Never End

34

Winter went to Yngvesson's studio. It had a dry smell, as if from another year. Dust was dancing in tunnels of light over the computer. Tapes spun around, emitting their dead screams. It was hard to breathe.

When this is all over I'll give up smoking. We'll buy a house by the sea, and I'll take a year off work, and then we'll see.

"Still just bits and pieces," Yngvesson said.

"Should I come back another time?"

"This afternoon."

"So far it hasn't been possible to recognize a voice. Really recognize. Do you think it will be possible? A voice we've heard before?"

"I'm trying to get as close to the voice register as possible, Erik."

Kurt Bielke was staring at a point somewhere above Winter's head. The camera was on the table between them. Beier's forensics team had finished with it. There were several fingerprints on it, corresponding to others, as yet unidentified, found in Bielke's home. They hadn't taken Bielke's fingerprints yet. Soon, though. Winter had spoken to Molina about detaining him. Give me an hour, Molina had said. No. You spend another hour with him. Then call me.

After that we'll take blood tests. Then it'll be over.

Bielke was still staring.

"I'll ask you one more time: do you know who this camera belongs to?"

"I've never seen it before."

"It was found at your house."

Bielke didn't respond. Winter looked at the tape recorder.

"I'll repeat what I just said: it was found at your house, Kurt Bielke."

Bielke shrugged.

"Why was it there?"

"Where?"

"At your house."

"Where in my house?"

"We found it in one of the cars in your garage."

"I have no idea."

Winter thought. The air in the room already felt too hot and too scarce.

He wanted a confession. Now. Everybody wanted to go home. It was summer outside.

"You have been identified at the scene of a crime."

Bielke said nothing. He could have said, "What scene, what crime?" but he said nothing.

"Talk to my family," he said now.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Talk to my family."

"Why?"

"They know where I've been."

"I'm asking you."

Bielke didn't reply to that. There was no answer in his eyes, nothing. His eyes were a blue reminiscent of over-washed jeans, blue going on white, and soon destined to fade away altogether.

What happens if the fingerprints and DNA and the whole damn mess don't turn up anything? Winter thought. If we have to let him go?

He asked again, kept on asking. Bielke answered intermittently.

Winter called Molina after an hour, and was granted the extension he asked for. It meant that he gained time, a maximum of four days to prepare a charge.

"Be sensible about this, now," Molina said.

Winter hung up without comment. He felt a degree of relief. As that feeling drifted away with the smoke from his cigarillo out of the window and over the river, he thought again about what Bielke had said.

The family.

The man was crazy. Everything he said might well mean something, but only to him.

He called the SOC team. Beier answered.

"Are your boys still at Bielke's house?"

"Not right now. Why?"

"I'm going there."

"Have you nailed him?"

"I don't know. When will we hear from Linkoping?"

"About the glass, you mean? They're working overtime on it, I can promise you that. But you know how it is."

They had vacuum-cleaned Bielke's shoes and clothes one at a time and found some very small pieces of glass that would be compared to the broken glass they'd found after the Hanssons' house had been broken into. It wouldn't necessarily tell them anything, but they could measure various properties of the shards and establish if it was the same type of glass they'd found in the shoes, or in the breast pocket. It might be a pointer, no more than that. There were an awful lot of panes of glass. But one thing could lead to another, and then to another.

Yet again a hot afternoon with no promise of cooling down as evening drew in. The sun was still strong as it started to sink down to the horizon he was driving toward. All growing things were shrinking in the heat, starting to die and emitting the same dry, acidic smell that permeates old folks' homes as the bodies of ancient inhabitants dry out with the onset of death. The same smell of decay mixed with pungent disinfectant.

Winter turned into the Bielkes' drive.

There was nobody on the verandah. He noticed that Jeanette's window was wide open.

The family.

Bielke's deranged eyes might have indicated something. Jeanette. Was she the key to the riddles? Her relationship with her father was complicated. A silly word, given the context. He was standing at the front door, which was slightly ajar. Was she crazy, too? Her mother? Was she normal?

He made a face at his thoughts, possibly an ironic smile: what's the point, where are we headed, are there really any alternative routes to take, in which world does life weigh heaviest?

He knocked on the door, which opened slightly more as a result. He shouted. No answer. He shouted again, and went inside. On his left he could see the west side of the garden though a window in the room beyond the big, bright entrance hall. The shadows were now at their longest. The gulls were shrieking louder than ever, as they hoped to find tidbits in the gardens.

Something moved out there. A shadow shorter than the rest, contrasting with the long, recumbent giants that would soon be swallowed up by the ground.

A movement. As if somebody had run over the lawn. Winter charged out of the door and raced along the gravel path that surrounded the house. Tried to look in all directions at the same time. Why on earth am I doing this? Because somebody's been here and it has to do with what's going on inside this house. Went on.

The gulls laughed at him as he stood there. No sign of anybody else. The shadows were everywhere now, as if a black blanket had been lowered over the scene. He approached the hedge separating the garden from next door: there were gaps big enough for somebody to scramble through.

What now?

He turned back, toward the house. No sign of movement, no voices, no shouts, no faces, no bodies. There ought to be a reaction. The door open.

Winter went back into the house. He couldn't hear a sound from inside, only the birds outside and the faint hum of traffic; no radio, no dishwasher, no fan, no clinking of cutlery on dishes, no mixer, no TV, no voices, no laughter, no weeping, no screaming, no blows.

"Hello? Hello?"

He stood stock still, but there was no answer.

"Hello?"

He went upstairs. It was darker on the landing. A half-open door. Jeanette's room.

He could hear a faint humming noise now, a soft buzz that seemed to be creeping over the ceiling, slowly.

"Hello? Jeanette?"

Winter strode purposefully across the landing and into Jeanette's room. The window was still wide open, and he looked out over the garden and the hedge and the trees, and noticed a movement behind one of them and a pale… object that was there and then not there, a sort of sphere in the twilight, and Winter stayed put, watching movements in the bushes and among the trees, but he couldn't go racing downstairs again until he actually saw something; nothing happened, and he waited, but the face didn't return; it had been a face, or the outline of a face, but he hadn't recognized it, not from this distance.

He came to life again and heard the noise, still faint but louder than before, louder, it sounded like… sounded like… and he turned to look at the alcove on the right where the bathroom door was and… Jesus, he could see a trickle of water stuttering out from under the door and onto the parquet floor that was gleaming in the fairy-tale light of evening, and he could hear the sound now, a waterfall splashing down inside there, and he flung himself at the door, which was locked, he rattled the knob, pulled at it, shouted her name, took two paces backward, then kicked at the middle where the resistance would be lowest, three kicks and then a fourth, and the damn thing split open at last, and he kicked his way into the bathroom that was overflowing with water and blood, and he slipped and fell heavily and felt something give way in his elbow, and scrambled to his feet with the pain affecting somebody else and his fancy khaki clothes were now soaked in blood, and water was still overflowing from the bath where Jeanette was sitting with her eyes closed or maybe open, he couldn't tell which, all he could see was her face and her neck sticking up out of or perhaps sinking down into the red sea, and he glided over the ice toward her as if on skates, bent down and lifted her up. Lifted a body that was heavier than anything else he'd ever lifted, and the pain in his elbow was like red-hot needles in a wound.

It was past midnight when he got home with his arm in a sling and a pain that seemed like a caress compared with what he'd had to endure before. Angela gave him a hug, looking even paler than he did. She'd arranged for him to be treated far more quickly than he would've been able to manage alone-but that was her place at work, after all.

The babysitter was hovering in the hall, was duly paid, and looked frightened to death when she saw Winter's face.

"Pour me a whiskey," he said, from his chair in the kitchen.

"It's not a good idea to drink alcohol in your state."

"Make it a double."

She poured him a glass from one of the bottles on the counter in the kitchen.

"Aaagh!" he said, after the first swig.

He felt the alcohol penetrate his body, his head, down as far as his elbow. He took another drink.

"You should have stayed in," she said. "They'll have to put your arm in a cast once the swelling's gone down."

"She's still alive," said Winter, holding out his glass. Angela poured him a miserly measure. "And another." She filled him up, and he drank. "She made it. She's still alive."

"Just barely."

"But she'll make it."

"It looks like it," said Angela. "She'd lost a lot of blood. Too much, really, if she'd hoped to survive."

Winter could still see the floor, the water in the bath. The pain, the pressure. The girl's naked body on the floor as he fumbled for his mobile that he'd dropped in the nasty, foaming water pouring out of the tap. He'd given up, slid into her room, and used the telephone by her bed. He'd used his belt and a strip of curtain to bind her wrists. He'd tried her pulse, and maybe just about heard something. He'd given her mouth-to-mouth, but she hadn't responded. He'd checked her wrists, and looked for other possible injuries. Done whatever he could until the ambulance blasted its way to the door.

"Erik?"

"Hmm… What?"

"Time you went to sleep."

"Eh?"

"Let me help you."

She leaned over him. She was strong.

She's stronger than I am.

"You saved her life."

"I was too late."

"If you hadn't gotten there, she would've died."

"She was more or less dead anyway."

"Come on, Erik."

He let her help him. Sank back into the pillow, and fell asleep.

The first thing he knew was the smell of coffee. He heard Elsa asking some question or other, using the new words she'd just learned. Angela answered. He tried to sit up, and felt the pain from his elbow.

Elsa was in her high chair in the kitchen.

"Daddy, Daddy!"

Winter went to see her, and stayed there for ages.

He'd called the hospital. Now he was sitting on the blanket in the living room, trying to protect his arm from Elsa. Angela lifted her up, and whizzed her through the air like an airplane.

"The crisis is over," he said. Again.

"Hang on," she said.

She came back alone.

"She's my baby. Goes to sleep at the drop of a hat."

"Mind you, she's the boss," said Winter with a smile.

"Stay at home now," Angela said.

"She's awake," he said.

"No, she isn't."

"Jeanette."

"So you're going there?"

"Bertil and Lars are there already."

"Is that your answer?"

"Can you help me put my clothes on?"