The Spring Tide (16 page)

The stench was frightful.

Olivia held a hand over her nose and mouth and tried to accustom her eyes to the dark. It wasn’t total darkness, in the middle of the floor a little tea light had been lit. With its help she could see Stilton’s outline against a wall. He was sitting on the cement floor.

‘You’ve got the tea light, that’s your time,’ he said.

‘My time?’

‘Until it goes out.’

Stilton’s voice was calm and brief. He had decided to behave himself. Olivia had decided to get answers to her questions.

Then she would leave.

Then she would never again set her foot anywhere near Tom Stilton.

The stinky cheese.

‘Yes, well, it was those questions about…’

‘The woman on the beach was not anaesthetized. The amount of Rohypnol in her body was enough to keep her calm but not to anaesthetize her. So she was conscious when they buried her. Her coat was the only item of clothing we found. We assumed that the perpetrator had taken the rest of the clothes with him but missed the coat in the dark. The only thing of value we found in the coat was a little earring.’

‘There was nothing about that in…’

‘We took a blood sample from the fetus. It was sent later to England for DNA analysis so we could determine a possible paternity if anyone turned up. And they didn’t. We weren’t sure if there were only three people on the beach besides the victim. The witness was nine years old and terrified and saw the event from about a hundred metres away, in the dark, but we had nothing else to go on. We could never confirm that information in the investigation. The woman was probably of Latin American extraction but we could never ascertain that. Ove Gardman lived close to the beach, he ran to his parents and after about forty-five minutes the air ambulance arrived. Any more questions?’

Olivia stared in Stilton’s direction in the dark. The tea light fluttered a little. He had answered every single question she had rattled off on her mobile, in exactly the order she had asked them. Who the hell was this man?

But she tried to be concrete.

‘Why was that earring of value?’

‘Because the victim didn’t have any holes in her ears.’

‘And it was that sort of earring?’

‘Yes. Have you finished?’

‘No, I would very much like to know what your theories were,’ she said.

‘We had a lot.’

‘Such as?’

‘Drugs, that the woman was a drugs courier, working for a cartel that was active on the west coast in those days, that something had gone wrong during a delivery. We interrogated a drug addict who had been on the island before the murder took place but that didn’t lead anywhere. Illegal immigration, that the woman hadn’t been able to pay her smugglers. Trafficking, that the woman was a prostitute and had tried to flee from her pimp and was murdered. We couldn’t find proof for any theory. The biggest problem was that the woman could never be identified.’

‘And nobody reported her missing?’

‘No.’

‘But there must have been a father to the child?’

‘Yes, but he might not have known about it. The child. Or he might have been one of the perpetrators.’

That thought hadn’t occurred to Olivia.

‘Were there any theories about some sect?’ she asked.

‘Sect?’

‘Yes, that there might be one, about the rise and fall of the tide and the moon, and…’

‘We never went into that.’

‘OK. But what about the actual place then, Nordkoster? That’s a very difficult place to get to and from. Not an ideal place for a murder.’

‘And what does an ideal place for a murder look like?’

‘One where you can quickly get away if you have planned a very advanced murder.’

Stilton was silent for a few moments.

‘The place confounded us.’

At that moment the tea light fluttered out.

‘Your time is up.’

‘Jackie Berglund,’ said Olivia.

Now it was pitch black in the dustbin room. Neither of them could see the other. You could only hear breaths. Is this when the beavers come out? Olivia wondered.

‘What about Jackie Berglund?’

Stilton gave her a few seconds in the dark.

‘I’ve got the impression that she was involved in some way, she was an escort girl then, and that the victim might also have been, or at least knew Jackie… and there was a link between them, did you think along those lines?’

Stilton didn’t answer immediately. His thoughts were in a slightly different place: Jackie Berglund, and the fact that the girl across from him in the dark had touched upon his own ideas, at some time in the past.

But he answered:

‘No, have you finished now?’

Olivia was far from finished, but she had understood that Stilton was, and she got up.

Probably it was the dark that did it, the relative anonymity, but at the same time that she was feeling her way to the metal door she asked a question. Behind her, in the dark.

‘Why are you a rough sleeper?’

‘I’m homeless.’

‘And why are you homeless?’

‘Because I haven’t got anywhere to live.’

Nothing more was forthcoming. Olivia reached the door and pressed the handle. She was just about to open it when she heard him, behind her.

‘You.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your dad was in the investigation.’

‘I know.’

‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘He died four years ago.’

Olivia pushed the door open and stepped out.

Stilton had lit a new tea light in the dustbin room. He was going to remain sitting there until he was certain she had disappeared. Then he would presumably be rid of her. He was fully aware that he had given her far too much information. Confidential. Far too many details. But he couldn’t give a damn about that. His relation to his police past was cold as ice. At some time he might explain why, to somebody.

But to whom, that he had no idea.

But he had very deliberately not mentioned a rather important detail to Olivia. The child in the murdered woman’s womb had survived, following an emergency caesarean by the
helicopter doctor. A piece of information that had never been made public to protect the child.

And then he thought about Arne Rönning. So he was dead? Sad. Arne had been a good police officer. And a good man. For a few years they had had quite close personal contact. They had trusted each other, liked each other, shared some secrets.

And now he was dead.

And his daughter had suddenly turned up.

Stilton looked at his thin hands. They were shaking slightly. This entire dive deep into the Nordkoster murder had raked up things in the wrong places. And then Arne’s death on top of that. He pulled out his little Stesolid bottle and twisted the top off… and changed his mind.

He would resist the temptation.

He would not become like Ben the Fibber.

He would find a couple of murderers.

He blew out the tea light and got up. He was going to go to the stone steps.

It was quite a nasty wound. It the blow had struck her just a little higher up it might well have crushed the base of her skull.

That’s what the doctor told Eva Carlsén.

As it was some stitches, a firm bandage and some painkillers had sufficed. The doctor, a woman from Tunisia, was just as empathetic as Carlsén needed. Not because of the wound – that would heal – but for the actual assault. That affected her much deeper. The violation. Strangers in her own home who had been through all her private things. It was repulsive.

Thieves? A simple break-in?

But what valuable things did she have at home? Paintings? Camera? Computer? No cash, she knew that. Or perhaps they weren’t thieves? Were they people who were out to get her, her
specifically? Who had been waiting in the house for her to turn up? So that they could attack her?

Adolescent violence?

That programme on TV?

First, she went home, a bit dozy because of the painkillers, then she looked through the whole house and could see that nothing had been stolen. Just vandalised.

And she could feel that.

Then she went to the police station in Solna.

On her way to the station she cursed herself for not getting her contact details removed from Eniro. She should not be listed on that, bearing in mind the work she did.

She would get her name removed.

Dusk had settled over Stockholm, the city traffic had thinned out. People had left the large offices on Sveavägen a couple of hours earlier. The only person still there was in the managing director’s office on the top floor. Bertil Magnuson. He was trying to keep calm with the help of a drink. Whisky. Not a good way in the long term, but temporarily, just for the moment, and not in large quantities. He would soon go home and he knew that Linn would have her radar turned on. The slightest deviation from normal would get her to bite.

No, not bite – now he was being unfair. She wasn’t like that. People bit you in his other world. Or perhaps stabbed would be a better word. It could come from the right or the left. They took no prisoners and they could kill if it served their purpose. That was a part of his business culture. And sometimes you killed somebody even though you didn’t really want to, but you had no choice. Like he had done too, indirectly. Unfortunately it wasn’t completely watertight. There was one person who had leaked.

Nils Wendt.

He took a big gulp, lit a cigarillo and looked out over Sveavägen. Across to the graveyard around Adolf Fredrik’s Church. He thought about his own death. He had read in an American magazine that nowadays there were air-conditioned coffins available. Interesting. The idea of an air-conditioned coffin appealed to him, perhaps with an inbuilt massage motor that kept the corpse in good condition? He smiled a little.

But the grave?

Where should that be? They had a family grave at Norra graveyard, but he didn’t want to go there. He wanted a place of his own. A mausoleum. A monument to one of Sweden’s great industrialists.

Or like the Wallenberg family. Secret grave sites on the family’s own property. He was more of a self-made man, although his father and uncle had grafted him. With various traits.

He was Bertil Magnuson.

So far, the whisky had done its job.

Raised him up to where he deserved to be.

No, he would just have to deal with that creep Nils.

Olivia had bought a tub of Indian food from Shanti. A
take-away
, but tasty, quick and well spiced. She indulged in a short slumber on the sofa after her meal. With Elvis on her tummy. Then things started to spin around inside her head again. She started to recapitulate her meeting in the dustbin room. Some time I’m going to tell mum about this, she thought. The meeting in the dustbin room where rats as large as beavers crept around along the walls and the stench, the scene wouldn’t have been out of place in a film by… she couldn’t think of a good comparison so she started again with the dustbin room.

When she had rewound every single word in her head there was one moment that particularly struck her. It was when she had told him of her little hypothesis about Jackie Berglund and asked whether Stilton had thought along the same lines. At that point there had been a little break in the dialogue. Silence, many seconds longer than during the earlier part of the exchange. At that point Stilton hadn’t said anything straight away. Like he’d done all the time before. At that point he had stopped to think.

Olivia imagined.

And why had he done that?

Because there
was
something with Jackie!

She pushed a rather insulted Elvis onto the floor and picked up the folder she had been given by Eva Carlsén. It was admittedly almost nine in the evening, but it was summer and not dark yet and she could always apologise.

‘I’m so sorry to disturb you so late.’

‘That’s OK, come in.’

‘Thanks.’

Eva invited Olivia in with a gesture into the hall. Just as Olivia passed the folder across, she saw the back of Eva’s head was bandaged.

‘Goodness! What have you done?’

‘Had a break-in and been knocked down and just come home from the hospital and the police and… the whole works.’

‘Gosh! Sorry! Then I won’t…’

‘It’s quite all right, I’m feeling OK now.’

‘But, what on earth…! A break-in? Here?’

‘Yes.’

Eva walked into the living room with Olivia behind her. A couple of low lamps spread a calm soft glow across the sofa and armchairs. Most of the mess from the break-in had been
tidied up. Eva made a gesture in the direction of an armchair and Olivia sank down into it.

‘But what did they steal?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Really, but then why? What…’

‘I think it was some people who were out to scare me.’

‘Because… you mean because of what you’re writing?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s creepy… those guys who beat up homeless people?’

‘Murder. The woman in the caravan died.’

‘I saw that.’

‘We’ll see if I end up on Trashkick,’ Eva smiled. ‘Would you like something? I’m just making some coffee.’

‘Thanks, that’d be nice.’

Eva went towards the kitchen.

‘Can I give you a hand?’ Olivia asked.

‘No, it’s fine.’