Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  She fell silent.

  “Or?” prompted Claesson.

  “Someone else maybe, but I haven’t seen the rug here… No one’s brought it here, so it must’ve gone missing en route. Maybe it was stolen in Istanbul?”

  “But who would’ve been able to bring it back to Sweden apart from Carl-Ivar Olsson himself?”

  “Someone else who’d been in Istanbul, I guess. It’s not my job to answer this question, but maybe Birgitta brought it in, what do I know?” she said with a shrug.

  “Can you tell us about it? We’ve not seen it, you see.”

  “Me, neither, but… I know at least that it’s a fragment that had been found in an old mosque in Turkey, in Cappadocia. Well, what can I tell you? You can bet it’s got a lot of blue and red in it. The old folk art of the Near East and Central Asia used a lot of blues and reds, and still does to some extent. The colors symbolize Heaven and Earth, among other things. To the nomadic people, who still live with the old worldview, you know, the Earth is a mid-level between the heavens above and a number of worlds below. A cosmic axis mundi, if you like. Or a world tree that unites Heaven and Earth, and you can see that in the patterning.”

  She fell silent, and looked anxiously at Claesson. You learn something new every day, he thought, but clearly wasn’t conveying.

  “This is irrelevant, I realize,” she said self-consciously. “But I don’t know what this particular fragment looked like in real life. I’ve only ever seen a black-and-white photo of it. But… anyway, there was a collector that Carl-Ivar had promised to procure the rug for.”

  “And what’s the name of this collector?”

  “I don’t actually know.” The silence hovered for a moment. “It’s true, honestly, I’d give you the name if I knew it… But in a way it’s been nice not knowing everything that Carl-Ivar was up to.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  “Oh, nothing in particular.”

  It looked like she was regretting her candidness.

  “Look, I was just an assistant… Carl-Ivar was always good to me. I helped out. That’s all.”

  “Can you tell us who else has come to the shop since Olsson’s death?”

  “Customers, of course! I don’t know their names… but most have paid by card so you can find out…”

  He nodded.

  “No one else? No lady friend or a friend of yours or Carl-Ivar’s?”

  “Nope.”

  She stared down at the table.

  “No one else from the Olsson family?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not his wife?”

  “No. We haven’t actually had time to meet since she returned from Istanbul. But there’ll be the funeral… and we’ll have to discuss what’s to become of the business.”

  He nodded encouragingly.

  “I’d love to keep the carpet business going, but maybe it won’t be possible. You need capital to do that, to buy up the company with…” she said, and then bit her lip as if she’d suddenly caught herself letting a cat out of a bag.

  Claesson made no comment.

  “I’ll repeat the question: Has no one else been here? Think back!” he said, as he sat leaning easily against the back the chair with one jeaned leg crossed over the other.

  He kept his gaze on her. He was aware that he gave a stable impression, calming possibly – maybe deceptively calming. He also knew that the stillness that surrounded him could also make people feel unsure of themselves. Or so secure that they ended up saying more than they’d intended.

  “No,” she repeated finally with a shake of her head. “No one else.”

  She’s lying, he thought. Her throat, which had paled, was now recovering its heavy blush.

  But who was she protecting?

  Claesson and Özen had a quick discussion as they crossed the square, battling the biting wind.

  Should they take off for Stockholm now and have things out with Öberg face to face, or follow up the lead of Claesson’s rug and try to find out who’d stolen it and then dumped it by a fatally sick man crawling along the cobblestones only a few yards from his own home?

  That story they’d heard over the morning coffee. Conny Larsson had been looking properly guilty. The new girl, Jessika Granlund, a cropped-haired masculine thing, had had the sense, at least, not to dump her colleague in the shit. You can get a bit lazy over the years, and Claesson supposed that that was what had happened to Larsson.

  They agreed to dig around their own patch and stay in Oskarshamn. To be quite honest, both were a bit tired of all the travel. Physically. Özen was to go knocking on doors around Lilla Torget Square, while Claesson intended to investigate things in his own little way.

  They parted a short distance along Östra Torggatan. Özen walked back toward Kråkerumsbacken to attack the residents in the houses there. Claesson remained standing for a while, looking up at the facades. At the apartments above the shops. He had the pedestrianiszed Flanaden in one direction and the cobblestoned Besvärsgatan down toward the harbor in the other, with the Shalom Café at its head.

  He went that way.

  Shalom was a Christian mission that he actually knew little about. He knew that they had a boat that they sailed along the east coast in, preaching and teaching or whatever it was they did. And they had a conference center not that far from where he himself lived.

  After Shalom, the idyllic detached wooden houses stretched down Besvärsgatan. Opposite the café on a corner plot, where there was once a parking lot, stood a modern, larger house of rather unsubtle design, to put it politely, its front garden facing Torggatan.

  The house’s two dark gray trash cans, on the other hand, stood at the edge of the plot on Besvärsgatan, opposite Shalom. He walked over to them, and lifted the lids. They were just the same as his trash can at home. Nothing unusual there.

  So this is where the rug had been taken by Andreas Gustavsson. It had been lying under the unconscious radiologist’s body on the cobblestones. The doctor was still alive, but in intensive care, he’d been told. Gustavsson had sworn that neither he nor his woman, the so-called assistant Nilla Söder, had touched the body.

  Claesson knew, of course, all too well who Andreas Gustavsson was – a notorious druggie who lived in a state of general degradation. Many had tried to save him over the years, for he was the kind of person who, despite his miserable life, easily evoked maternal feelings in others. Perhaps because the man had something gentle and unassertive about him, especially during the times when he wasn’t high. He’d lost a finger. Rumor had it that his malicious father had clipped it off with a pair of pincers when he was little, but whether this was true or not, he didn’t know. He shuddered when he thought of such out-and-out cruelty. Especially now, when he had his own children. To cut off one of Klara’s little fingers! Utterly unthinkable!

  Andreas Gustavsson had never had a guardian angel. These days, he looked scruffy and few people took him seriously. He was mostly considered a bit of a jerk. But he was neither dangerous nor serious in his delinquency. Not in Claesson’s opinion or anyone else’s at the station. A petty thief, quite simply.

  Claesson found himself only a block from the police station. He stared at the café door. It was more time for lunch than just a coffee, but making up his mind to check, just in case, he walked up to the door and opened it.

  Standing behind the counter was a dumpy woman in her fifties sporting a floral apron and transferring freshly baked cinnamon buns from an oven tray to a footed glass dish. The same kind that his mother always brought out during special coffee mornings with the rose-patterned china.

  He shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help it. Suddenly, he found himself sitting at a round table covered by a checkered cloth, with an oven-warm bun on a side plate and a cup of steaming hot coffee in front of him. Standard Swedish coffee, too. Not Turkish coffee, or latte or espresso or cappuccino. Fresh Swedish coffee was the best in the world.

  They were alone. The woman with the flowery apron contin
ued to busy herself with her buns, until he told her who he was – at which time she put down her tongs and straightened her back. But she soon relaxed and talked about the weather; it had started to hail outside.

  “In May, too, well I never!” she said, shaking her head. “I hope it turns! Imagine if we had a summer like last year’s! We deserve it!” she said and smiled charmingly.

  She brushed away a grain of pearl sugar that had attached itself to her pant leg.

  “You see, I’m looking for a man,” he said, and she looked curiously at him. “He’s not a dangerous man,” he reassured her, “but you might be able to help me.”

  He described the man from the carpet shop. Average height, bow-legged. Those were the most characteristic features that he’d gleaned from Annelie Daun. And they weren’t much.

  “Maybe you’ve seen him out here on the street. He’s probably not from around here, his dialect is more from the next county. Norrköping or Linköping or Mjölby… ? Maybe he’s come in for a coffee? Possibly with a rug under his arm.”

  “A rolled-up rug?” she said, her mouth twitching.

  “Yes.”

  “A big or small one?”

  “Not so big.”

  He demonstrated with his hands.

  “Let me have a think,” she said.

  “I wonder where he’s staying in that case,” Claesson said a little off-handedly and went to get a refill at the counter.

  “I would say I recognize most people who live round here, the ones that pass by,” she said, stroking her hands over her apron as if to smooth it out despite it already being stretched taut over her round tummy.

  He nodded and sipped his coffee.

  “And I must say I haven’t seen anyone walk past with a rug, that’s the kind of thing one remembers. But he might be staying in a hotel,” she suggested. “Which makes things more difficult for you, I should think.”

  He noticed that he’d got her going. She liked being helpful.

  “There’s the Post Hotel on the main square, although its guests probably don’t walk past here on Besvärsgatan, they’d go along Östra Torggatan instead,” she said.

  Claesson nodded.

  “But those staying at the Marine Hotel down in the harbor usually take this route through Besväret and down the steps… the ones not driving, that is.”

  He nodded again, declined another refill and, after handing her his card in case she thought of anything else, left the café.

  The wind was almost ripping the jacket off his back, but at least it had stopped hailing. The solid white grains dotted the cobblestones. They’d soon melt.

  He descended the hillside to Skeppsbron and continued along to the Marine Hotel, which was nicely situated with a wide and unrestricted view of the harbor.

  He stepped in out of the cold and introduced himself, asking if it was possible for him to see who’d been staying there the days around the rug’s disappearance. Although without actually mentioning the rug, of course.

  Eventually he was given a printout after the rather hesitant receptionist had called her boss to get approval to hand over the names.

  He tried the description of the man on her, but she just shook her head. Not even the man’s distinct dialect was anything that had stuck in her ears. However, a man coming in carrying a rolled-up rug under his arm she would’ve remembered, she said, but she’d come across no one like that among her guests.

  Once outside, he looked out over the harbor. Since it was low-lying with the town high up on a hill, it was a rather dreary place. The harbor and the town center were like two completely separate and totally unrelated entities. The shops and houses, which were barely visible from the harbor, lent no color at all to it, and if you came by ferry from Gotland and disembarked in Oskarshamn, you missed the heart of the town altogether.

  But that was the case everywhere, these days. Roads were laid around towns, not through them, he thought then, and walked quickly back to the police station.

  He hung up his jacket in his room and went in to see Özen, who happened to be at his desk, to ask if he could take a moment to look through the guest list from the Marine Hotel.

  Özen nodded efficiently, took the paper without a word, and turned to his computer.

  “We’ll have to check the Post Hotel, too. Did you find anything, by the way?” he asked Özen.

  “Nope.”

  Before Claesson left, Özen handed him a bunch of papers. Claesson saw that they were more reports from Istanbul.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Just as he turned to go and collect his things so he could leave early – he was, after all, meant to be on parental leave – he heard Özen’s phone ring and Özen answering it in Turkish.

  He needed something to eat. The cinnamon bun was still sitting heavily in his stomach. He went to fetch more than a week’s mail from his box, threw the pile onto his desk, and decided not to take up his letter opener until the next morning.

  He was just putting on his jacket when Özen suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  “Yes?”

  “That was Merve.”

  “And?”

  “One of the witnesses from the ferry has disappeared.”

  Claesson furrowed his brow.

  “The tea-seller wasn’t there today. He’s run off.”

  This was something to ponder over. Claesson backed up to the desk and sat down.

  “Tell me more.”

  He could see the young tea-seller, whose name was Ilyas Bank, clearly in front of him.

  “Merve was on the ferry to show them the photo of Öberg wearing an ICA cap. But then the older man who works in the onboard kiosk, Ergün Bilgin’s his name,” said Özen, who found it easier to memorize the Turkish names, “he thought that the man in the photo, Magnus Öberg in his ICA cap that is, could well have been the person he’d seen on the boat and who’d got off last, and who might’ve been carrying a soft bag… and this is a breakthrough in our investigation.”

  “Hmm,” nodded Claesson. “But it’s got to stand up in court, too. This’ll be too easy to just sweep aside. Live confrontation is better. Never mind, continue.”

  “What’s strange is that the younger man who sells tea hasn’t been there all day,” continued Özen. “Nor has he got in touch. This is the first time it’s happened. Sure, he’s been late, maybe missed the ferry, but he’s never been gone a whole day.”

  “Maybe he’s sick?”

  “That’s what Ergün Bilgin thought. He’s called his cell phone, and so has Merve, but he’s not picking up.”

  “OK.”

  “Bilgin actually said he thought he’d left the country. He’s apparently been going on about going abroad for a long time.”

  “Where? Doesn’t he need a visa to travel to most countries?”

  “Ergün Bilgin guessed that he went to Germany or Sweden, or possibly the USA.”

  Claesson stiffened.

  “But that’s not cheap.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Wasn’t he told by Merve not to leave Istanbul?”

  “He was.”

  Claesson ran his hand over his neck. He checked the time. It was coming up to three. That meant almost four o’clock in Istanbul.

  “Very well. We’ll have to get Interpol to put a warrant out for him, if we’re going to get this sorted out,” he said, and taking off his jacket again with a slight air of despondency, stood up and hung it back on the hook. “Leave it to me,” he said quietly. “There are certain formalities. It’d be better if you contacted all the airlines that fly between Istanbul and Sweden or Copenhagen today, and perhaps tomorrow. You can start with that and we’ll just have to take the other countries later. Ask if an Ilyas Bank has booked a ticket.”

  Özen looked at his watch.

  “Maybe the plane’s already landed,” he pointed out.

  “I know that.”

  Claesson was finding it hard to conceal his irritation. He wanted to go home.

  “I’ll
try to contact the Swedish Consulate General in Istanbul and find out if they’ve issued a visa to an Ilyas Bank.”

  Özen nodded, but without listening.

  “There’s more than one airline that flies to Turkey you know, and to Istanbul in particular,” he said instead, raising Claesson’s hackles even more.

  Claesson gave him a lingering look. He could feel that they’d been hanging around each other for quite a time now. That they really could’ve done with a break from the case of the dead Carl-Ivar Olsson, and from each other.

  But he had no choice other than to sigh deeply.

  “I’ll start with Turkish Airlines, they’re the biggest in Turkey,” said Özen sort of to himself, but in a drawn-out way that conveyed his total disinclination to do so.

  Well, forget it then, I’ll do it myself, Claesson found himself on the point of retorting.

  “Do that. Sounds like a good place to start,” he said instead in a tone he might have reserved for a small child. Had Özen suddenly lost all the autonomy that he’d shown so much of to date?

  Özen slunk away, muttering something about how the offices would all be closing soon anyway.

  But he was tired, Claesson realized. The man hadn’t had much sleep recently. Madly in love. And ambitious.

  Özen saw, of course, his chance to remain in the department. He’d been hand-picked for this very case. But Claesson guessed he wanted more.

  We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, thought Claesson as he lifted the receiver to call home.

  “I’ll be late,” he said.

  There was no other way of saying it. No beating about the bush. Although he could have added an I’m afraid.

  As he passed by Mustafa Özen’s room an hour or so later to tell him he was going home, he heard him sitting talking in Turkish on the phone.

  Is he sitting there flirting with Merve right in the middle of everything? he thought huffily. They certainly weren’t hanging about.

  But his voice was quite formal, he then realized, even if Özen seemed angry.

  “Fucking bitch,” he heard him say as he slammed the receiver down.