Read Room No. 10 Online

Authors: Åke Edwardson

Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective

Room No. 10 (10 page)

BOOK: Room No. 10
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“They’re tight as clams at the hotel,” Djanali said.

“They probably think they have a reason to be.”

“I know you mean the suspicions of prostitution. But this is a murder investigation.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Winter said.

“Not because they have a reputation to protect, but still.”

“The hotel protects its customers,” Winter said. “The johns, and God knows who else.”

“I haven’t gotten the names of all the guests,” Djanali said. “I don’t think I have, anyway. It’s not easy, you could say.”

“I understand.”

There was a scratching sound in Winter’s earpieces, as though they had switched to another frequency.

“But you’re not surprised, are you?” Djanali said.

“What?”

“About the people who are guests in the beds at Revy. Or who have been before.”

“No,” Winter answered. “Not anymore.”

“They’re probably going to close down, by the way.”

“They are?”

“The clerk I talked to said so. He didn’t know anything more. But there was something going on.”

•   •   •

There had been a time Winter could be amazed by anything. Amazed, aghast, afraid. Astonished. There was so much he didn’t know then. Once he learned, it helped him with his work, soon enough, but he didn’t feel that he became any richer because of it, or more whole as a person. All the darkness he encountered made him long for sunshine, lots of sunshine. He felt that he became a more solitary person the more experience he got. He couldn’t hang his thoughts on a hook inside the door when he left his office. He couldn’t leave the police station and forget everything when the doors swung closed behind him. He knew he had colleagues who forgot everything when the evening came; not many, but enough to make it harder for him and others who took their work seriously. At first he had thought that he took this job far too seriously. But how else could he take it? And his
solitude was a condition of this. He had never had a large group of friends. Some women, a few men. A childhood friend or two. He had never had anything against solitude. He didn’t feel lonely. If the alternative was to sit with people and talk his way through the evenings, he preferred his own company. He could talk to himself if he wanted to hear a voice in the evening. He had done so once in a while. He could call someone. He didn’t need to be alone with himself if he didn’t want to be. He found his own method. It presumed a silence that existed only in his apartment, not at the department.

He lived up in Guldheden then, in a rental apartment between Guldhedens School and Doktor Fries Torg. The building was tall and he could see a long way, over the river, the hills, the lakes to the east, the highways that had been built around the city, thirty years too late, but which simultaneously encircled some sort of innocence that had existed in this city where he’d grown up and remained. He could stand on the rickety balcony on the seventh floor and watch the wide net of roads twine themselves around the old roads that led out; he thought of them more as roads out rather than roads in; the highway down there was built meter by meter, and a remnant of the innocence would stay inside the roads as it had done inside the old city walls. Outside the roads: wilderness. Or maybe it was the other way around. All the statistics, every one of the available facts, indicated that the city had become a worse place to live during the nearly twenty years he had been a police officer here. More dangerous, more unpredictable, like an ax to the skull on a mild spring evening. Twenty years, half a working life. If I can stay for another twenty years, there will be only wilderness; the jungle has taken over but there are no beautiful palm trees.

He had several thoughts like that. He didn’t mean to think like that, but he knew what it was: his method. Or the preliminary phase. In the beginning of a case he wasn’t much use. His world was meaningless and he was the one who had made it so. When he was gone for good, there would only be a thicker crime registry, a larger hard disk. He became smaller with each year, more replaceable. And so on, and so on.

He got up and walked out onto the balcony and lit a thin cigar
and contemplated the copper roofs on the other side of Vasaplatsen. The obelisk down in the park was a finger to the sky. The sound of the streetcars was muffled on its way up to his balcony; the light was clearer down there, like slow-motion flashes as cars and streetcars slowly started moving or slowed down.

Some time on the balcony. It was one of the better times, especially now, and especially in the evening, in the seam between August and September, when the air around him had a simplicity and a particular blond and blue brightness that made everything more transparent than ever. Up here there were scents that lingered from the height of summer and blended with something spicier, more humid. The autumn had a more humid scent, the summer a drier one. This summer had been neither. And suddenly it was over.

He went into the room and poured a whiskey from the carafe that stood among other carafes and bottles on a corner table. He knew which brands were in the carafes, but friends who came to visit might want to test their knowledge of malt whiskey. He had friends, new friends. That was one thing that had changed. Angela had probably helped with that, and Elsa; because some of the new parents continued to get together even when they weren’t so new anymore. And then came Lilly, and everything started over again, possibly without as many new parents.

Angela.

He looked at the clock. Either she’ll call in the next five minutes or I will. He lifted the glass to his mouth. The phone rang as he felt the first sip of the day burn its way down through his throat and chest and stomach.

“High command,” he said.

“What if it hadn’t been me,” she said.

“High command is where I hang my hat.”

“You don’t have a hat.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“It’s an Anglicism. Besides, it’s ‘home.’ ‘Home is where I hang my hat.’ ”

“This is home,” Winter said, looking around.

“How is it at home, then?” Angela said.

“Lonely. How is it there?”

“Pretty warm. But it rained yesterday. People danced in the street. The last time it rained here in August was in 1923, it seems.”

“The year of my birth,” he joked, taking a few drops of whiskey in his mouth. It had a scent of burned peat and five-degree-Celsius Atlantic water. Tasted like wild herbs from northern Europe. It was a continent away from Costa del Sol. Angela and the girls were still staying with Siv, his little chain-smoking mom. He had come home ten days ago with a deep sunburn and a mild hangover from Mother’s very dry martinis. But she had reduced the drinking during the past few years. Maybe it was related to Elsa’s birth. Maybe she wanted to live a little longer. A life on the sunny coast took its toll, among golf courses and galleries and shopping malls and bored tax evaders who tried to escape existence even during the early-afternoon cocktail parties.

Angela liked Siv. She had even gotten her to start swimming in the salt water, after only a few decades on the Mediterranean. They had found a good beach past Estepona. There were also small coves closer to Puerto Banús if you looked. Elsa and Lilly went swimming, laughed; Elsa ran in and out of the umbrellas’ shade, becoming dark as chocolate.

There was suddenly life in the chalk-white house up in Nueva Andalucía, laughing, children’s tears, clatters and rumbles from the kitchen, and no longer just from the blender, which had long been Siv’s favorite appliance. Elsa played under the palm tree in the yard; one-year-old Lilly was learning how to walk. Angela was sometimes tired of their apartment at Vasaplatsen. She sometimes said so. They had a plot of land by the sea, south of Billdal. Something was holding him back, back in the heart of the city. The apartment was large. Children like to play in large apartments. That’s what he told Angela. Maybe she agreed. But the balcony was no yard. The plot by the sea could give them room for a summer house, for a start.

“Are you feeling old again, Erik?” he heard her voice. There was a buzzing through the line, as though he could hear the cicadas all the way up here.

“I was thinking about those first years,” he said.

“The twenties?”

“When I started this damn job.”

“So it’s that bad tonight?”

He gave a brief explanation of Paula Ney’s fate.

“So that’s what you came home to.”

“I should have stayed.”

“Well, that’s what I said.”

“But who would support the growing family?”

“I would, of course.”

“You haven’t talked more with the people at the clinic in Marbella, have you?”

“No, not yet.”

“Are you planning to?” he asked.

“I would earn more than you and me combined, Erik.”

“I hope you’re joking.”

“Not about the salary.”

“I could stop working. We would still be okay.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“I mean that there’s money apart from the job at the clinic.”

“I know that, too.”

“So in other words, you don’t need to take it.”

“I probably don’t want to anyway. But six months or so down here . . . the girls are at the right age; we don’t need to think about schools . . . a winter in the sun . . . well . . .”

“What would I do, then?”

“Be with the girls, of course.”

It sounded so simple. And so obvious.

That was because it
was
simple and obvious.

He looked at the clock, as though to see when winter would begin.

Suddenly he had made up his mind.

“It’s a good idea,” he said. “It’s just a matter of a leave of absence.”

“Why not retirement?”

“I’m not joking now, Angela.”

“Do you mean it?”

“It’s a good idea. I just realized it now. I’m serious.”

He was serious; he felt serious. The liquor wasn’t affecting him; not yet.

“I’ll talk to Birgersson tomorrow. I can take a leave of absence starting December first.”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s by the book. It’s more than two months until December.”

“Your . . . case, then? This murder?”

It will be solved by then, he thought. It has to be.

“We’ll find substitutes to run the primary investigation,” he answered. “It will work. We could do it even now, just in case.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Has the job at the clinic gone to someone else?” he asked.

Winter himself could tell how anxious his voice sounded. Suddenly he wanted to wander in the sun this winter, more than anything. Ice cream with the girls down at the harbor. A trip to Málaga, a glass of cava among the casks and the sawdust at Antigua Casa de Guardia, Picasso’s old haunt. More ice cream for the girls. A swim. Grilled sea bass. Various tapas in sunset after sunset.

“Angela?” She must be able to hear the anxiety in his voice. “Did you say no? Did the job go to someone else?”

“I’ve only spoken with them once, Erik. And it was almost only in passing. At least on my part.”

“Call them right away and make an appointment for an interview.”

“Things are moving quickly,” she said. “But . . . where will we live, for example? In that case. We can’t live with Siv the whole time.”

“Forget that for now! It will all work itself out.”

Now their roles had changed. She was hesitating. He had made up his mind. But she had never made up her mind. It was an idea, an impulse, something different. A nice memory, maybe. You only
live once. And Elsa would quickly learn to order for him.
Un fino, por favor.

“Okay, I’ll call,” she said. “But it’s too late tonight.”

“Spanish clinics open early in the morning.”

“I know, Erik.”

He sensed her smile.

“Now I want to talk to Elsa,” he said. “And Lilly.”

“Lilly fell asleep hours ago. Here’s Elsa.”

And she told him about her day. The words came in clumps; there was no space between them.

He didn’t tell her about his day.

•   •   •

He dreamed about a woman who was waving at him with one hand. She held the other hidden behind her back. She had no face. There was nothing. Where her face should have been there was only a white surface; it was dull. She waved for the second time. He turned around to see whether someone was standing behind him, but he was alone. Behind him was only a white surface, a wall that didn’t end. Someone said the word “love.” It couldn’t be her, because she didn’t have a mouth. It couldn’t be him because he knew that he hadn’t said anything. Here it was again: love. It was like a breeze. Now he could see the breeze; it was red, it rushed down over the wall and made the wall red. The woman stood there the entire time with her arm moving, a dress that was clutched by the breeze. Everything turned red, white, red, white. He heard something again but it was a voice without words, or words that he couldn’t understand, a different language that he’d never heard. He didn’t know what he was doing there. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t help the woman who was swept away with the wind. He couldn’t move. The wind picked up; the sound of something being struck, wind, strike, wind. He heard a name. It wasn’t Paula’s name, not Angela’s or Elsa’s or Lilly’s.

•   •   •

Winter woke up naked. His first thought was of the white wall that had turned red. He couldn’t see it in the darkness. He was freezing.
He heard the sound of something being struck, and wind, and realized that he had fallen asleep with the window open and the wind had come up out there and the window had come loose and now it was striking the window frame with perfect regularity. It sounded like a cry.

He heaved himself up and placed his feet on the sheet, which had ended up on the floor. He looked at the clock. When he had turned out the light a few hours ago, it had been a warm and humid night, early night. He had had trouble falling asleep and had pulled the thin comforter out of the duvet cover. Now the weather had changed, with a wind from the north. From tropical to temperate, or northerly. He shivered again and pulled on his linen pants and walked through the darkness out into the kitchen and took a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge and drank. It was still black night outside the window, toward the courtyard. It had recently been like day at this time, only a few weeks ago. There was always the same surprise. The darkness couldn’t wait. It couldn’t contain itself. Just a few more months and it would be night at three in the afternoon. Welcome to Scandinavia.

BOOK: Room No. 10
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