The Spring Tide (25 page)

‘And what do you do then? What area do you work in?’

‘I’m a pensioner.’

‘Yes, right, and before you became a pensioner?’

Stilton and Mette stood in the hall when Mårten and Olivia came up from the cellar. Mette glanced at them, leaned a little towards Stilton and lowered her voice.

‘You know you’ve always got a place to sleep here.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And think about what I said.’

‘About?’

‘Rune Forss. You or me.’

Stilton didn’t answer her. Mårten and Olivia came up. Stilton nodded goodbye to Mårten and went out through the front door. Mette gave Olivia a small hug and whispered:

‘Thanks for bringing Tom with you.’

‘It was him who brought me.’

‘Without you, he would never have come here.’

Olivia smiled a little. Mette gave her her card, with her phone number. Olivia thanked her and followed after Stilton.
When Mette had closed the door, she turned and looked at Mårten. He pulled her towards him. He knew exactly how tense the situation had been. He stroked her hair.

‘Tom was communicating,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Both sat in silence on the bus into the city. Occupied with their own thoughts. Stilton mainly thinking about the meeting with the Olsäters. It was the first time he had met them for almost four years. He was amazed at how easy it had been. How little they had needed to say. How quickly it felt natural.

The next step was Abbas.

Then he thought about that face in the mirror in the hall. That wasn’t his. That had been a shock.

Olivia thought about the dilapidated mansion.

In the cellar. About Kerouac. You must be a bit weird if you socialise with a spider? Yes, she thought, you must. Definitely. Or perhaps more of an original? Mårten was a man with a fascinating background, she thought. Down in the cellar he had told her a little about it. He had been a child psychologist before he retired. For many years he had struggled hard to introduce new ideas in Sweden, and had partly succeeded. For a long period he had also worked with Skå-Gustav Jonsson and participated in a number of projects for vulnerable children. And been a political left-wing activist.

She liked Mårten.

And Mette.

And their remarkable, cosy house.

‘You fell out with Mink,’ Stilton suddenly said.

‘Fell out…’ Olivia looked out through the bus window. ‘He made a pass at me,’ she said.

Stilton nodded slightly.

‘He suffers from inferio-mega,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Megalomania undermined by an inferiority complex. God on clay feet.’

‘OK. I think he’s creepy.’

Stilton gave a little smile.

The MHP-team sat in a partially blacked-out room on Bergsgatan and watched a film that had been downloaded from Trashkick. A film in which Tom Stilton had his clothes ripped off until he was naked, was sprayed across his back,
beaten up and thrown against a rock face. It was decidedly quiet in the room when the film ended. Everyone knew who Stilton was. Or had been. Now they saw a beaten-up wreck. Forss turned a light on and broke the silence.

‘That was roughly what one might expect,’ he said.

‘What?’

Klinga looked at Forss.

‘Stilton lost it completely in 2005, broke down in the middle of an investigation, about Jill Engberg, a prossy. I had to take over the case. He just disappeared. Resigned and disappeared. And now he has ended up there.’

Forss nodded towards the screen, got up and took his jacket off the hook.

‘But we ought to interrogate him, surely?’ said Klinga. ‘He has evidently been badly beaten up too.’

‘Absolutely. When we find him. See you tomorrow.’

Mårten and Mette had gone to bed. Their son Jimi could take care of the dishes. They were both exhausted and they turned the bedside lamps off straight away, but didn’t fall asleep. Mårten turned slightly towards Mette.

‘You didn’t think I was very subtle, did you?’

‘No.’

‘On the contrary, I was reading Tom all the time, when you and Olivia were talking about Koster, he was there, present, he listened, took part, but I saw that he’d never break into the conversation by himself, so I invited him in.’

‘You took a risk.’

‘No.’

Mette smiled a little and kissed Mårten on the neck, gently. Mårten regretted that he hadn’t swallowed a Viagra a couple of hours ago. They each turned in a different direction.

He thought about sex.

She thought about an empty suitcase on Nordkoster.

Olivia thought about her cat. She lay in bed and missed the warm animal by her feet. His purring, his bumping against her legs. The white mask on the wall looked down at her. The moonlight glistened in the white teeth. Now it’s just you and me, she thought, and you’re a bloody wooden mask! Olivia jumped out of bed, lifted down the wooden mask, threw it in under her bed and crept in under the covers again. Voodoo? she suddenly thought. Now he’s lying under the bed and staring up and cooking up something nasty. But voodoo is Haitian, the mask is from Africa and Elvis is dead.

And Kerouac is a fucking spider!

Joyously happy! I’m joyously happy!

Not.

Olivia stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror and studied her young aged face. Twenty-three yesterday and at least fifty today, she thought. Swollen and patchy looking, with eyes marbled with thin red streaks. She wrapped herself in her white dressing gown and felt how her breasts were tender and her tummy was tight. That’s just all I need, she thought, and crawled into bed again.

Up on the roof of one of the police buildings on Bergsgatan there are a number of exercise areas, cages shaped like wedges of cake. That’s where remand prisoners are taken to get some fresh air. This particular morning they were all empty, except one. A little grey sparrow sat on the cement floor. In comparison there was all the more activity in C-building.

‘The suitcase was empty?’

‘Yes,’ said Mette.

‘Where is it now?’

‘She gave it to the guy who runs the cabin camp, Axel Nordeman.’

Mette sat right at the back of the room. Various members of her team were reporting back. The tone in the room was low-key but intense. The information about the suitcase was interesting. Everything about Nils Wendt’s visit to Nordkoster was interesting. Why was he there? Who did he meet? Why did he leave an empty suitcase behind? Mette had sent a couple of police officers to the island before she went to bed the previous evening. They would get hold of the suitcase and knock on some doors.

‘Do we know when he came to Nordkoster?’ Lisa Hedqvist wondered.

‘Not yet, we’ll get a report from the guys there sometime today. But we do know where Olivia saw him the first time, up there near the Hasslevikarna coves on the north side of the island, she didn’t know exactly when, she had got lost herself, but she reckoned it was sometime around nine in the evening.’

‘Then he visited her in her cabin about an hour later, is that right?’

‘More like a couple of hours, sometime before midnight,’ Mette said. ‘What we know more precisely is that he took a boat taxi from the West Jetty at almost exactly midnight and was taken to Strömstad. That’s where the tracks end.’

‘Not quite.’

Bosse Thyrén got up. He had done a thorough job since Mette phoned him the evening before.

‘Dan Nilsson booked a ticket for the 04.35 train from Strömstad on Monday morning, then he took the express from Göteborg at 07.45 and arrived at the Central Station in Stockholm at 10.50. I’ve checked the railway booking system. At Central he rented a car from Avis at about a quarter past eleven and just before twelve he checked in at the Hotel Oden on Karlbergsvägen. As Dan Nilsson. The technicians are going through the room there.’

‘Excellent, Bosse.’

Mette turned round.

‘Have we heard any more about his mobile?’

‘No, but we have had a report from the pathologist. The blood on the granite rocks near the murder scene did come from Nils Wendt. There were fragments of skin too. The blood on the ground near the tyre tracks came from him too.’

‘So the damage to his skull can thus be linked to the granite rocks?’

‘It seems so.’

‘But did that kill him? Or did he drown?’

Lisa looked down at the pathologist’s report.

‘He was alive when the car rolled into the water. Presumably unconscious. He died from drowning.’

‘OK, so we know that.’

Mette got up.

‘Well done, everybody… now we must focus on determining his movements from when he checked in at the hotel to the time the body was discovered. He must have been seen on more occasions than when he checked in, he must have eaten at a restaurant somewhere, perhaps used the same bank card as when he rented the car, he might have used the hotel’s phone…’

‘No he didn’t, I’ve checked that,’ said Lisa.

‘Good.’

Mette walked towards the door. Everyone in the room started moving.

Just a few buildings away in the same block, sat Rune Forss in a similar room with Janne Klinga. The MHP investigation had been upgraded to a murder enquiry on account of Vera Larsson. The team had been reinforced with a couple of officers and some extra resources had been put at Forss’ disposal.

He had sent some of his team out into the city and talked with some of the homeless people who had been beaten up before Vera Larsson was murdered. One of them was still in hospital, a big northerner who couldn’t remember anything of what happened. They couldn’t do much more at present.

In Forss’ opinion.

He sat and browsed through
Strike
, a bowling magazine; Klinga was going through the technical report from the caravan.

‘We’ll see if that film leads to anything,’ said Klinga.

‘When they’re shagging in the caravan?’

‘Yes.’

The man who had engaged in sexual intercourse with Vera Larsson was still unidentified. Suddenly there was a knock on the door.

‘Come in!’

Stilton stepped in with a bandage round his head. Forss lowered his magazine and looked at him. Stilton kept his eyes on Klinga.

‘Hello, I’m Tom Stilton.’

‘Hello.’

Janne Klinga stepped forward and held out his hand.

‘Janne Klinga,’ he said as they shook hands.

‘So you’re homeless nowadays?’ said Forss.

Stilton didn’t react. He had prepared himself fairly well, mentally. He knew it would be like this. It didn’t bother him. He looked at Janne Klinga.

‘Are you in charge of the investigation into Vera Larsson’s murder?’

‘No, it’s…’

‘Do you know who beat you up?’ Forss asked.

He looked at Stilton, who still kept his gaze fastened on Janne Klinga.

‘I believe Vera Larsson was murdered by a couple of Kid Fighters,’ said Stilton.

There was silence in the room for a few moments.

‘Kid Fighters,’ said Klinga.

Stilton told them what he knew. About cage fighting, exactly where it took place, who took part in it and who he thought arranged it.

And which symbols some of them had tattooed on their arms.

‘Two letters with a ring round them, KF, you can catch a glimpse on one of the films on Trashkick. Have you seen that too?’ he asked.

‘No.’

Klinga glanced at Forss.

‘KF stands for Kid Fighters,’ said Stilton.

He started to walk towards the door.

‘How did you find out all this?’ said Klinga.

‘The tip came from a young boy in Flemingsberg, Acke Andersson.’

He left the room without even once having looked at Rune Forss.

A few moments later, Forss and Klinga were on their way to the staff canteen. Forss was extremely sceptical about Stilton’s information.

‘Cage fighting? Kids fighting in cages? Here? In Sweden? We’d have bloody well heard about it. It sounds totally daft.’

Klinga didn’t answer. Forss implied that Stilton might have been a victim of his own psychoses again and hallucinated a completely implausible story.

‘Or what do you think? “Kid Fighters”? Could there be anything in it?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Klinga.

He wasn’t as convinced as to the implausibility of Stilton’s information. He decided to look through the downloaded Trashkick films to see if he could find that tattoo.

Later, on his own.

Ovette Andersson was walking on her own along Karlavägen. Black stiletto heels, a tight black skirt and short leather jacket. She had just finished with a customer in a private garage on Banérgatan and been dropped off where she had been picked up. This wasn’t her usual patch. But there had been rumours of plain-clothes police on Mäster Samuelsgatan so she had changed venues.

She re-applied her lipstick and turned down Sibyllegatan, on her way to the underground station. Suddenly she caught sight of a familiar face in a shop on the other side of the street.

In Weird & Wow.

Ovette came to a halt.

So that was what it looked like, her shop. Her posh façade outwards. A huge step from sucking someone off with coke running out of her nose, she thought. It was the first time she had passed Jackie Berglund’s boutique. This wasn’t an area she hung around in, not nowadays at any rate. There had been a time when Ovette actually was pretty much at home in Östermalm, even though it might be hard to believe now.

It was before Acke.

Weird & Wow, she thought. A clever name. But then of course she had always been smart. Jackie, smart and calculating. Ovette crossed the street and stopped in front of the shop window. She could see the charming woman inside again. That very same moment, Jackie turned round and looked Ovette right in the eye. Ovette returned the look without flinching. Once upon a time they had been workmates, escort girls in the same stable, Gold Card. Her and Jackie and Miriam Wixell, at the end of the Eighties. Miriam had stopped when there was talk of sexual services. Ovette and Jackie had kept on.

The money was good.

Jackie was the smart one of the three. The one who always took the chance to get to know the clientele they served. Ovette just hung along and snorted coke with her customers now and then. Without any ulterior motives. When Gold Card closed down, Jackie took over the business from Carl Videung and renamed it Red Velvet. An exclusive escort firm for a small closed world. Ovette followed along with Jackie to the new firm, worked a few years for her and then she got preggers.

With a customer.

That was not good.

Jackie demanded that she should have an abortion. Ovette refused. It was the first time she was pregnant and would probably be the last. She wanted the baby. It ended with Jackie throwing her out onto the street, literally. And there she had to support herself as best she could with a newborn baby.

Acke.

The son of a customer, only Ovette and Jackie knew who it was. Not even the customer knew.

Now they were standing there glaring at each other, straight through a shop window on Sibyllegatan. The street whore and the luxury prostitute. Finally, Jackie looked away.

Did she look a little bit afraid? Ovette wondered. She stayed where she was a few moments and saw Jackie was tidying things inside the shop, well aware of Ovette’s presence outside.

She’s afraid of me, Ovette thought. Because I know, and could make use of that knowledge. But I’d never do that because I’m not like you, Jackie Berglund. That’s a difference between us. A difference that means that I’m on the street and you’re there inside. But it’s worth it. Ovette held her head rather high when she continued along towards the underground station.

Jackie tidied things in her boutique, a little maniacally. She was angry and upset. What was she doing here? Ovette Andersson? How the hell did she dare? Finally she turned back towards the window. Ovette had gone. Jackie thought about her. Ovette, the lively one, with the joyful eyes, in those days. She who had the idea of dying her hair blue and made Carl furious. She wasn’t that smart, Ovette, or strategic. Which was a good thing, Jackie thought. Ovette knew too much about some customers. But she had kept her mouth shut.

All those years.

She must be afraid of me. She knows who I am and what happens if somebody threatens me. It must have been a coincidence that she walked past here.

Jackie continued to tidy in her boutique, and managed to suppress the unpleasant sight through the window. After a while she could just shrug her shoulders. A little scrubber from Kärrtorp landed with a son. What a comedown. When she could have had an abortion and worked her way up to a totally different level. Some people make daft decisions in life, she thought, while at the same time opening the door for one of her regular customers.

Linn Magnuson.

Rune Forss had just finished his second cup of coffee in the staff canteen when he caught sight of Mette Olsäter. She was coming towards his table. Janne Klinga had already left.

‘Has Tom Stilton been in touch?’ Mette asked when she came up to him.

‘What do you mean in touch?

‘Has he talked to you today?’

‘Yes.’

‘About cage fighting and Kid Fighters?’

‘Yes?’

‘Fine. Goodbye!’

Mette started to walk away.

‘Olsäter!’

Mette turned round.

‘Has he told you about that too?’ said Forss.

‘Yes. Yesterday.’

‘Do you believe that stuff?’

‘Why shouldn’t I believe it?’

‘Because he… You saw the condition he was in?’

‘What has that got to do with the information?’

Mette and Forss looked at each other for a couple of seconds. Neither liked the other. When Forss lifted up his cup, Mette went off. Forss followed her with his gaze.

Was the National Crime Squad going to start interfering with his investigation?

Olivia half lay on her bed with the white laptop balanced on her outstretched legs and a tub of Ben & Jerry ice cream in her hand. She could knock back a whole tub at a single sitting and then skip dinner.

Not exactly low GI, but oh it tasted good!

She had spent a couple of hours on the Internet. Acquainting herself with Nils Wendt’s earlier life. In those days he was an active company director and partner of Bertil Magnuson. She didn’t think that this was breaking her promise of dropping the beach case. There was, after all, no connection between that and Wendt’s murder. So for the time being she called it research. About Magnuson Wendt Mining, first and foremost, the company that later became Magnuson World Mining, and which already back then, before Wendt disappeared, had been severely criticized from various directions. Not least for their contacts with dictatorships.

Roughly what Mårten Olsäter had been on about when he had his little outburst at the dining table.

Her thoughts slipped over to the big old mansion out on Värmdö. She thought about the previous evening. It was an experience that rather shook her up. She recapitulated some of the conversation at the dining table in her head. And what had happened down in the cellar, or rather music room, with Mårten. She tried to grasp the hidden undertones that existed between Stilton and the Olsäters. It was difficult. If she got a chance, she would ask Mette or Mårten what sort of relationship they had. Stilton and the Olsäters. Ask them what they knew about what had happened to Stilton.