The Spring Tide (35 page)

‘“Very beautiful. Came from Playa del Carmen in Mexico. Was related to a famous artist. Spent her time working on…”’

Abbas became silent.

‘On…?’

‘I can’t read what I’ve written, there was some turbulence… hang on! Wall hangings! “She wove beautiful wall hangings. Was very much liked in Mal Pais. Loved Dan Nilsson.” That was roughly it.’

‘Where did they meet?’

‘I think it was in Playa del Carmen, and then they travelled to Costa Rica to start a new life together. As Bosques put it.’

‘And that was in the mid-Eighties?’ Olivia wondered.

‘Yes, and then she got pregnant.’

‘And went to Nordkoster and was murdered,’ said Stilton.

‘By whom? And why?’ said Abbas.

‘Bertil Magnuson, perhaps,’ said Stilton. ‘After all, Wendt wrote that he was on that cassette tape, and besides, he had a summer place on Nordkoster.’

‘Did he have it already then?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

She remembered what Betty Nordmann had told her.

‘Then your Jackie theory falls,’ said Stilton.

‘Why? Magnuson might also know Jackie. He might also be one of her customers. Perhaps she knew him already back then? Perhaps they are mixed up in it, both of them? There were three people on the beach.’

Stilton shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t cope with any more talk about Jackie Berglund. Olivia changed the subject and turned to Abbas.

‘The men who did the break-in, at Wendt’s house, what happened to them?’

‘They regretted it.’

Stilton glanced at Abbas. He didn’t know what had happened but assumed it included details that weren’t for the ears of young Rönning. Which Abbas was perfectly aware of.

‘But they must have been after that stuff that you got from Bosques, surely?’ said Olivia.

‘Presumably.’

‘And then you can’t help wondering who they were working for. It must have been somebody from Sweden, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Soon she’ll say Jackie Berglund again.’

But Stilton smiled a little when he said that. He now had enough respect for Olivia to skip the jargon. He got up and looked at Abbas.

‘Is it OK if I…’

‘The bed’s already made up.’

‘Thanks.’

A dialogue that Olivia interpreted as meaning that Stilton would spend the night in Abbas’ flat.

He didn’t have a caravan at his disposal any more.

It turned out that the disastrous scenario, the third, was the one that was played out. Mette drove straight to the NCS at police headquarters with her blue plastic bag and disappeared in through the glass doors. K. Sedovic reported to Bertil Magnuson.

For a few moments, Bertil wondered whether he should disappear. Leave the country. ‘Do a Nils Wendt’. But he dropped that idea pretty quick. It would never work, he knew that.

And he realised what it had all boiled down to.

A question of time.

He parked the Jaguar outside the house and went straight up to the terrace. He sat down and lit a cigarillo. The summer night was clear and mild, the water glimmered. From Bockholmen he could hear voices singing. Linn was somewhere in the neighbouring district at what she herself called ‘a completely uninteresting ladies’ dinner with some people who called themselves Stocksund’s Skirts’. A group of abandoned housewives who devoted themselves to charity and what one might call luxury Tupperware parties. Linn had almost nothing in common with those women. Except perhaps her address. But since Bertil claimed that he would be having some business meetings and perhaps would be late home, she went to the dinner.

Dressed up.

And beautiful.

Still sitting, Bertil thought about her. About how she would react. About her eyes. How she would look at him and how he would handle that humiliation. And then he thought about the reason for all of it. About the people at the National Crime Squad who just now would be sitting listening to a recording where he distinctly admitted involvement in a murder. Not only involvement, he had initiated it.

Bertil Magnuson.

But what choice had he had?

The entire existence of the company was at stake!

So he chose a different path to that which Nils Wendt had proposed.

A catastrophically wrong path, it turned out. Now.

When he went to fetch the unopened bottle of whisky in the bar, he saw every imaginable newspaper headline before him and heard every excited question from journalists across the world and he knew that he wouldn’t have any answers.

Not a single one.

He was pinned to the murder.

The dimmed lighting hardly reached the thin white arm which hung down a bit from the covers. The letters that had been written there, KF, had almost been wiped off. Acke lay in the bed, unconscious, anaesthetized, with tubes in and out. Ovette sat in a chair close by and cried, quietly. Cried over everything that had gone wrong, all the time, throughout her life. She couldn’t even take care of her child. Of little Acke. Now he lay there and was in pain and she couldn’t do anything about it. She didn’t even know how to console him. She didn’t know anything. Why had it ended up like this? She couldn’t blame
everything on Jackie. She was after all a free agent who had made her own choices. But how free was she? At first, after she’d been kicked out from Red Velvet she had got a bit of money from Social Security. She didn’t get any unemployment benefits since she’d hadn’t paid tax all those years. She was outside the system. Then she became a cleaner for a while. But she didn’t like that and wasn’t particularly good at her job. After a few years, she returned to what she knew she was good at.

Selling sex.

But by then she had got a bit older and wasn’t quite as desirable, even on that market. Besides, she didn’t want to take customers to her flat because of Acke. So it was the street.

On the street.

Back seats in cars, gardens and garages.

Right at the bottom of the scale.

She looked at Acke. At the dimmed lighting. She heard the weak whooshing sound in the tubes. Oh, if only you’d had a dad, she thought. A real dad, like your mates. A dad who could help. But you don’t. Your dad doesn’t know about you.

Ovette swallowed a thick lump in her throat and heard how the door behind her creaked. She turned round and saw Mink standing in the opening with a football in his hand. Ovette got up and went over to him.

‘Let’s go out,’ she whispered.

Ovette took Mink a little way down the corridor. She needed a smoke and had found a glass door giving out onto a little balcony. There she lit a cigarette and looked at the football.

‘Zlatan has autographed it.’

Mink showed her a signature that with a certain amount of goodwill could be interpreted as Zlatan’s. Ovette smiled and patted Mink’s hand.

‘Thanks for caring, there aren’t many who do, you know what it’s like…’

Mink knew. That’s what it was like. If you were where Vettan was, then you had to suppress everything just so you could stick it. There wasn’t much room to care about others. The same for everyone around her.

‘I’m giving it up now,’ said Ovette.

‘Giving it up?’

‘The street.’

Mink looked at her and saw that she meant what she said.

Just then, just there.

At the other end of the corridor stood a doctor and two policemen. They were in charge of the MHP investigation. The technicians had just told them: there was no trace of a body in the remains of the caravan. So Stilton was alive at least, Forss thought. He received the news with some relief, rather to his own surprise. Now they wanted to talk with Acke Andersson. Stilton had mentioned his name in connection with the cage fighting and his own beating-up. Now they wanted to see if they could get any tips about the perpetrators. It might even be the same people who lay behind the murder of Vera Larsson and the Trashkick films.

‘I don’t think he’s in any condition to talk,’ said the doctor.

He wasn’t. Klinga sat on Ovette’s chair next to the bed. Forss stood on the other side. Acke lay there with his eyes shut.

‘Acke.’

Klinga tried. Acke didn’t react. Forss glanced at the doctor and pointed with his finger at the edge of the bed, and the doctor nodded. Forss carefully sat on the bed and looked at Acke. Beaten-up northerners and murdered tramps, no they weren’t part of what he could feel empathy with, but this was something different. A little boy. Been beaten black and blue and thrown into a skip. Forss realised he had put a hand on Acke’s leg on top of the covers. Klinga glanced at the hand.

‘The bastards,’ said Forss, in a low voice, mainly for himself.

Forss and Klinga stopped outside the door, took a deep breath and looked in the other direction. Towards a balcony with a glass door. Out there Ovette stood smoking, and she looked into the corridor. Forss reacted, for a split second, something fluttered past. Then he turned and went in the opposite direction.

For Ovette it wasn’t just a flutter. She followed his back with her gaze, a long time, until he had gone.

She knew exactly who he was.

It was pretty quiet between Abbas and Stilton. All the way to Dalagatan and right into the flat. They weren’t the type of men who talked. Not with each other, not in that way. They were both very knotted persons, each in his own noose. But they had a shared past and they had a now, and the balance between them had been difficult. It was Abbas who had stayed on his feet, while Stilton had fallen, and the roles had been switched. Not an easy transformation for either of them. Stilton had gone to extremes to avoid Abbas. One of the few people he trusted absolutely. Under normal conditions. When the conditions changed, to Stilton’s disadvantage, he couldn’t face meeting Abbas. He knew what Abbas saw, and for Stilton that was degrading.

It wasn’t for Abbas.

He had considerably more levels than Stilton assumed. On one of those levels, an absolute solidarity was anchored. In this case with Stilton. He had managed to keep an almost constant check on Stilton’s situation in the city slums. On a couple of occasions when Stilton had been in his worst periods and contemplated suicide, Abbas had been there and caught him. Taken him to the people who could help him with the proper care. Left him there and sneaked off. So as not to embarrass Stilton.

And Stilton was very well aware of that.

So they didn’t talk very much. They knew. Stilton sank down on one of Abbas’ wooden armchairs. Abbas put on a CD with music and pulled out a backgammon set.

‘Are you up to it?’

‘No.’

Abbas nodded and put the game away. He sat down in the armchair next to Stilton and let the music take over. They listened to the delicately beautiful tones for a long while. A single piano, a viola, a few simple stanzas that twirled around one another, were repeated, varied. Stilton twisted towards Abbas.

‘What’s the music?’

‘Spiegel im Spiegel.’

‘Yes?’

‘Arvo Pärt.’

Stilton glanced at Abbas. He had really missed him.

‘Did you need your knives in Costa Rica?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Abbas looked at his finely sculpted hands. Stilton sat up a bit straighter in his armchair.

‘Ronny gave me a book for you the other day.’

Stilton pulled out the slim tiny book from the antiquarian bookseller and handed it across to Abbas. He had had it in his back pocket in the caravan, which was lucky, his overcoat was incinerated.

‘Thanks,’ said Abbas. ‘Wow!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s… I’ve been looking for this for ages.
In Honour of Friends
, translated by Hermelin.’

Stilton saw how Abbas carefully touched the slim book’s soft covers, as if he was caressing a sleeping woman, and then he opened it.

‘What is it?’ Stilton asked. ‘What’s it about?’

‘The Sufi world… the one beyond the corner.’

Stilton looked at Abbas. When Abbas opened his mouth to explain to a complete idiot that it was about thawing or freezing thinking ability, Mink called on his mobile. Mink had phoned Olivia and wanted to get hold of Stilton and been given Abbas’ number.

‘One moment.’

Abbas handed the mobile across to Stilton. Mink spoke in a low tone.

‘I’m standing in a hospital corridor. Acke’s been beaten up.’

Stilton had missed the news about Acke. He had had quite a lot of his own problems the last twenty-four hours. But the analytic side of his brain was recuperating fast. He immediately linked the beating-up of Acke with the burning of Vera’s caravan. Kid Fighters.

‘Kid Fighters?’ Abbas asked when Stilton gave him back the phone.

Stilton quickly moved Abbas from the world beyond the corner to a much more concrete world with beaten-up children and murdered homeless people and torched caravans. And his own hunt for what the media had dubbed the Camera Phone Murderers.

‘Just say if you want any help.’

The knifeman gave a little smile.

Bertil Magnuson was not smiling. He had quickly become quite tipsy with the help of the whisky and in that state was trying to work out what it was all about. But he couldn’t get it clear. Neither what Wendt had been after, or what he had meant by ‘revenge’. But it didn’t make much difference now, for his part.

For his part, it was over.

Since he was the chairman of the Friends of the Cedergren Tower, a society that provided economic support towards the
preservation of the old monument, he had also been entrusted with a key to the tower.

A key that he with some clumsy effort managed to dig out of one of Linn’s beautiful mother-of-pearl boxes in the desk in the hall. Then he opened his private safe.

Mette Olsäter and her inner circle sat in the investigation room at the NCS. A room where just now you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Two women and three men sat around a tape recorder with an old recording. An old conversation. It was the third time they had listened to it.

‘That’s Magnuson’s voice.’

‘Without a doubt.’

‘Who’s the other guy?’