The Spring Tide (4 page)

‘Jelle!’ she laughed.

Pärt moved away from the wall. Was there trouble brewing? He knew Vera was a temperamental woman. Jelle was more of an unknown factor. It was said that he came from the
archipelago
, far out somewhere. Rödlöga, somebody had said? His father had hunted seals! But there was so much talk, and there was so little substance to it. And now the supposed seal hunter was standing outside the market hall having an argument with Vera.

Or whatever it was they were doing.

‘What’s the row about?’

‘We’re not having a row,’ said Vera. ‘Jelle and me, we never have a row. I just say how it is, and he stares at the ground. Don’t you?’

Vera turned towards Jelle but he had already moved off. Now he was fifteen metres away. He wasn’t going to argue with Vera about Benseman’s pitch. Really he didn’t give a damn about where Vera sold her magazines. She could decide that herself.

He was fifty-six years old, and really he didn’t give a damn about anything.

Olivia steered her car through the late summer’s evening, on her way to Söder. It had been an intense day. A poor start, Ulf Molin had pestered her as usual, but then she’d found that murder case. And things were suddenly going very nicely. For several reasons. Private and otherwise.

The hours she had spent at the National Library had left their mark.

Weird how things turn out, she thought. It wasn’t at all how she had planned things. She would soon be on summer holiday
after a tough and intense spell. At college on weekdays, and working weekends at the Kronoberg remand centre. After that she was going to take things easy. She’d managed to save a bit of money so that she could stay afloat awhile. A cheap last-minute charter flight was the rough idea. Besides, she hadn’t had any sex for almost a year. She was going to do something about that too.

And then this comes along?

Perhaps she should skip the murder-case project after all? It was voluntary, right? Then Lenni phoned.

‘Yeah?’

Lenni was her best mate from her final years at school. A girl who drifted around and desperately tried to find something to cling on to so she wouldn’t sink. As always, she wanted to go out in town, see what was happening, afraid to miss out. Now she’d got together with four other mates so that she wouldn’t miss Jakob, the guy she was interested in just now. She had read on Facebook that he was going to the Strand at Hornstull this evening.

‘You’ve got to come along! It’ll be great! We’re going to meet at Lollo’s at eight o’clock and…’

‘Lenni…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Can’t make it, I’ve got to… it’s some college work, I need to sort it this evening.’

‘But Jakob’s mate Erik is going and he’s been asking about you several times! And he’s dead handsome! Absolutely perfect for you!’

‘Yeah but I can’t make it.’

‘Livia, how can you be such a pain in the arse? You really need to get laid if you’re going to get back into form!’

‘Another time.’

‘That’s what you always say nowadays! OK then, but don’t blame me if you miss out!’

‘Promise. Hope it works out with Jakob!’

‘Yeah, keep your fingers crossed! Hugs and kisses!’

Olivia didn’t have time to say hugs before Lenni had hung up. Lenni was already on her way somewhere else, somewhere with a bit of action.

But why had she really said no? She had been thinking herself about guys just before Lenni phoned. Had she really become as deadly boring as Lenni claimed? College project work?

Why had she gone and said that?

Olivia put some fresh cat food in the bowl and emptied the litter tray. Then she sank down beside her laptop. What she really would have liked was a bath, but there was something wrong with the drains which meant that the water ran out over the floor when she let the plug out of the bath and she simply couldn’t deal with that just now. She’d do something about it tomorrow. Put it on her things-to-do-tomorrow list. A list that she had neatly pushed ahead of her most of the spring.

Instead she opened Google Earth.

Nordkoster.

She was still fascinated by the possibility of sitting at home in front of a screen and just hovering down almost to the window level of buildings and dwellings all over the world. She always felt spy-vibes when she was doing it. Almost like a peeping Tom.

But now they were a different sort of vibes, she noticed. The more she zoomed in on the island, the landscape, the small roads, the houses, the closer she got to her goal, the stronger the vibes became. And then she got there.

Hasslevikarna.

The coves on the northern part of the island.

Almost like a little bay, she thought. She tried to get as close as possible. And that was pretty detailed. She could see the sand dunes above, and the beach. The beach where the pregnant woman had been buried. There it was in front of her, on the screen.

Grey, grainy.

She immediately started imagining where. Where had the woman been buried?

Was it there?

Or there?

Where did they find the coat?

And where had that little boy been sitting when he saw it all? Was it over there by the rocks on the west side of the beach? Or on the east side? Up by the trees?

She suddenly noticed how irritated she had become because she couldn’t get any closer. All the way down. Almost with her feet on the beach.

To be there.

But she couldn’t. This was the best she could do. She turned off her computer. Now she was going to treat herself to a beer. A beer like Ulf had gone on about a couple of times. But she was going to have a beer on her own, at home, without having to rub shoulders with her classmates in the pub.

On her own.

Olivia liked being single. It was entirely her own choice. She had never had any problem with boys, on the contrary. Throughout her childhood and teens she received confirmation that she was attractive. First, all those cute photos of her as a little girl, and Arne’s mass of holiday videos starring little Olivia. Then there were all those admiring glances as she stepped out into the big world. For a while she amused herself by wearing sunglasses and observing all the boys she met beneath them. How their gaze would seek her out wherever she went and wouldn’t let go until she had passed. She soon tired of that. She knew who she was and what she had. In that respect. It gave her a sense of security.

She didn’t have to go out hunting.

Like Lenni.

Olivia had her mum and her little flat. Two rooms painted white, with wooden floors. It wasn’t hers for real, she rented it from a cousin who was working for the Swedish Export Council in South Africa. He’d be there two years. Meanwhile, she was living here. Amidst his furniture.

She just had to put up with that.

And she had Elvis, of course. The cat that had been left after an intense relationship with a sexy Jamaican. A guy she had bumped into at Nova Bar on Skånegatan, first she’d felt surprisingly horny and then she’d fallen in love with him.

The version she told him was the opposite way round.

For almost a whole year they had travelled and laughed and shagged and then he had met a girl he knew from ‘back home’, as he put it. And she was allergic to cats. So the cat stayed on at Skånegatan. She had named it Elvis after the Jamaican moved out. He had called it Ras Tafari, after Haile Selassie’s name in the 1930s.

Elvis was more to her taste.

Now she loved the cat almost as much as her Mustang.

She finished her beer.

It was good.

When she was about to open a second beer she happened to notice the alcohol content and realised it was much stronger than the first, and that she hadn’t had any lunch. Nor dinner for that matter. When she got going, food became low priority. Now she felt she ought to give her stomach something to work on, to counter the slight spinning sensation in her brain. Should she nip down and get a pizza?

No.

The slight spinning sensation was actually quite nice.

She took the second can with her into the tiny bedroom and sank down on top of the bedspread. A thin long
greyish-white
wooden mask hung on the wall opposite her. One of her cousin’s African art objects. She still hadn’t made up her mind if
she liked it or not. There were nights when she woke up from some cold dream and saw the moonlight reflected from the mask’s white mouth. That wasn’t exactly pleasant. Olivia let her gaze wander up towards the ceiling and suddenly realised: she hadn’t checked her phone for several hours! That was not like her. Her mobile was a part of Olivia’s outfit. She never felt fully dressed if she didn’t have her phone in a pocket. Now she grabbed it and unlocked it. Checked her emails, messages and calendar and ended up on the Swedish TV site. A bit of news before she slid away, that would do nicely!

The person who couldn’t stand there and reveal anything on the evening news was called Rune Forss, a chief inspector with the Stockholm police, fifty-something she guessed. He had been tasked with dealing with the repeated assaults on rough sleepers. A task that hardly made Forss jump for joy, she thought. He seemed to belong to the old school. That part of the old school where they thought that lots of people only had themselves to blame. For one thing or another. Particularly when it came to the mischief-makers, and even more particularly when it came to folk who couldn’t pull their socks up and get a job and behave like everybody else.

They only had themselves to blame, to a very large extent.

That definitely wasn’t an attitude that they taught at the police college, but everyone knew it existed. Amongst some people. Some of Olivia’s fellow students had already been infected by the same jargon.

‘Are you going to go undercover among the rough sleepers?’

‘Undercover?’

‘Yes, be like a rough sleeper, blend in among them. So you can catch the perpetrators.’

When Rune Forss finally understood what he was being asked, he seemed to have difficulty in suppressing a smile.

‘No.’

Olivia turned her mobile off.

If it had been a heart-warming story, then one of those homeless people would have been sitting on a simple chair at the bedside of the badly wounded man. Her hands would have smoothed the man’s blankets and tried to give him a sliver of fragile hope. But in the true story, the one that is true to what actually happened, the staff at the hospital reception had phoned security the very moment One-eyed Vera had cut across the hall on her way to the lifts. The security staff had caught up with her in a corridor not far from Benseman’s room.

‘You are not allowed in here!’

‘Why not? I’m just going to visit a mate who…’

‘Come along with us!’

And Vera was then removed from the premises.

Which is a euphemistic way of saying that the security people marched off with a protesting Vera, past staring people, right through the entrance hall and more or less threw her out on to the street. They did this in an unnecessarily brutal and deeply embarrassing manner, despite the fact that she reeled off all her human rights. Or her own version of them.

Out she went.

Into the summer night.

And that marked the start of her long walk to her caravan in the woods in Solna.

Alone.

On a night when violent young men were at large and Chief Inspector Rune Forss had fallen asleep comfortably on his stomach.

The woman who had just popped a large forkful of marzipan cream layer cake into her mouth had red-painted lips, a lot of fuzzy grey hair and ‘volume’. That’s how her husband had put it on one occasion: ‘My wife has volume.’ Which meant that she was quite wide. A fact that sometimes pained her, sometimes didn’t. During periods of the first instance, she would try to shrink the volume, with hardly noticeable results. During the latter she just liked being who she was. Now she was sitting in her spacious office in C-building at the National Crime Squad and surreptitiously eating a cream layer cake, half-listening to a news bulletin on the radio. A company called MWM, Magnuson World Mining, had just been named Swedish Company of the Year Abroad.

The cake-eating woman turned off the radio. She was familiar with the name Bertil Magnuson in connection with a disappearance in the 1980s.

She directed her gaze at a portrait on the edge of her desk. Her youngest daughter, Jolene. The girl smiled at her, with a peculiar smile and enigmatic eyes. She had Down syndrome and was nineteen years old. My darling Jolene, the woman thought, what does life have in store for you? She was reaching out for the last piece of cake when there was a knock on the door. She quickly pushed the cake behind a couple of box files on the desk, and then turned towards the door.

‘Come in!’

The door was opened and a young woman peered in. When she looked at you her left eye was not completely parallel with her right eye – she had a bit of a squint. Her hair was set up in an untidy black bun.

‘Mette Olsäter?’ the untidy bun asked.

‘What is it about?’

‘Can I come in?’

‘What is it about?’

The untidy bun seemed uncertain as to whether that meant that she should come in, or not. She stopped in the door frame, the door half-open.

‘My name is Olivia Rönning and I’m a student at the Police College. I’m looking for Tom Stilton.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m doing a project on a case that he was in charge of and need to ask him about a few things.’

‘What case is that?’

‘A murder on Nordkoster in 1987.’

‘Come in.’

Olivia stepped in and closed the door. There was a chair in front of Olsäter’s desk but Olivia didn’t dare sit on it. Not without an invitation. The woman behind the desk was not only obviously large, she had a very commanding presence.

Detective superintendent.

‘What does the project entail?’

‘We’re looking at old murder investigations and examining what could have been done differently today, with modern methods.’

‘A cold-case exercise?’

‘Sort of.’

The room fell silent. Mette looked at her piece of cake out of the corner of her eye. She knew it could be seen if she asked the young lady to sit on the chair, so she kept her on her feet.

‘Stilton’s left,’ she said bluntly.

‘Oh, right. When did he leave?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘No, I… but perhaps he could answer my questions. Even if he’s left. Why did he leave?’

‘Personal reasons.’

‘What’s he doing now?’

‘No idea.’

Like an echo from Åke Gustafsson, Olivia thought.

‘Do you know where I can get hold of him?’

‘No.’

Mette Olsäter looked at Olivia without moving her eyes. The message was clear. The conversation was over as far as she was concerned.

‘Well, thanks anyway.’

She found herself making an almost unnoticeable bowing gesture before going to the door. Halfway out, she turned round and faced Mette.

‘You’ve got a bit of something, some cream or something, on your chin.’

And then she pulled the door shut behind her, fast.

Mette – just as fast – wiped her chin with her hand and removed the little blob of cream.

So annoying.

But a bit amusing too, Mårten would have a good laugh at that this evening, her husband. He loved embarrassing
situations
.

But she was less pleased about Rönning’s hunt for Tom. She probably wouldn’t find him, but even just mentioning his name had stirred things up inside Mette’s head.

She didn’t like people stirring things up there.

Mette was of an analytical bent. A brilliant investigator with an overactive intellect and an impressive capacity for doing lots of things at the same time. That wasn’t boasting, it was what had got her where she was today. One of the most experienced
murder investigators in the country. A woman who kept a cool head when softer colleagues got caught up in irrelevant emotions.

Mette never did that.

But there was a place in her head where you could stir things up. On rare occasions. Those occasions almost always had some link to Tom Stilton.

Olivia left Mette’s office with a feeling of… yes, what? She didn’t really know. As if that woman hadn’t liked her asking about Tom Stilton. But why? He had been in charge of the
investigation
of the Nordkoster murder for several years, and then they had closed the investigation. And now he had left the police. Big deal. Surely she could get hold of that Stilton on her own. Or let go of the case, if it was going to be so complicated. But she wouldn’t do that. Not yet. Not that easily. There were still several ways to get hold of information now that she was in the police headquarters anyway.

One was Verner Brost.

And now she half ran down a dreary office corridor, several metres behind him.

‘Excuse me!’

The man slowed down a little. He was just under sixty and on his way to a slightly delayed lunch. He didn’t seem to be in the best of moods.

‘Yes?’

‘Olivia Rönning.’

Olivia had caught up with him and held out her hand. She had always had a firm handshake. She herself hated shaking something the consistency of a Danish pastry straight out of the oven. Verner Brost was a Danish pastry. He was also the newly appointed head of the cold-case group in Stockholm. An
experienced
investigator, with a suitable patina of cynicism and a genuine calling, all round a good civil servant.

‘I just wanted to find out if you’re doing anything on the beach case.’

‘The beach case?’

‘The murder on Nordkoster in 1987.’

‘No.’

‘You’re familiar with it?’

Brost had a good look at the pushy young woman.

‘I’m familiar with it.’

Olivia ignored the decidedly guarded tone.

‘Why isn’t it on your agenda?’

‘It isn’t accessible.’

‘… accessible? What do you mean by…’

‘Have you eaten lunch, Miss?’

‘No.’

‘Nor have I.’

Verner Brost turned on his heel and continued on his way to the Plum Tree, the staff canteen in the police building.

Don’t pull rank, Miss Olivia thought, and felt herself just as patronised as she had cause to feel.

Not accessible?

‘What did you mean by “not accessible”?’

Olivia had followed Brost, two steps behind him. He had homed in on the canteen like a robot, put some food and a beer on a tray, and then found a seat without losing momentum. Now he was sitting at a small table totally concentrated on eating his food. Olivia had sat down opposite him.

She soon realised that this man had to get some food into him, quickly. Proteins, calories, sugar. This was obviously a large scale problem.

She waited a while before saying her piece.

She didn’t have to wait very long. Brost dealt with the intake at impressive speed and sank back on his chair with a barely concealed burp between his lips.

‘What did you mean by “not accessible”?’ she asked again.

‘I meant that we have no justification for opening the
investigation
again,’ said Brost.

‘Why is that?’

‘How much do you know about this sort of thing?’

‘I’m in my third term at police college.’

‘You don’t know very much, in other words.’

But he smiled when he said that. He had seen to his bodily needs. Now he could allow himself a short conversation. Perhaps he could persuade her to treat him to a mint biscuit with his coffee.

‘If we are going to take on a case, a basic requirement is that we can apply something to it that they haven’t been able to use before.’

‘DNA? Geographic analysis? New witness statements?’

She does know something then, Brost thought.

‘Yes, that sort of thing, or some new technical evidence, or if we find something that they missed in the old investigation.’

‘But you haven’t in the beach case?’

‘No.’

Brost smiled indulgently. Olivia smiled back.

‘Would you like me to get you some coffee?’ she asked.

‘Yes, that would be nice.’

‘Anything to go with it?’

‘A mint biscuit would be tasty.’

Olivia was soon back. She had the next question on her tongue before the coffee was on the table.

‘Tom Stilton was in charge of the case, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where I can get hold of him?’

‘He is no longer with the police, he left many years ago.’

‘I know, but is he still in Stockholm?’

‘I don’t know. For a while it was rumoured that he was moving abroad.’

‘Oh right… gosh… then it’ll be hard to get hold of him.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Why did he leave? He wasn’t that old, was he?’

‘No.’

Olivia saw how Brost stirred his coffee with the obvious intention of avoiding her gaze.

‘So why did he leave?’

‘Personal reasons.’

I ought to stop here, Olivia thought. Personal reasons were not really any business of hers. It had no connection at all with the college project.

But Olivia was Olivia.

‘What was the mint biscuit like?’ she said.

‘Delicious.’

‘What were the personal reasons?’

‘Don’t you know what “personal” means?’

The mint biscuit hadn’t been that delicious, she thought.

Olivia left the police building on Polhemsgatan. She was
irritated
. She didn’t like it when she came up against a brick wall. She got into her car, pulled out her laptop, opened a search site and typed ‘Tom Stilton’.

Several articles were listed. They all had some connection with the police, all except one. A report from a fire on an oil platform off the coast of Norway in 1975. A young Swede was feted as a hero after saving the lives of three Norwegian oil workers. The Swede was called Tom Stilton and was twenty-one years old. Olivia downloaded a copy of the article. Then she started looking up Tom Stilton on all the directory sites. He wasn’t on Eniro, the online national address registry. Nor had she found any trace of him on the other sites. No results. Not even on Birthday.se. As a joke she checked the national vehicle registry too. Same there.

The man did not exist.

Perhaps he had moved abroad? Like Brost mentioned. These days he could be sitting in Thailand with a cocktail and boasting of his murder investigations to some drunken hotties. Or maybe not. Perhaps he had other inclinations?

Homosexual?

No, he wasn’t that.

At any rate not in the old days. Then he had been married to the same woman for ten years. Marianne Boglund, a forensic generalist, a sort of coordinator. Olivia had finally found Stilton in the tax authorities’ register of marriages.

He was listed there.

With an address but no telephone number.

She made a note of the address.

Almost on the other side of the world, in a little coastal village in Costa Rica, an elderly man was sitting and painting his nails with transparent nail polish. He was on the veranda of a most remarkable house and his name was Bosques Rodriguez. From his vantage point he could get a glimpse of the sea on one side. On the other, the rainforest climbed up the side of a mountain. He had lived here all his life, in the same place, in the same remarkable house. He used to be known as ‘the old bar-owner from Cabuya’. Nowadays he didn’t know what people called him. He rarely went into Santa Teresa, where his old bar was. He thought the place had lost its soul. It was probably because of the surfers, and all the tourists who flocked in and forced up the prices of everything that could be forced up.

Including the water.

Bosques smiled a little.

The foreigners always drank water from plastic bottles that they paid scandalous amounts for and then threw away.
Then they put up posters urging everybody to take care of the environment.

But the big Swede in Mal Pais isn’t like that, Bosques thought.

Not at all.