Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  On the other hand, Mustafa Özen had been pegged as the man to go under all circumstances. He was pretty new in CID, but he knew the lingo and the culture.

  “Good stuff, as Lundin said,” laughed Louise, mimicking their colleague. She revealed that Martin Lerde’s mood had thoroughly darkened when he heard the rumor. “During coffee this morning, he was so pissed off he slammed his cup down and the handle broke off!”

  Claesson gave a smile.

  “But how much Turkish can Özen actually speak? Wasn’t he just a little kid when he came here?” he asked.

  He was six, Claesson was told. He didn’t know Mustafa Özen that well, and that was all well and good, he thought. They were not a family here, just colleagues, even though some were closer to him than others, such as Janne Lundin. Özen, who was called Musty by his closest colleagues, claimed that he was totally familiar with Turkish, that it was what they spoke at home, Louise informed him. Özen was, naturally, raring to go.

  “Don’t they have many languages in Turkey?” asked Claesson.

  “How on Earth would I know? What is this, twenty questions? Anyway, isn’t that a bit more to the east, Kurdish and other languages? I’d imagine it’s like in Sweden, with Sami and Finnish, minority languages and stuff… But as I’ve learned, Turkish is the majority language and is what’s used by the national administration. Although…”

  “Although what?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent certain that we managed to outplay the National boys, and naturally they want to go down. I’m doing what I can, but it’s a grabfest, as you know,” Louise said, and he nodded on the other end of the line. It was always like this, particularly for the bigger, more prestigious investigations, like airplane crashes or shipwrecks.

  “Of course, the chances of us getting to go are greater if we say we’re sending people with knowledge of the victim’s home town and who can speak the local lingo. But our trump card will be that the other one is a highly experienced violent crime investigator, someone with gravitas,” she said.

  “And that person is me, you mean?” he said with a grin.

  “Yes. I mean, you realize yourself that…” he heard Louise continue as if she could read his mind.

  He was still lying flat on the sofa. His pulse had quickened, and his heart was thumping so violently from decision anxiety that he feared Nora would be awakened by the noise. Under normal circumstances it would’ve been good-bye and thanks for the ticket. Exciting and educational.

  But now…

  It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to leave Veronika on her own with the new baby and everything. It was more about his not wanting to miss that downy period, the very tenderest and so very ephemeral. For purely selfish reasons he wanted to watch over his new daughter. To be home, all of them together, a time that would never come again…

  Though of course Nora would be with him for a long time, forever, until he died. And after all, the trip was only for a few days.

  Veronika, he thought then. The prospect of even brining it up with her felt leaden. Not because she’d get angry or disappointed, but because the very question begged a yes.

  “We’ll first have to look into what can be investigated here at home, of course, and then you’ll have to take that to Istanbul, but we… or rather, you and Özen, will have to get over there as quickly as you can,” she said coaxingly.

  And he couldn’t help smiling as he lay there on the sofa with the cordless to his ear. It wasn’t hard to understand that Louise had made it far up the career ladder. At first, her efficiency and unconcealed ambition had rubbed him up the wrong way. Capable women were easily seen as officious by men, said Veronika. It was a way of bringing them down, a defense mechanism against competition that didn’t come from another man, which was easier to tackle, more established, more familiar, she said.

  He wasn’t always that thrilled when the feminist wave cascaded over the kitchen table, but he was trying to learn.

  And he’d doubtlessly tried to bring Louise down himself at times over the years. A woman who didn’t just want to work with domestic violence, what can you do? Janne Lundin took on a great many such cases these days, he was mature – soon due to retire – and sensible, and made people feel calm and able to put their trust in him, but he didn’t pull his punches. It worked out well, and Janne was happy.

  Louise was like a terrier. “We’ve checked the records, and the carpet dealer’s clean, and never been under surveillance. Ludvigsson and Özen have just gone to see his widow to give her the news before the media runs with the ball. If she’s home, that is.”

  Claesson had a vague memory of Veronika saying that she knew the carpet dealer’s wife. That she worked at Veronika’s clinic, or something along those lines.

  “We’re counting on the wife being willing to go down and identify.”

  “Has he got children?”

  “Two, grown up.”

  He could hear that he was asking far too many questions. But he could still back out. He had his statutory right to parental leave. Ten days. Guaranteed!

  “You’ve got a valid passport, I assume?” asked Louise and gave him the name of the Turkish preliminary investigator. It was on the encrypted Interpol report. She tried pronouncing it. The first name was easy, Fuat, but the surname wasn’t one easily committed to memory. Something beginning with K. But it sounded Asian and evoked images of a dark-haired man with inscrutable velvety eyes and a neat, jet black moustache.

  Louise continued to talk about the widow and the two adult children and about coordinating their identification of the body with his and Özen’s trip down. He listened with half an ear.

  Louise fell silent on the other end. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Of course,” he said quickly. “But you’re talking as if it’s already been decided that I’m going. Can’t I at least run it by Veronika first?”

  Claes heard Veronika’s bike trundle into the garden. Tire against gravel. She opened the door. Nora whimpered.

  “Jesus, the stress,” she said, checking the time. “We’ve got just over an hour before we have to fetch her again.”

  She picked up Nora and sat down to breast-feed.

  “What’s up?”

  She looked at him.

  “Louise Jasinski just called.”

  That was all he said.

  “Yes? And?”

  His divided loyalty sat like a brand on his forehead.

  “Did she want you to go in to work?”

  Veronika smiled crookedly.

  “What would you say if I went to Istanbul for a few days?”

  “Oh.” She fell silent.

  He said nothing, either.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she finally said. “What do you have to go there for?”

  “You know that carpet dealer?”

  “Who?”

  “The one who’s got our rug.”

  “Well, yes, and?”

  “He’s been murdered in Istanbul… Nah, forget it. You’re right. It’d be crazy to go,” he said resignedly, following it with the world’s deepest sigh.

  A mite feigned it was, he could admit that. A bit of emotional blackmail.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” she said teasingly. “Hold your horses, why don’t you? Come on, you have to let me get used to the idea. I guess I’ll survive a few days. Me and the girls… I could ask Cecilia to come over. She’s not totally useless, you know… It’ll just be a pity for you to miss out being with Nora, now that she’s changing so much from day to day. But I can be terribly nice and kind and sweet and all that, you know I can be, and take photos of her every day and text you over there in the far east.”

  “Come on, it’s not that far…”

  He tried to make the trip shorter. Shrink the journey.

  “A three- or four-hour flight, I’d imagine,” she said. “It’s not exactly a return trip to Kalmar. If I put it like that.”

  CHAPTER 13

  NETTAN BROMSE HAD Mo
ndays free, it was a way of prolonging the weekend. Sven was always free. He’d reached that age.

  They’d just come home from Skorpetorp golf club and it was getting close to midday. They were starving.

  Nettan had, conveniently enough, some leftovers from the weekend – roast pork with wine sauce – that she popped into the microwave while she chopped up a salad and set the kitchen table. Sven was in the shower. He didn’t hang around; she intended to have her shower after lunch.

  She left the wine box where it was in the cupboard under the little working top. It felt slightly “uncouth” to put the entire box on the table, and filling a carafe and decanting on a normal weekday like this would be making an unnecessary show of things. And anyway, she was the only one drinking.

  She’d already squirted a wine-red jet into the glass as silently as she could while preparing the food. She drank in shamefaced gulps and then rinsed out and wiped the glass before placing it on the table by her plate. A small glass with lunch you could treat yourself to, it’s what almost everyone she knew did. There was no reason to hold back when you’d passed the sixty mark. The Mediterranean diet with its olive oil, shellfish, and a glass of wine a day, at least, was good for the circulation and what’s more it helped to ward off Alzheimer’s, she’d read recently.

  Or was it coffee that counteracted this depressing dementia disease? She’d have to google it or ask Birgitta the next time they had a chat over the garden hedge. Pooh, what the hell!

  Sven was a beer man, and she didn’t want to put his can on the table before it was time to eat so it’d be nice and cold from the fridge.

  The bathroom door opened. Steam puffed from Sven as he chugged his way into the bedroom with a towel around his hips.

  “Lunch is ready!” she called merrily. She liked being merry, with or without wine coursing through her body.

  “Smells nice,” he called back just as affectionately as he entered the bedroom, where he quickly dressed himself and returned in a pair of khaki pants and an orange piqué top that Nettan had given him that week and that was apparently that summer’s color.

  When they’d seated themselves and laid the paper napkins on their laps – they were royal blue, according to the packaging – their gaze drifted naturally out through the window. As it always did, since the only things that ever chanced to happen did so on the street outside. Of each other they had their visual fill, although without becoming indifferent.

  The street outside was as calm as ever. There was, in other words, nothing more exciting to look at than the odd dog owner out exercising their mutt, or Enoksson’s driving school car creeping by at a snail’s pace.

  They chewed on. Nettan took another sip of wine and wondered if she dared pour herself another glass and risk one of Sven’s dirty looks. Sven drank his beer in large gulps, acquiring a froth moustache that he wiped away with his napkin. He then got up and went to fetch another beer as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nettan dished up some more salad and splashed some dressing over it. The salad filled out the stomach. They were heading toward the summer season.

  “Golf sucks,” said Sven, reseating himself.

  Their gaze was drawn again to the street. Another car came slowly cruising, but without the Enoksson logo. It was a police car. It drove past their garden and stopped right outside the Olsson’s driveway.

  “Oh my, I hope something hasn’t happened,” said Nettan when they saw two police officers, a short blonde woman and a large, red-faced man, step out. They both walked toward the door and out of sight. Nettan and Sven Bromse heard Birgitta Olsson’s door shut.

  “Well, at least she’s at home,” said Sven.

  They looked at each other.

  Birgitta Olsson was sleeping soundly, but still not as deeply as when she slept at night.

  Now a distant thudding sound penetrated her dreams. She didn’t like it and hoped it would stop. Someone was knocking on her door, but she didn’t want to get up and turned over in her bed to find a position in which she could get back to sleep.

  But the door knocker stubbornly continued, so she rose drowsily and walked to the front door, tying her robe around her as she went. The sunlight immediately stabbed at her eyes, and without her sunglasses on she was forced to squint. But it didn’t require much clarity of vision to understand that something terrible had happened.

  “Are you Birgitta Olsson?” asked the man outside, inviting himself in.

  The moment she stepped aside to let the two officers pass, she realized that someone was dead.

  “Is it Carl-Ivar?” she asked, lips taught.

  “Yes, your husband has been found dead in Istanbul,” said the strawberry blonde one.

  He hadn’t called as he usually did, and she’d suspected but suppressed the feeling that something was wrong. What more could she have done to try to get hold of him?

  They sat in the kitchen. No, she certainly didn’t feel like putting some coffee on, she said and offered them none, either. Her mind had come to a standstill. The police officers were both silent. The one, a women, was so young that Birgitta almost wanted to spare her from the kind of misery that the dead caused. Even more, she wanted to stop her life when the male officer continued to relate the brutal facts. He was called Lennie and did his best. Lennie was the kind of name that was easy to remember, unusual yet soft and kind.

  Carl-Ivar had been sitting on a ferry and someone had stabbed him to death, she was told.

  “It can’t be true!” she spluttered.

  They didn’t answer “well it is,” but left the truth of it hanging in the air.

  “But we don’t know who did it or why. It happened last Saturday. We didn’t hear about it at the station in Oskarshamn until now.”

  He needed to explain himself, she recognized it from her own job. And it was true that Carl-Ivar hadn’t been in touch, she said, and the young policewomen opened a little notebook and made notes.

  It was preposterous for Carl-Ivar to be murdered, she thought. It wasn’t his style to die so dramatically.

  Her heart thumped but her brain insisted on remaining inert. The tears didn’t come – although it would have been the right thing to cry, to be inconsolable in front of these two police officers.

  But she’d have to do her blubbering later, when she wasn’t in her shock phase, as they said at work. The reaction phase would come sooner or later, she knew that. As for her, it could come when it saw fit. She wouldn’t be feeling particularly good for a while, that’s just how it was.

  Did he often travel by ferry?

  “I’ve no idea,” she said, and felt a little foolish for not having had a better idea of what her husband was up to. It occurred to her to ask, “But what ferry was it?”

  “As we understand it, it went from Istanbul up through the Bosporus,” said Lennie, sounding a little out of his geographical comfort zone. The police officers had only been asked to announce the death, and she knew what that was like. But she couldn’t help wondering where Carl-Ivar had been going.

  “Was he alone?” she asked warily.

  “We don’t really know, but he was alone when he was found.”

  No, she had no idea of anything at all, she said. He’d been due home the next day. No enemies, as far as she was aware.

  “Carl-Ivar isn’t… wasn’t the kind of person to make enemies. One or two people he might have fallen out with perhaps… but… I can’t actually think of anyone right now.”

  She told them that she, too, had been in Istanbul. They’d traveled there with the carpet dealer in Kalmar and his wife, but she’d come back home alone on Friday in order to work. She’d been working last night, she said, which was why she was in her robe this late in the day. She gave them the name of the carpet dealer in Kalmar. Lennie Ludvigsson squirmed awkwardly as he explained that in the case of a death such as this, one that wasn’t natural, they had to question everyone involved.

  “So… do you by any chance have anything to show when you left Is
tanbul?”

  She’d flown by e-ticket, and might have the printout and the flight number somewhere, she said. Her bag was in the hall, so she went to fetch it and dug out a folded printout that she said they could keep.

  “And yesterday morning I was in town, and there are lots of people who can vouch for me. Veronika Lundborg, as a matter of fact, you know her, right?”

  They nodded. Claesson’s wife.

  “I can’t believe that when I left, it was the last time I saw Carl-Ivar.” She gave a sniff and stared out through the window. “Alive, at least…”

  “You can call us later if you think of anything,” said Lennie Ludvigsson.

  “But are you completely sure it really is Carl-Ivar? I’d like to go there and confirm it with my own eyes. I’m sure the children will want to come, too… maybe… if they can get away.”

  Yes, they’d thought of that, said the officers. Two of their colleagues from Oskarshamn would probably go down to help with the investigation. “It still hasn’t been decided which of our colleagues, but whoever it is they’ll try to be with you when you identify your husband. But according to the driver’s license he was carrying, it is him. There’ll be an investigation, of course… We don’t know how hard it will be to catch his killer, but we’ll do what we can.”

  “Have you got someone who can be with you?” asked the blonde woman.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, still completely empty inside, bewildered almost. “I’ll manage, I’ll call and tell the children.”

  To think that Carl-Ivar would mess things up and go and get himself murdered! The only comfort she had was that he was probably happy up there in heaven that it had at least happened in Turkey. In his beloved Istanbul.