The Shadow Woman (11 page)

“No driver anyway. The light was angled so that it was all blacked out on the driver’s side.”

“No passengers?”

“Not that I could see.”

“Where did the car come from?”

“I don’t know. But it hightailed it off toward town after it had been in there and turned around.”

Halders scribbled in his pad again.

“So it must have come from the other direction,” the man said. “From the direction of the lake or Helenevik, right?” Halders looked up from his notepad.

“Well, it’s possible the driver just drove the wrong way, or changed his mind, or just decided to go for a drive out to that intersection and then turn around and drive home again,” he said.

Fucking moron, Halders thought.

“Aha,” the man said. “Now I understand how you police work.” He gestured at his forehead with his index finger. “I would never have thought of that myself, know what I mean?”

“Did you hear anything?”

“Other than the sound of the car?”

“Yes. Before, during, or after.”

“Which do you want me to say first?”

Halders sighed audibly. “It’s getting late, and we’re both tired,” he said.

“I’m not tired.”

“So you saw nothing else unusual yesterday evening or last night?”

“That would’ve been difficult anyway, know what I mean?”

“I don’t understand.”

They were on the front steps of the man’s house and Halders could see the wire fence of the dog pen glinting beyond the corner of the cabin, illuminated by a lantern that hung on the wall. The kennel owner himself was short and sort of lumpy, and he’d immediately assumed a defensive posture toward the tall Halders, as if preparing to repel an attack.

“I didn’t understand that last bit,” Halders repeated.

“It would’ve been difficult to notice anything seeing as there was so much coming and going from your guys’ cabin the whole night, know what I mean?”

The man’s habit of ending all his statements in that way was starting to piss the hell out of Halders.

“You mean the function that took place yesterday at the police department’s recreation lodge.”

“Or the
beer
lodge, know what I mean?”

“Were you disturbed by it in some way?”

“Can’t say I was. But there was a lot of traffic.”

“Cars, you mean?”

“Well, that’s traffic, know what I mean?”

“No pedestrian traffic?”

“Not that I saw. But there have been festivities up at your beer lodge during which the guests have ended up scattered all over my land in the small hours of the morning. Once there was this plainclothes officer and a woman with barely a stitch on who decided to bed down for the night in the moss behind the foxhounds over yonder.” He jerked his head toward the corner of the cabin.

That might well have been my fortieth birthday bash, Halders thought to himself. “But nobody was running around in the night last night?”

“Not that I heard. But you ought to speak to your buddies.”

“We’re in the process of doing that.”

“That’s a good idea, know what I mean?”

“But you’re sure about the car?” Halders was amazed at his own patience.

“I already told you, know what I mean? We’ve gone into all sorts of detail here, know what I mean?”

“Well, thanks for all the information. If anything else comes to mind, anything at all, then do get in touch, know what I mean? Even if it’s something that happened earlier, someone who passed by more than once. Anything. You know what I mean?”

 

He parked the car outside the police station and walked along the stream. Outside the city hall a couple was drinking something out of transparent plastic cups. That’s not raspberry juice, Halders thought to himself, seized by an urge to grab the cups out of their hands and arrest them—kick up a real stink over some petty shit. Society ought to send a clear message: zero tolerance. Every little goddamn crime should be treated as a crime. Anyone riding a bike without a light should lose their license. Anyone caught drinking in public should be sent to jail. That’s what they did in New York. The city would calm down. The country would calm down.

Everything and everyone would calm down, except me, thought Halders. The more I think about calm, the angrier I get. How far would I go if society gave me the go-ahead for my brand of zero tolerance?

He waited together with a thousand others to cross over Götaleden and suddenly found himself crowded together with ten thousand others on the Packhuskajen quay. The fireworks began. Halders’s head was popping. He bought a mug of beer and sat at the very end of a long table and scowled at a man opposite him. The man moved after a few minutes.

Halders raised his gaze to the sky and saw the fireworks explode. The light reflected in people’s faces. Their foreheads looked like they were tattooed and their cheeks and chins were stamped with symbols that he couldn’t decipher. He emptied his mug. He thought of Aneta in her white bed at the hospital. The bad thoughts brewed.

 

Winter had crawled into the playhouse and lain down on the air mattress. It was only partially inflated, and he felt the grain of the floorboards in the small of his back. Maybe there was old air inside the mattress, some that had remained in the hard corners. Maybe he was lying on air from his childhood.

He reached out his arms and felt the walls on both sides of him. He fell asleep.

WINTER BIKED HOME AT DAWN. HE HAD MADE AN ATTEMPT AT
around midnight, against his better judgment.

“Go lie down in the guest room,” his sister said, and that’s what he’d done.

Now the streets were being swept clean after the night, water flowed over the asphalt, and he nearly fell off his bike while illegally cutting across Linnéplatsen.

In the apartment he kicked off his sandals and bent down for the newspaper. The
Göteborgs-Posten
had covered the murder with restraint, without a lot of speculation.

Helene was without a name, a cold body in cold storage in a white zippered bag. It was Friday morning, twenty-four hours after he had seen her face for the first time. He tried to remember her features, but they melded together with other lifeless faces he’d seen.

The sun climbed onto the roofs of the buildings on the other side of Vasaplatsen. Winter adjusted the blinds and took out beans and a mill and ground the African coffee, its aroma wafting in his face, invigorating him even before it was brewed.

He put butter and cheese on two French rolls that he had bought at the local bakery on the ground floor of the building. The butter was cold in his mouth. He ate the cheese by itself, two thick slices. Streetcars rattled past below, and a seagull took off from the balcony with a shriek and darted awkwardly past the kitchen window. Winter drank his coffee and heard the flap of its wings in the early morning stillness.

 

The meeting was a short one. Winter took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair, rolled up his sleeves, and brushed away something from his pant leg.

Cerruti, Sara Helander thought. Cool. Quality.

“So we still don’t know who she is,” Winter said.

“We’re going through that community today—what’s the name?” Fredrik Halders said.

“Helenevik,” Bertil Ringmar answered.

“There’ll be seven of you,” Winter said.

“Wow.”

“That’s as many as we could scrape together.”

“I meant that’s a lot,” Halders said. “I’m impressed.”

Winter looked at him but said nothing. Fredrik was starting to have increasingly obvious problems with his attitude. Is that how it is to grow old? To step across the magical crest at forty and slowly slide downhill?

“How many of us are going to be working with our fellow officers?” Bergenhem asked.

“What do you mean?” Carlberg said.

“The little party the guys over at investigations had,” Helander said.

“Can’t they investigate that themselves?” Halders asked.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Janne Möllerström asked.

“Investigation . . . investigations department.”

“Cool it, Fredrik,” Winter said.

“You and Börjesson handle the party animals,” Ringmar said to Bergenhem.

“Some of them are doubtless a little tired,” Bergenhem said.

“They’re not the only ones,” Helander added.

Everyone in the room—all twenty-four of them—suddenly thought of the upcoming weekend. Many of them would have planned the season’s big crayfish party for later that evening or Saturday night. Would they have the energy to have a good time? Would they even make it home? How much overtime was the brass ready to give them?

“Tired? Who’s tired?” Winter said, and yawned and waved auf Wiedersehen to the group. There was a tie-up at the door as everyone tried to get out at the same time.

 

Winter took the stairs up to forensics and went in through the double doors that protected the department from unwanted visitors.

He was let through. Immediately to the right was the laboratory section—the evidence lab with two employees, a firearms examiner, and a chemist to analyze narcotics and clothing and do the chemical processing of fingerprints.

A few men were sitting in the new coffee room. The National Center for Forensic Science had come through with a substantial sum of money for the department just minutes before the premises were to be deemed inadequate. Beier was able to refurbish and expand the single lab into a rough lab, where materials were brought in; a room for clothing and fiber analysis; a chemistry and toxicology lab; the trace evidence lab that Winter had just walked past; a fingerprint lab; and an isolation room, since they didn’t want to put the clothes from the victim and suspect in the same room.

Impressive, Winter thought. He hadn’t been here for a while. Beier came striding down the corridor. “Want some coffee?”

“You bet.”

They walked back down the corridor, and Beier shut the door behind them.

“What should we start with?” he asked.

“The car.”

“That’s some blurry footage.”

“But it is a Ford?”

“We think so.”

“Escort CLX?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“Could you see anything more of the driver?”

“Jensen is sitting with it now, trying to peer through the blur, but he’s not very optimistic, nor am I.”

“Can you tell whether it’s a man?”

Beier threw out his arms. “You can’t always tell even when the pictures are sharp.”

Winter drummed his fingers on the desktop. “And one more big question: the plate number.”

“We may have found something there,” Beier said. “Three letters.
HEL
or
HEI
.”

“How sure is that?”

Beier threw out his arms again. “We’ll keep at it,” he said. “But in the meantime you can get to work on these, if you’ve got the manpower.” He poured out the coffee, and Winter drank without registering its taste.

“We know that this car may have been in the vicinity of the dump site when the body was left there,” Winter said.

“That’s right,” Beier said.

“That’s something to go on.”

“All you have to do is track down all the Ford Escorts in the city. Or the country.”

“All the CLXs.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but that’s where I’m gonna start. That case I worked on last spring, in London—my colleague there told me they were looking for a car and all they had to go on was the color and maybe the make. This is better.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course it’s better, Göran. I can really feel my optimism growing just sitting next to you.”

“Then maybe I’d better rein it in.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have anything new on that strange marking on the tree. Or whatever you wanna call it.”

“This kid in my department suggested that it might be a Chinese character.”

“Well, that would make things easier.”

“Exactly.”

“Then there are just a billion Chinese to bring in for questioning.”

“You’ve forgotten all the Westerners who know Chinese,” Winter said.

“I suggest you start there,” Beier said.

They sat in silence for a short while, sipped their coffee, listened to the noisy ventilation system. Winter almost felt cold in the chilled air. We’re probably the only two police officers in the whole building wearing ties today, Winter thought, noting that Beier’s leaned toward burgundy. He loosened his own. Beier didn’t comment on it.

“I’m sure it’s connected to the murder,” Winter said.

“Why?”

“It’s just a hunch, but it’s a strong one.”

“Positive thinking, you mean.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence that someone would paint on the tree at virtually the exact same time.”

“Maybe she took part in a ritual.”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“That little inlet may have been a haunt for satanists and other fanatics, or maybe even still is, but she didn’t take part in that kind of thing.”

“Maybe she didn’t have a choice.”

“It would have been noticed. Someone would have heard something.”

“Like our colleagues from the investigations department.”

“That department has some of the most keen-eyed officers on the force.”

“Regardless of the state they’re in?”

“A police officer is always prepared.”

“For what?”

“For the worst,” Winter said, and they both became serious. “It’s often been shown that the choice of location is not random. A murderer selects his spot.”

“I agree with you. I think.”

“We have to ask ourselves why she was put there. Why she was lying at Delsjö Lake. Then, why at that particular end of the lake—”