The Spring Tide Read Online Free

Edsviken. An extremely serene setting.
    Her mind was on Arne.
    She had loved her dad, deeply, and now he was dead. And he’d only made it to fifty-nine. That wasn’t fair. And now the thoughts were back. The ones she had suffered from, often, and which she could almost experience as a physical pain. The thoughts about her betrayal.
    Her betrayal of him.
    They had been extremely close all through her teens, and then she had let him down when he suddenly fell ill. She’d gone off to Barcelona to study Spanish, work, chill out… have some fun.
    I just ran away, she thought. Although I didn’t realise it at the time. I did a bunk because I just couldn’t get to grips with the fact that he was ill, and that he could get worse – that he could actually die.
    But he did. When Olivia wasn’t there. When she was still in Barcelona.
    She could still remember the phone call from her mum.
    ‘Dad died during the night.’
    Olivia rubbed her eyes gently and thought about her mum. About the time after her dad’s death when she had returned from Barcelona. A dreadful time. Maria had been devastated and was locked up inside her own grief. And that grief had no room for Olivia’s guilt and anguish. Instead they had tiptoed around each other, not saying anything, as if they were afraid the whole world would shatter if they gave voice to their emotions.
    Eventually, things settled down, of course, but it was still something they steered well clear of talking about.
    That was putting it mildly.
    She really did still miss her dad.
    ‘Have you found a case?’
    It was Ulf, who had materialised in front of her in his own unique way.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Which one?’
    Olivia looked down at her file.
    ‘A case from the west coast.’
    ‘When was it?’
    ‘Eighty-seven.’
    ‘Why did you choose that one?’
    ‘Have you found anything? Or perhaps you’re not going to bother? I mean, it wasn’t compulsory.’
    Ulf gave a slight smile and sat down on the bench.
    ‘Does it bother you if I sit here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Olivia was quite good at speaking her mind. Besides, she wanted to concentrate on the case she had just picked out.
    The case that her dad had worked on.
     
    It was a rather spectacular case, as it turned out. Åke had written such an interesting summary that Olivia wanted to know more straight away.
    She drove to the National Library and went down into the basement to the reading room with all the old newspapers on microfilm. The woman behind the counter showed her how to find things on the shelves and which microfilm readers she could use. Everything was arranged meticulously. Every single newspaper from the Fifties onwards was now on microfilm. All she had to do was to choose which newspaper and which year, sit down at the reader and get going.
    Olivia started with a local newspaper that covered the island of Nordkoster.
Strömstads Tidning
. She had the date and the location of the murder from the file. When she launched the search function it didn’t take long for the headlines to fillthe screen: MACABRE MURDER ON ISLAND SHORE. The article had been written by a fairly excited journalist but did actually provide some hard facts about the time and place.
    She was hooked.
    She spent the next few hours working her way through the regional papers,
Bohuslänningen
and
Hallandsposten
, and then widening her scope bit by bit. The Göteborg newspapers. The Stockholm-based evening papers. The big national dailies.
    And she made notes.
    Feverishly.
    Major features as well as details.
    The case had really attracted nationwide attention. For several reasons. It was a deliberately brutal murder, the victim was a young pregnant woman, and the perpetrators were unknown. They hadn’t got any suspects. No motives had come to light. They didn’t even have a name for the victim.
    The case had remained an unsolved mystery ever since.
    Olivia became all the more fascinated. Both by the case as a phenomenon, but above all by the murder itself.