The Spring Tide (2 page)

The covers had slipped off and exposed her naked thighs. The rough warm tongue licked its way a bit along the skin. She moved in her sleep and felt it tickle. When the tongue turned into a little nip on her thigh, she sat up and pushed the cat away.

‘No!’

It wasn’t really aimed at the cat, more at the alarm clock. She had overslept. Well and truly. And to make it worse, her chewing gum had fallen off the bedstead and firmly attached itself to her long black hair. Semi-crisis.

She leapt out of bed.

She was an hour late and that put pressure on all of her morning timetable. Her multitasking capacity was going to be tested. Especially in the kitchen: the milk for her coffee was about to boil over at the same time as the toast started to burn and her bare right foot trod on a patch of transparent cat vomit just at the same time as she got a call from an insufferably intimate telephone salesman who started with her first name and guaranteed that it wasn’t about selling something, only an invitation to a course about financial consulting.

Almost a total crisis now.

Olivia Rönning was still stressed when she rushed out of the door on Skånegatan. No make-up, with her long hair quickly put up in something reminiscent of a bun. Her light suede jacket was unbuttoned, a yellow T-shirt showed under it, somewhat frayed at the bottom, her washed-out jeans ended in a pair of well-worn sandals.

It was sunny today too.

She stopped for a moment to decide which way she’d go. Which was quickest? Off to the right. She started to half run while glancing at the billboards outside the supermarket:

ANOTHER ROUGH SLEEPER BADLY BEATEN.

Olivia carried on running.

She was on her way to her parked car. She had to go to Sörentorp out in Ulriksdal. To the Police College. She was twenty-three and this was her third term. In six months she would be able to apply to be taken on as a police trainee at a station in the Stockholm district.

After a further six months she would be a police officer.

A little out of breath, she reached her white Mustang and pulled out her car keys. She had inherited the car from her Dad, Arne, who had died of cancer four years earlier. It was a convertible, a 1988 model, red leather upholstery, automatic, and a straight-four which roared like a V8. The apple of her dad’s eye for many years. Now it was hers. Not in mint condition, the rear window had to be secured with gaffer tape now and then, and the paintwork had the odd blemish. But it nearly always sailed through its MOT.

She loved the car.

With a few simple moves she lowered the roof and sat down behind the wheel. She nearly always noticed the same thing, a smell, for a second or two. It wasn’t from the upholstery, but from her dad: the inside of the car smelt of Arne. Only for a couple of seconds, then it was gone.

She attached her headphones to her mobile, selected Bon Iver, turned the key in the ignition, put the car in drive and drove off.

The summer holidays were on their way.

A new issue of
Situation Sthlm
, the magazine for the homeless, was now ready for sale, Issue 166. With Princess Victoria on the cover, and interviews with Sahara Hotnights and Jens Lapidus. The editorial office on Krukmakargatan 34 was filled
with homeless sellers who were buying their copies of the new issue. They could buy them for twenty kronor each, half the retail price on the street, and keep the difference when they sold them.

A simple deal.

And it made all the difference for many of them. The money they got from selling magazines kept them afloat. Some of them spent it on their addictions, others to pay back money they owed. Most of them quite simply used the money to buy food for that day.

And to have some self-esteem.

It was, after all, a job they were doing, and they got paid for it. They weren’t nicking things, or shoplifting, or mugging pensioners. They only did that if everything got fucked up. Some of them. But the majority were actually proud of the way they performed their sales job.

And it was quite hard work.

Some days, you could stand at your pitch for ten or twelve hours and hardly manage to flog a single copy. In rotten weather and icy cold winds. Then it wasn’t much fun creeping into an outhouse somewhere with no food in your stomach and trying to get to sleep before the nightmares seized you.

But today there was a new issue coming out. That was usually a cause for celebration for all those in the room. With a bit of luck they’d manage to flog a whole bundle on the first day. But there was no sign of merriment in the office.

On the contrary.

A crisis meeting was taking place.

Yet another of their mates had been badly beaten up the previous evening. Benseman, the northerner, the guy who had read a hell of a lot of books. He had broken bones all over his body. His spleen had ruptured and the doctors had struggled all night to stop the internal bleeding. The guy in charge of reception had been to the hospital earlier in the morning.

‘He’s going to survive… but we won’t be seeing him here for quite a while.’

People nodded a little. In sympathy. Tense. This wasn’t the first attack of recent times, in fact it was the fourth, and the victims had all been homeless people. Rough sleepers, as they had been called in the papers. And it had been the same each time. Some youths had sought out one of them at a well-known meeting place, and beaten them up. A really nasty beating. And they also filmed the whole bloody thing and then posted it on the Net.

That was almost the worst part of it.

So fucking humiliating. As if they were nothing more than punchbags in a ‘reality’ documentary about violence as
entertainment
.

And almost as hard to deal with was the fact that all four had been sellers of
Situation Sthlm
. Was that just a
coincidence
? There were about 5,000 homeless people in Stockholm, and only a tiny proportion of them were sellers.

‘Are they just picking on us?’

‘Why the fuck would they do that!’

Of course there was no answer to that. Yet. But it was unpleasant enough anyway to frighten the group in the room – and they were already shaken.

‘I’ve got hold of some teargas spray.’

That came from Bo Fast. They all looked at him. Everybody knew Bo, his name sounds pretty stupid and when pronounced as one word it meant something completely different,
bofast
means ‘permanent resident’. They had given up teasing him about that years ago. Now Bo held up his powerful spray for all to see.

‘You know it’s illegal,’ said Jelle.

‘How d’you mean?’

‘A spray like that.’

‘So what? How legal is it to beat people up?’

Jelle didn’t have a good answer to that. He was standing by a wall with Arvo Pärt next to him. Vera stood a bit to one side. For once, she had kept her mouth shut. She had taken it really badly when Pärt phoned and told her what had
happened
to Benseman just a few minutes after she and Jelle had left the park. She had been convinced that she could have prevented the assault if only she had stayed behind. But Jelle didn’t think so.

‘What the hell would you’ve done?’

‘Fought them! You know how I floored those guys who tried to grab our mobiles out in Midsommarkransen!’

‘But they were pissed out of their minds, and one of them was almost a midget.’

‘Well, in that case you’d have had to give me a hand, wouldn’t you?’

Now Vera didn’t say a word. She bought a bundle of
magazines
; Pärt bought his bundle, while Jelle could only afford five copies.

They went out onto the street together and suddenly Pärt started to cry. He leaned against the rough façade and put a dirty hand up to his face. Jelle and Vera looked at him. They understood. He had been there and had seen it all and not been able to lift a finger.

Now it was all coming flooding back.

Vera gently put her arm around Pärt’s shoulders and bent his head down towards her shoulder. She knew how frail he was.

His real name was Silon Karp and he was from Eskilstuna, the son of two Estonian refugees. But during a nocturnal heroin trip in an attic office on Brunnsgatan, he had caught sight of an old newspaper with a picture of the shy composer and been struck by the amazing likeness. Between Karp and Pärt. He saw his double, quite simply. And during the next fix he had slipped into his double, and two became one. He was Arvo Pärt. Since then, he had called himself Pärt too. And seeing as the company
he kept couldn’t care less what people were really called, he became Pärt.

Arvo Pärt.

He had worked as a postman for many years and had delivered letters in Stockholm’s southern suburbs, but weak nerves and a craving for opiates had dragged him down into what was now his rootless existence. As a homeless magazine seller for
Situation Sthlm
.

Now he stood here crying against One-eyed Vera’s shoulder, inconsolable, he cried because of what had happened to Benseman, because of how bloody awful everything was, all the violence. But most of all he cried because life was the way it was.

Vera stroked his matted hair and looked up at Jelle, and Jelle looked down at his bundle of newspapers.

Then he left.

Olivia turned in through the college gates at Sörentorp and parked her car immediately to the right. It stuck out a bit, among the dark grey saloon cars of various types. She had nothing against that. She glanced up at the sky and wondered whether she ought to put the roof up, but decided against it.

‘What if it starts raining?’

Olivia turned around. Ulf Molin. A guy the same age as her, and in her class too. A guy who had a remarkable talent for always turning up in Olivia’s vicinity without her actually noticing. Now he had appeared behind her car. I wonder if he’ll follow me, she thought.

‘Well then I’d have to put the roof up.’

‘In the middle of a lesson?’

This sort of totally meaningless conversation got on her nerves. She took her bag and started to walk off. Ulf followed her.

‘Have you seen this?’

Ulf was by her side holding a swish tablet.

‘It’s that assault last night, the rough sleeper.’

Olivia took a look and saw a bleeding Benseman being hit by several kicks to various parts of his body.

‘It’s posted on that same site again,’ said Ulf.

‘Trashkick?’

‘Yes.’

They had discussed the site the previous day, at college; everyone had been very upset. One of the teachers had explained how the first film and a web link had been posted on 4chan.org, a site that was visited by millions of young people. The film and the site had been flagged pretty soon and removed, but a lot of people had already seen the link and so it spread. The link went to the trashkick.com site.

‘But can’t they close it down?’

‘It’s probably hosted by an obscure web hotel, not entirely easy for the police to track down and close.’

The teacher had told them that.

Ulf put away the tablet.

‘That’s the fourth film they’ve posted now… it’s so fucking sick.’

‘What, that they get beaten up, or that it’s out on the Net?’

‘Well… both of them.’

‘And which do you think is worse?’

She knew that she shouldn’t start up a conversation, but they had about two hundred metres to the college building and Ulf was going the same way. Besides she liked to make people say what they thought. She didn’t really know why. It might just have been a way to keep her distance.

Attack.

‘I think it’s all connected,’ said Ulf. ‘They beat people up so they can post it on the Net, and if there wasn’t a site to post it on then perhaps they wouldn’t beat them up.’

Well done, Olivia thought. A long sentence, coherent thinking, sensible reflection. If did a bit less sneaking around and a bit more thinking then he would definitely rise a couple of notches in her estimation, and she had her standards. Besides, he was pretty trim and half-a-head taller than her, with dark brown curly hair.

‘So what are you doing this evening? Fancy a beer or something?’

Ah, now he was back at his old rating.

The classroom was nearly full. There were twenty-four students in Olivia’s class, divided into four basic groups. Ulf wasn’t in her group. Åke Gustafsson, their tutor, was standing beside the blackboard. A man in his early fifties with a long police career behind him. He was very popular in college. Some people thought he went on a bit. Olivia thought he was charming. She liked his eyebrows, the bushy type which seem to have a life of their own. Now he was holding up a file in one hand. There was a whole pile of them on the table next to him.

‘Since we are going to go our separate ways in a few days, I’ve thought up something – and this is a bit outside the course – something that you could do during the summer holiday, and it’s completely voluntary. This is a file with a number of old unsolved Swedish murders, I put it together myself, my idea is that you can choose one of them and make your own analysis of the investigation, look at what could have been done
differently
with modern police methods, DNA, geographic analysis, electronic surveillance, and whatnot. This is a little exercise in how cold cases can be tackled. Any questions?’

‘So it isn’t compulsory?’

Olivia glanced at Ulf. He always had to ask something just for the sake of asking. Åke had already said that it was
voluntary
.

‘It’s completely voluntary.’

‘But it might boost our marks a bit, right?’

When the lesson was over, Olivia went to the table and picked up a file. Åke approached and nodded at the folder in her hand.

‘Your dad worked on one of those cases.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes, I thought it’d be a bit of fun to include it.’

Olivia settled down on a bench some distance from the college building, next to three men. All three were silent – they were made of bronze. One of them was Handsome Harry, a notorious conman from the old days.