Never End

24

It was silent. Winter braced himself to listen to a murder.

He'd brought a new Pat Metheny CD with him the day before yesterday, but he still hadn't played it. It was on the pile on the shelf above the Panasonic, to the left of the window.

He put the tape recorder on the table. The birds had stopped singing outside. He turned on the message from Anne Nöjd's answering machine.

Screams and… and that other voice, like something from hell. Like something totally inhuman, he thought. Would they be able to separate the voices? Put them side by side and then listen?

There was a message there, unintentional. There's a message in everything.

Jeanette had talked about something her attacker had said. Three times perhaps, the same thing. She hadn't seen his face, but she had heard his voice. The sound. Assuming it was the same attacker.

Were there any words there? Real, actual words? Would it be possible to separate everything and hear the words, if there were any? Or parts of sentences? Filter the sounds? It should be possible. There were technicians in the building, only fifty meters away, and if they couldn't do it, there were always the sound technicians at Swedish Radio.

There was a knock on the door, and Ringmar came in. He was not alone. She looked scared.

Jeanette listened to the recorded message. Winter had tried to prepare her for it as much as possible. It wasn't possible.

"I don't want to," she said after three seconds.

"It hasn't even started yet."

"I know what it is, though."

"You kno-"

"Can't you leave me alone!?" she shouted. She got to her feet.

Winter stood up. Jeanette suddenly toppled over backward and hit the floor hard. Winter rushed around the table. She lay with her eyes closed. He bent down, and she opened them.

"I broke my fall with my hand," she said, wiggling her wrist. She looked at Winter. "OK, turn the tape back on."

"You don't have to."

"That's why I'm here, isn't it?"

Winter looked at her eyes. He didn't recognize her. She was there but not there.

She took a seat, looked at the tape recorder, then at Winter. He started the tape.

She listened: "nnaaaaieieieierryyy…"

Winter stopped the tape.

"I don't recognize it at all," she said, in a voice that sounded rehearsed, as if it too was recorded on tape. She looked at Winter.

"It's horrible. Is it really genuine?"

Bergenhem and Mollerstrom were looking into who had owned the place. It was taking time. Barock hadn't been registered in the usual way. Some of their colleagues knew of it, of course, but it wasn't at all clear who had owned it. There had been registered owners. Several names and faces, but they'd had no luck yet. They would eventually, but it was painstaking work, took days, and involved many interviews.

"There are a lot of names, said Mollerstrom.

But there was one particular name that stood out. It was linked to a dance restaurant-the kind with music and old-fashioned ballroom dancing-south of the river. The name was one of the most familiar in the Gothenburg restaurant world, had been for ages. One of several, and they'd worked their way down the list and come to the name, and they would ask the person in question before they went back to the list. Bergenhem had no great hopes.

"What is a dance restaurant nowadays?" asked Mollerstrom.

"A place where people eat and dance," Bergenhem said.

"Isn't that something from another era?"

"Eating and dancing?"

Mollerstrom grinned.

"Proper dancing. Makes me think of the Royal Hotel back home."

"We'll soon find out," said Bergenhem.

They drove through the hordes of tourists. Many of them looked tired and lost as they passed in front of the car. Visitors from faraway towns. Mollerstrom thought again of the Royal Hotel in the town where he had grown up.

The oil storage tanks were gleaming on the other side of the river. The place they were looking for was in one of the sand-colored brick buildings in one of the dockland streets.

Inside it smelled of dust and stale smoke, and the premises looked like a dance restaurant: a large dance floor in a semicircle around a stage; beyond it chairs and tables in another semicircle; and farthest back, a horseshoe-shaped bar. The tables had white cloths, and on every one was a flower in a bud vase.

There was nobody behind the bar. There were musical instruments on the stage. A woman was pushing a gray rag on a stick over the floor. She dipped the rag in a bucket of water. A few rays of sun came in through one of the windows and lit up her face as if she was on the stage ten meters away, starting to sing the first love song of the evening. She turned her head away from the sunlight and stared down at the floor, which was black-and-white checked. It was dark in the big room, but as light as it would ever be. A beam of sun suddenly fell on a saxophone in its stand on the stage, and it glistened like gold.

"Dance restaurant," said Mollerstrom.

A door opened to the left of the bar; a man came out and walked over to them. He stretched out his hand and introduced himself. He was tall, taller than either Bergenhem or Mollerstrom, bald headed and sideburns trimmed. He was wearing a white T-shirt under a dark jacket, and smart black pants. There was something familiar about him. Bergenhem shook hands and introduced himself and Mollerstrom.

"Pleased to meet you," said Johan Samic.

Bergenhem explained why they were there.

"You've come to the right place," Samic said.

Bergenhem waited. Mollerstrom looked surprised.

"We had that place in its final years," said Samic. "That's not exactly a secret."

"We never said anything about it being a secret."

"Barock was a decent club," said Samic.

What the hell does he mean by that? wondered Bergenhem.

"We turned it into a respectable place."

"Wasn't it respectable before?"

Samic smiled.

"Can we take a look around?" Bergenhem asked.

"No."

"No?"

"I don't like any old Tom, Dick, or Harry wandering in before we're open and looking around," said Samic.

"We're investigating some serious crimes," said Mollerstrom.

"I know, but what's that got to do with my restaurant?"

"We've just explained."

"Exactly. So what are you doing here?"

"We've got a few more questions to ask you," Bergenhem said.

"Well?"

"Maybe we'll ask them down at our place."

"Down at your place?"

"At the police station."

"Very funny."

"OK, let's go. Are you ready?"

"What the hell-"

"You can't refuse to come, Samic. I'm sure you know that."

"OK… for God's sake, it's just that I have a lot to do right now, but go wander around and poke your noses wherever you like." He looked around.

"The bathrooms are over there." He pointed with his thumb. "You have my permission to visit the ladies' as well."

"Arrogant bastard," said Mollerstrom, as they drove past more groups of tourists. Or maybe it's the same people going around and around in circles all day, he thought.

"He seemed familiar," Bergenhem said.

"The type, you mean?"

"More than that. The man himself."

"You didn't show him the pictures of the girls. Or of the wall."

"No."

"Why not?"

"It wasn't the right time." Bergenhem turned to face Mollerstrom, who was driving. "He would've sworn up and down he didn't recognize any of them, no matter what."

"You think?"

"There was something familiar…" Bergenhem breathed in the wind that was blowing into his face. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't unpleasant either. "I'll have to take another look at Winter's photos."

Richard Yngvesson listened to what Winter was saying. The technician was sitting at his computer, which was connected to a mixing board and other equipment that Winter didn't know the name of, nor what it did.

"You don't need to go to Swedish Radio," Yngvesson said. "It's a shame you found it necessary to mention them."

"Sorry about that."

"I didn't know you guys were so ignorant."

"Come on, Richard. Is it possible to get anything from that tape?"

"What do you want?"

"Anything at all that makes sense. A sentence or a word. A voice that sounds natural. Anything other than that noise, whatever it is."

"The problem is that there are no stereo tracks for me to work on," Yngvesson said. "The answering machine's only mono, so everything's in the middle." He turned to face Winter, who'd sat down beside him. "Do you follow me? There's just one signal for everything."

"I've got a vague idea about what mono is," said Winter.

Yngvesson pressed a few buttons, changed a few connections, and put the cassette into something that looked nothing like a tape recorder. The sound started.

The technician listened intently.

"What we need to do is try to filter this sound image," he said. "Give it a good wash."

"Is that possible?"

"Of course."

"Good."

"Don't expect too much. The main thing is cutting out the bass so that it isn't so deep, and increasing the descant in the middle register."

"When can you start?"

Yngvesson looked at a list on the notice board next to his computer.

"In a week."

"The hell you can."

"You're not the only person we're dealing with here, Winter. You seem to think that as soon as you come storming in, we can drop everything else." He looked almost angry. "There are other things going on out here, you know."

"Which murders are you referring to?"

"There are-"

"Give me the cassette."

"Eh?"

"I'm taking it to somebody at Swedish Radio."

"Hang on a minute-"

"I don't get people sometimes," Winter said. "Here I am working on a complicated case, to say the least, with young girls being raped and murdered while Gothenburg basks in the summer sun, and you sit here babbling on about something that is supposedly more important."

"Are you making a speech?" asked Yngvesson. "Tell me when you've finished so that I can start work."

"On what?"

"On your murder," said Yngvesson, turning to one of the computer screens and gaping at Winter as if in a mirror.

"Plural," said Winter. "It's several murders."

Yngvesson listened to the cassette again.

"Three minutes," he said.

"Yes."

"It took her three minutes to die."

"Unusually long for an answering machine."

Yngvesson shrugged.

"When do you think you can come up with something?"

"I'd rather not talk about results." Yngvesson did something with his keyboard. "Give me three days."

"Three days?"

"Back off now, Winter. You should really be waiting for a week, possibly two, and you've got it down to three days. OK?"

"OK."

"Three minutes, three days," said Yngvesson. "But be prepared for it to take longer."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'll put it into the computer and let a few programs get to work on the sound image. There's software that can clean up the sound and analyze it. If there's some kind of background noise, for instance, a constant hum or something, such as an air-conditioner fan, I can remove those frequencies."

"Hmm."

"It's not something you can rush. I have to work on the sound a little bit at a time. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"What I've heard so far is partly treacle, what we call treacly sound, that's muffled and vague. I'll try to raise the descant and see if I can tease out what I assume you're interested in."

"I'm interested in everything," Winter said.

"The voice," said Yngvesson. "Aren't you trying to hear words? Or at the very least a voice? Bits of words, or whatever else we can produce?"

"Of course."

"There are voices here, but it's not possible to hear anything intelligible aside from the girl's cries for help now and again. You could say most of it's a sort of whisper. And then there's the other stuff… the grunting, or whatever you want to call it."

"That's it," said Winter. "That's the stuff I’m mainly interested in."

"Alright. I'll concentrate on the middle register, do some work on the compression. Amplify the faint pants. Try to dampen the loud ones."

Winter made no comment. Yngvesson listened to the tape again.

"Right, let's see if we can manage to dig out a few pieces of words. It sounds like the mobile was inside something. Presumably it was in her handbag, is that right?"

"I have no idea. We haven't found the phone."

"That makes it more difficult. If it was in her handbag, that is. It also sounds as if they were at varying distances from the microphone."

Winter could picture the scene. The handbag, the ground, the man, the girl, the struggle, the blows, the hands, the dog leash. Death. The leash? Why had he thought of the "dog leash"? He hadn't thought of "the belt." He could see a dog leash around the girl's neck. What was the difference between a leash and a belt?

"There's something positive here as well," said Yngvesson. "She had a hands-free set."

"You think?"

"She must have. It sounds like the microphone was outside the handbag. At the end here at least. The sound is clearer, if you can call it that. The mike has picked up clearer sound."

"We didn't find anything to support that. No earphones."

He wondered where they might be now. Would anybody use that mobile phone again?

He played Michael Brecker at top volume and watched the clouds disperse, maybe for good. The music had chased them away.

He called Angela.

"The sun's coming out. Look."

"Is that why you called?"

"Isn't that a good enough reason?"

"Here's Elsa."

He spoke to his daughter. Angela returned to the phone.

"We've been invited to a party on Saturday, by the way."

"Where?"

"At Agneta and Pelle's." "Ah. A beach party, I take it?" "Can you make it?" "Saturday? I certainly hope so.