The Spring Tide (41 page)

Mårten, the man with Kerouac. The expert on child psychology who had got her to open up in a way that amazed her. How had he done that?

Mette, his wife, who had almost frightened her to such a degree that her legs seemed to turn to jelly, and who still kept her distance. But with respect. She had after all let Olivia come into her office and her murder case.

And then Abbas. The slender-limbed man. With his secret knife on him, and his strange scent. Like a Ninja warrior, she thought. Who was he really?

She took another gulp of wine. That was when she noticed it, or rather felt it. A sort of expectant atmosphere around the table. No smiles or quick exchanges, just a sort of wait-and-see feeling.

‘What is it?’

She just had to ask, with a bit of a smile.

‘Why are you so quiet?’

The others glanced at each other round the table. Glances that Olivia tried to follow from one to the other, until she landed at Stilton. He wished he had his bottle of Stesolid pills with him.

‘Do you remember when I asked you in the kitchen, in your flat, when the caravan had burnt down, why you had chosen the beach case?’ he suddenly said.

The question surprised Olivia.

‘Yes.’

‘And you said it was because your dad had been involved in the investigation.’

‘Yes.’

‘There was nothing else that you reacted to?’

‘No… well, yes, after a while. The murder took place the same day I was born. A bit of a weird coincidence.’

‘No it wasn’t.’

‘What do you mean? It wasn’t a coincidence?’

Mette poured out some more wine for Olivia. Stilton looked at her.

‘Do you know what happened that evening, after Ove Gardman had run home from the beach?’

‘Yes, they… or what do you mean. Straight after?’

‘As soon as he came in through the door and told them what he’d seen, his parents rushed to the beach at the same time that they called an air ambulance.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘His mother was a nurse. When they got to the beach the perpetrators had gone, but they managed to get the woman, Adelita, up out of the sand and water. By then she was unconscious but still had a weak pulse, his mother tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, and they kept her alive a while, but she died a minute or so before the air ambulance arrived.’

‘Right.’

‘But the child in her womb was still alive. The helicopter doctor did an emergency caesarean and got the baby out,’ said Stilton.

‘What? The child survived?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what, why haven’t you told me anything about that? What happened to the baby?’

‘We decided to keep the baby’s survival a secret, for reasons of security.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we didn’t know anything about the motive for the murder. In the worst case it might have been about the unborn child, that it was the child they wanted to kill.’

‘So what did you do with the baby?’

‘We let one of the investigation team look after the baby at first, we thought we’d be able to establish the woman’s identity, or that a father to the child would turn up, but that never happened.’

‘No? So?’

‘The police officer who took care of the child eventually applied to adopt her, he and his wife were childless. We and the social services thought it was a good solution.’

‘Who was the police officer?’

‘Arne Rönning.’

Olivia had presumably already suspected where Stilton was going, but she needed to hear it. Even though it was incomprehensible.

‘So the child is me?’ said Olivia.

‘Yes.’

‘So that makes me… what? The daughter of Adelita Rivera and Nils Wendt?’

‘Yes.’

Mårten had his gaze fixed on Olivia the whole time. Mette was interpreting her body language. Abbas had pushed his chair back a little.

‘… that’s not true.’

Olivia was still in control of her voice. She was still way behind.

‘Regrettably,’ said Stilton.

‘Regrettably?’

‘Tom means that perhaps you ought to have been told about this in a different way, on a different occasion, under different circumstances.’

Mårten tried to keep Olivia where she was. She looked at Stilton.

‘So you’ve known about this all the time since we met outside that shopping centre?’

‘Yes.’

‘That I was the child in that drowned woman’s womb?’

‘Yes.’

‘And not said a word about it?’

‘I was about to several times, but…’

‘Does my mother know about this?’

‘Not the exact circumstances. Arne decided not to tell her,’ said Stilton. ‘I don’t know if he told her before he died.’

Olivia jerked her chair back, got up and looked around the table. She stopped at Mette.

‘How long have you known about this?’

Her voice now had a slightly higher tone. Mårten realised that it was getting close.

‘Tom told me a few days ago,’ said Mette. ‘He didn’t know what he should do, if he should tell you or not. He needed help, he was extremely worried by…’

‘He was worried.’

‘Yes.’

Olivia looked at Stilton and shook her head. Then she ran out. Abbas was ready and tried to get hold of her but she tore herself loose and disappeared outside. Stilton tried to rush after her but was stopped by Mårten.

‘I’ll do it.’

Mårten ran after Olivia.

He caught up with her a little way down the road. Olivia had sunk down against some iron railings with her hands over her face. Mårten bent down to her. Quick as a flash, Olivia stood up and started to run again. Mårten ran after her and caught up again. This time he pulled her to him, turned her round and held her in a tight bear hug. She calmed down after a while. The only sound to be heard was her desperate sobs against his chest. Mårten stroked her back gently. If she had seen his eyes at that moment she would have known that she wasn’t the only one who was in despair.

Stilton had moved across to the window in one of the rooms. The lights were turned off inside and with the curtains pulled to one side he could see all the way to the lonely couple on the road out there.

Mette came up beside him and she too looked out.

‘Did we really do the right thing?’ she queried.

‘Don’t know…’

Stilton looked down at the floor. He had gone through a hundred alternatives, ever since she had stopped him that first time and said her name was Olivia Rönning. Arne’s child. But none of the alternatives had seemed acceptable. In the end it had felt more and more uncomfortable and at the same time harder and harder to deal with. Cowardly, he thought. I was too cowardly. I didn’t dare. I had a thousand excuses to avoid saying it.

In the end he had turned to the only people he trusted. So as not to have to say it himself. Or at least say it surrounded by people who perhaps could handle what he himself was totally untrained for.

Like Mårten.

‘But now it’s been said,’ said Mette.

‘Yes.’

‘Poor girl. But she knew she was adopted surely?’

‘Possibly. I’ve no idea.’

Stilton looked up. They wouldn’t get any further with that just now, he thought, and looked at Mette.

‘The call you received in the garden, was that about Jackie’s clients?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Who did you find?’

‘A policeman, among others.’

‘Rune Forss?’

Mette went back into the kitchen without answering. If Tom gets back on his feet now then we’ll deal with Jackie Berglund and her customers together, she thought. In the future.

Stilton looked down at the floor and noticed Abbas come up by his side.

They both turned towards the street.

Olivia was still in the grip of Mårten’s bear hug. His head was leaning against hers and his mouth was moving. What he said to her stayed between them. But he knew that this was only the beginning, for her, the beginning of a long journey. Melancholic and frustrating. A journey she must make by herself. He would be at hand if she needed him, but it was her journey and her journey alone.

Somewhere en route, at an abandoned station, she would get a kitten from him.

She sat quietly in the summer night, a night that wasn’t night, that was little more than a rendezvous between dusk and dawn, with the glow of that enchanting light that southerners tend to get so excited about. Sensual, and for Olivia hardly noticeable.

She sat among the sand dunes, alone, she had pulled up her knees under her chin. She had been looking out across the cove for a long time. The tide was low, very low, there would be a spring tide tonight. She had been sitting there and watched the warm sun sink low and watched the moon take over the stage, a show off in borrowed rays, colder, more blue, without any particular empathy.

The first hour she had been able to collect her thoughts and tried to think in concrete terms. Where exactly did they take Adelita down on the beach? Where was her coat found? How far out had they taken her? Where had they dug the hole? Out there? Or there? It was a way of holding back, or at least delaying what she knew would come.

Then she thought about her biological father, Nils Wendt. Who had come here one night with a suitcase on wheels and walked out to where the tide had withdrawn and stopped there. Did he know that it was here? That the woman he loved had been drowned just here? He must have known, what otherwise was he doing here? Olivia realised that Nils had mourned Adelita, that he had sought out her last place in life so that he could mourn.

Just here.

And she had been sitting hidden behind some rocks and seen it.

Seen that moment.

She breathed in, heavily.

She looked out towards the sea again. There was a lot that washed through her, inside her, and she tried to hold it back.

The cabin. He came to the cabin. To borrow her mobile. Suddenly she remembered a short moment, just as he had come in through the door, how Nils had stopped and there had suddenly been a look of surprise in his eyes. As if he saw something he hadn’t expected. Was it Adelita he saw in me? For a split second?

Then came the second hour, and the third, when the concrete things and the actual things weren’t enough to hold it all back any longer. When the child in her became all of her.

For a long time.

Until the tears came to an end and she managed to look out again and get in touch with her intellect. I was born on this beach, she thought, cut out of my drowned mother’s womb, one night with a spring tide and moonshine, just like this one.

Just here.

She let her face sink down towards her knees.

That was how he saw her, far away. He stood behind the rocks, in the same place as before. He had seen her walk past the house a few hours earlier and she hadn’t come back. Now he saw her crouching down, at almost the same place where the others had stood, that night.

He heard the sea again.

Olivia didn’t notice when he came, only when he sank down next to her, crouching too, and becoming still. She turned a little and caught his eye. The boy who had seen it all. The man with the sun-bleached hair. She looked again. It was my father he talked with in Costa Rica, she thought, and my mother he saw murdered here, and he hasn’t a clue about that.

Some time I’ll tell him.

They looked out across the sea. Towards the wet expanse of beach that was bathed in moonlight. Small, shiny crabs scuttled back and forth across the sand glowing in the steel-blue
light. The rays glistened in the rivulets between the folds of sand. The limpets clung particularly hard to the rocks.

When the spring tide came in, they left the spot.

Cilla and Rolf Börjlind have written twenty-six Martin Beck films for cinema and television, as well as most recently working on the manuscripts for the Arne Dahl’s A-group series. In 2004 and 2009 their crime series ‘The Grave’ and ‘The Murders’, were screened on Swedish television. In addition Rolf Börjlind has written eighteen films and received a Guldbagge Award for the manuscript for the film
Yrrol
.

As well as being among Sweden’s most praised scriptwriters, Cilla and Rolf Börjlind have now embarked on a new career as bestselling authors. Their books are characterized by charismatic protagonists and depictions Sweden, full of social conflicts.

Before its release,
Spring Tide
, the first book in the series about Olivia Rönning and Tom Stilton, had sold rights to twenty countries. And when published, it received rapturous reviews from Swedish critics.

Lia is horrified when she witnesses a grotesque crime scene on the way to work. A woman has been murdered, her body dumped in the boot of a car. With the police unable to solve the crime, Lia takes on the detective work herself, with help from her new friend Mari.

Mari is an enigma. Born with an incredible ability to read people, she runs a mysterious unit called The Studio, a motley group of brilliant minds fiercely loyal to her. They will do whatever it takes to put the world to rights, even if blood is shed.

Together Lia and Mari are playing a dangerous game, entering an underground world of human trafficking and brutality. With her life in danger, Lia is forced to decide how far she is willing to go in her quest for justice…

The first in The Studio series from the award-winning Finnish crime star Pekka Hiltunen.