The Spring Tide (29 page)

That alone.

He really hoped that Marianne looked after what she had, whatever it was. She was worth it. In his really healthy moments he found himself thinking about how his behaviour during their last year together must have pained her. His worsening mental problems. How his abrupt changes of mood had slowly undermined what they had built up together, and in the end it all collapsed.

And now these healthy moments were no longer so healthy.

Stilton got up. He couldn’t remain sitting. He felt how the pressure in his chest spread out towards his arms and he had left his Stesolid pills in the caravan. Then his mobile rang.

‘Jelle.’

‘Hi, Tom, it’s Marianne.’

She was talking rather quietly.

‘How did you get hold of my number?’ said Stilton.

‘Olivia Rönning is on Eniro, which you aren’t, so I texted her and asked for your number. Is the hairslide DNA urgent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Come over and give it to me.’

‘OK. Why have you changed your mind?’

Marianne ended the call.

Olivia was rather curious as to why Marianne Boglund wanted Stilton’s mobile number. Surely they didn’t have any contact? Or had he become interested anyway? In the hairslide? A bit
perhaps, there in the caravan, enough to ask her if he could keep it. Jesus, she thought. He worked on this case for God knows how many years. Without solving it. Of course he’s bound to be interested. But would he really get in touch with his ex-wife? She remembered her meeting with Marianne Boglund at the college. The chilly distance she showed when Olivia asked about Stilton. Almost dismissive. And now she had asked for his phone number. Wonder why they got divorced? she thought. Was that also connected with the beach case?

Presumably it was thoughts like this churning over in her mind that led her to get on the bus out to Kummelnäs peninsula on Värmdö. Out to that dilapidated old mansion. Out to the Olsäters. She felt that there lots of answers out there that she wanted. Besides, she felt something more indefinable. Something to do with the house itself, the atmosphere, the mood out there. Something that she found herself almost longing to be part of again.

Without knowing why.

Mårten Olsäter was down in the music room. The cave-room. That was his hiding place. He loved his big uninhibited family and all their acquaintances and non-acquaintances who were always invading the house and needed food and entertainment and it was almost always Mårten who had to take charge of things. In the kitchen. He loved it.

But he needed to crawl away now and then.

That was why he had built up his cave-room down here, many years ago, and explained to everybody up above that down here was private. Then he had explained, in due course over the years, to children and grandchildren, what he meant by private.

A space that was his alone.

Nobody entered who wasn’t invited.

And considering what Mårten otherwise meant to his family, his wishes were respected. He got what he wanted.

A little cave-room in the cellar.

Here he could return to the past and sink into nostalgia and sentimentality. Here he could take a little dip into sorrow about everything that demanded sorrow. His private sorrow. About everything and everyone that had left a track of despair in the course of his life. And there were quite a lot of tracks.

They tend to have accumulated by the time you become a pensioner.

He handled that sorrow with care.

And on a few occasions he indulged in a wee sip, without Mette knowing. Less often now, in recent years, but now and then. To get in touch with what Abbas sought in Sufism. That which was round the corner.

That was never wrong.

On really good nights it happened that he sang duets with himself.

Then Kerouac crawled into the crack.

When Olivia suddenly found herself standing in front of the big wooden door and ringing the bell, she still didn’t really know why she was there.

She just was there.

‘Hello!’ said Mårten.

He opened the door wearing what a girl in Olivia’s generation would hardly recognise as Mah Jong clothes. An echo from the Sixties in Sweden. Unisex, velour. A bit of orange, a bit of red and a bit of anything at all, softly hanging around Mårten’s generous girth. He held a plate in his hand, a plate that Mette had made on her potter’s wheel.

‘Hi. I’m… is Mette here?’

‘No. Will you settle for me? Come in!’

Mårten vanished inside and Olivia followed him in. This time nobody had been banished to the upper reaches. The house was crawling with children and grandchildren. One of the children, Janis, lived in a smaller house in the grounds, with her husband
and one child, and regarded her parental home as her own. A couple of other children, or grandchildren, Olivia assumed, rushed around in specially sewn-up fancy-dress costumes and squirted their water pistols. Mårten quickly waved Olivia over to a door across the hall. She just managed to duck away from some sprays of water before reaching the door. Mårten closed it behind her.

‘A bit chaotic here,’ he smiled.

‘Is it always like this?’

‘Chaotic?’

‘Well, I mean, so many people here?’

‘Always. We have five children and nine grandchildren. Plus Ellen.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘My mother. She is ninety-two and lives in the attic. I’ve just made some tortellini for her. Come along!’

Mårten took Olivia up some decidedly winding stairs, right up to the top of the house, to the attic.

‘We’ve furnished a room for her up here.’

Mårten opened the door to a light and beautiful little room, tastefully furnished. Totally different from the environment a couple of floors lower down. A white iron bed, a little table and a rocking chair. In the rocking chair sat a very old woman with chalk-white hair busying herself with a narrow, narrow piece of knitting which coiled several metres on the floor.

Ellen.

Olivia looked at the long narrow piece of knitting.

‘She thinks she is knitting a poem,’ Mårten whispered, ‘each stitch is a stanza.’

He turned towards Ellen.

‘This is Olivia.’

Ellen looked up from her knitting and gave a little smile.

‘Very good,’ she said.

Mårten went up to her and stroked her gently on the cheek.

‘Mama is a little demented,’ he whispered to Olivia.

Ellen went on knitting. Mårten put the plate down next to her.

‘I’ll ask Janis to come up and help you, mama.’

Ellen nodded. Mårten twisted round towards Olivia.

‘Would you like some wine?’

They ended up in one of the rooms downstairs. With a door that shut out most of the noise from the children.

And drank wine.

Olivia rarely drank wine. It was mainly if she was a guest somewhere, like at Maria’s.

Otherwise she stuck to beer. So after a couple of glasses of something that Mårten called an extremely keenly priced red wine, Olivia started to talk a little more than she had intended. Whether it was the setting or the wine or, quite simply, Mårten, she didn’t really know, but she talked about very private things. In a way she never had done with her mother, Maria. She talked about herself. About Arne. About losing her father and not being there when he died. About her never-ending guilty conscience for that.

‘Mum thinks that I want to become a police officer to soothe my guilty conscience,’ she said.

‘I don’t think so.’

Mårten had listened, hardly said anything, for a long time. He was a good listener. Many years with noisy people had trained his ear for emotional situations and drilled his empathetic ability.

‘Why don’t you think so?’

‘We rarely do things to satisfy a guilt complex, but we do, however, often think we do it. Or blame it, because we don’t really know why we make our choices.’

‘So why did I want to join the police then?’

‘Perhaps because your dad was a policeman, but not because he died when you weren’t there. There’s a difference. One is
inheritance and environment, the other is guilt. I don’t believe in the guilt bit.’

Nor do I, not really, Olivia thought. It’s only mum who does.

‘Have you been thinking about Tom then?’

Mårten changed direction. Perhaps because he felt that Olivia would feel better for it.

‘Why do you wonder that?’

‘Isn’t that why you came here?’

At this point, Olivia wondered whether Mårten was a sort of medium. If she had ended up in the hands of a paranormal phenomenon. He was spot on.

‘Yes, I have been thinking about him, quite a lot, and there are lots of things I can’t put together.’

‘How he ended up as a rough sleeper?’

‘Homeless.’

‘Semantics,’ Mårten smiled.

‘Yes, but, he was a detective chief inspector, a good one as I understand, and must have had a pretty good social net too, not least you, and still he ends up there. A homeless person. Without being a drug addict or something like that.’

‘What is “something like that”?’

‘I don’t know, but it must be an enormous step from the person he was to the person he is.’

‘Yes and no. In part he is the same as he was, on certain levels, on others not.’

‘Was it the divorce?’

‘That contributed, but by then he had already started to slide.’

Mårten sipped his wine. He pondered for a moment as to how far he should take this. He wasn’t going to reveal things about Tom in the wrong way, or in a way that perhaps could be misunderstood.

So he chose a middle road.

‘Tom came to a point where he just let go. Psychologically there is a terminology for this, but we’ll skip that, in concrete
terms he was in a situation where he didn’t want to hang on.’

‘Hang on to what?’

‘To what we can call a normality.’

‘Why didn’t he want to do that?’

‘Several reasons, his mental problems, the divorce and…’

‘He’s got mental problems?’

‘He had, psychoses. I don’t know if he has them now. When you came here, it was the first time we’d seen him for I think nearly four years.’

‘Why did he have psychoses?’

‘A psychosis can be triggered by lots of things, people are vulnerable to a greater or lesser degree. Sometimes it only needs a long period of stress, if you are extremely vulnerable. Overwork, or that something extreme suddenly takes place, that can trigger it.’

‘Was it something extreme with Tom?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘He’ll have to tell you himself, if and when he wants to.’

‘OK, but what did you do? Couldn’t you do anything?’

‘We did what we could, so we thought. Talked with him, many times, when he still could socialise, invited him to live here when he was thrown out of his flat, but then he slipped out of our hands, didn’t turn up when we had decided to meet, couldn’t be reached, and in the end he was more or less gone. We knew that Tom was a person who couldn’t be budged once he had made up his mind about something, so we let him go.’

‘Let him go?’

‘You can’t hold on to a person who isn’t there.’

‘But wasn’t it dreadful?’

‘It was dreadful, especially for Mette, she suffered for several years, and still does. But after your visit here, it got a
bit better, he was communicating again, it was extremely… overwhelming. For both her and me.’

Mårten filled the wine glasses, sipped his own and smiled a little. Olivia looked at him and knew where she wanted the conversation to go although she hadn’t really got it on the admitted it to herself yet.

‘So how’s Kerouac feeling?’ she said.

‘Fine! Or good, he’s got that problem with his legs, but you can hardly get a Zimmer frame for a spider, can you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have any pets?’

That was the direction Olivia had been aiming at. That was where she wanted to land. With somebody she could tell about it. Somebody who was far enough away and yet closer than anybody else. Just now.

‘I had a cat and I killed it with my car.’

She said, just to get it said, the most painful part.

‘You ran over it?’

‘No.’

And then Olivia told him, as clearly as she was capable, from the moment she saw the open window, via the moment she started the engine, to the moment she lifted up the bonnet.

Then she cried.

Mårten let her cry. He understood that this was a sorrow that she would take with her to her own cave-room and dip into now and then. That would never disappear. But just now she had formulated it and that was a part of the healing. He stroked her dark hair and gave her a cloth handkerchief. She dried her eyes.

‘Thank you.’

Then the door was wrenched open.

‘Hi! Hiii!’

It was Jolene who crashed into the room and gave Olivia a big hug right across the table. It was the first time they had met
and Olivia was rather taken by surprise. Mette came in just after her. Mårten quickly poured a glass of wine for her too.

‘I want to draw you!’ said Jolene to Olivia.

‘Me?’

‘Only you!’

Jolene had already taken a drawing pad from a shelf and was now kneeling down in front of Olivia. An Olivia who quickly dried her eyes with the handkerchief again and tried to look natural.

Then Stilton phoned. On Olivia’s mobile.

‘Marianne’s going to help,’ he said.

‘She’s going to do the DNA?’

‘Do an analysis, yes.’

‘Take that away!’ said Jolene and pointed at the mobile.

Mårten bent down and whispered something to Jolene who crouched over her drawing pad. Olivia got up and went to one side.

‘When is she going to do it?’

‘She’s doing it now,’ said Stilton.

‘But how has she… have you been there? In Linköping?’

‘Yes.’

At this point she felt a warm feeling for Stilton surge up inside her.

‘Thank you’, was all she managed to say just as Stilton ended the call. Olivia turned round and saw how Mette looked at her.

‘Was that Tom?

‘Yes.’

Olivia rapidly and excitedly told the story of the hairslide and that they were now testing for a match, and what that might mean for the beach case. To her surprise Mette was not especially interested.