The Spring Tide (39 page)

‘You have a pair of very special earrings on… in the photo, haven’t you?’

Mette pointed to Eva’s long beautiful earrings in the photo.’

‘I had a friend who was a silversmith, and she gave them to me for my twenty-fifth birthday.’

‘So they were made specially for you?’

‘Yes?’

‘And only one pair was made?’

‘I think so.’

Mette lifted up a little plastic bag with an earring in it.

‘Do you recognise this?’

Eva looked at the earring.

‘It looks like one of them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where does it come from?’ Eva asked.

‘From the coat pocket of the woman who was murdered in the Hasslevikarna coves in 1987. How did it get there?’

Olivia looked away from the screen. She thought it was starting to be hard to keep on watching. Mette’s way of calmly and deliberately hurting her victim.

With a single aim.

‘You have no idea how it ended up in her coat pocket?’ Mette asked.

‘No.’

Mette turned a little to one side and glanced at Stilton. An interrogator’s trick. The person being questioned should be made to feel that the interrogators knew more than they did. Mette looked at Eva again and then down at the old private photo.

‘Is that your brother standing next to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true that he died from an overdose four years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sverker Hansson. Did he visit you at your summer house ever?’

‘On occasion.’

‘Was he there the same late summer when the murder took place?’

‘No.’

‘Why are you lying?’

‘Was he?’

Eva looked surprised. Was she acting? Stilton wondered. She must be.

‘We know that he was there,’ said Mette.

‘How do you know?’

‘He was there with a man called Alf Stein. They rented a cabin on the island. Is he someone you know? Alf Stein?’

‘No.’

‘We have a tape recording where he confirms that they were there.’

‘Oh really, so they were there then.’

‘But that isn’t something you remember?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t meet Alf Stein or your brother?’

‘It’s possible I… now you mention it… I remember that Sverker had a mate with him on some occasion…’

‘Alf Stein.’

‘I don’t know what he was called…’

‘But it was you who gave them the alibi for the murder.’

‘Did I?’

‘You claimed that Sverker and his mate had stolen your boat and disappeared. The night before the murder. We believe it was the next night. After the murder. Wasn’t that the case?’

Eva didn’t answer. Mette went on.

‘Alf Stein claims that you have paid money to him over the years. Have you done that?’

‘No.’

‘So he is lying?’

Eva wiped her forehead with her arm. She was close to the edge now. Both Mette and Stilton saw that. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. They all turned round. A uniformed woman opened, and held out a green folder. Stilton got up, took the folder and handed it across to Mette. She opened the folder, glanced at the top sheet and then closed it again.

‘What was that?’ Eva wondered out loud.

Mette didn’t answer. Slowly, she leaned into the light from the table lamp.

‘Eva, was it you who killed Adelita Rivera?’

‘Who’s that?’

‘She’s the woman who can be seen with Nils Wendt in all the photos you have been shown. Was it you?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll continue.’

Mette lifted up the forged letter from Adelita.

‘This letter was sent from Sweden to Dan Nilsson in Costa Rica, Dan Nilsson was Nils Wendt’s alias there. I shall read it to you, it is written in Spanish but I shall translate it. “Dan! I’m sorry, but I don’t think we are right for each other, and now I have the opportunity to start a new life. I’m not coming back.” Underneath is a signature. Do you know who signed it?’

Eva didn’t answer. She was staring at her clasped hands on her lap. Stilton watched her, expressionless. Mette went on with the same controlled voice.

‘It’s signed “Adelita”. She was called Adelita Rivera and was drowned at the Hasslevikarna coves five days before this was posted. Do you know who wrote it?’

Eva didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up. Mette put the letter on the table. Stilton was watching Eva carefully.

‘The other day you were assaulted in your home, in the hall,’ said Mette. ‘Our technicians found traces of blood on your hall rug and checked these to see if they came from the perpetrators. In connection with that, you had to supply a DNA sample and that showed that the blood came from you.’

‘Yes.’

Mette opened the green folder she had just received.

‘We have also done a DNA analysis of the saliva on the stamp on the letter from “Adelita” in 1987 and that has matched your DNA. From the hall. They were the same. It was you who licked the stamp. Did you write the letter too?’

Everybody had an edge, an edge to the precipice. Sooner or later you get to that edge if you are pushed hard enough. Now Eva was there. At the edge. It took some seconds, perhaps almost a whole minute, but then it came. In a low voice.

‘Can we take a break?’

‘Soon. Was it you who wrote the letter?’

‘Yes.’

Stilton leaned back. It was over. Mette leaned towards the tape recorder.

‘We shall take a short break.’

Forss and Klinga had interrogated Liam and Isse for a couple of hours. They had both grown up in the Hallonbergen suburb of Stockholm. Klinga had been landed with Liam. He knew more or less what he would hear. Even before what they already had on Liam’s criminal record. A whole lot of shit which escalated during his teens. When Liam ended by telling how his dad used to help to inject his big sister at the kitchen table, the picture was pretty clear.

To Klinga.

Damaged children. Wasn’t that what she had called them? That woman he’d seen on TV, on some current affairs programme.

Liam was an extremely damaged child.

Forss had established roughly the same topography around Isse. Originally from Ethiopia, abandoned and left to his own devices even before his voice broke. Damaged and demolished. Crammed full of aimless violence.

Now it was about the cage fighting.

It took a while before they got Liam and Isse to reveal what they knew, but it trickled out in the end. Names of the other boys who helped to arrange them and above all: when the next fight was to take place.

And where.

Out on Svartsjölandet, in an old closed-down cement factory. Now empty and fenced off.

Except for some people.

Forss had put a watch on the place several hours earlier. The strategy was to let the whole thing get going before they raided it. When the first little boys were shut in the cages and the cheers and jeers started up, it was quickly stopped. The police had cut off every possible escape route and went in with heavily armed officers. The police vans outside were soon filled to the brim.

When Forss and Klinga came out of the factory, they were met by journalists and photographers.

‘When did you find out about the cage fighting?’

‘A while ago, via our undercover activities. It’s been a top priority recently.’

Forss said straight to a camera.

‘Then why haven’t you raided them earlier?’

‘We wanted to be certain the right people were there.’

‘And were they now?’

‘Yes.’

As Forss posed for another close up, Klinga walked away.

Some of the members of the team had left the room. Olivia was still there, with Bosse Thyrén and Lisa Hedqvist. They probably all felt the same thing. A sort of relief because an unsolved murder was about to be solved, mixed with various personal reflections. For Olivia, a lot of that was about motive.

Why?

Even though she had an idea what it might be.

The trio in the interrogation room had been given coffee. The mood was low key. For two of them some relief, and somehow perhaps even for the third. Mette turned the tape recorder on again and looked at Eva Carlsén.

‘Why? Can you talk about it?’ she said.

Mette had suddenly changed her voice. The impersonal interrogator voice had gone. The one that only had a single purpose, to get a confession. The new voice was from one person to another, in the hope of understanding why we commit the acts we do commit.

Knowledge.

‘Why?’ said Eva.

‘Yes.’

Eva raised her head a little. If she was going to tell them why, then she’d have to push herself through a whole lot of pain. Suppressed pain, sublimated. But she felt that she ought at least to present an explanation. Put words to what she had devoted a whole life to try to atone for.

The murder of Adelita Rivera.

‘Where shall I begin?’

‘Wherever you want.’

‘The first thing that happened was that Nils disappeared. Then, in 1984, without a word. He just vanished. I thought he had been murdered, that something had happened down there in Kinshasa, you thought something like that too, right?’

Eva looked at Mette.

‘That was one of our hypotheses, yes…’

Eva nodded and stroked the back of one hand with the other. She was talking very quietly now, and frailly.

‘Anyhow he never turned up. I was desperate. I loved him and was totally crushed. Then suddenly you came and showed me those tourist photos from Mexico and I saw that it was Nils, and he was alive and had a nice tan and was in some holiday resort in Mexico and I was absolutely… I don’t know… I felt horribly cheated. I hadn’t heard a word, not a postcard, nothing. There he was in the sun, and I was here and mourning and was desperate and… there was something extremely degrading about it… as if he didn’t give a damn about me…’

‘Why didn’t you say that it was him when I showed you the photo? Then, in 1985?’

‘I don’t know. It was as if… I wanted to get hold of him, myself, wanted an explanation, wanted to understand why he did that to me. If it was something personal between us, that he wanted to hurt me or whatever it was he wanted. Then I realised what it was about.’

‘How?’

‘When I saw those other photos.’

‘The ones we found in your house?’

‘Yes. I contacted a foreign agency, specialists at finding missing people, I told them where he’d last been seen, in Playa del Carmen in Mexico, you’d shown me those tourist photos from down there, and then they started looking and found him…’

‘There?’

‘Yes. And then they sent a whole pile of photos from there, of him and a young woman. Intimate photos, sex scenes, from bedrooms and hammocks and the beach and everything imaginable… you’ve seen them, it was terrible. It might sound… but I was incredibly hurt… not just deceived, cheated on. It was something about the whole way he had gone about it, as if I was just air, not somebody who existed, just something you could treat like… I don’t know… And then that day came along…’

‘…when the young woman suddenly turned up on Nordkoster?’

‘Yes. Pregnant. His baby. Came with her bulging belly and hadn’t a clue that I recognised her from the photos and I knew that she’d been sent there.’

‘By Nils?’

‘Yes? Why else would she turn up? And then I saw her sneaking around the back garden of our summer house in the evening, and I’d been drinking wine and became… I don’t know, I became furious. What was she doing there? At our house? Was she looking for something? And then…’

Eva became silent.

‘Where were Sverker and Alf Stein then?’ said Mette.

‘They were in the house. I didn’t really want them staying with me but they’d been kicked out of the holiday cabins and they’d moved in…’

‘And then what happened?’

‘We ran out into the garden and dragged that woman into the house and she started to fight and scream, and then Sverker proposed that they should cool her down a bit, he was high on drugs.’

‘So you took her to the Hasslevikarna coves?’

‘Yes, we wanted to get away from people.’

‘What happened there?’

Eva twisted one thumb with her other hand. She had to dig very deep to find the right words, to give them form.

‘There was no water on the beach when we got there, it was low tide, spring tide, the beach stretched a long way out. And then I remembered…’

‘About the spring tide?’

‘I had tried to get her to tell me what she was doing there, what she was after, where Nils was, but she didn’t say a word, just kept silent.’

Eva couldn’t look up any longer. Her voice was very low.

‘The guys fetched a spade and then they dug a hole… and put her in it… then the tide came in…’

‘You knew that it would come then?’

‘I’d lived on the island for several years, everyone there knew when the spring tide came and went. I wanted to frighten her, make her talk…’

‘And did she?’

‘Not at first. But then… when the tide came in… in the end…’

Eva became silent. Mette had to fill in.

‘She said where Nils had hidden his money?’

‘Yes… and where he lived.’

Stilton leaned forward a little.

‘And then you left her there?’

It was the first time he had said anything during the entire interrogation. Eva gave a start. She had been engaged in a painful dialogue with Mette, the man next to her hadn’t existed.

‘The guys ran home. I stayed behind. I knew that we’d gone too far, that the whole thing was madness. But I hated her so terribly, the woman out there in the water. I wanted to torture her for taking Nils away from me.’

‘Kill her.’

Stilton was still sitting in the same position, leaning forward.

‘No, torture her. It might sound strange, but I didn’t think she’d die. I don’t know what I thought, it was all black inside my head. I just went away.’

‘But you knew it was a spring tide?’

Eva nodded in silence. Suddenly she started to cry, quietly. Stilton looked at her. Now they had the motive for the murder of Adelita Rivera. He tried to catch Eva’s eye.

‘Now perhaps we can move on to Nils Wendt?’ he said. ‘How did he die?’