Third Voice (7 page)

‘Well, that’s as close as you get to putting make-up on,’ she said. ‘But I do my best. I’ll make some tea to sober you up.’

And that’s what Olivia did – sober up – while Lenni gave her an update about all their friends. Olivia was pretty clued up, at least about the things they’d chosen to put on Facebook, but of course Lenni was able to tell her a load of details and embarrassing stuff that they hadn’t wanted to boast about online.

Then Olivia told her about the trip, down to the very last detail.

‘And what about Ramón? What happened?’

‘Stuff happened. But then I left.’

Lenni laughed.

‘There’s something different about you, you know that?’

Olivia looked at her.

‘Well, I mean, I know that loads has happened,’ Lenni said. ‘But it’s not just that. Before, you would never just have had random sex with some guy in a little Mexican shithole.’

‘No, but then again I’d never been to Mexico before.’

Olivia smiled.

‘And what are your thoughts about Ove?’ Lenni wondered.

‘What do you mean “my thoughts”? What’s he got to do with anything?’

‘What’s he got to do with anything?’ Lenni mimicked. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

But Olivia didn’t. Ove Gardman was the boy who’d seen her mother being drowned and he’d actually saved her life. Literally. If he hadn’t been there that night, twenty-five years ago, then she would not be here today. Now he was no longer a boy, but a man of thirty-five who’d spent his life traipsing
around the globe saving coral reefs, dolphins and whales. He was a marine biologist. Their paths had crossed last year, when she returned to Nordkoster to see the beach where her mother had died and she was born. When she broke down, he was the one who took care of her. She’d stayed with him for a week. He’d listened, supported her and made sure that she got some food inside her. He’d been her rock. And since then they’d been almost like brother and sister, two only children who understood one another.

But nothing more.

As far as Olivia was concerned.

‘Ove is in Guatemala or somewhere like that,’ she said. ‘We skyped the other day.’

‘And he was missing you desperately? Am I right?’

Lenni dramatically laid one hand on her heart and pressed the back of the other against her forehead.

‘Stop it, we’re just friends, as you very well know.’

‘Yes, but I don’t know why. Such a waste! He’s seriously hot, nice and…’

‘And?’

‘Perfect for you. It’s only his name that’s a bit dull – Ove Gardman – but you’ll just have to live with that. He can always change his name, like you.’

Olivia laughed. Lenni always had opinions about everyone. And guys with the wrong haircut, wrong clothes and wrong name for that matter were a serious no-no in her world.

But then again, she could pick and choose as she pleased.

‘I’m not in love with Ove and he’s not in love with me. And that’s that.’

Lenni fixed her carefully made-up blue eyes on Olivia.

‘Have you asked him?’

‘Of course I haven’t.’

‘Have you asked yourself?’

Olivia hadn’t. She’d never even thought about Ove in that way. When he came into her life, there was no room for such
feelings, there were simply too many others she had to deal with first. And now that she’d dealt with those feelings she… well, what feelings did she have for Ove?

Olivia lay awake for a while after Lenni had fallen asleep next to her in the bed, in the middle of a sentence. She listened to Lenni’s deep breaths, and after a while these became gentle snores. Was Lenni right? Was there something more between them? She’d missed him, she knew that, and he’d always been happy to see her when they skyped. But… No, they were like brother and sister and that’s how it would remain. A love affair would just destroy what they had, Olivia concluded before disappearing into her dreams, to the tune of Lenni’s snoring.

Stilton had headed on down to the city. He called Abbas twice, but there was no reply. Was he hoovering the whole neighbourhood? Then he switched his mobile off to save some battery. He didn’t have that many other people to call. The Olsäters were having dinner with Olivia. And that’s where his friend list ended. He could have rung Benseman or Arvo Pärt, or one of the other homeless guys who’d sort of become friends during his years on the streets, but he felt that he’d moved on.

Instead he just roamed around the city.

He preferred the dark, narrow streets a few blocks away from the hustle and bustle. Fewer cars, fewer shops, less noise. He wanted to avoid people, he still felt that they were staring sometimes, as they had done not so long ago. He still avoided the gaze of unfamiliar people.

So he walked along with his head hanging low, looking at the pavement.

For a long time.

He felt that he had to make time pass. There was too much going on in his head for him to remain cooped up in that cell he’d just rented on Luna’s barge, he had to walk off some of that
restlessness. When he was in his cabin, he just wanted to detach. Tomorrow he’d be meeting Mette to talk about Rune Forss. He had to kill time until then.

So he walked through the city centre a few times before heading back to Söder. He saw former colleagues sail past him in police patrol vans and turned away slightly. Not that they’d recognise him, he’d never been on patrol duty, and the people inside the vans were too young to know who he was.

But they were police officers.

That was enough.

They reminded him of the wrong things.

Eventually he reached the barge, late at night, in a state in which he finally thought he’d be able to creep into bed and disappear. He climbed up the ladder. It was dark on deck. That Luna sure doesn’t waste electricity, he thought, and went over to the steps down to the cabin.

‘Hi.’

The voice came from the darkness over by the railings and it made him jump. He recognised the voice, but he couldn’t see anyone.

‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I was heading to bed.’

‘You don’t want to have a whiskey?’

Luna stepped out of the darkness and into a beam of light from the quayside lamp. Her dungarees had been replaced with a pair of worn jeans and a grey woolly jumper. She held a thick blanket around her shoulders.

‘I’m quite shattered,’ Stilton said.

‘Have you been working?’

‘No.’

Stilton hesitated a little. Luna was standing a couple of metres away. Her thick hair was hanging over her shoulder, tied in a ponytail.

‘Are you going to get up early?’

‘I get up when I wake up.’

Luna nodded a little and kept Stilton’s gaze.

‘But I’d like to have a whiskey,’ he lied.

Luna turned around and headed down towards the lounge, in front of Stilton. She’d put on a few lamps, there was gentle country music coming from somewhere out in the darkness, coupled with a light whiff of tar in the air. Two small olive trees and two larger lemon trees were placed along the bulkheads. Luna gestured towards a long wall-mounted bench. There were a couple of framed pictures hanging above it, small abstract oil paintings in bold colours. Stilton sat down. It was the first time he’d been down here. He immediately liked it. All the dark worn wood, brass fittings here and there, the rounded oblong table in front of him, full of scratches. He thought about Rödlöga, about the old wherries out there, the old fisherman’s cottages. He felt a strange longing for home. Luna walked towards the wooden cupboard on the wall and took out a bottle of Bulleit Bourbon and two small glasses.

‘Surely it’s all right to celebrate my first lodger,’ she said.

‘I think so.’

She poured the whiskey and held out a glass to Stilton.

‘Cheers.’

Stilton raised his glass and sipped the dry whiskey.

‘So this is the first time you’ve rented out a cabin?’ he said.

‘Yes. I need to boost my income.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a caretaker at the Norra cemetery and the pay is pretty bad. How did you end up on the streets?’

The question came out of nowhere and Stilton didn’t have a chance to duck. He looked down into his glass. He’d been asked that question enough times to be able to present a number of different responses, depending on who was asking. Right now he didn’t feel like answering at all.

‘It’s hard to answer that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t know who you are and what response I should choose.’

Luna smiled without saying anything. Stilton felt uncomfortable.

‘What’s that music?’ he said, trying to change the subject.

‘“Lover’s Eyes.” Mumford & Sons. What music do you like?’

‘None in particular.’

Luna looked at him and took a small sip from her glass.

‘Luna,’ said Stilton.

‘Yes?’

‘Quite an unusual name.’

‘Mum christened me Abluna, some family name.’

‘Sounds foreign.’

‘Abluna is an old Swedish girl’s name. But then Mum disappeared and Dad didn’t like the name so he called me Luna instead. Moon in Italian. I like it.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Thanks.’

‘When did your mum disappear?’

‘When I was twelve. She was a “wind walker”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s an old Sami term, he who walks with the wind. Who goes his own way.’

‘Was she Sami?’

‘No.’

‘Oh right.’

That’s where Stilton’s conversational stocks began to run dry, but he went for something within easy reach.

‘How long have you had the barge?’

‘I came across it two years ago, in Toulouse, I fell for the name.’

‘
Sara la Kali.
’

‘Yes. It’s the name of a Roman saint. I took it up the canals.’

‘On your own?’

‘No, my dad’s a sea captain. He came too.’

Stilton nodded and drank up the whiskey. He felt how the accumulated fatigue hit him with full force. Yet he still wanted
to remain seated. On one level. And on another he had Rune Forss to deal with.

‘I’m going to hit the sack now,’ he said.

‘Thanks for the company.’

‘There’ll be other times.’

Stilton looked away as he said it. Luna smiled again and followed him with her gaze. She slowly poured herself another splash. When she put the glass to her lips Stilton had disappeared.

‘I come from a family of seal hunters.’

Luna gulped the whiskey and put the glass down. As she let go she saw her hand was trembling slightly. It was a sinewy hand, divided by furrows, some from hard work and others were secrets. She turned it over and looked at her nails, broad, evenly cut, unpainted. She wasn’t one for nail polish. She was vain in a different way.

But the trembling?

She clenched her fist to calm it. The trembling was troubling her. She’d had it that morning too, and at the cemetery the day before. A light tremble in both hands that she couldn’t explain. She was forty-one years old and had been fit as a fiddle her entire life, apart from the odd allergy. She looked at the corridor into which Stilton had disappeared. Shame that he wasn’t been a doctor, she thought. Former coppers probably didn’t have much to say about trembling hands. She leant back and put the lights out in the lounge. The lamps on the quay were casting a dull raking light through the portholes, and her silhouette was visible against the dark wood-panelled wall behind her. She lowered her body onto the wooden bench and stretched out a little. She’d had trouble falling asleep recently. Sometimes she went up to lie down in the lounge, just to get a change of environment, and every now and again she fell asleep there. She shut her eyes and felt that she was drifting off, the booze rocking her in the darkness. Just a second before she was about to surrender to sleep, she heard the scream.

It came from Stilton’s cabin.

She sat up, her heart pounding. She was just about to lie back down when she heard another scream. Luna got up and went over towards the corridor. She stopped some distance away from Stilton’s cabin. There was no light seeping under the door. She stood there in silence. Then there was another scream, lower now, shorter, followed by a long protracted whimper.

He’s dreaming, she thought. Nightmares.

When Stilton asked whether he could lock the cabin door, she’d already felt that there was something mysterious about this man. As though the rent he was paying was just a necessary evil, a quick and easy way of getting an abode, a place to sleep and nothing more.

She went back into the lounge.

The little round beam of light slowly slid across a bare white bedroom wall. Carefully it brushed against the edge of a framed poster, paused, hesitated, and then slid back across the bare wall again.

Abbas sat on the floor with a small torch in his hand. He’d wrapped himself in a grey bedspread. His eyes were just about visible in the light, sore and red from all the rubbing and crying, and lack of sleep. He tried to look at the wall opposite, tried to reach the part that was shadowed in darkness, but he didn’t dare. He closed his eyes to win some time. He knew he had to look at the poster.

Now.

He’d been sitting here for hours, waiting for the darkness to fall, trying to gather his strength. To no avail. His entire body was drained, the arm holding the torch was limp and weak, the signals from his brain hardly reached his hand.

‘I have to look at it now.’

He heard himself utter those words. He repeated them again. Slowly he opened his eyes and began steering the shaft of light
across the wall and towards the poster again, held back, the light trembling up and down, and then he allowed it to spill over the edge, carefully.

It was a large, beautiful poster, a circus poster from France, Cirque Gruss, from the mid-nineties, in red and blue. The light explored the energetically charged image, the jugglers, the trapeze, the elephants; it took a while before he dared to move all the way to the bottom, towards the texts with the performers’ names.

There it remained.

Suddenly, the light went out and it became pitch dark. The only sound to be heard was a heavy inhalation.

The hoover had fallen silent.