Death Angels

3

A BOY IN HIS LATE TEENS HAD BEEN SPOTTED WITH A MAN IN downtown Gothenburg. Nobody could recall exactly where-maybe the Brunnsparken area. They hadn’t been seen together before that.

Three people might have caught sight of them after they left Brunnsparken, and that was a hell of a lot to go on. Who knows, maybe there were more than three.

They were obviously together, but they didn’t look like father and son.

According to a couple of witnesses, the kid had dark, badly cut hair, and since Winter knew how unreliable such testimony could be, he made a quick mental note and let it go at that.

There’s always a trail to follow, he thought as he walked by a sports complex. It might feel like you’re not getting anywhere, but it’s just a question of patience.

The icy soccer fields below him were in hibernation, dreaming of last year’s glory. In three months, players would be kicking the shit out of each other, the gravel soft and redolent of sweat and menthol.

Soccer isn’t a sport, Winter thought. It’s a million little injuries, the feeling of loose bone chips rattling around your knees. I could have been something, but I wasn’t injured often enough.

Nobody remembered what the man looked like. But they showed no reluctance to describe him anyway. He had been tall, average height or a bit short. Compared to the kid? No, compared to the streetcar, somebody said, and Winter closed his eyes as if he were exorcising the world’s ingratitude.

The man’s hair had been blond, black and brown. He had been wearing a suit, leather jacket and tweeds. He had horn-rimmed glasses, dark sunglasses and no glasses at all. He was stooped over, his posture was perfect, he was bowlegged and he had long, muscular legs.

What kind of world would we live in, Winter mused, if everybody looked at it the same way?

Winter had seen for himself that the kid’s hair was dark. Whether it had been “badly cut” was impossible to tell. The coroner and forensic specialists were done, leaving Winter alone in the dorm room at the Chalmers University of Technology. The body had already been carried out.

The walls reeked of blood. It’s not a real smell, he thought. It assaults the mind more than the senses. The color is what does it, the pale remnants of life splattered on ugly yellow.

The sun crept in from the right and cast its harsh light on the opposite wall. When he squinted, the colors disappeared and the wall became a luminous rectangle. He closed his eyes and felt the blood dissolve in the sun’s heat, heard the wall murmur about what it had witnessed less than twelve hours earlier.

As the murmurs turned to shrieks, Winter put his hands over his ears, crossed the room and opened the door to the hallway. He closed it again and heard the roar inside the room, and it struck him that the same ear-splitting silence had reigned while the crime was being committed.

Winter walked past the bar, turned around and retraced his steps. The decor was subtle and understated, but in sharp contrast to the pale sky outside, with colors that offered coolness in the summer and warmth in the winter. Johan knows how to pick his interior decorators, Winter thought, sitting down at one of the two tables by the window. A young waitress came up and he ordered a malt whisky.

“With ice?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Do you want ice in your whisky?”

“But I ordered a Lagavulin.”

She gave him a blank look. She’s brand new, he thought. It’s not her fault. Johan hasn’t trained her yet.

“No ice,” he said, and she walked back to the bar. Five minutes later she returned with a round, sturdy glass. Winter looked out at the street. People walked in slow motion as if on a conveyor belt. Soon spring will be here, he thought, and you can stroll barefoot along the beach.

“I haven’t seen you for a while.” Johan Bolger sat down across from him.

“I know.”

“Did she ask whether you wanted ice?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“She seems to know what she’s doing.”

“You’ve always been bad at telling white lies, but I forgive you. Actually, plenty of our customers take ice in their malt whisky. Not everyone is a snob like you.”

An old woman slipped and fell on the icy cobblestones outside. She slid along with one leg sticking out and screamed when something snapped. Her hat lay on the street and her coat was half unbuttoned. Her purse bounced along the pavement, flew open and spewed out its contents in a little semicircle.

Winter could hear her shrieks. A couple crouched down next to her, and he saw the man talking on his cell phone. If I were in uniform, he thought, I could go out and chase the idlers away, but there’s nothing to do now.

Bolger and Winter watched in silence. After a few minutes, an ambulance backed in from Västra Hamngatan Street. The crew lifted the woman onto a stretcher and drove off without turning on the siren.

“The days are getting longer,” Winter said. “Just when you get used to the darkness, the light starts coming back.”

“Does that depress you?”

“It gives me hope.”

“The eternal optimist.”

“Something terrible is about to happen, and I’m going to be right in the middle of it.”

“That doesn’t sound so hopeful.”

“It makes me sad,” Winter said. “I’ve always believed in goodness, but that seems to be slipping away from me.”

“That faith was your own self-therapy.”

“Do I sound confused?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“Then I must be on the right track.”

“So, playing the Good Samaritan isn’t your thing anymore?”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m just not so much into making the world fit into my own belief system.”

“Does that make any difference?”

“A policeman doesn’t have to spend all his time racking his brain about why people betray and kill each other.”

“Then who would do that dirty but necessary work?” Bolger waved in the direction of the bar.

The waitress approached and Bolger asked for a Knockando without ice in one of their thin new glasses.

“She looked like an old pro when she took your order,” Winter said.

“There’s hope for everyone. Except for those who have to clean up after you, or alongside you.”

“Clean up?”

“You know what I mean.” Bolger took his glass from the waitress.

“Mats’s death hit me pretty hard.”

“One day grief ends and turns into something else,” Bolger said after a strained silence. “You could have asked me to go to the funeral with you. He was my friend too.”

“True enough.”

“I could have been offended.”

“It wasn’t really my call, Johan. I thought you might turn up anyway.”

“It’s so goddam…”

“What were you going to say?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you mumbling about?”

Bolger hunched over his glass.

They listened to the voices of the other customers.

Winter was wearying of the conversation and all the unanswered questions. What was weighing on him? Probably that he didn’t want to watch people disappear from his life anymore, regardless of how it happened. He quickly dismissed the thought, deciding it was the atmosphere of the bar that was conjuring up all those phantoms. He hadn’t touched his whisky, and now was no time to start. He let go of his glass and stood up to leave. “See you, Johan.”

“Where are you going?”

“To work.”

“On a Saturday night?”

“Who knows?” Winter said. “Somebody else might have just disappeared.”

A memo from INTERPOL lay on Winter’s desk. My God, he thought, will this never end? What a naïve question.

The memo left out the gory details. Nor had he expected any. The facts spoke for themselves.

What the hell was Per Malmström doing in London anyway?

He heard his own heavy breathing as he picked up the receiver. Someone had to notify Per’s parents, and he knew that someone was him. The dreaded task generally went to an experienced officer-not necessarily the chief investigator-but Winter shouldered the burden like somebody who puts on a heavy raincoat before braving a storm. You bow to the inevitable without looking for an escape hatch.

A policeman’s job doesn’t get any worse than this, he thought. “I have some information for you,” he told Karin Malmström.

He wrote down her address. He hadn’t needed to ask, but he did it reflexively as if it might save a little time.

He would give Hanne Östergaard a call later. She was a good listener, and the pressure was starting to get the better of him.

The big adrenaline kick didn’t come from the actual burglary. His pulse raced every time the lock sprang open, but that wasn’t it either.

It was the waiting, making yourself invisible and still remaining fully alert, your eyes and ears everywhere.

She’s leaving now.

There he goes.

You had to study their daily habits. Who was going to work, and who was just out for a short walk. Who was suddenly afraid that she had left the stove on. Who was sure that he had forgotten to turn off the lights and went back day after day to check.

A pro had to keep track of everything. He wasn’t a true pro yet, but he was getting there. He had ransacked three apartments, and he already knew that working by yourself was a definite advantage. The guys who stripped cars always had a partner, but he didn’t want to depend on anyone else.

He left his hiding place under the stairway, walked up half a flight and had the door open in three seconds flat. He was already an expert at not scratching the frame.

He felt a warm pressure in his body and stood still in the hallway until his heart slowed down.

Silence was both his friend and his enemy. He never made a lot of noise. If the tenant in the apartment below was in bed with the flu, he wasn’t going to be so impolite as to disturb her.

He started with the living room because that’s the way it had happened the first time. After four months, he knew everything there was to know about living rooms. It’s a good thing you’re not a book thief, he always laughed to himself. People don’t usually own many books. You’re a burglar but you own books. A petty criminal, but also a husband and a father.

He had held down another job once or twice, but he never thought about that anymore. Some people can handle the rat race and some can’t, and he had made his choice.

This tenant owned books. He had seen in the man’s face that he was a reader but couldn’t tell the kinds of books he was into.

It would be fun to check out the titles, he thought. But he didn’t take unnecessary risks.

He rummaged through the drawers and glanced at the walls but saw nothing worth taking. He crossed the hallway to the bedroom.

Next to the unmade bed, a few feet from the door, was a garbage bag. There was something in it. It felt soft from the outside. He took hold of the bottom of the bag and carefully emptied it. A shirt and pair of pants fell out. Both of them looked like they had been dipped in something sticky that had now completely dried. I’m starting to see things, he thought. I’ve had enough for one day.

Back home, the burglar had difficulty concentrating. Snowflakes danced outside his window, and he could feel a draft through the sill. Some children were picking up the snow as soon as it hit the ground, while his son stood there with a carrot in his hand. A nose for a snowman, he thought. Why does that remind me of Michael Jackson?

“A penny for your thoughts,” his wife said.

“What?”

“You looked like you’d just discovered the theory of relativity.”

“I was thinking about Michael Jackson.”

“The singer?”

He kept his eyes on the children. The lower part of the snowman’s body was done. No legs, of course. A snowman with legs-that was a new concept.

“You meant the singer, right?” she repeated.

“What did you say?”

“Hello, anybody home?”

He turned and looked at her. “Yes, Michael Jackson. Kalle’s got a carrot in his hand, and he’s waiting for them to put a head on the snowman so he can give it a nose.” He glanced back at the children. “Michael Jackson had a nose operation or something a year or two ago.”

“That’s news to me.”

“It’s true. Is there any more coffee?”

She got up and took the coffeepot from the counter.

“So what did you do all day?” she asked after he had poured some milk in his cup, followed by the coffee, and taken a few sips.

“What do you mean?”

“You looked a little upset when you came home.”

“I did?”

“You weren’t your usual self.”

The snowman had a head now, and Kalle had stuck the carrot into a blank surface that would soon turn into a face with pebbles for eyes and gravel for a mouth.

“Did you have a bad day?” she persisted.

“No.”

“I thought you were in a better mood the last few days.”

“The caseworker at the employment office always looks right past me,” he said finally.

“Past you?”

“She sits there, and we talk and talk, but her eyes are on the window behind me. Like some job was about to climb in. Or she feels like jumping out.”

“A job will climb in soon. Take my word for it.”

She knows me through and through, he thought, but she hasn’t guessed anything yet. When the hauls get a little bigger, she might suspect something, but that won’t be anytime soon. Maybe I’ll get a regular job first. Bigger miracles have happened. But by then I might not want it anymore.

He couldn’t get the bloodstained clothes out of his mind. When he had stood and stared at them, they seemed to be beckoning to him, or screaming something for his ears only.

He would never know how he had managed to get the clothes back in the garbage bag, and he could only pray that he had left the bedroom in the same shape as he’d found it. Why hadn’t the idiot just burned them? I haven’t seen anything, he told himself.