The Spring Tide (36 page)

‘Nils Wendt, according to his letter.’

Mette looked at the board on the wall. The crime scene photos from the shore at Kärsön. The picture of Nils Wendt’s corpse. The maps of Costa Rica and Nordkoster and quite a lot of other stuff.

‘So now we know what those short telephone calls to Magnuson were about.’

‘Blackmail, presumably.’

‘With the help of this tape.’

‘Where Magnuson admits to having ordered a murder.’

‘The question is what Wendt wanted, what the blackmail was about?’

‘Money?’

‘Perhaps. According to the letter he wrote himself in Mal Pais he was going to Nordkoster to look for money he had hidden there…’

‘…and since he left the island with an empty suitcase, then he can’t have found any money, can he?’

‘No.’

‘But it doesn’t have to be about that,’ said Bosse Thyrén, the young and sharp one.

‘No.’

‘It could have been about some sort of revenge, on another level?’

‘And only Bertil Magnuson can answer that.’

Mette got up and gave the order to immediately arrest Bertil Magnuson.

It was very dark in the Cedergren Tower, silent, and rather spooky for an ordinary person. Or a person in an ordinary state. Bertil Magnuson was not in an ordinary state. He had a little pocket torch in his hand and was making his way up to the upper regions of the building. The tower room. The room right at the top with the bare brick walls, and just a couple of small slits out to the world.

A world that not very long ago had belonged to him.

The man who had mined coltan ore and given the electronics world its tantalum. The exclusive component that was the basis of the techinical revolution.

Bertil Magnuson.

Now linked to a murder.

But that isn’t what Bertil was thinking as he climbed up the narrow winding stone steps with the help of his little Maglite. He supported himself against the brick walls now and then, very drunk.

He thought about Linn again.

About the shame.

About having to look Linn in the eye and say:

‘It’s true. Every word on that tape is true.’

He couldn’t do that.

When he had finally clambered right up to the tower room, he was beyond physical sensations. It was unpleasantly damp and dark and that didn’t bother him at all. He felt his way to the closest little opening in the wall and pulled his grey pistol out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. Then he looked out and down.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have done that.

Far down below, in a direct line of sight from where Bertil was standing by the aperture, he saw Linn walk out onto the big terrace. Her beautiful dress. Her hair falling so beautifully over her shoulders. Her slim arm which reached out and picked up the almost empty whisky bottle and her head which turned round slightly, in some surprise, and then looked up.

At the Cedergren Tower.

And thus their eyes met, if eyes can meet at such a distance, in an attempt to reach each other.

Mette and her group arrived at high speed at Magnuson’s address. They all got out and approached the house where the lights were on. Since nobody opened despite repeated rings on the doorbell, they went round to the back up onto the terrace. The door from the house was wide open. An empty whisky bottle lay on the terrace.

Mette looked around.

How long she had sat there, she didn’t know. Time was totally irrelevant. She sat with her husband’s bloodied head in her lap on her cerise dress. Some of his brain tissue had plastered the brick wall opposite her.

The first shock, the one that came when she heard the shot from the tower and saw Bertil’s face disappear from the opening, was what had driven her up to the tower in a state of panic.

The second shock, when she had got up to the tower room and saw him, that too had worn off slightly. Now she was like
a carving, in another state, slowly slipping into mourning. Her husband had shot himself. He was dead. With her fingers she carefully touched Bertil’s short hair. Her tears dropped down onto his dark jacket. She picked a little at his blue shirt with the white collar. Even to the end, she thought. She raised her head and looked out through the opening, and down, towards their house. Police cars on the drive? Strangers up on the terrace? She didn’t really understand what those dark-clothed people were doing down there. On their terrace. She saw a big woman who pulled out a mobile phone. Suddenly Bertil’s mobile rang, in his jacket on her lap. She put her hand into the pocket and pulled it out. A strange object that she was holding in her hand, and which was ringing. She pressed the answer button, listened and answered.

‘We’re up in the tower.’

Mette and her team very quickly reached the top of the tower. And at least as quickly ascertained that Bertil Magnuson was dead and his wife in a state of severe shock. It was of course possible that Magnuson had been shot by his wife. But considering the background, it wasn’t particularly likely. Nor considering the situation in the tower.

It was simply tragic.

Mette looked at the Magnuson couple. She wasn’t the sort who got emotional when it came to crime and punishment, and her sympathy was entirely with the wife. She felt nothing for Bertil Magnuson.

No more than a second’s disappointment.

As a police officer.

But her sympathy for Linn led her to explain. A little while later down in the house. Linn had been given some sedatives and she’d asked them to tell her what had happened. Why they were there, and if it was connected with her husband’s death. So Mette told her part of it. As mildly as she could. She was of
the opinion that the truth was the best healer, even though it could hurt when it was served up. Linn wouldn’t really understand what it was about, that would be to expect too much. Mette didn’t fully understand herself. Yet. But there was nevertheless some sort of explanation for the husband’s suicide in that tape recording.

That was about a murder.

News of Bertil Magnuson’s suicide was soon out in the media.

Not least online.

One of the people who was quickest to comment was Erik Grandén. In an almost furious outbreak he tweeted his indignation over the witch hunt to which Bertil Magnuson had been subjected in recent weeks. One of the most shameful houndings of an individual in modern Swedish history. To find an equivalent he had to go back to the infamous lynching of the innocent nobleman Axel von Fersen in Stockholm in 1810. “The people who have hounded him bear a despicable guilt upon their shoulders! They have whipped up a suicide!”

An hour after his outbreak, the party’s governing board phoned and summoned him to a meeting.

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

Grandén had mixed feelings as he hurriedly made his way to the party headquarters. On the one hand, there was Bertil’s horrific suicide and his thoughts went out to Linn. He must remember to phone her. On the other hand he was rather elated about meeting the board. He took it for granted that it was about his future top post out in Europe, otherwise you wouldn’t be summoned so abruptly. He was slightly irritated that he wouldn’t have time to visit a barber before the meeting.

The press would of course be there to cover it.

Mette sat in her room. Shortly she would go through all the material with her team. Magnuson’s suicide had changed the game plan. Made things more tricky. Now a lot would be about the recorded conversation, while neither of the two
who spoke was still alive. The chances of proving who had murdered Nils Wendt had lessened radically.

The murderer was probably also dead.

What they had was circumstantial evidence. Wishful thinking, a celebrity lawyer would say to the press.

So for the moment Mette put Wendt’s murder aside and started to study a print-out of some of Jackie Berglund’s computer files. One of them contained a sort of card index. A register of clients. With a mishmash of sex buyers, known and unknown. But some of the names made her react.

Especially one of them.

Grandén sat down at the oval table. Normally there were eighteen people on the board. Today only a smaller group had gathered. He knew them all well. Some of them he had himself eased into politics, others he had been forced to put up with.

Such were the rules of the game. Of politics.

He poured out some water from the carafe in front of him, lukewarm. He waited for someone to take the initiative. It was slow in coming. He glanced around the room.

Nobody looked him in the eye.

‘Rather an historical moment for us, all of us, not only for me,’ he said.

And pulled in his lower lip slightly, in his familiar organic movement. The group looked at him.

‘Tragic about Magnuson.’

‘Outrageous,’ said Grandén. ‘We must take a stand against that mob mentality, it could hurt just about anybody.’

‘Yes.’

The man leaned forward towards a little CD player on the table. He stopped his finger just before pressing Play.

‘We got this a little while ago.’

The man was looking straight at Grandén who was just running his fingers through his hair and wondering if it would stick up and look silly as it tended to do when he had the wind against him.

‘Yes, right.’

The man pressed Play and a recorded conversation started. Grandén immediately recognised the voices. Two of the three musketeers, he himself being the third.

Having got that far in the conversation, Grandén began to realise that this meeting was not about his trampoline to a top job in Europe, and into the lap of Sarkozy and Merkel. He tried to win time.

‘Can you back that up a bit?’

The man pressed the buttons. The conversation started again. Grandén listened intensely.

The man turned the CD player off, and looked at the decidedly composed Grandén. The water cooler bubbled weakly in the background. Somebody was doodling on a notepad.

‘The journalist Jan Nyström was murdered on the 23rd of August 1984, in Zaire. As we just heard, the murder was instigated by Bertil Magnuson, managing director of the then MWM. At that time you were on the board of the company.’

‘That is correct.’

His lower lip puckered out again.

‘What did you know about it?’

‘The murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing. I do however remember that Nils Wendt phoned me after the murder and told me that that journalist had come up to their office in Kinshasa with a very serious report about MWM’s project down there and asked for a comment.’

‘Did he get one?’

‘Magnuson and Wendt promised him a comment the next morning, but he never turned up.’

‘He was murdered.’

‘Apparently.’

Grandén glanced at the CD player.

‘Did Wendt say anything else?’ the man asked.

‘He suddenly maintained that there was a lot of truth in that journalist’s report and that he himself had tired of Magnuson’s methods and wanted to pull out.’

‘From MWM?’

‘Yes. He was going to leave the company and disappear. “Go underground” as he put it. But first he would get some life insurance.’

The man pointed at the CD player.

‘He took a hidden tape recorder with him and got Bertil Magnuson to admit that he had ordered a murder.’

‘Apparently.’

Grandén kept quiet about the next phone call he had received. From Bertil Magnuson, the next day. In which he told how Wendt had disappeared and that almost two million dollars were missing from an account for ‘unspecified costs’. An account that Grandén knew wasn’t visible to the accountants and which was used to buy services from less scrupulous persons when problems cropped up.

And Jan Nyström had evidently become just such a problem.

‘Where did you get this recording from?’ he asked.

‘Mette Olsäter, at the National Crime Squad. She had obviously heard about your Twitter contribution today and thought we ought to have an opportunity to listen to this and talk to you before it reached the media.’

Grandén nodded. He glanced around the table, slowly, nobody would look him in the eye. Finally he stood up and looked at them.

‘Am I a liability?’

He already knew the answer.

A top political post in Europe? He could forget that, tainted as he was by his close association with Bertil Magnuson. Privately as well as in an official capacity. Besides, he had been on the board of MWM at the time of the murder.

He left the party office with long strides and walked across to the Old Town. He knew that his political career lay in ruins. Soon the hounds would be at his heels. They’d hunt him down. He who had lived so long with his high profile and his arrogant tweeting. They’d skin him alive, he knew that.

Without going anywhere in particular, he wandered around the narrow lanes. The lukewarm breeze made his hair stand up. He walked bent slightly forward, dressed in his smart blue suit, alone, a ghostlike scarecrow. The historic buildings leaned over the tall, slim body.

His days on twitter were over.

Suddenly he found himself outside a barbershop on Köpmangatan, his own barber. He walked in and nodded towards a chair where the barber was massaging some hair cream into the black hair of a man who seemed half asleep.

‘Hello, Erik? You haven’t got an appointment, have you?’ said the barber.

‘No, I just thought I’d borrow a razor, I’ve got some hairs on my neck that I want to remove.’

‘Yes, sure… you can use that.’

The barber pointed to a little glass shelf on which there lay a good old razor with a brown Bakelite handle. Grandén took the razor and went into the toilet at the far end of the shop. He locked the door behind him.

One for all.

Mette was in her room. She looked at her team. They were all there, concentrated. The suicide of the previous night had been something of a nasty surprise.

Mette took charge.

‘I suggest we go through it from the beginning. Theses and hypotheses.’

She stood at the very front of the room, next to the wall with the large board. Adelita’s false letter had been pinned up there, next to his own ‘letter of explanation’ from Mal Pais. Just under that, the photo of Wendt and Adelita that Abbas had taken from the bar in Santa Teresa.

‘If we start with the recording from 1984 in which Bertil Magnuson admits he ordered the murder of the journalist Jan Nyström,’ said Mette. ‘Since Magnuson is dead, we can put that aside, it will have repercussions on other levels. But we do know that Wendt left Kinshasa just after the murder and disappeared. His former live-in partner reported him as missing a week later.’

‘Did he go straight to Costa Rica?’

‘No, first he made his way to Mexico, to Playa del Carmen, where he met Adelita Rivera. We don’t have any exact information as to when he turned up in Mal Pais, but we do know that he was there in 1987.’

‘The same year that Adelita travelled from Costa Rica to Nordkoster,’ said Lisa Hedqvist.

‘Yes.’

‘To fetch the money that Wendt had hidden at his summer house there.’

‘Why didn’t he fetch it himself?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Mette. ‘In the letter he says that he couldn’t.’

‘Perhaps that’s connected with Magnuson. Perhaps he was afraid of him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did the money come from?’ asked Bosse.

‘We don’t know that either.’

‘Perhaps it was money he had pinched from their company before he disappeared?’

‘That’s possible.’ said Mette.

‘And all those years before he turned up here again, was he there all the time? In Mal Pais?’

‘Presumably. According to Ove Gardman he worked as a guide in a nature reservation there.’

‘And thought that Adelita Rivera had tricked him and taken his money?’

‘Possibly. He did receive a false letter from her in which she leaves him most abruptly, a letter that was written by one of the people who murdered Rivera on Nordkoster in 1987. The most likely purpose of the letter would have been to try to prevent Wendt from investigating why she didn’t come back.’

‘The perpetrators must have kept a very cool head,’ said Bosse Thyrén.

‘Yes. But then Gardman turns up in Mal Pais three weeks ago and tells him about the murder he witnessed as a boy, and from the Internet Wendt realises that it was Adelita Rivera who had been murdered, and he goes to Sweden.’

‘And now we’ve got to the present day.’

‘Exactly, and now we have a pretty good idea of Wendt’s movements. We know he didn’t find any money on Nordkoster, we know that he had his recording from Kinshasa 1984 with him, and we can assume that he played parts of that recording for Magnuson in those short calls we have proof of.’

‘The question is, what was he after?’

‘Could it be connected to the murder of Rivera?’

‘That he thought Magnuson was involved in it?’

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps we can check with the help of this?’

Lisa Hedqvist pointed at the board, at the old envelope.

‘That letter is signed “Adelita”, and was posted five days after she was murdered, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘We should be able to get DNA from it, from the stamp, don’t you think? And match it against Magnuson. Saliva works OK even after twenty-three years, surely?’

‘Yes.’

Lisa went up to the board, loosened the envelope and went on her way.

‘While we’re waiting for that, we can nevertheless note that Wendt’s calls must have put enormous pressure on Magnuson since on the tape he does admit that he ordered a murder. Of a journalist,’ said Mette. ‘The consequences of that being made public must have been completely clear to him.’

‘So he tried to get hold of the tape by having Wendt murdered?’

‘Well I think that’s a fairly likely motive.’

‘But Wendt had a copy of the tape in Costa Rica.’

‘Did Magnuson know that?’

‘We can’t be sure, but one could well assume that Wendt had mentioned that as a sort of life insurance, after all he knew what Magnuson was capable of.’

‘So Magnuson tried to find the tape in Mal Pais, is that it? Abbas el Fassi was attacked in Wendt’s house.’

‘Yes,’ answered Mette. ‘We don’t as such know if that was on Magnuson’s initiative, but it does seem very likely.’

‘And if that was the case, then he must have realised that he’d failed and that the recorded conversation would soon reach Sweden. Reach us.’

‘And then he shot himself.’

‘Which means that we’ll never get a confession about the murder of Nils Wendt. If it was him behind it.’

‘No.’

‘And nor for the murder of Adelita Rivera either.’

‘No.’

The conversation came to a halt. They found themselves in a cul-de-sac. They had no technical evidence to tie Magnuson to the murder of Wendt. All they had was circumstantial evidence, a possible motive and an old investigation that was in effect closed.