The Spring Tide by Cilla Börjlind, Rolf Börjlind Page A

a place in Kärrtorp.’
    ‘Can’t you kip down there then?’
    ‘No.’
    Jelle had no intention of kipping down at Mink’s place. The conversation they had just had was about the level of the relationship they had.
    Nowadays.
    And now Jelle knew what was coming.
    ‘You’re welcome to kip down in my caravan,’ said Vera.
    ‘I know. Thanks.’
    ‘But you don’t want to?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Where would you rather kip down then?’
    ‘It’ll sort itself.’
    They had had this conversation several times of late, Vera and him. It wasn’t about sleeping in Vera’s caravan. They both knew that. It was about something Jelle wasn’t too keen on, and the simplest way to avoid hurting Vera’s feelings was to decline the invitation.
    To kip down in the caravan.
    That meant no to the other thing too.
    For the moment.
    * * *
    Olivia turned over in the bed in the lonely cabin. She slipped in and out of feverish dreams. First she’d be on the beach at Hasslevikarna, then in Barcelona. Suddenly she felt how an icycold hand was touching her naked foot on the edge of the bed.
    She flew up!
    Her elbow knocked the little bedside table and the lamp fell onto the floor. She threw herself up against the wall and stared around the cabin – empty. She pushed the covers a little to one side. Her violent heartbeats made her gasp for air. Had she been dreaming? Of course she’d been dreaming, what else could it have been? She was the only one there. There was nobody else in the cabin.
    She sat up on the edge of the bed, picked up the lamp and tried to calm down. Breathe deep breaths, that’s what Maria had taught her when she was little on the odd occasion she had a nightmare. She dried her forehead and that was when she heard it. A sound. Like a voice, from outside. From outside the door.
    Axel?
    Olivia wrapped a blanket around her, went towards the door and opened it – two metres in front of her stood a man carrying a suitcase with wheels. The man from Hasslevikarna. Olivia slammed the door shut, locked it and rushed to the only window. She pulled down the blind while looking around her for some sort of object. Something to hit him with, anything at all!
    There was a knock on the door.
    Olivia didn’t make a sound. She was shaking all over. Could she be heard from Axel’s place if she screamed? Probably not, the wind out there would howl louder.
    There was another knock.
    Olivia hyperventilated and walked slowly towards the door.
    Silently.
    ‘My name is Dan Nilsson, I’m sorry to disturb you.’
    The voice came through the door. Dan Nilsson?
    ‘What’s the matter? What do you want?’ said Olivia.
    ‘I can’t get a signal on my mobile, and I need to phone for a taxi boat, I saw your light was on and… do you possibly have a mobile I can borrow?’
    She did have a mobile. But the man out there didn’t need to know that.
    ‘Just a quick call,’ he said through the door. ‘I can pay for it.’
    Pay for a quick call? To order a taxi boat? Olivia didn’t know what to do. She could lie and say she didn’t have a mobile and send him on his way. Or send him up to Axel’s. But at the same time she was beginning to get curious. What had he been doing up at Hasslevikarna? Standing out there on the beach at low tide in the moonlight? Who was he? What would Arne have done?
    He would have opened the door.
    And Olivia did too. Carefully. Just a little. She held out her mobile through the gap.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Nilsson.
    He took the mobile, dialled in a number and ordered a taxi boat to come to the west jetty. He would be there in a quarter of an hour.
    ‘Thanks for the loan,’ he said.
    Olivia got the phone back through the gap again. Nilsson turned and started to walk away.
    Then Olivia opened the door fully.
    ‘I saw you up at Hasslevikarna this evening.’
    Olivia was standing against the light from the bedside lamp when Nilsson turned round again. He looked at her and blinked, as if in surprise, but she didn’t know at