Never End

23

Winter waited in his office, which was illuminated by the gray light of dawn. The grayness was in tune with his mood. A strange feeling, as it was blended with the excitement he felt for what was coming next. Something was happening. He had a feeling of anticipation that was cold and, in its way,… undignified. It was like traveling through a barren landscape without hope, but feeling something reminiscent of hope even so.

There was a scent of newly woken heat from outside. Birds were singing again. The street on the other side of the river was being cleaned by a sweeper truck. He could hear the enormous brushes from where he was sitting.

The door was open, and in came a young man about twenty-five years old, accompanied by one of the forensics officers, who greeted Winter and then left. Andy looked as if his face had collapsed. His face had collapsed. Winter gestured toward the chair.

"What… what happened?"

Winter told him as much as he knew. But first he asked the young man's name.

"Andy."

"Your last name, too."

"Grebbe. Andy Grebbe."

Andy sat down. The T-shirt he was wearing had a tear in the left sleeve. His hair was cropped short but looked unkempt even so. There was a black ring under his left eye but not under his right. Winter could smell stale booze from the other side of his desk. Andy was sober enough now, but very tired. Nervous.

"When did you last speak to Anne?"

"Er… that would be tonight… no, I mean yesterday. Last night."

"When?"

"What do you mean? I said…"

"What time?"

"Er… about eight, I think. Eight, or thereabouts."

"Where?"

"Where? Nowhere… if you see what I mean. The telephone. I called her from home."

"And she answered?"

"Ans-of course she answered. I told you, I spoke to her."

Winter nodded.

"Then I called again later on, but she was out."

Winter nodded again.

"I left a message on her answering machine. It must still be there." He looked at Winter. A look that was white and red and black and tired, and maybe hounded. "If you play back her messages, it must be there."

"We have," Winter said. He tried to hold Andy's eyes. Was it now something would happen? Would he break down?

"OK. So you've heard it."

"Yes. What time did you call?"

"Er… after two. Half past two or so."

"Where from?"

"From a place in Vasastan."

He said the name of the bar. Winter knew the one.

"Why did you call?" he asked.

"Is this a cross-examination?"

"I'm just asking a few questions."

"Do I need a lawyer?"

"Do you think you do?"

"No."

"Why did you call?"

"Well… we were supposed to have met earlier, but I couldn't make it, and then she didn't show up at the bar, and so I called and said, would she give me a ring when she got home."

"Where were you going to meet?"

"At the bar."

"I meant the first time."

"At a café."

Andy said the name before Winter had time to ask.

"But you didn't go?"

"Yes, I did, but it was too late. She wasn't there."

"Had she been there?"

Andy didn't answer.

"Had she been there?" Winter asked again.

"I don't know. I looked inside, but she wasn't there, and there was nobody I knew to ask."

"What did you do then?"

"Wandered around town for a little while, and then went to the bar."

"And she didn't get in touch?"

"No."

"Where was she?"

Andy didn't answer. He took a drink of the water Winter had given him. His thoughts suddenly seemed to be miles away, in another world.

"Where was Anne last night?" Winter asked again.

"I don't know," said Andy, looking at something next to Winter. The grayness in the office had blended with the sharper light of morning, and it seemed to Winter that two lights mingling in that way caused confusion. It wasn't at all clear where they should go when they met in the middle of the room. The new light fell over Andy's face. Winter wondered why he was lying.

Halders wondered why she was lying. They were sitting in the garden. Her father was on the verandah. He's casting his shadow over her, Halders thought. He's thirty meters away, but his shadow is falling over her. It looks as if she's freezing cold, but it's eighty-five degrees.

"Don't you want us to put that bastard behind bars?" Halders asked.

"Of course," said Jeanette.

"You don't seem all that interested."

"I've told you all I know. All I… experienced. How I experienced it."

"What do you have to say about last night's murder?" Halders asked. Her expression didn't change. It was as if she hadn't heard.

"I know no more than anybody else," she said, before Halders had time to repeat the question.

"And you didn't know this girl either? Anne Nöjd?"

Jeanette Bielke shook her head.

"Never seen her?" asked Halders, showing her again a picture they'd found in the girl's house.

"I don't know."

"What about the house?"

She shrugged again.

"It's not far from here," Halders said.

"All those little houses look the same," she said.

Halders nodded.

"They shoot up like mushrooms."

Kurt Bielke had come down from the verandah and approached the table where they were sitting, underneath the maple that formed a sort of green roof.

"I think Jeanette needs to be left in peace now," he said.

Halders made no comment. Bielke looked at his daughter.

"You can go up to your room now, Jeanette."

She didn't look at her father. She started to get up. It's like slow motion, Halders thought.

"I haven't finished," he said. "We have some more to discuss."

"You always do."

Jeanette looked at Halders. He nodded to her, and she stood up.

"Good-bye, then, Jeanette," he said, stretching out his hand. Hers was cold as he shook it. She left.

"How is she?" Halders asked. He had turned to face Bielke.

"How do you think she is?"

"What's going to happen with her studies this autumn? University?"

"We'll have to see."

"What about the business?"

Bielke had been on the point of walking away, but stopped in his tracks and turned back to face Halders: "I don't follow."

"Your businesses. You are co-owner of several places of entertainment, aren't you?"

"Am I?"

"It's not a secret, is it?"

"Isn't it?"

"So it is a secret, is that it?"

"There are some questions you can't answer with a simple 'yes' or 'no,' " Bielke said. "Such as: 'have you stopped beating your wife?' or the one Mr. Police Constable just asked."

"Have you been beating your wife?" Halders asked.

Bielke took a step forward.

"Or your daughter?"

"What is this?"

Halders took a step back and turned away. He'd gone too far. That's the way I am. Maybe it was the right thing to do. Maybe I'd been intending to do that all the time, but didn't realize it.

"Bye, then," he said, over his shoulder.

"I'll be calling your fucking boss," Bielke said. He followed Halders out. Halders got into his car, which was parked in the shade of an oak tree. Bielke stood on the other side of the fence.

"Winter," said Halders, before closing the door. "DO Winter is my superior officer."

Halders drove south. There were patches on the road that might have been water, but it was a mirage. Caused by the sun. He squinted and lowered the visor whenever the sun attacked the car.

The buildings in Frolunda were shimmering in the heat. He parked in the vast parking lot, half of which had been dug up. The other half was being excavated as asphalt was being laid in the first one. Halders could smell the pungent fumes, made more acrid by the hot wind. The workers were in shorts, gloves, tough boots. Their skin was the color of the asphalt. This is what real workers are supposed to look like, thought Halders.

The square was full of people. Some had no doubt just come back from vacation, but not as many as this, he thought, as he bought a pear from a wrinkled old man from Syrabia, or some such place. There weren't all that many people around here who could retreat to their summer place for the season, or even go abroad. To Syrabia, or wherever. The shriveled old man had seen more of the world than most of these Swedish plebs who shuffled around all hunched up, glancing around furtively, with fat backsides and cheap clothes. For fuck's sake, Halders thought. What's the point? This country's gone to shit.

Mattias was waiting outside the sports center, at the bottom of the steps. The local drunks were staggering around on the other side. A woman sat with her head in her hands. A man-really more of a boy-was swigging from a bottle of whiskey that an older man was trying to reach out for from his lost world. As Halders walked past he could smell the stench of piss and stale alcohol. At least it's nice and warm for them, he thought.

"Have you been waiting long?" he asked Mattias.

"Well, sort of."

"Let's go, then."

"What's wrong with here?"

"The stench," said Halders, walking up the steps. "The stench from the dregs of society."

Mattias followed him, caught up.

"Why don't you kill 'em all off?" he asked, looking at Halders. Mattias was tall, taller than Halders. He seemed pretty heavy.

"We don't have the resources."

"You could make a start. Who would choose the victims?"

"Me," said Halders, as they sat down in the café in front of the big, red building.

"Nobody would want to use the indoor pool on a scorching day like this," said Mattias.

"It can be pretty good to take a sauna on a day like today, though," Halders said.

"Really?"

"Yes, really. I used to work for the UN around the Middle East, and we used to take saunas in places like Nicosia when the temperature outside was a hundred fifteen. It felt good afterward. Cool."

"If you say so."

"And what do you say, Mattias?"

"What about?"

"About Jeanette."

"Like I said when you called, I'm squeezed-out, for God's sake. There's nothing more to say."

"I spoke to her today."

"Oh yeah?"

"Not long ago. And to him."

"Her old man?"

"Yes."

Mattias looked up at the sky. It was motionless, as there were no clouds. A girl came to take their order. Halders asked for coffee and Mattias for an ice cream.

"You're right," said Halders.

"What about?"

"About him. Kurt Bielke."

"Right? What do you mean right? I don't remember saying anything about him."

"There's something funny about him. Know what I mean?"

The boy said nothing. Their orders came. The ice cream had already started to melt. Mattias eyed it without touching it.

"Take him, too," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"When you're choosing who to kill off."

The vacation season is always a problem for the police investigating a murder.

Winter was reading the file on Beatrice Wägner. Newspaper cuttings now.

The house-to-house operation hasn't produced much information. Most people aren't even at home," says Superintendent Sture Birgersson.

Police Working on Witness Statements Today.

It should say the police are working on witness statements, thought Winter. These reporters mangle the language. The police are working on witness statements today. Five years later. The old ones, and the new ones. And the police are still wondering about the missing witnesses.

The phone rang. Winter's mother, her first call for a few days. There was a rustling on the line from the Costa del Sol.

"I heard on the news that it's still warmer in Scandinavia than it is in Spain."

"You should congratulate us," he said.

"Just you wait and see, if it goes on like that. It'll be unbearable. You're talking to somebody who knows."

"Is that why you're still there in the south of Spain?"

"I'm coming in August, you know that. Then it's absolutely impossible to live down here. Impossible."

"You'll be welcome."

"Have you thought about a house yet, Erik?"

"No."

"But Angela said that…"

"Angela said what?"

He could hear the sharpness in his voice.

"What's the matter, Erik?"

"What do you mean? What did Angela say?"

"She just said that you might be looking for something in the autumn. Maybe."

"Really?"

"What's the matter, Erik?"

"Nothing. It's hot, that's all. Hot, and there's a lot to do."

"I know."

"Oh, do you?"

He could hear the rustling on the line again, the fragmentary chatter from a hundred thousand voices all over Europe.

"Erik?"

"Yes, I'm still here."

"Is everything alright with you? With you and Angela?"