The Spring Tide Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt surprisingly horny and then she’d fallen in love with him.
    The version she told him was the opposite way round.
    For almost a whole year they had travelled and laughed and shagged and then he had met a girl he knew from ‘back home’, as he put it. And she was allergic to cats. So the cat stayed on at Skånegatan. She had named it Elvis after the Jamaican moved out. He had called it Ras Tafari, after Haile Selassie’s name in the 1930s.
    Elvis was more to her taste.
    Now she loved the cat almost as much as her Mustang.
    She finished her beer.
    It was good.
    When she was about to open a second beer she happened to notice the alcohol content and realised it was much stronger than the first, and that she hadn’t had any lunch. Nor dinner for that matter. When she got going, food became low priority. Now she felt she ought to give her stomach something to work on, to counter the slight spinning sensation in her brain. Should she nip down and get a pizza?
    No.
    The slight spinning sensation was actually quite nice.
    She took the second can with her into the tiny bedroom and sank down on top of the bedspread. A thin long greyish-white wooden mask hung on the wall opposite her. One of her cousin’s African art objects. She still hadn’t made up her mind ifshe liked it or not. There were nights when she woke up from some cold dream and saw the moonlight reflected from the mask’s white mouth. That wasn’t exactly pleasant. Olivia let her gaze wander up towards the ceiling and suddenly realised: she hadn’t checked her phone for several hours! That was not like her. Her mobile was a part of Olivia’s outfit. She never felt fully dressed if she didn’t have her phone in a pocket. Now she grabbed it and unlocked it. Checked her emails, messages and calendar and ended up on the Swedish TV site. A bit of news before she slid away, that would do nicely!
    ‘But what are you going to do then?’
    ‘I can’t stand here and reveal our plans.’
    The person who couldn’t stand there and reveal anything on the evening news was called Rune Forss, a chief inspector with the Stockholm police, fifty-something she guessed. He had been tasked with dealing with the repeated assaults on rough sleepers. A task that hardly made Forss jump for joy, she thought. He seemed to belong to the old school. That part of the old school where they thought that lots of people only had themselves to blame. For one thing or another. Particularly when it came to the mischief-makers, and even more particularly when it came to folk who couldn’t pull their socks up and get a job and behave like everybody else.
    They only had themselves to blame, to a very large extent.
    That definitely wasn’t an attitude that they taught at the police college, but everyone knew it existed. Amongst some people. Some of Olivia’s fellow students had already been infected by the same jargon.
    ‘Are you going to go undercover among the rough sleepers?’
    ‘Undercover?’
    ‘Yes, be like a rough sleeper, blend in among them. So you can catch the perpetrators.’
    When Rune Forss finally understood what he was being asked, he seemed to have difficulty in suppressing a smile.
    ‘No.’
    Olivia turned her mobile off.
    * * *
    If it had been a heart-warming story, then one of those homeless people would have been sitting on a simple chair at the bedside of the badly wounded man. Her hands would have smoothed the man’s blankets and tried to give him a sliver of fragile hope. But in the true story, the one that is true to what actually happened, the staff at the hospital reception had phoned security the very moment One-eyed Vera had cut across the hall on her way to the lifts. The security staff had caught up with her in a corridor not far from Benseman’s room.
    ‘You are not allowed in here!’
    ‘Why not? I’m just going to visit a mate who…’
    ‘Come along with us!’
    And Vera was then removed from the premises.
    Which is a euphemistic way of saying that