Frozen Tracks

28

ANGELA CALLED AS WINTER WAS LEAVING BIRGERSSON’S OFFICE. He saw his own home number on the display.

“Yes?”

“Erik, the nursery-school manager just called. Our nursery school, that is.”

“Is Elsa at home?”

“Yes, yes, thank God.”

“What did she want?”

“They saw a strange person hanging around.”

“OK, do you have her phone number handy?”

He called immediately on his mobile, still only halfway to his office.

He was sitting in her office, which was decorated with children’s Christmas drawings. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in this room, but the first time on business like this. The only people in the nursery school were the cleaning staff. The silence was strange, almost unnatural for rooms that were normally echoing with children’s voices. He’d been here before in the evening, for parents’ meetings, but then the quietness had been different, a grown-up murmur.

“Somebody filming them,” Winter said.

“Yes. A delayed reaction, you might say. Lisbeth started to think about it when one of the fathers picking up his kid started taking video footage,” said the manager, Lena Meyer.

“Where exactly was it?”

“As they were crossing the soccer field.”

“Where was he standing?”

He heard a timid knock on the door behind him.

“This should be her now. Come in!”

Lisbeth Augustsson opened the door. She nodded to Winter-she’d spoken to him many times, but they’d only exchanged a few words. She was about twenty-two, possibly twenty-five, hair in thick brown plaits, red ribbons. She sat down on the chair beside Winter.

“Where exactly was he standing when he was filming?” Winter asked.

She tried to describe the spot.

“He followed us too,” she said.

“Still filming?”

“Yes, it looked like it.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Well, I can’t be certain, obviously. I didn’t see him for all that long either. And he had a camera in front of his face.” She smiled.

“Nobody you’d seen before?”

“No.”

“What made you report this to Lena?” Winter asked.

“Well, there was this business about the girl who said she’d, er, spoken to somebody. Ellen Sköld. That makes you a bit suspicious.” She looked at Lena Meyer. “We’re always careful, of course.”

She knew nothing about the other children. Not much about Simon Waggoner, not yet. Winter and his colleagues wouldn’t be able to keep that secret for much longer.

“Have you ever seen anyone filming you before?” Winter asked. “When you were out on an excursion somewhere? Or here at the nursery school?”

“No, I can’t say I have. It was just today.”

“Please tell me exactly what happened, as accurately as you can,” said Winter.

“There’s not a lot to say. I looked up once and saw him but didn’t really think about it. I mean, you often see people with video cameras nowadays, don’t you? But then I looked again, and he was still there, filming-apparently filming us.” She threw her hands up. “And when he seemed to notice that I’d seen him, that I was looking at his camera, he turned it away and pretended to be filming the buildings on the other side of the street, or whatever.”

“Maybe he was,” said Winter.

“Was what?”

“Filming the buildings. Maybe he wasn’t pretending.”

“It looked like he was.”

“What happened next?” Winter asked. “Did you continue watching him?”

“Yes. I watched for a bit longer, but we had the children to think about. And he turned away after only a few seconds and walked off.”

“In which direction?”

“Back toward Linnéplatsen.”

“Did you see him from the side? Or from behind?”

“From behind, I think. I didn’t watch very long. I mean, we had other things to think about. But then I remembered it again, later.”

“Can you describe what he looked like?” Winter asked.

“Well… He was sort of normal looking. The camera was in the way so you couldn’t see his face. His jacket was blue, I think, and trousers, I assume.” She gave a laugh. “He wasn’t wearing a skirt, I would’ve remembered that, and, well-that’s about it.” She was still thinking. Winter had sat thousands of times with witnesses trying to remember. Everything they said could be accurate, but it could also be totally misleading. Colors that were definitely green could be yellow, six-foot men could be dwarfs, women could be men, men women, trousers could be… skirts. Cars could be mopeds and 100 percent certainly dogs could turn out to be camels. No. No camels had cropped up in any of his cases, not yet.

Children could be children. Cease to be children, disappear. Cease to exist. Or never be children again, never be whole persons again.

“He had a cap!” she said suddenly.

“You said before he had a camera in front of his head.”

“In front of his face. I said in front of his face. And not all the time I was watching him. I remember now that you could see the cap over the top of the camera. And I saw it as well when he turned to film the buildings on the other side, if that’s what he was doing.”

“What kind of a cap?”

“Well, it wasn’t a Nike cap. Not one of those baseball things.”

Winter thought about Fredrik Halders: He often wore a baseball cap over his shaven skull. Nike, or Kangol.

“More like an old man’s cap,” she said.

“An old man’s cap?” said Winter.

“Yes. One of those gray or beige things old men always seem to wear.”

Winter nodded.

“Yes, one of them,” she said. “Gray, I think, but I’m not sure. A sort of gray pattern.”

“Was he an elderly man?” Winter pointed to himself. “Like me?”

She smiled again, big teeth, perfectly shaped, white; Nordic, if you could call them that.

“I really couldn’t say,” she said. “But he could have been about your age. Despite the cap. He walked normally, he wasn’t fat or anything like that, he didn’t seem old. He wasn’t an old man.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I don’t know. But if he was wearing the same clothes, and carrying a video camera-well, I might.”

“Have you spoken to anybody else about this?” Winter asked. “Apart from Lena.” He nodded in the direction of Lena Meyer.

“No.”

“How many staff were out this afternoon with the children?”

“Er, three, including me.”

“And none of the others noticed anything?”

“I don’t know. As I said, I sort of forgot all about it. Until now.”

Winter stood up. Thought. He could see the group in his mind’s eye. Staff first, in the middle, and at the back. He’d seen a set up like that lots of times. What did they do? Pause, fuss around, carry on. It was December now. Not long to go before the holidays. Everybody was caught up in the spirit. Something to celebrate coming up. Everybody on vacation. In a way, the holiday had already started. What do you do when there’s a holiday mood in the air? You sing. Dance. Have fun. Perhaps you might want to record these moments, or this mood. Record it. Watch it again later. Record it. Keep it.

He looked at Lisbeth Augustsson.

“Did any of you have a video camera with you when you went out?”

“Er… No.”

“An ordinary camera, perhaps?”

“Er…”

He could see that she was thinking hard.

“Did any of you have a camera with you when you went out on this excursion?”

Lisbeth Augustsson looked at Winter with a curious expression.

“Good Lord! Anette had her camera with her! An ordinary film camera. She might have taken a few pictures when we were crossing the soccer field. She said she was going to take some, but I was looking in the other direction.” Lisbeth Augustsson looked at her boss and at Winter again. “She might have a picture of him!”

“Could be,” said Winter.

“Amazing that you thought of that,” she said.

“We’d have found out anyway when we spoke to the others,” Winter said. “Where can I get hold of Anette?”

Ringmar was waiting for Gustav Smedsberg. He could hear voices in the corridor, somebody trying to sing a Christmas carol. The echo was not to anybody’s advantage. A peal of laughter, a woman’s voice. Detectives winding down for the holiday.

But here we are not winding down, we’re winding up, up, up.

He called home but there was no reply. Birgitta ought to be at home by now. He needed to ask her what she wanted him to buy from the market.

He tried Moa’s mobile. “The number you have called cannot be reached at this time.”

He would have liked to call Martin, if he’d known what to say.

The phone call came from the duty officer. Smedsberg was waiting downstairs in the cozy foyer, “the charm suite,” as Halders called the reception rooms. The first stimulating contact the general public had with the police authorities, step one on the way to the ombudsman.

Gustav Smedsberg looked thin, standing on the other side of the security door. He seemed underdressed, wearing a cap that appeared to be more of an accessory than anything else. Denim jacket, a thin T-shirt underneath. Open neck. The boy’s face was expressionless; he might have been bored stiff. Ringmar beckoned to him.

“This way,” he said.

Smedsberg was shivering in the elevator up.

“It’s cold out there,” said Ringmar.

“Started yesterday,” said Smedsberg. “A bastard of a wind.”

“You haven’t gotten around to digging out your winter clothes, I take it?”

“These are my winter clothes,” said Smedsberg, scrutinizing the buttons in the elevator. He shivered again, and again, like sudden tics.

“I thought you were used to chilly winds where you come from out on the flats,” said Ringmar. “And how to protect yourself from them.”

Smedsberg didn’t respond.

They exited the elevator. The brick walls were a big help to anybody who wanted to suppress the Christmas atmosphere. The thought had occurred to Ringmar that morning. Or perhaps in his case he had lost the Christmas spirit already. Birgitta had said nothing when he got up. He knew she was awake, she always was. Silent. He’d said a few words, but she’d just rolled over onto her other side.

“Please come in,” he said, ushering Smedsberg into his office.

Smedsberg paused in the doorway. Ringmar could see his profile, a nose curved like that of his father. Perhaps there was something in his bearing reminiscent of the old man as well. And in his accent, although the boy’s was less pronounced.

“Please sit down.”

Smedsberg sat down, hesitantly, as if he were ready to leave at any moment.

“Will this take long?” he asked.

“No.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“The same thing we’ve talked about before,” said Ringmar.

“I don’t know any more about it than I did then,” said Smedsberg. “He stirred things up about Josefin, and that’s about it.”

“What do you mean? Who’s ‘he’?”

“Aryan, of course. Isn’t he the one we’ve been talking about all the time?”

“There are others involved as well,” said Ringmar.

“I don’t know them, like I said.”

“Jakob Stillman lived in the same building as you.”

“So did a hundred others. A thousand.”

“You said before that you didn’t know Aryan Kaite.”

“Yes, yes.” Smedsberg shook his head dismissively.

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“Yes, yes. What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Snap out of it,” said Ringmar, sternly.

“What’s the matter?” said Smedsberg, more alert now, but still with a remote, bored expression that wouldn’t disappear that easily.

“We are investigating serious violent crimes, and we need help,” said Ringmar. “People who lie to us are not being helpful.”

“Have I committed a crime?” Smedsberg asked.

“Why did you tell us you didn’t know Aryan Kaite?”

“I didn’t think it was significant.” He looked at Ringmar, who could see a sort of cold intelligence in his eyes.

“What do you think now, then?” asked Ringmar.

Smedsberg shrugged.

“Why didn’t you want to tell us that you knew somebody who’d been assaulted the same way you almost were?”

“I didn’t think it was all that important. And I still think it was just coincidence.”

“Really?”

“The argument I had with Aryan had nothing to do with anything… anything like this.”

“What did it have to do with?”

“Like I said before. He misunderstood something.”

“What did he misunderstand?”

“Look, why should I answer that question?”

“What did he misunderstand?” said Ringmar again.

“Er, that he had something going with Josefin.” Gustav Smedsberg seemed to smile, or at least give a little grin. “But he hadn’t checked with her.”

“Where do you fit in, then?”

“She wanted to be with me.”

“And what did you want?”

“I wanted to be free.”

“So why did you have an argument with Kaite, then?” Ringmar asked.

“No idea. You’d better ask him.”

“We can’t do that, can we? He disappeared.”

“Oh yes, that’s true.”

“The girl vanished as well. Josefin Stenvång.”

“Yes, that’s odd.”

“You don’t seem to be particularly worried.”

Smedsberg didn’t answer. His face gave nothing away. Ringmar could hear a voice outside in the hall, a voice he didn’t recognize.

“You and Kaite were such good friends that you both went to your home to help out with the potato picking,” said Ringmar.

Smedsberg still didn’t answer.

“Didn’t you?” said Ringmar.

“So you’ve been to my dad’s, have you?” said Smedsberg. All I need to do is to mention die heimat, Ringmar thought, and the boy’s back home again on that godforsaken plain.

“Didn’t you?” said Ringmar again.

“If you say so,” said Smedsberg.

“Why didn’t you tell us about your friendship with Aryan Kaite?” Ringmar asked.

Smedsberg didn’t answer.

“What did your dad think of him?” Ringmar asked.

“Leave the old man out of this.”

“Why?”

“Just leave him out.”

“He’s already in,” said Ringmar. “And I have to ask you about another matter that is linked to this business.”

Ringmar asked about Natanael Carlström’s foster son.

“Yes, there was one, I guess,” said Smedsberg.

“Do you know him?”

“No. He moved out before I-well, before I grew up.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No. What are you getting at?”

Ringmar could see that the boy no longer looked bored stiff. His body language had changed. He was more tense.

“Do you know his name?”

“No. You’ll have to ask old man Carlström.”

Ringmar paused for a few moments.

“You were the one who mentioned that branding iron. Marking iron. We’ve looked into it but didn’t get anywhere until we paid a visit to Carlström.”

“Why did you go there?”

“It was your dad who thought that Carlström might have owned an iron like that.”

“Oh.”

“Which he had.”

“Oh.”

“Did you use to have one on your farm?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“You said you did before.”

“Did I?”

“Were you making it up?” Ringmar asked.

“No. What do you mean?”

“You said you used to have irons like that.”

“I must have gotten it wrong,” said Smedsberg.

“How could you have done that?”

“I must have phrased it wrong. I must have meant that I’d heard about irons like that.”

We’ll come back to that, Ringmar thought. I don’t know what to think, and I don’t think the boy does either. We’ll have to come back to it.

“Carlström had one,” said Ringmar. “Or maybe two.”

“Really?”

“You seem to be interested.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

Ringmar leaned forward.

“It’s been stolen.”

Smedsberg was about to come out with another “really” but controlled himself.

“It’s vanished,” said Ringmar. “Just like Aryan Kaite has vanished. And he has a wound that looks as if it might have been caused by a weapon like that. And that wound might be able to tell us something.”

“Isn’t it a bit far-fetched for you to meet an old man who’s just had an iron like that stolen, and that it should turn out to be precisely the one that was used?” said Smedsberg.

“That’s what we’re wondering as well,” said Ringmar. “And that’s where you come in, Gustav.” Ringmar stood up and Smedsberg remained seated. “If it hadn’t been for you, we’d never have made that journey to the flats.”

“I didn’t need to say anything at all about a branding iron,” said Smedsberg.

“But you did.”

“Am I going to get fucked over for that, then?”

Ringmar didn’t respond.

“I’ll be happy to join in a search party for Aryan if that’s what you need help with,” said Smedsberg.

“Why a search party?”

“Eh?”

“Why should we send a search party out to look for Aryan?”

“I have no idea.”

“But that’s what you said.”

“Come on, that’s just something you say. I mean, a search party, for Christ’s sake, call it what the hell you like when you’re looking for somebody.”

“Search parties don’t work in big cities,” said Ringmar.

“Oh.”

“They work better in the countryside,” said Ringmar.

“Really?”

“Is he somewhere out there in the flats, Gustav?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where is he, Gustav?”

“For Christ’s… I don’t know.”

“What’s happened to him?”

Smedsberg stood up.

“I want to leave now. This is ridiculous.”

Ringmar looked at the boy, who still seemed to be freezing cold in his thin clothes. Ringmar could lock him up for the night, but it was too soon for that. Or perhaps too late. But the evidence was too thin.

“I’ll show you out, Gustav.”