Read Room No. 10 Online

Authors: Åke Edwardson

Tags: #Fiction / Mystery & Detective

Room No. 10 (8 page)

BOOK: Room No. 10
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•   •   •

Winter called the prosecutor for a decision on a search warrant.

They identified the numbers of the six lockers with Roffe Bengtsson’s help.

They opened the lockers right on the spot.

There were orderly luggage tags on the outside; in some cases on the inside.

They could quickly identify all the owners.

None of them was Paula Ney.

•   •   •

Once again Winter left Bengtsson’s office, which was hidden behind rows upon rows of lockers. It looked as though the whole world had something to store. As though the whole city were on a journey. There’s no place like elsewhere. Or maybe they hadn’t had any choice in the matter. Winter knew that more people than anyone would guess were evicted from their homes and moved their belongings to Central Station. They had to get everything into a few plastic bags, maybe a suitcase.

He heard Bengtsson behind him.

“How many lockers do you have?”

“Three hundred and ninety-four,” Bengtsson said, and looked around, as though to count through them again.

“And how many of them would fit a suitcase of the size we’re looking for?”

Bengtsson laughed. It echoed through the room. A woman ten meters away turned around and gave them a sharp look.

“You know how there are world records for how many people
would fit in a Volkswagen bug?” Bengtsson said, following the woman with his eyes as she left the room. She walked quickly, as though she had just been subjected to an insult. “Back when they existed, I mean. The old kind.” Bengtsson gestured with his hand. “That’s what it’s like here. It’s crazy how much crap people can cram into a storage locker. They try to break records every day.”

Winter nodded. As though to confirm what Bengtsson had said, a family came into the room dragging trunks that would each require its own truck, if not a cargo plane. The group came to a halt in the middle of the shining floor and the man began to look for open lockers.

Bengtsson laughed again. The man looked up and smiled. He was of Indian origin. He turned back to the lockers again.

“That one will have to rent thirty lockers and also cut the suitcases into five parts,” Bengtsson said. “Maybe there are engine blocks in them. Some foreigners try to carry home cars in construction kits.”

“I want you to open all the lockers down here,” Winter said as he watched the man out there return to his family and fling out his arms.

•   •   •

Ringmar had bought a shrimp sandwich that looked like it had been lying in a locker for seven days. Winter told him this before he had time to stop himself.

“Why seven?” Ringmar asked, wiping mayonnaise from his upper lip.

“That’s when the time runs out,” Winter said. “There’s a counter mechanism for up to seven days, and when it’s counted down and no one has collected his things from the locker, Bengtsson opens it and checks it out.”

Ringmar looked at his shrimp sandwich.

“So he found this?”

They were sitting at one of the new cafés in Central Station. Bengtsson had called for help, locker-opening help. The search warrant was still in effect.

“Where is he?” Ringmar asked, setting down the sandwich on the plate, placing his napkin over it, and looking around.

“I was just kidding, Bertil,” Winter said, looking at the plate. “I’m sorry. The sandwich looks wonderful. So fresh. You don’t need to hide it.”

“Then you can eat the rest,” Ringmar said, pushing the plate over.

“I don’t have much of an appetite right now.”

“I did have one,” Ringmar said. “You pulled me away from my lunch on the town.”

“I’m sorry, Bertil, it was just something Bengtsson said.”

“Are you blaming him now? He’s not even here.” Ringmar looked around again. “Where is he?”

“Coming soon. But what he said was that pretty often they have to open lockers because of food smells. Or whatever they call it.”

Ringmar got up and grabbed the plate with his half a shrimp sandwich and carried it over to the cart of dishes.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” Winter said when Ringmar had returned.

“Not here.”

“It’s even worse than it sounds,” Winter said. “The food comes from someone’s pantry. When people are evicted they take what they can with them and lock it in here. Some photographs. Some knickknacks. Some clothes. Food from the fridge.” He flung one hand out. “It’s their living room and kitchen all in one.”

“Room number three hundred,” said Ringmar. “Or number ten.”

“Soon we’ll get to see what it looks like for ourselves.”

Winter had asked Bengtsson whether he had ever checked all the boxes at the same time before. Almost, Bengtsson had answered; one time when a horrible smell was driving all living things out of Central Station. They finally found food that some poor evicted bastard had brought from his fridge. The owner never came back. Maybe he, or she, had jumped in front of a train. That was common. The tracks were nearby, after all.

“What does he do with all the things that people never retrieve?” Ringmar asked, drinking the last of his café latte. There was no regular coffee here. “And I’m not talking about rotten cheese.”

“Keeps most of it for a few months,” Winter answered. “If there’s
space. If no one calls, he gives the things to the Salvation Army. Which then gives some of it away to the homeless.”

“So you could say that it’s a cycle,” Ringmar said.

He knew that many of Bengtsson’s customers were vagrants. Many died with the key in their pocket, or disappeared in other ways. Some actually left on a train.

“He empties ten or fifteen deserted lockers every day,” Winter said. “Here he comes, by the way.”

•   •   •

Halders couldn’t find any postcards in Paula Ney’s apartment. Not from ten years ago. Not from any year at all. Apparently no one thought about her, not even with the hasty thoughts that fit on a postcard, or else they had also been removed from the apartment, along with the photographs.

The bag, he thought, the suitcase. She never traveled away, but the suitcase has to be somewhere. I don’t think it’s been emptied. Someone has saved it for some special reason.

A painted right hand. What the hell kind of sick shit was that? Never seen such a thing. Can’t have to do with identification. Birthmarks. We don’t need that. Is there a photo of the hand in the suitcase now? Why am I thinking like this? Is the white hand on its way somewhere? Why did that bastard need her hand? A hand collector? Good God. Halders walked over to the window and looked out. These thoughts. What a job. Occupying your intellect with thoughts about painted dead hands. Dead people. He could have been a nuclear physicist, a disc jockey, a hockey coach. Could have watched the sun go down over the city without wondering what kind of shit it would bring up the next morning.

Now it was on its way down again, farther and farther down, and gone. At the end of October next year he would take Aneta and the kids to Cyprus; they had already planned on it. It was still warm there in October, and a bit into November, too; he knew this because he had done winter battalion exercises down there in the eighties. An MP with a severe crew cut who still had his hair. Now he had a severely
bald head. That was better; he wouldn’t scratch someone if he head-butted him. But he didn’t head-butt anyone, not even the car-borne drunk murderer. Cyprus. He would show them Cyprus for the first time. He hadn’t been back, himself. But it was still there. He didn’t think Larnaca had changed too damn much. He knew that Fig Tree Bay had. There had been nothing there then, only a bay they went to in an old piece-of-shit bus, a shed that sold drinks. Aiya Napa, not much then. A tired fishing village, hungover UN soldiers, Nissi Beach. A few dips in the salt water, a siesta in the shade of the palm grove near the entrance, two beers at the Pelican Bar and you were ready for everything again.

October. This one, or the next. Would they have caught Paula Ney’s murderer by then? He looked out through the window; it was the same view that Paula had seen for the past few years. In October, the trees on that hill would be as good as bare. There wouldn’t be much color left in this city. And that would just be the beginning of winter hell. It would be time to leave it. To travel. Traveling. This case was about traveling, in a way they didn’t yet understand. He turned around. It wasn’t just the suitcase.

Halders’s cell phone rang. The sound was muffled in the half-finished apartment. He thought of it as half.

“What are you doing?” said Djanali.

“Thinking about Cyprus, actually.”

“During working hours?”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Maybe she was on her way to the sunshine,” said Djanali.

“Or anywhere.”

“Are you still in the apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Found anything?”

“No. Nothing personal.”

“We don’t know much about Paula Ney’s personal life,” said Djanali.

“Surprisingly little.”

“She doesn’t seem to have had any friends at work. Not that I met, anyway.”

“Not so easy with headphones over your ears day after day,” said Halders.

“She was working on other things, at least just now.”

“What, exactly?”

“Well . . .”

“Thanks. Can’t be more precise than that.”

“It was services. Upgrading services for the customers.”

“Oh, shit. I thought it was all about degrading customers,” Halders said, turning in toward the room, the living room. The parlor. “Ex-customers.”

“That’s a bit retrograde of you,” said Djanali.

“Yes, I can understand that.”

“But anyway, she didn’t have headphones over her ears.”

“We’ll have to have a good talk with her service-upgrading friends,” said Halders. “Anything else new?”

“Winter is in the process of emptying all the lockers at Central Station.”

“My thanks.” Halders took a few steps into the room. He wasn’t completely passé yet; they still listened to him. He saw the branches moving grandly outside the window. The crown of the tree was very green.

“There are almost four hundred of them, you know,” said Djanali.

“Then they need help.”

•   •   •

Paula Ney had owned a black Samsonite and that’s what they could look for. They had gotten its approximate measurements from Paula’s parents. It wasn’t one of the largest models. It was one of the older ones.

Bengtsson was opening lockers with the help of two part-time employees of Speed Services AB and six police officers.

“What are you actually looking for?” Bengtsson had asked as they began.

“Just a suitcase,” Winter had answered.

“What’s in it, then?”

“Clothes, photos, maybe tickets. That’s what we’re going to check.”

“Mm-hmm,” Bengtsson had mumbled, looking as though he didn’t believe what Winter said.

There were a lot of suitcases.

“Lots of suitcases here,” said Halders, who had joined them.

They tried to work as quickly as possible. It felt like an impossible task; it was an impossible task. What are you actually looking for? Winter thought. It isn’t just a suitcase.

It was lucky that the peak vacation time was over now, and travel had died down. A third of the lockers were empty. Some contained all the goods of a household, a home in a box. There was a garden gnome in one of the largest lockers. The gnome looked at Winter when he opened the locker.

After an hour’s work, Bengtsson called out from over by the west end. Winter looked up and saw him take a few steps backward.

Winter ran through the aisle.

Bengtsson turned to him with a strange expression on his face.

“It doesn’t smell,” he said. “Shouldn’t it smell?”

Winter bent down; the locker was low to the ground. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

He saw a hand. It was wrapped in a transparent plastic bag. The bag was held closed by a rubber band that looked colorless. The hand was white as snow.

It was locker number 110.

There wasn’t any smell in there.

The hand looked like plaster.

It was plaster. It lay on a table under Central Station. The cold light made it even more naked. As though it were alive. It had been caught in an open handshake, or at rest. The fingers were hardly separate.

“What the hell is this?” said Halders.

“A plaster hand,” said Winter. “A perfect casting.”

“Of Paula’s hand?” said Halders.

“We don’t know yet,” said Ringmar.

Halders looked down at the hand. “It’s not large.” He looked up. “Her hand was just as white.”

“Do you find a lot of these?” Halders asked, turning toward Bengtsson, who was standing a few steps beyond the table.

“This is the first time,” said Bengtsson, who still appeared to be in some sort of shock. “I’ve seen plaster cats, and frogs . . . but not this.”

“A perfect casting,” Ringmar repeated. “If it is a casting.”

“The hand was at rest when it was made,” said Winter.

“It was probably dead,” said Halders.

“There’s some sort of scar on the upper side,” said Winter, “a line.”

He looked down at the hand. He bent down, bent closer. It was a horrible object. It shimmered green now among the green lockers and the green walls, a shade that made people feel nauseated. He was no longer certain that it was so perfect. It looked more like it had been cast from a standard form. Maybe it had even been purchased in some strange shop.

But the important thing wasn’t what it looked like. It was what it was, what it meant. Symbolized, one could say. Winter was convinced that this hand had something to do with the case. With Paula. It was the murderer’s greeting to them.

A wave. He wanted them to see him.

He knew that they would.

The murderer knew that they would
see
him soon.

See him on a shimmery green videotape.

Maybe he would wave. Make some signal that they would understand.

They would understand that he knew.

Winter felt the old familiar chill in his body. It appeared in certain cases, the most difficult ones. There could be years between times. It was a feeling that was related to dread.

BOOK: Room No. 10
11.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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