Never End

20

Birgersson summoned Winter. When Winter entered his office, the super, unusually, didn't have a cigarette in his hand.

"Yep," Birgersson said. "I've packed it in." He looked almost as if he were apologizing. "My lungs have had enough. They really have."

"I've started," Winter said. "Again."

"I didn't even know you'd stopped," said Birgersson, taking a deep drag on his white nicotine inhaler. He took it out of his mouth and looked hard at it. "A ridiculous thing." He looked at Winter. "What's going on?" He indicated the chair in front of his desk. "Take a seat." Winter sat down, crossing his legs. "The young guy's background?"

"We don't have a clue."

"Is he a ghost?"

Winter didn't respond.

"Recently come down to earth?"

"I don't know, Sture."

"There's got to be an explanation."

"Yes."

"An illegal immigrant?"

"Why isn't he hiding away, in that case?"

"But surely he is? Pretty well, come to think of it."

"He met the girl. Angelika. All aboveboard, it seems."

"Love is all you need," Birgersson said.

"No," Winter said. "There is a limit. And that's where it's at."

"If you say so."

"I take it you've seen how this case has been developing?"

Birgersson nodded, and sucked at his ridiculous gimmick.

"It's developing outward, and collapsing inward. The more that happens, the less we know," Winter said.

"The opposite would have been preferable."

Winter smiled. Birgersson fiddled with his dummy cigarette. The sun shone in through the Venetian blinds, as usual. They were sitting there, as usual, talking over the latest tragedy. Everything was just as exciting as usual.

How is it going to turn out? Would the streets come up with a solution? Would all the threads come together in the end? Where do we start? Have I got them in my hand? Winter looked again at the ridiculous, empty holder Birgersson had in his mouth, flicking up and down like the back end of a wagtail. Ridiculous. He could have been somewhere else. Sunbathing on the rocks. Elsa and him. Five meters out. She's gasping for breath. They go for a drink. Sand in their sandwiches. Somebody kicking a ball. Living is easy. Not like this: nasty and sweaty and life threatening. Dead kids, hardly out of the nest. Nobody could care less about them apart from us, and we're paid for trying to figure things out.

Pack it in.

But that's not the only reason why.

"How's Halders?" Birgersson asked.

"Screwed up, I think."

"As usual, you mean?"

Winter didn't answer.

"Can he go on working? Really?"

"Yes."

"Talking to people?"

"Better than ever, it seems. He can't let go of the Bielke family."

"Should we?"

"Maybe, for the time being. We have another murder on our hands. Winter said.

"And the whole population will be back at work in a few days."

"Meaning what?"

"Everything will be starting up again."

"I'm impressed by your philosophical perspective," Winter said.

Birgersson took out his dummy cigarette and put it on his desk.

"That club, or whatever it is. For crying out loud, we ought to have pinned it down by now."

"If it exists at all."

"If it exists? What the hell do you mean?"

It's not so easy, working with folks who are detoxing, Winter thought.

"Take Bergenhem off the case and put somebody else onto it," Birgersson said.

"No. Not yet."

"Is it you or me who's in charge here, Erik?"

"Me."

Bergenhem was sitting in the bar. His tenth in two days. Other officers were in other bars. Everybody had been informed, questioned: the fire department, the health authorities, bar owners, trade unions, the general public. Known drinkers, known eaters. The in crowd. Whores. Pimps. Hoods. The ones who've survived, at least, thought Bergenhem, as he showed the photograph to the restaurant owner sitting on the chair beside him. He looked hard at the photograph. Nobody had recognized the location so far.

"You think it's here in Gothenburg?" asked the man, studying the table and the wall, the cutlery and the glasses, and the girl sitting there. Beatrice. And later Angelika. Bergenhem didn't mention that there was a five-year gap between the pictures.

"We don't know."

"So what you're saying is it could be anywhere at all, anywhere in the world?"

"Yes."

"It seems familiar," the man said. His name was Peter Nordin.

Bergenhem waited. There were no other customers in the bar. The bartender started brewing some coffee, then busied himself putting bottles of beer in the refrigerator behind the bar.

"Yes. I recognize it. There used to be a little cellar bar in Nordstan. It had an exposed brick wall just like that, with tables in front of it." He looked again at the photograph. "You see that shadow on the wall, on the edge there? Looking like a bunch of grapes, or something like that? Well, it was a bunch of grapes. There were several porcelain bunches of grapes hanging from the ceiling there." He looked at Bergenhem and burst out laughing.

"Awful!" He laughed again. "Just like the name they gave the place. Toward the end, at least. Barock. Spelled with a 'ck.' Have you heard that name before? Barock?"

"Did you go there?" Bergenhem asked.

"One of the few who did. Near the end."

"You mean it wasn't very popular?"

"Well, yes: but not with the general public, if you get my meaning." He looked again at the photograph. "It was an interesting place. The people who ran it kept changing the decor. They used to hang various tapestries over the walls. That kind of thing. The place looks bigger in this picture than it really was. Even though this is only a little corner. It was really a sort of side room, a kind of offshoot of the bar itself. Mainly for… well, for the staff, I suppose. Although there was a bar in there, too."

"Where is it?"

"Well… these pictures must be old ones. The place was demolished quite a few years ago. The whole building, and quite a bit more of old Nordstan. I think that building was one of the last to go."

"You're sure that the place has been demolished?"

"Why would I lie about that? The place was demolished at least three years ago. Absolute minimum."

"I'm not suggesting you're telling lies." Bergenhem was looking at the photograph of Angelika. "But the fact is that this photograph was taken just last winter."

Nordin examined it again.

"Hmm. I guess it must be somewhere else, then. But in that case, it's a pretty good replica." He pointed at the shadow once again, then looked at Bergenhem. "just look at that. Bunches of grapes."

Winter and Bergenhem were at the old address. New buildings on all sides: office blocks in red brick, newly designed cobbled streets to encourage the traffic of newly designed shoes. Where the club used to be was now a travel agency. The air was warm. Winter wondered if it shouldn't be cooler, given all the shadows.

"Do you think we should start digging?" Bergenhem asked. "Expose the basements?"

Winter tried to smile.

"The adventure continues," said Bergenhem.

A woman emerged from the travel agency. The window was full of photographs of beaches and palm trees. They should be showing pictures of snow, Winter thought. He could feel the sweat running down his back.

Bergenhem had been efficient in following up on the information he'd received. The old building had been demolished four years earlier. There could very well have been a club in the basement, but it hadn't yet been possible to establish that for sure. If there had been one, though, it had clearly been unlicensed. There was no aboveboard club registered there when the building was felled. Those were Ringmar's words: "The building was felled."

"Well, where does our Angelika fit into all this?" asked Winter, watching a man emerging from the front door next to the travel agency. He looked pale, not in the least cheerful. No doubt he'd taken his vacation in May, when the rainfall was the worst this century. Now he's busy writing reports. Just like me.

"We've got to track down the owners," said Bergenhem. "I figure they'll be at it again, somewhere else."

"Or buried under here."

"Ha, ha."

"Get looking for them," said Winter. "You'll have three men to help you."

"OK."

"I'll have a word with somebody I know."

Winter met Vennerhag at the café on the corner. He was wearing shorts, as was Winter.

"Is that really allowed when you're on duty?"

"Were you ever at Barock, Benny?" Winter asked, gesturing at the travel agency some fifty meters away. "That was the name of the place. Or at least, one of its names."

"No."

"Don't lie to me, Benny."

"If I'd been there I would've recognized the place from the pictures you showed me the last time we talked. You've got to trust me."

Winter made no comment.

"I'm your friend."

Winter swigged his Zingo soda from the bottle.

"Now that we think we know where, we want to know who." Winter drank again, and looked at Vennerhag over the neck of the bottle. "That's where my friends come in."

"Thank you."

"You don't even recognize the name?"

"No. But that's not so odd, Erik. There were clubs… and clubs. Were. Some… well, I know about them, and others are simply not of much interest, purely from a financial point of view. Not for me, at least."

"You and your, er, colleagues," Winter said.

"OK, OK. But I don't know anything about Barock, or whatever you said it was called. I knew there was a place here, but it was called something else. I can't remember what."

"What do you think the people who ran this place are doing now?"

"You want me to guess?"

"Yes, take a guess."

"I have no idea, honest. Now that I know where it was and what it might have been called, maybe I can get somewhere."

"Thanks for agreeing to help."

"Christ, Erik, I hope you're on the right track. That this place really is important for your… your preliminary investigation. Trying to find answers."

"In which case you've got something useful to do with your time, Benny."

Halders sat in Winter's office. Winter was standing by the window, smoking. There was a slight evening breeze now. Halders ran his hand over his hair. He was looking cheerful. He was there, which must mean somebody else was looking after his children.

"Aneta's with the kids tonight," Halders said.

"Good."

"She's sacrificing her free time."

Winter said nothing.

Halders stood up. "Jeanette's old man used to have some kind of restaurant business."

"So you said."

"I've tried to check him out, and it seems he was mixed up in that kind of thing."

"But legitimate, presumably?"

"What is legitimate when it comes to restaurants and bars in Sweden?" said Halders.

"Don't let the occasions when you've had to put up with poor service influence you," Winter said.

"He's apparently used to running that kind of place," said Halders. "Sort of on the side. He's never mentioned it, though."

"We haven't asked."

"We will now."

"Wait a while."

"Why?"

"Just hold back for a while."

"Why?"

"I don't want to be pulling at too many strings at the same time, that's why." Winter took a puff at his cigarillo. Just this one, then that's it. Not for at least an hour. "We've got a fresh murder and an old one, neither of them solved, and I've been thinking as you have that Jeanette Bielke fits into the pattern somehow, but I can't quite see how at the moment, and we have other leads that we need to pursue that are more pressing. By all means poke into Kurt Bielke's business interests, but hang on a bit before you talk to him."

Halders said nothing.

"OK?"

"They took the wall with them," said Halders.

"If it actually was a wall."

"Stage scenery?"

"Something like that."

"Unless the ghosts are at it again," said Halders. "Do you believe in ghosts, Erik?"

"People come and go in real life, too. Things exist, and then they disappear. Places vanish. But they still exist."

"Where are they, then?"

"Somewhere. We're going to find them."

Anne was on her way through the night, or was it the early morning? It depended where you drew the line. There were still a lot of people around in the center of town. Somebody shouted, but not to her. Andy wasn't there; she'd left the other place without telling him. She hesitated halfway up the steps to the outside part of the restaurant.

"It's full," said the doorman. His face was red after standing in the sun for so long, and it looked even redder in the neon lights. He looked like an idiot with his bleached hair standing up on end. Like somebody in a cartoon who's just seen something horrific.

Me, perhaps.

"I'm not going in anyway," she said, turning back.

There was a smell of cooking and alcohol all the way down the Avenue. Sunscreen, after-sun, all the other nasty stuff.

She waited for a streetcar to rattle by, then jumped onto her bike and pedaled away down the Allé. There was a slight breeze, and it felt like taking a lukewarm bath.

I'll take a bath when I get home. Light a candle in the bathroom and watch it burn down.

There weren't many cars around. One was behind her. Passed her and stopped at the traffic lights. She ignored the red light, turned left, and headed for home.