The Spring Tide (19 page)

‘Yes.’

Ovette opened the little airing window and lit a cigarette. Mink knew her very well, from the old days, and he knew some things about her life. Some but not all. He didn’t know why she sold herself on the street, but he assumed it was about money. Survival, and a never-ending illusion that tonight would be the last night. Or the next to last. Or just one more night and then that’s it.

But that night never arrived.

‘What else could I do?’

‘Get a job? Anything at all?’

‘Like you?’

Mink smiled a little and shrugged his shoulders. He was not exactly a brilliant role model when it came to that side of reality. He hadn’t had a job in that sense since he was in charge of the Katarina lift one season when he was young. Up and down for nine hours and then straight out into the bustle.

‘Have you got some coffee?’

‘Yes.’

While Ovette made a couple of cups of filter coffee, Mink tried to tell her as kindly as he could about Acke’s bruises. Without Ovette being hit too hard.

Stilton had been helped by Mink many years earlier to get into touch with UE, on police business. It was about a suspected infringement of an underground military area. UE stood for
Urban Exploration, a loosely formed group of individuals who devoted their time to mapping underground places in urban environments. Tunnel systems. Abandoned factories. Rock shelters and air raid shelters. Abandoned environments, often forbidden to enter.

The activities of UE were not entirely legal.

Mink had sent a text message with the phone number of his UE contact and Stilton had rung up and asked for a meeting. He said he was going to do a report for
Situation Sthlm
about weird and hidden environments in the Greater Stockholm region. The guy knew about the magazine and liked it.

So it worked.

Their activities not being entirely legal, not surprisingly the two guys who turned up had hidden their faces with balaclava helmets when they met. Stilton had nothing against that. The meeting place had also been chosen with discretion in mind. A van parked down in Hammarby docks. One of the guys sat behind the wheel. The other one sat in the back. Stilton sat on the passenger seat. His general appearance wasn’t a problem, seeing as he was writing for
Situation Sthlm
, and neither of the guys reacted.

‘What do you want to know?’

Stilton explained what the report was going to be about. To show how incredibly many hidden spaces there were under a city like Stockholm, and that UE presumably were those that knew most about this, and were most familiar with the spaces themselves. Flattery and white lies. One of the guys laughed a little and wondered if it was about showing places where rough sleepers could find somewhere to sleep. Stilton joined in with the laughter and said that was a risk they must take. Then the two guys looked at each other, after which they pulled their balaclavas off, and one of them was a girl.

Well now, that was a little lesson about preconceived notions, Stilton thought.

‘Have you got a map?’ the girl asked.

Stilton had come equipped with a map. He pulled it out and opened it flat.

The girl and the guy devoted the next half hour to pointing out every manner of weird space hidden under the ground in the city region. Stilton acted sometimes fascinated, sometimes surprised. And it perhaps wasn’t all acting. He was actually genuinely surprised about some of the places. Both over the fact that they existed, and that this young couple knew about them. He came very close to being impressed.

‘Incredible,’ he said, more than once.

But after half an hour he felt it was time. He said that one of his homeless mates claimed that there was a really fantastic underground space in the Årsta area that hardly anyone knew about.

‘Do you?’

The girl and the guy smiled at each other. What they didn’t know about Stockholm’s underground spaces wasn’t worth knowing… and so on…

‘There is a space there,’ said the guy. ‘It’s called Wine and Spirits.’

The girl pulled the map towards her and pointed out the place.

‘There.’

‘Large?’ Stilton asked.

‘Gigantic. It was meant to be some sort of water treatment or sewage works in the beginning, but now it is just entirely empty. It reaches down several storeys underground.’

‘Have you been there?’

The couple looked at each other again. How much should they tell?

‘I won’t put in your names or take any pictures, nobody knows I’ve talked to you, it’s OK,’ said Stilton.

They weighed it over for a few seconds.

‘We have been there,’ said the girl.

‘How do you get down? Is it difficult?’

‘Yes and no,’ said the guy.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can either get in through the grid gates at the front and then down a very long tunnel through the rocks, it’s an old cable tunnel, and then there’s a steel door into the main cavern, that’s usually sealed… that is the simple way,’ said the guy.

‘And the hard one?’

The girl looked at the guy behind the wheel who looked at Stilton. Now they were talking secrets.

‘There is a narrow shaft, you can access it via a manhole on the street… here…’

The guy pointed at the map again.

‘There’s a narrow metal ladder attached to the wall under the grid, you have to climb down about fifteen metres in the shaft, then you come to an iron door and inside that is a passage…’

‘Which leads to the cavern?’

‘Yes, but it is…’

The guy became silent.

‘It is…?’

‘It’s a damn narrow passage.’

‘And long,’ said the girl. ‘And pitch black.’

‘OK.’

Stilton nodded. The girl folded up the map. The guy looked at Stilton.

‘You’re not going to try to get in that way?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Good, you’d never get through.’

He would climb down the narrow shaft under the manhole with the help of the metal ladder on the wall. Fifteen metres down there would be an iron hatch in the rock wall. If he was lucky, it would be open. If he had even more luck, he would be able to squeeze through the hatch and crawl in. On his stomach. In a pitch black passage. It wouldn’t be possible to turn in the passage. If he couldn’t go forward any more, he would have to push himself back again.

If he didn’t get stuck.

That was one of his recurrent nightmares. Getting stuck. In various places in every dream, but always with the same scenario: he lay there stuck, jammed in, a locked position, and knew he would never get loose. That he would just fade away in a vice of terror.

Now he was going to put himself in precisely such a
nightmare
situation. Voluntarily. He would slither along inside an unknown rock passage that wasn’t much wider than a human body.

If he got stuck, he would be stuck for good.

Very slowly he started to climb down the metal ladder in the narrow shaft. Fat black spiders crept along the walls. Halfway down it occurred to him that the hatch might not be open. A sort of forbidden hope that he quickly pushed aside.

The hatch was open.

Or half open. Stilton pushed it further as much as he could with one foot, and managed to get the upper part of his body in through the hatch. He looked ahead, which was rather pointless. There was just a black hole that went in a few metres, and after that only black. When he lit his torch he saw that the passage bent slightly and disappeared.

He pushed his entire body through the opening and gasped. It was much narrower than he had anticipated. He lay on his stomach in the passage with his arms stretched out ahead and realised what a crazy idea it was. Then he thought about Vera. He turned the torch off and started to shuffle along.

He had to push with his toes to move forward. If he raised his head he hit the rock. If he lowered it too far he scraped his chin. It was extremely slow, but he moved forward. A decimetre at a time shuffling in the black passage. He felt the sweat running down his neck. It took a while before he reached the bend he had seen. There, he would have to make a decision. If the bend was too sharp he would never get through. The risk of getting stuck was too great.

The risk of living his nightmare was maximal.

Now he was at the bend.

He turned on the torch and saw the rat’s yellow eyes little more than a metre in front of him. It didn’t really bother him. If you have lived as a rough sleeper for a few years you get to be very familiar with
rattus norvegicus
. Often the only company available. The rat probably felt something similar because it turned round after a second or so and disappeared past the bend.

Stilton shuffled after it. Into the bend. Halfway through he stopped. The angle was too sharp, which Stilton unfortunately discovered too late, when he had already got the greater part of his body into the bend. He wasn’t going to get through. What was a lot worse, existentially speaking, was that he wasn’t going be able to go back either. His body had jammed in the bend.

He was stuck.

Like in a vice.

He had parked his grey Jaguar not far from the Maritime Museum. The front of the car pointing towards the Djurgård Canal. It was almost the only car there. He had nevertheless looked around before he pulled out Wendt’s cassette. An old cassette tape. Why hadn’t he copied it onto a CD, he wondered. Typical Nils. Luckily the exclusive car had a player for cassettes too.

Now he took the cassette out of the player and held it in his hand. He had listened to the entire taped conversation, even though he remembered every word.

He had tormented himself.

Very slowly, he pulled the narrow plastic tape out of the cassette. Bit by bit, until he had the whole tangle in his hand. Not that it helped very much to destroy the tape. The original tape was still somewhere. Somewhere unknown. With exactly the same conversation, and the same disastrous information. A tape that he must get hold of, one way or another. Preferably within three days. The idea of doing what Wendt demanded, going along with his ultimatum, that was not something he would consider. It wasn’t part of his plan.

Yet.

But he was enough of a realist to realise that there was a risk it would end up there. In his plan. When the three days had run out.

What would he do then? If Wendt made the conversation public? What could his lawyers do? Claim that it was a forgery? But a voice analysis would of course reveal that it was him. And Linn? She would immediately recognise his voice.

Bertil lit a cigarillo. He had got through almost a whole
packet today. He glanced at his face in the rear-view mirror. He looked just as worn out as Wendt had done. Unshaven, grey skin. Hadn’t slept last night, no breakfast, some spiteful comments about cancelled meetings, and then Linn. He knew that she was sensitive to any change in his behaviour and would be wondering what was going on, and that she would ask some very difficult questions as soon as she got the chance. Questions that he couldn’t answer without lying. And it wasn’t that easy to lie to Linn.

He was under a great deal of pressure.

‘You sound a bit stressed?’

‘Oh really? Well, yes, rather a lot on just now.’

Erik Grandén suddenly phoned. He had got home from Brussels and insisted on a light dinner and since Bertil wanted to avoid close contact with Linn as long as possible, a dinner there would be.

‘The Theatre Grill at half seven?’

‘That’ll do nicely.’

‘Will you bring Linn?’

‘No.’

Bertil hung up on Grandén. He looked at the tangle of tape in his hand, looked out across the Djurgård canal and felt a clump forming in his throat. A warm clump. He swallowed, and swallowed, and then he gave in.

One could call the interior at the Theatre Grill intimate. Muted dark red wallpaper, small gold-framed pictures and dimmed lighting playing on the walls. Erik Grandén liked it here. Right in the city centre. This was where he wanted to be. He had just looked in at the Bukowski auction showrooms on Arsenalgatan. The viewing was for the coming Modern Art auction and Grandén had come across an early Baertling that he was charmed by. He might put in a bid. Baertling had suddenly become bankable again.

He had manoeuvred his tall gangly body into a small sofa cubicle opposite his ‘old boy’ Bertil Magnuson. Not that they had ever been boys together, but in their circles people liked to be part of the ‘old boys’ club’. Now they were sitting here and toying with a sole meunière and a couple of glasses of chilled wine, one of the best. Wine was Grandén’s field. He had invested a considerable sum in a number of rare bottles that he kept in a special store at the Opera Cellar restaurant.

‘Skål!’

‘Skål!’

Bertil was quiet. That suited Grandén nicely. He liked to hear his own voice. He expressed himself well, his words were chosen carefully, he had had plenty of training in the public eye.

And he liked being there too.

When he started talking about his ‘possible’ future appointment at the highest level in Europe it was like hearing an election speech for his own election.

‘I say “possible” because nothing is certain until it is certain, as Sarkozy usually says. Incidentally, we have the same barber in Paris. But I would be rather surprised if this didn’t come about. Who else would they choose?’

Bertil knew that the question was rhetorical so he took another bite of sole.

‘But enough about me, how are things going for MWM? I understand that there have been a few splashes in the pond, in connection with the award.’

‘Yes.’

‘The Congo?’