Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  Sven felt his fear like a hunk of ice in his gut. But it neither crawled up his spine nor rode on his back. He clenched his jaws, noticing that he became fired up as he did. This bastard wasn’t to go around believing that he could act as if he ruled the place! “I’m calling the police,” he threatened.

  “Like hell you will!”

  Sven felt that it was time to leave. He swung round and stepped quickly into the little hall. A pair of winter boots that clearly belonged in the closet stood in his way.

  Just as he lost his balance, a hand grabbed hold of his jacket and then one of his arms. At the same time, the front door blew shut, and all of a sudden the situation became dangerous. Nettan wouldn’t hear if he shouted. But she’d probably come soon enough anyway. Wondering where he was.

  “You’re going nowhere,” hissed the son-in-law and the grip on Sven’s arm tightened. A fist landed on his jaw.

  Sven’s mouth was bone dry, but now suddenly he could taste blood. His throat stung, and his heart was pumping so wildly that his legs became weak. He tried to tear himself free but he felt almost paralyzed. He couldn’t do any more, he was too old and out of breath to fight. Finally, he managed to slip out of his jacket, but it was too late. As he turned his head, he saw through watery eyes that the son-in-law had grabbed hold of something. A lawn edger. He held it over him, preparing to strike.

  “No!” was all he could manage as he tried to protect his face with his hands. He gasped for air, and his breath came heavily, almost like a hiss. Magnus Öberg swung the sharp edger down toward him. He was done for, that much he realized.

  Again and again, he struck like a man possessed. Chopping at the scalp, face, neck. Hewed open huge gashes, chop, chop, chop. Pain and blood. His nasal bone splintered. Broke off. The eyes, no, not the eyes! Red. Lips, teeth, crash, smash. Throat and neck again.

  The taste of blood was Sven Bromse’s last sensation before the darkness descended on him.

  She sat huddled on the steps, a middle-aged woman with a frozen face, refusing to budge.

  “I reckon it’s the neighbor,” said Conny Larsson quietly. “Her old man…” he said with a jerk of his head toward the door.

  Claesson nodded. Louise was standing next to him. Both understood.

  Larsson and Özen had arrived first. Ilyas Bank had been told to stay in the car. Since the call had come in, the various emergency vehicles had started to gather.

  They were cordoning off the area, and the forensic team’s minibus stood ready with its back doors wide open. Forensics Benny and his two assistants had climbed into their overalls and plastic shoe covers, and had started to rig up the lighting indoors.

  “Take care of her and put her in one of the cars, and stay with her,” said Claesson to Police Sergeant Lena Jönsson, who’d arrived in one of the patrol cars.

  The woman was in such a bad way that they could hardly get her onto her feet. Larsson helped his younger colleague to virtually carry her off.

  Agneta Bromse was her name. It said so on the mailbox, Claesson and Louise were informed.

  “So then it’s Sven Bromse who’s lying in there,” said Özen.

  They opened the door and looked in.

  “Nobody’s goin’ over this threshold!” ordered Benny Grahn.

  “We can see well enough from here,” Claesson said dryly.

  The man was lying heavily on his back, his head and face horribly disfigured. The worst thing was his missing nose, which had left a mere hole in the middle of his face. A method used a long time ago, thought Claesson as he swept his gaze over the floor and walls. Desecrating one’s adversary by cutting off his nose, even if it was on a marble statue, although whether this was a fabrication or just a matter of the nose being the most vulnerable to weathering, he didn’t know. One ear was also missing, and his eyes were so mashed that their aqueous jelly was dribbling out of the orbits. There were huge gashes in his scalp, the flesh sticking out from his skull like bloody flaps. His stomach heaved, and he focused instead on the garden edger that lay on the soiled carpet. Öberg must have simply dropped it and fled. Just taken the car and driven away.

  But they’d find him.

  “OK,” he said quietly to Louise Jasinski. “We’ve got our work cut out for us now. Looks like he’s totally lost control.”

  Just as he was about to turn away from the door, he caught sight of the shoe rack under all the coats.

  “Benny!”

  The forensics technician looked up. Claesson nodded at the sports shoes that stood there.

  “OK,” said Grahn and turned them over with his gloved hands. “10 ½.”

  Claesson nodded.

  “I’ll take ’em with me. Naturally,” said Grahn. “If we’re lucky, it’s via blood that Öberg will be tied to both murders.”

  Through blood will he be tied to the murders, thought Claesson as he walked away. It sounded like some macabre line from Shakespeare. Or like a cool headline.

  CHAPTER 63

  BIRGITTA OLSSON LOOKED out through her parents’ kitchen window, past the geraniums that had got so tall. Midsummer was approaching.

  Lasse was on his way inside. She could only see his head sticking up above the lilac bush. He generally kept to his own house, and she hardly ever went there herself. It was a bachelor’s hovel. Admittedly, it wasn’t particularly simple, not so as to break your heart with pity, but she got the impression that he was ashamed of exposing his life. The mess and the smell.

  Although he wasn’t starving or neglecting his health, he couldn’t hold his drink any more. Most things fade with time, she thought. Life’s tolerant sides. And Lasse was a hard worker, and many of the locals called for him. But still their father would never think that he’d made a man of himself. But that would also soon be a thing of the past, what their father thought.

  Things were as they were.

  Perhaps Lasse wanted a bit of company, and that was fine with her. She lifted the thermos. Yep, it still sloshed. Her mother had gone to lie down, and she had no idea where her father was.

  Lasse stepped out of his shoes in the hallway, the big, heavy shoes that clumped. He then stood in his socks in the kitchen, pulled off his cap, and ran his hand over his crown, groping for the words.

  “Hi,” he ended up saying.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  She set out some cups, a loaf of bread, some butter and various toppings.

  “So you’ll be staying here, then, Sis?” he said once he’d sat down to tuck in.

  “Maybe. But not in this house…not with Mom and Dad.” She made a face as if to stress the word naturally. Her aversion to becoming a maid or a nurse to her parents she kept to herself, but she was watching her words. Many people had no doubt seen Lasse as their father’s menial. “I guess I’ll find a cottage somewhere. After all, I know this area, it’s my home,” she said, batting him affectionately with her hand.

  She’d never go back to Holmhälleväg. Once the hall had been cleaned properly, she’d sell. She guessed Agneta wouldn’t want to hang around, either. She’d stopped chirping. There was no one left to call her Nettan.

  It was terrible. She’d been helped not to feel ashamed in front of Agneta. She wasn’t the one who’d attacked Sven. But Agneta was firmly convinced that the entire Olsson family were a bunch of dangerous criminals.

  Birgitta was training herself not to think about it. So she smiled. Lasse smiled back, but tamely; his teeth were not a source of pride for him.

  “But you’ll stay on at the hospital?” he said.

  “I was thinking of it.” She took a gulp of coffee.

  “You’re a good girl, Sis.”

  “I don’t know about that…”

  He spread a thick layer of butter on his bread and slapped on three slices of polka-dotted salami. German sausage of the best kind, she thought, and watched him eat with large mouthfuls.

  There was something he was wanting to say. She waited.

&nbs
p; “Well,” he said when he’d warmed up, and rose from his chair to walk out to the hall. He returned with a soft bag made of some kind of black textile.

  “I found this in the barn.”

  She stared at it. The truth will always come out in the end, she thought.

  “It’s mine.”

  “What is it? I peeked inside but it doesn’t look like anything worth keeping. An old blanket or rug or something. Do you want it, or shall I drive it over to the tip?”

  It was nice to be around people who didn’t know everything, she thought.

  “Lasse, I can deal with it myself. Give it to me.”

  It gave her a sensation of stability to have the soft bag there by her feet. Maybe she’d ask Annelie to help her value it and to get in touch with an auction house. But she’d have to do it on the sly. She could do without any more attention.

  They’d gotten past the warm-up. The air was slightly muggy, but the oxygen was still adequate. Claesson, Özen, and the defense lawyer. Magnus Öberg had been reduced to a mere shadow of his former self.

  He clearly wanted to testify. Wanted to confess, unburden himself of everything he could, that much they’d understood. Liked letting the words take control of the thoughts.

  “Can you tell us what was going through your mind?” asked Claesson.

  “When it came to the neighbor, I guess nothing. I’d say I’ve never thought so little in my entire life. I’m not really sure what happened, I just went berserk. All I knew was that I had to get my hands on the rug and then that old bugger came in and started asking questions. I was desperate for money, quickly. I was.…”

  Öberg stared helplessly at the wall while seeming to struggle with the angst that was probably billowing up.

  “It sickens me to think about it,” he said in a near whisper. “I’m not usually a violent man, but I’ve been under such pressure of late… the firm, the debts, Lotta and the kids…that my whole life would go down the tubes.” He lifted his glass and moistened his lips with a little water. “I thought of Mom and Dad, the bankruptcy, the shame, the… Well, I was struck by panic, that’s all. As if someone was controlling me from the outside.”

  He drank some more water.

  “Look, I knew Patrik Lindström could turn just like that and totally flip out,” he continued. “Er, we’ve known each other since military service… I hadn’t actually had much contact with him over the years, but I got in touch with him now. He was the only one I thought capable of doing me a favor, or whatever you want to call it, because I could hardly have gone down to Oskarshamn to look for the rug myself.”

  He told them that Lindström had agreed to the job of getting hold of the valuable rug for a cut of the sale price. Magnus had called Lindström when he’d returned from Istanbul, but had said nothing about having killed Carl-Ivar Olsson. Lindström, for his part, had been eager to stress this in earlier interviews.

  Lindström wasn’t interested in being embroiled in a murder inquiry, he’d explained. Claesson had pointed out that if he’d opened a newspaper and read about a murdered carpet dealer in Istanbul, surely he’d have put two and two together. But Lindström didn’t read papers, he said then, and that was possibly the case.

  And anyway, he couldn’t believe that Magnus Öberg had killed his own father-in-law! There were bound to have been other maniacs in Istanbul only too happy to help out, he said, and Claesson let the matter drop for the time being.

  According to Lindström, Magnus Öberg had only told him that there was a valuable rug being taken to Oskarshamn, that the widow had carried it home from Istanbul, and that it either had to be at her place or in the carpet shop. Or possibly that it had been sent by courier to one of these places.

  “Is that true?” asked Claesson.

  Magnus Öberg nodded.

  “Yes. I missed the rug in Istanbul, didn’t I, so I called Patrik and lied a little. Said nothing at first that Carl-Ivar was dead. He did his job pretty much as he liked. It was the way he worked, he said. That was why he stole a rug that he’d seen Annelie carry home from the post office. In the end he became like a bloodhound, obsessed with finding it, and I lost control of what he was up to… And I grew worried, of course, when I heard that he’d almost strangled the wrong woman… the one’s who gone missing… Well, so, then I thought that we’d best just give up and walk quietly away. But at the same time I was thinking of the rug, of all the problems that the money would solve…”

  He shrugged and asked to go to the bathroom.

  They had a brief recess, and asked for some coffee and tea.

  “Can you tell us how you knew about this valuable rug… what you knew about your father-in-law’s life?” said Claesson once they’d resumed the interview.

  “It was ages ago… perhaps five or six years, that I happened to be in the carpet shop. This was a long time before Annelie started working there. My father-in-law had a dentist’s appointment and wondered if I could hold down the fort while he was away. There wasn’t that much to do there, so I just wandered around the carpets for a while. And then I noticed a letter.”

  “Where?”

  “In one of the desk drawers downstairs. I couldn’t help having a read.”

  He was snooping around, thought Claesson.

  “It was a letter containing a photograph of someone called Ayla with an unpronounceable surname.” He fell silent again.

  “Did you read the letter?”

  “Yes. She wrote that her mother had died and that she needed money to pay for the funeral. I didn’t understand at first, but then I started to rummage around the desk drawers and found a whole heap of files of letters and photos and then I realized that my father-in-law lived a double life.”

  “So what did you think?”

  “I thought it was repugnant… but also quite appealing.”

  A crooked smile.

  “Did you tell anyone that you’d discovered his… his secret?”

  “I told him, no one else.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He got scared.”

  “What happened then?”

  Magnus Öberg fell silent.

  “What happened?” insisted Claesson.

  “I promised to keep quiet. It wasn’t the same day I discovered what he was up to that I decided to confront him with it. First, I thought I’d do the honorable thing and keep it to myself, but then… I think it was some time just before Christmas, that’s why we were in Oskarshamn. I was in the carpet shop one day and so I told him that I knew. He couldn’t protest, because at that moment a customer came in. I imagine she could feel the tension in the air…”

  “So you promised to keep quiet?”

  “Yes, if…”

  “If what?”

  “If he gave me some money. I was in a real fix and needed money for the business, which had been doing pretty badly at times.”

  “And he gave you money to keep you quiet?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…”

  The defense lawyer squirmed on his seat.

  “But this time, when you went to Istanbul, what did you have in mind to do?”

  “I’d found out where he was staying, it was in one of the letters, so all I had to do was book into a place nearby so I could keep an eye on him.”

  “Did he know?”

  “Maybe. I can’t say for sure.”

  “Tell us more about Istanbul.”

  “I hadn’t been there before, but had managed to sniff out the fact that he had some weird rug deal going on there. He’d boast about rugs and carpets and his contacts in Istanbul… and spoke about some precious item he was going to be bringing home with him.

  “Well, I understood that this was one exclusive rug, so I booked a flight at the same time as his. I knew everything about the date and itinerary through Lotta, she and her mother talk almost daily. Naturally, we didn’t take the same flight, Carl-Ivar and I. He flew from Kastrup and I flew from A
rlanda, and I didn’t arrive until the day that Birgitta was leaving.”

  “So you didn’t meet her down there?”

  “Oh, no. I made sure of that. She’d have smelled a rat at once if she’d seen me there! But once she’d left, I called my father-in-law on his cell phone and told him I was in Istanbul and that I was thinking of supplementing my spending money. And he offered me what I wanted…”

  “How much?”

  “What, about two hundred thousand… not lira, kronor, though I’d get it in euros.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “Sure. So we decided on a restaurant in the old part of the city where he’d hand over the money.”

  “But then it dawned on me that I could possibly get more, after all he had that rug too, didn’t he? And so I kept an eye out for him from my hotel window and watched him come out and take a taxi and he had that bag in his hand. The rug, I thought. And then I wondered where he was off to, I mean we were meant to be meeting the next day. Was he thinking of slipping away? Although I knew it would’ve taken him time to rustle up that kind of money. I mean, it wasn’t as if he was some sort of bank robber, exactly. So the next morning I called him and asked him what was happening, and he just said that everything was worked out and that he’d be taking a ferry from that place where his daughter lived, Yeniköy or whatever the place is called, to that quayside in the center…”

  Öberg poured himself a Ramlösa soda water and took some gulps.

  “I don’t know what got into me, but I was all wound up… I really needed that money. I also needed a weapon, but shooting isn’t really my thing, and you can’t on a boat anyway, I thought. Otherwise I was thinking I could stick a knife in him down some dark alley. But then what happened, happened. I bought the knife… and… it came in useful.”

  Magnus Öberg suddenly looked exhausted.

  “Can you continue? Or shall we take the rest tomorrow?”