Frozen Tracks

16

WINTER COULD SEE THE BOY THROUGH THE DOOR. HE WAS ASLEEP. Or more likely mercifully anesthetized. Angela was standing beside Winter. They’d taken a taxi from the bistro. I want to be there this time, she’d said. You shouldn’t have to face everything on your own. Besides, it’s my workplace. Even my ward. And Elsa’s asleep.

“He could have frozen to death,” said Ringmar, who was standing on the other side of Winter.

“That, or some other awful fate,” said Winter. He’d read the reports, not that there were many of them so far. One by the hospital doctors, and one by Pia Fröberg, the pathologist.

“When did the call go out?” Winter asked.

“It couldn’t have been long after he disappeared,” said Ringmar.

“When was that? When did he disappear?”

“Just after four.” He checked his notes. “About a quarter past four. But that timing hasn’t been confirmed.”

“Is that information from the nursery-school staff?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly happened? What did they do? What did he do?”

“Nobody can say for sure.”

“So he was wandering around on his own?”

Ringmar didn’t respond.

“Is that what he was doing?”

“I don’t know, Erik. I haven’t interrogated the-”

“OK, OK. Anybody determined to kidnap a child can do it, no matter what.”

Angela gave a start.

There was a woman dressed in white sitting beside the boy. Machines were humming away. Sounds that didn’t sound natural. Lights that were anything but pretty.

“Let’s go to that other room,” said Winter.

A room had been set aside for them.

“Where are the parents?” Winter asked as they walked down the corridor.

“With one of the doctors.”

“I expect they’ll be staying overnight?”

“Of course.”

“I’m going home now,” said Angela.

They embraced, and Winter kissed her. He looked Ringmar in the eye over Angela’s shoulder. Ringmar’s face looked hollow.

The room was as bare as the trees outside the window and the streets below. Winter leaned against the wall in a corner of the room. The three glasses of wine he’d drunk had given him a headache that he was now trying to rub away from his forehead with his left hand. A radio in the distance was playing rock music. He could just about hear it.

Touch me, he thought he heard. And something that sounded like take me to that other place. But there was no other place. It was here, everything was here. He didn’t recognize the tape. Halders would have recognized it immediately, as would Bergenhem. And Macdonald. When was Steve supposed to be visiting them? Take me to that other place. Reach me. It’s a beautiful day.

The boy in that other room wasn’t that much older than Elsa.

“What happened next?” Winter asked.

“They sent out a car, and then another one,” said Ringmar.

“Where to?” Winter asked.

“First to the Plitka playground at Slottskogen Park. Then, well…”

“Grasping in the dark,” said Winter.

“They were six miles apart,” said Ringmar.

Six miles between Plitka and the place where he was eventually found.

“Who found him?”

“The classic setup. A dog, and then the dog’s owner.”

“Where is he? The dog’s owner, I mean.”

“At home.”

Winter nodded.

“So four hours had passed,” he said.

“Just over.”

“How much do we know about the injuries?” he asked.

Ringmar made a gesture that suggested everything and nothing. It was as if he could barely raise his hand. The guitars had stopped resounding in the corridor. Who the hell was playing rock music in the hospital?

“There are obvious injuries to the boy’s torso,” said Ringmar. “And his face. Nothing under, er, below his waist.”

“I saw his face,” said Winter.

“I saw one of his arms,” said Ringmar.

“Does anything surprise you anymore?” Winter asked, prying himself away from the wall and massaging his forehead again.

“There are questions you can’t answer with a yes or a no,” said Ringmar.

“Where were the parents when the alarm was raised?”

“The man was at work-he has lots of colleagues-and his wife was drinking coffee with a friend.”

And I was drinking wine in a restaurant, Winter thought. A brief moment of calm and warmth in a protected corner of life.

“He must have had a car,” he said. “Don’t you think? Driving through the rush hour traffic when everybody else is staring straight ahead and looking forward to getting home.”

“He parked inside the park,” said Ringmar. “Or close by.” He scratched his chin and Winter could hear the rasp from the day-long stubble. “The crime-scene boys are out there now.”

“Good luck to them,” said Winter, without conviction. A million tire tracks one on top of the other in a parking lot. With some luck a soft and wet patch of grass; otherwise there would be no chance.

We’ll have to check up on the usual suspects, he thought. To start with. Either we find him there, or we don’t. This could be a long journey.

“I’ll have to talk to the nursery-school staff as well,” he said. “How many of them are there now? Or rather, how few?”

But first, the parents. They were sitting in an office that Winter recognized. It was Angela’s. She’d arranged for them to be settled there before going home. There was normally a photograph of himself with Elsa on her desk, but she had removed it before Paul and Barbara Waggoner arrived, bringing their desperation in with them. Good thinking. Angela was sensible.

The man was standing, the woman seated. They radiated a sort of restrained restlessness that Winter knew all too well from all his other meetings with the relatives of victims, who were also victims, of course. A restlessness that was a sort of tangible desire to reach back in time and preserve the past forever. Of course. The victims of crimes were always searching for a life in the past. Perhaps they were not the only ones. He himself would have liked to remain in Bistro 1965, an hour ago, which could easily have been in another era in another world. The protected corner.

Take me to that other place. Strictly speaking Bertil didn’t need to call him, but Bertil knew that Winter would want to be there. Bertil’s intuition on this occasion had scared Winter, but his colleague was never wrong in such matters: This was going to be a long, dark road and Winter needed to be there from the very beginning. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could explain to others. He noticed that Ringmar was standing beside the woman, who was sitting on the little visitor’s sofa. It’s something between Bertil and me. He rubbed his forehead again. My headache has gone.

“Will he be able to see again?” asked Barbara without looking up.

Winter didn’t respond, nor did Ringmar. We are not doctors, Winter thought. Take one look at us and you’ll see that.

“They are not doctors, Barbara.” The words came out more like an exhalation. “We’ve just finished speaking to the doctor.” Winter detected a slight but unmistakable foreign accent, possibly English. His name suggested that.

“He couldn’t say anything about that for sure,” she said, as if she were transferring her hope to the new specialists who had just entered the room.

“Mrs. Waggoner,” said Winter, and she looked up. Winter introduced himself and Ringmar. “May we ask you a few questions?” He looked at her husband, who nodded.

“How could anyone do that to a child?” she said.

Winter couldn’t answer that. He asked the hardest question first: Why?

“Isn’t that your job? Isn’t that what you are supposed to find out?” Paul asked, with the same intonation as before, an aggressiveness lacking in energy. Winter knew it could become much more forceful if he didn’t play his cards right. He must be an Englishman, he thought.

“We’re going to do everything we can to find whoever did this, you can count on it,” he said.

“What kind of a fucking monster did this?!” Yes, Englishman.

“We’ll-”

“Don’t you have a register of scumbags like this? All you have to do is look him up?” His accent had suddenly become more marked.

“We’ll do that,” said Winter.

“Why are you sitting here, then?”

“We have to ask some questions about Simon,” said Winter. “It will-”

“Questions? We can’t say any more than what you’ve seen for yourself.”

“Paul,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Please calm down.”

Paul looked at her, then at Winter, and then looked away.

“Ask your questions, then,” he said.

Winter asked about times and routines and clothes. He asked if Simon had had anything with him. Things he couldn’t talk to the boy himself about.

“What do you mean, anything with him?”

“Have you noticed anything missing? Something he had before but doesn’t have now?” Winter asked.

“A toy or something similar,” Ringmar said. “A stuffed animal. A charm, anything at all that he used to have with him or on him.”

“A keepsake?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I understand why,” said Barbara, who was sitting up straight now. Winter could hear a slight accent when she spoke now, very slight. He wondered if they spoke English when they were at home together, or Swedish, or both for Simon’s sake.

“Oh yes?” her husband said.

“If he’s lost something,” she said. “Don’t you see? If he… if the one that… if he took something from Simon.”

“Was there anything to take?” Winter asked.

“We haven’t thought about that,” said Paul. “We haven’t checked it.”

“Checked what?” asked Winter.

“His watch,” said Mrs. Waggoner, raising her hand to her mouth. “He never took it off.” She looked at her husband. “I didn’t see it.”

“It’s blue,” said the father, looking at his wife.

“A kid’s watch,” said the mother.

Ringmar left the room.

“Would you like me to fix some coffee or something?” Winter asked. “Tea?”

“We’ve already had some, thank you,” said Barbara.

“Is this a common occurrence?” asked Paul. “Does this happen to many children?”

Winter didn’t know if his question referred to the city of Gothenburg, or to Sweden, or to child abuse in general, or the type of crime they were up against now. There were various possible answers. One was that it was common for children to be abused by adults. Children and young people. It was most common within families. Nearly always within families, he thought, and looked at the Waggoners, who seemed to be about thirty, or possibly even younger, aged by the sharp lines and hollows that marked their faces in their distress. Fathers and mothers beat their children. He’d come across a lot of children who’d been beaten by their parents. He’d been in many such homes and tried to hide the experience away in his memory until the next such occasion. Children who were handicapped for life. Some of them could no longer walk. Or see, he thought, thinking of little Simon lying in the ward with eyes that were no longer like they used to be.

Some of them died. The ones who lived never forgot it. God, he had met victims who had become adults, but the damage was still present, always there in their eyes, their voices.

In their actions. Sometimes there was a pattern that carried on, a terrible inheritance that wasn’t really an inheritance but something much worse.

“I mean here in Gothenburg,” said Paul. “That children can be abducted by somebody just like that, and abused, and dum… dumped, and maybe… maybe…” He couldn’t bring himself to go on. His face had collapsed a little bit more.

“No,” said Winter. “It’s not common.”

“Has it happened?”

“No. Not like this.”

“What do you mean? Not like this?”

Winter looked at him.

“I don’t really know what I mean,” he said. “Not yet. First we need to learn more about what actually happened.”

“Some unknown madman kidnapped our son when he was at a playground with his day care people,” said Paul Waggoner. “That’s what happened.” He looked at Winter, but there was more resignation than aggression in his eyes. “That’s what actually happened. And I asked you if anything like that had actually happened before.”

“I’ll know more about all this soon,” said Winter.

“If it’s happened before it can happen again,” said Waggoner.

“

Isn’t it enough for you to know that it’s happened, Paul?” said his wife, getting to her feet and walking over to them and putting her arm around her husband’s shoulders. “It’s happened to us, Paul. It’s happened to Simon. Isn’t that enough for you? Can’t we… can’t we concentrate on trying to help him? Can’t you understand? Can’t you just let the police do what they have to do while we do what we have to do? Paul? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He nodded, abruptly. Perhaps he did understand. Winter heard Ringmar open the door behind him. Winter turned around. Ringmar shook his head.

“Did you find the watch?” asked Paul Waggoner.

“No,” said Ringmar.

Larissa Serimov adjusted the strap and felt the weight of her gun against her body. Or perhaps it was more the knowledge of what it could do that she felt. A SigSauer wasn’t heavy, anything of a similar weight could be forgotten about; but not a gun.

This early December day was mild, almost as if they were farther south. Signs of Christmas everywhere but a temperature of eleven degrees, maybe twelve. Brorsson was driving with his window more than half down.

“You’ll get a stiff neck,” she said.

“I only get that in summer,” he said. “For some reason.”

“I know the reason,” she said as they turned off toward the sea. She could hear seabirds through Brorsson’s open window.

“What?”

“You get a stiff neck in the summer because you drive with the window open,” she said, and saw the glint of water beyond the field that appeared to be almost as full of water as the sea.

“But it’s not summer now,” he said.

She laughed loudly.

“Although it’s pretty warm,” he said. “From a purely statistical point of view the average temperature today is high enough for it to count as summer.”

“In that case it must be summer, Billy,” she said.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said, turning to look at her.

“And so it follows that you’ll soon get a stiff neck,” she said, looking out at the rocks and the sea, both of which were totally motionless.

Brorsson rolled the window up.

“Straight ahead,” she said at the roundabout.

They drove to a turning space and parked, and stepped out of the car. The modern terraced houses on the right were built-in steps, like some of the rocks. There were hills behind them. The bay was open here, and the ocean lay in wait beyond the archipelago. There were sailboats still moored to jetties as if to confirm what Brorsson had just said: Summer had refused to die this year. No snow this year, and Larissa Serimov liked snow. Snow on the ground and snow on the ice. That’s my heritage. A white soul in a white body.

“It’s open,” said Brorsson.

They could see the interior of the restaurant through the glass doors. It looked inviting. The horizon appeared to cut right through the building, making it seem like a tower, or a lighthouse. The placidity of the coast this newly born December felt as restful as it was. But not for them.

“We just had lunch,” she said. “Have you forgotten?”

“Yes, I know, but I thought we could get the customers to blow into the bag when they come out.” She noticed his eyes, apathetic and exhilarated at the same time. “I need to book a few more drunks before Christmas.” He looked at her. “The statistics are important as far as I’m concerned.”

“So I’ve gathered.”

“What do you say, then?” he said, checking his watch.

“Can’t you leave poor people alone just for once?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like that poor woman yesterday afternoon in Linnégatan. We wouldn’t have needed to be there at all if it hadn’t been for your statistics.”

“She didn’t stop,” he said.

“She tried to let you pass.”

“She was lucky she got away with it,” he said.

“Got away with what?” asked Serimov.

He didn’t answer.

“Got away with what?” she asked again.

“Arrogant bitches,” he said.

“You have a problem, Billy,” she said.

“So, should we wait here for a while and see what we can do?” he said.

“Certainly not. They live up there, and that’s where we’re going,” she said, pointing.

“In that case there was no need for me to drive down here first,” he said.

“I wanted to see the sea,” she said.

“The sea, the sea! I could kiss the sea!” he said.

Kiss my ass, she thought: She was good at swearing. She had a Russian background, after all. The Russian language is world champion when it comes to swear words. In Sweden people call them “rude words,” but a lot of the Russian swear words are beautiful, she thought, gazing out to sea again.

They got back into the car and drove up the steeply sloping streets.

“Here we are,” she said, and he pulled up.

“I’ll wait out here,” he said.

“Don’t harass the neighbors,” she said. She got out of the car and rang the doorbell.

Kristina Bergort answered after the second ring. Larissa could see Maja peeping out from behind her mother.

“Come in,” said Mrs. Bergort.

“I hope this isn’t too inconvenient for you,” Larissa said, aware of how silly it sounded. She had called in advance and Kristina Bergort had said that it was OK.

The girl was clinging to her mother.

“Magnus called to say that he couldn’t get away from work,” said Bergort.

You are the one I want to talk to anyway, Larissa thought, feeling awkward in the kitchen wearing her police uniform.

The girl looked at her belt and the gun sticking out like… like a… well, sticking out. Larissa realized that she hadn’t spoken to the girl yet.

“Hello, Maja,” she said.

The girl looked up, shyly, smiled quickly, and then looked down again.

“You can go back and play,” said her mother.

Maja turned around and Larissa could see a scratch on her upper arm, like a line of chalk. Larissa watched her walk away. She crossed over the threshold. Larissa was still watching. There was something odd. But what? There was something about the way she moved. What was it? Her leg? It was…

Maja was out of sight now.

“Is there something wrong with her leg?” Larissa asked.

“What? Her leg?”

“Maja’s leg. She seemed to be limping.”

“Limping? Maja? I haven’t noticed anything.” Kristina Bergort looked at her with an expression that could have been one of concern. “Surely I would have noticed?”

Larissa Serimov wondered what to say next. She ought to know. She knew why she’d come here.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” asked Mrs. Bergort.

Larissa thought about Billy Brorsson waiting outside, said “yes please,” and then her mobile rang.

“Are you going to be in there long?” asked Brorsson.

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll go for a little drive.”

She hung up and thought about the plight of humanity exposed to assault by Brorsson, and turned to Kristina Bergort.

“I’ve been thinking a bit more about that story Maja told you,” she said.