The Shadow Woman

HE HEARD THE SOUNDS OF THE FOREST, BUT THEY WEREN’T like they were before. Nothing was like that former calm. He barely heard the wind anymore.

She had stepped out of the past like a greeting from the devil. He’d tried to fend her off during that first call. You’ve got the wrong number, miss.

That voice. Like something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore, that wasn’t meant to be heard.

He had done what he could to forget. The others who could talk were gone.

Afterward, while he could still hear her voice, he had looked down at his hands and shut his eyes, and still those hellish visions taunted him. The house and the wind from the sea that blew right through that damned house. He had done what he had to. Though he’d planned it, he’d thought it wouldn’t be necessary-but then he understood that he had to do it. His hands did it.

This was the second time he’d driven to the bus stop and picked them up. It wasn’t the closest stop, but she understood why. Perhaps she was the one who’d suggested it. He was afraid now. He hadn’t been able to hang up when she called again. Come alone, he’d said. She refused.

No no no-who said anything about that? he’d asked. She eyed him with a crazed look that he recognized in himself. Terrified of what was going to happen, he’d looked up at the ceiling, thought about how he had one way out. It had been there the whole time. One option. Fear had stopped him.

There was screeching above their heads. It was the second time she’d come alone, and he didn’t know if she knew everything. As they walked through the field down to the other glade, animals ran off into the trees. She’d turned her face toward him, but he hadn’t wanted to look into her eyes. A shout came from far away and suddenly he wanted the child there. Next time she’d bring the child with her.

The sweat running down into his eyes blinded him, and he couldn’t hear any cars on the road. It never got really dark. He tried to blink away the sweat. Her arms…

When he turned around, he saw a white boat floating on the surface of the lake, without sound, as if it were waiting. She seemed to be following it with her eyes, her head turned to the side, but the boat lay still, trapped in the late-night fog. He couldn’t see anyone in the boat, and when he turned around again, for the last time, the surface of the water was empty and black.

34

THE APARTMENT WAS LOCATED IN A BUILDING WITH A VIEW out toward Black Marshes. There was nothing outside to suggest that it housed a private day care with three rooms and a kitchen.

The architecture struck Winter as frozen music, crystallized chords, which carried a rough beauty within its walls but kept everything confined within. Nature was right up alongside it, but apart.

He’d received instructions from Karin Sohlberg, but she didn’t want to accompany him. He walked in through the building’s front entrance and rang the doorbell of the apartment to the left in the stairwell on the first floor. The door, covered with children’s drawings, was opened by a man who could have been seventy years old or eighty. He was wearing a brown khaki shirt and broad suspenders fastened to gray trousers that were big and comfortable. He had a white mustache and thick white hair, and Winter thought of a Santa Claus who had shaved off his beard and descended to live among humans for good. The old man was holding the hand of a little boy who was sucking his thumb and staring wide-eyed at the long-haired blond police officer in a black leather jacket.

“Hello,” Winter said, as he bent down a few inches toward the boy, who started to cry.

“There, there, Timmy,” the white-haired man said, holding his hand. The boy stopped crying and pressed his face against the man’s pant leg.

“Well, good afternoon,” Winter said, and held out his hand. He introduced himself and his reason for being there. The search for a missing person. Two missing persons, he thought. A child and a murderer.

“Ernst Lundgren,” the man said. He was tall and slightly bent forward. He must have been nearly seven feet tall when he was young, Winter thought.

“Could we speak for a moment?” he asked.

Lundgren turned around. Winter had heard children and adult voices, and he now saw several elderly people busy helping the children put on their coats.

“We’re just on our way out, as you can see,” Lundgren said. “In ten minutes or however long it takes, it’ll be quiet in here. If you can wait that long.”

“Certainly,” Winter said.

“We couldn’t just sit here and do nothing, seeing how difficult things are for them,” Lundgren said. “The young mothers, that is.”

Winter nodded. They sat in the kitchen. Through the window he could see the little troop move across the road and in among the trees. It might have been ten children and four adults.

“There are a lot of single mothers with small children living around here,” Lundgren said. “They have no jobs and no child care and hardly even any friends. Many are stuck in their loneliness and never get out of it.”

Winter nodded again.

“It’s dangerous,” the day-care manager said. “Nobody can survive for very long under those conditions.”

“How long have you been running this day care?” Winter asked.

“About a year. We’ll see how long we can keep it going. It’s not really a proper day-care center, in the strict sense of the word, if by that you mean an institution.”

“So what is it, then?”

“It’s a few old fogies trying to help the young and desperate, to put it bluntly.” Lundgren nodded toward the coffee machine. “Would you like a cup?” Winter accepted the offer, and Lundgren stood and prepared coffee for himself and Winter, then sat back down at the table. “Some of these poor girls don’t know which way to turn. They need, well, for want of a better word I guess I’d have to say alleviation. We try to provide them with a little alleviation in their daily lives.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That means a young mother can leave her child here with us for a few hours and go off to the hairdresser or into town to be by herself for a bit. Or just go home and take it easy.”

“Yes,” Winter said. “I think I understand.”

“Having the chance to be by themselves for just a little while a couple of times a week,” Lundgren said. “Can you imagine what it’s like never to have a moment to just be by yourself?”

“No,” Winter answered. “I’m more familiar with the opposite.”

“What did you say?”

“The opposite. Spending too much time by myself.”

“Aha. But you see that’s also a problem these girls face. They don’t get to socialize with anyone their own age.” Lundgren rolled up one sleeve of his khaki shirt, and Winter saw that the hair on his arm grew like white moss all the way down to the middle of his knuckles. “And don’t forget that some of them have more than one child.”

“Are there many wanting to come here?”

“A few, but we can’t handle any more. We’d need a bigger apartment and there’d have to be more of us, but we’re already dependent on charity as it is. No doubt the municipal authorities see us as pirates. Fine by me.”

“You’re doing a good job,” Winter said.

“You gotta do something before you die. And it’s fun. It’s the most fun I’ve had for a long time.”

Winter finished his coffee. It was still warm.

“There’s always a lot of crap being said about the city’s outlying suburbs, but one thing is true,” Lundgren explained. “There’s a hell of a lot of loneliness in areas like this. The little lonely people are being pushed out to the margins. It’s strange out here. On the one hand, you’ve got the immigrant families, who after all do have a sense of community. It can be a little fragile sometimes. But still. And wedged in among them you’ve got these young Swedish mothers with their little kids. Almost never boys. Young girls and their children. It’s a strange mix.”

“Yes.”

“And many people keep their distance.” Lundgren’s eyes were still fixed on the group from the day care outside. “That may be why I haven’t seen this woman you’re asking about. Helene, was that her name?”

“Yes. Helene Andersén. The little girl’s name was Jennie.”

“I don’t recognize it. Of course, I can ask my staff, or whatever it is we’re called.”

“It’s possible,” Ringmar said, eyeing the big pile of children’s drawings on the table in Winter’s room.

“A diary,” Winter said. “It could be like a diary.”

“Then we’ll have to get lucky.”

“Luck is often a question of seeing the opportunity when it presents itself,” Winter said. That was a real smart-ass remark, he thought to himself.

“And you think that opportunity lies here.” Ringmar held up a picture depicting a lone tree in a field. The drawing was divided in two. Rain. Shine. “There’s both rain and sunshine in this one.”

“It’s like that in a number of the drawings I’ve seen so far,” Winter said.

“Seems like a case for a child psychologist.”

“I’ve thought about that too.”

“And then there are the locations.”

“And the figures.”

“This can really give you the creeps. I was thinking about my own kids’ drawings. What stuff like that can mean.”

“The fact is that kids draw a lot, right? And what is it that they draw? They draw what they see. What we have lying here in front of us is what she saw.”

“Rain and sun and trees,” Ringmar said. “A boat and a car. Where is this taking us?”

“Well, we can at least go through them, can’t we? Beier isn’t finished with all the drawings upstairs.”

“What else does he have to say?”

“They’re just test firing the rifle into the water tank.”

“Aha. Does the rifle match up?”

“He doesn’t know yet,” Winter said.

They had empty shells from the shoot-out at Vårväderstorget and a suspected weapon. Beier had procured similar ammunition of the same make and fired it into a water tank in order to compare the bullets with the casings.

“What are you thinking about?” Ringmar said.

“Right at this moment? A bullet traveling through water, and a motorcycle crashing through a roadblock somewhere in Scandinavia.”

“I’m thinking about the little girl,” Ringmar said. “And the mother.”

“I’m still waiting for the reports from child services,” Winter said. “And the hospital.”

“She seems not to have any family or friends.”

“Sure she did. We’re slowly getting closer to them. It won’t be long.”

He grabbed his jacket from the chair and put it on.

“Where are you going now?” Ringmar asked.

“I thought it was about time I agreed to meet with a reporter. Don’t you think?”

“Go and get a haircut before you meet the press. Birgersson mumbled something this morning about a Beatles wig.”

“He’s still living in the good old days,” Winter said, heading toward the elevators.

Hans Bülow was waiting at a bar in the center of town. It was getting dark outside, and the candles on the tables were lit. People on the Avenyn were walking briskly, on their way home or out.

“Can I buy you a beer, seeing as you’ve taken the time?” Bülow said.

“A Perrier will do just fine.”

“You’re increasingly becoming one of those straight-edge types.”

“Do they drink Perrier?”

“Water. No alcohol.”

“Straight edge?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds good,” Winter lit up a Corps. “It has a ring to it.”

“They don’t smoke either.”

Winter looked at his cigarillo.

“Then I guess I may as well have a light beer. Hof on tap, if they’ve got it.”

Bülow went over to the bar and came back with two tall glasses. He nodded to a familiar face and sat down. “That’s a colleague of yours, isn’t it?” he said, and took a sip from his glass.

“Where?”

“Behind me, off to the right. The one I said hello to.”

Winter looked over the reporter’s shoulder and saw Halders’s close-cropped head. Halders didn’t turn around. Winter couldn’t tell if he was sitting with anyone.

“You know Halders?”

“You kidding me? As a reporter embedded at the police station, you get to know the forces of good,” Bülow said.

“And you count Halders among them?”

“He’s got the best reputation of anyone.”

“With whom?”

“With the press, of course. He doesn’t put on an act. If he has nothing to say, he doesn’t say anything.”

Winter took a sip of his beer.

“So what’s going on?” Bülow asked.

“We’re still trying to determine the dead woman’s identity. And possibly looking for a child as well, but we don’t know for sure. It scares me.”

“What if I say that you’ve found her?”

“You can say whatever you like. But what do you mean? Of course we found her.”

“Her identity. That you know who she is. But you don’t want to release it.”

Winter sat silently. He took another sip of his beer, to keep himself occupied. The bartender played music at two-thirds volume. It sounded like rock.

“Why not, Erik?”

“I agreed to meet with you because I want to sort out a few things,” Winter said. “But there are certain questions I simply cannot answer.”

“For reasons pertaining to the ongoing investigation?”

“Yes.”

“By virtue of the statutory confidentiality of the preliminary investigation?”

Winter nodded. Halders still sat with his back to him. Perhaps it’s a doppelgänger, thought Winter.

“Paragraphs 5:1 and 9:17 of the Swedish Penal Code,” Bülow said.

“Are you a lawyer too?”

“It’s enough to be a legal reporter.”

“I see.”

“So what can you tell me, then?”

35

IT WAS DARKER NOW. WINTER WAS BACK IN HIS OFFICE. BÜLOW was ready to hold off on writing certain things. You owe me a favor, he said when they parted. I just did you one, Winter had answered.

The music from the CD was louder than the other sounds in the room. Michael Brecker was blowing ice-cold notes from the tenor sax on “Naked Soul” from Tales from the Hudson.

He thought about Helene’s face and body. Her soul had left her body. Thinking about her name now was no different than it had been before. He had known. How had she let him know? How had she communicated her name to him?

He picked the topmost drawing from the pile on his desk. It showed a figure, who might be a child, with its arms reaching upward. There was no ground. The figure was hovering in the air.

Winter studied the next image. In the middle of the picture, a car was driving along a road that went through trees. There were no faces in the windows of the car, since it didn’t have any. The car had no color, was white like the paper. The trees were green and the road brown. Winter picked up the next drawing, which also showed a car. It was driving among houses that were drawn like tall blocks with windows that were irregularly square. The road was black. Winter flipped through the drawings until he found another with a car in it. It was driving on a brown road. In five drawings the car was driving along a black road. The cars were uncolored, left white like the paper. He saw a person with red hair in one of the windows. None of the cars had any drivers.

He looked for any letters or numbers on the cars. She had written her name, “jeni.” She could recognize and copy a letter or a number. Weren’t there five-year-olds who could read and write fluently?

He closed his eyes. The music helped his concentration.

He opened his eyes and laid the drawings with cars in them to the right. There were also other vehicles-something that looked like it could be a streetcar, in some of the drawings. The carriages were long and lined with windows, like the high-rises he had seen earlier, only lying down. One drawing showed something that could have been a streetcar seen from the front. The number 2 was drawn at the top, above a large window.

Winter laid the drawing aside and looked for more streetcars in the pile. After ten drawings, he found one. It didn’t have a number. He flipped past a few more and saw the number 2 written on yet another streetcar, only this time on the side. A face with red hair could be seen in one of the windows. Eyes, nose, mouth.

Checking his watch, he reached for the pink commercial section of the telephone book and looked up the number for the public transport information center. The office at Drottningtorget was still open. He called and waited. A woman answered. He asked about the route of the number 2 streetcar, was told, and hung up.

It fit. That number 2 passed North Biskopsgården. Clearly they would have taken it. Maybe on a daily basis. Or else the number 5, which he’d learned also went through there. Maybe he would see a 5 in the drawings. He’d started sweating, a thin film he could feel from his hairline to his eyebrows. He stood and went out to the toilet without turning the light on and splashed cold water on his face.

The telephone rang. He walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Winter.”

“It’s Beier here. I figured you’d still be there.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a slip of paper that’s centuries old. Or pretty old, anyway.”

“A slip of paper?”

“A piece of paper with something written on it. We took everything that was in her storage room back with us, including two boxes of clothes. One of them had some children’s clothes in it, and we found this slip of paper in the pocket of one of the dresses.”

“I see.”

“It’s an old dress and an old slip of paper.”

“You’ve already been able to determine that?”

“Yes, but no more than that. We haven’t started analyzing it yet, so we haven’t established exactly how old it is.”

“You sound like a doubtful archeologist.”

“That’s just what you are in this job. But coming up with a precise age is very difficult. So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want to come up and take a look at it? I’m leaving pretty soon.”

Winter looked at the drawings that he had started to sort into piles. He felt interrupted. “Should I?”

“It’s up to you. It’s not going anywhere. But-it’s a little odd-I’m feeling some kind of vibes here.”

“Intuition,” Winter said.

“An impulse,” Beier said.

“Then I’d better come up.”

“So, what do you say?” Beier said.

Winter looked at the dress and the slip of paper lying next to it on the illuminated examination table. The dress could be Jennie’s, but it had an old-fashioned feel to it, as if it belonged to another time. Winter couldn’t say which one, but that kind of thing wasn’t hard to establish.

The paper was four by four inches and looked like it had been folded a thousand times. It was yellowed with age and seemed incredibly delicate. A Dead Sea Scroll, thought Winter. “It certainly looks old,” he said. “Do you have the copy?”

Beier handed it to him.

“It’s still legible,” he said.

“Is it ballpoint?”

“Felt-tip, we think. But don’t ask me anything difficult yet. We’re going to check it out, just like everything else. If there’s any point.”

“Well,” Winter said. “People hang on to old stuff sometimes. There’s nothing unusual about that per se.”

“No.”

“Then they get murdered or disappear and suddenly we’re poring over their personal effects.”

“That’s when a child’s dress becomes interesting,” Beier said. “Or a piece of paper with a mysterious message.”

Like a cry from the past, thought Winter. He held the copy in his hand. Written on it was “5/20.” On the line below was a dash about a quarter of an inch long followed by “1630.” The third line read “4-23?” and after that came a blank space of an inch or so and then “L. v-H, C.” The C had been circled. On the right side of the paper were lines that looked to Winter like some kind of map. Next to one line, in the upper left-hand corner, was something that could be a cross or short lines.

“This could be a map,” he said.

“The horizontal lines start next to that C,” Beier said.

“It could be a road. A street or a country road. Or just a line.”

“It could be anything,” Beier said.

“One of them ought to be the time; 1630, that’s a time.”

“And 5/20 could be a date,” Beier said. “May 20.”

“The twentieth of May at four thirty,” Winter said. “What happened then, Göran? Can you tell me what you were doing then?” he said, dead-pan. “Well. We’ll just have to think about it. Can you determine how old they are? The dress and the paper?”

“That all depends. The older a piece of paper is, the easier it is to find out how old it is. But this isn’t a hundred years old.” Beier looked down at the slip of paper again. “So the margins we have to work with are smaller, since the methods of manufacturing paper won’t have changed much over such a short period of time. We’ll have to check with paper manufacturers about watermarks and such. We’ll have to look at the quality of the paper.”

“But nothing more?”

“We can’t do a full chemical analysis here, if that’s what you mean. Fingerprints, yes. Maybe. Age, no. For that you’d have to hand it over to the National Center for Forensic Science. That is, if they can handle stuff that’s just ten or twenty or thirty years old. Otherwise there might be other experts.”

“I see.”

“If it’s worth the trouble.”

“Right.”

“With clothes it’s a little different. Here, for example, we have a label, which makes the job a lot simpler. I don’t recognize the name of this particular clothing manufacturer, or whatever it is, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of difference if it’s closed down. Of course it’s easier to pin down the age of a piece of fabric. That we ought to be able to do here.”

“Maybe the slip of paper is from the same time,” Winter said.

“Possibly. But we don’t know that, of course.”

“How about fingerprints?”

“There are some, but that’s all I can say for the moment.”

The dress in front of him could belong to the girl, to Jennie, but he didn’t think so. He was convinced it had been Helene’s, but he didn’t say that to Beier. She had worn it when she was about the same age as her daughter is now, so about twenty-five years ago. That’s when it’s from, thought Winter. The early seventies. On the cusp of my own teenage years. She wore this dress, and maybe she put the slip of paper in there at some point. Or someone else did, at a completely different time. Perhaps her daughter. The question is why. The question is also whether it has any significance for me. I think so. Yes. I think so.

“If you can determine the age of this paper, I think it would be helpful,” he said.

36

WINTER PARKED BELOW THE KONSUM SUPERMARKET IN MÖLNLYCKE and walked the narrow arcade. There was one shop that sold both perfume and health food. Granola with a scent of musk, he thought to himself.

To the right lay the post-office entrance. He stood next to the doors and studied the open square, about seventy-five yards across, like a park. Immediately to his left was the big Konsum supermarket complex. Kitty-corner to that was Jacky’s Pub. To the right of him the open arcade led east, and he could make out a sign for the Sparbanken savings bank and another that said “Flowers.” Anyone leaving the square normally headed to the left or right, to access the parking areas or the other shops. He stepped out into the square and turned around. The windows of the post office covered maybe twenty yards of the facade. Sitting down on a bench, he still had a clear view. He got up and walked to the pub. It was closed but would open in three hours. He turned around. From there he could see the entrance to the post office. Behind him was a window, and inside he saw a counter and bar stools. He guessed that he could sit in there and still see the doors to the post office.

Stepping through those doors, he first entered a vestibule with all the post boxes: 257 of them. You had to push open another door to get to the service windows. Good, thought Winter. It took longer to come in but also to get out.

He knew that nobody had paid the rent for Helene Andersén’s apartment yet. Unless it had been done within the last hour, in which case they had failed.

In the center of the service area was a large desk. Three people were leaning over it and appeared to be filling out forms.

One of them was Bergenhem. He looked up and gazed indifferently at Winter, or at something next to him, and then peered back down at his form.

Attached to the wall four yards up, between the sign for banking services and service window 1, was a CCTV camera. Winter looked into it, briefly. It was well positioned and an unremarkable gray like the wall, except for the black eye that moved slowly.

The other camera was placed above cashier 3, next to a sign that said, “Our advice costs nothing.”

Winter hadn’t noticed the sign by the door stating that the premises were under CCTV surveillance. That’s good, he thought again. I didn’t notice it and maybe no one else will either.

Winter saw that the thick blue-gray carpet by the door had a fold in the middle of it, and he knew that Bergenhem had arranged for that in some discreet way.

Two women with children around their legs were chatting. Others were writing or staring straight ahead. There were about the same number of women and men in there. None of the adults had beards or glared suspiciously at the cameras.

Maybe this was it after all, Winter thought. Maybe this was the time. If he sticks to the program, then it’ll be tomorrow, but anyone can change routine.

The ladies manning the cash registers were working calmly and professionally. They wore navy blue post-office blazers with pinstriped blouses. There were lines at each window even though everyone had taken a ticket.

Each cashier had a slip of paper marked with the numbers. Everyone knew the deal. No customers were jumping the line, demanding quick service to distract attention. If that happened, they would all be extra vigilant.

Winter drove in toward town, past Helenevik and through the tunnel beneath the highway. He turned off into the parking lot and climbed out of the car. There were two other cars there. He heard a motor out on the water but could see no boat. The sky was reflected across the whole lake. Sky and water were one, and he was blinded by light as he drew closer.

Beneath the trees or in the water, thought Winter. We’ll have to drag the lake soon if we don’t find anything on land. The boat that woman, Maltzer, says she saw. That could have been the boys’ boat. There were a thousand fingerprints on it from five hundred people. It was a popular boat. Made the boys a bundle. But it had no prints from Helene, so it was useless as evidence for the moment. Still, it did have a red daub of paint.

The symbol was there on the tree-the marking that could be a Chinese character and that resembled the letter H.

A boat steered slowly into the inlet a ways, then turned back out again in a wide circle. Winter made out two people in the boat. One of them was wearing a cap and held a fishing pole out over the side, and Winter thought he saw the wet fishing line flash for a moment in the light from the sun that now seemed to be coming from below.

“They’re not done with the deposit slip yet,” Ringmar said. He scratched the bridge of his nose and seemed at the same time to be sucking on a tooth.

“Stockholm sent it over by car, like you asked.”

“I didn’t ask. I ordered.”

“They had a car coming down here anyway.”

“That’s their way of alleviating the shame of having to obey orders from Gothenburg.”

“Do you have a complex?”

“Not me. But Stockholm does.”

Ringmar continued scratching. Bertil’s nose is becoming paler, thought Winter, as if he has cut off its blood supply.

“One thing’s for sure, though-that slip definitely has prints. There could be prints from thirty different people on it. And those are just the ones we can actually identify.”

Winter felt the excitement but also the doubt. The one who paid the rent would most likely have worn gloves, just in case. But you never know.

What they were certainly going to find were traces of the innocent fingers of the post-office staff.

“By the way, there was an incident out at one of the motorcycle clubs just now,” Ringmar said.

“It’s escalating.”

“I wonder what’s going on. And here we were thinking peace had taken hold.”

“We trusted the motorcycle-borne youth,” Winter said.

“Most of them are older than you are.” Ringmar scratched himself again. “Something’s gotten them rattled,” he said.

“You can say that again.”

Ringmar knew Winter was referring to the shoot-out at Vårväderstorget. “On the other hand, it’s not the first time the Angels have taken potshots at each other in the midst of us mortals. It’s part of their business model.”

“You mean-”

“Terror is their business model. It’s good to spread fear.”

“Except for the ones that get shot.”

“Jonne’s gonna be all right, thank God.”

“We’ll have to see if we can get our hands on Bolander again.”

“He’s gone to ground.”

“An underground Angel,” Winter said. “Just like the devil. A fallen angel.”

“Speaking of shoot-outs, that Kurd was sent home today. So we have finally carried out the good edict of the state.”

“I know.”

“Poor bastard. You think he hoped to be indicted for threatening to shoot himself and the kid?”

“For unlawful threat? I don’t know. We don’t fall for that anymore. He’d have had a chance only if he’d actually succeeded in doing what he said he was going to do.”

“Then we would have taken it seriously.”

Or if he’d had a slick lawyer to get him a stay by entering an insanity plea, thought Winter. But there was no sign of that, of course. The man had behaved completely normally, possibly a little overwrought, but perhaps there were reasons for it that they didn’t understand.

“I’m sure he’ll be happy,” Ringmar said.

Winter was busy working his way through the pile of Jennie’s drawings when the phone rang. He lifted it with his right hand and held a picture of a sparse forest and open sky in his left.

“You seem to have stopped going home altogether,” his sister said.

“Hi, Lotta.”

“Do you have a bed in that office?”

“It hasn’t reached that point yet.”

“Can you get away for a few hours next Saturday?”

“What’s happening then?”

“A little party. I think I mentioned something about it earlier. I’m turning an even number of years. Far too many.”

“Weren’t you going to Marbella?”

“I see you’ve spoken to Mother.”

“Or the other way around.”

“I’m going later. So, what do you say?”

“Where is it?”

“Here at my place. If that makes any difference.”

“Saturday night?”

“Yes, from about six on. Nothing formal, some punch and then dinner. No assigned seating. If you want, you can sit in the kitchen.”

“In that case.”

“Good. I’ll put your name down.”

“I really don’t know if I can, Lotta.”

“I see.”

“I’ll come if I can. Maybe.”

“You can’t damn well spend every waking hour investigating! Not to mention the few you’re asleep, knowing you.”

“I’ll do my best to be there next Saturday evening. At six o’clock.”

“The invitation includes Angela, of course.”

“Angela,” Winter repeated.

“Your girlfriend or lady friend or whatever you want to call her. Remember her?”

37

BEIER RETURNED FROM SUNDSVALL ROSY CHEEKED.

“There was a scent of snow in the air,” he said from his office chair.

“It’s not like you were all the way up in Kiruna,” said Winter, sitting opposite him.

“Norrland is Norrland. They’re very particular about that up there.”

“Have you discussed it with Sture?”

“I just got here, as you well know. And Sture doesn’t like talking about his northern roots.”

“Maybe he’s hiding something.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Which leads me to the reason for my visit.”

“You’re quick. I expect it’s the usual demand from homicide. ‘You must have something.’ But I haven’t had time to speak to the team since returning from my educational trip.”

“When?”

“Give me an hour.”

The telephone in Winter’s jacket pocket rang when he passed through the security gate leading out of the forensics department.

“Winter.”

“Hi, Erik.”

“Good morning, Mother.”

“We read in the GP that some madmen opened fire on a square in Hisingen.”

“That was ages ago.”

“We took a trip to Portugal with some close friends of ours, and when we came home we went through the pile of newspapers, and then I thought I should call and ask you if you were involved. The newspaper didn’t say anything about that.”

“I wasn’t involved in any way.”

“That’s a relief.”

Winter walked down the steps, meeting Wellman outside the elevators on the fourth floor. Wellman nodded and stepped in through the elevator’s steel doors.

“Are you there, Erik?”

“I’m here.”

“It’s so awful about that woman getting murdered.”

“Yes.”

“You still don’t know who she is?”

“No.”

“How dreadful.”

“Guess I’d better-”

“Lotta has postponed her trip down here.”

“So I heard.”

“You’ve spoken to her?”

“Yes. Just now.”

“You saw her?”

“It was on the phone.”

“She wants you to go see her more often. But I guess I’ve already been on your back about that.”

“Yes.”

“Now, she’s going to have a little party anyway to celebrate her big day. You’re not going to miss that, are you?”

“No.”

“Promise? Lotta needs her little brother.”

“I know. We have to look out for each other up here while you two are occupied elsewhere.”

“Don’t be like that now, Erik. We’ve talked about that. Your father has tried…”

Winter was standing in his office. He looked at the CD player and the desks covered with drawings. It was quiet.

“Someone’s trying to call me on my work line,” he said.

“I can’t hear it ringing.”

“It blinks. Good-bye, Mother.”

He hung up and walked over to the window and picked up a CD case from the sill, took out the disc, and slipped it into the player.

Beier called down to Winter.

“Come up here right away, please.”

“What is it?”

“Just come up as quickly as you can.”

Winter passed through the security gate and entered the fingerprint lab, where Beier and Bengt Sundlöf were waiting. The slip with the map or whatever it was, and the codes or whatever they were, was lying on a table.

“One thing is clear now,” Beier said. “There are two sets of prints from Helene Andersén here.”

“What do you mean?”

“As a child and as an adult.”

“As a child?” Winter said.

“Yes. They’re the same lines, only smaller. She held this slip of paper when she was a child of around four or five.”

“So she’s the one who held on to it. Why?”

“It’s your job to find that out, Erik,” Beier said.

“So then we do have at least some kind of time frame for the paper.”

“I didn’t say that,” Beier said. “We know that she held it in her hand about twenty-five years ago.”

“Are there any other prints on it?” asked Winter, and he looked at the paper that seemed younger now that he knew more about its history.

“That’s where it gets trickier,” Beier said. “We can see some traces of fingerprints but only partials. I can’t help you there yet.”

“Okay.”

“You want us to continue?”

Winter blew air out through his mouth and thought. He studied the faint characters and lines.

“Maybe she had a reason for saving it. I don’t know. I really don’t know, Göran.”

“I’m only asking because we have a whole apartment’s worth of evidence to go through. And this isn’t exactly the only case we’re working on.”

“Keep working on this one whenever you get a little time left over, then.” Winter eyed the slip of paper again. “But what can you do with the partial prints?”

“For us to be able to conclusively establish identity, there have to be twelve points of comparison, minimum. You follow me?”

Winter followed him, in theory. But practically was another matter. The computer didn’t know what a fingerprint looked like-it simply registered the ridge endings, bifurcations, and dots.

There were twenty fingerprint experts in Sweden. Two in Gothenburg. One of them was Bengt Sundlöf and he was still standing there next to Beier and Winter.

“It does kind of give me itchy fingers, so to speak,” Sundlöf said of the slip of paper.

“A challenge,” Beier said.

“You sit there and peer into those two microscopes and search-and make sketches.”

“For days on end,” Beier said. “And get bad back pains from working so intensely in a hunched-over posture.”

“And you carry on like that until you find twelve points that match,” Sundlöf said.

“Know what you say then?” he asked Winter.

“Bingo?” Winter said.

“We’re going to help you,” Sundlöf said. “You appreciate knowledge and experience despite your youth and long hair.”

“In France they require a fourteen-point match for a positive ID,” Beier said.

“Maybe we’re taking risks up here in the north.”

“The Americans have the largest fingerprint database in the world, naturally,” Sundlöf said. “The FBI has millions to choose from and compare to. They once found a seven-point match. Only they were different people!”

“I think I’ve lost you now,” Winter said.

“They had two sets of prints, and seven of the minutiae points in the two fingerprints were identical,” Beier said. “They were completely identical. And yet it turned out they came from two different people. No one’s ever found so many matching points in two separate individuals. Never.”

“Not yet anyway,” Winter said. “So twelve gives us a pretty good margin, then?”

“You can be pretty sure,” Beier said.

“Then do the same with the print on the drawer in Helene’s apartment,” Winter said.

“That’s a partial print,” Sundlöf said. “And a faint one, probably deposited through a tear in a woolen glove, judging from the fiber sample. We’re analyzing that right now.”

“So, difficult in other words?” Winter asked.

Beier and Sundlöf nodded simultaneously.

“How about the others? In the apartment?”

“We’re still working at it, Inspector,” Beier said.

“I’m sure you’ll find all there is to find,” Winter said, and took a step toward the door. “Thanks for the lesson, by the way.”

Winter passed through the security gate. He wanted to get back to his office to go through the drawings, to sort them.

He also wanted to study his copy of the slip of paper again. Here in forensics it was as if the numbers and letters had become more distinct, the lines longer, sharper. It meant something to him. It was a map.

It had meant something to Helene too. Or had she simply forgotten the slip of paper twenty-five years ago in that pocket, after some kind of game? It was possible-for those who believed in coincidences.

But she hadn’t written the numbers and drawn the lines herself. It was a grown-up’s hand that had guided the pen.

He felt warm and the inside of his head felt sort of swollen. A cold shower was in order.

38

THE LIGHT OVER THE SQUARE WAS JUST AS HARSH AS ON PREVIOUS days, though the air had grown warmer. Winter was sitting on one of the benches, eyes trained on the entrance to the post office. He’d been sitting there for half an hour and was about to stand. It was a quarter to one. Lots of people were walking in and out through the doors along the arcade-the time of the month when salaries and pensions were paid out and bills came due. A group of men were waiting outside for the doors of Jacky’s Pub to open. I’ll go in there later, Winter thought. I can see from in there.

Sara Helander had relieved Bergenhem an hour and a half ago and was sitting on one of the benches by the window, with a brochure on the art of borrowing.

She glanced down at it and tried at the same time to keep an eye on what was going on over at the service windows. She could see them, but perhaps she ought to stand. I’ll rest my legs a minute longer, she thought.

She’d lifted her gaze and stood when she saw the women at window number 3 raise a hand. Helander quickly moved closer, crossing between a baby carriage and a child. The woman behind the counter looked pale, as if she was about to fall off her swivel chair. She lowered her hand and pointed toward the doors.

Helander saw the light signal flashing at short intervals above the service window, like a reminder of her negligence. A man as broad as the poster above him had already positioned himself in front of the window, expecting to be served. Helander thrust him aside, thrashing her way forward, intense nausea surging in her chest.

“What the he-”

“He was here!” the woman behind the glass said. “I tried to catch your eye. He was here thirty seconds ago. Didn’t the light go on?”

Reflexively Helander looked up once again at the angry signal from the warning light mounted above the service window. Fuck, I’m gonna get fired! Oh my God, I didn’t even think… But she pulled herself together.

“Was it the same number?”

The woman held up a deposit slip.

Helander grabbed hold of the little woven basket on the counter. It was half-filled with slips.

“Put these somewhere safe,” she shouted, and tried to squeeze the basket through the far-too-narrow gap beneath the window. “Open up and put these inside!”

“He went ou-” The woman in navy blue and pinstripes felt her voice crack.

I bet he fucking did. Helander almost tripped over the fold in the carpet but regained her balance and avoided breaking her nose against the shatterproof glass.

Winter was just lighting a Corps when he saw Sara Helander fly out through the doors of the post office and look around wildly.

Something’s gone wrong. He threw away his cigarillo and ran to where Helander was standing. She saw him.

“He was here!” she said breathlessly. “The cashier processed a deposit-”

“Which way?”

“I don’t know.”

“When?”

“Just now. A few minutes ago. I’m sor-”

“Forget about that now. What does he look like?”

“I don’t know. It happened so fa-”

“Bergenhem is eating over in the bar. Go over there and tell him to come over to the post office right away, to the room at the back where we’ve got the video machine. You come back here with him. But first call Bertil and tell him to send over two cars with extra manpower. I’ll call the officers watching the parking lots.”

He dialed a number for one of the cars stationed at the western parking lot and spoke into his cell phone.

“They’re standing by,” he said, and hung up. “We’ll see if we can’t pick him up.”

Damn it, he thought to himself. “I’m going inside to check the CCTV footage. Come as quickly as you can. Which window was it?”

“Number 3.”

Inside the post office, life went on as usual. The postmaster was waiting by the door to the back room.

“I’ll go in and rewind the tape,” Winter said. “He was in here. Have someone relieve the girl at window 3 and send her back here to the video room.”

“But I’ve got no one else!”

“What’s the matter with you? We’re investigating a mur-” But he calmed down. “Look, just close it or sit there yourself if you have to. I want her in here immediately.”

The camera was connected directly to the video recorder, which was connected to a monitor in a room with no windows. Winter stopped the machine and looked at his watch. He rewound the tape to a half minute before the time Helander had put down that the man had been there. The woman from window 3 came in. Winter pressed play. The film scraped to life and the interior of the post office appeared.

Winter had chosen the camera location at the very back of the premises, and from there it looked like a thousand people were gathered. The woman now standing next to him could be seen in angled profile close by. A female customer left the window. A man wearing a baseball cap and a long, heavy jacket was next in line and then stepped forward.

Winter saw the man drop his slip in the basket on the counter, like a reflex action. Winter couldn’t see his face-just his profile, at an angle, from behind.

“That’s him,” the cashier said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course it’s him. He was wearing that same cap,” she said, as if the footage they were watching wasn’t a replay but a live take in a reality show.

Winter saw how the man handed something over and how the cashier took it and shifted her gaze in front of her, still angled down, and how she then looked up at the man and seemed to look past him. Winter followed that gaze right across the room to Helander, who was sitting on a bench, looking down at a brochure.

The light above the service window started flashing. The woman said something to the man.

“I tried to keep him there, but he didn’t want a receipt.”

The man in the cap left the counter and moved toward the door. The cashier raised her arm and waved her hand. Another man stepped up to the window and looked at the cashier gesturing. Winter saw how Helander jumped up and forced her way up to the window. The man in the cap walked out through the double doors without tripping over Bergenhem’s fold in the carpet.

Bergenhem and Helander had entered and were standing next to the cashier.

“My God,” she said. The idiot’s caught on film, she thought when she saw herself.

Winter stopped the tape and backed it up. The man in the cap came back into frame.

“That’s him,” Winter said. He won’t be the only one out there with one of those fucking caps, he thought to himself. But his has some big, pale lettering on the front.

“Yes, that’s him,” the cashier said.

Winter spoke on his cell phone, repeated the description.

“They’re searching for him,” he said to Helander and Bergenhem as he held the phone to his ear, waiting for someone else to pick up. “Hello? Yes, seal everything off. Forge-What? No, no sirens for Christ’s sake. And don’t forget the bus station. Yes. The bus station. Send someone over there now!”

He hung up and headed for the door.

“Is Bertil bringing more men?”

“Yes,” Bergenhem said. “What do we do now?”

“You all know what he looks like.” Winter checked his watch. “Less than ten minutes have passed since he was in here. He may have jumped into a car and driven off, but there’s a chance he’s still around, and we’ve got the big parking lots and the bus station covered. I don’t think he suspects anything. And call Bertil again, right away.”

“Okay,” Bergenhem said.

“He’s still here,” Winter said. “I think he’s still here. One of the female officers has taken up position outside the doors to Konsum. I want you to go into the department store and see if you can spot him. And if you do, call me and go outside and wait there with the others.”

He looked at Helander. “You come with me.”

She didn’t answer as he hurried her out of the post office.

“You circle around the edge of the square, to the left, and we’ll meet up at the corner over there,” Winter said.

He entered the savings bank and came out again. The man in the cap wasn’t in the flower shop, nor was he in the Bella Napoli Pizzeria. Not in the real estate office on the corner.

“Nothing,” Helander said when they met.

They walked down the pedestrian tunnel. They walked past the newly built high school and stood in front of the cultural center. To the left Winter could see a bridge over a stream. The path forked in two after the bridge, and then again farther on, and once more after that. He thought about the fingerprint, his heart pounding.

They entered the cultural center and continued through the library and the other public spaces. They saw two teenagers wearing caps.

“He was at least forty,” Helander said.

“Yes.”

They went out and the wind hit them from the left. They continued into the wind, half-running. Up ahead lay the bus station. Winter could see the back entrance to the supermarket and the parking lot below, toward the street. Fredrik and Aneta-back on duty-moving around among the cars. Halders’s scalp was self-illuminating.

There were police officers standing by the buses. He could make out Ringmar speaking to Börjesson. Bergenhem approached from the arcade next to Konsum and shook his head when he saw Winter. We’re all here, thought Winter, the whole hardworking team, but what good is it?

He continued west across the bus station. On the other side of the road was the health clinic, and in front of him was yet another big parking lot. As he drew closer he saw a man, thirty yards away, leaning forward to unlock a red Volvo 740. He was wearing a black cap with white text and a green oilskin coat that Winter could only see the upper part of since the man was standing on the other side of the car. Winter started to run.

The man looked up, black cap pulled down over his brow. He was wearing a red scarf. It’s like watching a black-and-white film transform into color, Winter thought as he ran.

The man saw him and turned around to see if anything was happening behind him, and that’s when the others approached. A police car tore out from the bus station and accelerated toward him. The blond guy in the leather jacket sprinting toward him was now shouting something. He threw himself into the car and jammed the key into the ignition, and the Volvo roared to life. When he sent the car surging backward, the guy in the leather jacket clung to the door, but then flew off when he popped the clutch and shot forward. It would have worked if the back end of a cop car hadn’t smashed right into his front on the exit ramp and then been dragged halfway across the damn street on the hood of his Volvo before he finally came to a stop. He couldn’t get the door open, so he threw himself to the passenger side and stepped out onto the asphalt, which was when that goddamn skinhead came at him and barreled into his stomach skull-first, and the air just exploded out of him and he crumbled to the ground after two steps, and the skinhead flew onto him again.

“You okay?” Halders asked.

“Just a little scratch,” Winter said, peering at his elbow through the hole in his leather jacket. “Nice work, Fredrik.”

“So that’s him,” Halders said, and looked at the man sitting in the backseat of one of the radio cars.

“He’s the one who paid the rent.”

“Has he said anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Guess we’ll have to torture him,” Halders said. “This is just the beginning. Aren’t you happy, Winter?”

“Happy?”

“It could have all gone to shit.”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

“Come on, this is a big breakthrough for homicide. Look at him. He knows he’s going to come clean.”

“Nice takedown there,” Winter repeated. “I’m going to have a quick chat with Sara before we head back.”

Halders nodded and walked toward Aneta and the car. It looked as if he were going for a stroll.

Helander was waiting by the station building.

“I was negligent,” she said. “Criminally negligent.”

“We should have practiced a bit,” Winter said. “But there’s no guarantee it would have turned out differently anyway. There were a lot of people in there and he was quick.”

“Bullshit.”

Winter lit up a Corps. It tasted good. “Okay. But we had a preparedness that worked.”

“He wasn’t suspicious,” Helander said. “Not even when you came running toward him. Isn’t that strange?”

“We’ll have to see what he says and who he is,” Winter said. “If his name matches what his driver’s license says-that is, if he’s got one.” He took a drag and studied the smoke that followed the wind up toward the sky.

39

THE MAN’S NAME WAS OSKAR JAKOBSSON AND HE HAD HIS own registration number at the station. They’d pulled the fingerprints from the slip and compared it to the ten-print database and the system found a match. Oskar Jakobsson had a criminal background. Nothing big.

He’d done time for larceny and battery against friends and had been convicted of car theft, and he had done stuff they didn’t know about, Winter thought as he sat in front of Jakobsson, who looked worried but not desperate. He was prepared for a detention lasting twelve hours and maybe longer, but not a lot longer. He claimed that he knew what he had done, but not why.

“Of course you help someone out when they ask you. Of course you do.”

Beneath the baseball cap his hair was dark brown and disheveled. Jakobsson had declined the offer of a comb, but had said yes to coffee. He had a scar above his chin, like a proper criminal who’s had broken bottles shoved in his face in his time.

“You’re happy to lend a hand?” Winter asked.

“People help me out.”

“Tell us again from the beginning.”

“From when?”

“From when you were asked if you’d be willing to help out.”

The tape recorder was turning on the table between them. The interrogating officer, Gabriel Cohen, sat next to Winter and was silent. No one else was in the room. There were no windows. The ventilation system droned from the walls. When Jakobsson asked if he could smoke, Winter said no.

“I’d just parked,” Jakobsson said.

Winter wondered how the man had managed to drive a car around for months without getting stopped. He’d never had a driver’s license. The car belonged to his brother, who seldom drove.

“When was that?”

“When was it I parked? Last month. Unless it was the end of the month before that. At the same spot in the parking lot where I was standing this time. Maybe a luck-”

“What were you going to do?”

“Do? I was going to do some shopping.”

“Where?”

“At the Terningen supermarket. My brother wanted some snus, so did I, and a loaf of bread and some potatoes.”

“Okay,” Winter said. “You’ve just locked the car and are about to walk away from it. What happens then?”

“She comes up to me after I’ve turned around and maybe taken a step or two.”

“You didn’t see her before?”

“No.”

“Did you see this woman after you parked but before you got out of the car?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

“So you got out of the car and took a few steps. What happened then?”

“Like I said. She came up to me with that damn envelope.”

“She had an envelope?”

“Yeah.”

“What did it look like?”

“What are you asking about that for? You already have it for Christ’s sake. You took it from the glove compartment.”

“Did it look like this?” Winter held up a white A5 envelope. “Go ahead and take it.”

Jakobsson held it in front of him. “It’s the same size, but this one was brown.”

“She came up to you, you say. You say she had the envelope. Could you see it? Was she holding it out in the open?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say anything?”

“She asked me if I wanted to make a little cash. Well, she didn’t say ‘a little,’ come to think of it-she just asked if I wanted to make some cash.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I guess I must have just stared at her.”

“Describe what she looked like.”

“There wasn’t a lot you could see. Black sunglasses and a hat, so I couldn’t see any hair, but she wore a shirt and pants. That’s what I remember.”

“Was she white?”

“What do you mean, white?”

“What color skin did she have? Was she white or black?”

“Well, she wasn’t a black person, if that’s what you’re asking. She had a tan, I guess, but the shades were so big they covered almost her whole face.”

We’ll have to return to this later, Winter thought. He’s got more to tell us about her appearance. “What did she say?”

“I just told you, she asked if I wanted to make some cash.”

“What did you answer?”

“Nothing. I stared at her like a fucking idiot. It’s fucking creepy, someone just popping up out of nowhere like that and handing you an envelope.”

“What did she say then?”

“She said that I could make some cash if I did her a little favor, and then she told me what it was-that I was to go to the post office at the end of every month and pay this rent and write down the number of the apartment. That was it.”

“What was the envelope for?”

“That’s where the money was, for Christ’s sake. And a paper with the depo-direct deposit number and the other number.”

“Where’s that slip of paper now?”

“I threw it away.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I remembered the number. I have a good memory for numbers, see. And of course I wasn’t so stupid as not to realize that it had to be something a little shady. In which case you shouldn’t hang on to any little slips of paper. Never keep slips of paper-that’s my motto.”

Jakobsson looked as if he was going to smirk, and Winter felt the skin tighten around his scalp. He was full of impatience, but he kept it suppressed beneath the calm that was necessary for him to be able to make it through the interrogation.

“Say the number,” Winter said. “The direct deposit number.”

“What?”

“You’ve got a good memory for numbers, right. You said earlier that you had to pay two rents and that you had received five thousand for your trouble. Then you must remember the number.”

“Three rents,” Jakobsson said, “and I got ten thousand. Talk about a memory for numbers, huh?” He looked at Cohen, who nodded. “This guy doesn’t even remember if it was two or three rents.” Cohen nodded again.

“Okay,” Winter said. “Let’s hear the direct deposit number, then.”

Jakobsson stared at the tape recorder. The air-conditioning droned, and finally he cleared his throat. “Damn it, it’s this interrogation. It makes me nervous. It’s not so strange. You don’t even remember how many rents it was.”

“You don’t remember the number?”

“Sure I do, just not right now. I have to pay another rent, don’t I? Then I gotta remember.”

“Where is the money?” Winter asked, well aware of the answer.

“Are you kidding me? You think I’ve got it in the bank?”

“So where, then?”

“Spent, Mr. Chief Inspector. Consumed, you might say. And a long time ago.”

“What was the number you were supposed to write on the payment slip at the post office?”

“What?”

“You were supposed to write another number too. What was it?”

“I’ll know it when I’m standing there.”

“You won’t be standing there anymore.”

“No. But you know what I mean. When I have to remember, I do. It’s kind of like this motto I’ve got.”

“Do you have any idea what this is about?” Winter said, edging closer to the table.

“Nobody tells me anything.”

“This is about murder and kidnapping.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You’re involved.”

“How the hell can I be involved? What did you say-kidnapping? Murder? What the f-You guys know me, well, not you maybe, but ask some of the other officers in the building. Go on! How the hell can anyone think that Oskar Jakobsson would be involved? Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Where’s the slip of paper?”

“I told you I threw it away.”

“Where?”

“In the garbage, for fuck’s sake. At home.”

“When?”

“When? Ages ago. When I got the stuff from the woman.”

Winter decided to reveal something else to him about the reason for their interest, and at this Cohen stood up and went to get some coffee. Jakobsson then said he was dying for a smoke, and Winter took out the pack of Princes he had bought and handed it to him, lighting Jakobsson’s cigarette and a Corps for himself.

“I might have it at home,” Jakobsson said.

“So you didn’t take it with you when you were going to pay the rent at the post office? You’ve got to help me out here a little,” Winter said.

“Okay, okay. I threw it away afterward.”

“You threw it away? When?”

“After I paid it. There was a wastebasket in that room you walk through before you get to the section with the service windows. I threw it away in there.”

“Why did you throw it away? You had another rent to pay.”

Jakobsson exhaled and gazed at the smoke rising to the ceiling.

“Why did you throw it away?” Winter repeated.

“Okay, okay. I didn’t have to pay any more rents.”

“You didn’t have to pay any more rents?”

“I said, no. You were right before, although you didn’t know it. I only had to pay two rents.”

“Are you telling me the truth now?”

“Yes.”

“Why should we believe you now?”

Jakobsson shrugged his shoulders.

“I guess ’cause of what you told me,” he said. “That’s some heavy shit. That’s not something you want to be involved in, hell no.” He looked around for an ashtray, and when Cohen nodded to a plate where some buns had been, Jakobsson flicked off a long pillar of ash. “I’m not involved. I haven’t done anything.”

“Why are you lying about this woman, then?”

“What the fuck is this now? I’m not lying, am I?”

“You told us that she came up to you when you got out of your car. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“You stood there facing each other, and she handed you the envelope and made you this offer?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh for Chri-How many times do I have to tell you? She asked if I wanted to make some cash and do them a favor at the same time.”

“Them?”

“What?”

“You said ‘them’ now. What do you mean by that?”

“I did? I don’t mean anything.”

“You don’t want to help us, Oskar. Should we break it off here and continue when you’ve had a chance to think it over?”

“I don’t need to think it over.”

“You want to continue?”

“You’re asking and I’m answering. That’s how it always is. Ask me a good question and I’ll give you a good answer.”

“This isn’t a game,” Winter said. “There’s a four-year-old girl somewhere out there who may still be alive, and we’ve already wasted a lot of time.”

She wasn’t five. They’d been able to establish that Jennie was four and a half.

Jakobsson was silent. The cigarette butt lay crumpled in the dish. Winter held his extinguished cigarillo in his hand.

“How this ends might depend on you,” Winter said. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Can I have another cigarette?”

Winter handed Jakobsson the pack and let him light one himself.

“Everybody knows that I would never have anything to do with murder,” Jakobsson said. “Everybody knows.”

“Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill the woman?”

“What the fu-”

“Just tell us and you’ll be doing us both a favor.”

“Oskar Jakobsson a murderer? People would laugh-”

“Where did you meet this woman?”

“What?”

“The woman you say made you the offer. Where did you meet her?”

“Christ, you guys are too much. I told you, the parking lot.”

“I don’t think you’re telling the truth. Unless you tell us where it was, I can’t believe anything else you say.”

Jakobsson looked at Cohen, who nodded encouragingly.

“Okay, okay. Fuck! There was this coffee shop there, and I got a call beforehand.”

“A call? A phone call?”

“Yes.”

“From whom?”

“From her. The woman I met later in the coffee shop.”

“She called you?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you then?”

“Where was I? At home, of course. I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Were you alone at home?”

“When I got the call? Well, my brother may have been out. I can’t remember.”

“What did she say?”

“That she had a proposal and that I could do her a favor and… For Christ’s sake, we’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“What do you mean?”

“She said what I said she said, only it was someplace else. At the coffee shop.”

“Which coffee shop?”

“Jacky’s Pub.”

“That’s a coffee shop?”

“To me it’s a coffee shop. Coffee’s the only thing I drink there. The beer’s too damn expensive, and anyways I’ve quit.”

“Who suggested that you meet there?”

“I did.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Nah. Maybe it was her. It’s so… Can we take that break soon? This is tiring me out.”

“We’ll break soon,” Winter said. “Try to remember who suggested that you meet there.”

“It was her.”

“What was the first thing she said?”

“I can’t remember a damn thing anymore.”

“What’s her name?”

“No idea. I told you several times before we sat down here. I’d never seen her before.”

“You know her.”

“No way.”

“Why else would she get in touch with you?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“You said before that you’re happy to lend a hand.”

“I said that? Well, maybe that’s why she got in touch.”

“Are you known for lending a hand?”

“Don’t ask me. But that could be the reason, like I said. She heard from somebody that I’m a good guy and she called me.”

“Who might she have heard that from?”

“What?”

“That you’re a good guy?”

“A hundred people at least,” Jakobsson said.

“List them,” Winter said, and took out a fresh notepad from his inside pocket, along with a stubby pencil.

“You’re out of your… I gotta go to the toilet.”

“In a minute.”

“You don’t get it. If I don’t get to a toilet in one minute, it won’t be much fun for anyone to sit in here.”

“What’s her name?”

“I said I don’t know. You can continue questioning me in the toilet if you want to but I can’t-”

“Give me a name.”

“I don’t know for fuck’s sake!”

“Who might have tipped her off that you’re ready to lend a hand?”

Jakobsson didn’t answer. He’d risen up to a half-standing position, and they could tell from the dark spot spreading out across his jeans that perhaps for the first time during the interview he had spoken the truth.

40

RINGMAR READ THE TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE SESSION WITH Jakobsson. He too was struck by its significance, by the possibility that they were suddenly making progress. It was like catching a whiff of something you knew would smell a lot worse when you got closer.

“I don’t think he knows what he’s involved in,” Ringmar said.

“He’s a pretty tough character.”

“Not that tough,” Ringmar said. “Not for this. Jakobsson is small time.”

“Möllerström is working on his circle of associates.”

“There must be a lot of them,” Ringmar said.

“Not as many as you might expect.”

“That all depends. Did you know that Oskar used to ride a motorbike?”

“Yes,” Winter said, “but it’s hard to believe.”

“He was in a biker gang. Some local chapter of the Hells Angels, but even they kicked him out, I think.”

“I can hear the rumbling throughout this investigation,” Winter said.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. The sky’s rumbling.”

Ringmar sized up his younger superior. Winter had dark circles under his eyes, and in certain lighting he almost looked as if he were wearing war paint. His long hair reached his shoulders.

“Maybe I’m reading too much into it,” Winter said. “Maybe Jakobsson is just an innocent bystander.”

“Innocent messenger,” Ringmar said. “But there are no innocent messengers.”

Winter flipped through the printouts. The words struck at him from the paper. Over the last two or three years, he’d come to read interrogation transcripts with a vague feeling of dread, as if they were fiction taken from a reality he couldn’t penetrate. The exchanges were fiction and sport at the same time, and both parties knew it.

“He says that the woman could have been forty or twenty-five.”

“That may be because of the sunglasses,” Ringmar said. “That is, if she was wearing any. Or if she even exists.”

“It’s not unusual to have a proxy,” Winter said. “Someone like Jakobsson gets an assignment from someone who got it from someone else who in turn was contacted by the prime mover. The murderer.”

“Yeah, standard criminal procedure,” Ringmar said.

“So we have to work our way backward along the chain,” Winter said.

“If all he did was that one service, and didn’t think any more about it, then he would have said so straight off.”

“Yes.”

“That means he knows whoever it was that gave him the job. The woman, if it is a woman.”

“Could be.”

“We can’t even say for sure that there was any money involved.”

“No.”

“We’ll have to put the screws to him again,” Ringmar said. “But let him go empty his bladder this time.”

The nationwide APB had been issued. Wellman defended the delay and did a good job of it. Winter might see Wellman in a different light after this.

Everything from the past month came back. Winter could see his own investigation described in different varieties of newspaper prose. He read the newspapers and set them aside. Bülow’s article was fairly well informed, but that wasn’t so strange given that Winter had provided the facts. It was an agreement of sorts.

Winter had agreed to take part in a press conference the next morning. Tomorrow, not earlier.

Sitting alone in his office, he reached for the drawings, but first he closed his eyes so his mind would be as dark and still as possible.

They dragged Delsjö Lake. They walked through the forested areas along the water’s edge again. They were able to be more candid when they questioned the neighbors.

Photographs of Helene Andersén’s apartment had been disseminated through the media and printed on posters. They went through the census register. Helene Andersén had lived in the apartment at North Biskopsgården and before that in an apartment in Backa. Jennie had been born at Östra Hospital. The father had been listed as unknown. Helene had taken care of her child on her own from the start.

She’d been in contact with the social services or, rather, the other way around. They had evaluated her and visited her home, but she was apparently deemed fit to look after her little daughter. No one that Winter spoke to remembered anything.

She had no job and she was not getting any support from the welfare office. It didn’t make any sense. She had an unblemished credit history. Not even someone who lives simply can manage that. Winter opened his eyes again. She had money coming in from somewhere. She had stated in her tax returns that she had a minor sum of money put by, but they didn’t find any accounts or safe-deposit boxes. They had more to do there.

There were 145 Anderséns in the Gothenburg telephone book, but none had thus far been in touch.

Helene had had a telephone installed three months before, and she wasn’t registered as having had one before that.

It was October now, and her service had started on August 10. She’d bought a telephone, but they didn’t as yet know where. A twenty-nine-year-old woman who may have gotten her first phone ever. Why did she get a phone? Why had she decided not to have one earlier?

Something had happened that caused her to need a phone, thought Winter. She needed to get in touch with someone, maybe quickly if necessary. Was she afraid? Had she bought it for protection? Had she been told to be reachable?

Seven days after her phone was hooked up, she was dead. She’d made two calls, both to phone booths. One was at Vågmästarplatsen, which she had dialed at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of August 14. The other booth was at the bus terminal at the Heden recreation grounds, which she’d called the following evening, August 15.

Helene had in turn received three calls, two immediately preceding the calls she’d placed herself and from the same phone booths. Someone had apparently been waiting there for her to call back. Why?

The third call came from a number that was registered to an apartment in the Majorna district. Someone had phoned at four thirty on the afternoon of August 16. The conversation had lasted one minute. The dialer was a woman named Maj Svedberg, and she had no recollection whatsoever of the call. August 16? Had she even been in town? Could it have been when she dialed a wrong number? A child had answered and then a woman, and it was a wrong number. Whom had she intended to call? The public dental service, actually, and if they wanted to check her story, she had the number for the dentist, but she didn’t know anything about this other number.

They checked the number for the dental office, and it was identical to Helene’s except for one number.

“Check up on her,” Winter had said to Möllerström.

The pile of Jennie’s drawings had become smaller, and Winter continued to go through them. He could see that some were more accomplished or more detailed. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with age. Perhaps sometimes the girl just grew tired of drawing.

There were recurring elements: boats and cars, faces in a window a few times. A forest or just a few trees. A road that was brown or sometimes black. Sun and rain, nearly always sun and rain. Always outside. Winter had yet to see a single drawing of an interior.

He held up a drawing depicting a house with a pointed roof and a Danish flag on top.

A Danish flag, thought Winter. White cross on a red background. The house stood in a field indicated by a few green lines. The house had walls that were white like the paper.

Over the next half hour he worked his way through the rest of the pile of drawings, and found another with a Danish flag.

Two drawings with a Danish flag.

More than twenty of a boat on water.

Three drawings of a car driven by a man with a black beard that grew straight out from his chin.

He laid the two Danish flag pictures next to each other on the desk and studied them, one at a time. He searched for the signature “jeni” and suddenly stiffened. The drawing on the left was signed “helene.” He looked for the signature on the other. It was in the lower right-hand corner: “helene” again. He swallowed and started to go through the piles in front of him. One of the drawings of the car was signed “helene.” You couldn’t tell it apart from the other two. Five of the drawings depicting boats were signed “helene” in the same childish scrawl as “jeni.” The motifs were the same, their execution seemingly identical.

This is one of the spookiest things I’ve ever experienced, thought Winter.

In the back of his mind was something else that he had noticed as he’d sorted through the drawings over the past half hour-something recurring, something he hadn’t reacted to, like a spot in a corner that you only vaguely register but don’t ascribe any importance to.

He went back to one of the desks with the sorted drawings. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… There. It was the path that went from the bottom of the page to the top. It was possible that it was a road, since it gently wove its way past a few trees before ending up at a house that had a door and a window but no roof.

The pages felt stiff in his hands as he sifted on. There: The road leading up from the bottom of the page. The house with no roof, a window to the left of the door. To the right of the house-like a vertical rectangle with an X at the top-was a double cruciform.

Winter looked at the first drawing again. The same little barely visible box in a dead corner, with diagonally crossed lines.

A windmill, he thought. It could be a little windmill that she’s drawn.

Both drawings were signed “jeni.”

“I brought along a basket,” Angela said, and held it up for him to see.

“Is it Friday?” Winter asked.

“Friday evening, eight o’clock.”

“Then I can’t leave you standing out here on the doorstep.”

“You could come outside.”

“And miss the trumpet solo? Here it comes now.”

“Sweet.”

“Well, come inside, then, before it’s over.”

“You weren’t surprised, were you?”

“No, it’s just that I was-”

“Sitting and working? Or thinking? Forgot that I was coming?”

He didn’t answer, took the basket and set it down on the floor and helped her with her coat, which was heavy and smelled divinely of her and pungently of the street along Vasaplatsen.

“I haven’t been here for a long time,” she said as they stood in the living room.

“Me neither.”

“So I’ve realized.”

“May I?” Winter grabbed hold of her and pulled her out onto the wooden floor, which bounced varnished reflections from the glow of a lamp over by the windows.

She bent her face a little backward and looked at him. “What’s this?”

“Donald Byrd.”

“I mean this. This dance. It’s a surprise.”

“Life’s full of surprises.”

“What’s gotten into you? Have you been drinking?”

“Quiet now and follow my lead,” Winter said.

He swung her around, in a right turn, when Trane came in after Byrd’s solo, and then Byrd came back and he drew her more tightly to him and continued the right turn.

They danced. She couldn’t remember when they had last done that. It was nice. It was just a good way to start a Friday evening. Dancing and the wine she had brought along and the langoustine and white…

They continued to dance until the music ended, then moved to the kitchen. She took out the food while Winter prepared dry martinis in a shaker.

“When did you last have a dry martini?” she asked.

“Was it five years ago?”

She looked at him. His face seemed sort of chipped along the edges, paler than the last time they had seen each other. His shirt was open at the collar, and she could see the sinews in his neck. He looked up from his shaking and smiled.

“Are you celebrating something, Erik?”

He stopped moving the ice-colored cylinder and set it down on the kitchen counter.

“More the opposite really.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I felt that I needed something else.”

“Something other than that awful case you’re working on?”

“Well, yes, something that glittered and sparkled a little differently. Like that,” he said, and nodded at the shaker.

“Well, pour it up,” she said. “Here are the glasses.”

He poured and they drank.

“Shall we set the table and sit down and talk about this past week?”

“Let’s do yours,” Winter said.

“You’re probably the one who most needs to talk,” she said.

41

IT WAS SUMMER AGAIN WHEN HE STEPPED OUT THE FRONT DOOR before eight o’clock, the shadows from the houses still bearing traces of the past night’s darkness. A street cleaner dragged itself along the asphalt on the other side of Vasaplatsen and sucked the last of the morning haze into its rotating bristles. A van delivered fresh bread to the Wasa Källare restaurant. Winter took in the smells. He was hungry. He’d drunk a cup of coffee and that was it. Angela had continued sleeping.

He walked across Kungstorget. The market stalls were being set up for the day. Crates of vegetables and fruit were carried out from trucks to their spots on the stands. He went into a shop on the other side of Kungsportsplatsen and ordered a café au lait and two French rolls with butter and cheese. He sat down by the window and watched the tabloid paper’s city office across the square opening for the day. A young lady had put up headline posters. He couldn’t read them from where he was sitting, but he could guess what they said. Up to now the media reports had brought in hundreds of tips, perhaps thousands. Winter had worked with them as much as he could bear and tried to take seriously anything that seemed worth being taken seriously. There was a desire to help but also a fear of what had happened. Of what might happen again, what might happen to me.

He got up and walked north to Brunnsparken and stood at the number 2 stop. Jennie had drawn a streetcar with a 2 at one end. It was likely she had ridden on it, most likely together with her mother, Helene.

They’d questioned the streetcar drivers, but no one recognized the faces of the people they drove through the city. Perhaps it was a form of security. It was an insecure job. They had also shown photographs around North Biskopsgården but nobody knew anything; no one recognized anyone.

A series of photos of the girl had been taken in a studio at Vågmästarplatsen a year ago. The photographer remembered doing it but nothing more. The few other photos of Jennie they’d found in Helene’s apartment were taken with one or more cameras that they hadn’t found.

Someone had taken the photos of Helene and of Helene with her daughter.

There were seven or eight that had been taken relatively recently, in addition to the studio photos. Two had dates printed on them and that could prove helpful.

There were no photographs of Helene as a child.

Winter looked around. A dozen or so people were waiting for the streetcar. The number 2 arrived, and on an impulse he boarded, together with four men who might have been Ethiopians and a drunk who was Swedish.

He got off at Friskväderstorget, and the sun filled the ears protruding from the sides of the buildings. The satellite dishes seemed to swivel back and forth, homing in on sounds from a native land. He heard music, coming from somewhere, which sounded like John Coltrane with a hookah and a fez. Turkish jazz, he thought. It really swings.

Ernst Lundgren was out with the children in the playground outside the building that housed the pensioners’ day-care center. The tall old man bent down in a way that would either strengthen his back or soon snap it in two.

“Anything new?” he asked when Winter said hello.

Winter told him the latest.

“Well, we still don’t have anything here,” Lundgren said. “She didn’t belong to our little flock.”

“And none of the other parents recognize her?”

“The mothers? No, not a one.”

“She seems to have been one of the loneliest people in the world,” Winter said.

“There’s nothing strange about that. Nothing surprises me.”

“I didn’t take you for a cynic.”

“I’m not cynical. I’m just not surprised.”

“About the loneliness?”

“She wasn’t the only one,” Lundgren said. “There’s a whole bunch of them. You could safely say that they’re in the majority.”

The apartment smelled of wood and wind.

“I’ve cleaned the house,” Angela said, holding a glass of wine in her hand. “A proper housewife.”

“Apart from the glass of wine,” Winter said.

“Want some?”

“No. I’d prefer a gin and tonic, seeing as you’ve started the drinking.”

“You’re the one who’s started. You never used to drink, but now you’ve started.”

“It’s never too late.”

She followed him out of the kitchen.

“I’ve been here all day,” she said.

“That’s more than I’ve ever managed.”

“It’s quite a nice place. If you like, I can show you around.”

“Where’s dinner?”

“What?”

“Dinner’s supposed to be on the table!” Winter shouted, and pointed at the round table by the window.

“Let’s eat out,” she said.

“Spoken like a true housewife. But if we’re going out, I want to jump in the shower first.” He started unbuttoning his shirt.

She’d been busy over by the sink and now brought him his gin.

“How’s it going, Erik?” She helped him off with his shirt and held it between her hands.

“Well, how’s it going? It’s moving forward, I guess, but I’m worried as hell about the little girl. You know as well as I do what the chances of finding her are.”

“I’ve been thinking a bit about what you said about her. Have you checked with all the ERs?”

“What exactly are you asking, here, Doc? If we’ve checked the hospitals? Well, of course we have.”

“Helene? I mean, the mother.”

“Helene? What are you talking about?”

“If she doesn’t have family-if no one has been in touch-she still must have grown up somewhere.”

“As soon as we got her name, which was just recently, we contacted all the institutions and agencies under the sun. That includes foster homes, orphanages, and stuff like that too.”

“Okay. I was sitting here today thinking about Helene as a child. When she was little, like her own girl. Jennie, is it? Okay. Maybe she isn’t at some hospital, Jennie that is, or you don’t know yet. But maybe the mother was admitted to the hospital when she was a child. Or was brought in to the ER for some reason. Helene, I mean. I know you’ve been thinking about that name. Andersén.”

“Yeah,” Winter said. “Keep going.”

“Well, say a little girl named Helene something was brought in for some reason years ago. If she was, then there must be a record of it.”

42

WINTER MET BERGENHEM IN THE PARKING LOT OUTSIDE POLICE headquarters. He was on his way in, and Bergenhem, who had the afternoon off, was carrying his daughter on his back. Winter walked behind Bergenhem, and Ada looked at him wide-eyed.

“We’ve met before,” he said.

“As recently as yesterday,” Bergenhem said.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Oh.”

“How’s it going?” Winter ran his finger along the baby’s cheek. It felt like something soft that he couldn’t remember.

“It’s going good,” Bergenhem said.

“I’m still not talking to you.”

“She’s lost her power of speech,” Bergenhem said. “You’ve made an impression. Could you lift her out, by the way?”

Winter raised his hands toward the infant. Ada began to squeal.

“She doesn’t want me to.”

“She’s just testing.”

“Okay.” Winter lifted her up, and Ada stopped her screaming. “What do I do now?” He held her close.

“Nothing,” Bergenhem said.

Winter kept his unpracticed grip in place, and the little girl ogled him.

“I’ve heard that kids like Ada here can get it into their heads that it’s no fun to go to sleep at night,” he said.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I must have read it somewhere.”

“Ada has never heard about that.”

Winter stole a glance at Bergenhem. The detective was ten years younger than him. Or was it eleven? Right now it felt the other way around. Lars has knowledge in a field where I don’t even qualify as a trainee. Lucky thing Angela isn’t along.

Winter set the child gently on the ground.

“See you this afternoon,” he said.

The desk in Birgersson’s office glistened. The department chief was smoking with the window open, but Winter left his cigarillos where they were, inside his jacket pocket.

Birgersson’s face looked fried in the sunlight coming in, as if he’d held it over a fire. “The dragging of the lake has attracted every journalist in the country,” he said.

“That may be a good thing.”

“Now you’ve got more material than you can shake a stick at.”

“Better make sure I don’t get too conscientious, then.”

“Are you still upset about that?”

“Yes.”

Birgersson smiled and tapped his cigarette into the ashtray that he had taken from his drawer.

Same old procedure, thought Winter.

Birgersson cocked his head like a dog that’s just detected a sound. “Hear that? The bikers are out in force.”

“They’re fewer now that the heat’s gone.”

“But it’s come back, hasn’t it?”

“Not to the same degree.”

“This damn shoot-out at Hisingen. What’s his name? Bolander. Can’t we nail him somehow? I don’t like how he got off scot free.”

“You know how it is, Sture.”

“They can just stay put over in Denmark,” Birgersson said. “It’s a Danish phenomenon. Maybe southern Swedish.”

“American,” Winter said.

“The Danes have the worst of it,” Birgersson said. “I heard about Ålborg. They shot at each other outside the station. Outside the railway station!”

Möllerström met up with Winter at the situation room. He was excited.

“Sahlgrenska Hospital issued an appeal for information,” he said. “In 1972, October. They’re a little unsure of the exact date.”

Winter thought about Angela in her white coat in a ward where someone lay in bandages.

“About a child?”

“About a girl who came in. Alone, somehow.”

“Sahlgrenska?”

“Yes, apparently the child was in a pretty bad way.”

“And that was Helene,” Winter said, and at once Möllerström looked disappointed that Winter had interrupted his chronological account.

“Yes,” he said tersely.

“What happened?”

“What I know now is that they put out an appeal for her… no, I mean for her family, asking them to come forward, and that someone recognized the girl quite soon afterward.”

“But no family,” Winter said, and Möllerström looked disappointed again.

“No.”

“It’s the same pattern,” Winter said. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Neighbors from Frölunda recognized her.”

“And that’s when she got a name?”

“Yes. Helene. Helene Dellmar.”

“Dellmar?”

“She lived with her mother in an apartment in Frölunda, and their name was Dellmar.”

“But it wasn’t her mother who’d gotten in touch?”

“No.”

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Möllerström said. “Nobody seems to know.”

Winter held the copy of the slip of paper between his fingers. The young Helene and the grown-up Helene had both held the original. Those were the conclusive prints. Had the child’s sweaty hands caused those specific prints to leave a more indelible impression behind than the others?

“So it was found in the dress in the box in the basement?” Ringmar asked. “The same one she was wearing when she was brought into the hospital?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say here.”

“Is there anyone who’d know?”

“I don’t know, Bertil. That’s yet another question that needs an answer.”

“I’m just thinking about the dress, if she was wearing it. What happened to it afterward?”

“Yes.”

“It’s unlikely she asked for it back herself. From the hospital.”

“Well, that’s a good question.”

“So, questions: Where did that slip of paper come from? When did it end up in the dress pocket? How long has it been lying there? Who put it there?”

“Another question,” Winter said. “What does it mean?”

The apartment smelled of garlic and herbs.

“I’ve cooked dinner,” Angela said, with a glass of wine in her hand. “A proper housewife.”

“Apart from the glass of wine,” Winter said.

“Want some?”

“No. I’d prefer a gin and tonic, seeing as you’ve started the drinking. No, scratch that. I don’t want any right now.”

She followed him out into the kitchen.

“You were right.”

“Right? About what?”

“A little girl named Helene something was brought in for some reason years ago. There was a record of it.”

43

THEY HAD SLEPT TOGETHER, AND WINTER FELT THAT DIVINE fatigue in his body, like a creative fatigue that took over from the destructive one. His body was supple, rejuvenated. The last few days it had been a tool, easily abused.

“You’re thinking about the girl,” she said.

“Yes. But not like before.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know how it goes up and down. One moment you see possibilities and the next only obstacles.”

“Sounds like a good description of life.”

“And of work, unfortunately. Earlier today I was feeling discouraged.”

“You’re thinking the worst.”

“I’d rather not say that.”

“There’s hope,” she said. “You’ve said so yourself several times before.”

“There’s hope in the sense that this isn’t a classic disappearance where a child goes missing from a playground and we think that some bastard’s taken her. In those cases there’s rarely any hope. We seldom find the child, unless a psychopath confesses and takes us to the grave.”

“But here that’s not the case.”

“No. What we have here doesn’t follow the typical pattern. There may be hope. Or else something worse than we’ve ever seen.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “Or maybe you need to.”

He didn’t answer.

“You should speak to somebody-other than your fellow detectives on the force.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“Well. I’m listening.”

“But there’s something else as well.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “There’s a great loneliness that rests over this case. It’s taken a long time to find out her name and where she lived, and to get the suspicions about a missing child confirmed. If it hadn’t been for an old lady, we would still be fumbling around looking for a viable lead. You know what I mean? An enormous loneliness. We have her name but we still don’t know more than a few small fragments about her past.”

“More is sure to come in now that you’ve gone out with it in such a big way, with a public appeal and the APB or whatever you call it.”

“Yeah, that’s true. Or is it? That’s what I mean. That awful loneliness that seemed to surround her life.”

“Yes.”

“No one to speak to. You know? Like you and I are speaking now.”

“Like you and I,” she repeated. For how much longer? she thought. I can’t bring it up now. It’s impossible and he knows it, if he’s thinking about it. He looks more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen him. Younger, and it’s not just the hair. It’s not the right time for an ultimatum. Maybe in an hour. Or two days.

She raised her arm and ran her hand through his hair.

“How long are you going to let that grow?”

“It’s growing all the time.”

“Just no ponytail. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Okay.”

“The only man I ever thought looked good in a ponytail was your colleague from London.”

“Macdonald.”

“Are you in touch with him at all, by the way?”

“Macdonald?”

She nodded. She had taken her hand away from his hair.

“Just the odd postcard. I might give him a call. Maybe he can give me some advice.”

“Cross-border cooperation.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Winter said, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He twisted his body and looked back at her. “Angela.”

“Yes?”

“We found out that Helene may have spent a short time at Lillhagen for depression.”

“Oh.”

“One of my men looked through the records, and it could be her. Under another name. Then she was discharged and never came back.”

“That’s common nowadays,” Angela said.

“That they don’t come back?”

“You know that yourself. How things are now. The psychiatric hospitals are closing and people are being discharged and don’t come back because there’s nothing to come back to.”

The call came after the morning briefing. Winter took it in his office and he was prepared. He had expected something as early as yesterday, possibly even the day before, if he was lucky. They already knew about the orphanage, and he was sitting there with the name of the one who was supposed to call in front of him. They had known for a few short minutes, and it was as if Louise Keijser sensed it.

“I’m calling about Helene Andersén,” she said.

“Where are you calling from?” Winter asked.

“Helsingborg. I spoke to someone from the police down here and they said that I should contact you.”

“Yes. We’ve just been informed about that.”

“I am-or was-her foster mother. One of them, I should say.”

“Just talk about yourself,” Winter said. “You recognized Helene Andersén?”

“Yes.”

“In what way?”

“Well. I saw the photograph in the Helsingborgs Dagblad, and then they spoke about it on TV. And I guessed that it was Helene.” There was a pause. “I live in Helsingborg,” she added.

“When was the last time you saw Helene?”

“Oh, it was many years ago.”

“Many years ago? How many?”

“We haven’t had any contact in… It must have been, let’s see… It was long before Johannes died-that’s my husband. Helene moved away from here some twelve years ago. I’ve got a record of it here somewhere. I can look it up.”

“But you recognized her from the pictures in the newspaper?”

“Well, I didn’t know that she had a girl. They looked so alike in the pictures.”

“I would like for you to come in to see us, Mrs. Keijser. Could you do that?”

“Come up there? Travel to Gothenburg, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m getting along in years, but of course I can take the train, if need be.”

Winter eyed his watch. “It’s still early. We could book you on a train and call and let you know. We’ll meet you at the station and can arrange for you to spend the night in a hotel.”

“I have friends in Gothenburg.”

“Whichever you prefer, Mrs. Keijser.”

Helene had been placed in three different foster homes. As far as he knew, she’d never been adopted by anyone. She spent a brief period at an orphanage when she was four, after which she was at Sahlgrenska Hospital in Gothenburg, critically ill with pneumonia. She’d been left on a couch in an empty waiting room by some unknown person. No message. Just the little girl, who suddenly cried out in her delirium.

All this he now knew. The girl had been mute for weeks, and it had taken time before they were able to identify her as Helene Dellmar. Her mother’s name was Brigitta Dellmar.

The woman had by then been missing from her home for three weeks.

She had lived alone with her daughter, Helene.

The apartment was at Frölunda Square.

It had had thirteen tenants since then.

Brigitta Dellmar was known to the police. She was arrested in 1968 in connection with a fraud ring but had been released for lack of evidence. She had been pregnant. Her name was mentioned in connection with the robbery of a branch of Handelsbanken in Jönköping in 1971, but she had only been questioned regarding her relationship to one of the men involved. He’d served four years for another robbery, but the police had been unable to tie him to the one at Jönköping.

The man’s name was Sven Johansson. That’s the Swedish equivalent of John Smith, Winter thought when he read through the pile of documents from Möllerström.

Sven Johansson. He died of lung cancer seven years ago. Was he Helene’s father? Why was her name Andersén? There was no Andersén in the files, but he was still missing the name of one of the foster families.

The mother had disappeared and never returned. Brigitta Dellmar. That’s how it was. History repeated itself. It was peculiar but not unheard of. The daughters of single mothers sometimes have children with men who then disappear. Disappear. You can’t simply disappear. We find everyone we go looking for. We found Helene and now we’ve found her mother and we’re going to find her father and her husband. Jennie’s father.

We’re going to find Jennie.

“It’s a long way down to the street,” Halders said, and peered out the window in the living room. “I can see all the way to the army drill hall.”

“Does it make you feel dizzy?”

“Yeah. I always feel dizzy when I see the Heden recreation grounds.”

“Bad memories?”

“Bad ball control,” Halders said, and turned back in toward the room. Aneta Djanali was crouched in front of the CD player.

“What sort of music do you listen to when you’re relaxing at home?”

“I don’t relax.”

“What do you listen to when you’re not relaxing?”

“I borrowed a few jazz albums from Winter, but I grew sick of it. He doesn’t ever get sick of it.”

“No.”

“I saw him sitting in a bar with Bülow the other week. Suspicious.”

“Bülow?”

“The journalist. At the GT. Runs around at the station, trying to look important.”

“Like you, then.”

“Exactly. Just like me.”

“What were you doing at that bar?”

“Relaxing,” Halders said. “I don’t relax at home. I relax at the bar.”

“Must cost a bit.”

“Winter didn’t look like he was relaxing.”

“So tell me what you like, Fredrik.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“I’m curious.”

“You think it’s gotta be white power music?”

“Yeah.”

“WAR stuff, huh?”

“Only when you’re relaxing.”

“You really are curious, aren’t you?”

“I’m interested in widely diverse cultures,” she said. “Yours. And mine.”

“Bruckner,” Halders said.

“What?”

“Bruckner. That’s my kind of music. Te Deum.”

“My God, that’s worse than I thought.”

“Wagner. I’m a Wagner man.”

“Don’t say any more.”

Halders looked out across the city again. “It’s a long way down. The people look like ants.”

“More like beetles.”

“Cockroaches. They look like cockroaches.”

“Fredrik. Try to relax for a moment.”

“I told you I only relax at the bar. Wanna go out?”

“Get away from that window, Fredrik.”

“You afraid I’m gonna jump?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But the thought crossed your mind?”

“It did occur to me, yes.”

“You’re right.”

Winter parked in front of Benny Vennerhag’s house. A dog barked like crazy from the neighboring yard, and he heard the rattle from the running leash.

The entrance lay in shadow. He rang the doorbell and waited, then rang the bell again, but no one opened. He went back down the steps and turned left and started along the plaster wall.

There was no longer any sun reflected in the water of the swimming pool. Nor was there any water. The pool was a hole of blue cement, and if anyone dived into it, they’d kill themselves.

Benny Vennerhag was trimming bushes. He turned around in half profile and saw Winter but kept on trimming. Scattered at his feet lay piles of branches and twigs. He wiped his forehead and put away his loppers. “I thought I heard something.”

“Then why didn’t you answer the door?”

“You came in anyway.”

“I could have been somebody else.”

“That would’ve been nice.”

“Don’t you have the impression we’ve had this conversation before?”

“Sure,” Winter said. “But now it’s even more serious.”

“I agree.”

Winter moved in closer.

“You’re not planning on becoming violent again?” Vennerhag said, and raised the loppers.

“Do you know a Sven Johansson?”

“Sven Johansson? What kind of name is that? You might just as well ask me if I know John Smith.”

“Bank robber. Among other things. Died of cancer seven years ago.”

“I know who he was. I was just thinking. It was a bit before my time, so to speak, but Sven wasn’t unknown. Not to you either, so I don’t understand why you’re coming to me.”

“He may have had a relationship with a woman named Brigitta Dellmar. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Birgit. Dell… No. Never heard it before.”

“Brigitta. Not Birgitta. Brigitta Dellmar.”

“Never heard it.”

“Are you being totally honest now, Benny? You know what this is about?”

“Broadly speaking, but not what these names have to do with your murder.”

“And the little girl’s disappearance.”

“Yes. The child is missing, I hear.”

“Brigitta Dellmar is the dead woman’s mother.”

“Uh-huh. So, what does she have to say?”

“She’s disappeared, Benny. Gone.”

“Well I’ll be damned. That’s a lot of disappearances.”

“Two disappearances.”

“Disappeared, huh? Guess you’ll have to put out an APB.”

“She disappeared twenty-five years ago.”

“That shouldn’t make her much more difficult to find.”

“Really?”

“People tend to leave traces behind. Especially if they’ve been together with Sven Johansson.”

“You’d better tell me everything you know.”

“Will that be enough to satisfy you?”

“I have a few more names,” Winter said.

44

DRAGGING DELSJÖ LAKE HAD PRODUCED RESULTS. WINTER left the moment he got the call, and it was as if he were blind to the traffic, the sky was so clear. Once he could see parts of the road again he grabbed for his sunglasses.

A child’s shoe lay in the grass along the water’s edge. The shoe was filled with rocks, as if the intention was to make it sink. It could have been lying in the water for a month or more, or less. It could belong to anyone and no one, but Winter knew.

They had found a lot, but nothing belonging to a child until now. The discovery had been made north of the promontory that narrowed into a finger that pointed out the spot where they should look.

Winter felt a dread, frozen sensation that took partial control of his faculties. They ought to break off the dragging before they all went insane. What would the shoe be followed by? He saw the faces of the men and women, and they all said the same thing: that the girl lay down below.

Louise Keijser was sixty but looked older.

“I’m grateful you could come, Mrs. Keijser,” Winter said.

“It was the least I could do. If I had known…”

Winter said nothing. He waited for her to sit down in the chair.

“If I had known. I’m almost glad that Johannes isn’t alive.” She took out a handkerchief and dried the corners of her eyes. “I was so sad on the train.”

“How old was Helene when she moved out?” Winter asked.

“Eighteen. When she came of age. We didn’t want her to go, but what could we do?”

“When did you last hear from her?”

“It was-it was several years ago. Before she had a child.” She took out her handkerchief again. “I didn’t know about it. But perhaps I already mentioned that.” She blew her nose cautiously. “The little girl looks like Helene. Not the same hair, but otherwise you can see that it’s the sa-How awful. You know nothing more? About the girl?”

“No,” Winter said. “We can talk about that later, but right now I’d just like to ask you about Helene. Is that all right?”

“Yes. Certainly. Excuse me.”

“How long did she live with you, as part of the family?”

“It was just Johannes and I-but nearly three years. I’ve brought records with me, if you’d like to see them. From social services and the like.”

“Three years,” Winter repeated. “And not much contact after?” He made his voice stable, calm. “You said it’s been a number of years since you last heard from her.”

“Yes. It sounds strange, of course-awful-but that’s how it was. We tried but she, she didn’t want anything to do with us.” She raised her handkerchief to her face again. Winter could see small specks of black in the corner of her eyes where the thin mascara was being dissolved by her tears.

“Can you describe your relationship with Helene when she was living with you? How did you get along?”

“Well, I always thought she was a very special girl, with her background and everything. But we always got along well. She was very quiet, of course, and sometimes Johannes tried to bring up, well, what had happened, but she wasn’t up for it, really. It was mostly Johannes who tried. For me it worked better to have that silence in the house.”

“First she moved to Malmö,” Winter said. “That much we know.”

“Yes. It’s not that far away, and we saw each other a few times. But it was never very good. We tried to invite her over, but she didn’t want to come. She came once, but it was as if she had never been in the house. It was strange-or it sounds strange anyway-but somehow that sort of fit in with how she was.”

“She then moved here, to Gothenburg,” Winter said. “She lived at three different addresses in Gothenburg.”

“We never received a moving card. Not when she moved away from Malmö. We tried to call her, but she didn’t have a telephone.”

“No.”

“She didn’t like telephones. She didn’t want to speak on the phone. Don’t ask me why, I’m no psychologist, but you might find something about it in the files there.”

“What files?” Winter asked.

“The evaluation that the child psychologists carried out on her, or, rather, that they started to. I don’t think they ever really followed through with it.”

“We’re waiting for that material.”

“You won’t find it under Andersén,” Louise Keijser said.

“No.”

“Her name was Dellmar back then. Did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Her name was Dellmar when she lived with us too. I don’t know when she suddenly became Andersén. Do you know? Do the police know?”

“A few years ago. She changed her name four years ago.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.”

“Maybe when she had her baby? Is the father’s name Andersén? I mean the father of Helene’s little girl. Her name’s Jennie, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know that either,” Winter said. “That’s why we’re asking so many questions.”

“The father’s unknown? How awful. And he hasn’t been in touch with you?”

“Not yet.”

“How terrible. That’s just what happened with Helene. She had to grow up without knowing who her father was.”

“Did you talk to her about it?”

“About her father? No. She didn’t want to, or else she couldn’t. I don’t know how much you know about her problems-her clinical picture or whatever you call it.”

“I’m listening,” Winter said.

“As I recall, Johannes and I were the third foster family. I’m suddenly a little unclear on that point. But she had gaps in her memory from when she was little, and when she would recall something it would cause her a great deal of distress, and then it would disappear again, as if it had never been there. She was very much alone in that sense. Alone with herself, or however you want to put it. We tried to help her, but it was as if she was surrounded by gauze.”

“Didn’t she ever talk about what had happened to her when she was little?”

“Never. And nothing about what happened afterward either-that is, after she ended up in the care of others.”

“She never asked about her mother?”

“Never. Not that I heard, or Johannes either. Of course, you can ask someone else, but we never spoke about it. I don’t know if she knew.”

“Excuse me?”

“Did she know? What did she know? Do you know that?”

“No. Not yet.”

“And now it’s not possible anymore,” Louise Keijser said, and covered her eyes with her handkerchief. “It’s too late.”

“Maybe we can uncover a few answers,” Winter said.

“Just so long as you find the little girl,” Louise Keijser said. “I feel somehow like a grandmother.” She looked straight at Winter. “Is it wrong of me to feel like that?”

“My God,” Ringmar said. “You mean to say that Brigitta Dellmar’s name has come up in connection with this case?”

“Yes. Möllerström dug up everything there is on her, and an APB was put out on her back then,” Winter said.

“Sven Johansson too?”

“He was questioned but they couldn’t tie him to it in any way. He had a watertight alibi.”

“But her name was in there?”

“Several witnesses were able to identify her from the photographs. A few of the robbers were Swedes-that much they knew. And one of the employees had seen a child.”

“What the hell are you saying? You mean they brought a kid along? For the actual robbery?”

“I don’t know for sure, but several witnesses testified to that fact. It’s all in there.”

“Good Lord. Where’s this taking us?”

“To a solution,” Winter said. “It’s yet another complication that will lead to a solution.”

“Or a dissolution,” Ringmar said. “She had the child with her?”

“It’s possible.”

“It boggles the mind,” Ringmar said.

“Do you remember the case?”

“Yes, but only vaguely. Now that you mention it. An officer was killed, if I remember correctly. That’s probably why I remember it at all.”

“An officer and two of the robbers.”

“Jesus Christ. Yeah, that’s right.”

“At least three of them got away. Along with the child, if the information is correct.”

Ringmar shook his head and picked up the incident report but held it without reading it. “You don’t bring a child along on an armed robbery.”

“Maybe something went wrong,” Winter said. “Could have been anything. Maybe the mother was supposed to be the driver and had to go anyway when nobody came to look after the child. I don’t know.”

“Danske Bank in Ålborg,” Ringmar read. “Monday October 2, 1972. Danske Bank, on the corner of Østerågade and Bispensgade. At five past five in the afternoon.”

“Yeah,” Winter said. “No customers but plenty of staff inside the bank, working with money.”

“Plenty of money.”

“Seven million.”

“A big haul in Ålborg.”

“Big anywhere. And there’s more.”

“What?”

“Helene was there.”

“What?”

“At about the same time we learned all this stuff, we also got everything else connected to the name Brigitta Dellmar.”

“Obviously.”

“It was the name that suddenly opened everything up for us. We had nothing on Helene Andersén, but we do on Helene Dellmar.”

“What do you mean, she’s been here? Helene has been here?”

“She was prepped for questioning and then questioned, when she was Helene Dellmar.” Winter fixed his gaze on Ringmar. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Bertil.”

“Just heard about a ghost, more like.”

“It’s just that I learned about this a few minutes before you did.”

“What did you get to know, for Christ’s sake?”

“We’ve got the files here. When the girl ended up at Sahlgrenska Hospital, or afterward, I’m talking about the four-year-old Helene now, right? There were suspicions coming from Denmark and they managed to tie her to her mother-who may have disappeared in connection with the robbery.”

“How did they identify her?” Ringmar asked. “At the hospital, I mean, or afterward, when she was questioned, or whatever. How could they make the connection with her mother?”

“They put out a description. And it appears some neighbors got in touch.”

“We’ll have to get that confirmed. Anyway, so they spoke to the girl here, at this station? Who was the interrogating officer?”

“Sven-Anders Borg, it says.”

“He went into retirement about five years ago.”

“But he’s still alive, right?”

“Still clear in the head, as far as I know. But he could hardly have been expected to sound the alarm about this.”

“If we had gotten a name earlier.”

“I’ll give him a call,” Ringmar said.

“Ask him to get down here as soon as he can.” Winter read the file while Ringmar dialed, but he was distracted by the call.

Ringmar covered the receiver and turned to Winter. “He’s got a pain in his leg, but we’re welcome to come by and see him. He lives in Påvelund.”

The light over the river was stronger than ever. They drove along Oskarsleden, and the cranes on the other side were ablaze in the glare from the Kattegat. Two ferries met out at sea, and Winter thought about Denmark.

“She drew a Danish flag,” he said to Ringmar.

“Who? Helene?”

“Yes. And her daughter, Jennie. They drew Danish flags.”

The distance between the ferries was growing. The larger one continued out across the sea.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Winter described the two different signatures.

“Have you sent them in for analysis?” Ringmar asked.

“On their way.”

“Christ.”

Winter followed the ferry’s westward progress. It grew ever smaller.

“Maybe they went there,” Ringmar said. “To Denmark. Anything’s possible now.”

Aneta Djanali introduced herself and Halders, and the man in the doorway invited them in. The house looked a hundred years old. Through the windows she saw the forest and beyond it a field. Two horses walked along the edge of the clearing with their heads bowed down to the ground. They were chestnut and sleek. There was a serenity in what she saw.

“Nice view,” she said.

The man followed her gaze as if it were the first time he had seen the forest and the field. They knew from their search at the Swedish Road Administration that he was sixty-nine years old. They had names, addresses, and personal identity numbers. According to the vehicle registration database, he owned a white Ford Escort with plates that began with the letter H. That was what they knew about this man. But he looked like a nice old man. Georg Bremer’s head was as bare as Fredrik Halders’s, but he had a mustache that was dark and didn’t look dyed. His shirt was light blue and open to a neck wizened with age. He wore black trousers held up by a brown belt.

He seems almost withered, Djanali thought.

Bremer continued to look out through the window, and his profile hardened suddenly when the sun disappeared. Seconds later the sun reemerged from behind a cloud and the light softened his face again.

That was strange, thought Djanali. The shadow sort of sliced off his jaw. How silly. I’ve become obsessed with jawlines since getting my own smashed.

“We’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” Halders said. “Don’t you listen to your answering machine?”

“I’ve been away for a while. Got home yesterday and just haven’t gotten round to it.”

Damn courteousness, thought Halders. We shouldn’t bother calling ahead. We ought to come barging in just when the family is sitting down to dinner and ask what the hell Daddy or Mommy’s car was doing in the vicinity of Delsjö Lake in the dead of night. Make people choke. On their shame if nothing else.

“It’s about your car,” Halders said. “It’s just routine, as I’m sure you understand.”

“Don’t you want to take a seat?”

“Thank you,” Djanali said.

She sat down on a couch that was green and worn. Halders remained standing, as did their host.

“What about my car?” Bremer asked.

“You drive a white ’92 Ford Escort?”

“A ’92? Is that when it’s from? I really don’t know. I’ll have to look at the registration.”

“See, we’re checking up on the owners of a certain type of car, who might be able to help us solve a case.”

“What case is that?”

“A murder.”

“And a Ford Escort is involved?”

“One was seen close to where the body was found on the night in question. We’re hoping that the driver of that car may have seen something.”

“Like what? And where?”

Halders looked at Djanali, who sat in the couch with her notepad.

“The night we’re talking about was August 18,” Halders said. “Back when it was still hot summer.”

“That’s not something you forget. I sweated half to death out here.”

“Guess we pretty much all did, every man jack of us.” Halders eyed Aneta again. “And woman.”

“I was here then anyway,” Bremer said. “And so was the car.”

“Okay,” Halders said.

“I didn’t see any car out front,” Djanali said.

“It’s been at the shop since last Friday. Started leaking oil like a sieve. You can probably see for yourselves out there on the driveway.”

“When did you take it in to get fixed?”

“Day before yesterday. I tried to have a look at it myself, but it’s probably the oil pan. And I get dizzy if I spend too much time under the car.”

“But you said you were away yesterday?”

“Yeah, so? What is this, an interrogation?”

“No no. I was just wondering since it’s a little out of the way-you need some kind of vehicle to get out here, don’t you?”

“Well, you sure don’t walk all the way from the bus. But I have a motorbike that I dust off from time to time. It’s out in the barn, if you want to have a look-see.”

“Where is the car?” Djanali asked.

Bremer named the repair shop.

Djanali wrote down the address. “That’s pretty far away from here,” she said.

“That’s how it is sometimes. You gotta go to the ones that offer the best prices.”

“So you’ve checked around?” Halders asked.

“Well, you pick up on these things. Found it through a friend of a friend, you might say.”

“How far is your closest neighbor?”

“You gonna ask me about their cars too?”

“We didn’t see any houses on the way here.”

“I guess there are a few out in the forest at the end of the road, but I’m pretty much on my own out here. There’s a farm to the right a few miles up the road. I think it’s more of a summerhouse. I knew the last owner, but the new ones I only wave to a few times a year when I see them.”

45

SVEN-ANDERS BORG OPENED THE DOOR, PROPPED UP ON A crutch.

“Been playing football?” Ringmar asked.

“I wish. Bad circulation. If it continues like this, they’ll probably have to take it off.” He looked down at his left leg.

“It’s not that bad, is it, Sven?”

The retired homicide detective shrugged. “And now I’m back in horrible reality. Guess you better come in.”

They walked through the hall and into a room lit up from the garden out back. Unwashed windows couldn’t block out the sunlight, only dampen it. Dust swirled in the air. It smelled of tobacco and fried onions. A radio was speaking in some other part of the house.

Borg sat down heavily on one of the armchairs and waved to the couch opposite. “Have a seat, guys.”

They sat and Ringmar started to speak.

“I was thinking about it,” Borg cut in. “It’s one hell of a case. A real nightmare investigation. Nothing at first, then everything all at once. You don’t even have time to sort through all the stuff.”

“No,” Ringmar said. “We were talking about that on the way out here.”

“Had I known before, I would have gotten in touch. Maybe I would have made the connection between the name, Helene, and that last name. What was it again? Dellmer?”

“Dellmar.”

“Dellmar. Right. But you haven’t released it.”

“We haven’t had the chance,” Winter said. “We’re busy sorting through everything, like you said.”

Borg sounded like he sighed, then looked up at the ceiling and then at Ringmar. “Here’s more or less how the whole thing went down. We heard about the kid being left at the hospital-well, and then we got the name of the mother. Dellmar, that is. And she had a record. Once we had her name we started looking, but she wasn’t at the apartment out in Frölunda and nowhere else either. Vanished into thin air.”

“So she’s been missing ever since,” Ringmar said. “And you never found any leads, as I understand.”

“In a way we had a lot to go on,” Borg said. “That robbery didn’t exactly go down without a trace.”

“So she was identified in connection with that,” Winter said. “How certain were you?”

Borg looked at Winter as if the young dandy had asked a trick question. He’d left the force before the kid had made inspector, and maybe that was just as well. “How certain? Guess you’d better ask the Danes that. What can I say, of course we believed it. How certain is certain? I don’t know if it’s possible now to get further than we did. There was no video surveillance back then, but a couple inside the bank saw the car drive off and saw the woman. She’d turned around or something. I’m a little rusty on the details. You’ll have to look that up for yourselves in the files.”

“Of course,” Ringmar said.

“How did you tie her, Brigitta Dellmar, to the robbery?” Winter asked. “It wasn’t just because of the child, was it?”

“In part, of course. She was critical. But we followed the usual procedure when we got the call from Denmark. Started checking through our list of known criminals over here. She was among them, after all, though not one of the worst, you understand. A ways down the list, and I guess we hadn’t made it down that far when we were contacted by Sahlgrenska.”

“And you knew, of course, that there was a child involved over there. In Ålborg.”

“Well, it was in the report,” Borg said, “but it was by no means certain. In any case, the neighbors got in touch when they recognized the girl, and then we got right on it.”

“I see,” Ringmar said.

“Then, of course, it took a while to make the connection with the robbery in Denmark.”

“Yes,” Ringmar said.

“And by then she’d disappeared, of course,” Borg said.

“Yes,” Ringmar said.

“Executed,” Borg said.

“What?” Ringmar’s face had gone pale.

“Executed, of course,” Borg said. “Or possibly scared out of her wits. Or, as a third alternative, dead from injuries that we didn’t know about, but that she might have sustained during the robbery.”

“How was it that there were police on the scene,” Winter asked, “so soon after the robbery?”

“Something to do with the bank’s alarm system going off before the whole thing had really started. Something strange having to do with a short circuit or one of the employees-no, it was something technical. You’d better check about that with the Danes too, if need be. But a patrol car arrived on the scene just when the whole thing began, and the rest, as they say, is history. One hell of a history.”

“So what you’re saying is that she could have been killed by one of the other robbers?”

“Why not? Two of them escaped with her. They had the money. Then they dropped off the kid, because maybe there were certain things they weren’t willing to do. I don’t know. But I do know she never got in touch. She had a kid, after all, right?”

Ringmar nodded.

“You know those hard-core biker gangs were really staking out their territory big time around then, after a bit of a soft start. We never managed to prove it, but there’s no doubt they were the ones behind it.”

“I read about that in the file,” Winter said.

“That Dellmar woman had those sorts of contacts,” Borg said. “We did what we could to follow her sad life back in time, and she’d flirted a bit with the local bikers. How innocent it was then, I don’t know.”

Ringmar nodded again.

“But she wasn’t there later, as far as we could tell. The Danes worked at it from their end, but she was gone. Just vanished. And then this fairly well-known biker thug pops up in Limfjorden, or wherever the hell it was, and when the bank cashier gets a look at him, she says she’s sure that he’s one of them!”

“You have a good memory, Sven,” Ringmar said.

“There’s nothing wrong with the circulation in my head,” Borg said. “It’s getting clearer now as I’m thinking about it.”

“But no one ever managed to tie that guy to the robbery?”

“I don’t know. No. But we knew. Deep down we knew. He was Danish and disappeared at the time of the robbery and eventually turned up floating facedown in the water, like a dead fish.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Then the kid ended up here in Gothenburg, and we had good reason to suspect that she had actually been along when it happened. There was a reason to try to speak to the girl. A number of reasons. So we did.”

“We read the transcripts,” Winter said.

“Well, then you’ve seen it for yourself. She didn’t actually say anything. She was clearly distressed by what had happened, that was obvious. But what exactly that was-you’ll have to talk with a psychiatrist about that. We had one sitting in back then. Have you spoken to him?”

“No,” Winter said.

Borg stretched out his left leg and massaged it. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the dust moving about the room disappeared with it.

“But you’ve read it yourself. There’s a section in there where she may have been trying to talk about how she’d been in some house or in a particular room. Maybe a basement somewhere for a while. The Danes talked about a house where they’d been.”

“They?” Winter asked. “The robbers?”

“Who else are we talking about?” Borg said. “I’m talking about the robbers. They had been in some house outside town. Preparing. Planning. You’ll have to ask the Danes about that.” Borg started to rub his leg again. “Could be that’s where they hid out again afterward. The ones who were still alive, that is. A little while longer. Maybe the child was along. I don’t know. Maybe the mother. We never found out.”

“You found out a fair bit,” Ringmar said.

“Most of what I’ve said you could have read in there yourselves. But you’ve got to speak to the Danes again.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go over there.”

“Yeah,” Winter said. “I’m starting to see that.”

“There’s one more chilling aspect to this, if you guys want to torment yourselves some more. At least I think there is. But I guess you’ve already seen it.”

“What are you talking about, Sven?” Ringmar leaned forward.

“In my day there was no such thing as video cameras, but back when this whole thing was going on we were testing out filming the questioning sessions in Super 8. That footage should still be lying around somewhere. Have you checked it out?”

“There’s a film?” Winter said.

“Of the questioning session. Tapes get recorded over, I guess, but maybe that film of us speaking to little Helene is still there.”

“There’s no mention anywhere,” Ringmar said.

“That we were filming? Or that we saved the film?”

“Neither,” Ringmar said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it in connection with this case.”

“Well, you weren’t with us back then,” Borg said. “I guess someone was sloppy and forgot to enter it or something, or else the film was simply discarded. That kind of thing does happen, far too often, unfortunately.”

They found the film among a group of cassettes containing stuff that had been transferred from Super 8 to video and then forgotten. There was an index, but not with the Dellmar case file.

They took the cassette into Winter’s office and popped it into the VCR. Ringmar made a gesture that looked like he was crossing himself. Winter felt a hood of steel slowly being screwed tight around his head.

Borg entered the frame, younger and with better circulation. The room could’ve been any in the station, at any time. Not much had changed.

The child sat across the table with barely more than her face visible. She said a few words and looked straight down at the table and then up and directly into the camera, and at Winter and Ringmar. The pressure around Winter’s head mounted. That was perhaps the most appalling thing about it-sitting there with the answer sheet, knowing how things had turned out, and making this awful trip back in time, clutching the answer sheet like some kind of bridge spanning the long divide.

He thought about Helene’s face on the gurney.

“I don’t know if I can fucking handle this,” Ringmar said.

Winter saw the girl get up from the chair, and he wished that the tape had been destroyed.

Ringmar stood up.

“Now let’s go out there and find Jennie,” he said.

46

WINTER READ THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THE CONVERSATION THE child psychologist had with Helene. The experienced psychologist, who was now deceased, had tried to find something in her memory that she didn’t want to-or was unable to-talk about. It made short and painful reading, and as in the film, it was clear that she had been traumatized.

The assessment didn’t reveal much either. There was a note about the girl’s need for conversational therapy at the psychiatric clinic-continuing into adulthood. What would happen then? Winter wondered. Wasn’t that when the nightmarish memories worsened?

They hadn’t found anything to indicate that Helene had had such conversations as an adult. There’d been no follow-up as she became older, other than a routine checkup a few years after the event. Winter made a note about the foster parents at the time.

He read: “When she reaches adulthood, she may become aware of the ordeal she shows clear signs of having experienced, but it’s possible that she will only be able to recall a few specific images.”

Winter considered the lonely woman living with her child in the apartment he had wandered around in, and where he’d felt such a powerful sense of fear. There were few memories there. The memories were sealed, like hatches.

Long-repressed memories could open into an abyss.

There were examples of patients who’d had memory lapses in the middle of conversations. Suddenly the patient could become someone else. Memory disorders could cause a patient to split the self into different identities, Winter had read.

“Consciousness wants to protect the person from the memory of unbearable experiences.” It was an awful sentence. What was going on in the mind of a person like that? Had Helene been like that? The cursory investigation into her fate hinted at it, but Winter couldn’t find anything conclusive.

It was raining again, pattering rhythmically against the windowpane. Winter looked for a moment at the childish drawings attached to the wall opposite him. They showed flags, windmills, men in beards driving cars. It was raining and the sun was shining. The sky is displaying different identities, he thought.

“Once they reach their thirties, people who have been subjected to severely traumatic experiences as children can gain increased awareness of their ongoing torment.” Yet another awful sentence. “Once awareness returned, these people could find themselves in another place.”

She didn’t know how she got here.

Different identities. He read the words again: “another place.”

Was it possible that had happened to Helene? Who, then, had taken care of her child?

It struck him now that they hadn’t established the time of the daughter’s disappearance. They didn’t know when Helene and Jennie had been seen together for the last time. Had the child disappeared before Helene? Had Helene been aware of who she was? Maybe she’d been confused for a long time. Was that possible?

He made a note that he should speak to Ester Bergman again.

Halders switched on his bathroom light and leaned in closer to the mirror. His hair had started to grow out on the sides and he decided to go to the barbershop over the weekend and let the machine trim it down again.

He thought about running a bath, but that felt like a lot of effort. He thought about going out and sitting down at Bolaget and ordering a beer, but it was so far away. He thought briefly about making himself something to eat, but he didn’t have the energy.

Damn it, he thought. I barely have the strength to go into the bedroom to lie down.

He thought about calling somebody, but he couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to speak to or who would want to listen. It would be Aneta in the case of the former.

He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took a bottle of beer from the shelf in the door.

He sat down in front of the TV, with the remote in his hand. He debated whether to switch it on.

“We can’t hold Jakobsson any longer,” Ringmar said.

“I realize that,” Winter said. “It’s… Shit.”

“All he’s done is pay somebody else’s rent,” Ringmar said.

“We’ll have to keep him under surveillance.”

“After this, he’ll go to the liquor store and disappear for two weeks.”

“I think we can tie one of them to the weapon and the shoot-out,” Winter said.

“Excellent,” Birgersson said. “Bolander?”

“He’s not saying anything, of course, but he was there.”

“I still don’t understand why they did it. Unless it was yet another crazy display of power.”

“You might not be far off.”

“Or a reminder of power, though I guess that’s the same thing. In any case, it nearly cost us one of our officers.”

“Yes.”

“There’s been trouble down in Malmö again,” Birgersson said. “Seems those bastards were in the process of building up some scheme. There’s something really scary about this gang. Especially the control they have over their own.”

“It’s a little calmer in Denmark right now.”

“Speaking of which-I spoke to Wellman and he gave us the green light.”

“I’ll go as soon as I’ve read through a little more of the material they sent over,” Winter said.

Halders entered Winter’s office with the expression of someone pissed off as hell and yet at the same time a bit relieved.

“We can cross one of the leads off our list,” he said.

Winter was already standing. “Let’s hear it.”

“That marking on the tree. It was as I suspected. Did I mention that? Some punk kid put it up there.”

“Some punk kid?”

“The boys with the boat were, as you know, a little reluctant to help us out by remembering who they’d lent their boat to. There were quite a few of them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, okay. Two boys-younger than the ones with the boat-had borrowed it, and they’re the ones who put the marking on the tree.”

“Did they come in here and say so?”

“Like I said, we’ve worked our way through the list now. I spoke to one of them on the phone, and what he said sounded a little strange, so I went over to his school to chat with him. He was having one of his apparently innumerable free periods.”

“He confessed?”

“Came straight out with it. Said it was just a goof they got into their heads to do.”

“When did you find this out?”

“Just now, damn it. I know, it’s taken time to go through all this but it’s not like we didn’t have other things to-”

“Did we get round to checking whether there are any similar markings by any of the other lakes?”

“Yes. So far we haven’t found anything.”

“And he knew that we were looking for information about this?”

“He hadn’t seen it,” he said.

“Is he lying?”

“Of course he is. But I doubt he’s lying about the marking.”

The evening was dark and mild as Winter biked across Sandarna and through the center of Kungsten. Långedragsvägen was lit with dim streetlights. You could feel and hear the sea in the wind.

The road outside Lotta’s house was crowded with parked cars. He heard the party through the open windows. Bim and Kristina had put a sign that said “Happy Birthday Mommy” above the open door, which was festooned with balloons and left ajar. The daughters had chosen white and blue. Winter removed the rubber bands from his pant leg and walked up the few steps.

He took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.

Standing in the front hall were people he’d never met. He nodded to the three in the kitchen entrance and hung up his leather jacket on top of three thousand others. He smoothed out his jacket and stuffed his polo shirt down the back of his black pants. He was carrying a present under his arm.

“Erik!” Lotta had come out into the hallway from the kitchen.

“Hiya, sis.”

“So you made it after all!”

“I promised. And I wanted to.”

She hugged him and stroked his cheek. She smelled like the evening outside and faintly of wine.

“Happy birthday,” Winter said, and held out his present.

“There is a standing order that all presents be put in a pile and opened at the same time to the cheers and adulation of the masses,” Lotta said, and took the present.

“When?”

“Oh come on, what kind of a question is that?”

“Sorry.”

“It was the girls’ idea.”

“Come on. You like it too,” Winter said. “Being in the spotlight.”

“But Angela couldn’t come,” Lotta said.

“She was on call and got paged.”

“Well, that’s a shame. She called me.”

“Really?”

“She said to say hello to you. Seems I’m acting as go-between for you guys.”

“It’s not that bad. It’s better.”

“What do you want to drink?” She waved toward the kitchen. “There’s wine, beer, and the hard stuff.”

“No water?”

“On a day like this? Of course not.”

“Uncle Erik!” Bim and Kristina grabbed hold of Winter and pulled him out into the kitchen.

47

THE MORNING WAS PALE AND THE SUN SLOWLY DRAGGED THE day up from behind the rooftops in the east. Winter drank coffee with milk and read the papers. Michael Brecker blew hard through the apartment, but at low volume.

The worst of the commotion has settled, Winter thought, reading District Chief Wellman’s statement about the preliminary investigation. Wellman was good at saying something in public when there was nothing to say.

The commotion was down to three columns on the first page of the news section and a short lead-in on the front page. Brigitta Dellmar was unknown to the press, or at least they weren’t writing about her. Oskar Jakobsson was known, since his arrest in Mölnlycke, but his identity hadn’t been released.

There were some differences here and there, Winter thought. The Danish press wasn’t very particular about protecting the names of the people involved.

He thought again about Brigitta Dellmar. Had her name appeared in Danish newspapers back when it happened?

They’d kept quiet about the Danish connection, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Perhaps it might be to their advantage to leak some of the information, but Winter wanted to head over there first, to build up a picture of what happened, perhaps even to get a feeling for what happened.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that what had transpired in Ålborg played a role in the murder that had recently happened here, maybe even a decisive role, like a long shadow reaching from the past into the future, like a distant cry or a voice. Helene’s voice, or her mother’s, and in a ghastly repetition of history, also that of the girl, Jennie.

It was nearly twelve o’clock, and the sun shone into the room through the big windows. Winter had opened the balcony door to the sound of the sparse Sunday traffic. A flock of seagulls passed by engaged in eager discourse in the wind.

He studied the photograph in front of him. Brigitta Dellmar. The photo had been taken three weeks before she vanished. She disappeared on October 2, 1972, sometime just after five in the afternoon, and this photograph was taken in a studio in west Gothenburg three weeks before that, almost to a day. It was found in her apartment in Frölunda. Hers and Helene’s. Was there any particular reason why she’d had her picture taken at that time? She seemed to be looking past the lens at something standing next to it. Her gaze was lowered. Was she looking at her daughter? Was Helene standing there and consequently also in this photograph?

There was a clear likeness between mother and daughter. Their mouths were broad and their lips full. Their eyes were spaced widely apart. Their hair was blonde, their cheekbones high. They were beautiful women. They disappeared at the same point in their lives.

Jennie had inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s face and someone else’s hair. What sort of person could abandon their child? Where was Jennie’s father? Was he dead? Who was Helene’s father? One of the men killed during the robbery? Or did he disappear? The man found floating in Limfjorden?

Who was Helene’s father?

Hidden within that question was part of the solution to the riddle-that much Winter realized. Perhaps even the entire solution. The past cast its stark shadow over the future.

Brigitta wore a tight-fitting sweater typical of the time, but the photo cut off where the shoulders gave way to the arms. Her face was angled slightly downward in the photo, as if she couldn’t hold her head higher. It wasn’t a furtive look, but Winter got that impression. There was something evasive in her posture. She was alone in the photo. No props. The studio she was sitting in glowed with a harsh loneliness. The picture was black and white but there wouldn’t have been any color in it anyway, thought Winter. He didn’t think in color when he thought about Helene’s mother. When he saw Helene, he thought in red and in the ice blue that hovered mutely in the cold rooms of the morgue. When he imagined Jennie, he saw in black.

Winter biked across Heden and saw students playing football in the mud.

A fax was waiting for him in the basket in his office. His Danish colleagues were looking forward to his arrival. They may well have meant it. The unsolved robbery and killing of an officer had plagued the Ålborg police over the years.

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow morning, with the catamaran.”

Ringmar poked in his coffee cup with a spoon.

“I have to go, Bertil. It feels like I can do more good over there than here right now.”

“I think you’re right. It’s just that, well, it’s as if you’re going over there to confirm that this thing happened, while we keep on working without finding the right lead.” Ringmar looked around. “We’re starting to shrink down to a skeleton crew. Even the search for the little girl is going cold. People are hanging their heads.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m not hanging my head. You’re not hanging your head.” Bergenhem entered the coffee room. “Lars isn’t hanging his head.”

48

WINTER DROVE ON BOARD AND PARKED IN THE SEACAT’S BELLY. He locked his Mercedes and gripped his briefcase and wandered up to the passenger deck, standing at the stern as the catamaran put out to sea. The remains of the devil’s hour floated across the river from the south and disappeared among the run-down buildings by the northern bridge pylon.

He went inside and passed through the bar. The wrinkly ones were already in position, with their first beer of the day. Smoke wafted in clouds across their faces, which were slowly becoming smoothed out by the alcohol.

Winter sat in an armchair in a lone row of seats facing the windows. The catamaran accelerated when it reached Dana Fjord and he saw how the sun hit the cliffs with a sharp glare. The archipelago was all nuances of rock, which shone in the early morning sunlight and was transformed into steel and earth and granite. The sky pushed the thin clouds downward and outward.

Two boats met and their red sails slid into one another over a sea of congealed lead. The world was reflected through the window. These were northern waters, increasingly viscous as winter approached.

He took the E45 to Ålborg and turned off toward the city, following the tunnel underneath Limfjorden. It was years since he’d last been there and the city seemed bigger than he remembered it. The route in passed through docks where the warehouse buildings blocked the sun. The steam from the distillery turned the sky white, as if it had been chalked.

Winter parked outside the railway station and walked straight across John F. Kennedy Square to the Park Hotel. His room was small and infused with the sour smell of tobacco. It looked out onto a dark courtyard where a pile of boxes was stacked halfway up the wall and stood level with Winter’s room. There was a low humming from the ventilation system that clung to the wall outside his window like ivy made out of aluminum. The sound reminded Winter of the vibrations from the catamaran.

He took his bags and went back to the antique elevator and rode it down to reception.

“I want another room,” he said to the young clerk, who nodded as if it was to be expected for a guest to return like that five minutes later.

“We don’t have any more single rooms,” he said.

“Then give me a double.”

“That’ll cost-”

“I don’t care what it costs,” Winter said. “But I want one on the third floor, with a view.” He gestured through the lobby and out toward Kennedy Square.

The guy at reception studied something on the counter in front of him and then turned toward the board behind, where the keys hung from row upon row of hooks fixed on red felt. I crossed a time zone in the middle of the Kattegat and have landed in the nineteenth century, Winter thought, closing his eyes. When he opened them again the young man was holding out a key.

“You’re in luck,” he said. “Third floor, double room, facing the square.”

The room seemed clean. Winter went up to the window and through the thin curtains saw the square below and the state railway building on the other side of it. Two soldiers stood outside the station, as if guarding his car from the buses driving back and forth. Winter saw a man pass by holding a hot dog and he felt hungry. There was a bar in the station building, level with his Mercedes, so he pulled the door closed and left the key with a new man behind the counter. Outside the sun stood right above the square. It was still a warm October.

Winter ordered two red pölser sausages in a bun, with roasted onions, and a Carlsberg Hof. He stood at a bar table and started eating. He was alone inside the bar. It smelled of bacon and other fried food and malt.

Diagonally off to the right was the bus station, and in the adjacent parking lot stood four motorcycles, as if chained together in the middle of the entrance. The owners were standing next to them and talking. They wore black leather and blue denim and black boots with sharp heels-all men with black beards and hair as long as Winter’s. Two had a ponytail. All were drinking beer. The cars were forced to skirt around the campsite the biker gang had set up, but Winter didn’t hear or see any of the drivers honk their horns and tell them to get the hell out of the way. What he saw was just a natural part of city life. Perhaps this was a place where everyone lived happily side by side.

Winter finished off his lunch and went out to his car. Following directions from the guy at the hotel, he drove around the block and back onto Boulevarden from the right and parked on the one-way street alongside the hotel. He got out and locked the car and walked back across the square, past the station. The motorbikes had disappeared in a low rumble that could still be heard above the fjord. Winter followed Jyllandsgade for two blocks, and the police headquarters loomed up on the left like a futuristic palace of coal and silver.

Inside the police HQ everything was black leather and steel and marble floors. The walls of glass brought in the city.

He reported his arrival at a short counter to the right, where a uniformed officer asked him to have a seat in a steel chair and wait.

Instead he walked into a big airy public reception area where the counter was at least fifteen yards long. People were standing at pulpits, filling out forms. This place is full of space and light, Winter thought, conjuring in his mind the cramped hovel in Gothenburg that was supposed to accommodate all the citizenry in need of assistance from the police.

He went back to the big hall, and a woman in a black shirt and black jeans was standing at the counter, next to the uniformed officer. She was thin and had thick, slicked-back fair hair. Winter could see a pack of cigarettes sticking halfway out of her left breast pocket. She had blue eyes, which he could detect because the light was reflected in them from the glass walls. She seemed even younger than he was. It can’t be possible for someone in such an exposed position to be younger, Winter thought, as he took the hand that was held out to him.

“Welcome, Inspector Winter.”

“Thank you, Inspector… Poulsen?”

“That’s right. Michaela. So now we can dispense with the titles.”

She followed Winter’s gaze out through the glass wall. “Pretty sleek, huh? I’m not talking about those wrecked railcars out there. But this building. The police station.”

“I’m impressed,” Winter said.

“We’re all impressed,” Poulsen said. “We’re impressed by the audacity of our superiors. We’re short on computers, but we’ve sure got a beautiful building to not house them in.” She looked at Winter. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“No. But the last time was many years ago.”

49

THE HOMICIDE DEPARTMENT’S OFFICES CONSISTED OF LONG corridors and small rooms-akin to Winter’s workplace in Gothenburg in that respect.

She showed him into a chamber at the far end of the corridor. Inside was a computer on a table and some binders on a desk. There was also a telephone. Through the window he could see the local Alcoholics Anonymous.

“If you Swedes can help us with this old case, we’ll be thrilled,” Michaela Poulsen said. “I wasn’t around back then, of course. But there are people here who haven’t forgotten. Jens Bendrup is one of them, and he’ll be happy to speak to you as soon as you like.”

“Thank you,” Winter said.

“No problem. It was a nasty business.”

Poulsen sat down on one of two austere chairs by the window. She waved her hand toward her hair, as if to push away bangs that weren’t there. The black-and-white border tartan jacket she’d popped into her office to grab took on another color in the glow from outside. Her eyes were just as blue when they met Winter’s.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “It would be great if you could fill me in on a few details.”

“Let’s bring in Jens first,” she said, and stood up and walked out.

From the desk Winter picked up a binder with a registration number on its spine. He counted five binders and also some brown A4 envelopes that might contain photographs or other materials.

When he looked up, Poulsen was back with Detective Jens Bendrup. Casually dressed in a shirt and sweater with jeans, he was a burly man, broad across the neck but shorter than Poulsen. Winter guessed he had only two or three years left to go before retirement, and he smelled of cigar smoke when Winter greeted him-along with a whiff of the two beers he’d had with lunch.

“Welcome to the scene of the crime,” Bendrup said.

“I’m grateful for the reception.”

“I need a smoke,” Bendrup said. “This is your room, so I guess it’s your call.”

Bendrup had pulled out a cigar that looked life threatening and Poulsen nodded. “The boss is usually restrictive,” Bendrup said, waving toward Poulsen with the match he’d just used to light his cigar. “Better do the same while you have the chance.”

Winter shook his head and let his Corps remain where they were in his jacket pocket. He would relish the secondhand smoke. Bendrup sat down.

“A young police officer sacrificed his life,” Bendrup said, and his face was no longer soft. “I was the one who had to deliver the news to his fiancée, and that’s something you never forget. She was pregnant as well.”

“What happened?” Winter asked.

“It was an inside job, of course, but we were never able to prove it. Maybe that’s what bothers me the most.” He drew in and blew out some smoke, and Winter thought about a locomotive. “But there was seven million in there that afternoon, and the ones who came for it knew about it.”

“Wasn’t the bank locked?” Winter asked. “It was after closing, wasn’t it?”

“It was officially closed, but the door was still open,” Bendrup said. “Everyone blamed everyone else. But that’s not what makes me think it was an inside job. You see, back then it wasn’t that usual to lock the doors. Not here in good old Denmark anyway.”

“That’s why they could just walk in,” Poulsen said. “The money was there, and four men entered. Black stockings over their faces, of course. Three marched straight in and one remained by the door.”

“You know that? Precisely?”

“There was a camera,” Bendrup said. “This may seem, for the most part, like something out of the 1800s, but there was a camera in the bank. So we could see.”

Winter nodded.

“And then all hell broke loose,” Bendrup said, and sucked on his cigar, which glowed in front of his face.

“As it turned out, we were already on our way over there before the crooks even stepped back out across the threshold.”

“So I understand,” Winter said. “How did that happen?”

“It’s the sort of thing that only happens to fools and geniuses,” Bendrup said.

“A group of morons from the electric company was putting new wiring in the vault and tripped the alarm to the police station, which also stood right here but wasn’t quite as beautiful.”

Winter nodded. Poulsen was leaning against the desk. A truck had pulled up outside the window and was revving its engine. Someone called out. Winter heard a train. The truck suddenly rattled and went silent.

“Meanwhile, the staff was sitting there with seven million in used bills. We called, course-well, not me because I wasn’t on duty-but they called and didn’t get any answer because those idiots managed to cut the phone lines at the same time that they set off the alarm. So there was no answer, and the first car careered down Østerågade and arrived right in the middle of the party. Or just as it was ending. The robbers were on their way out, and the police car came screeching to a stop on Nytorv and Søren Christiansen was first out and the first to get killed. The robbers brought guns with them, see. AK-4s that rip a body apart even if you’re a bad shot.” Bendrup fixed his eyes on the window and then on Winter. He sucked at his cigar, but it had gone out while he was talking. “Jesus Christ. With a bit of imagination you can still see the stain left by Søren’s blood.”

“But there was return fire, right?” Winter asked.

“Yes. The officers who’d arrived with Søren took cover behind the car and opened fire. Just then another car came up from Ved Stranden-I can show you later, when we go down there-and those officers saw what was going on and more or less took the bastards from behind. There was more shooting. A few of the guys called it the ‘Bonnie and Clyde case’ afterward,” Bendrup looked at Poulsen. “But not me. It was too serious to joke about.”

“Two robbers died,” Winter said.

“One died on the spot. A bullet in the eye that must have been a lucky shot. The other was still alive when it was over, but he was in a bad way. We thought he’d make it, but he died without ever regaining consciousness. The doctors said he’d had something called a fat embolism. Know what that is?”

“Vaguely,” Winter said.

“Same here, but I learned a bit about it. He’d been hit in several places, and the resulting fractures caused bone marrow to enter the bloodstream, which in turn caused a clot that resulted in his death. It was-well, disappointing. We had no one to question.”

“No,” Winter said. “The others got away.”

“They got away. Two men and the driver and maybe the kid. The driver was a woman. Two detectives and a uniformed officer swore they’d seen a child’s face lying on the floor of the getaway car when the doors were opened before they took off.”

“They were sure of it,” Poulsen said. “Just as sure as they were that the driver was a woman.”

“Brigitta Dellmar,” Winter said.

“Apparently she was later identified as such,” Poulsen said.

“She was unknown here,” Bendrup said.

“So they got away.” Winter kept his voice neutral.

Bendrup looked at him suspiciously. “That’s the story, in broad strokes. The epilogue is that they hid out in a holiday home in Blokhus. And that the third robber floated up in the fjord a few weeks later. At least it’s believed that it was him. He was buddies with the two who died. Or one of them anyway.”

“What was their connection to the biker gangs?” Winter asked.

“Well…” Bendrup tried to light up his cigar again.

Winter waited. Michaela Poulsen, irritated by the noise, walked over to the window. It quieted down just as she looked out.

“Well, the organization was being built up here back then. They’d come over from California, like the Beach Boys and all kinds of other crap. Somehow they got a stronger foothold here in Denmark than in other European countries. I think. In any case, there were a few trail-blazers, and two of these hapless bank robbers were among them. At least two. But that’s about all we know, which, of course, isn’t the same thing as what we think.”

“So, what do you think?” Winter asked.

“We think-or I think anyway-that it was a straightforward attempt to raise funds. Seven million was a lot of money back in ’72. Anyone wanting to build up a strong organization needs capital. Bear in mind that the Danske Bank heist wasn’t the only one that took place at the time, nor the first. It was probably just one in a series of planned robberies, even if it was the biggest. And the bloodiest.”

“Supporting that theory,” Poulsen added, “is the fact that one of the robbers was probably killed by his own-”

“How do you mean?” Winter asked.

“He was executed since he was no longer needed. That may sound shocking, but things got pretty nasty around here. Or else he was weak-according to their definition, that is-a weak person whom they couldn’t trust.”

“Or else they simply had a falling-out over something,” Bendrup said. “They may just have been hired hands. Connected to the organization, yes. Sent out by the gang leadership, no. Could be.”

“You said they may have had a falling-out,” Winter said. “Over what?” He felt a cold surge through his head and hair. Suddenly his pulse was racing.

“I can almost see what you’re thinking,” Bendrup said. “I can see it now. And it’s not a very nice thought.”

“Is it possible that the woman and the child had to disappear?” Winter asked.

“Well,” Bendrup said. “I’ve thought a lot about it, and that’s one potential explanation. Either there was an order handed down from above that the weak had to be gotten rid of, or else something happened between the robbers afterward. Maybe the men fought over the lives of the woman and child. Perhaps all their lives were in danger. Maybe it was just a coincidence that things turned out the way they did, but I don’t think so. All you can say for sure is that it was a nightmare.”

“Turned out the way they did?” Winter asked. “You mean that the one guy was murdered?”

“Yeah. He was shot, but why him?”

“Okay,” Winter said, and lit up a Corps. “They escape and get away. They hold out somewhere. Maybe others in some organization know where they are, maybe not. Then something happens. It’s possible they’ve already gone their separate ways, but let’s assume that one of the men is killed in the presence of the others. That leaves a man and a woman and possibly the child. The woman is from Sweden. They manage to make it back to Sweden-”

“Yeah, fucking hell,” Bendrup said. “We did what we could, but that wasn’t good enough. They must have had contacts and been taken across by some smuggler.”

“Or else they got themselves a contact,” Poulsen said. “They had money, after all, right?”

“If there was any money left,” Bendrup said. “With them, I mean. The money might already have been in the coffers.”

“But if the girl was actually along during the robbery, and we also know that she came to Sweden and was eventually found at a hospital in Gothenburg,” Winter said, “then the question is, who else made the trip over?”

“Maybe no one,” Bendrup said. “It’s not unthinkable that the woman and the last remaining man, if we call him that-that they’re dead too. That they died soon after the robbery. Executed.”

“Or else they came across too,” Poulsen said.

“So the last man was never identified?” Winter asked.

“No. He may have been a Swede. The woman was Swedish. The man might have been Swedish too.”

“Then why did they come over here in the first place?” Winter said. “Why did they specifically take part in this robbery?”

“Maybe there was a sister organization in Gothenburg, but we never managed to determine that,” Bendrup said. “That is, after we heard about the child and the hospital and the connection to Brigitta Dellmar. And that she’d been seen during the heist.”

“You found no link between her and any of the Danish men who were killed?”

“Nothing. Nor with anyone else in the fledgling organization. But there may have been. Maybe cross-border love. Just like cross-border collaboration. Spread the risk.”

“We really searched for them,” Poulsen said. “The woman and the man.”

“She’s never been heard from again,” Bendrup said. “And she had a little child, after all. That really points to only one possibility.”

“So, what was the deal with that house? Where was it? I can’t remember the name from the file.”

“Blokhus. On the North Sea. It’s a seaside resort.”

“You were able to establish that they’d been in a house there?”

“According to some witnesses, they had. We checked out the house, but it was empty. Empty as a tomb.”

“Of course this was long after the robbery,” Poulsen said.

“What?”

“They’d picked the lock or something and gotten inside. Or else they’d had a key. No one saw anything suspicious back then. The house was a bit isolated, given that there were no year-round residents. Now it’s different, but back then there were nothing but holiday homes along the whole street. They left no trace behind. Then the owners came along a few weeks later and continued renovating the house, which they’d already been in the process of doing for some time. New wallpaper. Fresh coat of paint. And finally someone living up the road reacted to all the commotion following the robbery. In other words, it all went very slowly.”

“How did they connect the robbers to that specific house?”

“They found something,” Bendrup said. “The owners of the house, that is.” He stood and picked up the binders. He found the one he was looking for and started flipping through it. “They were busy working on the house.” Bendrup put down the binder and picked up another one. “It should be here.”

“It was really just a small slip of paper wrapped up in a little child’s sweater,” Poulsen said. “It was when they were getting started on the flooring and were about to access the crawl space underneath. There was a loose floorboard in the corner, over by the window. Lying inside was a sweater, and that slip of paper fell out when they picked it up. It was a slip of paper with symbols on it. Like a map.”

“Here it is,” Bendrup said, and held out the binder. Winter felt sick to his stomach and excited at once. “Don’t you feel well?”

Winter shook his head. He took the binder. Lying in a plastic folder was a copy of the same map, or message, as the one he had studied several times in Gothenburg, with the same letters and numbers and a similar drawing that could be a set of instructions or anything at all: 5/20,-1630, 4-23?, L. v-H, C.

“I recognize this,” he said, and explained the connection to them.

“Good God,” Poulsen said. She’d removed her jacket.

“Well, we never managed to decipher it,” Bendrup said. “But this is a step forward nevertheless.”

“Did you find any fingerprints?” Winter asked.

“Mostly from those who touched the stuff afterward,” Bendrup said. “But we did come up with one set that belonged to Andersen.”

“Andersen? I haven’t seen anything about an Andersen in the files,” Winter said.

“What? Oh shit, sorry, I was unclear,” Bendrup said. “The robber we later found, the one who was floating in Limfjorden, his name was Møller and that’s how he appears on all official documents, but when we checked with his buddies here in town, it turns out he had some kind of a code name, and that was Andersen. They all had double names, every one of them.”

Winter’s mouth was dry. He had trouble swallowing, but he felt that he had to swallow before he could speak. “The dead woman in Gothenburg, her name is Andersén,” he said. “Helene Andersén. She adopted that name a few years ago. So she may well have been that little girl.”

“Good God,” Poulsen repeated.

“When did you find that out?” Bendrup asked. “Her identity, I mean. That name. Andersén.”

“Just a few days ago,” Winter said. “Everything’s gone so quickly after that. Didn’t you get the name from us? My registry clerk was supposed to send over most of the material ahead of my arrival.”

Poulsen looked at Bendrup.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Bendrup said. “I’ve been off work for the past three days and only came back this afternoon. The stuff was lying on my desk. It must have been there since it arrived, without anyone taking a look.”

“That’s my fault,” Poulsen said. “I should have checked the mail earlier. But maybe we’ve made some progress here after all.” She eyed Winter. “If you’d like, we can all head downtown now so you can have a firsthand look at where it happened.”

“But first we’re going to have a beer,” Bendrup said.

50

WINTER AND BENDRUP EACH SAT WITH A CARLSBERG HOF AT LA Strada opposite Danske Bank, on the corner of Østerågade and Bispensgade. Michaela Poulsen was drinking a club soda with lemon. They were alone in the bar, but there was a lot of hustle and bustle on the pedestrian street outside.

The bank occupied a building that looked as if it might have been a church erected in the late Middle Ages, though it had been a bank for as long as anyone in Ålborg could remember. The stones in the walls were rough-hewn. The windows were large and appeared to have been there for centuries. A telephone booth stood next to the gaping entrance, just opposite them, across the pedestrian street.

“I wonder how many times they walked past here and planned that job,” Winter said, turning to the Danish homicide detectives.

“It could have been done by others,” Bendrup said. “Or just one of them.”

“We also believe that the driver-the woman-first tried to drive east along Nytorv, but that way was blocked off,” Poulsen said. “I’ll show you when we go outside.”

“You mean that the escape route across the bridge wasn’t planned?”

She made a gesture with her hand. “It may have been, but perhaps from a different direction. We don’t really know. What I mean is that maybe everything wasn’t planned down to the last detail.”

“But the idea didn’t just occur to them as they happened to be walking past,” Bendrup said.

The bank was closed, and they were alone in there with two of the staff. The commotion outside the window intensified apace with the onset of evening. Winter reconstructed the events in his head, while Bendrup and his boss recounted and pointed.

They’d rushed in with their black masks, a repeat of so many robberies in the criminal history that united all countries.

Outside, the young police officer had been gunned down. Christiansen. And two of the robbers. Their names and background were in the files that Winter had brought along from the police station to read in his hotel room.

Bendrup indicated where people had stood and where they had fallen. Everything eventually flowed together from all different directions, and Winter felt the fatigue take hold, his consciousness dulled like the daylight that was seeping away into the walls of the buildings on this street corner of the world where people had died for money. Or was there something else too? He wondered if it might have been for an idea-an awful concept of power and control, of naked terror.

“And heading north,” Bendrup said.

Winter followed his gesture past something that seemed to be a copy of a British pub.

“We took off after them, but I already told you that,” Bendrup said. “It started to get dark, like it is now. It was almost the same time of year.”

Winter wished himself back at the hotel. An hour’s sleep and then work and a bit of food. He needed to be alone again.

“Well,” Bendrup said. “Is there anything else we can show you? That you want to see right now, that is.”

“Not right at the moment,” Winter said. “You’ve been very forthcoming, I must say.”

“Out of pure selfishness,” Bendrup said. “You solve the case, and we get the glory.”

“Of course,” Winter said. He was starting to get a little tired of Bendrup’s chatter.

“Well, maybe we’re trying to be a little more professional than that,” Poulsen said. “Let’s get going, then. We can drop you off at the hotel.”

“I’d prefer to walk,” Winter said. “It’s not very far, is it?”

“Not far at all,” Bendrup said. “Just follow this street and it’ll take you straight to the square next to the station. Kennedy Square. That’s where your hotel is.”

Winter raised his hand in farewell and started walking. “I’ll come by tomorrow morning.”

Poulsen waved and nodded.

He had dozed off for a while and was awakened by the sound of motors. Eventually you barely notice it, Michaela Poulsen had said. It gets to be like living next to a railroad. Here he had both. Motors and trains. He got out of bed and walked to the window. The room was half in darkness from the encroaching evening and half in light from John F. Kennedy Square, which was patchily lit from there to the station building, where two motorcycles stood revving their engines. After a few minutes they drove off to the right.

There was a rumbling from bus traffic at the far end of the square. To the right he could see the dim light from the Mallorca Bar. Two men staggered in and another staggered out.

Winter drew the curtains and took off his clothes and left them in a pile on the floor.

The water in the shower reached the right temperature almost immediately. He stood there for a long time before he lathered his body and rinsed the suds off with his face pointing into the stream.

There were still a lot of people on the streets in the center of town as Winter headed south along Boulevarden. He met with fewer as he neared the station. The evening was so mild that he could walk with his jacket unbuttoned.

Two men were standing outside the Boulevard-Caféen, opposite the hotel, but they went inside the bar when he drew closer. The windows were open and he heard the murmur of voices. Winter walked across the street and glimpsed a man through one of the windows. He lit a cigarillo as he walked, which allowed him to glance at the window of the bar, and the man was still standing there, with the half darkness behind him and half-hidden behind the thin curtains.

It might not be, thought Winter. But if those are the same men who were standing outside the Jyske Bank, talking over a hamburger, when I was there, this city isn’t actually very big.

He was standing next to his car now. He opened it and pretended to rummage around in the glove compartment. The man remained standing in the window, but his silhouette had moved, as if to follow Winter’s movements more closely.

Winter stepped out of the car, rounded the corner, and went into the hotel. He was handed his key. The elevator had gotten stuck somewhere, so he walked quickly up the stairs and waited in the hallway outside the door until the timer switched off the hall lights. Then he opened the door to his room and slid from darkness into darkness and shut the door at once behind him. The room was silver from the illuminated square and streets outside. Winter went down on his knees and crawled across the floor.

When he was below the window, he crawled off to the side and slowly stood up, concealed by the thick curtain that hung there. He heard a shout from the Mallorca Bar and saw a man move along unsteadily. He couldn’t see the door to the Boulevard-Caféen, but he waited and saw the man outside the Mallorca joined by another drunken lout, who shouted in Danish.

Then something moved in the right of his field of vision and he backed up a few inches into the room, but not far enough to prevent his seeing.

The two men came into view, moving away from the street and across the square. Winter saw that it was the same men he’d seen just before, outside the bar. He was certain he had also seen them up by Nytorv. More than certain, in fact.

The men looked up at the window as they walked past on the sidewalk below. They can’t see me, thought Winter. One of them kept his gaze fixed on the window, and Winter stayed still.

Then they had passed.

The most foolish thing now would be to go down and follow them, he thought. I don’t think they know that I know.

51

THE SOUNDS SEARED WINTER’S SLEEP LIKE RED-HOT COALS, waking him from a state of deep unconsciousness. No dreams tonight. The exhaustion from the day before had taken its toll and given him rest. He lay still for two minutes and primed himself to get up, opening his eyes to a room washed out by the morning light from John F. Kennedy Square. As he climbed out of bed, the room began to vibrate from what he now identified as one hell of a racket coming from outside. For a second, he thought it was motorcycles, but the sound was different. He checked his watch. It was 6:30. Just then the alarm clock on the bedside table rang.

He drew the curtains and saw a tanker truck parked next to the phone booths, with thick hoses feeding from it into the ground. Sometimes the local sewage cleaners know when you’ve checked into a hotel and make a point of getting to work outside your window at the crack of dawn, he thought. But I was getting up anyway.

The sky encased his field of vision like dirty steel. The buses in front of the station departed with early-rising unfortunates. There were still soldiers in front of the station. Maybe it’s a permanent posting, he thought.

The vibrations ceased seconds after the racket, and the sewage cleaners pulled levers and pressed buttons and headed off for breakfast.

Winter could now take in the sounds of early morning, delicate and clear.

He was escorted to his temporary office on the second floor by a uniformed officer who didn’t say a word. Michaela Poulsen came in a minute later.

“I’m being followed,” Winter said.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. Winter noticed that she didn’t ask if he was sure. “Your arrival was no secret, after all.”

“Who are they?”

“Who’s following you? To know that I’d have to see a few faces.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to invite you out for dinner tonight,” Winter said. “You’ll have to discreetly glance over your shoulder.”

“Okay. But it’ll have to be after eight.”

“Could be that one of the gangs over here got a message from Sweden,” Winter said.

“Or an alarm,” Poulsen said.

“Yes. An alarm. That could tell us something. And there’s something else,” Winter said. “The name Andersen. Or Møller. The one who wound up dead afterward.”

“Kim Møller.”

“Let’s call him Kim Andersen. I read up on him yesterday in my hotel room. I couldn’t quite get my head around it. He seems to have been a reluctant member. A reluctant biker. There wasn’t much in there.”

“And he wasn’t known to us before.”

“First time?”

“First and last.”

“Are you talking bank robberies now?”

“The more serious stuff, yeah.”

“His parents weren’t especially forthcoming, as far as I could tell.”

“They were terrified,” Poulsen said. “Literally scared to death. The father died a few months later, and while it could have been his heart, it may well have been something else.”

“Is the mother still living?”

“Yes.” Poulsen looked at Winter. “Do you want to question her? That is, do you want us to question her again?”

“Where is she?”

“At home, I think.”

“Can you set it up?”

“We can try. If she doesn’t want to, we’ll have to go see a judge.”

“Try contacting her at home,” Winter said.

Poulsen left the room and returned five minutes later. “No answer and no answering machine.”

“Do you have the address?”

“Yes, but that’s not a good idea. If we just show up on her doorstep, she’s liable to just deny everything. And if she was afraid back then, she’s afraid now too. We’ve had some contact over the years.”

“Is she being watched? By them, I mean.”

“I would think so.”

Winter was alone in the room, studying the slip of paper that resembled the map he had first seen on Beier’s desk in Gothenburg, a copy of which he’d brought along and was now holding up for comparison. The handwriting was different but the message was the same. The lines were scrawled in the same directions. The letters and numbers could be references to times and quantities. People or money? Or both? Initials of places or names? On the desk before him and in the files on the computer were fragments of answers. As soon as he got home, he could sit down with all the documents and other materials and very slowly work his way through the preliminary investigation from August 18 to today. He looked at the photo of Kim Andersen that glistened through the plastic pressed over his face. From October 2, 1972, up to the present, thought Winter. Andersen’s face was alive and seemed painted with a heavy burden that could have been anything. Winter knew it was taken the year before Andersen died. He was a member then, in one way or another. He had a Harley 750. His eyes were black and his chin was in shadow. The shadow fell from the left and made his face indistinct. Winter knew what he was looking for, but he couldn’t find any direct resemblance to Helene Andersén in Kim Andersen’s youth of twenty-five years ago.

He drove across the bridge and turned left on Vesterbrogade. This was the route Brigitta had driven. Helene sat in the back or lay pressed against the floor. Or was held there. How frightened had the child been? The mother? Had she known where she was going? According to Bendrup, a few witnesses later came forward saying they’d seen a Fiat driving at high speed between the high-rises. The high-rises gave way to detached gray stone houses when the street turned into Thistedvej.

The traffic thinned out when fields began to open up along the roadside, and Winter could hear the wind. The light was transformed as he went from city to countryside, a paler hue now spanned the sky to the west, where the sea lay. Before Årbybro he looked to the right and saw mile-long stretches of tree-lined country roads rambling through ploughed fields.

One ran parallel to the road that he was driving on. He looked to his right again: a flash of movement among the trees, keeping pace with his own. He looked again: the movement continued when the roads ran side by side through the Store Vildmose marshes. He guessed it was three hundred yards to the tree-lined road that paralleled his. The sun broke through the sky. His gaze returned to the road in front of him. There were no cars ahead, and he saw none in his rearview mirror. He looked to the right again, and now he was certain. The polished chrome of two motorbikes caught the sun at rhythmic intervals as they passed tree after tree.

Then the trees came to an abrupt end, as if an artist had tired of drawing them and lifted his pen from the paper. At that same moment, the motorcycles disappeared from view. Winter drove another half kilometer, but there was no longer any parallel movement. He slowed down suddenly and pulled into a parking space at the side of the road. With the engine running, he tried to see the line of trees in his rearview mirror. He saw the end of it and how it meandered back the way he’d come. They must have stopped right at the last tree, thought Winter. They knew how it looked. Maybe they didn’t notice that I’d spotted them. Perhaps it wasn’t them. I’ve got to stay calm.

He continued on, at Pandrup turning left toward Blokhus.

The resort town looked at first like a cautiously inhabited year-round community, but the impression of life dissipated the closer he got to the sea.

Winter turned right at an intersection and stopped two hundred yards farther on, in front of the Bellevue Hotel-all wood and glass that shook in the wind gusting from the sea, across the sand dunes that abutted the hotel. The balconies were abandoned zones waiting for the next season. A pennon was being ripped to shreds on one of the house’s yellow timber-framed towers.

He removed a piece of paper from his jacket’s inside pocket and read it.

They’d been seen leaving Blokhus on a path that ran between the dunes just as it does now.

He climbed out of the car and the wind lifted his hair up, slapping the collar of his jacket against his throat. Sand from the beach had been swept across the street like snowdrifts. It grew higher and ever closer to one of the few open shops, where clothes on hangers waved armless greetings from empty sleeves.

This is a ghost town, thought Winter.

A new square marked the center of Blokhus. There was a Cowboyland and a Sky Bar, whose windows were just shadowy black holes. Outside another clothing store, dresses and jackets swelled to twice their size in the wind. Winter saw no seabirds. Perhaps the grotesque scarecrows on the hangers in this town scared the shit out of birds.

The house lay behind the square, on Jens Baerentsvej-the third to the right on the dirt road that led to the sea across wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was an extension on the back of it that might be a room. There was no fence. A rusty lawn mower stood in the center of the little front yard, as if abandoned in miduse.

It was here. It was here, he thought to himself again. They had been here. Helene had been here. The little girl that was Helene had been here. And someone else besides. Maybe her mother, maybe not. Maybe her father, maybe not. Kim Andersen. Maybe a father. Thou shalt obey thy father. Honor thy father. Our father who art in heaven, thought Winter.

Had he been murdered here?

During the drive back to Ålborg, Winter thought about how much the Danes had been able to accomplish in their forensic examination of the house back then. The technicians found traces of Helene, but not of anyone else except the owners.

He would have liked to have gone right in, but that was an issue for the judge in Hjørring. The house had changed hands three times.

When he reached the tree-lined stretch again, all was still. The setting sun covered everything in gold leaf, and Winter put on his sunglasses for the drive into town. He parked outside the black police headquarters, which he thought looked more and more like a spaceship that had landed in the midst of this Danish urban agglomeration.

Michaela Poulsen was still in her office. The glow from her computer screen gradually caught up with the fading sun.

“Beate Møller wasn’t interested in being questioned,” she said, as she saved a document in the word-processing program and looked up.

“Not even in having a talk?”

“What she actually told us was to go to hell, using only slightly more genteel language.”

“I see.”

“Her son has never done anything bad. He’s only had bad things done to him.”

“Where does she live?”

“Why do you want to know? You’re not thinking of doing something foolish?”

“Never while on duty,” Winter said, and Poulsen laughed.

Winter asked about the things he had been thinking about in the car on the way back.

Poulsen listened. “I don’t know who owns the house now, but that can be checked out. If we’ve got enough to establish probable cause, we can get a search warrant from the judge in Hjørring. Where leads are concerned, I think it’s all there in the binders in your office. And I’m sure forensics conducted a thorough search of the house.”

“Even underneath the new wallpaper?”

“I don’t know about that specifically, but we can quickly find out. We can check with the National Center for Forensic Science in Copenhagen.”

The phone on the homicide inspector’s desk rang. She lifted the receiver and listened.

“It’s for you. From Sweden.”

52

WINTER HEARD RINGMAR’S BREATHING FROM ACROSS THE KATtegat before the man had even started speaking. The receiver crackled as if the phone line were swinging in a storm.

“Hi, it’s Winter.”

“Hi, Erik. It’s Bertil. I called your mobile but you didn’t answer.”

He picked up his mobile phone and looked at it. “It looks completely normal.”

“I’m not talking about how it looks. But how it sounds.”

“Something must have happened to it,” Winter said, and brought up the call list on the display. Nothing since he’d arrived in Denmark.

“Oh well. We’re speaking now anyway. And we haven’t found any Møller here,” Ringmar said. “No one who fits, anyway. Not yet. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve really had our hands full over the past twenty-four hours, sifting through all the tips about the girl-well, you know all about that, of course, but we have a couple of interesting ones here. One came in just an hour ago. A bus driver at Billdal says he’s sure that he’s seen the girl on his bus.”

“Alone?”

“He says she was accompanied by a woman. I’ve only spoken to him on the phone. He should be showing up here any minute.”

“When did he see the girl?”

Winter heard the overloaded phone line crackle again.

“He was going to try to remember on the way over here. He’s checking his driver’s log. It’s too early to tell. But it was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Months. Could be in connection with the murder.”

“Or before.”

“What?”

“Nothing. We’ll have to discuss it later, when I get back.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow evening, I think. I really ought to stay longer, but I can always return.”

“How’d it go today?”

“I think the biker gang, or gangs, over here are keeping an eye on me. Somebody is.”

“They’re following you?”

“Possibly, but I think they want me to know about it. Or else they screwed up.”

“We’re working on that lead,” Ringmar said. “It’s gotten stronger.”

“What’s happening otherwise?”

“Halders had something-no, I think that had to do with the shoot-out. I don’t know, in that case it’s in the interrogation file. But I don’t know if I have time to read it to you right now, with everybody calling in with their information. You can read it later. It’s your job. You can’t go on eating smørrebröd forever.”

“I haven’t had a single bite.”

“Then there’s no reason to stay on. If you’re not planning on eating those tasty smørrebröds.”

“Good-bye, Daddy,” Winter said, and hung up.

A female police officer showed him the way out. He walked down the stairs. It was past sundown. Iron clanged against iron in the freight yard across Jyllandsgade. Winter followed the street westward toward his hotel.

He hesitated outside the entrance to the Park Hotel and instead headed left across Boulevarden. No one was standing in the window of the Boulevard-Caféen this time. He walked up a chipped stairway and opened the door to the beer hall. It smelled at once of alcohol and the smoke that enveloped its two large rooms in a great haze. The few tables by the windows were empty. Winter sat down and saw the hotel’s facade through a windowpane that was smeared in fat. He couldn’t see the window to his room. Few of the windows in the hotel’s facade were lit up.

The bar was located in the far room, and a few old men sitting at a table in front of the counter were in the midst of a sing-along about faith, hope, love, and alcohol. A woman wearing a white blouse and black skirt was sitting at the table, eating a meal. When she saw Winter sit down, she stood and wiped her mouth with a napkin that was fastened to the waistband of her skirt. The old men turned their heads toward Winter and then turned back again in midsong. The woman came up to his table. He ordered a Hof. She went back and fetched a bottle from a large refrigerator behind the bar and returned to Winter with the opened bottle and a glass. He paid the few kroner it cost.

He grabbed the bottle by the neck and drank it like a Dane, and realized as he drank how thirsty he was.

Sitting at a table at the very back of the bar was a man in a brown coat, with a beer and a bottle of aquavit in front of him. He was staring straight at the bottle of liquor and never moved his head except when he drank. Winter saw his elbow rise up at an angle at regular intervals. A professional. When the woman finished eating, she rose and fetched another beer for the man in the coat without his having made any sign that Winter was able to see. Winter finished his beer and stood up. The old men were still singing. No one seemed to pay any attention to him.

Michaela Poulsen called from the lobby. It was shortly past eight. Winter was ready and walked down the steps under the desolate landscapes that hung in frames on the walls.

They followed Boulevarden, which turned into Østerågade. There were a lot of people out. Winter heard Swedish and German. A street troubadour sang about eternal youth in an open square to the left and had just started “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” when they walked past.

The wind tore at Winter’s hair at the intersection of Bispensgade.

“I always feel a strong sense of dread right here,” Poulsen said.

“I can understand that.”

“Come to think of it, I often feel a sense of dread in this job.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Now I’m going to keep looking straight ahead while I speak to you, because I think there’s a guy standing over there by the bookstore who’s more interested in us than he is in the books in the shop window.”

Winter felt he had to make an effort not to turn his head to the left. He looked at the dark stone walls of the bank in front of him. People passed behind them on the sidewalk as they stood with their backs to La Strada.

“Do you recognize him?” he asked.

“It’s hard to tell from here, but I doubt it. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to send a celebrity after us. A celebrity to me, that is.”

They moved a bit to the side and gazed at the Jyske Bank.

“So let’s get back to talking about what we were talking about just now,” Poulsen said. “Do you remember what it was?”

“The strong sense of dread we feel in our work,” Winter said.

They continued looking at the Jyske Bank but in silence.

“I can now inform you that the guy over by the bookstore has gone,” she said. “You don’t have to look, but we can walk over there now. I’m starting to feel stiff from standing here.”

They passed the bookstore. Mannequins stood unclothed in the windows of the Nordjylland fashion house and gazed out with glassy eyes. The bookstore was displaying new books by best-selling Danish authors.

“He’s either been reading Ib Michael or Susanne Brøgger,” Poulsen said.

They continued along Bispensgade to the entertainment district around Jomfru Ane Gade. It was difficult to make headway among all the people moving between the restaurants and bars. Music was coming from every direction. Winter thought about the Gothenburg Party. It was the same atmosphere here, filled with an anxiety that was both hard and soft, or of that same old search for calm.

“Shall we grab a table somewhere, seeing as we’ve confirmed that we are being watched?” Poulsen asked.

“Let’s do that.”

“There’s a pretty good brasserie in the next street. Or should we try to force our way into the thick of things right here?”

“Might be best to be in the thick of things,” Winter said. “It’s easier to observe us without our seeing.”

“He’s been walking behind us for the past few minutes,” Poulsen said.

Winter looked around. A hundred brutal neon signs pummeled his eyes: “L.A. Bar,” “Fyrtøjet,” “Rock Nielsen,” “Down Under Denmark,” “Café Rendezvous,” “Faklen,” “Rock Caféen,” “Duty,” “Jules Verne,” “Sunrise,” “Dirch på Regensen,” “Fru Jensen,” “Gaslight,” “Pusterummet,” “Corner,” “Jomfru Ane’s Dansbar,” “Giraffen,” “Musikhuset,” “Spirit of America.”

They went into Sidegaden. The slogan for the place was: “The night belongs to us.”

Poulsen ordered two bottles of Hof, and they squeezed together in front of the bar.

Winter was about to say something but was cut off by his Danish colleague.

“He walked past and now he’s walking past again.”

Winter raised the bottle to his mouth and turned his head slightly. He saw people out on the street and that was it.

“I don’t recognize him,” Poulsen said. “But that bastard’s certainly keeping an eye on us.”

“What conclusions should we draw from that?”

“I suppose you should feel honored. And that this is serious. I think your arrival has stirred up a bit of dust.”

“We’ve gotten closer to something.”

“Yes, and it both frightens and pleases me.”

“Now we’re going to find the last man in the group,” Winter said. “The group that visited the bank.”

“You think he’s still alive?”

“Yes. He killed Helene Andersén and he killed her father.”

Poulsen gripped her half-finished bottle of Hof and looked at him. “After twenty-five years. Why?”

“That’s what I’m trying to work out.”

“He could have done it right away.”

“No. That may have been the intention, but it didn’t work out. Maybe Kim Andersen got in the way.”

“What happened to the mother, then? Brigitta.”

“He killed her too,” Winter said. “He killed Kim Andersen and Brigitta Dellmar and the child was taken to Sweden. The idea was to get rid of any connection.”

“So why kill Helene after all this time?”

“I don’t know. Something happened. Something has happened. She found out something. She got to know who did it. She confronted him. The man who killed her mother and father. I’ve been looking for a single murderer all along.”

“And another child,” Poulsen said. “It’s a horrific situation.” She set her bottle down on the bar. “They’re all possible theories. But the question is still whether our bikers are more than just indirectly involved.”

“Look at the guy following us.”

“Maybe they know,” Poulsen said. “But the question is whether more than just the original gang of five was involved in this from the beginning.”

“Six,” Winter said. “You’re forgetting the child, Helene.”

“Where’s your murderer, then? Did he go along to Sweden or is he still in Denmark? Maybe even here in Ålborg?”

“He may have just walked by out there on the street,” Winter said. “I don’t know. The murder in August in Gothenburg doesn’t necessarily point to him living permanently in Sweden, but he was certainly there then.”

“If it is a he,” Poulsen said.

Winter nodded mutely.

“Or there’s another possible theory,” she said. “That there’s still just one survivor left from that bank robbery-and I’m counting all six-but that it’s a woman. Brigitta.”

Winter nodded again.

“I think your face just went pale,” she said. “I’m probably just as pale as you are. That’s an even more horrific thought.”

“That would have meant having her own child killed.”

“Maybe she had no choice. Maybe she didn’t know. You know as well as I do that we’re treading along the very brink of human misery here.”

“Yes,” Winter said, “that’s part of the job.”

“But it’s also just a theory,” Poulsen said.

53

THE RAIN AGAINST THE WINDOWWOKE HIMBEFORE THE ALARM. There was no sky out there to light the path through the room from the bed to the toilet.

Winter swung his legs over the side of the bed, and as he walked toward the john he stubbed his toe against the bedside table. It happened once every season.

He swore and sat down to massage his toe. The pain shrunk to a dull ache, and he stood up in order to take care of his pressing need.

When he was back in bed, he looked up at the ceiling and thought about Beate Møller, whom he hadn’t seen. Is that what he would end up doing? Would he drive out to her house in the east of the city only to park a ways off and see her walk in and walk out?

He wouldn’t be alone. There would be another car parked out there or a motorbike that he would be able to see, or not. It would be a provocation. Perhaps from both sides. The woman would end up caught in the middle. What good could come of that?

Better to let Michaela speak to her, he thought. I’ll probably just screw things up.

“We have two unsolved murders gnawing at our souls,” Jens Bendrup said, as he sat on the desk in Winter’s office. “That wander like ghosts through the passageways of the soul.”

“Excuse me?” Winter raised his gaze from the computer screen.

“Old, unsolved murders,” Bendrup said. “Not to mention a couple of old armed robberies. Are you aware that the statute of limitations has run out on the Danske Bank robbery? It’s twenty years. Anything requiring a minimum sentence of eight years has a twenty-year statute of limitations here in Denmark. The same goes for murder. But stuff like that loses its meaning now that we’re linking the past and the present together, right?”

“What unsolved murders are these?” Winter asked.

“One of them, I believe, is a biker killing,” Bendrup said, “but as usual it’s impossible to find the evidence to back up the suspicions.”

“What happened?”

“A twenty-four-year-old woman was found with her throat slit in a toilet stall at the railroad station. She had a ticket to Frederikshavn in her purse. The train was scheduled to leave a half hour later, but she wasn’t on it. That was fourteen years ago, in ’84.

“At some point every year, I take out the case file and go through it. The Jutte case. Her name was Jutte, the girl who had her throat cut at the railway station. It’s my case-I have the whole preliminary investigation and now it’s even being transferred to the computer. Maybe that’ll improve our chances. I never forget. The case is going nowhere, and I can’t forget.”

“No new leads?”

“Little things pop up every year, of course, but nothing solid to go on. Then there’s Pedersen from Ringsted who calls every so often to confess. He confesses to everything, but I guess you get that kind of thing too.”

“Yeah.” Winter switched off his computer. “So you think that this murder of Jutte can be tied to the biker gangs?”

“To the Bandidos,” Bendrup said. “She was what you might call a passive member. Her boyfriend was a mechanic and a passive member too. But there’s no such thing when you’re dealing with these people. Maybe that was the message we-she-got in that damn toilet stall. But it wasn’t her boyfriend who did it.”

“Any other suspects?”

“Nothing solid or substantial.”

“You mentioned another murder,” Winter said.

“What? Yeah. A Mrs. Bertelsen. Four years ago. She was at a restaurant of the cheaper variety, left on her own, and disappeared. Eight months later somebody’s pet grubbed up a skeleton in an empty lot down by the docks. We found no personal belongings. Nothing. She was buried naked, and when we dug her up she was more than that. She’d been reported missing, and we ID’d her by her teeth. But that’s as far as we’ve come.”

Winter thought about Helene. He saw the lake. The narrow ditch like an open grave. The mossy ground. A seagull that shrieked a warning.

There was one more thing he wanted to do. First he called the Seacat office in Frederikshavn and changed his ticket, getting one of the last available seats on the 1515 boat home. He’d checked out from the hotel, and his suitcase was in his car parked in the lot opposite the Alcoholics Anonymous. It was just past noon.

Winter walked down the corridor to Michaela Poulsen’s office. The door was open. He saw her through it, hunched over her desk. Her hair was hanging loose today. He knocked on the door, and she looked up and waved him in.

“I’m leaving now,” he said.

“Right. Anything new on the home front?”

“Maybe. A bus driver claims he saw the girl. Could be. And then I’m dying to read through the preliminary investigation again.”

“So you said yesterday.”

“But we’ll be in touch soon again?”

“I hope so,” she said. “I’m trying to arrange to speak to Beate Møller. To start with. Then I’m going to speak to the judge, and the current owner, about the house in Blokhus.” She looked down at the papers in front of her and shook her head. “Once I’ve waded through all this mess.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a mess, literally. A mess of hooch! We found eighty thousand liters of the stuff on a farm halfway to Frederikshavn. Eighty thousand liters! That ain’t hay.”

Winter sat alone in a room on the ground floor with a sign that read “Newspapers on Microfilm” on the door. He placed the rolls of film in the machine and then stood to open the window of the stuffy room. Outside lay a pedestrian crossing, and the crosswalk man was glowing red. Even after he’d hitched open the window, it was still red. He read the first page of the Aalborgs Stiftstidende. It was dramatically type-set, with the news about the bank robbery plastered across more than half of the front page: “GUNMAN KILLS OFFICER.” The subheadings told of the other deaths.

Jens Bendrup was interviewed, and Winter couldn’t help but smile at the young Bendrup with long hair and flipped-out sideburns. All the men he saw in the photos had flipped-out sideburns on October 3, 1972.

Bendrup lied a little and spoke the truth where necessary. Winter sat there knowing some of the answers. Bendrup’s superiors spoke about what little they knew. “You always have to keep one last card up your sleeve,” Bendrup had said to Winter that morning.

In this case, they had truly done just that. The question was whether there was one, and where.

Winter continued reading but found nothing of any greater value than what he already knew. He stopped scrolling the film, and the blurred lateral movement halted before his eyes. He felt slightly nauseous. It may have been from the air in there and also the film in the reader, the different speeds that made it feel as though he were sitting in a car and staring out at the passing countryside printed on paper.

He walked over to the window again. The little crosswalk man was still red and the crossing long abandoned by the city’s pedestrians.

Winter walked back to the microfilm reader and sat down. He slowly scrolled through the past, the events of the day. What had it been like? How had it been when Helene and Brigitta were here? Had Brigitta read the same thing he was reading now?

He continued his slow journey through the time machine. Denmark was the world’s largest exporter of beer in 1972. An illustration showed how Ålborg’s infrastructure was likely to look in 1990: subway, a raised monorail around a city that the artist seemed to have modeled on something taken from the Liseberg Amusement Park. Mass transport by helicopter. Winter envied that era’s faith in the future. He had been twelve years old back then, also on his way somewhere, and could always be found in the playhouse at the bottom of the garden in Hagen.

England’s manager, Alf Ramsey, was sticking with his old stars for the 1974 World Cup qualifier. There was a picture of Bobby Moore, and young Ray Clemence, and a twenty-one-year-old Kevin Keegan with sideburns that were even more flipped out than Jens Bendrup’s had been seven pages earlier.

Paul and Linda McCartney started writing “The Zoo Gang,” and the students’ abuse of power at the universities was squelched.

The flickering of the racing screen made Winter’s nausea worse. He looked at his watch. Time to quit and head north. He’d kept scrolling the film forward as he looked down, and when he looked at the screen again, he’d landed on a local page about Pandrup and the surrounding area. The name Blokhus was in the headline of an article that seemed to be covering the building of the big hotel he’d passed on the deserted square the day before.

There was another article about Blokhus on the same page. If Winter understood the headline correctly, it had something to do with reclaimed land. There was a photo taken from a spot just off the square. The photographer was standing on a street called Sønder i By. Winter studied the car.

He stiffened. He knew exactly where the photographer was standing when he took the picture, which was supposed to illustrate land-use zoning and partitioning from the street on down to the sea. Winter read the lead-in. He read the caption that explained the partitioning and the piece of land in question. There were seven or eight houses in the photo that showed the full length of Jens Baerentsvej. Winter knew which street it was because he recognized the third house on the right-hand side of the dirt road that led to the sea across the wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was no fence. No sign of life in the windows. The photograph could have been taken anytime within the past twenty-five years, but Winter knew that it had been taken in conjunction with the article, as generic accompanying artwork. He knew that. The pressure mounted in his head and his midriff. A car was parked on the road outside the crooked house. The distance was fifty yards or more. Two figures could be seen in front of the house, on their way in or out. You couldn’t make out their faces, but it was an adult and a child.

He had deliberated with himself and then driven to Frederikshavn. Before, he’d called straight to Michaela Poulsen and told her about the photo in the Aalborgs Stiftstidende.

“It must be possible to find out when it was taken,” Winter had said.

“Of course. I’ll contact the newspaper. And the photographer, if he’s still alive.”

“Would you please send me a good enlargement of it as quickly as possible? So we can continue working on it.”

“Of course,” she’d said again.

The wind grabbed at his hair. He was standing on deck, watching as Denmark grew smaller and disappeared. Dusk fell over the sea. It had stopped raining in international waters. Winter felt as if he had a fever, a heightened heart rate. They were halfway home. He went into the bar, which was full of glazed-eyed people who continued the drinking they’d started hours ago in Frederikshavn. A few of them were sitting in wheelchairs, which was convenient for anyone who really wanted to get tanked, he thought.

Mountains of bottles and cans took form on the tables. People’s contours seemed to dissolve, he thought, and become part of history in such a way that more and more of them now seemed to resemble some kind of medieval troupe of jesters or lepers.

The smoke smudged out the features of the bar guests still further. Winter went out again, to get enough fresh air to feel like smoking a Corps. The catamaran passed Vinga. Wild ducks flew black against the evening sky while the lighthouse swept cones of light across the water. He smoked and felt his pulse drop. They passed Arendal. The big North Sea ferries slammed against the Skandiahamnen docks, reminding Winter of the walls of high-rises around North Biskopsgården-only the satellite dishes were replaced by a thousand eyes peering up toward outer space.

The drawings glowed on the wall of his office when he switched on the desk lamp and the ceiling light. The Danish flag in the depictions had taken on new meaning.

The road still ran through forest.

A windmill moved its vanes.

The streetcars went somewhere.

Ringmar knocked on the open door and entered. “Welcome home.”

Winter turned around. “Thanks. How’s it going?”

“I should be asking you that.”

“How’d it go with the bus driver?”

“It could have been her.”

“I had an odd experience,” Winter said. “I saw a photograph in a newspaper from back then, in 1972, of someone who could be Helene, and all I could think about was her.” He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “The girl I saw was Jennie.”

“That’s not so strange,” Ringmar said.

“Don’t you see? Everything’s getting mixed up. Pretty soon I won’t know who’s who. Or else that’s just how it feels at the moment. Maybe I’m just tired.”

“You look pale. For Christ’s sake, Erik, go home and get some rest.”

Halders was drumming his fingers against the desktop. He hadn’t done all the work himself, but he was responsible.

The material lay neatly organized in translucent-gray plastic folders. He was the first to see it in its entirety: 124 owners of Fort Escorts with license plates that begin with the letter H.

They hadn’t arrested anyone. They hadn’t even seen anything out of the ordinary. One of the stolen cars had not been accounted for, but the owner had an alibi and a spotless record.

Not everyone had quite so spotless a record. One-eighth of those 124 people had been convicted of minor offenses and occasionally something a little more serious, but Halders had been a police officer long enough to be able to say whether that was a high or low number.

There was something else in the back of his head. It was one of the ex-felons, Bremer. Georg Bremer. The old man had once done time for burglary. Six months twenty years ago. Halders remembered his house out in the sticks. The road through the wilderness. The horses at the edge of the field. The airplanes coming in over Landvetter and Härryda, which sounded like lightning striking.

Christ, Halders thought. What was it? What was it I didn’t check? What was it I put off till tomorrow?

He flipped through the folders and read.

It was the repair shop.

Aneta had taken notes. He had written his report, but who had checked out the shop where Bremer left his car for repairs? Should he have done it himself? No. Someone else had been assigned that task. Who was it? It wasn’t recorded here. It didn’t say the name of the repair shop either. Halders had written down the name. It was something generic, like Joe’s Car Repair or something. But the job wasn’t done. Or else it was done but hadn’t been entered. He checked his watch and called Möllerström, who answered on the third ring.

“It’s Fredrik. Can you help me with something?”

Halders sat with his interrogation transcript. Veine Carlberg had checked out the repair shop. Nothing strange about it. The time matched what Bremer claimed in his statement. It was a little odd that he had taken his rust bucket all the way in from the outback, and driven it across town, but the guy who owned the repair shop was an acquaintance.

Still, Halders was also acquainted with the guy who owned the repair shop. He’d brought him in for questioning once: Jonas Svensk. He remembered it, managed to reconstruct most of it with the help of his memory and the report in front of him. Svensk had a past he claimed to have put behind him. Halders hadn’t believed him.

Should he talk to Winter about Bremer and Svensk? Or should he check up on it himself a little more first?

He tried to think. They had leads going in different directions, and they had to pull back on one and focus more on something else. Right now it was the lead through the Billdal bus company. During the briefing this morning, Winter spoke about the house in Denmark and the connection or the link or whatever the hell you want to call it to that Andersen guy.

Halders thought about it. Bremer had a large plot. Aneta had thought of it as a vacation home.

54

ALONE IN HIS OFFICE ONCE AGAIN, WINTER SLOWLY MADE HIS way through the preliminary investigation while he waited for Michaela Poulsen’s call.

The telephone rang, and the switchboard informed him the call was from Ålborg.

“I thought for a while that we’d bungled things even more than I’d thought, and I’ve turned out to be right,” she said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“The photographer is retired but living. It was the local bureau of the paper that took the photo-i.e., not a professional photographer. Anyway, I’ve spoken with him and he remembers the story about the land partitioning and all that. But he couldn’t remember the photograph itself. I went over there and showed him a copy of the newspaper, but he still couldn’t remember taking it, although he must have, he said.”

“When was it?” Winter asked.

“He didn’t know the exact day, but it must have been shortly before the article was published. The vote in the town council came just before it, and that was three days before the article went to print, so he must have taken the photo during those two or three days.”

“Does he have copies?”

“No. That’s where the next link in this chain comes in. Every afternoon he used to hand over his roll of film to the pig truck or some other farmers’ transport-sometimes to the intercity bus-and it would be developed at the main bureau in Ålborg, where the prints were made. Everything is filed away in the archives of the newspaper. They have it all in good order. I know because that’s where I’m calling from now.”

“Have you seen a print?”

“They made me a quick print, and I’ve got the negatives. There are several frames. I’ll take them back to the station and let the photographer down in forensics work on them. Once we have some good enlargements, I’ll give you a call.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ll let you know,” Poulsen said, and hung up.

“Jakobsson has disappeared,” Ringmar said. “His brother thinks he’s been the victim of a crime.”

“The man himself is a crime,” Halders said. “He’s probably holed up somewhere drinking himself into a stupor.”

“But he’s gone,” Winter said. “He went home the day before yesterday and now his brother has reported him missing.”

“What do we think about that?” Bergenhem said to no one in particular.

“We think the worst,” Ringmar said.

Halders stayed behind after the late-afternoon meeting. He’d said a few words to Winter beforehand.

“Let’s go into my office,” Winter now said.

Halders eyed the drawings in the office but said nothing about them. He rubbed his hand over his scalp as if to emphasize the difference between his own crew cut and Winter’s long hair. Winter stroked his hair back behind his ears.

“Have you had a chance to go through all the reports on the owners of the cars yet?” Halders asked.

“No. They’re lying here.” Winter nodded toward the desk piled high with binders and document stacks of varying sizes. In and out trays were a thing of the past.

“There’s one name…”

Georg Bremer. Winter read his rap sheet while Charlie Haden played a solo from the shadow beneath the window: the volume was on low and Haden’s bass was part of the office walls.

Bremer had done time for burglary and criminal damage and had behaved himself while serving out his sentence at Härlanda Prison. No conspicuous drug use. After his release, he disappeared from the world of cops and robbers. He owned a Ford Escort, but that was no crime. He was acquainted with one former biker, as he himself put it. His car may or may not have driven along Boråsleden on the night of the murder. Winter grabbed hold of the lamp and directed it toward his new shelf, where he’d placed the VHS cassette. The sphere of light was reflected in the TV screen.

He walked over to the shelf and pulled out the telephone book, flipping to the B section of the Hindås district. There was one Bremer, Georg.

He picked up the phone and sat there with his finger poised over the buttons. No. Better to wait until tomorrow. All he really wanted was to hear the guy’s voice. Perhaps determine whether this was yet another distraction that they didn’t have time for. And yet he knew he would drive out there the next morning.

“You look like you could do with some sleep,” Angela said.

“Give me a hug,” he said. “No, on second thought, a massage.”

“First I’ll give you a hug,” she said, and did so. They stood still for half a minute. “Now sit down.”

She began to knead his neck and shoulders.

Winter was silent and closed his eyes and felt her strong fists get his blood flowing and make him a little more supple.

She continued.

“I think that’s enough,” he said. “Now you can fetch my slippers.”

“I’m not your housewife,” she said. “Masseuse, yes. Housewife, no.”

“You wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he said.

“So we’re back there again,” she said.

“Angela.”

“No. I know that you came home from Denmark with a fresh batch of horrendous things on your mind and that you’re searching for that little girl and the murderer. All that, I know. I’m trying to stay out of the way.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t want to keep going on about it-you know that’s not what I want. But now it’s serious. It’s serious again,” she said, and her hands disappeared from his shoulders.

He’d remained seated while she spoke. Now he stood. She was still turned away.

“I’m going home now,” she said. “I want you to make up your mind. This can’t come as a surprise.”

She turned around, and he saw that her eyes were glistening.

“It’s always the wrong moment,” she said. “You’re tired. You have a lot of stuff to work out. But I also have a lot of stuff to work out. We have a lot of stuff to work out. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I don’t want to.”

She walked out into the hall, and Winter called her name but got no answer.