Room No. 10 (24 page)

“Are you married?” Börge asked.

“How often did Ellen say that she wanted to have children?” Winter asked.

“So you’re not married,” Börge said. “Make sure to get married. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

“What will I learn?” Winter asked.

“Well . . . how women are, for example.” Börge’s gaze moved away and reached the window. “You learn stuff like that.”

“How are they, then?”

“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.” It seemed to Winter that Börge was smiling. “You have to figure
something
out for yourself.”

“Do you mean that all women are the same?” Winter asked.

Börge didn’t answer. He seemed to be studying what was outside the window, but there was nothing there.

Winter repeated the question.

“I don’t know,” Börge said.

He didn’t seem to notice the contradiction in his words.

“What was Ellen like, compared to other women?” Winter asked.

“She loved me,” Börge said, looking straight at Winter again. “That’s the only thing that matters here, isn’t it?”

•   •   •

Now the lobby was deserted, as though the hotel had already closed down. The young clerk who had found Paula Ney was standing behind the reception desk. Bergström, his name was Bergström. It sounded like a name from Norrland, and he had a Norrland accent. Everyone up there was named something with “ström”—stream—combined with something else from nature. It was wild up there; it was beautiful. Sometime Winter would head north. Past Stockholm. He wanted to show his children what snow was for real. Elsa had seen snow during a total of two weeks in her five-year-old life. Lilly had never seen snow. It wouldn’t happen this winter, either. But there would be other winters.

“We’re closing in two weeks,” Bergström said.

“That was fast.”

Bergström shrugged.

“The hotel already looks closed,” Winter said.

Bergström shrugged again. Once more and it would be some kind of spasm.

“How’s it going?”

“Not great,” he answered, “I shouldn’t actually be here.”

“Why not?”

“I’m off sick. But don’t tell the insurance office. Salko has the flu and there’s no one else left.”

“Are there any guests, then?”

“A couple of salesman types. But they’re out doing sales.”

Winter saw the man smile faintly. It disappeared as quickly as it had come.

“You can keep the cordon up until the place closes up,” Bergström said.

“That’s kind of you,” Winter said.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I’m going up,” Winter said, and he left the lobby and walked up the stairs.

He climbed over the cordon and opened the door.

He stood in the middle of the floor and listened to the sounds from outside. They were faint but distinct through the double-glazed windows.

Had she brought the rope along herself?

Had the murderer brought the rope?

Did they know each other?

He looked around. Room number ten. Everything was familiar in there, like in a cell. A place a person knows well but doesn’t want to spend a second of his life in. He looked up, toward the beam that the rope had been wrapped around. She hadn’t done it herself.

Winter hadn’t seen her hanging; Bergström had seen to it that he didn’t have to see. But he had wanted to. What a fucking wish. I wish I had been standing here then, to see her swinging from the rope.

Would I have learned anything? Understood anything?

He felt the familiar tingling on his neck and across his scalp. He closed his eyes and saw the image he wanted to see and didn’t want to see. At the same time, he felt a draft from the window, as though someone had opened it while he stood there. As though someone were observing him.

He opened his eyes. The window was closed. The room was closed. But he knew that he would come back here.

He remembered her words, all of them:
I love you both and I will always love you no matter what happens to me and you’ll always be with me wherever I go and if I’ve made you angry at me I want to ask for your forgiveness and I know that you’ll forgive me no matter what happens to me and no matter what happens to you and I know that we will meet again.

•   •   •

Elisabeth Ney’s face was pale and closed. She had opened her eyes a little while ago, but she still looked . . . closed in. Closed off. Closed up. Winter didn’t know. He was sitting on the chair next to the bed. There was a vase of red roses on the nightstand. He couldn’t see a card.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

“I pop up everywhere,” he said. “I apologize for that.”

She blinked once, as though to accept the apology.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She blinked again. That must mean yes. Two times was no.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she said after a little bit. “How I ended up here.”

“You needed to rest,” Winter said.

“Am I sick?”

“Haven’t you spoken with a doctor?”

“They say that I need to rest.”

Winter nodded.

“But they let you in.”

She said this in the same slow way as everything else. There was no accusation in her voice.

“I wanted to see how you felt,” he said. “And I admit that I wanted to ask a few questions, too.”

“I understand. And I do want to help. But I don’t know what I should say.” She moved her head on the pillow. “Or what I should remember.”

Her brown hair looked black against the pillow. The light fell in through the blinds and gave her circles both above and under her eyes. Her chin looked like it was in two parts. There was a particular characteristic in her eyes that Winter thought he’d seen before, on someone else. It was a pretty normal observation. There were people everywhere who weren’t related at all but still resembled each other. That’s the way it was with Ney. He had seen those eyes on someone else. He didn’t know who, or where, or when. Someone he had met or had seen on the street, at the store, in a bar, in a park. Anywhere and anytime.

There was green in her eyes.

“It’s possible that Paula met a man at the gym,” Winter said.

“At the gym? What gym?”

“Friskis & Svettis. Didn’t you know that?”

“Uh . . . yes. Of course.”

She didn’t look certain. But that didn’t have to mean anything. This time, it might be the words themselves that were the truth.

“Didn’t Paula ever say anything about it?”

“That she worked out?”

“Whether she met someone there.”

“Well, she didn’t even say that she’d met anyone at all. In general. I told you that before.”

Winter nodded.

“She would have told me about it, if it were true.”

“Is there any reason that she wouldn’t want to say anything?” Winter asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe she wanted to tell you that she had met someone. But she couldn’t do it.”

“Why wouldn’t she be able to?”

“Maybe she was afraid to.”

“Why would she be afraid to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you mean that she was with someone who forced her to keep it a secret?”

“I don’t know that either. It’s just a . . . manner of questioning.”

Ney had raised her head from the pillow. Winter could see the depression her head had left on the pillow. It was like a shadow.

“She should have told me. Whatever it was.”

Winter nodded.

“Do you think she went to that hotel voluntarily?” she asked.

“What’s voluntarily?”

“Do you mean she was drugged?”

“Right now, I guess I don’t mean anything,” Winter said.

But Paula hadn’t been drugged. The autopsy had shown that. Maybe she had been paralyzed. Scared into motionlessness. The autopsy couldn’t show something like that.

“But if someone dragged her into the hotel . . . into that room . . . then surely someone else must have seen it?” Ney was sitting up now. She was almost on her way down from the bed, with her feet on the floor. Winter realized that some of the shock was finally beginning to subside. The questions were starting to come. “Surely someone would have seen?”

“That’s what we’re hoping, too,” Winter said. “We’re looking for witnesses. We’re working on that all the time.”

“Well, there are people who work at the hotel, aren’t there? What did they say?”

“No one saw her,” Winter said.

“What about the maids? Don’t they see everything? Don’t they go into the rooms?”

“Not into . . . that room,” Winter said. It felt like a personal failure to say it. “They hadn’t cleaned there in the past day.”

“Oh, God.”

Winter didn’t say anything.

“If they had, Paula might be alive!”

Winter tried to disappear, become part of the air, let his face become inscrutable. Color had suddenly come to Ney’s face. She looked younger. Winter again had the vague sense of recognition.

“And how can someone check into a hotel without being seen?” she said, moving to the edge of the bed. Winter extended a hand to steady her, but she waved it away.

“She didn’t check in,” he answered.

“Why wouldn’t she do that? Why didn’t she do that?” Ney’s face was close to him. Her head began to fall forward. She tried to bend it back again with a jerky movement. Winter thought of the taped sequences from Central Station. “Why didn’t anyone see her in the lobby? Why?”

“We’re trying to figure that out, too. But as I said, we don’t know how it happened.”

“Do you know how anything happened?”

“Not much.”

“Oh, God.”

She lurched, and now Winter extended a hand and steadied her. She sat down on the edge of the bed again. Her nightgown was large, like a tent. She could have had any body type at all under the nightgown. Her hands were small and sinewy; they looked like they were made of some kind of brittle wood that had been subjected to wind and rain.

“Her hand!” Elisabeth Ney burst out. “Why her hand?”

•   •   •

Winter ran into Mario Ney in the hall.

Ney nodded as they passed each other but showed no sign of stopping.

Winter stopped.

“What is it?” Ney said, still walking.

“She’s coming out of the shock,” Winter said.

Ney mumbled something that Winter couldn’t hear.

“Sorry?”

“So it got better here, I said.”

“Now listen, she had to come here. For a bit.”

“Are you a doctor?”

Winter looked at the café at the other end of the hall. It was only a few tables with a large plant in the middle. No one was sitting there now.

“Can we sit down for a little bit?”

“I’m on my way up to Elisabeth.”

“Just for a few minutes.”

“Do I have any choice?”

“Yes.”

Ney looked surprised. He came along almost automatically as Winter began to walk toward the café.

“She’s waiting for me,” Ney said as he sat down.

“What can I get for you?” Winter said.

“A glass of red wine,” said Ney.

“I don’t know if they have that here,” Winter said, looking over toward the counter.

“Of course they don’t,” Ney said. “What did you think?”

“We can go to a bar,” Winter said.

“I’m going to see Elisabeth.”

“I mean after that.”

“Okay,” Ney said, standing up.

“I’ll wait here,” Winter said.

Ney nodded and left.

Winter’s cell phone rang.

“Yes?”

“The clerk from the hotel was looking for you. Hotel Revy.”

It was Möllerström.

“Which one of them?”

“Richard Salko.”

“What did he want?”

“He didn’t want to say.”

“Did you give him my cell number?”

“No. Not yet. I asked him to call again in three minutes. It’s already been two.”

“Give him the number.”

Winter ended the call and waited.

The telephone vibrated in his hand. He had turned off the ringtone.

“Winter.”

“Hi. It’s Richard Salko.”

“Yes?”

“There was some dude standing outside the hotel today. He stood there for a while.”

“A dude?”

“A man. A weird guy. I saw him through the window. He looked up and side to side and up again.”

“Young? Old?”

“Pretty young. Thirty. Maybe a young forty. I don’t know. He had some hat on. I didn’t see his hair.”

“Have you seen him before? Did you recognize him at all?”

“Don’t think so. But . . . he stood there for a while. Like he just wanted to stand there. Do you know what I mean? Like the place meant something to him, or whatever. Like he’d been here before.”

“Did he come in?”

“No. Not that I noticed.”

“He might have?”

“Well, only for a minute, if he did. I had to do something in another room, but I was only gone for a minute or two.”

“Maybe it was one of your regular customers,” Winter said.

“Maybe. But no one from my shift. Like I said, I didn’t recognize him.”

“A tourist?” Winter said.

“He didn’t look like a tourist,” Salko said.

“How do they look?”

“Stupid.”

“How’s it going with the list?” Winter asked.

“The list?”

“I’m still waiting for a list of all the employees you’ve ever had.”

“I am, too,” Salko said.

“What the hell kind of comment is that?”

“Sorry, sorry. But it takes time. We’re talking about a long period of time here. And a lot of turnover.”

“If we had enough people we’d have done the whole job ourselves,” Winter said.

“I know how it is,” Salko said.

“Oh?”

“I’ll do my best. Keep doing my best. I called you just now, didn’t I?”

T
ourists. The city was full of tourists; they were still there even far into September: pointing, asking, spying around, eating, drinking, laughing, crying. Winter had nothing against tourists. He was happy to give directions. The city might go under without tourists; soon it would be the only industry left. Tourism and crime. Organized, unorganized. Heroin had finally reached Gothenburg. It had only been a question of time, and now, in the late eighties, the junk was here.

“Comes with our friends from faraway lands,” Halders said.