said ‘Olivia Rönning’ under it. He went across to the round table and sat down. On the wall behind him hung a large number of photos with black frames, of homeless people who had died the last year. About one a month had died, and three new ones came instead.

Vera’s photo had just been put up.

Stilton rubbed the paper with the number on between his fingers. Furious. He didn’t like it when people pestered him. When he wasn’t allowed to be left in peace. When they tried to get inside his vacuum. Especially people outside the circle of homeless people. Like Olivia Rönning.

He looked at the paper again. He had two choices. Ring her now and get it over with. Answer her damned questions and disappear. Or not give a fuck about ringing. Then there’d be a risk that she would start nosing around and find Vera’s caravan and come barging in there. He definitely didn’t want that.

He phoned her.

‘Olivia! This is Jelle. Tom Stilton. Phone me.’

Stilton hung up. He wasn’t going to waste his pay-as-you-go card on Rönning. Five seconds later, his mobile rang.

‘Hi! This is Olivia! Great that you got in touch!’

‘I’m in a hurry.’

‘OK, but listen, I… can’t we meet? Just briefly? I can come…’

‘What are your bloody questions?’

‘They are… shall I list them now?’

Stilton didn’t answer so Olivia had to immediately gabble them. Luckily she had her notebook right next to her and she started listing her questions. Quickly, now she had the chance, she didn’t know when she’d have contact with him again next time. Or if there even was going to be a next time. ‘Was the
woman on the beach anaesthetized when she was drowned? Where were the rest of her clothes, did you find them? Did you get a DNA sample from the fetus? Were you sure there were only three people on the beach besides the victim? How could you tell she was of Latin American origin?’

Olivia managed to rattle off another two questions before Stilton abruptly hung up.

In the middle of a sentence.

The shop was simply called MOBILE TELEPHONES and lay on Långholmsgatan, just opposite the exit from the underground station at Hornstull. A dirty shop window with some mobile phones on display, a few alarm clocks and some other bits and pieces. Olivia went up the two stone steps to the shop door and opened it. A dirty grey curtain was folded back over the entrance. The shop itself had a floor area of about four
square metres surrounded by glass display cases filled with mobile phones. Hundreds of them. Of every make, in every colour and all of them second-hand. On a few shelves behind the counter were yellow and blue plastic containers with more heaps of mobiles. Second-hand. And in a narrow passage at the far end was a cubbyhole where they repaired even more
second-hand
mobiles.

Not exactly your huge electronics store.

‘Hi, I’m looking for Tom Stilton, d’you know where I can get hold of him?’

Olivia had turned towards the man in front of the glass display cases. She tried to look like she absolutely didn’t feel.

Friendly, calm, trying to find a friend.

‘Stilton? Don’t know who that is…’

‘Well, Jelle then, he calls himself Jelle?’

‘Oh, right, Jelle? Is he called Stilton?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, would you believe it, isn’t that some stinky cheese?’

‘Right.’

‘And he’s called the same as a stinky cheese?’

‘Evidently. Do you know where he hangs out?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes?’

‘No. He comes by now and then, when they’ve nicked his mobile, they’re like ravens the way they nick things from one another, but that was a few days ago.’

‘Oh, right…’

‘But you can ask Wejle, he sells magazines over there, by the entrance to the underground, he might know where Jelle is.’

‘And what does Wejle look like?’

‘You can’t miss him.’

The shop-owner was right. You couldn’t miss Wejle. Outside the underground. Apart from the fact that he sold
Situation
Sthlm
with a strong penetrating voice, his appearance was also such that it quite obviously distinguished him from the stream of travellers on their way to the underground. His slouch hat, for example, with feathers from birds that were very endangered. The moustache, very closely related to Åke Gustafsson’s eyebrows. And of course his eyes, dark, intense and genuinely friendly.

‘Jelle, my dear lady, you don’t put Jelle where you place him.’

Olivia interpreted this as meaning that Jelle was rather fickle.

‘But where has he been hanging out recently?’

‘That is hidden from us.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Jelle moves quietly at night, we don’t really know where, you can be sitting on a bench out in Jakobsberg with him, pondering the right of minks to exist or not, and suddenly he’s gone. Like a seal hunter, he melts into the rocks.’

Olivia realised that Wejle presumably had many qualities as a salesman, but not as an informant. She bought one of his magazines that she already had a copy of and went back to her car.

Then he phoned.

It took Olivia a while to find. She did admittedly live surprisingly close herself, almost round the corner, so it wasn’t the address that was the problem. Bondegatan 25A. But where the dustbin room lay. Inside the doors and iron-gridded gates with their codes. Stilton had given the necessary number combinations but it still took some time.

Especially when in the middle of a cement corridor she met a man wearing short trousers with wide braces, round his neck a cervical collar that hadn’t been washed since it had been put there. And on top of that the man had weird red spectacles and seemed half drunk.

‘And where do you think you’re going then? Bibblan!’ he said.

‘Bibblan?’

‘She’s doing her washing today, don’t come and do yours too, you’ll end up in the tumble dryer!’

‘I’m looking for the dustbin room.’

‘Are you going to kip down there?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Cause I’ve put down a ring of rat poison.’

‘Are there rats in the dustbin room?’

‘Beavers, some folks might call them, beasts as long as half a metre, not a place for a young thing like you.’

‘Where’s the dustbin room?’

‘There.’

The cervical collar pointed down the corridor and Olivia slipped past. Towards the rats.

‘Are there rats here?’

Olivia had asked that question the very same moment Stilton had pushed open the heavy steel door.

‘No.’

He disappeared into the darkness. Olivia pushed the door open a bit more and stepped in after him.

‘Close the door.’

Olivia wasn’t sure she should do that. The door was her escape route after all. But she did close it. That was when she noticed the stench. A stench that some dustbin rooms are spared, dustbin rooms where the ventilation works like it ought to. It wasn’t working here.