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Authors: Åke Edwardson

Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective

Room No. 10 (3 page)

BOOK: Room No. 10
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“There is some reason for this. That bastard wants to say something to us. He wants to tell us something.” Ringmar flung one hand
into the air. “About himself.” He looked at Winter. “Or about her.” He looked out through the window. Winter followed his gaze. There was only darkness out there. “Or about both of them.”

“They knew each other?” Winter said.

“Yes.”

“They had planned to meet at an out-of-the-way hotel? And to be on the safe side they didn’t bother to announce their arrival in the lobby?”

“Yes.”

“And we believe this?”

“No.”

“But she knew the murderer?”

“I think so, Erik.”

Winter didn’t answer.

“I have been in this damn line of work ten years longer than you, Erik, I’ve seen almost everything, but I’m having trouble putting this together.”

“We’ll put it together,” said Winter.

“Naturally,” said Ringmar, but he didn’t smile.

“Speaking of before,” said Winter. “When I was really green, it was my first year as a detective, I think, I worked on something that involved Hotel Revy.”

“This is definitely not the first time that place has been involved in an investigation,” said Ringmar. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Yes . . . but the case . . . or whatever I should call it, was special.”

Winter contemplated the night outside, a dim darkness and a dim light, as though nothing could make up its mind out there now that summer was nearly over and autumn was slowly sliding up out of the earth with the mist.

“It was a missing person,” said Winter. “I remember it now.”

“At Hotel Revy?”

“It was a woman,” said Winter. “I don’t remember her name right now. But she disappeared from her home. Was going to run some errand.
She was married, I think. And as I recall she had checked in at Hotel Revy the night before she disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Disappeared to where?”

Winter didn’t answer. He sank down into his thoughts, into his memory, as the darkness out there sank over roof ridges and streets and parks and harbors and hotels.

“What happened to her?” Ringmar asked. “I guess I’ve investigated too many missing persons; they run together.”

“I don’t know,” Winter said, staring at Ringmar’s face. “No one knows. I don’t think she was ever found. No.”

•   •   •

Winter had been twenty-seven and a green detective, and the late summer had been greener than usual because it had rained more than usual all summer. Winter had moved through the city every day without a thought of vacation, but he had thought of the future, this future, the future of a detective; he had cut his legal studies short before they really even started in order to become a police officer, but after his training and one year in uniform and six months in plainclothes he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to devote his life to penetrating the underworld. There was so much aboveground that was so much brighter. Even when it rained. In his six months or so on the force he had seen things that normal people never see, even if they live for a hundred years. That was how he thought: normal people. The people who lived aboveground. He lived there, too, sometimes; he came and went, crawled up and crawled down again, but he knew that his life would never be “normal.” We have our own world down here, we police officers, along with our thieves and murderers and rapists. We understand. We understand one another.

He had begun to understand what understanding involved. When he did, it became easier. I’m becoming like them, he thought. The murderers.

I’m becoming more and more like them because they can never become like me.

He realized that he had to think in irregular patterns to find answers to mysteries. It was easier then. It was also more difficult then. He could feel himself changing as he became better and better at his job, at the way he thought. When he had found the answers to the mysteries, or parts of the answers, he said that he had an active imagination and that was all there was to it. But it wasn’t just imagination. He had thought like
them
, gone into the darkness like
them
. He didn’t have a life of his own for long periods of his life; the more clever he became, the more difficult it was to live “normally.” He was alone. He was like a rocky point of land. He didn’t keep track of the time of day. He didn’t keep track of anything more than his mystery. He tended to the mystery, tucked it in, watered it; when it came to the mystery he was a perfectionist, compulsive in his care. His documents lay in straight lines on his desk. At home, his clothes lay in messy piles on the way from the bedroom to the bathroom. He had neat civilian police clothes because he didn’t see any virtue in being a slob, but sure as hell, he was a slob beneath a lovely shell. He tried to cook real food but gave up in the middle of it. He opened a bottle of malt whiskey instead, when hardly anyone knew what malt whiskey was; that put Winter ahead of the game in the normal world, and he tried to drink the whiskey as slowly as possible and listen to the atonal jazz that no one else could stand. Whiskey and jazz, that was his method, when night fell, and so did everything else out there, and he sat in the half darkness with his plots, his mystery, and soon enough with a laptop that dispersed a cold light.

After a few years in the unit he realized that he had found himself because he had slowly lost what had been himself, and he thought that it was nice; it was liberation from normalcy.

•   •   •

Ellen Börge had been liberated from normalcy. Or had liberated herself. She had gone out to buy a magazine and never come back. It really had happened, reality imitated fiction: Ellen had really gone out to buy a magazine, a so-called women’s magazine. Winter had guessed at first that it was
Femina
because there was a small pile of
Femina
magazines on the coffee table, and no other magazines. Her husband, Christer, had no idea.
Femina
, huh? Well, I have no idea. She didn’t say.

She had never arrived at the ICA store nearby where she usually bought her magazines, and everything else, too. They were lucky in the sense that the two clerks who had been working that afternoon recognized Ellen Börge and they said they would probably have remembered if she had been there.

Christer Börge had waited for five hours before he called the police. First he was transferred to local district station three, as it had been called then, and after twenty-four hours without Ellen the investigative unit was called in; more specifically the security forces that worked with missing persons reports. Greenhorn Erik Winter had gotten the case; wet-behind-the-ears Winter. He suspected foul play because it was his job to suspect foul play; it was also his nature to suspect foul play, and he had sat in front of the coffee table with
Femina
on it and asked questions about the twenty-nine-year-old Ellen of her thirty-one-year-old husband. The trio were all about the same age, but Winter felt like an outsider; he hadn’t met Ellen, and Christer hadn’t rejoiced when Winter arrived. Christer had been nervous, but Winter didn’t understand what kind of nervousness it was. That kind of understanding of people required years of being an interrogator. It wasn’t something that could be taught at the police academy. All you could do was wait for years, or wait them out, ask your questions again and again, read faces, listen to the words and simultaneously try to understand their implications. Winter had known even then, at the beginning of time, in 1987, that scholars of literature talked about subtext, and that was a good word for police interrogations, too: there could be a gulf between what was said and what was meant.

“You waited five hours before you called the police,” he had said to Börge. This was no question.

“Yeah, so what?”

Börge had shifted on the sofa across from him. Winter had been sitting in an easy chair, some kind of white plush; he had thought
that the furniture seemed too . . . adult for people of his same age, the whole home seemed . . . established, lived in, as though by a couple in late middle age, but here he didn’t trust his own judgment; his own apartment was two rooms with a bed and a table and some kind of easy chair, and in a direct interrogation he wouldn’t have been able to account for what kind of furniture he had, and what its purpose was.

But Börge would be able to account for everything in his home, a complete contents list down to the number of napkins in the second kitchen drawer from the top. Winter had been sure of it. Börge had looked like someone who had to have total control if the world were to retain its normalcy. His wife looked about the same in a photograph that stood on the coffee table, a conservative face, a hairstyle that didn’t take any chances, a gaze that was somewhere else. But Ellen had had beautiful features, neat and regular, in that photo. It was a face that could be nearly sensational in a different context, with a different hairstyle, and Winter had thought, while sitting in the chair, that perhaps Ellen Börge hadn’t been so happy with her husband. Too much control. Maybe children had been planned in their timetable, but not for a couple of years, when the moon was in the correct position, when the tide had gone out, when finances permitted it. Winter didn’t have any thoughts of children himself, but on the other hand he didn’t have a woman to share such thoughts with.

Maybe Ellen hadn’t been able to stand it.

Five hours. Then her husband had called the police. If Christer was who he seemed to be, he ought to have called immediately. Demanded his rights. Demanded a massive effort. Demanded his wife back.

Winter had wondered.

“Weren’t you worried? Five hours can be a long time when you’re waiting for someone.”

“Would you have done anything if I’d called earlier, huh?” Börge’s voice had suddenly become more clear, almost shrill. “Wouldn’t you just have said that we had to wait and see?”

“Have you called before?” Winter asked. “Has Ellen disappeared before?”

“Uh . . . no. I just mean that you have to wait. You know, that’s what you read. The police wait and see, right?”

“It depends,” said Winter, who was suddenly the one answering questions. This was difficult; interrogations were very difficult. “It’s impossible to generalize.”

“Sometimes . . . she would take a walk,” Börge said, though Winter hadn’t asked a follow-up question. “She would be gone for a few hours without saying anything. Like, ahead of time, I mean.”

“Five hours?”

“No, never. Two, maybe; three on rare occasions.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

Börge was sitting still on his sofa now, as though he had begun to calm down when he looked back on what had been.

“Why was she gone for hours without saying anything ahead of time?”

“I said a few.”

“Did you ask her?”

“What would I ask?” Börge stroked the plush, as though he were petting a dog, a cat. “She was just taking a walk, after all.”

“And this time she went out to buy a magazine. Maybe
Femina
.”

“If you say so.”

“That’s the only magazine here,” Winter said, grabbing the pile in front of him and reading the month of publication on the top issue. “You’re sure that she said that she was going to buy a magazine?”

“Yes.”

“Did she subscribe to any others?”

“What? No . . . she used to . . . but now I guess it was . . . single copies or whatever it’s called.”

“When did she stop subscribing?”

He could check everything like that, but he wanted to ask anyway. They could be important questions. Often you didn’t know until afterward.

“Well . . .” Börge said, looking at the little pile on the table. “I don’t really remember. A few months ago, I think.”

“Does she read any other magazines or journals?”

“Well, we have the daily paper of course,
GP
. And other than that it’s just those.” He pointed at the pile that Winter was still holding in his hand. “You’re welcome to look in the closets, but I’ve only seen that one.”

“She had it already,” Winter said.

“What?”

Winter held up the two top magazines.

“She had the August issue, and the September one.”

“September? But it’s not September yet.”

“They come out a bit before the new month starts, I would guess.” Winter read the cover again. “It says here: September 1987.”

“Maybe it wasn’t that magazine,” Börge said. “I mean, the one she talked about going out to buy.”

Winter didn’t say anything. He waited. He knew that it was good to wait sometimes. That was the hardest thing, the hardest part of the art of interrogation.

Thirty seconds went by. He could see the silence causing Börge to think he had said something that Winter didn’t like, or had become suspicious of, and that he ought to say something now that made the atmosphere around the coffee table a little better, a little lighter, maybe.

He suddenly got up and walked over to the bookcase, which mostly resembled a very large cabinet along the wall, a glass case, with space for china, knickknacks, books, a few photographs in frames. Winter had seen Ellen’s face.

Börge was still standing in front of the books, as though he were looking for a particular title. He turned around.

“We had argued a little bit.”

“When?”

“Before . . . when she went out.”

“What were you arguing about?”

“Children.”

“Children?”

“Well . . . she wanted to have children but I thought it was early. Too early.”

Winter said nothing to the thirty-one-year-old in front of him, mostly because he himself didn’t have anything to say about children because “early” in his case was just the beginning, just a preface. A family of his own lay eons in the future. Not even
his
imagination could see over that hill.

“You were fighting about it?”

“Like I said. But it wasn’t so bad.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“It wasn’t really a fight. It was just that she was . . . talking about it.”

“And you didn’t want to talk about it?”

Börge didn’t answer.

“Had you argued about it before?”

BOOK: Room No. 10
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