The Spring Tide (22 page)

And Bertil was most definitely not in that sort of mood now.

He was not going to go to any party.

Whatever the circumstances.

Not tonight.

Nature had exploded this spring and early summer. It had been extremely hot and sunny. It was almost too quick for comfort, but there was a positive side to it: Lake Mälaren soon reached bathing temperature. At least most parts of the lake. And at least for some people. But not for Lena Holmstad. She still thought the water was a bit too cold for swimming. She sat on a rocky promontory that had been warmed up by the sun, listening to an audiobook with the help of small headphones. A coffee cup next to her. She took a gulp and felt satisfied. She had been a clever mum. Fixed a picnic basket and cycled out with her two sons to their favourite spot on Kärsön.

This would be the first swim of the season.

And she had even baked the cakes herself.

She ought to take a photo of the basket and put it on Facebook, she thought. So that all her friends could see what a super mum she was.

Lena fumbled for her mobile. Suddenly the elder boy, Daniel, came running up. With blue lips and dripping wet. He wanted his diving mask and snorkel. Lena took her headphones off, pointed at the beach bag and tried to point out to her son that he perhaps ought to warm up a bit in the sun before throwing himself into the water again.

‘But I am warm!’

‘But you’re shivering, pet!’

‘Pah!’

‘Where’s Simon?’

Lena looked out towards the water. Where was he, her youngest? She’d seen him only a few moments ago. She felt the panic rising. Fast. She couldn’t see little Simon. She got up quickly and knocked over her cup, spilling coffee on her mobile.

‘Look what you’ve done!’

Daniel picked up her coffee-saturated mobile.

‘He’s over there,’ he said.

Then she caught sight of him. A little bobbing head that swam in a life jacket, just off to the left. Down below the rocks. A bit too far away, Lena thought.

‘Simon! Swim over here again! It’s too deep for you there!’

‘It isn’t deep at all,’ the five-year-old called back. ‘Look! I can stand here!’

Simon carefully stood up so as not to lose his balance. The water only reached up to his waist. Daniel came up to Lena.

‘Can he stand there? That’s really weird.’

And it was. Lena knew that it was quite deep there. Sometimes people jumped in from those rocks above. And Daniel knew that too.

‘I’ll swim across to him! Stay where you are, Simon! I’m coming!’

Daniel threw himself into the water with his diving mask and snorkel and started to swim towards his little brother. Lena observed her sons and felt how her pulse was returning to normal. What had she been thinking? He did have a life jacket on after all. It had only been a few seconds. Amazing that you can get so silly over the years. As soon as you’ve given birth to your first child, it starts.

The thought of a catastrophe.

Daniel had almost reached his little brother. Simon was getting a bit cold and was trying to keep warm by wrapping his arms around his chest.

‘Simon! What are you standing on?’ Daniel called out.

‘A stone, I think. It’s a bit slippery, but large. Is mum angry?’

‘No.’

Daniel reached his brother.

‘She was just a bit worried,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a look, then we can swim back.’

Daniel put his head under the surface and started breathing through the snorkel. He loved snorkelling. Even if it wasn’t as
fantastic here as in Thailand. In the rather murky water he could just make out his brother’s feet standing on… what? Daniel swam closer to be able to see better. When he was right up close he could see it.

Lena was standing on the shore. She was thinking of going back to her audiobook. Suddenly she saw Daniel’s head shoot up out of the water and shout out.

‘Mum! There’s a car down here! He’s standing on the roof of a car. And there’s a bloke inside!’

It was almost eleven o’clock. She had slept as if she’d been knocked out for just over eight hours. Lying across the bed, fully dressed. She hated waking up dressed. She tore her clothes off and was just going into the shower when things caught up with her.

‘Elvis?’

There was no Elvis in the flat. She looked down into the yard.

No cat.

She had her shower and let the lukewarm water rinse away some of the night’s experiences. Some, a lot still remained. Both from the caravan and the lift. Had those bastards in the lift anything to do with Elvis? Had they left the window open just so that the cat would slip out? What ought she to do?

She phoned the police and reported that her cat had
disappeared
. It had an identity chip in its ear but no collar. The policeman who she spoke to was fairly sympathetic and promised to get in touch directly if anything came in.

‘Thank you.’

She didn’t mention the bastards in the lift. She didn’t really know how she could explain it without explaining what she herself was doing. Spying on an elegant boutique-owner in
Östermalm. On account of a student project about an unsolved murder on Nordkoster in 1987.

Not exactly crystal clear.

She would, however, drive out to Stilton to see how he was getting on. She had a feeling that he was much worse than he had let on the previous evening. Besides, perhaps she should tell him about the lift. At least he knew who Jackie Berglund was.

Olivia squeezed some fish paste onto a bit of crisp bread, and gobbled this on her way to the car. She felt a little better as soon as she came out into the sun. She lowered the car roof, sank down into the front seat, put her headphones on, started the straight-four and swept off.

Towards Ingenting forest.

The special sensation of driving an open car in the sun and wind did her good. The speed and the wind blew away some of the night’s unpleasantness. She was slowly getting back into better balance. Perhaps she should buy something to take with her? It didn’t seem to be the world’s best stocked caravan out there. She stopped at a 7-Eleven to buy some sandwiches and pastries. When she got out of the car and passed the front she noticed a strange smell. From the engine compartment. A smell that was unfamiliar. Don’t say that something’s got burnt now, a belt or some other shit, not today, not after that night, that’s something I absolutely do not need, she thought, and opened the bonnet.

Five seconds later she vomited. Right on the street.

The remains of her beloved Elvis lay burnt on one side of the engine block. The heat during the drive from Söder out to Solna had transformed the cat to a piece of smouldering black meat.

A crane was just lifting the grey car out of the sea by the rocks on Kärsön. Water poured out of the open driver’s door. The corpse had already been taken out by divers and put into a blue bag on a stretcher. The entire area had been cordoned off. Crime scene technicians were checking tyre tracks from the slope to the rocks.

And some other stuff.

The woman who lifted up one of the police tapes and approached the stretcher had been called in an hour earlier. By the County Police Commissioner herself. A couple of other murder investigations in combination with the summer holidays meant that they were short of investigators this particular day, so Mette Olsäter from the National Crime Squad had been summoned. Besides, Commissioner Carin Götblad had long since had her eye on Olsäter. She knew that the case would be in safe hands. Mette’s track record was long and unblemished. This would be something like her fifteenth murder investigation.

It soon became clear that this was a case of murder or manslaughter. There was a possibility that the man in the car had himself driven down the slope and out across the rocks to drown himself. Until he was put on the stretcher and the forensic doctor noted that he had a rather large hole on the back of his head. Large enough to make it impossible to drive a car. They had also found blood on a granite rock face not far from the slope.

Possibly from the man in the car.

Mette established that a person or persons had come with the car to the place. Possibly the man was already dead then, or he died there. The blood on the rock face and the forensic doctor would show that. Then he was put behind the steering wheel, and a person or persons pushed the car down the slope and it ended up where it did.

So far it was fairly clear.

Hypothetically.

What was less clear was the man’s identity. He had no personal belongings on him. Mette asked the doctor to pull down the zip so she could see the man’s face again. She studied it. Quite a long time, and flipped through her photographic memory. She almost got there. Not quite, no name, but a vague feeling from the past.

‘Do you think he was alive when I started?’

‘Impossible to say…’

The police woman in front of Olivia handed her another serviette. Olivia had gradually got over the first shock. Now she was crying because she couldn’t stop. The police had been called to 7-Eleven by the shop owner and had seen what had happened. With the help of a chap from the shop they had collected the remains of Elvis and put them into a plastic bag. They had put Olivia in a police car and driven to the station. There she had eventually managed to tell them. About the men who had threatened her in a lift. About the open door to her flat, the missing cat, and about what connected them. Then she had been asked to describe the men. But it wasn’t a particularly detailed description. She had hardly seen them, in the dark. There wasn’t much more that could be done, by the police, just now.

‘Where’s the car?’ she asked.

‘It’s here, in the station yard, we drove it here. But perhaps it would be best if…’

‘Can you drive it home for me?’

Which they did. Perhaps because Olivia was a future colleague. She didn’t want to go with them.

She didn’t want to sit in the car.

Mette Olsäter stood in the Forensic Medicine department in Solna with a pathologist. In front of them lay a naked body. An hour earlier, Mette’s memory had caught up with the past and found the right picture. The picture of a man who had
disappeared
a long time ago and whom she herself had been tasked with trying to trace.

Nils Wendt.

It must be him, she thought. Some years older here on the slab. Drowned and with a hole on the back of his head. But with a physiognomy that in other respects made her very certain.

This is going to be interesting, she thought, and studied the naked corpse.

‘There are several external characteristics that can help you with identification.’

The pathologist looked at Mette.

‘An old gold filling in his upper jaw, scar from when his appendix was removed, another scar here by his eyebrow, and this too…’

The pathologist pointed at a large angular birthmark on the outside of the man’s left thigh. Mette leaned closer to the corpse, to the thigh, the mark. She thought she recognised it. But from where? She couldn’t immediately place it.

‘When did he die?’

‘Preliminary estimate?’

‘Yes.’

‘Within the last twenty-four hours.’

‘And the wound on the back of his head, could he have got that from falling on the rocks out there?’

‘Possibly. I’ll have to get back to you on that.’

Mette Olsäter rapidly put together a small team. A couple of old hands together with a couple of younger talents who hadn’t gone off on holiday yet. The team was installed in a central command room on Polhemsgatan.

And started to work.

Methodically.

They had people out looking for witnesses in the Kärsön area. Others were looking for close relatives of Nils Wendt. They had found a sister who lived in Geneva. She hadn’t heard from her brother since he disappeared in the Eighties, but she confirmed the description they could give her. The scar on his eyebrow was from their childhood. She had pushed her brother into a bookcase.

That was all they had so far. Now they must collect all the reports together as soon as possible. Not least from their technicians.

They were busy working on the car.

Mette gave the younger members of the group, Lisa Hedqvist and Bosse Thyrén, a briefing about how Wendt disappeared in 1984. The disappearance happened just after a Swedish journalist, Jan Nyström, had been found dead in a car. That too had been dumped in a lake, outside Kinshasa in what was then Zaire.

‘Rather remarkable,’ said Mette.

‘That the methods are similar?’ Lisa wondered.

‘Yes. Anyhow, they classified the event in Zaire as an accident, locally, but we strongly suspected that it was murder. And at the same time Wendt disappeared from Kinshasa, and there was speculation as to whether he too was involved in the event.’

‘With the journalist?’

‘Yes. The journalist was writing an article about Wendt’s company, MWM. But it was never made clear.’

Lisa Hedqvist’s mobile rang. She answered, made a note and hung up.

‘The divers have found a mobile in the water, roughly where the car was,’ she said. ‘It might have fallen out of the open driver’s door?’

‘Does it still work?’ Mette asked.

‘Not yet, it’s on the way to the technical department.’

‘Good.’

Mette turned towards Bosse Thyrén.

‘Perhaps you could try to get hold of Wendt’s ex-partner, he lived with a woman before he disappeared.’

‘Back in the Eighties?’

‘Yes. Hansson I think she was called, I’ll check that.’

Bosse Thyrén nodded and left. An older colleague came up to Mette.

‘We did a quick check of the Stockholm hotels, there was no Nils Wendt booked in anywhere.’

‘OK. Contact the credit card companies and see if they have anything. And the airlines.’

The group left the room. They all had their tasks. Mette remained there alone.

She started thinking about the motive.

Olivia struggled to hold herself together.

First she washed the cat dishes and put them in a cupboard in the kitchen. Then she took out the cat litter. Then she collected together all the bobbles and balls that Elvis used to play with. At that point she was close to breaking down. She put it all in a plastic bag and wasn’t sure whether to throw it away. Not yet, she thought, not yet. She put the bag on the window sill and looked out.