Third Voice (11 page)

‘I’m just taking it easy at the moment,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just got home. It looks like I’ll be able to do some shifts at a video store where Lenni works, to make some money. I’m thinking of
studying history of art in the spring. But I told you that last time, right?’

‘Yes. Are you sure that’s what you want to do?’

‘No, but it’s what I’m most sure of right now. And I’ve sort of been dragged into a murder investigation.’

Ove laughed.

‘Sort of been dragged into? How does that happen?’

So Olivia explained what ‘sort of dragged into’ meant. Her version, not Mette’s. She kept her blunder and Mette’s outburst to herself. It was all a bit too sensitive, even to tell Ove. For now anyway.

‘So you’re barely home five minutes before you manage to sniff out a murder?’

Olivia was a bit offended by his choice of words.

‘I didn’t exactly “sniff it out”.’

‘OK then, but a normal person would just drop it and you won’t do that, if I know you correctly. But where…’

The last few words were interrupted by a crackling sound. Small rectangles were rearranging his face.

‘Hello?’

The crackling continued and she finally deciphered what he was saying: ‘I’ll be in touch.’ Totally out of sync. Then he was gone. She stared at the screen a while longer, as though she hoped he might reappear. I miss him, she thought, I really do. Not like Lenni thinks, but it’s great that he’s coming home.

Olivia closed the laptop, resting her hands on it.

The laptop?

Who had stolen Bengt Sahlmann’s laptop? The murderer, who else? Why? What was on that laptop that the murderer wanted to keep hidden? Or
murderers
? Or was it something they needed? It wasn’t her job to find out, Detective Chief Inspector Mette Olsäter had made that quite clear. And that’s precisely why it was enticing. And she had a little trump card, which she hadn’t remembered until now and that’s why she hadn’t told Bosse Thyrén when he talked to her.

The man who called Sahlmann’s house on the night of the murder.

Alex Popovic.

The journalist.

She quickly started up her computer again and searched for his name. No problem – a journalist at
Dagens Nyheter
. His phone number and address were there.

She called him, even though it was almost midnight.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s Olivia Rivera here. I was the one who answered at Bengt Sahlmann’s the other night. Could we meet up some time tomorrow?’

‘Why?’

‘Aren’t you a journalist?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, you should be wanting to know why Sahlmann was murdered.’

‘You said that he committed suicide.’

‘I was wrong. Are you free?’

‘Yes.’

They arranged a time and a place and ended the call. Olivia had ‘blabbed’ again about the suicide that was a murder, but she was feeling fine. She’d just seen a news report about the murder about an hour ago. Hadn’t Alex Popovic heard? Not much of a journalist, she thought. And what was she going to talk to him about?

Time would tell.

They changed trains in Copenhagen, onto the City Night Line. Abbas’s quick decision to go had meant he’d had to buy a first class ticket in the sleeper carriage – there weren’t any second class tickets left. It didn’t bother him. He had money enough, and in any case, money was irrelevant at the moment. They sat
opposite each other, in their own bunks, with a little window table between them. A rounded lamp was casting a warm yellow light over the table and the carriage smelled of detergent.

The train was to take them to Paris with one change in Cologne.

They would have to change yet again to get to Marseille.

During the journey from Stockholm, Abbas had sunk down into his seat and fallen asleep before they’d reached Södertälje. He seems exhausted, Stilton thought, and picked up a book he’d brought.
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler. He’d found it among some other books in the lounge on the barge. Stilton liked the title. He thought it might be a crime story. By the time they’d reached Katrineholm, he’d realised his error and fell asleep too. The book was about the author’s disillusionment with communism.

‘How many did you bring?’

Stilton nodded at the two thin black knives lying on the table. Abbas was busy rubbing one of them with a blackish grey paste from a small metal tin.

‘Five,’ he said.

‘The same kind?’

‘Yes.’

Stilton noted that Abbas’s slim fingers treated the knives as though they were precious goods found in a treasure chest in the Caribbean. Perhaps they were, Stilton had no idea. He’d seen Abbas use them, several times, and he had great respect for the way he handled them.

‘You’re really good with knives,’ he’d once said.

‘Yes.’

The conversation had ended round about then. Abbas had never been particularly talkative and when it came to the knives he was basically mute. So Stilton didn’t know much. He assumed that the knives were a necessary accessory out in Castellane, the slum district where Abbas had grown up.

Abbas started polishing the other knife.

‘You liked the poster?’ he suddenly said, not looking up.

‘The poster? The one in your bedroom? The circus poster?’

‘I worked there.’

‘At the circus?’

‘Yes. Cirque Gruss.’

‘When?’

‘Before I fell into crime.’

Abbas took some more paste from the metal tin.

‘My dad took me to the circus when I was thirteen, for the first time. We’d never been able to afford anything like that. I sat almost right at the edge of the ring and felt sorry for the animals being forced to do lots of degrading things. After a while, I felt that I wanted to leave, but I knew what the ticket had cost so I sat still. And that’s when he came in.’

Abbas fell silent, put the black knives into his bag and took out two more.

‘Who came in?’ Stilton asked after a while.

‘The Master, Jean Villon, the knife thrower. His performance only lasted fifteen minutes, but it changed my life. I was mesmerised.’

‘By knife throwing?’

‘By his whole performance. He threw the knives at a girl strapped to a spinning wheel and the knives framed her body. My stomach was churning, almost knotted, throughout the performance. When we left, I asked my dad whether we could go again the following night. We couldn’t. So I started saving money, secretly, some of it pinched from my dad’s pockets while he slept. But by the time I had enough for a ticket, the circus had left.’

Abbas looked out through the window, into the darkness, as though the memory of the departed circus still pained him.

‘But then you started working at a circus?’

‘Yes, four years later, when I was seventeen. By then I’d seen a number of performances in various circus tents around Marseille. All of them had knife throwers and none of them came close to Jean Villon.’

‘The Master.’

‘That’s what he was known as among circus people. He was quite famous, but I had no idea. One day I saw that Cirque Gruss was coming to town again, with Jean Villon. And that’s when I decided. I’d been practising knife throwing for a couple of years, at home in the backyard and out on the fields. I knew the basics. So I got in touch with Jean Villon and told him that I wanted to be a knife thrower and asked him whether he would consider training me.’

‘That was quite cocky.’

‘Perhaps, I wasn’t so polished in those days. Maybe that’s why he listened. Then he asked me to throw a few knives against a plank of wood. It was quite dark outside and hard to judge the distance, but I managed to hit the plank with two of the three knives. At the right angle. “Come back tomorrow at seven,” he said. I’d thought he meant in the evening and was there bang on time – he’d meant seven in the morning. But I was given another chance, and the next day I was there at six. He’d already started. He practised with the knives for four hours every morning and two in the afternoon whenever they weren’t travelling. I was there for two hours and he showed me all the mistakes I was making. There were plenty. When we’d finished, he asked whether I wanted to go with the circus to Nice. I certainly did.’

‘He hired you?’

‘I became his apprentice. Board and lodging, that was enough. I shared a little blue circus caravan with a dwarf, Raymond Pujol, the grandson of the great Joseph Pujol. Have you heard of him? Le Pétomane, the “fartomaniac”.’

‘No. Fartomaniac?’

‘He was once a very famous artist. He could fart
La Marseillaise
and blow out a candle three metres away. He married a dwarf and their daughter gave birth to Raymond.’

‘With whom you shared a caravan.’

‘Yes.’

Abbas held a knife up to the lamp and inspected the blades. Stilton watched him. He’d never heard Abbas give such a long and detailed account about himself, and he realised that this had nothing to do with knife throwing or Abbas’s life in the circus. This was the prelude to the unusual trip they had embarked upon. He still had no idea what it was about, but he knew he would find out.

All he needed to do was listen.

‘I accompanied Jean Villon for almost two years,’ Abbas said. ‘Mostly around southern France, Nîmes, Avignon, Perpignan. Each day we practised for several hours and I improved with every hour that passed. Eventually I was able to pin up a five of hearts on a post ten metres away and hit each heart without the knives touching. Then came the really hard part, when you have perfected the technique and it’s all just in the mind, to be so focused on the throw that nothing can distract you in the ring – a child screeching, someone coughing or gasping, a balloon suddenly bursting, you know. Being able to shut out everything around you.’

‘You learned that too?’

‘Gradually. The acid test came in Narbonne. It was our first night there and suddenly the Master became ill, with a fever. I was summoned to his caravan. He was lying under a couple of large tattered blankets. “You’re throwing tonight,” he said. And that’s all he said. It was a sell-out and there was no way of cancelling. When I left his caravan his wife was standing next to one of the wheels. He was married to a much younger woman, a very beautiful Moroccan woman called Samira. She was blind.’

‘Blind?’

‘Yes. She was the Master’s target girl, the one who was attached to the spinning wheel when he threw the knives.’

‘And she was blind?’

‘Yes.’

‘Strange.’

‘Perhaps. She heard me stepping out of the caravan and waved at me. I walked towards her. “You’ll be throwing at me tonight,” she said. “Yes, are you worried?” I asked. “No, Jean says that you’re as good as he is.” “I’m not,” I said. “Tonight you are,” she replied.’

Abbas turned over and stuffed the last of the knives into his bag. Stilton saw his eyes straining, it was hard for him to talk about this. Why? So far it had just been about knife throwing, hadn’t it?

‘We were very attracted to each other.’

He said it while he still had his head turned towards his bag, as though he was revealing a secret.

‘You and the woman who was going to be your target girl?’

‘We’d been dancing around each other, emotionally, for more than a year. It was easier for me, I could see her. She could only imagine. What, I don’t really know, but once she said it was my smell, another time my voice. We’d never touched each other. She was Jean Villon’s wife. But we both knew. I dreamed about her at night, stole a glimpse as she washed behind the caravan in the morning. She was a fantastic woman. Fantastically beautiful, in my eyes. I was utterly consumed by her.’

‘And now you were about to throw a load of knives at her on a spinning wheel?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did that work? I mean that total concentration you talked about, being able to shut everything else out. Considering your feelings for her?’

‘It worked perfectly. As though whatever was between us was helping. When they dimmed the lights in the packed circus tent and it was only me and her in the ring, it really was only us in there. No one else. Just me and her. And the knives. When the wheel started spinning and I weighed the first knife in my hand and flung it at her, it was like a strange declaration of love. For every knife that landed a couple of centimetres from her body I became more and more aroused, without losing focus. When
the final knife was in place and the whole tent started roaring, I collapsed into the sawdust. Pujol ran in and lifted me up and out of the tent. The last thing I saw was her face as she was lifted off the wheel. She looked very sad.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ll get to that presently.’

Stilton nodded. He was trying to tally Abbas’s flow the whole time, so as not to interrupt him in the wrong place, not say something that would make him shut off. In some way, the whole tale was connected to what he knew was coming – what Abbas was getting closer to telling him… in his increasingly thinner voice.

‘It was almost two o’clock at night, that same night that she’d been my target girl, and I couldn’t sleep. I was lying naked in the bed, staring at the strange bells hanging here and there on the ceiling, wondering where Pujol was. Suddenly the door opened and he helped Samira up into the caravan. Then he disappeared. I got up out of bed. The light from one of the tent lamps was shining in through the window, enough for me to see her. She’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. When she dropped it on the floor she was naked. I touched her shoulder – it was the first time I touched her. She reached out her hand and touched my waist. I took her hands and guided her down into the bed. Then we made love.’

Abbas fell silent and Stilton didn’t dare to say anything. He tried to picture the scene in front of him – the beautiful blind woman and the young knife thrower in a cramped circus caravan somewhere in southern France, aroused following months of dancing around each other, unleashed by knife throwing in a packed circus tent, making love as silently as possible, while the woman’s fever-ridden husband lay in a nearby caravan.

He wanted to know more.

‘So what happened then?’ he dared to ask.

‘The last thing I asked her was why she’d looked so sad out in the tent. “Because you and I will never be,” she whispered
and kissed me. When I woke up she was gone. I fell asleep again and was woken by the Master. He was better and came into the caravan with a thermos of coffee and a bottle of calvados. We drank coffee and some booze. Then he calmly and rather cheerlessly explained that I had to leave the circus that same day. I understood. So an hour or so later I said goodbye to Pujol and a few others I’d got to know and left. As I was walking out through the gate, I turned around and looked back at Samira’s caravan, at the oval window. There was no one there – I never saw her again.’