Frozen Tracks

9

JANNE ALINDER STRETCHED OUT HIS ARM IN AN ATTEMPT TO EASE the pain in his elbow. He raised it to an angle of about forty-five degrees, palm down, and it occurred to him that if anybody were to come into his office now it might look a little odd.

Johan Minnonen came in and stood behind him.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody,” said Minnonen.

“Tennis elbow,” said Alinder.

“Unusually straight for that.”

“You can believe whatever you like.”

“My dad fought on their side.”

“Whose side?”

“The Germans, of course. Against the Russians.”

“Not all Germans were Nazis,” said Alinder.

“Don’t ask me.” Minnonen’s expression became more somber. “I was too little. And Dad never came back home.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Alinder.

“Neither did I, actually. Come home again, that is. I was sent to Sweden, and I stayed here.” Minnonen hadn’t sat down. “A war child, as they called us. My real name was Juha, Johan in Swedish.”

“What about your mother?”

“Oh yes, we met again after the war; but there were a lot of us brothers and sisters. Ah well…”

Alinder knew that was as much as Minnonen was going to let on. He had never been as forthcoming as this before.

Oh my God; he realized that he still had his arm raised.

The telephone rang. He lowered his right arm and picked up the receiver. Minnonen clicked his heels and saluted, then left and made his way toward the police cars.

“Police, Majorna-Linnéstaden, Alinder.”

“Er, yes, hello. My name is Lena Sköld. I called a few days ago about my daughter, Ellen.”

Sköld, Sköld, Alinder thought. Daughter. He had some vague recollection.

“It was about Ellen. She said she’d been with, er, with some stranger or other.”

“I remember now. How is she?”

“She’s fine. Everything’s normal.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, you said I should get in touch again if I thought that… that something was missing. I think that’s what you said?”

If you say so, Alinder thought. Hang on a minute, yes, I remember now.

“Yes, I remember saying that.”

“Well, she always has a good-luck charm in a pocket in her overalls, but it’s missing,” said Lena Sköld.

“A good-luck charm?”

“Yes, you know, one of those-”

“Yes, I know what it is. I mean…” Hmm, well, what the hell do I mean? “A charm, you say?”

“An old good-luck charm, one that I used to have myself when I was a kid. It’s a sort of superstition thing, from me. It’s supposed to bring you good luck.”

Silence.

“Yes?”

“She always has it in the left-hand chest pocket of her overalls. A special extra pocket. I can’t understand how…”

Silence again.

“Yes?”

He waited for whatever she was going to say next.

“I can’t understand how it could have fallen out,” said Lena Sköld.

“Could Ellen have taken it out herself?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“And this is the first time?”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time it’s been lost?” Alinder asked. A daft question, but what am I supposed to do? This is the type of conversation I don’t really have time for.

“Yes, of course.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Well, if what Ellen says is true, then it could be that the man in the car took it.”

“Have you asked Ellen about him again?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“She says more or less the same thing as before. Odd that she should remember, don’t you think?”

I have a file with notes on what was said before, Alinder thought. I guess I can add a few sentences.

“Can you describe that charm for me,” he said, picking up his pen.

“It’s a little bird, silver,” she replied.

Just a little thing. A souvenir. He’d be able to take it out and look at it, and that would be enough.

For now at least. No. No! That would be enough. Enough!

He knew that it wouldn’t be enough. He would have to make use of it.

He closed his eyes and looked toward the wall and the bureau that stood next to the bookcase with the videos.

He had that little drawer in his bureau, with the boy’s car and the girl’s little silver bird. The car was blue and black, and the bird glistened and showed off a color of its own that wasn’t like anything else.

He had in his hand the little ball that the other girl had had in her pocket. It was green, like a lawn at the height of summer. Maja, her name was. That was a name that also suggested summer. Maja. It wasn’t a name for this time of year. He didn’t like the autumn. He felt calmer in the summer, but now-now he wasn’t so calm anymore.

He would go out driving, driving around. He drove around, didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it. Playgrounds. Day nurseries.

Being there and joining in the fun.

He dropped the ball and it bounced up as high as the top drawer in the bureau, then down again, and he leaned to one side and caught it in one hand. A one-handed catch!

When it was so dark outside that he didn’t need to draw the curtains in order to watch the video recording, he switched on the television.

Maja said something funny. He could hear himself laughing on the film. He smiled. He could see the rain on the car window behind her. The empty trees. The sky, empty. It looked so miserable out there, on the other side of the car windows. Gray. Black. Damp. Rotten. A sky that was gray or black or red like… like blood. No. Nasty. The sky is a big, nasty hole that’s bigger than anything else, he thought, and he squeezed the ball hard in his hand. Things fall from the heavens that we are afraid of, run away from, hide from. The heavens are empty, but rain comes down from there and we can’t get away from that, and that’s why heaven is just a place on earth. Heaven is a place on earth, he thought again. He used to think about that when he was a child. Uncle had come to him when he’d been crying. The light had been out, and Uncle had asked him various things and then gone away. But later, he’d come back again.

It had hurt so much. But who had it been? Had it been Dad? Or Uncle? Uncle had comforted him afterward.

Comforted him so often.

He turned to the television again. It had been warm and cozy in the car. He’d felt warm as he shot the film. He could hear the radio as well. Then came the voice, and a swear word. The child had heard it. Maja. Maja said that the man on the radio has used a bad word.

Yes indeed. It was a very bad word.

What a nice ball you have, Maja. Show it to me.

Winter was sitting on the floor by the door in the long, narrow hall with his legs spread out, and he was rolling the ball to Elsa, who was sitting at the other end. He managed to roll the ball all the way to Elsa, but she couldn’t roll it all the way back again. He stood up and sat down again a bit nearer.

“Ball stupid,” Elsa said.

“It’s easier now,” he said, and rolled it to her again.

“The ball, the ball!” she shouted as she succeeded in rolling it all the way to him. “The ball, Daddy!”

“Here it comes,” he said, rolling it back to her.

Elsa was asleep when Angela got home after her evening shift. A long day on the ward. Morning shift. A short rest. Evening shift. He heard the elevator clattering up to the landing outside, and opened the door before she had even reached it.

“I heard the elevator.”

“So did everybody else for miles around.” She took off her raincoat and put it on a hanger ready for transportation to the bathroom. “That elevator should have been retired thirty years ago.” She took off her boots. “It’s scandalous that the poor thing has to keep on working.”

“But Elsa likes Ella being here and working for us,” said Winter.

Ella Vator was Elsa’s name. Just think, all these years I’ve lived here and traveled up and down in this elevator without knowing its name, Winter had thought when Elsa christened the old girl. Ella Vator.

“How did it go today?” said Angela, heading for the kitchen.

“Another incident at the nursery school,” he said, following her.

“What this time?”

“I think it was the same little boy as before who ran off through the bushes, but this time he got out.”

“Got out? Where? Who?”

“August, I think his name is. Do you know who that is?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“There was a hole in the wire fence, and he got out into the street.”

“Oh my God.”

“I managed to catch up with him before anything happened.”

“How the hell could there be a hole in the fence?”

“Rusted away.”

“Oh my God,” she said again. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“What are we going to do about Elsa? You don’t think I’m going to leave her there when there’s a hole in the fence leading out onto one of northern Europe ’s busiest roads?” She looked at him and raised a hand. “It’s like a hole straight into the cruel world outside.”

“They’ve fixed it.”

“How do you know?”

“I checked.” He smiled. “This afternoon.”

“Have they replaced the whole fence?”

“It looks like it.”

“Looks? Are you not as worried as I am?”

“I called the lady in charge, but I couldn’t get through.”

“Well, I’m going to get through.”

She marched over to the telephone and called one of the numbers on a Post-it note stuck onto the refrigerator.

Angela bit his knuckle when she felt that he was as close as she was. He heard a spring complaining in the mattress underneath them, a noise that could in fact have come from Ella on the landing, but he didn’t think of that until afterward.

They lay still in the silence.

“Could you get me some water, please?” she asked eventually.

He got up and went to the kitchen. Rain was pattering on the window overlooking the courtyard. The wall clock showed a quarter past midnight. He poured a glass of water for Angela and opened a Hof for himself.

“You won’t be able to sleep now,” she said, as he drank the beer on the edge of the bed.

“Who said anything about sleeping?”

“I can’t come and go as I please like you,” she said. “I have strict working hours.”

“I can be creative at any time of day or night,” he said.

She took a drink of water and put the glass down on the wooden floor that seemed to gleam in the glow coming in from the street lighting outside. A bus could be heard driving past, tires on water. Then another vehicle. No ambulance at the moment, thank the Lord. A voice perhaps, but it could also have been a bird, hoarse from having stayed too long in the North.

That thought triggered another: Have we stayed here too long? Isn’t it time we moved out of this stone city?

She looked at him. I haven’t brought it up with him again. Perhaps that’s because I no longer want to move away myself. You can lead a good life in Gothenburg. We are not country people. Elsa isn’t complaining. She’s even made friends with somebody on our floor. The fence around the nursery school has been mended. We can always rent a house in the country for the summer.

She looked again at Erik, who seemed to be lost in thought. Things between us are better now than they used to be, a year or so ago. I didn’t know for certain then. I didn’t know for certain for some time. I don’t think he knew for certain either.

We could have been in different worlds. I could have been in heaven, and Erik here on earth. I think I’d have gone to heaven. I’m not sure about him. Ha!

I’ve forgotten about most of the experience. It was just bad luck.

She thought about what had happened during the months before Elsa was born. When she had been kidnapped by a murderer. How she had been kept in his apartment. What thoughts had gone through her mind.

I don’t think he ever intended to hurt me.

Things are different now. It’s good. This is a good time to be on earth. A good place.

She heard another noise from the street down below, a brittle sort of noise.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said to Erik, who was still sitting in the same position with an introspective look on his face, which she could make out, even in the half light.

He looked at her.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I was thinking that we have it pretty good, you and me,” she said.

“Hmm.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Hmm.”

She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him, and he ducked.

“Elsa will wake up if we start fighting,” he said, putting down his bottle of beer and throwing his pillow, which thudded into the wall behind her and knocked a magazine off her bedside table.

“Try this on for size,” she said, hurling his pillow back at him. He saw it coming.

“We actually found a little decomposing pile of newspapers outside the entrance,” said Bergenhem, the first time he’d spoken at the morning meeting. “It was underneath an even more unpleasant pile of leaves.”

“How come you didn’t find it earlier?” asked Halders.

“We weren’t looking, of course,” said Ringmar. “We didn’t know we should be looking for newspapers.”

“Have we found any fingerprints?” asked Halders.

He rubbed at the back of his head, which was feeling stiff again. Stiffer than normal, if you could call this goddamn stiffness normal. He’d been cold out in the square the previous day.

“Beier’s team is looking into it now,” said Ringmar. “They’re also trying to see if they can make out the date on the newspapers. They should be able to.”

The forensic officers had looked doubtful when they were handed the rotting bundle.

“Pointless,” said Halders. “Just as pointless as trying to find specific bicycle tracks at the places where the boys were clubbed down.”

“Bicycle tracks?” said Bergenhem.

“It’s my own theory,” said Halders, sounding as if he were preparing for a DCI examination. “The attacker zoomed in on them on a bike. Silent. Fast. Unexpected.”

“Why not?” said Winter. He didn’t say that the same thought had occurred to him.

“It sounds like such an obvious possibility that all of us must have thought about it,” said Bergenhem.

“Go on, rob me of my idea,” said Halders.

“A newspaper boy on a bike,” said Aneta Djanali.

“It doesn’t have to match up exactly,” said Halders.

“Speaking of newspaper boys,” said Ringmar.

“Yes, go on,” said Djanali.

“It’s a bit odd, in fact. The newspaper delivery person for the buildings around Doktor Fries Square phoned in sick the morning Stillman was attacked,” said Ringmar. “Just like when Smedsberg was almost clubbed down on Mossen.”

“But Stillman didn’t say anything about seeing anybody carrying newspapers,” said Halders.

“Nevertheless.”

“Nevertheless what?” said Halders.

“Let’s leave that for the moment,” said Winter, starting to write on the white board. He turned to face the group. “We’ve been discussing another theory.”

The evening had moved on when Larissa Serimov sat down at the duty officer’s desk. Moving on was an expression her father liked to use about most things. He had moved on himself, moving from the Urals to Scandinavia after the war, and he’d managed to have a child at an age when others were having grandchildren.

We’ll go back there one of these days, Larissa, he always used to say, as if she had moved there with him. And so they did when it finally became possible, and when they got there she had realized, genuinely realized, that they had in fact moved together all those years ago. His return had been her return as well.

He had stayed there, Andrey Ilyanovich Serimov. There were people still living there who remembered him, and whom he remembered. I’ll stay on for a few months, he’d said when she left for Sweden, and she’d been at home for three and a half days when she received the message that he’d fallen off a chair outside cousin Olga’s house, and his heart had probably stopped beating even before he hit the rough decking that surrounded the big, lopsided house like a moat.

The telephone rang.

“Frölunda Police, Serimov.”

“Is this the police?”

“This is the police in Frölunda,” she repeated.

“My name is Kristina Bergort. I’d like to report that my daughter Maja was missing.”

Serimov had written “Kristina Bergort” on the sheet of paper in front of her, but hesitated.

“I beg your pardon? You said your daughter was missing?”

“I realize that this might sound odd, but I think my little daughter was, well, abducted by somebody, and then returned again.”

“You’d better start again, at the beginning,” said Serimov.

She listened to what the mother had to say.

“Are there any marks on Maja? Injuries? Bruises?”

“Not as far as I can see. We-my husband and I-have only just heard about this from her. I called right away. We’re going straight to Frölunda Hospital to have her examined.”

“I see.”

“Do you think that’s a bit, er, hasty?”

“No, no,” said Serimov.

“We’re going anyway. I believe what Maja told us.”

“Of course.”

“And, she also told us he took her ball.”

“He stole it? Her ball?”

“He took her favorite ball, a green one. He said he would throw it to her through the car window once she got out, but he didn’t. And she doesn’t have it now.”

“Does Maja have a good memory?”

“She is very observant,” said Kristina Bergort. “Here comes my husband. We’re off to the hospital now.”

“I’ll meet you there,” said Larissa Serimov.