Third Voice (44 page)

‘How did you come to think about him? Welander?’ Abbas asked.

It was a question all three, but Mette in particular, had wanted to avoid. She’d hoped that Abbas wouldn’t dig any further into it. She’d intentionally avoided mentioning the film from Jean-Baptiste, the film with the three voices. She didn’t want him to know that it existed.

And neither did Stilton nor Olivia.

But she also knew that Abbas could decide to ring Jean-Baptiste himself at any time, like he did when he found out about Mickey Leigh.

She didn’t want to keep quiet or tell half-truths. Not to Abbas. So she told him about that hideous film and the murder.

Just like that.

When she’d finished, Abbas got up and looked at her.

‘Could you drive me home?’

‘Absolutely.’

Mette got up.

‘Mette.’

Mette turned around. Olivia took a few steps towards her and lowered her voice.

‘I would like to have a USB stick with the contents of Sahlmann’s laptop, with the stuff about the scandal at Silvergården, is that all right?’

‘I’ll fix that… and listen.’

‘Yes?’

‘You still made a difference.’

‘Without being a police officer.’

‘You are a police officer, you’ve just gone AWOL for a while.’

Mette smiled and left the lounge with Abbas. On the way from the barge, Mette asked Abbas about what had actually happened in the circus tent. With Mickey Leigh. So Abbas told her. He finished just as they got to the car.

‘Imagine if one of the knives had missed,’ Mette said.

‘Hit him, you mean?’

‘Yes?’

‘They didn’t.’

Abbas got in the car. Mette sat down behind the wheel and rolled the car out onto the street.

‘We’ve tied him to Borell’s murder. They were his fingerprints on the murder weapon in the boathouse.’

‘Great.’

Then they basically sat in silence until Abbas got out of the car near Dalagatan. Just before he slammed the door shut, he leant over towards Mette.

‘Thank you for telling me about the film.’

‘I assume that you don’t want to see it.’

‘No. Can you give these to Jolene?’

Abbas took several French sachets of sugar out of his pocket and handed them over. Jolene collected sugar sachets, she had a couple of large glass jars full of different sachets from all over the world.

‘She’ll be really happy!’

‘I know.’

‘But do you want to come and see her yourself?’

‘No, I want to give my handsome face a bit more time to recover before that.’

Abbas closed the car door and walked towards the building.

Mette watched him go.

Stilton and Olivia were still sitting in the lounge. He’d made her a cup of tea. He himself was sitting munching a large carrot, his stomach was rumbling a bit. Both of them felt relieved after Mette’s briefing. Most of it had fallen into place and each one of them had contributed in their own way. Abbas had found pictures of Mickey Leigh, Tom had recognised him, Mette had been able to move in on Jackie and find Sahlmann’s laptop. Olivia had photographed it out at Borell’s and given Mette a link between Mickey and Borell, which had led to Tomas Welander. The third voice.

So far so good.

Now there were just two things remaining. A simpler, more satisfying task for Stilton. And a rather more difficult one for Olivia, namely Sandra. Tomas Welander had killed her father, this family friend and priest was a murderer. The motive was that her father threatened to reveal that he had witnessed a brutal murder during a sex act that he had ordered.

And she’d be telling that to a young girl who’d just tried to commit suicide?

She felt a longing to go back to Mexico.

To the solitude and isolation.

Or maybe to Nordkoster?

Then he called, as though she’d placed an order. Olivia’s mobile vibrated on the table and Ove Gardman’s name lit up on the display. She glanced over at Stilton. He was half-lying down on the bench, in his own world, a world of revenge. She picked up her mobile, got up and went towards the corridor. She took a deep breath before she answered, she didn’t really know what
to say. Should she apologise? Say that she was missing him? Or just act as though nothing had happened?

‘Hi, Ove, how are you doing?’

She tried to sound averagely flippant.

‘So-so.’

His voice sounded subdued and sad. Olivia felt herself getting irritated. Is he going to play the martyr? To make me feel bad? Just because I haven’t been touch there’s no need for him to sound like the world has ended. He was actually the one who’d been rather insensitive last time we met up? But OK, I’ll give in and apologise, I have nothing to lose.

She took a deep breath. Saying sorry wasn’t her strong point. She needed a run-up, rather like Mette.

‘Hello?’ Ove said.

‘I’m still here. It’s just quite bad reception.’

A white lie that comes in handy when you need to buy time.

‘Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had a lot on my plate recently, you know, with that case I told you about, and I haven’t had time, well, once I did actually call your mobile, but it was switched off. I heard what happened with Maggie. Lenni told me. It was…’

‘My dad’s died.’

Ove’s voice almost broke when he interrupted Olivia babbling on. Abruptly. A pang of guilt flashed through her head. She became painfully aware that not everything was about her. She crouched down, her back sliding against Stilton’s cabin door, before it suddenly opened and Olivia fell back straight into the cabin. She hit her head on his bunk, but still managed to keep her mobile pressed against her ear.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘When did it happen?’

‘Last night.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ove, I didn’t know he was so bad.’

She heard Ove sighing before he starting telling her. His father had caught some kind of virus that resulted in pneumonia and then he just got worse. His body couldn’t cope.

‘The shittiest thing of all is that I wasn’t there. I’ve been sitting there day and night since I came home, and I just went to get some new clothes. That’s when he died. Alone. Not a single fucking soul was there!’

‘Was he in hospital?’

‘No, but he should have been. It seems like they didn’t grasp how ill he was, even though I tried to tell them. And there was no doctor available either. They promised me they’d watch him while I went off for a few hours, but then some-one fell and fractured their hip and my dad was left alone. It’s fucking awful. No one should have to die alone, I get so angry thinking about it. It’s so undignified! It’s all just about cash.’

Olivia recognised this, all too well.

‘I can come down and see you,’ she said. ‘I just need to deal with something here tomorrow.’

‘I’m not sure if I’m that fun to hang with right now. There’s a lot to deal with. The funeral and stuff.’

‘I’ll come anyway.’

‘OK, thanks… And listen!’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve missed you.’

‘I’ve missed you too.’

It was true. She really had been missing Ove.

She ended the call and carried on sitting on the floor for a while. She thought about Ove’s dead father and Hilda at Silvergården, and Claire Tingman. If Claire hadn’t told Olivia about everything, things would have been very different. More people should speak out, she thought. When she came back into the lounge, she saw that Stilton was still lying on the bench, his eyes half-closed. She sat down at the table.

‘Hi, there!’

It was Luna coming down the iron steps with a couple of grocery bags.

‘You haven’t eaten yet, have you?’

They hadn’t, so both gladly accepted when Luna suggested having dinner together. Stilton rather more enthusiastically than Olivia, which Luna noticed.

‘I’ve bought you some rib-eye,’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen.

It was a long and chatty dinner, with several vegetarian specialities that Olivia thought were great. Stilton was very happy with his piece of meat. The food was accompanied by a couple of well-aerated bottles of ripasso wine. They were expensive, but Luna had sold a few rare stamps and she felt she could treat herself to something nice.

It was largely Olivia and Luna who did the talking; they soon found themselves on the same wavelength and chatted about the past and present. Stilton mainly just sat filling in, when asked, but he felt good in their company. Luna’s tattoo flashed through his head a couple of times, but he let it pass without getting hung up about it.

When Olivia poured herself yet another glass of wine the dinner was more or less over. The three of them had settled down into a pleasant state, it had taken the edge off, and she suddenly felt that she wanted to ask that question now, to Tom, the one she’d once asked without ever getting a proper answer.

So she went ahead and asked it.

‘What was it that made you go off the rails?’

Luna looked at Olivia. She didn’t know? Not her either? He hadn’t even told her? She turned towards Stilton. Was he going to ignore Olivia’s question too? After all that had happened?

Stilton cupped his wine glass in his hands. He saw the way Olivia was looking at him and presumed that Luna was doing the same. A few seconds passed, a minute perhaps, before he made up his mind.

‘It was when I was dealing with Jill’s murder,’ he said to Olivia. ‘I’ve mentioned that, haven’t I?’

Olivia nodded. He’d told her about the murder of Jill Engberg, one of Jackie Berglund’s escort girls.

‘I slogged away at that case, day and night, constantly being hindered by Rune Forss. He didn’t want me to go sniffing around Jackie Berglund. I slept badly, was unpleasant to Marianne, and on top of that, Astrid, my mother, was dying. So I really busted my arse during the day and then sat by her bedside during the night.’

Stilton was breathing deeply and looking down at his hands. They were trembling a little, his body still recalling how he felt.

‘I guess you could say that I wasn’t in great shape,’ he said.

‘You must have been burned out?’

‘Probably. All the warning signs were there, but I just ignored them. Tough detective chief inspectors don’t get burned out.’

Stilton looked at Olivia with a wry look on his face. He was telling the story to her, even though he was very aware of Luna sitting on the other side of the table.

‘Late one night, when I was on my way up to see my mum, I stopped at a red light. I was exhausted and that red light suddenly became unbearable. It was as though it was triggering some kind of volcanic eruption in my body, my head started spinning, my heart was pumping and my throat tightened. I could hardly breathe. I was forced to pull over and stop the car.’

‘A panic attack?’

‘Yes, but I thought I was having a heart attack. Then my body calmed down and I thought I should book an appointment to see someone at the hospital, after I’d been to see my mum. Then I just drove on.’

‘And were you all right?’

‘Sort of.’

Stilton sipped his wine. There was a little left in his glass.

‘When I saw my mother she was asleep, so I sat down by her bed and held her hand. There was a horrid black mark on it
from a cannula. I sat and stared at the mark and suddenly felt it starting to grow, slowly, like a snake slithering up her arm and towards her neck, as though it was going to strangle her.’

The women sitting at the table looked at him in horror.

‘Of course it was all in my head,’ he said.

And he drifted off into the memory…

…into the past.

‘Tom?’

Stilton blinked. Astrid had woken up. The snake had gone. Those fucking images, he needed to sleep more, take care of himself, otherwise it really would be a heart attack next time.

‘Do you remember having nightmares as a child?’

Her voice was weak. Stilton looked down at this pile of skin and bones that was his mother. Age is unfair, he thought, terribly unfair. He suddenly felt incredibly tired.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you used to say that dreams are dreams, they’re only in your head and have nothing to do with real life.’

Which is a bloody lie, he thought.

‘But it wasn’t true,’ she said. ‘It did have something to do with real life.’

Astrid looked at him with a steady gaze as she whispered these words. He steeled himself. Her expression foreshadowed something he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. At least not now, he wasn’t really in the right state.

‘You don’t need to, Mum.’

‘I have to.’

She had to? What? If there was a secret she’d been bearing her whole life, then she may as well take it to her grave. She’d never been religious. She couldn’t have been thinking that some God would pass judgment on her when she died? He gently stroked the black mark on her hand, it was not growing again.

‘You remember the nightmares?’

Astrid kept her gaze fixed on him.

‘Yes.’

‘They were always about the same thing, a fire. Do you remember? That we were running from a burning house?’

‘Yes, something like that.’

Why did she have to tell him this?

In his profession, he was manically focused on finding the truth, and he got incredibly frustrated if he was unable to solve a case. He wanted to know the truth at any cost.

But not now.

Not this truth.

He’d managed to run away from it, hiding himself so well that he had no idea what it was about. All that remained were fragmented pieces that still appeared in his dreams sometimes. His nightmares.

Couldn’t they just stay there in that oblivion?

‘It was us,’ he said. ‘We ran from a burning house, you and I.’

Astrid took a deep breath.

‘And I was the one who started the blaze.’

‘You?’

‘I set our house on fire, yours and mine.’

Stilton breathed a sigh of relief. A fire. It wasn’t any worse than that, the secret. He could cope with that.

‘But there’s more to it than that,’ Astrid said.

‘Mum, you don’t need to…’

‘I must. Don’t you understand? You were only six then. Do you remember?’