The Spring Tide (24 page)

‘Hello! And who are you?’

‘Olivia Rönning. Mette said I should go in, she is…’

‘Welcome! I’m Mårten. We’re just about to eat, are you hungry?’

‘Smells good, doesn’t it?’

Mårten pointed with a ladle towards a large casserole dish on the cooker. Olivia was standing next to him.

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘Well now. I was aiming for soup, but I’m not sure, we’ll have to taste it.’

Then Mette and Stilton walked in. It took Mårten a few seconds, seconds that Stilton registered, but then he smiled.

‘Hello Tom.’

Stilton nodded.

‘Would you like something to eat?’

‘No.’

Mette was fully aware of the extremely delicate situation. She knew that Tom could leave the house the very second that things tensed up, so she quickly turned to Olivia.

‘You wanted to see me?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s Olivia Rönning,’ said Mårten.

‘I know, we’ve met.’

Mette turned towards Olivia.

‘Arne’s daughter, aren’t you?’

Olivia nodded.

‘Is it about him?’

‘No, it’s about that Nils Wendt, who was found murdered yesterday. I’ve met him.’

Mette gave a start.

‘Where? When?’

‘On Nordkoster, last week.’

Olivia quickly told about her meeting with the man on Nordkoster. She had recognised him from the portrait of Nils Wendt that a newspaper had published today. Admittedly a very old portrait, but sufficiently similar for Olivia to be quite certain who she had seen.

‘It must have been him. He said his name was Dan Nilsson,’ she said.

Mette was absolutely certain, for a very concrete reason.

‘He used the same name when he rented his car here.’

‘Oh really? But what was he doing there? On Nordkoster? Up by the Hasslevikarna coves?’

‘I don’t know, but he had links to the island, he had a summer cottage there many years ago, before he
disappeared
.’

‘When did he disappear?’

‘In the mid-Eighties,’ said Mette.

‘Then it must be him that she talked about.’

‘Who?’

‘A woman that I rented a cabin from, Betty Nordeman, she talked about somebody who disappeared and perhaps was murdered and who knew that person who was in the papers today, Magnuson?’

‘Bertil Magnuson. They were business partners, and they had summer houses on the island, both of them.’

On the surface, Mette was fully focused on Olivia Rönning and her information, but out of the corner of her eye she was checking every detail of Tom. His face, his eyes, his body language. He was still sitting there. She had told Jimi and the grandchildren not to come down, and hoped for God’s sake that Mårten had enough subtle intuition and wouldn’t suddenly think of bringing Tom into the conversation.

‘But you, Tom, how did you and Olivia come into contact with each other?’

That was Mårten. Suddenly. What had happened to the subtle intuition? A sudden silence around the table. Mette avoided looking at Tom so as not to put any pressure on him.

‘We met in a dustbin room,’ said Olivia.

Her voice was steady and distinct. It was up to each of them to decide whether it was meant as a humorous comment or an intuitive way of saving Stilton. Or quiet simply as actual information. Mårten chose that interpretation.

‘A dustbin room? What were you doing there?’

‘I had asked her to come.’

Stilton looked Mårten straight in the eye when he said that.

‘Oh Jesus. Do you live in a dustbin room?’

‘No, in a caravan. How’s Kerouac?’

The iron cramp suddenly loosened its grip in Mette’s chest.

‘Not too bad, I think he has arthritis.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he has difficulty moving his legs.’

Olivia looked from Stilton to Mårten.

‘Who’s Kerouac?’

‘It’s my mate,’ said Mårten.

‘It’s a spider.’

Stilton smiled when he said that, at the same time that his eyes met Mette’s gaze, and what passed between them during a few endless seconds wiped away years of despair in Mette.

Tom was communicating again.

‘But there was something else.’

Olivia turned towards Mette while Mårten got up and started to hand out some funny-looking plates.

‘What?’

‘He had a suitcase with him on the beach, one of those with wheels that you can pull behind you, and he had it with him at the cabin too. Then when I woke up and peeped out it lay there below the steps, and then I opened it and it was completely empty.’

Mette had now reached out and picked up a little notebook and she wrote a few words in it. Two of them were ‘Empty suitcase?’

‘Do you think that Wendt could have been involved in that murder on the beach, of that woman? 1987?’ said Olivia.

‘Hardly, he disappeared three years before the murder took place.’

Mette pushed the notebook away.

‘But he could of course have returned to the island without anybody knowing about it, and then disappeared again? Couldn’t he?’

Both Mette and Stilton smiled a little. One of them inwardly and the other more obviously. That was Mette.

‘You’ve learnt something at the breakfast table.’

Olivia, too, smiled a little and looked down at what Mårten possibly thought was soup. It looked good. Everybody tucked in, although Stilton only took one spoonful while the others took five. His stomach was still suffering the after-effects of the
beating. Mette hadn’t yet dared ask about the bandage around his head.

They ate.

The soup contained meat and vegetables and strong spices and they drank some red wine with it, while Mette told about Wendt’s earlier life. How he and Bertil Magnuson had started the then Magnuson Wendt Mining company and quickly become successful internationally.

‘By dealing with a shitload of dictators in Africa to exploit their natural resources! They didn’t give a fuck about apartheid and Mobutu and you name it!’

Mårten had suddenly exploded. He hated both the old and the new MWM. He had spent a large part of his left-radical years demonstrating and printing pamphlets about the company’s ruthless exploitation of impoverished countries and the
environmental
pollution that resulted.

‘The bastards!’

‘Mårten.’

Mette laid a hand on her indignant husband’s arm. He was after all of an age when a stroke could result from the next outburst. Mårten shrugged his shoulders slightly and looked at Olivia.

‘Do you want to have a look at Kerouac?’

Olivia looked at Mette and Stilton out of the corner of her eye but didn’t get much support. Mårten was already on his way out of the kitchen. She got up and followed him. When Mårten turned round in the door to see if Olivia was with him, he got a special look from Mette.

He left the room.

Stilton knew exactly what it meant. The look. He nodded towards the cellar under the kitchen floor.

‘Does he still smoke?’

‘No.’

Mette’s answer was so quick and short that Stilton understood. End of that. He couldn’t care less. He never had done. He
knew that Mårten used to smoke a joint now and then down in his music room. And Mette knew that he knew and that they were the only people in the world who knew. Apart from the joint-smoker himself.

And thus it would remain.

Mette and Stilton looked at each other. After a few seconds Stilton felt he must ask what he had wanted to ask ever since she caught up with him out on the road.

‘How are things with Abbas?’

‘Fine. He misses you.’

Silence again. Stilton traced the edge of his water glass with a finger. He had said no to wine. Now he was thinking about Abbas and he found it rather painful.

‘You can say hello from me,’ he said.

‘Yes, I will.’

And then Mette dared ask.

‘What have you done to your head?’

She nodded towards Stilton’s bandage and he didn’t feel like evading the issue so he told her about the beating-up in Årsta.

‘Unconscious?’

And about the cage fighting.

‘Children fighting in cages!’

And about his private hunt for the people who murdered Vera Larsson and their link with the cage fighting. When he had finished, Mette was noticeably agitated.

‘But that’s just dreadful! We must put a stop to it! Have you told the people in charge of the case?’

‘Rune Forss?’

‘Yes.’

They looked at each other for a few seconds.

‘But for Christ’s sake, Tom, that was more than six years ago.’

‘Do you think I’ve forgotten?’

‘No, I don’t think that, or I don’t know, but if you want to help us find the people who killed the woman in the caravan then I think you must swallow that and talk to Forss! Now! There are children getting hurt! Otherwise I’ll do it!’

Stilton didn’t answer. He could, however, hear how heavy bass tones from the cellar were beginning to come up through the kitchen floor.

Linn sat alone down in the beautiful yacht. A Bavaria 31 Cruiser. It was moored at their private jetty in the sound quite near the Stocksund Bridge. She liked sitting there in the evenings. The boat rocking a little with the waves, and she could look out over the water. On the other side lay Bockholmen with its lovely old inn. On the right she could see the cars driving over the bridge. A bit further up she saw the Cedergren Tower sticking up above the trees and just now she saw Bertil up by the house, on his way down to the jetty with a little glass in his hand. With something brown in it.

Good.

‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Bertil sat down on a wooden bollard next to the yacht. He sipped his drink and looked at Linn.

‘I am sorry.’

‘For?’

‘A bit of everything, I have been rather absent lately…’

‘Yes. Is your bladder better?’

Bladder? He hadn’t felt anything down there for a while…

‘It seems to have settled down,’ he said.

‘That’s good. Have you heard anything about Nils’ murder?’

‘No. Or rather, yes, the police were in touch.’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did they want?’

‘They wanted to know if Nils had been in touch with me.’

‘Really? What… but he hadn’t, surely?’

‘No. I haven’t heard a sound from him… since he walked out of the office in Kinshasa.’

‘Twenty-seven years ago,’ said Linn.

‘Yes.’

‘And now he’s been murdered. Disappeared for twenty-seven years and then suddenly murdered, here, in Stockholm. It is strange, isn’t it?’

‘Unfathomable.’

‘And where has he been all those years?’

‘Nobody knows.’

And if anybody did know, Bertil would have given his right hand to get in touch with them. That question had been at the top of his agenda for a long time. Where the hell had Wendt holed up? The tape was in some unknown location, which could be anywhere at all on earth. A rather large area to search.

Bertil leaned back slightly and downed his drink.

‘Have you started smoking again?’

The question came out of the blue and Bertil had no time to duck.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

Linn immediately noticed the piercing undertone. He was ready to attack if she were to go on. She dropped it.

Perhaps he had been more affected by the murder of Nils than he wanted to show.

‘There he is!’

Mårten pointed at the whitewashed stone wall in the cellar. Olivia followed his finger and saw how a large cellar spider crawled out of a crack in the wall.

‘Is that Kerouac?’

‘Yes. A genuine cellar spider, not an ordinary house spider, he is eight years old.’

‘Oh, right.’

Olivia looked at Kerouac’s subcutaneous nerves which were vibrating slightly. The spider that might possibly be suffering from arthritis. She noticed how it moved rather carefully across the wall, with long black legs and a body that was just over one centimetre in diameter.

‘He loves music, but he is fussy about it, it took me a few years to learn his taste, I’ll show you!’

Mårten moved his finger along the other wall. It was covered from floor to ceiling with vinyl records, large and small. Mårten was an aficionado. A vinyl fan with one of Sweden’s most original collections. Now he pulled out a 45-rpm by Little Gerhard, an old rock king from a forgotten age, and placed the B-side on a gramophone.

One of those with an arm and a needle.

It didn’t take many chords before Kerouac had stopped his slow crawl across the wall. When Little Gerhard’s voice reached full volume, the spider changed direction and crept towards the crack again.

‘But now look at this!’

Mårten was like an enthralled child. He quickly pulled out a CD from the much smaller collection on the short wall. He lifted the needle off the vinyl record and pushed the CD into a modern player.

‘Watch this now! And listen!’

It was Gram Parsons. A country guy who had left some immortal traces behind him when he died from an overdose.
Now the sound of ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ flowed out of Mårten’s well-rigged stereo system. Olivia stared at Kerouac. Suddenly the spider had stopped, some way away from the crack. It twisted its fat black body almost 180 degrees and started to move out across the wall again.

‘Pretty obvious, isn’t it?’

Mårten looked at Olivia and smiled. She wasn’t really sure whether she had ended up in a lunatic asylum or in Detective Chief Inspector Mette Olsäter’s house. She nodded and asked if Mårten was a potter.

‘No, that’s Mette’s.’

Olivia had nodded towards the door where they had just passed a room with a large kiln. She turned towards Mårten.