The Spring Tide (6 page)

Bit by bit.

When the professionally pleasant serving staff had done their bit, and the lights were finally dimmed inside the plane, he had fallen asleep.

Or so he thought.

But what took place in the dreamlike state inside his brain could hardly be called sleep. More like torture. With ingredients that were painfully tangible.

A beach, a murder, a victim.

Everything revolved around that.

And everything should revolve around that.

Olivia had now applied herself to the floor drain in the
bathroom
. With a growing feeling of nausea, and with the help of a toothbrush and a borrowed screwdriver, she had fished up a fat grey-black sausage about twenty centimetres long. A sausage of hairs which had effectively blocked the water lock in the floor drain. She felt even more nauseated when she realised that some of that hair was probably not hers. It must have accumulated over the years. Holding the hair sausage at arm’s length, she carried it to the rubbish bin and then tied the plastic bag as soon as she had deposited her burden. She almost felt as if it could come to life.

Now she would open her emails.

Spam. Spam. Spam. And then her mobile rang.

It was her mum.

‘You are already up, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘It’s half past eight.’

‘I never know with you.’

‘What do you want?’

‘What time should I pick you up tomorrow?’

‘You what?’

‘Have you bought masking tape?’

Oh, that meant Tynningö. Yes, of course. Maria had phoned a couple of days earlier and explained that it was time to deal with the sunny side of the house, where the façade got the worst of it. Arne had always paid particular attention to that. They would repaint it over the weekend. She had never asked whether Olivia had any other plans. In Maria’s world you didn’t have other plans if you were Maria’s daughter and Maria had plans.

This weekend they were going to repaint that side of the house.

‘Can’t make it.’

Olivia quickly flipped through the calendar inside her head searching for an excuse.

‘What do you mean, you can’t make it? What is it that you can’t make?’

A fraction of a second before she would be exposed as a bluff, she caught sight of the file next to her laptop. The beach case.

‘I need to go down to Nordkoster this weekend.’

‘Nordkoster? What would take you there?’

‘It’s umm… it’s a college thing, an assignment.’

‘But can’t you do it next weekend?’

‘No, it… I’ve already booked the train ticket.’

‘But surely you can…’

‘And you know what the assignment is? It’s a murder case that dad worked on! Back in the Eighties! Weird isn’t it!’

‘What’s weird?’

‘That it’s the same case.’

‘He worked on lots of cases.’

‘Yes, I know, but even so.’

The rest of the conversation didn’t take long. Maria seemed to realise that she couldn’t force Olivia to go to their summer house. So she asked how Elvis was, and then hung up straight after Olivia had answered.

Olivia quickly opened the railway booking site on her laptop.

Jelle had kept pretty much to himself all day. Sold a few copies of the magazine. Visited the New Community soup kitchen on Kammakargatan. Got some cheap food. Avoided people. He avoided people as often as he could. He could cope with Vera and perhaps one or two of the other homeless, otherwise he completely avoided contact. As he had done for several years now. Created a bell jar of loneliness. Isolation, physically as well as mentally. Found an inner vacuum where he tried to keep his footing. A vacuum that had been drained of all that had happened in the past. All that had happened, and that nothing could ever change. He had mental problems, and a diagnosis, he was on medicines to keep his psychoses in check. So as to be able to function – more or less. Or survive, he thought, it was more a question of surviving. To manage to survive from when he woke up in the morning, to when he fell asleep in the evening. With as little contact as possible with the rest of the world.

And as few thoughts as possible.

Thoughts about who he had been in the past. In another life, in another universe, before the first stroke of lightning came. The one that wrecked any possibility of a normal life, and created a chain reaction of breakdown and chaos and finally the first psychosis. And the hell that came in its wake. How he became a totally different person. A person who successively and deliberately destroyed all the social nets he had. So as to be able to sink. To let go.

To let go of everything.

That was six years ago, in a formal sense. For Jelle it was far longer ago. For him, every year that had passed had managed
to rub out all normal concepts of time. He found himself in a timeless nothing. He fetched magazines, sold magazines, ate sometimes, looked for reasonably safe places to sleep. Places where he would be left in peace. Where nobody would be fighting or singing or dreaming noisily horrendous nightmares. Some time ago he had found an old wooden shack, with part of the roof caved in, it was off the beaten track some way outside the city.

It was a place he could die, when the time came.

Now he was on his way there.

The TV screen was on the wall in a sparsely furnished room. A rather large screen. Now you could get hold of a forty-two-inch screen for next to nothing. Especially if you weren’t fussy about where you bought it. That was how this TV had been obtained, the TV which was now being watched by two youths with hoods on their jackets. One of them zapped a bit feverishly between different channels. Suddenly the other one reacted.

‘Hey! Look!’

The zapper had tuned in to a channel where a man was being bombarded with kicks.

‘Hell man, it’s that bloke in the park! It’s our fucking film!’

A couple of seconds later, a female presenter appeared on the screen and introduced a current affairs programme that had replaced something else at short notice.

She made a gesture with her arm towards the wings.

The woman who entered the studio was dressed in black jeans and a black jacket with a white T-shirt underneath. Her blonde hair was worn up and her reasonably high heels carried a body in good physical shape. She was approaching fifty and knew what she was doing. She made her presence felt without any effort.

Carlsén sat down on a studio armchair.

The presenter held up a newspaper.

The presenter lowered the newspaper and looked at Carlsén.

‘Hell, that’s fucking rubbish!’

It was the guy in the dark green jacket who reacted. His mate reached out for the remote.

‘Hang on! I want to hear this.’

On the screen, the presenter shook her head a little.

‘We are all to blame. Every one of us who has created a society where young people can end up so far outside all the safety nets that they become inhuman.’

‘And how can we remedy that, in your opinion? Is it possible to remedy it?’

‘It’s a political issue, it’s about how society uses its resources. I can only describe what is happening, why it is happening, and what it leads to.’

‘Repulsive films on the Internet?’

‘Among other things.’

At this point, the youth clicked the remote. When he put it down on the table, a little tattoo could be seen on his lower arm.

Two letters inside a ring: KF.

‘What’s the bitch called?’ his mate asked.

‘Carlsén. We’ve got to push off to Årsta now!’

Edward Hopper would have painted it if he had still been alive, and Swedish, and had found himself east of Stockholm in a forest area next to Jarla Lake, that night.

Painted that scene.

He would have captured the light from the only narrow lantern, high up on a metal pole, the way the soft yellow light fell upon the long, deserted road, the asphalt, the emptiness, the muted green shadows from the forest, and on the very edge of the field of light the solitary figure, a man, worn-out, tall, slightly stooped, possibly entering the field of light, possibly not… he would have been pleased with the painting.

Or not.

Perhaps he would have been bothered by the way his model suddenly deviated from the road and disappeared up into the forest. And left behind him, to the artist’s disappointment, a deserted road.

The model who disappeared couldn’t care less which.

He was on his way to his night shack. The shack with the partly caved-in roof behind what had once been a depot for large machines. Where he had some sort of roof to shield him from the rain, walls from the wind, a floor from the worst cold. No lighting, but what would he need that for? He knew what it looked like in here. But what he himself looked like, that was something he had forgotten several years earlier.

He slept here.

At best.

But at the worst times, like tonight, it crept up upon him. That which he did not want to come creeping up. This wasn’t
about rats or cockroaches, or spiders, animals could crawl however much they wished as far as he was concerned. That which came creeping, came from inside him.

From what had happened long, long ago.

And that was something he couldn’t deal with.

He couldn’t kill it with a stone or frighten it off with sudden movements. He couldn’t even kill it by screaming. Although he tried, tonight too, tried to scream away that which came creeping and knew that it was useless.

You can’t kill the past with screams.

Not even with an hour’s continuous screaming. You simply destroy your vocal cords. When you have done that then you make use of the very last thing you want to make use of, because though you know it helps, it destroys you at the same time.

You take medicine.

Haldol and Stesolid.

Which kill that which creeps, and silence the screams. And mutilate yet another bit of your dignity.

Then you pass out.

The bay had the same shape as it had then. The rocks lay where they always had lain. The beach followed a wide arc along the same thick forest edge. When it was low tide, it was still dry quite a long way out, right down to the sea. In that respect nothing had changed at Hasslevikarna, twenty-three years later. It was still a beautiful and peaceful place. Anybody who came here to enjoy it today could hardly imagine what had happened then.

Just here, on that particular night when there was a spring tide.

He came out from the arrival hall at Göteborg’s Landvetter airport wearing a short leather jacket and black jeans. He had changed in the toilet. He wasn’t carrying anything, and went straight to the taxi rank. An immigrant, looking as though he would rather have been in bed, slipped out of the first taxi and opened one of the back doors.

Dan Nilsson climbed in.

‘The Central Station.’

He was going to take a train up the coast to Strömstad.

You could feel it as soon as
Kostervåg
had left the shelter of the harbour. The big red ferry felt the heaving sea. It got worse for every nautical mile they progressed. The whole of the North Sea pushed against land here. When the wind reached nine to ten metres per second, Olivia’s stomach started to churn. She never usually became seasick. She had sailed a lot in her parents’ boat, mainly in the Stockholm archipelago but
even there a strong wind could blow up. The only times she had reacted was when there was a heavy swell with long waves.

Like now.

She made sure she knew where the toilet was. On the left, opposite the canteen. The crossing wouldn’t take so very long, so she ought to manage it. She had bought a cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun, which is what you usually did on this type of ferry, and took a seat beside one of the large windows. She was curious to see what the archipelago looked like on the west coast, so different from her own on the east. Here the rocks were low, worn, dark.

Dangerous, she thought, when she saw how the waves broke against a barely visible reef some way out.

But for the skipper this must be everyday fare, she thought. Three return journeys every day in the winter, and at least twenty now. In June. Olivia turned her gaze inwards. The saloon was fairly full, even though this was an early crossing. Islanders who were on their way home from a night job in Strömstad. Summer visitors on their way to their first week’s holiday. And just a few day trippers.

Like her.

Well almost.

She was actually going to stay one night on the island. No longer. She had booked a cabin in a little holiday camp in the middle of the island. Rather expensive, it was high season after all. She looked out again. Far away she could make out a dark strip of coast and she realised it must be Norway. So close? she thought, and that same moment her mobile rang. It was Lenni.

‘People might think you were dead! You haven’t been online in fucking ages! Where the hell are you?’

‘I’m on my way to Nordkoster.’

‘And where’s that?’

Lenni’s knowledge of geography was not the best, she could hardly have marked in Göteborg on an empty map. But she did
have other talents. Among them what she was now going to share with Olivia. It had all gone a treat with Jakob, they were as good as a couple now and were planning to go off to the big Peace & Love festival together.

‘Erik went home with Lollo, there at Strand, but he did ask about you first!’

Oh, nice, Olivia thought, at least she was the first choice.

‘So what are you doing down there? On that island. Have you met somebody?’

Olivia explained a bit, not all, since she knew that Lenni only had a limited interest in her college work.

‘Hang on, that’s the doorbell!’ Lenni cut her off. ‘It must be Jakob! Keep in touch, Livia! Phone when you get back!’

Lenni hung up just as the ferry was approaching the sound between the Koster islands.

The ferry called at the west jetty on the south-eastern part of Nordkoster. Some ubiquitous goods carrier mopeds with ubiquitous islanders were parked on the quayside. The first deliveries of the day had arrived.

And Olivia was one of them.

She stepped down onto the jetty and felt how it rocked. She came close to losing her balance and it took a few moments before she realised that the jetty was immobile. It was her who was wobbling.

‘A rough crossing?’

The woman who asked was approaching Olivia. An elderly grey-haired women wearing a long black raincoat and with a face that had been facing the sea for the greater part of her life.

‘A little.’

‘I’m Betty Nordeman.’

‘Olivia Rönning.’

‘You’ve got no luggage?’

Olivia was holding a sports bag in her hand and thought that was surely a type of luggage. She was only going to stay one night.

‘Only this.’

‘Have you got a change of clothes in there?’

‘No. A change of clothes?’

‘You can feel it yourself, the wind is blowing from the sea and it will get worse and if we get rain too then it can be hell here. You haven’t planned on sitting inside the cabin all the time, or have you?’

‘No, but I do have an extra jumper.’

Betty Nordeman shook her head a little. They never learnt, did they, these mainlanders. Just because the sun shone in Strömstad they would come out here with just swimming trunks and a snorkel and an hour later they would have to rush off to Leffe’s and buy lots of rain clothes and wellies and God knows what.

‘Shall we move along?’

Betty started to walk and Olivia followed her. She found it hard to keep up. They passed a number of basket-like cages piled on the quay. Olivia pointed.

‘Are those lobster traps?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there a lot of lobster fishing here?’

‘Not like there used to be. Now we’re only allowed fourteen traps per fisherman, they’ve decided, before we could have as many as we wanted. But it’s probably just as well, because there are hardly any lobsters left out there.’

‘Pity, I like lobster.’

‘I don’t. The last time I ate lobster was the first time, and since then I’ve stuck to crabs. It’s them that like lobster!’

Betty pointed at a couple of enormous yachts beside the jetty some way away.

‘Norwegians. They sail here and buy up every lobster we catch. Soon they’ll buy up all of Nordkoster.’

Olivia gave a little laugh. She could imagine that there would be some tension between the Norwegian nouveaux riches and the old islanders. They lived so close to each other.

‘But the lobster season doesn’t start until September so they’ll have to cool it till then… or fly in some from America, like he did once, him Magnuson.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘I’ll show you when we go past.’

They walked up through the little gathering of wooden houses down by the water. Some red and black fishing huts. A restaurant, Strandkanten. A couple of shops selling a mixture of archipelago kitsch and old fishing tackle. And then Leffe’s Laundry. And Leffe’s Fishmongers. Leffe’s Kayaks. And Leffe’s Veranda.

‘This Leffe guy seems to have a finger in every pie.’

‘Yes, we call him XL here on the island. Short for Extra Leffe. He grew up on the eastern side of the island. On one occasion he visited Strömstad and got a bad headache, and since then he hasn’t left the island. There it is!’

They were now a bit above the harbour. Houses large and small lined the narrow lane. Almost all of them were well tended, with neat façades, properly painted. Mum would approve of this, Olivia thought, and looked in the direction Betty was pointing. At a large, magnificent house, obviously designed specially for its beautiful site on a plot sloping down towards the sea.

‘That’s Magnuson’s house. Bertil Magnuson, you know the man who owns that mining company, he had that built in the Eighties, he had no planning permission or anything, and then afterwards he bought his way out of it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He gave all the local councillors a fancy dinner and flew in a hundred lobsters from America and that problem was soon dealt with. For the people from the mainland, the rules are not the same as for us.’

They continued walking towards the part of the island where there were fewer houses. Betty guided, and Olivia listened.
Betty had the gift of the gab. Olivia had her work cut out to keep track of who had been fishing lobster unlawfully, who had had an affair with somebody else’s wife and who hadn’t kept their garden in good order.

Crimes great and small.

‘And that’s where his companion lived, by the way, the one who disappeared.’

‘Whose companion?’

Betty looked quickly at Olivia.

‘Him, Magnuson, I told you about him earlier.’

‘Yeah, right. And who disappeared? Magnuson?’

‘No, his companion, I just said. I can’t remember his name. Anyway, he disappeared, people thought he’d been kidnapped or murdered, as I recall.’

Olivia stopped in her tracks.

‘But, wait a minute! Did that happen here?’

Betty smiled at Olivia’s excited expression.

‘No, it was somewhere in Africa, and a bloody long time ago.’

But this had fired Olivia’s imagination.

‘When did he disappear?’

‘Sometime in the Eighties it must have been.’

Olivia picked up the scent. Could there be a connection?

‘Was that the same year that woman was murdered? At Hasslevikarna?’

Betty came to a sudden halt and turned towards Olivia.

‘Is that why you’re here? Murder tourism?’

Olivia tried to read Betty. Was it the question that had made her angry, or what? Olivia quickly explained why she was on the island. That she was a student at the Police College and was working on a student assignment about the beach case.

‘Is that right? So you’re going to join the police, are you?’

Betty scrutinized Olivia with a sceptical look.

‘Yes, that’s the intention, but I’ve not finished…’

‘Well now, we’re all different aren’t we?’

Nor was Betty especially interested in hearing about Olivia’s studies.

‘But no, he didn’t disappear the same year as the murder on the beach.’

‘When did he disappear?’

‘A lot earlier.’

Olivia felt a sting of disappointment. But what had she thought? That she would find some sort of connection between a disappearance and the beach murder as soon as she had set foot on Nordkoster? And, on top of that, a connection that the police had missed over all those years?

They met some families with small children out cycling, and Betty said hello to everyone. And kept on talking.

‘But that murder on the beach, nobody here on the island will ever forget that. It was horrific. It hung over us for years and years.’

‘Were you here yourself when it happened?’

‘Yes, of course. Where else would I have been?’

Betty looked at Olivia as if that was the stupidest question she had ever been asked. So Olivia refrained from mentioning that there was an entire world outside of Nordkoster where Betty could have been. And then there was a long harangue about what Betty had done when the air ambulance arrived and the island was invaded by police and everything.

‘And then they interrogated everybody on the island and you can be sure that I told them what I thought had happened.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘Satanists. Racists. Some sort of -ists that was for sure, that’s what I told them.’

‘Cyclists?’

Olivia meant it as a joke, but a few seconds passed before Betty twigged. Was she making fun of an old islander?… but then she started laughing. City humour. You had to take it for what it was.

‘There’re the cabins!’

Betty pointed at a row of small yellow cabins a bit ahead of them. They were well kept too. Newly painted for the high season, set out in the shape of a horseshoe at the edge of a
beautiful
meadow.

Just behind started a dark forest.

‘Now it’s my son who runs it. You booked it with him, Axel.’

They got closer to the cabins and Betty got going again. Her hand indicated cabin after cabin.

‘Well, we’ve had all sorts of people staying here I can tell you…’

Olivia looked at the small huts. All of them were numbered with a figure in brass that looked as if it had just been polished. Everything was spick and span at Nordemans.

‘Do you remember who was staying here then, when the murder took place?’

Betty made a bit of a face.

‘You don’t give up do you? But yes, I do actually remember. Some of them anyway.’

Betty pointed at the first in the row of cabins.

‘There, for example, a couple of homos stayed there, there was a lot of hush-hush about that, it wasn’t like it is today when every Tom, Dick and Harry climbs out of the closet. They said they were birdwatchers, but I didn’t see them looking at anything other than themselves.’

Homos. Olivia had hardly heard the word used before. Would two homos have been capable of killing the woman on the beach? If, of course, they were homos, that might have been fake.

‘In number two was a family with children, as far as I recall. Yes, that’s right. Mum and dad with two kids who ran about frightening the sheep in the meadows. One of the kids got badly cut on the barbed wire and the parents were extremely
indignant
, they considered the farmer had been irresponsible. But the gods punish some people straight away, that’s what I thought.

‘Number four was empty, I know that, but there was a Turk staying in number five. He was here a long time, several weeks, he always had this red fez on his head, and he had a harelip and he lisped something awful. But he was nice and polite. Even kissed me on the hand once.’

Betty laughed at the memory. Olivia’s head was processing the polite Turk. The woman had dark hair, could she have been Turkish? A Kurd? Honour killing? In the newspapers there had been something about her possibly being from Latin America, but what was that based on? Betty nodded at cabin number six.

‘And there were a couple of drug addicts in there,
unfortunately
. But I won’t stand for that sort of thing so I kicked them out. I had to scrub the whole cabin after them! The devils! And I found old syringes and bloody serviettes in the bin.’