The Spring Tide (9 page)

She sat up on the edge of the bed, picked up the lamp and tried to calm down. Breathe deep breaths, that’s what Maria had taught her when she was little on the odd occasion she had a nightmare. She dried her forehead and that was when she heard it. A sound. Like a voice, from outside. From outside the door.

Axel?

Olivia wrapped a blanket around her, went towards the door and opened it – two metres in front of her stood a man carrying a suitcase with wheels. The man from Hasslevikarna. Olivia slammed the door shut, locked it and rushed to the only window. She pulled down the blind while looking around her for some sort of object. Something to hit him with, anything at all!

There was a knock on the door.

Olivia didn’t make a sound. She was shaking all over. Could she be heard from Axel’s place if she screamed? Probably not, the wind out there would howl louder.

There was another knock.

Olivia hyperventilated and walked slowly towards the door.

Silently.

‘My name is Dan Nilsson, I’m sorry to disturb you.’

The voice came through the door. Dan Nilsson?

‘What’s the matter? What do you want?’ said Olivia.

‘I can’t get a signal on my mobile, and I need to phone for a taxi boat, I saw your light was on and… do you possibly have a mobile I can borrow?’

She did have a mobile. But the man out there didn’t need to know that.

‘Just a quick call,’ he said through the door. ‘I can pay for it.’

Pay for a quick call? To order a taxi boat? Olivia didn’t know what to do. She could lie and say she didn’t have a mobile and send him on his way. Or send him up to Axel’s. But at the same time she was beginning to get curious. What had he been doing up at Hasslevikarna? Standing out there on the beach at low tide in the moonlight? Who was he? What would Arne have done?

He would have opened the door.

And Olivia did too. Carefully. Just a little. She held out her mobile through the gap.

‘Thank you,’ said Nilsson.

He took the mobile, dialled in a number and ordered a taxi boat to come to the west jetty. He would be there in a quarter of an hour.

‘Thanks for the loan,’ he said.

Olivia got the phone back through the gap again. Nilsson turned and started to walk away.

Then Olivia opened the door fully.

‘I saw you up at Hasslevikarna this evening.’

Olivia was standing against the light from the bedside lamp when Nilsson turned round again. He looked at her and blinked, as if in surprise, but she didn’t know at what. It only lasted a flash of a second.

‘What were you doing there?’ he asked.

‘I’d got lost and ended up there.’

‘A beautiful place.’

‘Yes.’

Silence… and what were you doing there? Didn’t he understand that that was the underlying question?

Perhaps he did, but it was a question he had no intention whatsoever of answering.

‘Good night.’

Nilsson went on his way, with the image of Olivia on his retina.

The trombone lay in its black case and XL sat next to it, on the quay below the restaurant. It had been a long evening and he had poured quite a lot down his throat. Now he was going to sober up a little. He would open a smoke house tomorrow. Leffe’s Smokehouse. Freshly smoked fish for the mainlanders, that would turn a nice profit. The well-built islander next to him was sober. He was on call to man the taxi boat and had just got a booking.

‘Who is it?’

‘Someone from over there.’

Over there could mean anything from Strömstad to Stockholm.

‘How much did you ask for?’

‘Two thousand.’

XL did a bit of mental arithmetic and compared it with his smokehouse. The hourly rate did not work out to the
smokehouse
’s advantage.

‘Is that him?’

XL nodded upwards. A man with a leather jacket and black jeans was walking towards them.

A man who had done what he had to do.

On Nordkoster Island.

Now he was forced to take another step.

In Stockholm.

She had finally fallen asleep. With the lamp on, the door locked and the name Dan Nilsson on her lips.

The man from Hasslevikarna.

The rest of the night Olivia was in the grip of feverish
nightmares
. For hours. Suddenly a frayed bellow pushed up through her throat and out of her wide-open mouth. A terrible bellow. Cold sweat ran out of every pore and her hands clawed at the air. On the windowsill behind her, a spider sat watching the drama taking place in the bed. How the young woman tried to clamber up out of a hole of terror.

In the end she got out.

She remembered the nightmare down to the tiniest detail. She had been buried in the sand. Naked. The tide was low and there was moonlight and it was cold. The sea started to roll in. Closer and closer. The water rushed up towards her head, but it wasn’t water, it was a lava stream of thousands of small black crabs that gushed forth towards her naked face and into her open mouth.

That was when the bellow came.

Olivia leapt out of bed and gasped for breath. She pulled up the blanket with one hand, wiped the sweat off her face and stared around in the cabin. Had the entire night been a dream? Had that man really been there? She went up to the door and opened it. She needed air, oxygen, and stepped out into the darkness. The wind had died down a great deal. She felt she needed to pee. She went down the steps and then squatted behind a large bush. It was then she saw it, a little to her left.

The suitcase.

The man’s wheeled suitcase lay on the ground.

She went up to it and peered around her in the darkness. She couldn’t see anything. Or anybody. She couldn’t see Dan Nilsson at any rate. She sank down beside the suitcase. Should she open it?

She unzipped the flap from one side to the other, and cautiously lifted the upper part of the case.

It was completely empty.

From a distance, it might look rather idyllic, the greyish caravan. Embedded in the nocturnal greenery from the Nothing forest, quite close to the Pampas Marina in Solna, with a weak yellow glow through the oval window.

But on the inside the idyll vanished.

The caravan was very decrepit. At one time the Calor gas stove beside the wall had worked, now it was all rusty and useless. At one time the plexiglass dome on the roof had let in some light, now it was covered with dirt and opaque. At one time the doorway had been covered with long colourful plastic ribbons, now there were only three left, and they only reached halfway to the floor. At one time the caravan had served as a holiday dream for a family with two children from Tumba, now it was One-eyed Vera’s.

At first she had cleaned it, often, tried to maintain a decent level of hygiene. But as she found more and more things in skips and insisted on dragging them back, the level sank
considerably
. Now there were ant paths going back and forth among the junk, and earwigs lurking in various corners.

But rather that than dossing down in tunnels or bicycle sheds.

The walls had been decorated with newspaper articles about the homeless and small posters she had found now and then;
above one bunk hung something that looked like a child’s drawing of a harpoon, above the other was a cutting: ‘It isn’t the people who are outside who should be allowed in, it is the people on the inside who should be thrown out.’

Vera liked that.

Now she was sitting at her worn formica table and painting her nails black.

It wasn’t going too well.

It was that time of night when nothing went well. When she kept watch. Vera often kept watch, and waited, kept watch during the hours of dark and cramps. She rarely dared to sleep. When she finally did fall asleep it was more like a form of collapse. She just flopped down, or fell into a sort of hibernation.

This had been going on a long time.

It was about her mental state, as for so many of those around her. A mental state that had been damaged and mutilated long, long ago.

In her case, which was hardly a unique one but did have its personal details, there were three things that had done the most damage. Or caused the worst mutilation. A bunch of keys had damaged her. Physically as well as mentally. The blows from her father’s big bunch of keys had left visible white scars on her face and invisible scars inside her.

She had been beaten with the bunch of keys.

More often than she deserved, in her opinion. Blind to the insight that a child never deserved a bunch of keys in the face: she blamed herself for some of the blows. She knew that she had been a difficult child.

What she didn’t know, then, was that she was a difficult child in a dysfunctional family, with two parents who couldn’t cope with life and vented their frustration on the only person in the vicinity.

Their daughter Vera.

It was the bunch of keys that damaged her.

But it was what happened to her grandmother that mutilated her.

Vera had loved her grandmother, and her grandmother had loved Vera, and for every blow of the keys that landed on Vera’s face, her grandmother had shrunk.

Helpless.

And afraid, of her own son.

Until she gave up.

Vera was thirteen when it happened. She went to visit her grandmother’s farm in Uppland with her parents. The booze they had with them led to the usual results, and a few hours later her grandmother went out. She just couldn’t face watching and hearing the misery of it all. She knew what would come: the bunch of keys. When it did come, Vera managed to get out of the way, this time, and ran to fetch grandmother.

She found her in the barn. Hanging from a thick rope attached to a beam.

Dead.

That was a shock in itself, but it didn’t stop there. When she tried to get the attention of her extremely intoxicated parents, they were beyond communication. So she had to do it herself. Take her grandmother down from the beam and lay her on the ground. And cry. For hours, she had sat beside her
grandmother
’s body until her tear ducts had dried up.

That mutilated her.

And that is what made it so hard to get her newly found black nail polish as even as she wanted. It got a bit messy. Partly because Vera’s eyes were veiled in tears by the memory of her grandmother, but partly because she was shaking.

That was when she thought about Jelle.

She nearly always did that when it became too painful to keep watch. Thought about him, his eyes, there was something about his eyes that had caught her attention, from the first time they had come across each other, up at the magazine office.
He didn’t look, he saw. That’s what Vera thought, as if he saw her, saw beyond what was her shabby outside, right into who she was in another world.

Or could have been. If she hadn’t lacked the tools and ended up keeping the wrong company, and started down the path to Calvary carved between various institutions and authorities.

It was as if he saw the other Vera. The strong, original one. The one who could fulfill the role of citizen in any modern welfare state she chose.

If there still had been one.

But there wasn’t one, Vera thought, they have pared it down to the ground. The ‘people’s home’, the welfare state that had once been created in Sweden was no more. But we did have the postal code lottery!

And then she smiled a little, and saw that the nail of her little finger looked really nicely painted.

The man who lay in the bed had had a bit of work done, discreetly, conjuring away a couple of bags under his eyes. His greying hair was short and thick, it was trimmed every fifth day, the rest of his body getting its due in his private gym on the floor below.

He kept his age at arm’s length. From the double bed in his bedroom he could see the Cedergren tower, a folly just a couple of plots away. Stocksund’s most famous landmark. It had been intended to be a showpiece, and had been started by forest-owner Albert Gotthard Nestor Cedergren.

The man in the bed lived himself on Granhällsvägen, down by the water, in a much smaller building. Only about 420 square metres, with a sea view. But that would have to do. He did, after all, have his little treasure on Nordkoster too.

Now he was lying on his back and being massaged by the bed, a gentle, exclusive massage of his whole body. Even the insides of his thighs got the treatment. A favour that was worth the extra twenty thousand it had cost.

He delighted in the moment.

Today, he was going to meet the King.

Well ‘meet’ was perhaps a clumsy way of putting it. He was going to be present at a ceremony at the Chamber of Commerce at which the realm’s monarch would be the main figure. He himself would be the number two main figure. In fact, the entire ceremony was planned in his honour. He was going to be awarded a medal for running Sweden’s most successful company abroad in the previous year, or whatever the citation was.

As the founder and managing director of Magnuson World Mining AB.

MWM.

It was he who was Bertil Magnuson.

‘Bertil! What about this?’

Linn Magnuson swept into the room in one of her creations. It was the cerise one again, the one she had worn the other evening. It was very beautiful.

‘That’s pretty.’

‘Do you think so? It isn’t too… you know…’

‘Provocative?’

‘No, but simple? You know who’ll be there.’

Bertil did know. More or less. The cream of Stockholm’s business community, a few titled bigwigs, a few well-chosen politicians, not at cabinet level but almost. Or perhaps? Perhaps Minister of Finance Borg would nip in for a few minutes, if he was lucky. That always provided a bit of extra glory. Erik would not be able to come, unfortunately. His latest tweet: ‘Brussels. Meeting with the top brass in the Commission. Hope to fit in a barber first.’

Erik was always fussy about his appearance.

‘What about this then?’ Linn asked.

Bertil sat up in bed. Not as a reaction to his wife’s latest presentation, an expensive piece she had found at the Weird & Wow boutique on Sibyllegatan, but because he felt he had to.

He had to empty his bladder.

This had been a bit of a problem of late. He had to visit the toilet more frequently than a man in his position had time to do. Only a week ago, he had met a professor of geology who had almost frightened him to death. The man in question told how he had become incontinent at the age of sixty-four.

Bertil was sixty-six.

‘I think you should wear that one,’ he said.

‘Do you think so? Yes, perhaps. It looks lovely.’

‘So do you.’

Bertil gave Linn a light kiss on her cheek. He would have given her more than that. She was extremely attractive
considering
she had passed fifty, and he loved her to distraction, but his bladder steered him past her body and out of the room.

He could feel that he was nervous.

This was a big day for him, in many ways, and even bigger for MWM. His company. Following the news about the award, the last few days had seen a growing amount of criticism of their prospecting activities in the Congo. They were picked on from all sides, there were negative articles in the papers and demonstrations too. About questionable methods and exploitation and infringement of international law and all the other things they could think of.

On the other hand, people had picked on Bertil as long as he could remember. They always picked on you if you were Swedish and were doing well abroad. And MWM was doing very well. The little company that he had started with a colleague had grown into a multinational conglomerate of companies large and small, spread throughout the world.

Now MWM was a big player.

He was a big player.

With a bladder that was a bit too small.

She had woken in the cabin, long after the check-out time. Axel wasn’t bothered. Olivia had blamed her high temperature, the soaked clothes, her ‘tumble’ as he had called it. Axel still wasn’t bothered. When she started to explain that she normally woke up very early, he had asked her if she wanted to stay another night. And she did. On one level, his level. But on another level she knew that she must return home.

That was on the cat level.

Quite a lot of persuasion had been required to get her neighbour to look after Elvis. Her neighbour was a nerd who worked down at Pet Sounds, and he had finally agreed.

Two nights.

Three nights? No way.

‘Afraid I can’t, I would have like to have stayed,’ she said.

‘Did you like the island?’

‘I like the island a lot. The weather’s a bit nasty, but I’d like to come back.’

‘That would be nice.’

That’s how real lobster boys express themselves, she thought, walking up Badhusgatan in Strömstad and noticing how something in her throat seemed to be swelling. She was on her way to visit a former policeman. Gunnar Wernemyr. The man who – according to Betty Nordeman – had interrogated the silly Jackie from Stockholm. Olivia had found Wernemyr in the Eniro address registry online, and had phoned him before getting on the ferry from Nordkoster. He had been very friendly. He had nothing against meeting a young police student, pensioner that he was. And besides, in less than three seconds he had realised which Jackie from Stockholm Olivia was interested in. It was in connection with the Hasslevikarna murder.

‘She was called Jackie Berglund. I remember her very well.’

Just before she turned down on Västra Klevgatan, her mobile rang. It was Åke Gustafsson, her tutor. He was curious.

‘How’s it going?’

‘With the beach case?’

‘Yes. Did you get hold of Stilton?’

Stilton? He hadn’t been on the agenda at all the last
twenty-four
hours.

‘No. But I spoke to Verner Brost, at the Cold Case Division, he said that Stilton had left the force for personal reasons. Do you know anything about that?’

‘No. Or rather yes.’

‘No, or rather yes?’

‘He left for personal reasons.’

‘OK. No, otherwise I haven’t found much.’

She thought she could save her Koster experiences for a more considered summary at some later date.

If there ever was to be one.

The Wernemyrs lived in a beautiful old building, on the first floor, with a view of the harbour that estate agents love. Gunnar’s wife, Märit, had made some coffee and given Olivia a spoonful of brown liquid to ease her throat.

Now they sat in the couple’s green-painted kitchen, which probably hadn’t been renovated since the early 1960s. On the windowsill, small china dogs vied for space with photos of grandchildren and pink Mårbacka geraniums. Olivia was always interested in photos. She pointed at one of them.

‘Are they your grandchildren?’

‘Yes. Ida and Emil. They’re our pride and joy,’ said Märit. ‘They’re coming to visit next week and they’ll be staying over the midsummer holiday. It will be such fun to look after them again.’

‘Now, then, don’t exaggerate,’ Gunnar smiled. ‘You usually think it’s rather nice when they go home again too.’

‘Yes, it is rather a lot at once. How does your throat feel?’

Märit gave Olivia a sympathetic look.

‘A bit better, thanks.’

Olivia sipped some coffee from the dainty china cup with red roses on it. Her grandmother had the same service. And they chatted about today’s police training, all three of them. Märit had worked in the police archives in Strömstad.

‘Now they’ve centralised it all,’ she said. ‘Everything has been put into the central archives down in Göteborg.’

‘I suppose that’s where the case records are now,’ said Gunnar.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

She hoped he wouldn’t be too secretive when it came to opening his heart a little about the investigation. It had, after all, happened many years ago.

‘So what did you want to know about Jackie Berglund?’

Not so secretive, Olivia thought, and said:

‘How many times did you interrogate her?’

‘Twice, here at the station. And once out on Nordkoster, to help with enquiries. That was the first,’ said Gunnar.

‘Why was she brought in here for an interrogation?’

‘It was because of the yacht. Do you know about that?’

‘Not really…’

‘Well, Jackie was evidently a female escort.’

A luxury prostitute, Olivia reflected from the viewpoint of her Rotebro upbringing.

‘You know, one of those luxury whores,’ said Märit in her Strömstad manner.

Olivia smiled a little. Gunnar went on:

‘She was on board a fancy Norwegian yacht with two
Norwegians
who left the island shortly after the murder. Or tried to leave the island, one of our police boats stopped the yacht some distance from land, checked where it came from and
accompanied
it back to the island. And because the Norwegians were extremely drunk and Jackie Berglund was clearly under the influence of something other than alcohol, all three of them were brought here so that we could interrogate them when they had sobered up.’

‘And you were in charge of the interrogation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Gunnar was the best interrogator on the west coast.’

Märit said that more as a statement of fact that as a boast.

‘And what did you get out of them?’ Olivia asked.

‘One of the Norwegians said they’d heard on the radio that a storm would blow up the next day so they left the island, they wanted to get to their home harbour. The other one said that they had run out of booze and they were sailing to Norway to get some more.’

Very different versions, Olivia thought.

‘And what did Jackie Berglund say?’

‘That she had no idea why they sailed off, she just went along with them.’

‘She said: “Sailing’s not exactly my thing”,’ said Märit with a Stockholm dialect.

Olivia looked at Märit.

‘That’s what she said, that Berglund woman, we had a good laugh about it when you came home and told me, do you remember?’

Märit smiled at Gunnar who looked a bit embarrassed. Leaking information from an interrogation to your wife was not exactly according to the rule book. Olivia didn’t care.

‘But what did they say about the actual murder?’ she asked.

‘They all said the same about that, none of them had been up by Hasslevikarna, not on the murder evening or before that.’

‘Was that true?’

‘We don’t know, not a hundred per cent, the case was of course never solved. We didn’t have anything that could connect them to the site of the murder. Are you related to Arne Rönning, by the way?’

‘He’s my father. Or was.’

‘We read that he had passed away,’ said Gunnar. ‘I’m sorry.’

Olivia nodded and Märit pulled out a photo album with pictures from Gunnar’s police career. In a couple of photos he was standing with Arne and another policeman.

‘Is that Tom Stilton?’ Olivia wondered.

‘Yes.’

‘Right… you don’t have any idea where he is today? Stilton?’

‘No.’

She had chosen the cerise dress, in the end, after all. She was particularly fond of it. It was simply cut, but pretty. Now she
was standing next to her husband at the Chamber of Commerce and smiling. It wasn’t just for show. She smiled because she was proud of her husband. Just like she knew he was proud of her. They had never had any problems with keeping a professional balance. He looked after his business, and she looked after hers, and they were both successful. She on a lesser scale, globally, but still successful. She was a career coach, and had been doing very well in recent years. Everybody wanted to have a career and she knew the tricks. She had learnt some of them from Bertil, there were few with his experience, but the greater part of her success was due to her own merits.

She was competent.

So when the Swedish monarch leaned forward and gave her a compliment on the cerise piece it wasn’t indirect polite flattery intended for Bertil. It was addressed directly to her.

‘Thank you.’

It wasn’t the first time they had met. The monarch and Bertil shared an interest in hunting, especially grouse shooting. They had been in the same hunting party a couple of times and were on speaking terms. In as far as anyone was on speaking terms with a king, she thought. But sufficiently ‘speaking’ for Bertil and his wife to be invited to a couple of small dinners with people in the royal family’s closest circles. They were rather formal for Linn’s taste, the Queen was no joker, but they were important for Bertil. Contacts were established, and it was never a bad thing if word got about that you had had dinner with the King now and then.

Linn smiled to herself, that was important in Bertil’s world, less important in her own. What was more important was to try to bring an end to all the mud that was being slung at MWM just now. Mud that even splashed onto her. On their way into the ceremony there had been a little flock on Västra Trädgårdsgatan with banners which accused MWM of rather nasty things. She saw that this irritated Bertil. He knew that
the media would cover this too, and be sure to compare it with his award.

And dirty it a little.

A pity.

She looked around her. Most of the people there were familiar to her. There was a cast of rich business men named Pirre and Tusse and Latte and Pygge and Mygge and similar. She had never really learnt who was who. In her world people had more distinct names. But she knew that these people were important for Bertil. People he went hunting with, sailing with, did business with – and to whom he was often related.