Never End

13

There was nothing in the wardrobe he hadn't seen before.

Nobody had moved the clothes since he and Bergenhem had been there on their first search and removed sweaters and pants, a job he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. He had an innate reluctance to touch dead people's clothes. He wasn't cut out to be a forensics officer. Those clothes would never be worn again. He'd seen it before: they'd lie there for years on their shelves and in their drawers, just as all the furniture would stay exactly where it had been, the papers would still be on the desk, the books on their shelves, the few ornaments would be untouched.

They were all concrete memories now, memories they didn't want in that house, but they didn't have the strength to obliterate them. Or the will. Or both, he thought, as he closed the wardrobe door.

What am I looking for? If he knew, he wouldn't be here, intruding on the despairing parents in the next room. If he knew, he would already have found it, taken it away to be examined under a brighter light.

A secret.

The thought had been in the back of his mind since he'd spoken to Jeanette's father that first time. There was a secret. Either the father or the daughter was hiding something. Maybe both of them. Something they hadn't said. It wasn't something he could point to like a physical piece of evidence, but it had to do with the crime committed on the daughter, the rape. He couldn't pin it down, not yet. But he could sense it. And Halders could sense it. He needed Halders. This was a case for Halders as well, a complicated case that required a sort of thinking that aimed straight for the target, without too many sidetracks.

And here he was now, in this room that would only ever allow in a mixture of half light and half darkness through the closed Venetian blinds.

He sat down at the desk and looked at a photo of Angelika on a jetty by the sea. A young black body and a smile as big as the horizon, and just as white.

These confounded photographs that took no account of the future. He had already stared at a thousand pictures similar to this one, like a clairvoyant predicting a tragedy that is going to happen. Everything in photographs like these acquires a significance different from what one sees on the surface, it seemed to him. When I look at this picture, it's as if I'm coming to that jetty from the future, with a death announcement.

Angelika's father had no secret of that kind. Winter could hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. Her father-an adoptive father, but her father even so-had been genuinely ignorant about his daughter's pregnancy and possible boyfriends.

But did Angelika have a secret? Who was it she had come up against in the night? Just like Beatrice she'd split off from her friends and been alone. Or had she met the man who'd made her pregnant some eight weeks earlier?

What had she done then? She had almost finished her twelve years of schooling and was on her way out into the big wide world. Did she bump into a rapist and murderer who lay in wait for his victims in the summer night? A coincidence. Bad luck, to put it mildly. Or was there a motive behind it? Was it a planned crime?

The location could have been carefully selected… in either case. By the madman. Or by the murderer who was waiting for somebody in particular, just for her.

But then this wasn't about Beatrice Wägner, or Jeanette Bielke. Or was it?

Maybe the three girls had something in common that had led to their attacks, maybe it wasn't just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had they done something that… linked them? Could that be it? For God's sake, I need to concentrate on this particular murder. It's possible to find common denominators in everything.

Winter sat with his head in his hands, thinking, then stood up and opened one of the desk drawers. He needed a cigarello, but controlled his craving. It had gotten stronger since he'd become a father. He had thought it would grow weaker, or maybe disappear altogether, but it had become worse. He was smoking more than ever. That meant it was time to stop. Angela's discreet hints had slowly developed into something else. Not nagging. Never that. But maybe… irritation. It wasn't just the doctor in her. It was healthy common sense. Healthy.

He stood up, walked through the house, and as soon as he was outside he lit a Corps.

When he came back he searched the room methodically. He spent some time studying the photograph again, her skin against the water. He opened the desk drawer and took out the eight bundles of photographs he'd just been through. He started once again, sorted them into small piles, resorted them. Angelika in various locations, mostly outdoors. Smiling, not smiling. He put the outdoor pictures together, the indoor ones together. Summer snapshots. Winter snapshots. The bright colors of autumn leaves. Angelika in a snowdrift, black, black, white, white. Angelika on a hillside in spring with wood anemones gleaming white. Angelika with her mother and father, on the same hillside: her parents so pale after the winter they looked almost ill.

There were no dates on the photos, but they all seemed to have been taken during the last year. It was a guess, but became more than that when he checked the dates on the envelopes. There were nearly three hundred pictures. It was like an open diary of her last year. Summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer again. Her last summer, or half summer, he thought, and turned to a series of photographs taken at her graduation party. Flowers, balloons, all the traditional things, a one-year-old Angelika enlarged eighteen times on a poster hanging above their heads.

There were a lot of people standing around, in a wide semicircle, a lot of faces. Winter recognized her parents, but nobody else. Angelika was wearing her white cap and laughing at the camera.

That was six weeks ago.

Winter continued sorting the photos into different piles. Why am I doing this? Is it a sort of private therapy because this case is so goddamn distressing? A sort of patience game? Patience. It was all a matter of patience.

The birds were singing outside the window. After a break, the rain was now pattering against the panes once again. Winter had been sitting with a photograph of Angelika in some kind of room with an exposed brick wall behind her. The brick was… well, brick colored. She was looking straight at the camera, but not smiling. Her face was actually expressionless, it seemed to him. There were a glass and some bottles on a table in front of her. A few empty plates with what could be some food leftovers. There was a shadow of something in the top left-hand corner of the picture. A lamp shade, perhaps, or something hanging on the wall.

It was definitely indoors, the light was coming from all directions, and he could see no suggestion of daylight. Maybe there was a faint, shadowy outline of the photographer.

He put the picture down and picked up another one with Angelika in half profile at the same table in front of the same wall, but with no shadow in the top left-hand corner. It was taken from a different angle.

A restaurant, maybe, Winter thought. A bar.

The photos had been in the same envelope as the winter pictures. Maybe they had been taken around the same time. He hadn't found any negatives with them.

Perhaps it was a place she often went to. Maybe one of her regular haunts. Did they have any information about the places she used to go to in her free time? Yes. There were some. Was this brick wall in any of them?

There were no other photographs of places of entertainment or restaurants or bars among the three hundred pictures Winter had sifted through and laid out in about a dozen piles on the table. Not one taken indoors. There were a few of sidewalk cafes. There was a waiter making a face in one of them.

He stood up, left the room, and went to look for Lars-Olof Hansson, who was sitting by himself in the dining room, watching the rain trickle down the windowpane.

"There's something I'd like you to take a look at," said Winter. "If you've got a minute."

"Only one," said Hansson. "I'm waiting for the rain to run down this Windowpane." He pointed. "It can't make up its mind."

Winter nodded, as if he understood.

"What is it?" Hansson asked.

"Some photos," said Winter. "I'd like you to take a look at them." He gestured toward the hall. "In Angelika's room."

"I'm not going in there." Hansson tore his eyes away from the windowpane. There was a smell of both heat and dampness in the room, like the air outside. The wind was making the trees sway. It was like dusk both inside the room and in the garden on the other side of the glass, which was streaked with rain. "I haven't been in there since it happened."

"I'll bring them here," said Winter, going out and returning with the photographs. He handed them to Hansson. The man looked at them, but didn't seem to take them in.

"What's this?" he asked.

"I don't really know," said Winter. "Some kind of a bar. A restaurant, maybe. Don't you recognize it?"

"Recognize what?" asked Hansson, looking at Winter.

"The place. The wall in the background. Or anything else. Angelika's sitting there after all, and I wondered if you knew where it is."

Hansson took another look at the photo he was holding in his hand.

"No," he said. "I've never been there."

"Angelika was there," said Winter. "There were a few pictures in her desk drawer taken there."

"I have no idea where it is," said Hansson. "And… does it make the slightest difference?"

"I don't know," said Winter.

"I mean, she used to go to several different places, the way young people do. I never kept a check on them." He looked at the picture again. "Why should it be important to know where that brick wall is?"

"It depends on who else was there," Winter said.

"Angelika was obviously there," said Hansson. "Maybe she was alone."

"Somebody must have been holding the camera," said Winter.

"Timer control," said Hansson, producing a series of cough-like chuckles. It sounded like an explosion in the enclosed room. "Sorry," he said, when he finished.

"She was there not long ago," Winter said.

Hansson seemed too tired and far too desperate to ask how Winter could know that.

"Other people might have seen her," said Winter. And seen other people as well, he thought.

He had another idea. He went back to Angelika's room and got the pictures of the graduation party, passing them to Hansson, who reached out a hand in a way that seemed almost apathetic.

"It's her graduation party," Hansson said.

Winter nodded. "Could you help me by identifying the people in the picture?"

Hansson studied the photograph.

"Even the ones with their backs to the camera?"

"If you can."

Hansson pointed at the photograph.

"That fatty over there on the left," he looked up at Winter, "that's Uncle Bengt. My brother, that is. He's looking the other way and chewing at a turkey leg or something." He held up his hand to his mouth. "Compulsive eater."

"Who else do you recognize?" Winter asked.

Hansson named them one after the other, sticking his index finger into their faces.

When he'd finished, there were still four left.

"Never seen them before," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"Why the hell shouldn't I be?"

Winter looked at their faces. Three men and a woman. Two of the men looked about forty. One was dark and the other blond, with a beard and glasses. There was something vaguely familiar about him. The third was a boy of around Angelika's age. The woman looked around forty too, maybe a bit younger. She was on the outside, as if about to step out of the picture. She was looking away, in another direction. One of the men was standing next to the boy. The man looked like the boy, or maybe it was the other way around. Southern European appearance, dark and yet pale, pale faces. The man with glasses and beard was holding a balloon and laughing, just as Angelika was laughing. Winter tried to think where he might have seen him before. He didn't recognize the face. Maybe it was his bearing, leaning forward slightly.

"Never seen them before," Hansson repeated.

Winter felt his flesh creep. Something was happening right now, right there. Something's happening. He looked at the four people with the unknown faces. It was as if the others standing around the girl were known to him, now that Hansson had identified them. But these four were strangers.

They could have been sent from some unknown place. Something was happening.

"Isn't that a little strange?" he asked.

Hansson shrugged. "There were a lot of people at the school hall, you can see that for yourself." He pointed at one of the pictures. "I guess these people I don't know got in this photo by mistake."

"Is that likely?" Winter nodded toward the picture. "They look like they're… part of it. Like they know Angelika."

"Well, I don't know them, in any case."

"You didn't speak to them?"

"I just said I don't know who they are, for Christ's sake."

"OK."

Neither of them spoke. Winter could no longer hear any rain pattering against the windows. He could hear a car driving past, the sound of the tires on wet asphalt.

"What the hell were they doing there?" said Hansson suddenly, looking again at the photo. "I didn't invite them." He looked at Winter again. His expression had changed. "I didn't notice them at the time. I suppose I should have."

"There were lots of people there, as you said yourself."

"They couldn't have been there," said Hansson.

"What do you mean?"

"They showed up… afterward." He looked at the photo again, then up at Winter, who could smell his sweat and the odor of fear and despair. "Don't you understand? They showed up later! They'd been sent to that goddamn party but nobody could see them!" He stared into Winter's eyes like a blind man. "Nobody saw them. Angelika didn't either. But they came with a message. A message from Hell!"

He continued staring right through Winter's head like a blind man.

"And they've gone back!" he shouted.

He needs counseling, thought Winter. Or he may be right, but in a way I don't understand.

Hansson's expression changed again. He shook his head and stared at the photograph in his hand. "You'll never find this group," he said.

"So you think they belong together? Like a… group?"

"It doesn't matter," said Hansson. "They don't exist."