The Spring Tide (31 page)

That was when he saw it.

The cockroach.

A great big one. With long antennae and strong yellow-brown wings folded over its body. It was crawling across an opening in the bottle shelf. A plank wall that was covered with pinned-up tourist photos and picture postcards. Suddenly, Igeno caught sight of it too, and of Abbas’ gaze that followed it. With a little smile he crushed the cockroach with the palm of his hand. Right over a photo. A photo in which Nils Wendt had his arm around a young woman.

Abbas put his drink down with a slight crash on the counter. He pulled out a piece of paper from his back pocket and
tried to compare the picture on it with the photo under the crushed cockroach.

‘Can you take that away?’

Abbas pointed at the cockroach. Igeno swept it away from the wall.

‘Don’t you like cockroaches?’

‘No, they spoil the view.’

Igeno smiled. Abbas did not. He quickly noted that the young woman that Nils Wendt was holding was identical to the victim on Nordkoster. The woman who had been drowned in the Hasslevikarna coves. He finished his drink. ‘See if you can find any connection between Wendt and the woman who was murdered on Nordkoster,’ Stilton had said.

And there was.

‘Another one?’

Igeno was beside Abbas again.

‘No thank you. Do you know who the people are in that photo there?’

Abbas pointed and Igeno turned round and pointed too.

‘That’s the big Swede, Dan Nilsson, the woman there I don’t know who she is.’

‘Do you know anybody who might know?’

‘No, hang on, perhaps Bosques…’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He used to own the bar, he was the guy who put those up.’ Igeno nodded towards the photos on the wall.

‘Where can I get hold of Bosques?’

‘In his house. He never leaves his house.’

‘And where is that?’

‘In Cabuya.’

‘Is that far away?’

Igeno pulled out a small map and pointed out the village where Bosques had his house. At this point, Abbas considered going back to Mal Pais and asking Garcia to drive him to the
village. Two things caused him to choose another alternative. The first was the third, the man who presumably was hiding somewhere outside the bar. The second was the police. It was likely that Wendt’s house was now crawling with local police patrols by now. Some of them might want to ask some questions that Abbas didn’t want to answer.

So he looked at Igeno who was smiling a little.

‘You want to go to Cabuya?’

‘Yes.’

Igeno made a phone call and a couple of minutes later one of his sons turned up outside the bar with a quad. Abbas asked if he could borrow the photo on the wall. He could. He went out and sat behind the son on his quad and let his faceted eyes scour the area. Although it was fairly dark and there wasn’t much light from the bar, he saw the shadow. Or a glimpse of it. Behind a fairly large palm some way away.

The third man.

‘OK, let’s go.’

Abbas patted Igeno’s son on his shoulder and the quad set off. When Abbas turned his head he saw that the third man was moving back towards Mal Pais with surprising speed. To fetch a car, Abbas assumed. He realised that it wouldn’t take very long to catch up with the quad considering that there was only one road. In one direction.

Towards Cabuya.

Igeno’s son wondered if he should wait, but Abbas sent him off. This could take some time. Just making his way to Bosques’ house took time. There was a lot you had to climb over and past before you reached the veranda.

Bosques sat there. In his white clothes, half-shaved, on a chair by the wall. With a glass of rum in his hand and a naked light bulb hanging some way away. Not turned on. The concert
of the crickets in the jungle around them didn’t disturb his ears. Nor did the weak rush that could be heard from a small waterfall in among the greenery. He observed a very small insect that was making its way along his brown hand.

Then he looked at Abbas.

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Abbas el Fassi, I’m from Sweden.’

‘Do you know the big Swede?’

‘Yes. Can I come up?’

Bosques looked at Abbas who was standing somewhat below the veranda. He didn’t look like a Swede. Or a Scandinavian. He didn’t look a bit like the big Swede.

‘What do you want?’

‘To talk to you, Bosques, about life.’

‘Come on up.’

Abbas climbed up onto the veranda and Bosques kicked a stool in his direction. Abbas sat down on the stool.

‘Is it Dan Nilsson you call the big Swede?’ Abbas asked.

‘Yes. Have you met him?’

‘No. He’s dead.’

Bosques expression was not easy to interpret in the dark by the wall. What Abbas did see was that he took a gulp from his glass and that the glass was not exactly steady on its way down.

‘When did he die?’

‘A few days ago. He was murdered.’

‘By you?’

Bit of a strange question, Abbas thought. But he was on the other side of the world in some pit of a village in a rainforest with a man whom he didn’t know. He also didn’t know what sort of relation he had to Nils Wendt. The big Swede, as Bosques called him.

‘No. I work for the Swedish police.’

‘Have you got any ID?’

Bosques had been around a few years.

‘No.’

‘So why should I believe you?’

Yes, why should he? Abbas thought.

‘Have you got a computer?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Can you get online?’

Bosques looked at Abbas with cold eyes. So cold that they pierced the dark. He got up and went inside. Abbas remained where he was. After a minute or two, Bosques came out with a laptop and sat down on his chair again. He carefully pushed his mobile modem into the computer socket and opened it.

‘Search for Nils Wendt, murder, Stockholm.’

‘Who is Nils Wendt?’

‘That’s Dan Nilsson’s real name. It’s spelt with a W and DT at the end.

The blue glow from the laptop reflected from Bosques’ face. His fingers played on the keyboard. Then he waited, and looked at the screen, and even though he couldn’t understand a word of what stood there, he did recognise the picture on the front of a newspaper. The picture of Dan Nilsson, the big Swede. A twenty-seven-year-old picture. Roughly what Nilsson looked like when he turned up in Mal Pais the first time.

Under the photo it said: ‘Nils Wendt’.

‘Murdered?’

‘Yes.’

Bosques closed the computer and put it on the wooden floor in front of him. He fished out a half-full bottle of rum from the dark and poured some into his glass. Quite a lot.

‘It’s rum. Do you want some?’

‘No,’ said Abbas.

Bosques emptied the glass in one gulp, lowered it to his lap and wiped his eyes with his other hand.

‘He was a friend.’

Abbas nodded. He gestured with his hand as a token of sympathy. Murdered friends demand respect.

‘How long had you known him?’ he asked.

‘A long time.’

A rather vague measure of time. Abbas was after something more precise. A time that he could link to the picture of the woman from the photo in the bar.

‘Can you turn that on?’

Abbas pointed to the light bulb across the room. Bosques twisted round a little and reached an old black Bakelite switch on the wall. The light almost blinded Abbas for a couple of seconds. Then he pulled out the picture.

‘I borrowed a photo in Santa Teresa, Nilsson’s standing with a woman on the… here.’

Abbas handed over the photo. Bosques took it.

‘Do you know who she is?’

‘Adelita.’

A name! At last!

‘Just Adelita, or…?’

‘Adelita Rivera. From Mexico.’

At this point, Abbas weighed it up. Should he also tell that Adelita Rivera had been murdered too? Drowned on a beach in Sweden. She might have been a friend of Bosques too? Two murdered friends and almost no rum left.

He refrained.

‘How well did Dan Nilsson know this Adelita Rivera?’

‘She was pregnant with his child.’

Abbas kept his gaze fixed on Bosques’ eyes. A lot of the situation built upon it. That neither of them fell to one side. But inwardly he knew what this would mean at home. For Tom. Nils Wendt was the father of the victim’s child!

‘Can you tell me a little about Adelita,’ Abbas wondered.

‘She was a very beautiful woman?’

And then Bosques told of what he knew about Adelita and Abbas tried to memorise every single detail. He knew what it would be worth to Tom.

‘Then she went away,’ said Bosques.

‘When was that?’

‘Many years ago. I don’t know where she went. She never came back. The big Swede became sad. He drove down to Mexico to look for her but she had disappeared. Then he went home to Sweden.’

‘But that was very recently, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. Was he murdered in your home country?’

‘Yes. And we don’t know why or who did it. I’m here to see if I can find anything that can help us,’ said Abbas.

‘Find the murderer?’

‘Yes, and a motive for the murder.’

‘He left a bag with me when he went off.’

‘He did?’

Abbas had all his senses on full alert.

‘What was in it?’

‘I don’t know. If he didn’t come back before the 1st of July I was to give it to the police.’

‘I am the police.’

‘You don’t have any ID.’

‘It’s not necessary.’

Before Bosques could blink with his thin eyelids, a long black knife struck the electric wire on the wall. After a few seconds of spluttering, the light bulb in the ceiling went out. Abbas looked at Bosques in the dark.

‘I’ve got one more.’

‘OK.’

Bosques got up and went inside again. Quicker than last time he came out with a leather bag in his hand and lifted it across to Abbas.

The third man had parked his dark van at a safe distance from Bosques’ house and then sneaked up as close as he dared. Not close enough to see with the naked eye, but with the help of his green infra binoculars he had no difficulty seeing what Abbas lifted up out of the little bag on the veranda.

A little envelope, a plastic folder and a cassette tape.

Abbas put the objects back in again. He immediately realised that it was the bag that the gorillas were after in Wendt’s house in Mal Pais. He wasn’t going to go through the bag’s contents now. Besides, he had himself extinguished the only light on the veranda. He raised the bag a little.

‘I will have to take this with me.’

‘I understand.’

The black knife had increased Bosques’ understanding remarkably.

‘Do you have a toilet?’

Abbas got up and Bosques pointed to a door a bit inside the other room. Abbas loosened his knife from the wall and disappeared into the toilet with the bag in his hand. He wasn’t going to let go of that. Bosques remained sitting in his chair. The world is a strange place, he thought. And the big Swede is dead.

He fished out a small bottle from his trouser pocket and started to put some clear nail polish on his nails in the dark.

Abbas came out again and took his farewell of Bosques, who wished him good luck. Somewhat reluctantly, Abbas received a hug, unexpectedly. Then Bosques went back inside.

Abbas went down towards the road and started to walk. His mind was filled with thoughts. He had got a name for the woman that Tom had been trying to find for more than twenty years. Adelita Rivera. A Mexican. Who was pregnant with the child of the murdered Nils Wendt.

Strange.

A hundred or so metres away from Bosques’ house, where the road was at its narrowest, and the moonlight at its faintest, he suddenly got a pistol against his neck. Far too close for him to be able to use the knives. The third man, he thought. That same moment, the bag was wrenched from his grip. When he twisted round he met with a powerful blow to the back of his head. He lost his balance and fell into the greenery at the side of the road. He lay there and saw a big black van roar out of the forest and vanish down the road.

Then he too vanished somewhere.

The van continued to roar through Cabuya and right across half of the Nicoya peninsula. Not far from the airport in Tambur, it stopped at the roadside. The third man turned on the ceiling light in the driver’s compartment and opened the leather bag.

It was full of toilet paper.

Abbas came to his senses by the side of the road. He put his hand on his head and felt quite a large lump up there. It was very tender too. But it was worth it. He had given the third man what he wanted. The leather bag.

What had been in the bag was however inside Abbas’ sweater.

He was going to keep it there until he reached Sweden.

The third man was still sitting in his van. He had struggled with himself and had had a mental block for quite a while. Now he realised that there wasn’t much he could do. He had been tricked, and by now the knifeman would certainly have got back to the police in Mal Pais. He pulled out his mobile, clicked his way to the photo he had taken through the window of Wendt’s house, wrote a short text under it and sent off a picture message.

It reached K. Sedovic in Sweden, who immediately forwarded the message to a man who was sitting on a very roomy veranda not far from the Stocksund Bridge. His wife was inside the house, taking a shower. He read the short text on the mobile, which described the contents of the bag that was later filled with toilet paper: a little envelope, a plastic folder and a cassette tape. An original tape, he thought. With a recorded conversation which made all the difference to Bertil Magnuson.

He looked at the accompanying photo.

At the knifeman Abbas el Fassi.

The croupier?

From the Casino Cosmopol?

What was he doing in Costa Rica?

And what the hell did he want the original tape for?

Olivia had slept badly.

She had been out on Tynningö Island over the midsummer holiday. With her mother and a couple of her acquaintances. Of course she could have been celebrating out on Möja with Lenni and a gang of mates, but she chose Tynningö. The sorrow after Elvis swept over her in waves and she had a need to be on her own. Or rather to be with people who would not expect her to be in a festive mood. Yesterday, her mum and she had been there on their own and had painted half of the side of the house that caught the full sun. So that Arne wouldn’t have to be ashamed, as Maria had said. Then they had shared perhaps a little too much wine. And she paid for that during the night. She had woken at about three and not been able to get back to sleep until seven. Half an hour before the alarm clock was to go off.

Now she had gobbled down a couple of rice cakes and was on her way to the shower in her dressing gown when the doorbell rang.

She opened. Stilton stood there on the landing in a black overcoat that was a bit too short.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello! Have you cut your hair?’

‘Marianne’s been in touch, there was no match.’

Olivia saw how a neighbour slipped by with a sweeping glance at the man beside her door. She stepped to one side and gestured to Stilton to come in. Then Olivia closed the door.

‘No match?’

‘No.’

Olivia went ahead of him into the kitchen. Stilton followed her without taking off his overcoat.

‘So the hair didn’t come from the victim?’

‘No.’

‘It could come from one of the perpetrators.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Jackie Berglund,’ said Olivia.

‘Drop it.’

‘But why not? Why couldn’t it be hers? She has dark hair, she was on the island when the murder took place and she had a bloody useless explanation for why she vanished shortly afterwards. Didn’t she?’

‘I’ll use your shower,’ said Stilton.

Olivia didn’t know what to say, so she pointed towards the bathroom door across the hall. She was still speechless when he disappeared inside. Using somebody else’s shower is decidedly intimate, for some people, for others it’s neither here nor there. For Olivia it took a while to accept the thought of Stilton standing in there and rinsing off whatever it was he was rinsing off.

Then she started to think about Jackie Berglund.

Black thoughts.

‘Forget Jackie Berglund,’ said Stilton.

‘Why should I?’

He had taken a long cool shower, thought about Olivia’s fixation about Jackie Berglund and decided to let her in on some things. Olivia had got dressed and was giving him coffee at the kitchen table.

‘It was like this,’ he started. ‘In 2005 a young pregnant girl called Jill Engberg was murdered and I was in put in charge of the investigation.’

‘I already know that.’

‘I’m only starting from the beginning. Jill was a call girl. We soon established that she worked for Jackie Berglund in Red Velvet. The circumstances surrounding the murder made us believe that Jill’s murderer could be one of Jackie’s customers. I pushed that line pretty hard, but it came to a halt.’

‘What sort of halt?’

‘Some things happened.’

‘Like what?’

Stilton became silent and Olivia waited.

‘What happened?’ she finally said.

‘Well several things happened, at the same time. I had a breakdown and ended up in a psychosis, for one, was on sick leave a while, and when I came back I’d been removed from the case.’

‘Why?’

‘Officially because I wasn’t considered as being in a condition to handle a murder enquiry just then, which might have been true.’

‘And unofficially?’

‘There were people who, I believe, wanted me away from the Jill case.’

‘Because…’

‘Because I’d got too close to Jackie Berglund’s escort business.’

‘Her customers, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who took over the case?’

‘Rune Forss. A policeman who…’

‘I know who he is,’ said Olivia. ‘But he didn’t solve the murder of Jill. I read about that in a…’

‘No, he didn’t solve it.’

‘But you must certainly have been struck by the same thought as me? When you were working on the Jill case?’

‘That there were similarities with Nordkoster?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure, I was… Jill was pregnant too,’ Stilton went on, ‘like the victim on the beach, and Jackie cropped up in both investigations, perhaps the victim was a call girl? We didn’t know anything about her after all. So my idea was that there might have been a link, that it might have been the same perpetrator with the same motive.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Murder a prostitute who had blackmailed him on account of the pregnancy. That was why I took DNA from Jill’s fetus and compared it with the DNA from the beach woman’s child. There was no match.’

‘That doesn’t exclude Jackie Berglund from being involved.’

‘No, and I had a hypothesis about her that I followed quite a while, she had been on Nordkoster with two Norwegians on a luxury yacht, and I thought that they might have been a quartet from the beginning, with the victim being the fourth person, and then something went wrong between them and three of them murdered the fourth.’

‘But?’

‘It didn’t lead anywhere, I couldn’t prove that any of them had been on the beach, or had any contact with the victim, as to whose identity we had no clue.’

‘Now perhaps you can show that Jackie had been on the beach?’

‘Via the hairslide?’

‘Yes.’

Stilton looked at Olivia. She didn’t give up, he became all the more impressed by her tenacity, curiosity, her ability to…

‘The earring?’

Olivia interrupted Stilton’s thoughts.

‘You said that you found an earring in the victim’s coat pocket, on the beach, which presumably wasn’t hers. Isn’t that right? You thought it was a bit strange.’

‘Yes.’

‘Were there fingerprints on it?’

‘Only the victim’s. Do you want to see it?’

‘Have
you
got it?’

‘Yes, in the caravan.’

Stilton pulled out the big cardboard box from under one of the bunks in the caravan. Olivia sat on the other one. He
opened the box and lifted up a plastic bag with a small beautiful earring in it.

‘This is what it looks like.’

Stilton handed the earring across to Olivia.

‘Why have you got it here?’ she asked.

‘It ended up among my things when I gathered everything together at the office when I was removed from the case, it lay in a drawer I emptied.’

Olivia held the earring in her hand. It was a rather special design. Almost like a rosette which became a heart, with a little pearl hanging at the bottom, and a blue stone in the middle. Very beautiful. They reminded her of something. Surely she had seen a similar earring before?

Not so very long ago?

‘Can I borrow this until tomorrow?’

‘Why?’

‘Because… I’ve seen something similar quite recently.’

In a shop? she suddenly thought.

A shop on Sibyllegatan?

Mette Olsäter sat with some of her team in the investigation room at Polhemsgatan. A couple of them had celebrated the Midsummer holiday, a couple of others had kept on working. Now they had listened to Mette’s interrogation of Bertil Magnuson. For the third time. They all felt the same: he’s lying about the telephone calls. Partly it was an empirical feeling. Experienced interrogators who could weigh every sliding nuance in the tone of the person being interrogated. But also something more concrete. Why should Nils Wendt phone Bertil Magnuson four times and not say anything? As Magnuson claimed. Wendt must have understood that Magnuson would not in his wildest imagination ever think that it was Nils Wendt, missing for
twenty-seven years, who wasn’t saying a word on the other end. And what then would be the point of the calls? On Wendt’s part?

‘He wasn’t silent.’

‘No.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘Something that Magnuson didn’t want to reveal.’

‘And what could that be about?’

‘The past.’

At this point, Mette cut in on her colleagues’ reasoning. She assumed that Wendt really had been missing for twenty-seven years and suddenly turned up in Stockholm and phoned his former business partner. And the only thing that connected them today was yesterday.

‘So if we hypothetically say that Magnuson is behind the murder of Wendt, then the motive must lie in those four conversations,’ she said.

‘Blackmail?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And what did Wendt have that he could blackmail Magnuson with? Today?’ Lisa wondered.

‘Something that happened then.’

‘And who can know about it? Besides Magnuson?’

‘Wendt’s sister in Geneva?’

‘Doubtful.’

‘His ex-wife?’ Bosse wondered.

‘Or Erik Grandén,’ said Mette.

‘The politician?’

‘He was on the board of Magnuson Wendt Mining when Wendt disappeared.’

‘Shall I get in touch with him?’ Lisa wondered.

‘Yes, do.’

Olivia sat on the underground train. The whole way in to town from the caravan, she had been pondering Stilton’s information.
She wasn’t sure what he had meant. More than that it wasn’t a good idea to get too close to Jackie Berglund. When he himself had done so, it ended with him being removed from the case. But she wasn’t a police officer. Yet. She wasn’t part of any official investigation. Nobody could remove her. Threaten, absolutely, and kill her cat under the bonnet of a car. But no more. She was free to do what she wanted, she thought.

And she wanted to do just that.

Get close to Jackie Berglund, cat murderer. Try to get something from Jackie that you could use for a DNA test. To see if it was Jackie’s hair that Gardman had found on the beach.

And how could that be arranged?

She could hardly walk into Jackie’s boutique again. She must have help. Then she had an idea. Which would necessitate her doing something repulsive.

Exceedingly repulsive.

It was a shabby two-room flat on Söderarmsvägen in Kärrtorp, on the second floor. No name on the door, almost no furniture in the rooms. Wearing only underwear, Mink stood beside the window sticking steel needles in his flesh. It didn’t happen often. Almost never. He was on less heavy stuff nowadays. But sometimes he had to have a real blowout. He looked around him in the pad. He was still really pissed off about what happened out at the caravan. ‘Not even with a bargepole.’ That fucking bitch blew him off like he was a nobody. A loser, someone you could imagine standing in their back garden jerking off into a flowerpot.

It felt fucking awful.

But what do you need to support a fallen ego? In less than ten minutes, Mink was out on the track again. His fluttering brain had already constructed several explanations for the
humiliation. From the fact that the girl had had absolutely no clue as to whom she was talking to – Mink the Man – to that she was an idiot quite simply. Besides, she was cross-eyed. A pathetic cunt who thought she could get the better of Mink!

Now it felt much better.

When the doorbell rang, he was right back on the level of his own ego again. His legs almost trotted away by themselves. High? So what? He was a guy on the move. A trickster who had his entire toolbox under control. He almost wrenched open the door.

The pathetic cunt?

Mink stared at Olivia.

‘Hello,’ she said.

Mink continued to stare.

‘I just wanted to apologize,’ she went on. ‘I was dreadfully rude the other evening, quite out of order, out by the caravan, and I really didn’t mean it, but I was so shocked over what they had done to Stilton, and it was nothing personal, I promise.

I was just bloody stupid. Really. Sorry.’

‘What the fuck d’you want?’

Olivia thought she had already expressed that very clearly, so she went on according to plan.

‘Is this the flat you own? Worth five million?’

‘At least.’

She had thought through her strategy very carefully. She had a pretty good idea how this joke of a man should be handled. You just had to find an opening.

‘I’m sort of looking for a flat, she said. How many rooms are there?’

Mink turned round and went inside the flat. He left the door open and Olivia took that as a form of invitation. And stepped in. Into the virtually empty two-room flat. Shabby. With wallpaper partly hanging loose. Five million? At least?

‘Stilton sends his regards by the way, he…’

Mink had disappeared. Sneaked out through the bedroom window? she thought. Suddenly he turned up again.

‘Are you still here?’

He had wrapped himself in some form of dressing gown and held a carton of milk in his hand which he drank from.

‘What the fuck d’you want?’

It wasn’t going to be that easy.

So Olivia dived straight in.

‘I need help. I must get hold of some DNA material from a person that I don’t dare let see me, and then I remembered what you had told me.’

‘What the fuck was that?’

‘How you had helped Stilton with lots of difficult cases, a bit like his right hand, weren’t you?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘And then I thought that perhaps you’ve some experience of this, you seem to know about most things?’

Mink gulped down some more milk.

‘But perhaps you don’t do this sort of thing any longer?’ said Olivia.

‘I do most things.’

He’s taken the bait, Olivia thought. Now I’ll pull the line in.

‘Would you dare do something like this?’

‘What d’you mean, dare? What the fuck d’you mean? What fucking thing is it?’

Ah, well and truly hooked.

Olivia came walking along from the underground station at Östermalmstorg with an exceedingly merry gentleman by her side, Mink the Man, a man who was afraid of nothing.

‘Some years ago I was on my way up K2, you know the fourth summit of the Himalayas, it was Göran Kropp and me and some sherpas, ice-cold winds, minus 32… pretty tough.’

‘Did you get to the top?’