Third Voice (5 page)

‘Yes.’

They walked through the underpass. Olivia peered at the girl next to her. The night before she had walked this way on her way home, happy, looking forward to celebrating her exam result. Now her entire existence was crushed.

They emerged on the other side.

‘Where did you put your scooter?’

‘Over there, by the tree.’

Sandra walked ahead towards some trees where she’d left her scooter. But there was no scooter to be found.

‘It’s gone!’

Olivia caught up with her.

‘And this is where you left it?’

‘Yes.’

Olivia looked around and saw the severed lock on the ground, half-hidden by wet leaves.

‘It looks like it’s been stolen.’

‘Yes.’

Olivia thought that Sandra might break down again. But she didn’t. It was as if the missing scooter was just a part of the greater tragedy, that everything was connected.

‘It must have been that bloody man,’ Sandra said.

‘What man?’

‘The one I walked past.’

‘Where?’

‘In the underpass, on my way home. He was walking the other way and then he disappeared. I ran back to the scooter to get my bag with the key and he was gone. Imagine if he was hiding and saw me when I got to the scooter and then went back? He would have seen that it was just standing there. And then stolen it.’

‘Yes, maybe. You didn’t recognise him? From the area?’

‘No.’

‘But when he walked past you, was he coming from the direction of where your house is?’

‘Yes, what do you mean?’

‘Nothing.’

Olivia got out her mobile.

‘I’m going to report the scooter missing.’

Mette Olsäter pulled out a small paper napkin and wiped under her nose – she could feel there were beads of sweat on her upper lip. She’d asked for a window to be opened in the cramped boardroom to keep the temperature down, as the thermostat wasn’t working properly. Her bulk and the inescapable tension would make her sweat, she knew that, and sweat undermines authority. She couldn’t be doing with that – she needed some authority for what she wanted to say. She looked at her watch, a thin black Rado watch that she’d been given by her husband when she turned fifty, and realised there was less than one minute to go. She took a last glance around her sparsely decorated office,
one of the oldest at the National Crime Squad headquarters. Before, she’d had private photos on her desk and various pieces of pottery that she’d made in the windows. Now everything was gone. She’d reached a phase when she wanted to keep her work and her private life completely separate. She was approaching retirement.

She picked up her blue file and headed towards the open door. She knew there’d be questions over there, some more intelligent than others. She was able to foresee and prepare for most of them. The less intelligent ones. But the others, the intelligent questions, the ones that would come when she least expected them, and from where she could not predict, they worried her. They could stump her, or at least demand answers she couldn’t give. She could ill afford them. She knew that the people gathered in the room would meet for an evaluation afterwards, and that the outcome of this would determine the ongoing investigation. And maybe even her role in it. Sweden had been tasked with putting together a strategy for a coordinated international response to the explosive growth in online drug sales. Mette Olsäter had been put in charge of the project. Now she was about to present the strategy advocated by the Swedish police to sixteen foreign police representatives.

She pulled the door closed behind her and headed towards the boardroom. Just before she was about to go in she felt her mobile vibrating in her pocket. She pulled it out. Olivia had texted: ‘What time?’ Mette answered: ‘7.00 p.m.’

She had invited Olivia for dinner.

Stilton arranged his things in the cabin. It didn’t take long. A few clothes in the tiny wardrobe and a tattered portrait of One-eyed Vera on the narrow shelf by the bedside lamp. It was as close to home as he could get in his situation. He didn’t care. Just over a year ago he was living in a borrowed caravan that burned
down – some kind of arson attack. Now he lived in a cabin on an old barge. A bit more cramped, but untainted by broken memories.

It suited him perfectly.

He left the barge without bumping into Luna. He thought he’d go and see Abbas. He knew that Abbas seldom started work at the casino before eight o’clock. Stilton wanted to begin some private investigations into the shit that had happened before he became homeless, and he might need Abbas’s help.

They had a pretty special relationship, based on mutual respect. Stilton had once taken care of Abbas when the young Frenchman had been arrested for counterfeit sales of this and that, and was close to attacking a fellow inmate with a knife when his back was against the wall. Stilton made a connection with him, found a way into his closed world and saw something that no one else saw back then.

A good person.

Damaged and closed, with baggage that Stilton could only guess at, but still. He organised a special programme for Abbas with two supervisors he trusted. Mette and Mårten Olsäter.

Over time, it turned out that Stilton’s evaluation of Abbas had been right. He was a good person. So good in fact that he was eventually considered family by the Olsäters, decided to train as a croupier and began studying Sufism. He never forgot what Stilton had done for him.

During the years that Stilton was homeless, Abbas was given the chance to repay some of his debt of gratitude.

And now Stilton was ringing at his door on Dalagatan.

No answer.

He’s probably with Ronny Redlös, thought Stilton, with his phone turned off. Or maybe he’s in the bath with his earphones on listening to music. Abbas often had baths. Stilton did not. He rang the doorbell again. As the sound faded away he leant against the door. What was that? A dull whirring noise could be heard inside the flat. Was he hoovering? Stilton knocked on
the door a couple of times, hard. The whirring noise continued. Stilton concluded that Abbas el Fassi, who was rather anal about tidiness, was hoovering with his earphones on. And he might well be doing that for quite some time.

Stilton stepped out onto Dalagatan and started walking towards Odengatan. It was that time of year again when people didn’t look at each other. That cold and harsh time when it was dark almost all day, before the snow came to brighten things up a bit. Everyone he passed was looking down, channelling their bodies to somewhere warm.

Stilton didn’t care about the weather, not in that way.

People who’ve grown up on the flat islands in Stockholm’s archipelago have a different relationship to the weather than people in the city. Out there, the weather is a matter of life and death. When storms lash in at thirty metres a second from the open sea, you can’t just glide into a posh restaurant like Sturehof to complain about how bloody cold it is!

So Stilton walked towards Odenplan not paying any atten-tion to what was blowing around him. He’d stood outside underground stations selling
Situation Stockholm
in far worse conditions than this. With one major difference. Back then he was totally drained, absent, without a single relevant feeling in his body.

Now it was quite the opposite.

He was extremely fired up. Focused. He had a task. He was going to deal with Rune Forss, the detective chief inspector who had manipulated him out of the police.

A very unpleasant man.

The pressure rising inside Stilton forced him to clench his teeth until his cheeks were straining. He stopped outside the Hellmans toyshop on Odengatan and watched his reflection in the window. He’d never done that when he was homeless. Never. The first time he saw himself in a mirror, after five years on the streets, at home with the Olsäters, he’d had quite a shock. Not now though. He saw himself as the person he had restored.

On Rödlöga.

For the past year he’d lived alone out there in the house he’d inherited from his mother – her parents’ old fisherman’s cottage. Before that he hadn’t been there since he went off the rails in 2005. Abbas had come out to visit him a couple of times and he’d gone into the city to meet Mette and Mårten a couple of times too. Mette was one of his oldest colleagues from the squad, the only one there for whom he had total respect, which had over time resulted in a close personal relationship as well. And subsequently also with her husband Mårten, a slightly eccentric child psychologist.

But the visits to the city were short lived, as he longed to get back out to the island again. Back to isolation. In the beginning he spent time getting the house in order. It was a simple house, wooden panelling on the walls and a stone floor, a tiled roof that had withstood the worst of the weather. It had been standing there for more than a hundred years and Stilton intended to ensure that it would remain there throughout his lifetime.

Once he’d got the house in order he started to clear the land.

Several years had passed since anyone had tended to the plot and many trees had fallen down during storms. It suited him perfectly. He got to work with his grandfather’s old bow saw, cut, stacked and then started chopping. Every morning he went out to his chopping block, grabbed a new piece of wood and took up his axe. Hour after hour, until his arms were like putty. Afterwards he went to lie down on the bed just next to the kitchen and checked his arms and legs for ticks.

Then he read.

The Manhattan series. Whodunnits from the fifties. The only books there’d ever been at his grandparents’ house. His grandfather had loved them. Peter Cheney, James Hadley Chase, Mickey Spillane. He’d read them over and over again when he was young, when he lived out there with the old folks, smuggling the well-thumbed paperbacks to the outhouse to lose himself in the hard-boiled stories. He still recalled many of the
heroes’ names. Lemmy Caution. Slim Callaghan. Mike Hammer. Sometimes he’d wondered how much his juvenile fascination with these crime stories and coppers had influenced his choice of profession.

He read the books again, until he fell asleep.

When he woke, he ate whatever he’d been able to get hold of – either from the small island shop or from the Vaxholm boat deliveries, depending on the time of year.

Always food that was easy to prepare.

Then he’d sit down and look out through the hand-blown windowpanes. At the sea, the stars and the lights on far-off ships. He had no dreams about the sea, or a life at sea – he wanted firm ground under his feet. But he enjoyed sitting by the window.

He was biding his time.

As his physical strength returned, through wood chopping and fishing and long walks over the island, his brain also started working again.

For better or for worse.

He did some serious soul-searching. It was quite painful. He forced himself to recall the names of all those he had betrayed during his years in the force. People he’d abandoned, cut ties with, treated like shit. People who had loved him, tried to support him, been there for him. People who had eventually given up hope.

It took its toll.

But it led him onwards.

First into shame. That took a couple of months to process. But when he finally realised that the first step forward was to respect himself more, for the person he now was, the pressure eased a little. He was who he was and he dealt with it as best he could. And he would try to draw new self-respect from that.

That’s when he started feeling a sense of rage.

Not immediately. He still wasn’t up to it, but he began mulling over certain things. ‘Lost years.’ He’d lost a number of years in his life. Why? He knew what had sparked it, he knew there weren’t any medical explanations, but was that the whole truth?

That’s when he came closer to rage.

He got closer to Rune Forss.

Stilton peered at himself in the toyshop window again. An older man in a stiff coat came and stood next to him.

‘You don’t have a poo bag, do you?’

‘Poo bag?’

‘Little Wiffin has pooed on the pavement and I forgot to bring a bag.’

Stilton looked down and saw an odd-looking ball of fur circling around the man’s legs.

‘Sorry, I haven’t got a poo bag.’

‘All right, sorry to bother you.’

The man pulled Wiffin away. Stilton turned back to face the shop window. He had no trouble connecting to what was taking place inside him. It had been going on for quite some time now and had recently escalated. A kind of frenzied need to get back. And assume a place in the world again.

Make up for lost time.

Yet he didn’t quite know how. He’d dedicated a great deal of deep thought to the matter. Where should he go? What was he going to do with his life? He had given it up once and now he’d got it back again.

Or reclaimed it.

What was he going to do with it?

He’d spent the majority of his adult life working in the police, successfully. He had a good moral compass, a sense of right and wrong, perhaps even more clearly now than before his years on the streets. But he couldn’t possibly imagine returning to that police environment.

He needed to go in another direction.

But he first had to deal with Rune Forss.

It was the first step towards the closure he was looking for.

He looked past his reflection into the toyshop. He saw electric train sets and puzzles and large boxes of Lego and caught himself missing children.

Children playing.

With him.

Children who were his.

He’d never have any, he was sure of that. That time was over. When the time had been right, during his marriage to Marianne Boglund, he’d been consumed by murder investigations and made it quite clear that he wasn’t ready to have children. That was probably one of the reasons for the divorce.

But there were others.

He pulled himself away from the toyshop and walked towards Odenplan. He glanced over at the Tennstopet restaurant on the other side of the road. It was crowded in there, away from the cold and desolation. That sense of community had never appealed to him. He got out his mobile and called Mette Olsäter. She answered after a couple of rings.