Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  “So you didn’t happen to go through his pockets, then?”

  “No. Why would I do that?”

  “To find out who he was, for instance. To see if you could find a wallet with a drivers license in it or a passport or something,” she said in a tone that was deviously smooth, but with such exaggerated stress on every syllable that Ilyas understood she was used to a much tougher approach.

  This is a trap, he thought. I’d better watch my step.

  “No,” he insisted. “It was horrible. I ran to get help straight away.”

  “Without going through his pockets first, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared briefly at him and then leaned back to her computer.

  “We will, of course, be making a thorough search of the boat,” she said.

  Ilyas’s pulse started to gallop. This was torture! His stomach was on fire, and he thought he was going to burst. He couldn’t hold it back any more.

  “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” he said, knocking over his chair as he shot up and rushed out.

  “It’s on the right,” she called after him.

  But he’d already locked himself in and was emptying the entire contents of his body, or so it felt.

  She stood in the corridor and waited for him, and watched as he came out, shamefaced.

  “You never know, sometimes things turn up much later,” she said and actually smiled, and he noticed that her teeth were even and white. “I’d very much like you to get in touch,” she continued and gave him a piece of paper with a phone number he could call.

  He promised to do so, took the number, and left.

  CHAPTER 7

  SUNDAY TRANQUILITY, thought Birgitta Olsson, pulling up the blinds.

  She stood by the window for a few seconds, looking out onto the garden. The sun was shining as heedlessly as it did yesterday. Another lovely day to take advantage of! She couldn’t wait to thrust her fingers into the soil. She had the whole long day to herself and wasn’t due to start her nightshift until nine o’clock.

  The window stood ajar to let in the blackbird’s song while she made the bed. Flowing in with it was the pleasant sound of hoes and spades. Her neighbors had already gotten started on their gardens. At least the Bromses, she thought, and pictured first Sven in her mind. That was natural. She knew him best. Not that that was known to Nettan, whose real name was Agneta. Birgitta had never got used to calling her Nettan, the two of them weren’t intimate enough for that. The Bromses would no doubt be taking off to Skorpetorp’s golf course later, she thought. They were golfers, as Carl-Ivar said, sounding as if he were talking about some lower species of human. Or perhaps higher.

  She’d just smoothed down the bedspread when the peace was shattered by the rumble of a powerful motor that seared through the serenity and lay over the neighborhood like a carpet.

  How rude, she thought, and then went to put the coffee on. There was once a time when Sunday was a day of rest, when maybe you mowed the lawn if absolutely necessary, but you did so with a quiet push mower, and then after mass. But now times were different, with evening shopping and round-the-clock gas stations and TV or Internet entertainment when you wanted it. A new generation had grown up and thought differently and more selfishly.

  She noticed that her brain was working, but wrongly. She wanted to stay in her state of harmony.

  Of course she knew who it was who was being disrespectful and cutting their grass this early morning. Everyone in the neighborhood knew. A weasel among the ermines. She grew irritated with herself over the way she couldn’t help getting worked up by it. For letting herself be irritated.

  She turned into the bathroom, splashed her face quickly, and then squeezed out a blob of suntan lotion that had been sitting in her medicine cabinet for God knew how many years. She rubbed it into her face with small, habitual circular movements, while her thoughts continued to snag on the lawn mower.

  She entertained herself by working out how long she and Carl-Ivar had lived on Holmhälleväg. Thirty-four years this September, she concluded. They’d moved from a cramped little one-bedroom apartment on Borgmästargatan. They were delighted with their solid, spacious 1960’s house. They repapered and painted it, but they kept the walls where they were.

  The house was no flimsy knock-up; builders knew their stuff back then! She and Carl-Ivar could even live there when they were old enough to use walkers, they sometimes talked about that. It was a bungalow, but that didn’t bother them when they bought it. Of course not. When you’re young, you’re immortal.

  They moved in at a time when it was quiet here, almost rural. For a moment she could hear once more the silence that then prevailed.

  But now a generational shift was underway. The house that their neighbors down the road had taken over a few years back hadn’t been that cheap. These days she and Carl-Ivar would never have been able to afford a house here. Nor the kind of renovations that their new neighbors were subjecting their property to. They lived three plots down, closer to the sea. The husband was in the IT business, as many people were nowadays. Or they were consultants. Whatever they did, they earned a lot of money. Or had nothing against taking huge loans. That was something that people in her and Carl-Ivar’s generation were more cautious about. Borrowing. What if you couldn’t pay it back?

  They’d renovated the house out of all recognition, rendered the walls smooth, dug up the garden – massive machines had rumbled down to their little piece of territory – and cleared everything away. Birgitta had heard that the purple lilacs didn’t match the façade, but if the little sprays had been white they’d have been kept. The wife was some kind of landscape gardener. There was no accounting for taste! Almost anything goes with gray, Birgitta had thought, and actually felt sorry for the bushes as they were hauled away to an incinerator: dog rose bushes, bird-cherries, hardhacks, spiraea, mock orange.

  Then even more machines had trundled down the road to lay out a sterile landscape with gravel and grass in neat little rows, piquantly interspersed with the odd low, topiaried, evergreen bush.

  She went into the hall and opened the door of the walk-in closet, in which cast-off but clean clothes lay waiting to be used in the garden. As she stepped inside, she tripped over a bag that she had herself placed on the floor the moment she came home from Turkey. It was a soft, roomy black cloth holdall that Carl-Ivar had asked her to take home with her. Jokingly, she and her husband called these types of holdall “smuggler bags.” The carpet traders in Turkey kept plying you with them and there were different sizes depending on the size of rug purchased. The traders were phenomenal at folding and compressing rugs, even carpets, so that they could be taken home. Otherwise they’d send them on by courier. Carl-Ivar had never known of a rug that had failed to arrive.

  However, this particular bag wasn’t very large. She had no idea what Carl-Ivar had bought, but it was doubtlessly something remarkable, that much she understood since she’d been given detailed instructions about keeping it with her at all times. She wasn’t to check it as luggage, in other words, but to take it with her to her cabin.

  She thought about Carl-Ivar while she lifted the bag and squished it into place above her husband’s shoes and underneath all the jackets and suits. He had shoe trees in most pairs, so they could take it.

  It struck her that he hadn’t called her that evening.

  They used to talk to each other once a day. Not necessarily a long conversation, it was enough to hear that the other was alive and that everything was fine. There wasn’t much they had to say to each other after so many years together. And it was nice. She could be her on her own.

  She thought about giving him a call after breakfast as she grabbed herself a short-sleeved top and a pair of over-washed faded blue jeans from the pile of clothes, which was large enough to last the rest of her life. She’d have to deal with it one day, she thought. Liberation by rejection.

  The lawn mower engine was still rumbling away as she stepped out of th
e closet. She got dressed and looked at the man down the street in front of her. How he sat on the four-wheel drive mower, sweating fatly.

  She didn’t even need to force his image, it arrived on its own accord with the noise he was making. The man was one big warning sign about what an unhealthy lifestyle could do to a body. Around forty-five and already magnificently pot-bellied. What would become of his heart in the future she couldn’t imagine.

  She went into the kitchen, poured the hot coffee into a thermos, quickly prepared two rye bread sandwiches – the same breakfast every morning – filled a glass with juice, took out the coffee cup, and sat down. There was no paper on Sunday, and so instead she stared out through the window, crunching audibly. In a sequence of images she imagined her neighbor down the street suddenly clutching his chest as his face twisted in agony and pain.

  Her imagination was vivid, it always had been. She let the neighbor with the mower suffer. He gasped for breath and called for help, but his voice was drowned out by the din of the engine. He made a few clumsy attempts to stop the infernal machine, but failed and fell headlong over the steering wheel, while the mower continued on its own expedition through the low bushes marking the boundary of his garden and into his neighbor’s. The machine chewed its way along, leaving behind it stubble and a shiny, well-mown strip along the neighbor’s lawn as it approached the pool, the lifeless body hanging like a mountain of sunburned flesh over the steering wheel.

  Just when the contraption and its driver were about to tip into the water – she could already hear the splash and then the sudden silence as the engine came to an abrupt stop – she blinked.

  What on earth was she doing, imagining this? She exhaled and sipped her coffee.

  Just how the neighbor with the swimming pool further down the street reacted when he found the lawn mower in it, and a corpse, she didn’t find out. That would have to wait for a later occasion.

  The heat struck her. She peered into the garden, which was bathed in bright spring light. Yesterday’s breeze had abated and the air was balmy.

  The shed smelled of dry earth and gasoline. The pruning shears were hanging on their hook and the long gardening gloves lay in their place. She put them on right away to protect her forearms from scratches, as she was going to start by pruning the roses. A task she enjoyed.

  At last!

  She took a deep and blissful breath and squatted down. It was a rather bushy rose that they had planted when they bought the house. It came into bloom with clusters of deep red flowers, made even more beautiful by their appearance only once a season.

  The phone rang. She had the portable in her pocket and stood up to retrieve it. It must be Carl-Ivar, she thought. She had mixed feelings. He was no doubt going to tell her that he was intending to stay a few extra days and wouldn’t be home on Tuesday.

  But it was Magnus. Their son-in-law.

  “Hey, Birgitta,” he said in his Stockholm dialect.

  Well now, he sounds ingratiating, she thought.

  “Hi,” she answered, more neutrally.

  “Is Carl-Ivar at home?”

  “No. He won’t be back till Tuesday.”

  “Is that so? That’s a pity.”

  “Was there something special you wanted?”

  “Well, it’s about a rug that he’d promised to get me from Turkey.”

  “What rug?” she said, her ears now pricking up. She thought she could hear fairly heavy traffic in the background. Magnus and Lotta lived on Sibyllegatan on Östermalm in Stockholm, but it was a quiet street, especially on Sundays.

  “I can take it up with Carl-Ivar when he gets back,” he said.

  I bet you will, she thought.

  “Can I speak to Lotta?” She mainly just wanted to hear her daughter’s voice.

  “She’s not actually here at the moment. I’m in Germany, in Munich, on a job.”

  They hung up. She stood motionless for a while with the sun on her back to let the conversation sink in before she returned to the flowerbed. She snipped away the dead twigs with a practiced hand.

  After a while her knees started to ache. She pulled herself up and stood by the flowerbed, swaying to bring the life back to her hips. Spotting her, her neighbor yoo-hooed at her over the hedge.

  It was Agneta Bromse and she was always happy.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” she chirped. She was called Nettan by her husband, but Birgitta couldn’t make herself say it. It was far too intimate. “Real summer weather here already!”

  Birgitta assumed that Agneta was smiling but couldn’t actually see to make sure as her face was shaded by the broad peak of one of those caps that people otherwise wore when playing golf.

  She tried to spy Sven. The sight of him produced a soft tingle in her body. She didn’t feel guilty. She had nothing to feel guilty about. No actions, at least.

  But Sven didn’t seem to be at home, otherwise he probably would have popped up from behind the hedge and given her his crafty yet warm smile. She was definitely not going to ask Agneta were he was. There were limits to her fervor.

  “Yes, it certainly is,” she agreed instead, placing her hand over her eyes so as not to have to squint. Her head was bare, although probably shouldn’t have been.

  “But to make up for it, midsummer will be cold and rainy,” she heard Agneta sigh under her peak. The straggly wad of graying, formerly blonde hair that stuck out from a slit in the back of the cap vibrated merrily.

  “By the way, did you have a nice time in Turkey?”

  “Oh, yes! Carl-Ivar’s still there. He’ll be home this week.”

  “So you’re enjoying the single life,” chuckled Agneta and they smiled like two conspirators. “Sven’s not at home, either. He’s away on some business thing, but he’ll be home tonight.”

  Not much more was said and they each got on with her own work.

  Some relationships never quite fully develop, even if it doesn’t mean you’re constantly at odds, thought Birgitta and returned to her weeding.

  She had to call her parents, she reminded herself. Perhaps she’d travel over there tomorrow when she’d had a good night’s sleep.

  They were old now. Every time she paid them a visit, she thought that it might be the last time she saw them alive.

  Her dear little mom. She remembered her voice from her childhood: “I think I’ll go across to the salon,” she’d say, meaning that she’d be stepping into the salon she’d set up in one of the rooms on the ground floor. She was continually shuttling between the kitchen sink and local female heads. She had the only hairdresser in Brådbygden. The men worked the soil or toiled in the forest. The women generally tended to the animals, milking and mucking out. They kept them all fed, animals and people alike. But her mother also took care of the vanity and beauty.

  Birgitta remembered the laughter and voices that bounced around the walls as they tried to make themselves heard above the drone of the hair dryer hoods. As a little girl, she’d love to hang around here, in the world of joy and beauty among the chamois curlers and the pungent odors of the perming fluids and various packs and hair dyes. Among women who walked away, freshly coifed, waving and happy.

  She wondered if most of the profits went straight into the farm. Although her mother did squirrel away a little in the tin behind the floral-patterned cloth that hung from the shelf with the large mirror above it.

  At times, she’d take out the tin and give Birgitta a coin or two for a new hair slide or a lemonade down at the café where she hung out as a teenager. She’d never asked her mother about the money. Her childhood long pre-dated the “talk-about-everything” era.

  The leaf basket was full again. She struggled upright and went to empty it onto the compost.

  The phone rang again. She no longer took the phone out with her as it chafed in her pants pocket. The door was wide open so she heard the signals and rushed inside. It was Lotta, wondering how things were with them.

  “Fine,” said Birgitta.

  “Has Dad com
e home?”

  “No, he’s staying a couple of days extra. You know him, he likes being in Turkey, but I’m working nights now and don’t want to take out all my vacation time just yet. Anyway, where are you?”

  “At home in Stockholm. Why d’you ask?”

  Birgitta thought. Should she say that Magnus had called?

  “Pah, it was nothing,” she said, realizing that it would only lead to questions. Things were so delicate between Lotta and Magnus, but she couldn’t put her finger on just what. That’s just how it was, and you had to go along with it. “How are the kids?” she asked instead.

  The two beloved grandchildren, who were unfortunately the source of considerable disquiet. Were they really doing alright?

  “They’re doing just fine,” said Lotta, sounding as businesslike as usual. How had she given birth to such an efficient daughter?

  “Don’t they want to talk to Nan?” wondered Birgitta and tried not to sound needy.

  “I don’t think so,” said Lotta. “We’re just on our way out.”

  “I see… Well, give my love to them and Magnus, won’t you?”

  She went into the kitchen, ran the cold tap, then drank a couple of glasses as she thought about Magnus. About how he had developed a recent interest in carpets. She supposed it was just part of the upper class thing: attractive apartment, antiques, sailing.

  Of course, it was nice for Carl-Ivar to have someone listen to his detailed accounts of his trips to the Orient and rug purchases. To be sure, there was money in rugs and carpets, but you had to be a player in the higher divisions to access it, and Carl-Ivar wasn’t there. He bought rugs for the simple reason that he loved them. And he’d made a success of it because he was a customarily parsimonious Smålander, who’d grown up in rather meager circumstances and had thus developed a sense of and respect for money.

  Magnus, on the other hand, worked with the big companies. Helped with advertising and marketing and whatnot, Birgitta had never really grasped what it was he did. Nor had Carl-Ivar. Anyway, modest sums it wasn’t – that much they’d understood.