The Spring Tide (7 page)

Drugs? Olivia had read somewhere that there were traces of Rohypnol in the woman’s body. Could there be a connection? She didn’t have time to follow that thought through before Betty went on.

‘But when I come to think of it, I reckon I threw them out before the murder… yes, I did, because after that they stole a boat and went off to the mainland. To stock up on drugs, if you ask me.’

And there went Olivia’s lead too.

‘What an incredible memory you have!’ she said.

Betty paused for breath and lapped up the praise.

‘Well, yes, I suppose I do, but we have a ledger too.’

‘But nevertheless!’

‘Well, I’m interested in people. That’s what I’m like, quite simply.’

Betty looked smugly at Olivia and pointed to a cabin at the end of the row with number ten.

‘And that’s where the silly woman from Stockholm stayed. She stayed there first, then on a Norwegian yacht in the harbour. She was a real slut, made a show of herself for those poor
lobster boys down by the quay so they couldn’t keep their eyes off her. But of course the police interrogated her too!’

‘To help them with their enquiries?’

‘I suppose so, they talked to her here first, and then I heard that they took her to Strömstad and continued there. That’s what Gunnar said.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Gunnar Wernemyr, policeman, but he’s retired now.’

‘And what was she called, the silly woman?’

‘Her name was… let me think, I can’t remember but she had the same first name as Kennedy’s wife.’

‘And what was she called?’

‘Don’t you know what Kennedy’s wife was called? You know who I mean, she got together with that Greek later, Onassis.’

‘No?’

‘Jackie… Jackie Kennedy. Yes, that’s what she was called, the silly woman, Jackie, I can’t remember more than that. That’s your cabin!’

Betty pointed at one of the yellow cabins and walked up to the door with Olivia.

‘The key’s hanging on a hook inside. If you need anything, Axel lives there.’

Betty pointed to a house with asbestos-cement cladding on a rise a bit away. Olivia opened the door and put her sports bag inside. Betty remained outside.

‘Hope it suits you.’

‘It’ll be perfect!’

‘OK then. We might meet in the harbour this evening, XL is going to play his trombone at the Strandkant restaurant, if you end up there. Bye for now!’

Betty started to walk away. Suddenly Olivia remembered what she had intended to ask all the time but not managed to fit in.

‘Fru Nordeman!’

‘Call me Betty.’

‘Betty… I was wondering, there was a little boy who saw what happened on the beach, wasn’t there?’

‘That was Ove, the Gardman boy, they lived in a house in the forest there.’ Betty pointed towards the dark forest. ‘His mother’s dead now, and his father is in a home in Strömstad, but Ove still has the house.’

‘Is he there now?’

‘No, he is out travelling. He’s one of those, what do you call it… a marine biologist, but he comes here now and then to look after the house when he’s in Sweden.’

‘OK, thanks!’

‘And Olivia, bear in mind what I said, about the weather, it’s going to get worse by the hour, so don’t go out on the rocks on the north side or anything like that, not on your own. If you do go there, then perhaps Axel can go with you. It can be dangerous up there if you take the wrong path.’

Betty went off. Olivia remained where she was a minute or two and watched her. Then she glanced up at the cement-tiled house where her son Axel evidently lived. The idea that a guy she didn’t know should follow along with her as a bodyguard just because there was a bit of wind, she found that somewhat comical.

He had bought a suitcase in Strömstad. A suitcase on wheels and with an extendable handle. When he went on board the Koster ferry he looked just like any other tourist.

But he wasn’t.

He was a tourist, perhaps, but not just anybody.

He was a man who had struggled with a growing chaos in his chest the whole way from Göteborg and not managed to get it under control until now.

When he went on board the ferry.

Now he knew that it wasn’t much further. Now he must be in control of himself. What he was going to do didn’t allow for wavering or weakness. He was forced to steel himself.

When the ferry departed, inside him it felt shiny, cold, stripped. Like the rocks they passed. He suddenly thought about Bosques.

They had hugged each other.

Olivia was lying down on the simple bed in the cabin. She had slept badly on the train. Now she stretched out and inhaled the mouldy smell of the cabin. Perhaps it isn’t mouldy, she thought, more like stuffy. She glanced up at the bare walls. Not a painting, no posters, not even one of those old fisherman’s floats of green glass. Betty would never be interviewed by one of the glossy magazines. Nor Axel, if it was him who was responsible for the furnishings. She raised the map again. She had bought it before she got on the ferry in Strömstad. A rather detailed map of the north-west side, only that. Coves with funny names, and not far away, on the map, Hasslevikarna.

That was where she was really going.

The site of the murder.

Because that is what the entire journey was about, she knew that. Getting to the site of the murder and seeing what it looked like.

Murder tourist?

If you like. That’s what she’d have to be. But she was going to get to that beach. The place where a young woman had been buried and drowned.

With a child in her womb.

Olivia let the map sink down onto her chest and she let her mind wander, wander off to the Hasslevikarna coves and out
on to the beach, the sea, the low tide, the darkness, and the naked young woman in the sand, and the little boy in the darkness somewhere, and then the perpetrators, three of them, that’s what it had said in the investigation, based on the boy’s statement, but how could they be sure of that? A
terrified
nine-year-old in the middle of the night? Perhaps they weren’t sure? Had they just assumed that he had actually seen three men? Or had the police simply just accepted that as a starting point, as they had nothing else to go on? What if there were five? A little sect?

There she was again.

This wasn’t especially constructive.

She got up and felt that the time had come.

To be a murder tourist.

What Betty had said about the weather was fairly accurate, apart from the fact that the rain had already hit the island now in the afternoon. The wind coming from the sea had increased in strength by a couple of metres per second, and the
temperature
had dropped radically.

It was pretty horrible outside.

Olivia could hardly open the door when she went out. It slammed shut behind her as soon as she was out. Her extra jumper helped a little, but the wind pulled her hair across her face so she could hardly see, and the rain poured down. Why the hell hadn’t she brought a raincoat with her? She had behaved like an amateur! Or somebody from the mainland, as Betty would have said. Olivia glanced up at Axel’s house.

No way. There were limits.

She chose a path that led into the dark forest.

The very overgrown forest. There had been no thinnings here for decades, and nobody had cleared the undergrowth either. Dry, brittle branches, a tangle of brushwood, everything almost black with the odd bit of rusty sheep netting.

But she followed the path. She could just about manage that. The advantage was that there was much less wind in among the trees. Just the rain. At first she had used the map to shield her head until she realised it was a really stupid idea. The map was her only chance of getting to where she wanted to go.

First she was going to see the little boy’s house. Ove Gardman. According to Betty it was somewhere around here, in among the trees, which Olivia was beginning to doubt. All around her was just a mass of bushes and fallen trees and netting.

Suddenly there it was in front of her.

A simple black wooden house. Two storeys, in the middle of the forest, in an opening where the trees had long been chopped down. There was a steep edge at the back and no garden. She looked at the house. It seemed to be deserted, and a bit spooky. At any rate under the circumstances that now prevailed. A strong gale and getting darker. She got the shivers. Why had she wanted to see this house? She already knew that the boy, or man as he must be today, presumably thirty-two years old, wasn’t there. Betty had told her. She shook her head a little but pulled out her mobile and took a couple of pictures of the house. She could always append them to her assignment report, she thought.

Ove Gardman’s house.

She reminded herself to phone him when she got back to the cabin.

It took Olivia almost half an hour to get to the north side of the island. Now she was there, almost anyway, and she was beginning to fathom what Betty had warned her about. Here it was completely exposed to the open sea. The rain beat down from the black clouds. The wind howled round the rocks. Gigantic waves from the North Sea rolled in and crashed over the rocks. It was hard for her to judge how far up they came.

She crouched down behind a large rock and looked out towards the sea. She thought she was in a safe position, but suddenly a super wave came roaring up to the rock and the water reached way up her legs. When she felt how the cold pull tugged at her body, she panicked and screamed.

If she hadn’t fallen into a little gully, she would have been pulled into the sea.

But she didn’t realise that until much later.

Now she was running.

As fast as her legs could carry her.

Away from the sea up onto dry land.

She ran and ran until she tripped on a flat rock, or an oasis of flat rocks. She landed flat on her stomach. Once down, she hugged the rock, hugged Mother Earth, gasping, with a
bleeding
forehead from when she fell into the gully.

It was quite a while before she turned round and looked out at the raging sea beyond the small coves, and realised what an idiot she was.

Then her whole body started to shake.

She was soaked to her skin.

Considering it was a trombone evening with XL, there weren’t really very many people in the Strandkanten restaurant, which otherwise had a very good reputation. Perhaps the trombone had put them off. There were a few islanders at the tables, with glasses of beer, XL in one corner with his trombone, and Dan Nilsson was there too.

He was sitting at the table closest to the water. The wind was driving the rain against the window. He had come here directly from the ferry. Not because he was hungry, or thirsty, or to get out of the rain.

He needed to gather strength.

All the strength he could muster.

He knew there was a minimal risk he could be recognised, he used to have a holiday house here many, many years ago. But that was a risk he was forced to take.

Now he was sitting here with a glass of beer in front of him. One of the waitresses had whispered to XL during a break from the trombone: he looks like a policeman that guy by the window, and XL had answered that there was something familiar about his face. But Nilsson didn’t hear that. He was somewhere totally different in his thoughts. Further north on the island.

Where he had been before.

A place he was going to visit again, this evening.

And then yet another place.

And when that was done, he was done too.

Or perhaps it was the opposite, not quite clear.

He didn’t know.

That was what he was going to find out.

Besides being soaked to the skin, bleeding from her forehead and half in a state of shock, she had also suffered a minor
catastrophe
. She had lost the map. Or the super wave had taken it. Now she no longer had a map. She didn’t know which way to go. Nordkoster is not a large island, not in the summer sun and the heat of June, but in stormy weather when it’s pissing it down and it’s getting dark, then the island is big enough to get lost on.

For somebody from the mainland.

Strips of forest, patches of heathland, rocky areas that suddenly appear before you.

Especially if you have never been there before.

Like Olivia.

Here she was, in the middle of nowhere. Totally disoriented. With dark forest in front of her and slippery rocks behind her. And since her otherwise excellent mobile had been immersed in the sea and given up on her, she didn’t have many other choices.

Except to start walking.

In one direction or the other.

So she walked, shaking, in one direction or the other.

Several times.

Dan Nilsson knew exactly where he was going, even though it had now got really dark because of the awful weather. He didn’t need a map. He pulled his suitcase along after him on the gravel road, veered off away from the sea and then turned down along the path he knew would be there.

Which led to the place he was going to.

The first place.

She wasn’t normally afraid of the dark. She had slept alone in the house in Rotebro since she was quite young. The same when they’d been out at their holiday house. The opposite really, she found it peaceful and calming when the darkness came down and everything else died out. And she was left by herself.

Alone.

And she was alone now. But under rather different
circumstances
. Now she was alone in strange surroundings. There was the roar of thunder and the rain was coming down in bucketfuls. She could hardly see more than a metre or two in front of her. Just trees and rocks, and then more of the same. She slipped on moss, tripped over stones, was suddenly rammed by branches in her face, and slid down into deep gullies. And she could hear
sounds too. The howling of the wind, that didn’t scare her, and nor did the raging sea round about her, she knew what that was. But the other sounds? That sudden muted bellowing that cut through the darkness. Was it sheep? Surely sheep didn’t sound like that? And that thin shriek that she had heard between the trees just a moment ago, where did that come from? No children would be outside now, would they? She suddenly heard the shriek again, closer, and then another one. She huddled against a tree trunk and stared into the darkness. Could she see eyes over there? Two eyes? Yellow? A tawny owl? Did they have tawny owls on Nordkoster?