Third Voice (25 page)

She hoped that they did.

Borell went and stood right in the middle of the room with his martini glass in his hand. It was empty.

‘This is my treasure chamber,’ he said. ‘Maybe not in terms of market value, but to me. This is my Shangri-La.’

Olivia peered at Borell. His gaze slowly scanned the walls and she felt that he really meant it. This room was special. To him.

‘What’s that I can hear?’ she said.

The electronic music had stopped, and instead she could hear a gentle buzzing sound, from above, from a ledge running along the ceiling.

‘The vacuum system.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The world’s most modern way to prevent art theft. It’s only available to private buyers so far.’

‘How does it work?’

‘You’re inquisitive.’

‘Is it secret?’

Borell smiled.

‘Not at all,’ he said and gestured up towards the ceiling. ‘When the system turns on, the doors slide shut and all the air is sucked out of the room. As you can see, there are no air valves. It gets hermetically sealed and it’s impossible to get inside.’

‘What happens if someone happens to be in there?’

‘It would be pretty excruciating.’

Olivia looked up at the buzzing ledge on the ceiling. Was he lying? Why would he do that? He could probably install whatever high-tech system he wanted with all his money.

She felt that she wanted to get out.

From this room.

From the house.

‘Would you like another martini?’ Borell said.

‘No. Thank you.’

Olivia left the L-room. Borell followed her. The whole way through the atrium, Olivia tried to keep her gaze on the wall opposite the glass facade. She didn’t want to see that disgusting formalin aquarium. Borell was silent the entire time. As they passed through a short, poorly lit hallway, Olivia suddenly smelled smoke. Cigarette smoke. They were not alone. There was someone else here too.

She started walking faster.

‘You met Magnus Thorhed?’

Borell’s voice revealed that he was right behind her.

‘Yes, at Bukowskis,’ she said. ‘He seemed interested in a Karin Mamma Andersson piece. Was that for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘So he’s involved in your art collection?’

‘He’s involved in everything that concerns me. He’s very loyal. Very much at the forefront of things.’

‘Did you buy the painting?’

‘Yes. I also bought some video art by Ann-Sofi. Would you like to see it?’

‘Ann-Sofi Sidén?’

‘Yes.’

Olivia had read about Sidén, one of Sweden’s most successful international video artists. She had no desire to see this video. What she wanted was to go to her car and back to civilisation.

She’d had enough.

‘It’s in my office,’ said Borell.

His office?

‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘But then I have to go.’

Olivia followed Borell into his office. She couldn’t quite work out where exactly it was in relation to all the other rooms and corridors, suddenly it was just there. On the other side of another door that slid into the wall without a sound. Borell
went up to a large flat-screen television, pushed a CD into a player and put on Ann-Sofi Sidén’s video.

It started.

Whatever was playing on the screen was probably fine art, a talented woman’s attempt to explore the human psyche with the tools available to her. But it just passed her by. She didn’t look at the screen. She let her gaze wander around the room without turning her head. She couldn’t see much in her field of vision. There was a large beautiful mirror with a gold frame on one wall. On the left was a desk with an open laptop on it. A PC. On one side of the flat screen she saw a large bookshelf full of folders and on the other side was a shelf with random piles of art books. And at the far end, on top of a couple of large books, she saw a thin bag. Closed.

A very special bag made from checked hard-pressed cork.

A laptop bag.

Olivia felt her pulse rise dramatically.

‘What do you think?’

Borell looked at her. He’d been looking at her the whole time, ever since the video had started. He hadn’t even glanced at the screen. Olivia felt it.

‘It’s fascinating,’ she said.

‘Very.’

Borell carried on looking at her with his good eye. Olivia tried to fix her gaze on the screen in front of her. Borell laid his arm around her shoulder and turned off the video. He leant in towards her and almost whispered.

‘You’re not writing a dissertation,’ he said gently. ‘Am I right?’

Olivia removed Borell’s hand from her shoulder. That gave her a couple of seconds. Then she said: ‘Yes, I am.’

‘I think you’re lying. Why did you come here?’

‘To interview you. But now I need to go back to the city. Thanks for letting me come. I’ll find my own way out.’

Olivia quickly proceeded towards the door. Borell stood still. Olivia came out into a corridor and she didn’t quite know
where it led. She turned her head slightly and saw that Borell was looking at her. She started walking faster and heard the electronic sounds bouncing off the walls. When she turned a corner she saw a coloured stream of light a bit further off. The bar? She quickened her step, her heels clicking against the stone floor.

It was the bar. She reached a room that she recognised and hastily headed towards the front door. From the corner of her eye she saw something move and looked back at the bar. A man was sitting there with his back to her. A ring of blue smoke was swirling up in front of him. She immediately knew who it was, she recognised the plait at the back of his neck. Had he been there the whole time? Why didn’t he turn around? She reached the hallway and saw the large wooden door. How the hell do I open it? She didn’t need to. A couple of metres before she reached it, the door slid open by itself.

She ran out.

She ran along the avenue of lanterns.

She ran through the open gate and jumped in her car and sank down into the seat. Why did I run? she thought. She shook her head a little, started the car, reversed and set off down the dark forest road in front of her. In her rear-view mirror she caught sight of a dark figure coming through the gate. Thorhed? Why weren’t her bloody rear windscreen wipers working? She put her foot down and tried to keep the car on the narrow lane. Suddenly she was forced to slam on the brakes. Her headlights had stopped working. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, it was a loose cable, she knew that. She got out of the car. As she was about to lift the bonnet she saw a couple of cones of light shining through the forest, far off behind her. I have no desire to meet whoever that might be, she thought, not now, and she jumped back into her car again. I’ll have to make do with my parking lights. She put her foot down again and tried to see as far ahead of her as she could. The rain had stopped and the clouds had revealed a cold moon. The greyish-blue moonshine gave her a good few more metres of visibility. She looked in her
rear-view mirror and saw two blurry headlights getting closer. She drove as fast as she dared to. Twice she’d almost driven into the ditch, the gravel bouncing off her windscreen.

Suddenly she saw lights. Houses. Street lights. Suddenly she was no longer surrounded by forest. She’d almost reached Brunn. She pulled the car up onto the main road and looked into the rear-view mirror. The headlights behind her were gone. Had he stopped? Whoever the bloody hell it was? Thorhed? She sped out onto an asphalted road and kept her eyes looking straight ahead until she saw a petrol station.

She turned in and parked. There were several people moving around her, filling up their cars, going in and out of the shop. She turned off the motor and took her mobile out while looking at the time. It was only half past eight. She dialled Sandra’s number.

‘Hi, Sandra! Sorry to bother you, I just wanted to ask you about that bag you used for your computer, what did it look like again?’

‘It was some kind of pressed cork, with brown and black checks. Dad bought it in Milan… But apparently you can buy it online too. Have you found the computer?!’

‘Maybe. How are you?’

‘OK.’

‘Good. Listen, I need to head off now, but I’ll be in touch tomorrow. Bye!’

Olivia ended the call.

The first thing he thought was that he was thinking. I think, therefore I live. They didn’t beat me to death.

But his face was a dream for a teacher of watercolour painting. He had the whole spectrum there. From deepest cobalt blue to purple and red and bright yellowy orange, connected with black stitches.

‘Have you seen your face?’

The question was put to him in French and it was Jean-Baptiste who did the asking. He was sitting on a chair next to Abbas’s bed at the Hôpital de la Conception in central Marseille.

‘No.’

Abbas had sat up a bit. He hadn’t looked in the mirror, he didn’t need to, he could feel what he looked like. But he was alive. It was thanks to the waiter at Eden Roc, who’d caught sight of him and called an ambulance, that he was black and blue instead of deathly white.

‘I thought you had your knives with you?’ Jean-Baptiste said with a smile.

He tried to lighten the mood a little. Abbas did not smile back. He couldn’t, otherwise half his face would have split open. But he could speak. Not completely clearly as his nose had been badly clobbered, but he snuffled out what he’d seen. The face of the guy who’d assaulted him, who’d had a little bull tattooed on his neck.

‘He must be the guy known as Le Taureau,’ Abbas managed to utter.

‘Presumably.’

Abbas described the man’s face to Jean-Baptiste. He shook his head.

‘It doesn’t ring any bells.’

‘But this has to have something to do with Samira?’

‘Or Philippe Martin.’

‘Or both.’

‘Yes. When are you being discharged?’

‘Soon.’

‘Are you going to go home?’

‘I’ll go when I’m done.’

Jean-Baptiste looked at the battered man lying in the bed. What was he planning to do? He’d already viciously attacked one person in this city, admittedly an arsehole, but still. Jean-Baptiste had accepted it, but he wasn’t going to accept any more. Stilton was no longer here. He leant forward a little.

‘El Fassi.’

‘Yes?’

‘As soon as you are discharged from this hospital you’re going to get out of Marseille. By train or plane. I don’t want to have to identify you in some morgue or take you in for whatever shit you do next. I’ve turned a blind eye once, I never do that twice. Do we understand each other?’

Abbas looked at the large policeman.

There was another man sitting in another hospital in another country at a similar hospital bed. Mette Olsäter was in the bed, half-sitting, with a thick plaster on her cheek. She’d needed nine stitches.

Her husband was holding her hand.

‘It was a heart attack,’ Mårten said.

‘I know. A mild one.’

‘This time. There might be more. You know that.’

The doctors had made that very clear to both of them. It wasn’t certain that there’d be more heart attacks, but there could be, unless the detective chief inspector changed a few things: her lifestyle in general and her workload in particular. And to underline the gravity of her situation, Mette was put on sick leave for a while. Which required her to stay at home.

It wasn’t something she was looking forward to. Mårten knew that.

‘But you have to,’ he said.

‘I know.’

Lisa and Bosse had visited her a short while earlier to give her an update. Clas Hall and Gabriella Forsman had managed to get out of the city despite a massive police presence. Their car was found outside Södertälje. They’d probably taken another car.

Several bags of 5-IT were also found at Forsman’s flat. They were currently trying to establish whether the bags were part of the missing drugs at Customs and Excise. It seemed likely. They’d also seized Forsman’s laptop and the computer forensics team was busy working on it.

After Lisa and Bosse had left, Mette realised how much she was longing to go back to the Squad already. Back to work. Instead, she was going to be sitting locked up in Kummelnäs, with a man who was going to be fretting about every step she took. On the stairs. In the cellar. Up in the attic.

‘But surely it’s going to be nice to come home and have a bit of a rest?’ Mårten said.

‘Yeah, lovely,’ Mette said.

It’s going to be unbearable, she thought to herself.

Stilton was sitting in the lounge on the barge drinking coffee. He found himself in an unbearable void. Mink hadn’t got back to him and Abbas still wasn’t answering. There was something wrong, seriously wrong – he was increasingly convinced of it. He looked at the screen in front of him. He had borrowed Luna’s computer to check for flights to Marseille. There weren’t any direct ones, only with stopovers and shit, just like on the way back, so it was going to take quite a while to get there.

Then Mink called. And came through for him.

‘Ovette Andersson,’ he said.

‘Acke’s mum?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has she worked for Jackie Berglund?’

‘Apparently. But she stopped eleven years ago, when Acke was born.’

‘How did you find that out?’

‘Listen, us professionals don’t reveal our methods, right?’

‘Of course not. Thanks!’

‘So where are you planning to be?’

‘When?’

‘When the world ends?’

‘On the moon. Bye!’

Stilton ended the call.

Ovette Andersson? And Jackie Berglund? That was a big surprise.

He looked at the time again and closed the laptop.

Marseille would have to wait.

There were quite a few pedestrians who turned around as the young woman charged past them on the pavement, at pretty high speed. Exercising in this weather was tantamount to masochism. Olivia realised that too. She was on her way home after a long run in bloody awful weather and she still had a way to go before she reached Skånegatan. The blister she’d got in Mexico was throbbing, but she tried to ignore the pain as best she could. Her adrenalin-fuelled mind tried to get to grips with her visit to Borell’s. ‘You’re not writing a dissertation. Am I right?’ Did he know that I was faking the whole time? Had he looked me up? How? So why did he let me come? And why was Thorhed hiding like that? Why didn’t he come and say hello? He didn’t even turn around in the bar.

She couldn’t work it out.

So she thought about the laptop that she’d seen in Borell’s office instead. Not the one on his desk, the one lying half-hidden among the art books on a shelf. In a bag made from hard-pressed cork. Unusual, but not unique. Borell could have bought it during one of his countless trips around the world. He could even have ordered it online. But he could have stolen it too. From Bengt Sahlmann, to get hold of any files about the neglect at Silvergården. That would mean he was involved in the murder of Sandra’s father.

In that case her theory was correct.

The cold, raw wind blew up from Hammarby and Skanstull and was pressed between the stone buildings. Once it reached Skånegatan it was like a wall of ice. She had to run with her head hunched over to be able to get home.

So what about her intuition? What use had that been? What had the visit to the spaceship out there yielded in that respect? What had she felt?

She’d felt a great many things, both during her visit and in the car on her way home. And during the night that followed. She’d gone through the visit from beginning to end, several times, gone through all the conversations. All the impressions, all that had remained unsaid. The next morning she’d boiled it down to what she’d just been thinking about.

There was a cork bag with a laptop inside in his office.

That had nothing whatsoever to do with her intuition.

On the other hand, she’d established that Jean Borell was a very unique man with very unique inclinations. A man who got what he wanted and probably did so without any scruples. And he was probably willing to go very far to protect what he had.

But how far was he willing to go to protect the millions he made in profits in the welfare sector?

Olivia cogitated about how she was going to find out to whom the laptop in the cork bag belonged. Was it Sahlmann’s or Borell’s? She couldn’t exactly go through Mette and order a search warrant on his house, she didn’t have enough to go
on for that. In fact, she had nothing, nothing substantial. And, moreover, she didn’t want Mette in on this. This was her own theory. And if it was correct, it was certainly going to put Mette in her place.

She was already relishing the thought.

Then Mårten rang, just as she reached her building.

Once he’d finished, the feelings of joy quickly dissipated. Mette’s heart attack really shook her up, even though it was a mild one and she was getting better. But what if it hadn’t been mild? What if she hadn’t made it?

Olivia pushed the door open.

‘She’s going to be at home for a while in case you want to get in touch.’

That’s what Mårten had said. She hoped that he would have heard the shock in her voice, and that he’d communicate her reaction to Mette. But get in touch? Did he mean that she should come over and see her? Be the bigger person?

Of course she would, but not yet.

Tomorrow she was going to Bengt Sahlmann’s funeral.

That took precedence.

She went into the stairway and pulled the door closed, rather harder than usual. As she was walking up the last few steps, a little bell started ringing in her mind. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but it was something about a car.

She started taking off her running gear.

But why wasn’t that bell ringing loud enough?