Room No. 10 (4 page)

“Yes . . .”

“Did these arguments end with her going out? Without saying when she would come back?”

Börge nodded. Winter wanted an answer in words. He repeated the question.

“Yes,” Börge answered.

“Is that the reason she went out this time?”

“Well . . . we weren’t really arguing. And, you know, she was going to go out and buy a magazine.” Börge’s eyes fell to the magazine that Winter had lifted from the pile, the magazine she was going to go buy but already owned.

“Was that always the reason that she left?” Winter followed Börge’s gaze. “Arguments about when you would have children?”

“Eh . . . I can’t remember,” Börge said. “But she always came back.” He looked straight at Winter now, sought his eyes. “She always came back.”

•   •   •

But this time she didn’t come back.

She never came back.

“I remember now,” Winter said. “She never came home. Ellen. Her name was Ellen. Ellen Börge.”

They were still standing at the window. The late August evening was as dark as in November. Winter thought of a magazine cover with “September” printed under the magazine’s name.

September came and went through the years, but Ellen Börge didn’t collect magazines in a pile anymore; not on that coffee table, anyway.

“I remember, too,” Ringmar said. He gave a weak smile in the glow from outside. “And I remember you. I think that was your first case, or one of the first.”

“First case, first failure.”

“In a long line,” Ringmar said.

Winter nodded.

“But all jokes aside,” Ringmar said, “that’s a missing-person case that we didn’t solve, but we never found out whether there was foul play behind it.”

“We haven’t even solved whether it was a crime that we would then solve,” Winter said.

“Does it mean something to you?” Ringmar said. “Something in particular? Her disappearance? Ellen’s?”

“I don’t know.” Winter suddenly felt damn tired, as though the years from then to now had come staggering in a single line and lay down on top of him, all at once. “But there was something about it . . . about Ellen . . . that made it hard to let go of.”

“It’s worse at first,” said Ringmar. “When you’re green.”

“No.”

Winter stroked his chin. He felt and heard the rasp of his stubble. It had begun to turn gray a few years ago. It wasn’t his age. It was genetics, pure normalcy. He wasn’t that old yet.

“I’ve thought about it occasionally,” he continued. “Throughout the years. That there was something there. Something I could have done. Something I could have seen. It was there, in front of me. I should have seen it. If I had seen it I would have gotten farther.”

“Farther where?”

“Farther toward . . . Ellen.”

“You talk about it like it was a crime,” said Ringmar. “That she was the victim of a crime.”

Winter threw out his arms, toward Ringmar and the night.

“But we have a completely real and obvious crime in front of us,” Ringmar said.

“Mm-hmm.” Winter shook his head. He felt something rattling suddenly in there, a loose screw or something. “I suddenly feel tired. Now I can’t even remember how we got on the topic of Ellen Börge.”

“Hotel Revy,” Ringmar said. “She had also checked into the city’s coziest lodgings.”

“But Paula Ney never checked in,” said Winter.

“No,” Ringmar said. “And she never checked out either.”

H
ad Paula Ney really written the letter to her parents, Mario and Elisabeth, herself? The handwriting looked like hers, and at present they were assuming that Paula had written the letter, but closer analysis would settle the matter. Closer analysis of everything they’d found at the scene was under way, but Winter couldn’t just sit in his office and wait for others to do all the preliminary work, or the background work. The analyses would arrive when they arrived. From the very start, he had to think about four big questions that always had to be asked, immediately: What happened, exactly? Why did it happen, and why in that particular way? Who could have carried out the murder in that way? In which case, what are the reasons behind it?

Winter was standing in the hotel room at Revy. The living city moved outside, mumbling behind the drawn curtains. He walked over to the window and pulled aside the curtains, which were like drapes, and the light over the city blinded him and the sound suddenly became louder, as though someone had turned up the volume by way of a central dial in city hall.

Just a few more days until September, and the warmth that had remained at the Tropic of Cancer all summer, and never reached up here, had suddenly been pushed north. The sun was on its way down to Capricorn now, but the warmth itself was heavy and compact over Scandinavia. Rusty grills came into use, fires burned in yards in the black evenings, it smelled like soot in the humid darkness and Winter thought of other countries, down there between Cancer and Capricorn. The tropics. One day he would be on his way there, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Madurai, Georgetown, Singapore, Padang, Surabaya.

There were no shadows in the tropics. A person cast no shadow; it ran straight down through your body and disappeared under the soles of your feet.

He blinked in the surprising light that came through the windowpane and turned in toward the room again and waited for the contours to become sharp.

The room shimmered with gold. Red gold. If he squinted, he couldn’t see the stains on the walls. Some of them belonged to the wallpaper; some had come later.

He took a few steps back toward the bed, which stood beside the far long wall. He moved his eyes to the door. There was a pattern on it, like a flower. It looked as though someone had thrown a glass of dark wine at the door. Wine? Why did I think of wine? It looks like ink. It’s as black as the writing in Paula’s letter. The suicide note.

Most everything in there looked like before, when they had come here for the first time. The silence hung there like a reminder, or a memory. Like one of the pictures on the wall, the biggest one. There were no traces left that he could see now. No stains of that kind. The red in here was the red gold as fake as the room, the hotel, the neighborhood, sometimes the whole damn city. But it was quiet in here now, as though the cordon also kept out all the sounds of the city.

But it was related; everything was connected in a way that he couldn’t see yet, like when you look at a pile of puzzle pieces and know that all those pieces fit together, but you don’t yet know how.

The awful message in the letter was part of a larger message. He knew the words by heart now, her words. They were about love, a great love. Or only about the opposite. Had she been drugged? Was he dictating? What do you write for your last words? Did she know that they were her last words? No. Yes.

He let the question and the answers go and concentrated on the room. What happened in here, exactly? Paula had come here but they didn’t know whether she had done so alone, as though she were preparing for a meeting. The man down at reception hadn’t noticed anything, and maybe it wasn’t his job to notice anything. She hadn’t
checked in, and no one remembered her standing alone at the reception desk. If she had stood there. People came and went here, women, men, women, men. Seldom any children. There was no playroom here. There were no sounds of children, and Winter didn’t think there ever had been. There were no such memories here.

•   •   •

The murderer had come here. Paula Ney had written her words on hotel stationery. There was stationery, like the remains of a better time. Remains. What a hell of a word that was. Had the murderer known that there was stationery in the room? Or was the letter a sudden decision, a random whim? Paula hadn’t left this room after she’d come in the door. Winter felt certain of this. After a few hours she had written a letter. He looked around again. Why this room? Why this hotel? Room ten. He thought suddenly of Ellen Börge. She had stayed here for one night. Which room had she stayed in? It must be in her file, such as it was. Winter could see it in front of him. It was down in the archives, a file that hadn’t been digitized because the contents dealt with a crime that happened before 1995. Then came modern times. The documents about Ellen Börge were stamped “No investigative results. PI suspended,” and it had been many years since Winter had held the papers in his hands. If it even said anything about a preliminary investigation.

Technically, there hadn’t been any preliminary investigation. He didn’t remember all the details of the text. Suddenly he wanted to know, as quickly as possible, and he took his cell phone out of the pocket of his linen shirt.

Janne Möllerström, the registrar, answered.

“The documents from Ellen Börge’s disappearance,” Winter said. “I mentioned the case to you yesterday.”

Ellen had disappeared long before Möllerström came to the unit. Winter had given him a brief description of the events.

“My short-term memory still works,” Möllerström said now.

“A day? You call that short-term?”

“Ha-ha.”

“Have you found the documents?”

“Yes. A missing-person case documented for posterity.”

“It’s no normal missing-person case.”

“In which case you’ll have to settle for paper, from the beginning.”

Möllerström was a big fan of computerized archives.

“Have you had time to bring up the archive file?”

“Actually, the answer is yes,” Möllerström said. “Feel free to ask how I had time to do it.”

“How did you have time to do it?”

“No idea.”

“One detail,” Winter said, staring straight at the wall above the bed. It was bare, without pictures. The pattern of the wallpaper ran together at this short distance. “Can you find out which room Ellen Börge had at Hotel Revy?” Winter tried to make out the pattern of the wallpaper anyway. “I’m standing in the Ney room now.”

Winter looked over at the window. The light was still bright out there. He felt a vague sense of recognition, an uneasy feeling, like the beginnings of feeling nauseous. There was something about the facade of the building on the other side of the street. The copper roofs.

“Should be somewhere at the beginning,” he said into the telephone.

“If it’s there at all.”

“I was there myself, damn it.”

“Well, in that case.”

“Call me as soon as you find it.”

Winter hung up and stood there with the phone in his hand. The sun swept over the green copper roofs on the other side of the street. It wasn’t more than twenty or thirty meters over there. There was a sudden flash in through the window, like from a powerful spotlight, as the weathervane on the roof to the left turned in a sudden breeze and was hit by the sun.

Winter knew that it was a rooster, a red comb.

He had stood here before, in a different time, another life. A younger, more uncertain, more open one. Unfinished, more unfinished than now.

The sense of unease moved in his stomach again, like a reminder of something.

He felt his hand tremble the second before the phone rang.

“Room number ten,” Möllerström said. “It was on page two.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“I just recognized something.” He watched the rooster revolve in a quarter turn and the spotlight went out. “But thanks for the quick answer, Janne.”

Winter hung up and remained standing in the middle of the room.

A coincidence?

Of course.

How many rooms did this stinking flea nest have?

More than anyone knew.

Was room ten reserved for solitary women without escorts? Escort services had otherwise been Revy’s specialty. He had been back here a few times during his career. Prostitution, narcotics, assaults. Revy was like an old punch-drunk boxer who always got up at the last second. The building had been allowed to remain when the rest of Nordstan and the surrounding neighborhoods were torn down by the wrecking balls. Was it for nostalgic reasons? Was it the blind sunspot on the map in Trädgårdsföreningen? Had the city planners been old customers here? In two cases they were, a city architect and a former municipal commissioner. Social Democrat. They tore down everything else, the beautiful and the ugly indiscriminately, but Revy was allowed to remain. The city architect allowed construction on lots that the municipal commissioner had had demolished. Maybe they arranged it at the bordello, two old gangsters. Winter saw the Social Democrat around town now and then; he walked with a cane now and presumably still thought with his dick. He had a lot on his conscience. He always seemed to be in a good mood.

Revy had remained until now, until Paula Ney’s death. Had stood here during Ellen Börge’s disappearance. Room ten. Had other things
happened here? He would have to put Möllerström on it. Keyword: room ten. Good God. And a dig through the dusty archives. Without archives, electronic or otherwise, they might as well quit, give up. Everything that happened now was related to the past, directly or indirectly. It was never like in the tropics. The past cast long shadows here, at Winter’s latitude.

There were shadows that moved in room ten. The bed didn’t really look the same now as when he had come in; nor did the table or the easy chair; nor the pattern on the walls and floor. A reproduction of a work of art hung on the wall next to the window. It was the worst place for a picture; there was almost no light there. It was a portrait of a woman with dark features. Gauguin. Winter had seen the original at a museum in Rome, a work on loan. Gauguin, he thought with his dick, too. Winter had quite recently read a biography of him. He chose the tropics, lived there, died there. Syphilis. Winter took his notebook out of the back pocket of his linen trousers and wrote: Check pictures all rooms. He didn’t know why right now. It wasn’t necessary to know. He knew that there were more questions than answers; there were a hundred questions for every answer. It would change; there would be more answers, but the questions would continue to be in the hundreds, thousands; and if the answers became more plentiful than the questions, it still wouldn’t be a given that they’d come closer to solving the mystery. Solving. Dissolving. Resolving. There were several words for something that almost always remained unclear, unfinished.