The Spring Tide (30 page)

‘But it’s really interesting!’ said Olivia.

‘For him.’

‘Tom?’

‘Yes. And good that he is working on something.’

‘But isn’t it interesting for you?’

‘Not just now.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m putting all my effort into solving the murder of Nils Wendt. It has happened now, whereas that happened twenty-four years ago. That’s one reason. The other is that it’s Tom’s case.’

Mette raised her wine glass.

‘And so it will remain.’

On the way home, that phrase echoed inside Olivia’s head. Did she mean that Stilton was going to take up his old case again? He wasn’t even in the police force. He was a homeless person. How would he be able to get at his old case? With her help? Was that what she had meant? ‘Without you, he would never have come here’, she remembered Mette saying. In the hall that last time. And she remembered very well how Stilton had unhesitatingly nicked her own hypothesis about Wendt’s link to the beach victim, when they were at Abbas’ place. Was Stilton getting back into his old case again? With her help?

Although her head was full of thoughts and questions, she was extremely wary when she approached the front door of the block of flats where she lived. She’d probably never again open that door without being all tensed up.

Especially after Stilton’s call.

And the DNA test.

Which had steered her directly back to that woman again, back to Jackie Berglund.

Whom she hated.

There are a large number of low-activity volcanoes in Costa Rica, and some active ones. Like Arenal. When it is active it is a spectacular natural phenomenon. Especially at night, the magma which makes its way down in the ready-cut gullies and embraces the mountain like glowing octopus tentacles. And the smoke, straight up in the sky and dramatically grey-black. If you see such an eruption from a little oval airplane window, then that alone is good value for the price of the journey.

Abbas el Fassi was totally uninterested in volcanoes. But he was afraid of flying.

Extremely afraid.

He didn’t know why. There was no rational explanation for it. But every time he was ten thousand metres up in the air only surrounded by a thin metal shell, he found himself on the verge of panic. On the verge; he could control it. He had to, but since he was no friend of drug-based or alcoholic anaesthetics it was an ordeal.

Every time.

It was only his natural brown skin colour that prevented him from looking like a newly dug-up corpse when he reached the Arrivals hall in San José and was met by a young man smoking a cigarette and holding a sign which said: ABASEL. FAS.

‘That’s me,’ said Abbas.

He spoke good Spanish. They were soon in the man’s little yellow-green car outside. Not until then, sunk down behind the wheel, did the man turn to Abbas.

‘Monsieur Garcia. Police constable. We’re going to Mal Pais.’

‘Afterwards. First we are going to Calle 34 in San José, do you know where that is?’

‘Yes, but I had orders that we should drive directly to…’

‘I’m changing that order.’

Garcia looked at Abbas. Abbas looked back. He had a really hellish flight in his body, from Stockholm via London and Miami to San José. He was near the edge. As Garcia could see.

‘Calle 34 it is.’

Garcia stopped outside a dilapidated building in a – as he had tried to explain to Abbas in the car on the way there – not particularly hospitable area.

‘It won’t take long,’ said Abbas.

He disappeared in through a shabby door.

Garcia lit another cigarette.

Abbas slowly lifted the lid off the little box and revealed two narrow black knives. Specially made, by his main supplier in Marseilles. A thin pale guy who came when Abbas called and who supplied things that Abbas couldn’t transport through the airports’ security controls around the world. So the pale man had to make them on the spot. Regardless of where that spot was.

Just now it was Calle 34 in San José, in Costa Rica.

They had known each other a long time.

So the pale guy wasn’t offended when Abbas asked for a couple of special tools that he knew the pale guy had with him. With the help of a little microscope he added the final touch to the edges of the blade.

For balance.

Something that could be a matter of life or death.

‘Thank you.’

They took the ferry across to the Nicoya peninsula and drove without stopping to Mal Pais, their conversation consisting of only a few words. Abbas found out what instructions Garcia had got from the Swedish police, that is from Mette. He was to drive the Swedish ‘representative’ and otherwise keep a low profile. On one occasion, Garcia asked what the visit was about.

‘A missing Swede.’

He was told no more.

The yellow-green car churned up quite a cloud of dust behind it. It was very rarely as dry as this on the roads along the coast.

‘Mal Pais!’ said Garcia.

They approached an area that looked like all the other areas they had passed. A few houses along a narrow dried-up road, only a stone’s throw from the sea. No type of centre, or even a crossroads, just a dusty road right through. The car came to a halt and Abbas climbed out.

‘Wait in the car,’ he said.

Abbas did the rounds. With a little plastic folder in his hand with two photos in it. One of the victim on Nordkoster and one of Dan Nilsson.

Alias Nils Wendt.

The rounds of Mal Pais were soon done. It was straight down one way, and then back again. No bars. A couple of restaurants some way up the mountainside, closed, a few small hotels and a beach. When he had walked there and back without meeting a soul, he went down to the beach. There he met with a couple of little boys who were playing at monitor lizards, scrabbling along in the sand and making small strange noises. Abbas knew that little boys had big ears and big eyes, when they wanted, at least he had had when he himself was little. It had helped him to survive in the slum districts in Marseilles. He sank down next to the boys and showed them the picture of Dan Nilsson.

‘The big Swede!’ said one of the boys straight away.

‘Do you know where the big Swede lives?’

‘Yes.’

The sun went quickly to bed in the ocean and left Mal Pais in cloying darkness. If he hadn’t had the little boys with him,
he wouldn’t have discovered the simple wooden building in among the trees.

Now it was no problem.

‘There!’

Abbas looked towards the beautiful wooden house.

‘Does the big Swede live there?’

‘Yes. But he isn’t there.’

‘I know. He has gone to Sweden.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m his cousin, he wanted me to fetch some things for him that he forgot.’

Manual Garcia had followed after Abbas and the boys with the car. Now he got out and came up to them.

‘Is this his house?’

‘Yes. Come along.’

Abbas gave the little boys a hundred colones each and thanked them for their help. The boys stayed where they were.

‘You can go now.’

The boys didn’t move. Abbas gave them another hundred colones. Then they thanked him and ran off. Abbas and Garcia went in through the gate and up to the house. Abbas assumed it would be locked. It was. He looked at Garcia.

‘I forgot my map in the car,’ he said.

Garcia smiled a little. Is that how he wanted it? No problem. Garcia went back to the car and waited a minute or two. When he saw a light turned on in the house, he went back. Abbas opened the front door, from the inside, he had pushed in a little pane at the back and managed to open a window. The fast-descending dark gave enough cover for that sort of break-in. Besides, the animals had started to make themselves heard. Every possible sort of call. From birds, from apes, from the throats of other primates unknown to Abbas. The dry silence of an hour ago had turned into a humid rainforest cacophony.

‘What are you looking for?’ Garcia asked.

‘Documents.’

Garcia lit a cigarette and sat down in an armchair.

And lit another cigarette.

And yet another.

Abbas was a thorough man. Centimetre by centimetre he went through the big Swede’s house. He didn’t even miss the little stone slab under the double bed which hid a pistol. He left it where it was.

Pistols weren’t one of his tools.

When the packet of cigarettes was empty, and Abbas was on his third round of the kitchen, Garcia got up.

‘I’m going to buy some cigarettes, do you want anything?’

‘No.’

Garcia went out through the gate, got in his car and drove off. He vanished out of Mal Pais with a cloud of dust after him, on his way to Santa Teresa. When the dust had settled, a dark van drove out from one of the narrow tracks down towards the sea. The van stopped between some trees. Three men climbed out of the van.

Big men.

Of a type that the drug dealers in Stockholm would drool over.

Protected by the dark, they moved towards the big Swede’s garden. They looked at the house where the lights were on inside. One of them pulled out a mobile and took a couple of pictures of the man who was moving around inside the house.

The other two went round to the back.

Abbas sat on a bamboo chair in the living room. He hadn’t found anything of value. Nothing that could help Mette. No papers, no letters. No links to the murder of Nils Wendt in Stockholm. And nothing at all that was connected with the victim on Nordkoster, as Stilton had hoped for. The house was
clean, except for the pistol under the bed. Abbas leaned back and closed his eyes. The long flight had taken its toll, physically. Mentally, he was inside his mantra, his way of recharging to be able to focus. So he didn’t notice the steps that slipped in through the back door, silently, the door that he himself had used. The very next second he did. He nimbly slipped out of the chair, shadow-like, and floated into the bedroom. The steps got closer. Garcia? Already? He heard the steps come into the room where he had just been sitting. Two? Sounded like it. Then there was silence again. Did they know he was here? Probably. The lights were on inside the house. He must have been visible from outside. Abbas kept close to the wooden wall. It could be neighbours. It could be people who had seen the lights on and wondered what he was doing in the house. It could be completely different people too. With completely different aims. Why couldn’t he hear anything? Abbas considered. The people outside knew that he was somewhere in the house and in the house there weren’t that many places he could be. The little kitchen was fully visible from the living room. They could see that he wasn’t there. So they must realise that he was where he was. Here. He breathed as silently as possible. Why didn’t they come in? Should he wait for them? Silently… in the end he made a decision and stepped out into the door opening. Two very brutally sculpted men with just as brutal pistols stood two metres in front of him with the muzzles of their guns pointed at his body. Calm.

‘Who are you looking for?’ said Abbas.

The men glanced at each other: he speaks Spanish. The man on the right pointed with his pistol towards the chair where Abbas had just been sitting.

‘Sit down.’

Abbas looked at the muzzles, went across to the chair and sat down. The men were presumably Costa Ricans, he thought. Malevolent Costa Ricans. Robbers?

‘What’s this about?’ he said.

‘You’re in the wrong house,’ said the man on the left.

‘Is it yours?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Cleaning.’

‘That was a stupid answer. Try again.’

‘I’m looking for a missing monitor lizard,’ said Abbas.

The man glanced at each other. Bothersome type. One of them pulled out a thin rope.

‘Get up.’

That was a movement that was second nature to Abbas. Get up from a chair, crouching slightly forward, head bent over chest, and – in that movement – act. Neither of the men saw the movement but one of them felt the thin knife go through his throat and out through his carotid artery. The other got a squirt of warm blood straight in one eye. He took an involuntary step to the side and got a knife deep into his shoulder. His pistol went flying across the floor.

Abbas picked it up.

‘JUAN!’

The man with the knife in his shoulder called towards the door. Abbas glanced in the same direction.

The third man out there heard the shout from inside the house. He was on his way to the gate when Garcia’s headlights caught him. He crouched down in the ditch next to the gate. The yellow-green car braked to a halt in front of the house and Garcia climbed out with a cigarette in his mouth.

Hope that weird Swede is finished by now, he thought.

He was.

When Garcia stepped into the living room, two men lay on the floor. He immediately recognised them, from ‘Wanted’ descriptions and innumerable reports within the Costa Rican police. Two exceedingly notorious men. One of them lay in a
large pool of blood on the floor and was presumably dead. The other sat leaning against a wall holding an arm against his bleeding right shoulder. The weird Swede stood beside the other wall and was wiping clean a couple of long narrow knives.

‘A break-in,’ said the Swede. ‘I’m going to walk to Santa Teresa.’

Abbas knew about the third man. He knew that the third man was somewhere out there in the dark behind him, or he assumed he was anyway. He also knew that it was a long walk on what was now a very dark and empty road in to Santa Teresa. He assumed that the third man had understood what had happened with the first and the second. Not least after Garcia had rushed out, pulled out his mobile and with an almost falsetto voice, informed half the police force on Nicoya.

‘Mal Pais!’

The third man must have heard that too.

Abbas was extremely focused as he walked along. With his back to the third man. Metre after metre, through silent dark curves, towards a distant light from Santa Teresa. He knew that he risked getting a bullet in his back. No black knives would help against that. At the same time, it seemed that the third man had been on some sort of mission, together with the throat and the other guy. They weren’t robbers. Why should three robbers enter a house that from the gate signalled nada? When there were considerably more interesting houses on the surrounding slopes? More hidden by rainforest, more affluent?

The trio was after something specific.

In the murdered Nils Wendt’s house.

What?

The bar was called Good Vibrations Bar. A copyright rip-off that The Beach Boys would just have to put up with. California was quite some way away. But the American surfers here
perhaps felt nostalgic when they slipped into the decidedly shabby drinking den in Santa Teresa.

Abbas sat at one end of a long smoky bar counter. Alone, with a GT in front of him. This time only. An alcoholic drink. He had walked in the dark with muscles and senses on full alert and small movements on his body where the knives were hidden. And he’d got this far. Without a bullet in the back. Now he felt like a drink. Against better judgement, said a little corner of his brain. But the rest said it was OK.

He assumed that the third guy was out there.

In the dark.

Abbas sipped his drink. Igeno, the bartender, had mixed it to perfection. Abbas turned round and looked at the other people drinking in the bar. Tanned and even more tanned and some badly sunburned men with torsos that were a major part of their identity. And women. Local women and tourists. Some of them presumably guides, some surfing enthusiasts, all in conversation with one torso or another. Abbas’ gaze wandered away from the bar room and in across the counter and ended up on the wall opposite. A couple of really long shelves with bottles, more or less flavoured liquor, all with a single purpose.