Never End

8

Winter passed on shaving. He put on a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of linen pants. Angela and Elsa were both asleep when he left at six-thirty. It was cool on the stairs. There was still a smell of paint after the renovations in early summer. He missed the ancient smell from the walls and the shiny wood of the banisters. They had always been there, ever since he had moved into the apartment ten years ago. Now it was like starting all over again. Which it was, in fact. Which means that the renovations and the new smell did fit in, he thought, as he emerged through the front door and into the balmy morning.

The Public Works Office was busy cleaning up Vasagatan, the brushes under the strange-looking contraptions scraping against the road surface and water trickling away toward the east, the same direction he was walking in. The Avenue was empty, completely empty. He could hear a streetcar, but couldn't see it.

There was no wind over Heden. The big thermometer on the wall of the building opposite said seventy-five. It was 6:50 a.m. and already seventy-five degrees. These were tropical conditions. It had been over seventy all night. When the average temperature over twenty-four hours exceeds seventy degrees, that's tropical.

He took the elevator up to his office, which was unlocked. Inside he noted the same smell as always. Nothing new there. He'd left the window ajar all night, but it hadn't made any difference.

The papers were still on his desk. His reading glasses on top. He had one pair here and another pair at home. He was starting to have problems with his long-distance vision too. Before long he'd be groping his way along walls, being guided. Pushed in a wheelchair. He was forty-one, after all.

A male witness had said he'd heard a scream from the park. It had been about 2:00 a.m., maybe closer to one-thirty. Half an hour to an hour after Beatrice had disappeared into the trees. The man lived nearby and was on his way home from a private party. He'd been drinking, but felt "clear in the head," as he put it, and one of the interviewers had noted that his account seemed reliable.

He'd gone into the park to investigate and passed about fifteen meters from the place where Beatrice's body had been found, but he'd neither seen nor heard anything else. He'd thought he'd heard noises before then, as if somebody was being chased. Yes, chased. A scream, or maybe two. But then nothing more.

Winter remembered the witness. He hadn't interviewed him himself, but he'd met him briefly a few days later. He recalled that the man had still seemed jumpy, or perhaps he was always like that. Jumpy.

He'd run away from the park after investigating that scream and raced to the nearest residential building, and on the sidewalk outside it he'd stopped a couple "about thirty-five years old" who had both been "dressed in white," and had told them what he'd heard. The couple had just walked through the park and the woman thought she might have seen somebody, she'd told the jumpy witness.

She thought she might have seen somebody.

The police had never spoken to her, nor to her companion. Winter remembered how they'd tried to trace that couple "dressed in white." Urged them to contact the police.

It was exactly like that business with the man and the boy packing their car in the middle of the night. It was as if they didn't exist. Perhaps the couple weren't supposed to be together at that time and in that place. Such facts tend to prevent witnesses from coming forward. Private problems, what is a murder compared to such considerations? An illicit affair. The sentence passed by society on illicit affairs is far too harsh, Winter thought. Possible unfaithfulness gets in the way of the police doing their job. Can you pass laws about morals? Something to tone down the condemnation would help, bearing in mind all the investigations that come up against a brick wall because of it.

But the man and the boy… Five years later and still not a word from them, even though neither of them could very well have forgotten packing a car in the middle of the night near a park in the center of Gothenburg.

There was something else as well.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his nose. He looked at his watch: eight o'clock. In two hours he would be seeing Jeanette Bielke at her home. He'd asked her where she'd prefer to talk, and she'd said at home.

He went to the coffee room and made himself a cup. He was the only one there. They'd canceled today's meeting. He'd have to sum up tomorrow, but everybody knew what they had to do today.

When he got back from his discussion with Jeanette, he would be expecting to know the outcome of the checks on known felons, potential suspects. They were likely to come up empty, but even that was an outcome of sorts. Elimination. This or that person couldn't have done it. Not this time. A convicted rapist had a solid alibi for that particular night. This particular murderer had been in jail. That one had been in bed asleep, with cast-iron proof. The ruthless GBH merchant had been busy beating up somebody else at that moment, but at the other end of town, or the other end of the country. Or somewhere abroad.

And so on, and so on.

The pavement outside looked white in the glow of morning. It was probably eighty-five degrees by now. Just like Marbella. He thought about his father, buried in a pretty little churchyard on the mountainside overlooking the sea at Puerto Banus, and the house in Nueva Andalucia where his mother had decided to stay put.

Winter had been present when his father died. Had attended the funeral, spent the night in the garden with the three palm trees, and eventually managed to think about nothing at all.

He returned to his office. The sun seeped in through the Venetian blinds, creating patterns on the brick walls of the corridors.

Back in his office, he stood in front of the window, smoking. It was his first of the day, after nearly two hours' work, and that was a step forward. Tomorrow he'd work for an extra fifteen minutes before his first Corps.

He sat down again and put on his glasses.

There was another thing. A woman in her twenties had been attacked and raped by a "slim" and "quite tall" man three days after the murder of Beatrice. There were similarities-but then, there always were in rape cases. This woman said she thought the man had been talking to himself when he attacked her, "mumbling," as she described it in the report Winter was holding in his hand.

The house was overlooked by trees that could be a hundred years old. The house itself might also be a hundred years old, Winter thought. A well-preserved centenarian. Old money. Like so much around here, the oldest part of Längedrag. He had grown up only a mile or so closer to town, biked along these streets occasionally. Welcome to Pleasantville.

Two boys came toward him on skateboards. They were good. He stood to one side, then continued along the street and up the drive to the house. A man was sitting on the verandah and stood up when he saw Winter coming up the steps. They shook hands. Jeanette's father. Winter hadn't met him before. Nor had he met Jeanette, it had been Halders. But Halders had different problems today.

"Is this really necessary?" Kurt Bielke asked. He was shorter than Winter, but didn't look up when he spoke to him. His tone was not aggressive, more of a troubled sigh.

That was a good question. How many times could one come back to the victim without her becoming resentful? That would do more harm than good.

"If you push them too hard you'll get all you want out of them in the end, but is what you get the truth?" Halders had said two days ago, when they were sitting in Winter's office. A good point. You can overdo questioning.

"We need to talk to Jeanette a little bit more."

"We?" said Bielke. "I can only see one of you."

"I."

What do you need to talk about? She's told you a hundred times now what she's been through."

Winter made no reply. He wondered whether there was any point in explaining about all the little details that could slowly find their way into a victim's consciousness, bits of an experience that build up to form something more substantial. Sometimes everything could come out at once. At 2:00 a.m. in a lonely place, like a sword in the soul. If Jeanette remembered now it would make things easier for her later.

"Things sometimes become clearer after a while," said Winter. "After a few days."

"What kinds of things?" Bielke was gazing into the distance behind Winter. He still didn't sound aggressive. His face was tense, stiff, as if it was molded aluminum. "Exactly what happened second by second during the rape? How he pulled the noose around her neck, or what?"

Winter said nothing.

"What good will it do her to remember all the details?"

"I don't know," said Winter.

"Why are you here then?"

"There's been a murder," said Winter.

Bielke looked at him. He'd moved closer. Winter thought he could smell alcohol, but it might have been shaving lotion. Shaving lotion was alcohol, after all. Bielke wiped his brow. Winter could see the sweat at his hairline. He was feeling the heat himself, now that they'd been standing still for a while on the verandah under a canopy that seemed to raise the temperature, if anything. The verandah must be like a sauna during the afternoon.

"My God, yes," mumbled Bielke. "I should have realized." He wiped his brow again. "You think it might be the same… criminal?"

"It could be the same person," Winter said. "We have no proof, but it's a possibility."

"You call it a possibility?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I wouldn't have used that word," said Bielke.

He blinked repeatedly. Winter suddenly had the feeling that Bielke was thinking about something quite different. He seemed lost in memories.

"Can I see Jeanette now?" asked Winter, taking a step to one side.

"She's up in her room." Her father backed away, as if the path was now clear to walk on. Cleared of mines. "She didn't want to come down."

Winter entered the house with Bielke behind him. Bielke pointed up a staircase to the left of the door. Winter could hear the sound of clinking glass and china coming from somewhere inside the house. He saw nobody else as he went up the stairs. The house reminded him of a palace.

Jeanette's door was open. Winter could see the corner of a bed, and a window in the shade of one of the big trees. The uncomfortable feeling he'd had in the car on the way here had grown stronger after the conversation with the girl's father. It crept all over him, inside all his professional thinking. Angela would say that was no bad thing. That it had to be that way, or it was not good, not good at all.

"Come in," she said, when he knocked on the door frame. He still couldn't see her. "Come on in."

She was sitting in an armchair. There was a sofa and a table, and a bit farther away a desk, next to a door that he could see led into a private bathroom. Old money, or new, or a combination of both.

She was brushing her dark brown hair. A face without makeup, as far as he could see. Jeans, T-shirt, no socks. A fine gold chain round her neck. She continued brushing her hair with long strokes and her face distorted slightly with each one: her eyes narrowed, giving her an almost oriental look.

She gestured toward the sofa. Winter sat down and introduced himself.

"It was a different one before," said Jeanette.

Winter nodded.

"Is that a sort of tactic?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You send different people to take care of the… talking. Interrogation, or whatever you call it."

"Sometimes," said Winter. "But not on this occasion."

"What do you mean by that?"

Winter didn't reply.

"I liked the one who was here before," said Jeanette, putting down her brush. "Fredrik… Inspector Halders." She looked at Winter. "Isn't that good? In which case it's a rotten tactic to change that, don't you think?"

OK, thought Winter, I'll tell her. And he explained what had happened to Halders's ex-wife.

"I won't ask anything else," she said.

"Is it OK if I do?" Winter leaned forward on the sofa. She nodded. A bird flew against the window, then flew off without her seeming to notice the dull thump on the pane. "Is there anything that's… come to mind since you last spoke to Fredrik? Anything at all?"

She shrugged.

"Like what?" she asked.

"Anything at all. From that evening. That night."

"I prefer not to think about it. I told that to… Fredrik as well." She started brushing again, and her face changed. "All I can think about is, am I going to get AIDS or something." She was brushing even more vigorously, and looked at Winter through eyes that were mere slits now. "Or HIV, rather. I don't know the exact terminology."

Winter didn't know what to say. He considered getting up and smoking a Corps by the window.

"Do you mind if I stand by the window and smoke?"

"Course not," she said, and there might even have been the trace of a smile when she added: "But look out for Dad, don't let him see you." She looked away. "He sees everything. He knows everything."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing. But look out."

"Look down, you mean," said Winter, standing up and taking the slim white packet from his left breast pocket and removing the cellophane from a cigarillo.

"What did you say?"

"I have to look down from here, to look out to make sure your dad doesn't see me."

"Ha, ha."

Winter opened the window and lit his cigarillo. The lawn looked about as big as a football field between the branches of the trees. He could hear the clink of ice cubes in a glass from down below, and faint voices that he couldn't quite catch. Something was poured into a glass. Half past ten, not time for a lunch drink yet. But it was holiday time. He blew smoke out of the window and turned back into the room.

Perhaps their daughter had been infected with HIV.

"What I meant a minute ago when I said I might never be sure about the terminology was that I was supposed to be starting my medical studies this autumn," she said, "but I'm not going to bother now."

"Why not?"

"Ha, ha again."

Winter took a drag at his cigarillo and blew the smoke out through the window. He heard a woman saying something in what sounded like an agitated voice and Kurt Bielke came into view as he strode across the lawn and then along a path to a black car standing in the drive. He started the engine and drove away toward the center of town. Winter remained standing with his back to the room. He heard a lawn mower, saw a cascade of water coming from a sprinkler, saw the two boys coming back on their skateboards, saw a woman with a baby carriage. Everything was normal out there in paradise.

"Do you dream about what happened in the park?" Winter asked after half a minute, turning to face the room.

"Yes."

"What do you dream?"

"That I'm running. Always the same. Running, and I can hear steps coming after me."

"What happens next?"

"I'm not really sure… it's mainly that… running… chasing."

"You never see anybody?"

"No."

"No face?"

"Afraid not." She paused in her brushing and looked at Winter. "That would be great, wouldn't it? If I saw a face in my dreams that I'd never seen in reality, and it turned out to be him. That it was that particular face." She put the brush on the table again. "Would that suffice as proof?"

"Not on its own."

"Too bad."

"But you haven't seen a face?"

"Not then, and not now. In my dreams."

"Do you get dragged?"

"What do you mean, dragged?"

"Does anybody drag you in those dreams? Pull you, try to carry you off?" Winter took another puff. "Drag you."

"No."

"What happened in… reality?"

"I've already answered that. I don't know. I fainted." She seemed to be thinking about what she'd said. "I must have."

"But when you came around you were in a different place from where you'd been walking? Where you remembered that you'd been walking before you were attacked?"

"Yes, it must have been."

"When did you come around?"

She brushed and brushed. Winter could see the suffering in those narrow eyes. It was as if she were trying to brush the demons out of her head with vigorous movements, flattening her hair against her scalp.

"Sometimes I'm sorry I came around at all," she said.

Winter heard the noise of a car behind him and saw Bielke park in the middle of the drive and walk briskly into the house. He could hear voices, but no words.

"Please pass on my greetings to him… the other detective. Fredrik."

"Of course."

"Is he at work?"

"Not at the moment."

"Surely he won't be able to work again after what happened? Not for a very long time?"

Winter looked at her. If you can live, you can work. He thought of what she'd said about coming around, and not coming around.

He heard the sounds of glass and china again from the verandah. Whatever had been said down there hadn't prevented them from having lunch.

"Excuse me," said Jeanette, going into the bathroom and closing the door behind her.

Winter looked around. The room was tidy, almost neurotically so. Everything was neat; in piles, rows. He went to the bookcase. The books were arranged in alphabetical order, by author name.

"Neat and tidy, eh?"

He turned around.

"Since… it happened I've done nothing but clean up in here," she said, nodding in the direction of the books. "Now I'm wondering whether to arrange them by subjects instead."

"There are a lot of books," Winter said.

"But not so many subjects."

"Mostly fiction, I see."

"What do you read?"

Winter felt like laughing. He did. "I read fewer and fewer real books. Literature. But I'm going to change that. I'll be taking a long time off soon. At the moment I read mainly reports connected with preliminary investigations. Witness interviews, stuff like that."

"Exciting."

"It can be very exciting," said Winter. "And I'm not kidding. But first you have to learn how to interpret the language. Different police officers have different languages. When they write their reports. Sometimes it's a bit like trying to crack a code."

"What's so exciting about it?"

"When you come across something that's linked to something you've read somewhere else. And when you eventually see something that you've stared at a hundred times before without actually seeing it. It was there all the time, but you hadn't noticed it."

"What do you mean?"

"You haven't realized the significance. Or you may have interpreted it wrongly. But then the other shoe drops." Winter thought about lighting another Corps. But he didn't. He sat down in her armchair.

"I've stolen most of the books in there," she said.

Winter said nothing, but stood up, walked to the window, and lit another cigarillo after all. There was a middle-of-the-day stillness out there now. Everything he'd heard before was silent.

"Did you hear what I said? Stolen!"

"I heard."

"Aren't you going to do anything about it?"

"I don't believe you."

"Really?"

"Tell me about the sounds he made."

"Huh?"

"You said before that he'd made sounds you couldn't understand. Talk about it."

"I have talked about it; it was exactly like you said. Just a noise. That's what I heard."

"Have you thought any more about it?"

She shrugged.

"Could you make out any words?"

"No."

Winter thought for a moment. "Can you try to show me what it sounded like?"

"Show you what it sounded like? Are you crazy?"

"It might be important."

"So what?"

"What's happened to you could happen to somebody else." He looked at her. "Has happened to somebody else."

"I know."

Winter nodded. "Good."

"It's a bit much, though, asking me to… to imitate that bastard."

"Think about it."

"For Christ's sake, that's exactly what I don't want to do."

"OK, I understand."

"It must be difficult."

"What do you mean?"

"Being forced to ask all these questions when you know the person you're asking wants to be left alone. Ought to be left alone."

"It is difficult, yes."

"There you are, you see."

"I can't avoid it. I'm not here for fun."

"But you chose to do your job."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Let me think about it," said Winter with a smile.

"Only until next time," she said. He couldn't see if she was smiling as well. He could feel a breath of wind through the window. He noticed a cloud in the west. Suddenly it was there.