Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  “Gah,” he said, cutting her off. He couldn’t cope with any more right now, and certainly not her accusations. “I need the toilet.”

  He flushed after having evacuated virtually his entire intestines.

  “I just have to get something,” he said, and slunk out without looking at Annelie.

  The fresh air cooled his face. He filled his lungs and exhaled slowly as he walked to the car. It stood so as not to be visible from the kitchen window. And yet still he turned just to check to make sure she wasn’t spying on him.

  He yanked open the front passenger door and stared down at the floor. It was empty except for the dark gray rubber mat and a little gravel. He bent down and felt under the seat. Nothing. Went down, just to be on the safe side, on all fours and laid his cheek against the rubber mat to have a proper look. He found a coin, which he pocketed. And a sweet wrapper, which he left. Nothing else. No red paper ball.

  It was gone.

  CHAPTER 18

  BIRGITTA OLSSON FETCHED some sheets from the linen closet. They were freshly mangled.

  “I suppose you should stay in your old room,” said her mother. “We don’t use the fireplace in there but it’s not that chilly out now, anyway.”

  Imagine being over sixty and still having the bedroom you had when you were a little girl! Some things had been taken out or moved, but it was still her room. Faded flowers on the wallpaper and a browned water stain up in the corner that had been there even when she was a child. More than fifty years ago. Her mother and father had had their bedroom across the hall, but these days they slept in the old salon on the ground floor to avoid having to use the stairs. A large fixed mirror with a shelf under it remained from the time when her mother dressed hair. A while ago, Birgitta had found one of the old drying hoods out in the barn, and was acutely reminded of the years that had passed.

  Nowadays, they didn’t just pass; they sped.

  She made the bed. The sheets were cool and soft to the touch. There was a top and a bottom sheet, her parents never having converted to a comforter. She ran her fingers gently over the border that her grandmother had once crocheted. The bedside lamp on the wall emitted the same yellowish glow that it always had.

  When she sat on the narrow and overly soft bed to undress, her eyes fell on the photo on the chest of drawers, the one that had been there ever since it had been taken by a traveling photographer sometime in the fifties. A bleached color photo of Lasse, Harry, and herself.

  Where her sister had been that day she didn’t know. Iréne, who was later to move out into the big wide world with her successful husband, but who’d since returned to the security of Sweden after he dumped her for a young Brazilian. Iréne had sailed through life, thought Birgitta. Had never got herself a proper education, and instead had mostly just drunk cocktails by miscellaneous poolsides. Many a time Birgitta had been envious of her little sister when feeling stuck in the safe but small-minded life of Oskarshamn. But now Iréne wasn’t having such a good time of things, what with having little money and aching joints. She lived outside Stockholm in Vallentuna.

  Birgitta studied the photo again, immersed in the past. Lasse, Harry, and she were standing in a row in the middle of the narrow, winding lane between their homes, the farms opposite each other. They looked like children from some Astrid Lindgren story. Freckly, flaxen-haired cherubs with gaps between their teeth.

  And then she snuggled down, feeling like a little girl again, back at home with Mommy and Daddy. And it was good.

  Claesson was on the lounge sofa again with Nora on his tummy, but this time it was almost half past nine in the evening. Klara was sleeping and Veronika was tidying the kitchen.

  He’d come home earlier than planned. Mustafa Özen and he hadn’t gone to Kalmar as the carpet dealer was out and would see them the next day.

  The widow hadn’t been in, either; she’d gone to stay with her parents. Good idea, he thought. You could always be a little child again with your parents. If he didn’t get around to talking to her before they went to Turkey on Wednesday, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He’d have to talk to her in Istanbul, better late than never. According to Ludvigsson and Jönsson, she had no idea of what had happened. She seemed to be telling the truth, they said, however they could have known that.

  Veronika came in and sank into the armchair. She looked bruised under the eyes.

  “How do you actually go about finding out the details of a murder committed abroad?” she wondered, lacing her bare feet on the table.

  “Well, you know, there are routines,” he said. “The local investigator in the country where the crime was committed writes a report to the Interpol office in their capital… I suppose Ankara in this case. The report includes a notification of the death to the next of kin and the information needed to get the victim’s personal details from his home country. Interpol has a computer system. You can actually find it on their website if you care to look…”

  “I think I’ve got better things to do,” she said, wiggling her toes. “What then?”

  “The whole lot is then translated in Ankara, into English in this case, and then gets sent off to the Interpol HQ in Lyon, which then sends it on to our Interpol office in Stockholm. The boys in National CID are informed and are generally interested, depending on the case.”

  “So what can you do that they can’t? They’ve got more resources, haven’t they?”

  “Well, they’ve got more forensic technicians to send out and the wherewithal to do the profiling, if it comes to that. We don’t. But we’re probably quicker at finding out the victim’s background, if need be. We’ve got the local knowledge. And we’ve got…”

  “What?”

  “A cop who speaks Turkish. He was with me today. It’s a feather in the cap to have a cop who’s from the area – Oskarshamn, I mean – and who also knows the foreign lingo.”

  Nora tried to lift her heavy head and started crying. Veronika picked her up.

  “Get yourself to bed,” she said. “You can do the morning shift instead.”

  CHAPTER 19

  CARPET DEALER ROLAND KARLGREN lived on Ängö, an island beautifully situated in the center of Kalmar, the skyline of which was dominated by the towering baroque church. It was actually a cathedral without a bishop, whose seat was in Växjö. Claesson didn’t really know why it was still called a cathedral. They could see the bridge to Öland stretch into the distance in the background; visibility was good, and the eye could follow the bridge all the way to its abutments about four miles across the strait.

  “Nice here, isn’t it?” said Claesson as Özen turned onto Sparregatan. “You could just saunter down to the water in your bathrobe for an early morning dip if you wanted to.”

  They looked over an even lawn with a playground, and then came the sea.

  “Sure is,” said Mustafa Özen, turning off the engine.

  Ängö consisted of a collection of wooden houses interspersed with rendered facades in harmonic tones, from white, pink, and light blue to warm yellow and ocher. There wasn’t a single housing estate or modern creation in sight. At one end of the island by the bridge was a budget hotel.

  Karlgren was waiting for them. He lived on the second floor. His sitting room was light and lived-in. His apartment wasn’t wanting for carpets, of course, even if some of them were modern items rather than Oriental, as far as Claesson could tell. The place smelt of coffee. Claesson stood by the window.

  “Nice view,” he said, looking out over the Kalmar strait and over toward Öland.

  “Quite, though it was nicer before they started building houses on Varvsholmen,” Karlgren said as he made the coffee. He’d already laid a pretty dining table with a freshly mangled tablecloth in one end of the sitting room, a place for guests to sit at. The carpet underfoot felt thick and soft.

  I just hope that Özen isn’t one of those tea drinkers, thought Claesson. The host having to go back into the kitchen to boil some more water could throw a man off his rh
ythm.

  But Mustafa accepted a cup of coffee.

  “Terrible news about Olsson,” said Karlgren, biting into his slice of bun and staring at the tablecloth. “Almost too hard to believe.”

  And then he started answering questions.

  The two carpet dealers had known each other for a long time, thirty years. They had been in sparse but regular touch, once a year or every other year they’d call each other on the telephone or bump into each other at some carpet-related event. They never called each other without a purpose, said Karlgren. Men seldom, if ever, call each other just for a chat, thought Claesson.

  They let Karlgren talk on for a while. Claesson “touched down,” as it was so flatteringly called, and then wondered if it was OK for them to turn on a tape recorder. He promised Karlgren that he’d get to read the transcription afterwards.

  “Fine by me,” said the carpet dealer and Claesson fished his tape recorder out from his jacket pocket and checked the battery – which, admittedly, he should’ve done before he took it with him.

  Karlgren said that they’d been in Turkey together before, him and Olsson. “But I got a feeling he goes there more often than I do.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “No, well, he’d sometimes speak as if he’d just been there.” Karlgren ran his fingers over his chin. “Can’t say exactly,” he added in a tone that suggested that he regretted mentioning it at all.

  “So what do you think he was doing there?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest. Looking at rugs, I suppose. Guess he liked it there.”

  “Business?”

  “Carpet business, yeah, of course.”

  “Other kind of business?”

  “You mean dodgy business? Drugs or something?”

  Claesson said nothing.

  “Nah, don’t reckon Carl-Ivar was into that.” The fingers around the chin again. “Though his getting brutally murdered like that, well, makes you wonder, of course…”

  Claesson waited, but nothing more came. He didn’t want to set the man’s imagination running, that wouldn’t do any good. He asked Karlgren to talk about the trip, about why they went. And found out that Karlgren and Olsson had slightly different itineraries, but that they’d been at the same meeting with other carpet people from around the world in an old former mosque that served nowadays as an exhibition and conference center. Claesson got the address and an information leaflet illustrated with delightful color photographs of the mosque and of carpets, which was in a plastic envelope on the table.

  “You can take the whole file. I’ve put some things together for you.”

  Here’s a man who needs no secretary, thought Claesson, taking a sip of the hot coffee before thanking Roland Karlgren for his consideration. Olsson and Karlgren had flown down together with their wives. Roland Karlgren’s wife, Marianne, was away in Gothenburg, but of course she’d be pleased to help the Oskarshamn police with their investigation.

  Claesson also learned that the Olssons and the Karlgrens had not stayed at the same hotel, but rather had been nearby each other in Sultanahmet, the part of Istanbul that was designated the old town and that lay inside the city wall that enclosed the famous and monumental buildings: churches, museums, mosques.

  “Alleyways and passages, right chaotic but fascinating,” he said. “Istanbul is an eternal city, like Rome,” he added, getting a dreamy look in his eye.

  Karlgren said that the four of them had gone out one evening for dinner.

  “Can you remember the name of the restaurant?”

  Karlgren shook his head.

  “That’s a tough one. Once you’ve been to Istanbul you’ll see what I mean. Can’t ever be sure to find your way back to the same place twice two evenings in a row, even if you wanted to. Maps are pretty useless. Parts of the city are a maze of unnamed streets. But hold on…”

  Karlgren got up and went to fetch his wallet from the hall, out of which he produced a calling card.

  “Forgot this,” he said. “If you’re lucky you might find it. If you ask a local for directions they’ll likely take you to another restaurant which is pretty much the same. Though much better, they’ll add. But they won’t say that it’s owned by a cousin. Everyone seems to have swarms of cousins. Family means a lot.”

  Karlgren looked curiously at Özen, who grinned back at him without a word.

  Claesson slid the card into the plastic envelope.

  “Otherwise nothing much special happened at the restaurant. We ate. Good food. Then went home and went to bed,” continued Karlgren. “I’ve known Olsson a long time and never in my wildest dreams could I imagine Carl-Ivar getting himself murdered so cruelly, I tell you… If it’s true what the papers said.” Roland Karlgren sought the answer in Claesson’s face, but it was totally blank. “Nothing short of an execution? But who in the name of thunder would want to execute him?”

  Karlgren shook his head.

  “Let’s move on to the carpets. Do you know if Olsson had any deal going on? I’m not much of a rug expert, can you help us out here?”

  Again the shake of the head.

  “No. Carpet deals rarely lead to murder. I know every business has its bastards, but it’s not exactly drug peddling,” he said with a curl of his lips. “Must’ve been a mistake or about something completely different. Never actually heard of a murder in the carpet world, even though pretty large sums do exchange hands at times.”

  “How large?”

  “Varies a lot. Rugs are cheap in a way if you compare them with other handmade objects, like antiques or newly made furniture and top notch goods.”

  “Seven figures, would that be unreasonable?” wondered Claesson.

  “Of course there are rugs that fetch that kind of money, it depends on what kind of rug it is. But then we’re talking the large global market, and the big auction houses like Sotheby’s and Bukowski’s. Nothing that me and Carl-Ivar are into… at least not me,” he added after a brief pause.

  “Is it just men in the business?”

  “You could say, to put it simply, that it’s the women that do the producing. They knot or weave the rugs at home or in special workshops, while the sales and repairs are done by men. It’s hard work repairing rugs, you know. And when it comes to money… well, tradesmen have always been men. I mostly sell new rugs, and not top of the range ones, neither. Kalmar’s no Mecca in that sense. A new rug that’s densely knotted can, of course, be expensive, but won’t fetch the kind of money you’re asking about. Five-figures, more like. A lot of work goes into them. Take this one, for instance.”

  He got up and walked over to a rug on the floor, and turned up one of the corners. “You can see here how tightly knotted it is. Meticulous job. Takes time.”

  Karlgren looked up at Claesson, who bent down toward the rug and nodded. But he avoided the question of whether children also made rugs. Knotting with slender, nimble fingers in some murky sweatshop. That’s how it was, of course, in some parts of the world.

  “Knot density doesn’t matter that much when it comes to old rugs, though,” Karlgren continued. “There are other things that count when those ones are valued. You’d have to work with antique rugs pretty much full time to get a feel for them. Olsson was better at it than I am.”

  “Like at what to look for?”

  “Well, age and the name of the carpet house that made it, color and design and originality, you know. Carl-Ivar’s always been more interested in antique rugs than I am – I mean ones over a century old. Those that are older than fifty but younger than a hundred are called semi-antique. But I never got the feeling that he was doing million-dollar deals, exactly.”

  Claesson showed him the photograph of the fragment from Cappadocia. Roland Karlgren put his glasses on his nose and looked at it closely. He shook his head.

  “Nothing I recognize,” he said. “It looks quite old.”

  “Fifteenth century, apparently,” said Claesson.

  “You don’t say,” said Karlgre
n without a flicker of expression.

  The silence hung in the air.

  “How are rugs stored, generally speaking?” wondered Claesson.

  “On the floor at home, or on the wall. Or as a cushion to sit on or as a pillow, like the nomads do and like the country folks did in Sweden back in the old days. Rugs are to be used, not stored in some safe somewhere, although I daresay there are some that do that with particularly remarkable items. Rugs are hardy. Feet, shoes, mud, just vacuum them clean. Otherwise, we dealers like to keep them in darkened rooms to preserve the colors. The room must be kept a constant temperature. Rugs should lie on shelves if they’re to be kept long, and not on the floor, at least not in a basement where you can get rising damp.”

  That almost goes without saying, thought Claesson.

  “Do you know who Olsson’s contacts are in Istanbul?”

  “I know he always went to a highly reputed carpet dealer, near the Grand Bazaar. They were old friends. Should think his son’s taken over the business now, but I daresay he hangs around there during the day. I know him, too. I’ve got no card, but I can show you where it is on a map.”

  He got up and went into another room, returning with a book on Istanbul. He looked up Kapalı Çarşı, the Grand Bazaar.

  “This particular carpet shop isn’t in the bazaar itself but just next to it, in a courtyard that’s right beautiful… Here!”

  He pointed at the northeast part of the enormous area that filled a double-page spread in the tourist guide. “It’s called Zincirli Hanı.” Mustafa Özen made a note. “It is without doubt one of the most beautiful hani in the Grand Bazaar. Han means caravansary, or hotel. Hani is the definite form,” explained carpet dealer Karlgren eruditely. “A peaceful oasis smack in the middle of alleys and boutiques. Not far from there, in the bazaar itself, is the oriental kiosk…here.” He pointed to a photograph of a small, narrow building, rather comical in appearance. “It was a café at first, but now it’s a jewel shop, I think. Did you know that the word kiosk comes from the Turkish? Originally means little garden shed or something like that… Anyway, the Grand Bazaar is an experience. You can easily get lost, but everyone knows where Zincirli Hanı is. Trust me.”