The Spring Tide (14 page)

Now she was dead and he was sitting here. Absolutely knackered. On some stone steps close to Slussen, and thinking about her, and how he had left her on her own in the caravan and walked away. Now he was going to do some walking here. Up and down the steps. Night after night, until he was fit enough to be able to do what he felt he was obliged to do.

Deal with the men who had murdered Vera.

It was as Bertil Magnuson expected. K. Sedovic had given his report: no Nils Wendt at any hotel in Stockholm. But where could he be hanging out? If he was even in Stockholm? He hardly had any contacts left from the old days, Bertil had already checked that, discreetly. Wendt was not in anybody’s address book nowadays.

So what now?

Bertil got up and crossed to the window. The cars rolled past down on Sveavägen. You couldn’t hear them. A few years earlier they had installed exclusive windows with insulating glass on the entire street side of the building. A sensible investment, Bertil thought, and then another thought came into his head.

Or idea, rather.

A sudden realisation.

About where Nils Wendt might well be found with his repulsive recording.

She sat beside a formica table in the kitchen, smoking, turned towards a little gap where she had opened the window. She didn’t want smoke in her flat. She would have liked to have stopped smoking altogether. She’d been wanting to do that for years, but it was the only bad habit she had and she knew that the sum of all bad habits was constant. If she stopped smoking she would only start with something else.

Something worse.

She was called Ovette Andersson and was the mother of Acke, a boy with wavy blond hair just over ten years old.

Ovette was forty-two.

She blew out some smoke through the gap and turned towards the clock on the wall, spontaneously. The clock had stopped. It had been stopped a long time. New batteries, new tights, new bed sheets, new existence, she thought. The list was overwhelmingly long. And at the very top was a pair of new soccer boots for Acke. He would get them as soon as she could afford it, she had promised him that. After the rent and all the rest had been paid. And all the rest included some big debts which the bailiffs were collecting and instalments to pay for some cosmetic surgery. She had enlarged her breasts some years ago, and borrowed money to do it. Now she had to look after every penny.

‘Hi!’

Acke put his cracked skateboard down and went straight to the fridge to get some cold water. He loved cold water. Ovette always put a couple of litres in a jar in the fridge so it would be waiting for him when he came home.

They lived in a two-room flat. Two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom in one of the high rise blocks. Acke went to Annerstad School down in the local centre. Now it was the summer holidays. Ovette pulled Acke towards her.

‘I think I’ll have to work this evening.’

‘I know.’

‘I might be rather late.’

‘I know.’

‘Have you got your soccer training?’

‘Yeah.’

Acke was lying, but Ovette didn’t know that.

‘Don’t forget your key.’

‘No.’

Acke had had his own key as long as he remembered. He looked after himself for a large part of the day. The part when his mum was in the city working. Then he usually played soccer until it got too dark and then he went home and heated up what
his mum had prepared. It always tasted good. Then he played his video games.

Unless he was doing something else.

Olivia was in a hurry and in fact she hated hypermarkets. Especially the ones she had never been in before. She hated wandering about more or less totally lost in narrow aisles with overfull shelves trying to find a little can of vongole, and in the end be forced to seek out some sort of staff person in a semi-uniform.

‘What did you say it was called, did you say…?’

‘Vongole.’

‘Is that a vegetable?’

But she didn’t have time to choose a shop today. She had just fetched her car from its MOT test in Lännersta and had turned in to shop at the huge ICA Maxi in Nacka. Now she was rushing from the car park towards the glassed-in entrance and realised that she probably didn’t have a five-kronor coin so she would have to settle for a plastic basket. She had a fifty-kronor note in her pocket but there wasn’t time to change that. A few metres in front of the entrance stood a tall thin man with a magazine in his hand. One of those homeless people who earned a meagre living by selling
Situation Stockholm
. The man had some scabs on his face, his long hair was matted and shone with grease, and judging by his clothes he had spent the last few weeks very close to the ground. Olivia glanced at the man. It said ‘Jelle’ on the ID-card around his neck. She passed by quickly. Sometimes she bought a magazine, but not today. Not when she was in such a hurry. She continued through the rotating doors and got a few metres inside the lobby – then she stopped abruptly. Slowly, she turned round and looked at the man standing out there for a moment. Without really knowing
why, she walked out again, went and stood a couple of metres away from the man and looked at him. He turned towards her and moved forward a step or two.

‘Situation Stockholm?’

Olivia dug into her pocket, got hold of the fifty-kronor note and held it up while scanning the man’s face. He took the note and handed over change and a magazine.

‘Thanks.’

Olivia took the magazine and put together her question in her mouth.

‘Are you Tom Stilton?’

‘What of it? Yes?’

‘It says “Jelle” on that.’

‘Tom Jesper Stilton.’

‘Okay.’

‘What of it?’

Olivia quickly walked past the man and in through the revolving doors again. She stopped at the same place as before, caught up with her shocked breathing, and turned round. The man outside was just putting his magazines in a shabby backpack and starting to leave. Olivia reacted. Slowly. She walked out again, and went after the man. He was walking quite fast. She had to almost half run the last bit to catch up with him. The man didn’t stop. Olivia cut in front of him.

‘What’s the matter? D’you want some more magazines?’ he said.

‘No. My name is Olivia Rönning and I’m a student at the Police College. I want to talk to you. About the beach case. The one on Nordkoster.’

The man’s weatherworn face didn’t show any reaction at all. He just turned round and walked straight out into the street. A car had to brake suddenly and the driver with his hair back-combed made an obscene gesture. The man continued to walk. Olivia stayed where she was. A long time. Such a long time that
she saw him disappear round a concrete corner some way away, and she stood so still and erect that an elderly gentleman felt obliged to hesitantly address her.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

Olivia was feeling everything other than all right.

He didn’t any more.

His physical decline had drained his appearance of all personality. Even his eyes seemed to have died. His thin body unwillingly supported a long-haired head which definitely did not match.

Yet it was Stilton.

She had reacted instinctively, at first, when she passed him, a fleeting sensation had swept past and formed an image when
she stopped inside the doors: Tom Stilton? It isn’t possible. It is… and then she had gone out again and studied his face.

Nose. Eyebrows. The clearly visible scar under one corner of his mouth.

It was him.

And now he had disappeared.

Olivia twisted a little in her seat. Next to her lay a notebook with a large number of written questions and thoughts about the beach case. All written down, ready to be answered by the man who had been in charge of the murder investigation.

Tom Stilton.

A shabby rough sleeper.

The rough sleeper himself was now sitting beside Järla Lake. His backpack still on his back. He sat here sometimes, not so far from his wooden shack. Some thick bushes, some water trickling under an old wooden bridge, relative silence.

He pulled a branch off a bush next to him, stripped the leaves off and stretched it down as far as he could reach. Far down where he stirred it around in the murky water.

He was disturbed.

Not because he had been recognised, he had to live with that. He was indeed Tom Jesper Stilton and had no plans to change his name. But because of what she had said, the girl who had cut in front of him and looked confounded.

Olivia Rönning.

He knew the name. Very well.

‘I want to talk to you. About the beach case. The one on Nordkoster.’

There are eternities, and there are eternities. And there are aeons. An eternity of eternities. That was approximately the distance that Stilton felt to his former life. Yet just one phrase was needed for that aeon to shrink to the size of a tick and begin its greedy penetration.

The beach case.

It sounded so trifling, he thought. A beach and a case. So harmless. But he himself had never called it the beach case. He thought it degraded one of the most repulsive murders he had investigated. It sounded like a newspaper headline. He himself had always referred to the case as Nordkoster. Concrete. What a policeman would say.

And unsolved.

And as for why was Olivia Rönning was interested in Nordkoster, that wasn’t his problem. She came from another world. But she had planted a tick in his mental body. She had made an incision in what he was now, and let the past in, and that disturbed him. He didn’t want to be disturbed. Not by the past, and definitely not by what had disturbed him sufficiently for almost eighteen years.

Jelle pulled the branch up out of the water.

The light summer rain poured down on the demonstrators who had gathered together on the pavement opposite MWM’s head office on Sveavägen. Their banners with various slogans: LEAVE THE CONGO NOW!, PLUNDERERS!, STOP CHILD LABOUR! A little group of policemen stood some way away.

Over by Olof Palmes gata an elderly man was leaning against a façade. He watched the demonstrators, registered their banners and read one of their pamphlets.

The pamphlet was illustrated with horrible pictures of dead gorillas, fastened to poles like bleeding Christ figures.

The man lowered the pamphlet. He slowly raised his eyes to look up at the façade across the street, right up to the very top floor, where the head office lay. Where the owner and managing director Bertil Magnuson had his office. The man’s gaze fastened on that. He knew that Bertil was in the room. He had seen him arrive in the brightly polished Jaguar and sneak in through the entrance.

You have aged, Bertil, Nils Wendt thought. He felt the pocket with the cassette tape.

In the city there was still a bit of the working day left, although it was gradually coming to an end. For Ovette Andersson, the working day had only just begun. Her workplace, the pavement area between Riksbanken and the Academy of Fine Arts, was in effect active day and night. The cars had already started to crawl along on the lookout for what the Law on Prostitution termed ‘sex-sellers’. As opposed to ‘sex-buyers’. As if it was about a formal business transaction with sex products.

It wasn’t long before the first car crept up beside Ovette and the window was lowered. When the formalities had been dealt with, and Ovette climbed into the car, she pushed away the last thought of Acke. He was doing his soccer training. He was having a good time. He would soon get some new soccer boots. She pulled the car door shut.

It was almost seven in the evening when Olivia stepped into her flat. Elvis lay stretched out like a Playboy centrefold on the hall mat with his legs spread in all directions: he demanded
tender attention. Olivia lifted him up and sank her face into her beloved cat’s soft fur. He smelt faintly of the food he had eaten that morning. Now he took up position across her shoulder, his favourite place, and started to chew a little on her hair.

With the cat on her shoulders she took a cold juice out of the fridge and sank down at the kitchen table. On the way home from Nacka, she had sorted the experience with Stilton. She had found him, at last, and he was a rough sleeper. Fine. She assumed there were reasons for that and they were not her concern. But he was still an important source for the beach case. A totally uninterested source, obviously, but…? Sure, she could drop the case, it was not a compulsory assignment after all, but that wasn’t really how she was made.