The Shadow Woman (12 page)

“Proximity to the road,” Beier interjected.

“Maybe. Then we have to ask ourselves why she was lying exactly in that spot. Not five yards this way or that.”

“You really go in for the mise-en-scène.”

“The mise-en-scène involves movement; it’s the opposite of standing still.”

“That was beautifully put,” Beier said.

 

Halders preferred to wander the path along the shoreline on his own. The houses slept soundly and impassively atop the hillside.

The area reminded him that he was a poor homicide detective who would never be anything else. He would never make inspector, but he didn’t know whether or not he was bitter about it.

If he was in the right place at the right time, his fortune would be waiting for him there. They would shake hands and return to headquarters, and the police chief would invite him up to his office and at the same time call out to Winter to say, “Now you can just hand everything over to inspector Halders here . . .”

He began the door-to-door inquiries at one of the houses close to a school he didn’t know the name of. He rang the doorbell and heard the chime echo through the cavernous interior. There was an awning above the door that shaded him and caused the sweat on his forehead to roll more slowly down his face and linger on his eyelids. When the door was opened by a woman in a robe, he blinked and bowed his head. She was dark haired, or it may have been just the intense sunlight that was streaming in from the open doors behind her.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m from the police,” Halders said, and held out his police ID. “Homicide department.”

He fumbled with his wallet.

“Yes?”

“We’re conducting an in—”

“Is it the murder on the other side of Boråsleden? I just read about it. We were talking about it a moment ago,” the woman said, and a barechested man in swimming trunks suddenly appeared behind her.

“It’s just routine. We have to ask everyone in the vicinity if they’ve seen or heard anything within the last twenty-four hours.”

“When should we be counting from?” the man asked. “My name is Petersén, by the way.” He held out his hand. Halders shook it.

“Same here,” the woman said. “Denise.” She smiled and held out her hand, and Halders squeezed it gently.

“Halders,” Halders said.

“Come in, by the way,” the man said. He followed the couple to an outdoor patio that was paved with what might have been mosaic tiles.

“Would you like a refreshment?” the man asked, and Halders answered with a yes.

“A drink? Gin and tonic?”

“I’m afraid—”

“A beer?”

“That would do nicely.”

The man walked back inside the house, and the woman sank into a folding chair that looked complicated. She nudged a pair of sunglasses to the tip of her nose and seemed to look at Halders. He looked back. She dangled one sandal on her foot. The sandal was red, like the fire in the sun.

“I’m happy to be of service in the meantime,” she said.

Don’t let your imagination run away with you now, Halders thought. Try to keep a little blood up in your head.

The man returned with a tray and three bottles of beer.

WINTER HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT BENNY VENNERHAG, FOR THE
moment, when he called.

“I heard you solved it—the attack on your colleague.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“You haven’t become naive, now, have you, Inspector?”

Winter thought of his hands around Vennerhag’s jaw.

“I’m still in pain,” Vennerhag said.

“What?”

“The brutality of the police force. What you did to me the other day? I could—”

“I may need your help again soon,” Winter said mellifluously.

“I don’t like that tone in your voice,” Vennerhag said. “And in that case it’ll have to be over the phone.” He waited but Winter said nothing more. “What do you need help with?”

“I don’t know yet, but I might be in touch soon.”

“What if I leave town?”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not allowed to leave town?”

“When did you last leave town, Benny?”

“That’s beside the point, Inspector.”

“You haven’t been outside the city limits in four years, Benny.”

“How do you know that?”

“You haven’t become naive, now, have you, Master Thief ?”

Vennerhag snickered. “Okay, okay. I know what it is anyway. I read the papers. But I don’t see how I can be of any help to you when I don’t know anything about it. Who is she, by the way?”

“Who?”

“The dead woman, for Christ’s sake. The body. Who is she?”

“We don’t know.”

“Come on, Winter. There’s no such thing as an unknown body anymore.”

“Maybe not in your world.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Winter was tired of Vennerhag’s voice. He wanted to end the conversation.

“I honestly don’t know who she is,” he said. “I may end up needing your help. And you will help me then, won’t you, Benny?”

“Only if you’re nice.”

“The police are always nice.”

Vennerhag’s laugh cut through the phone line again. “And everybody else is mean. How’s Lotta doing, by the way?”

“She told me that you called and complained.”

“I didn’t complain. And it was for your own good. What you did was out of order. It may be hot as hell, but you keep your emotions in check.”

“Don’t call her anymore. Stay away from her.”

“How far away? You said I wasn’t supposed to leave town, remember?”

“I’ll be in touch, Benny,” Winter said, and hung up the receiver. His hand was sticky.

He stood and pulled off his blazer and hung it over the back of the chair, then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, missing his summer outfit of T-shirt and cutoffs. Donning an expensive suit of armor for work sent out signals. What signals were those?

“They’re signals of weakness,” his sister had said the night before. “Anyone who has to take cover behind an Armani or Boss suit isn’t really comfortable in his own skin.”

“Baldessarini,” he had said. “Cerutti. Not Armani or Boss—that’s what you wear when you’re working on your car. Could just be that I like to be well dressed,” he had said. “That there’s nothing more to it.”

“There is more to it,” she had said.

And he had told her: About the fear that took hold of him when he came close to evil’s darkest core, about how that fear had intensified his own fragility like a bubble expanding with air. The knowledge that he couldn’t do anything else with his life, didn’t want to do anything else, became a burden when he knew what that involved. When nighttime came around he couldn’t set aside the day, just take it off and hang it up like one of his jackets and pull on a comfy tracksuit and think about something else. That goddamn Cerutti suit stayed with him all the way into bed.

But there was also something else there. His beautiful clothes were at the same time a form of protection against the apprehension that constantly threatened to force its way into his body.

“That could be one interpretation,” she had said. The problem was that his exterior seldom helped with his interior. “Think about that when you’re ironing your armored shirts,” she had said in the waning night that was moving toward morning.

 

The surface of the water was a sparkling layer of silver, with glints that looked as if they had been strewn by hand across the lake. It stung Winter’s eyes when he looked to the north.

He walked along the wooded path to the edge of the bog. Crickets were chirping all around him: the sound of intense prolonged heat. A faint breeze brought with it a damp smell from the nearly dried-out bog holes within the dark terrain. Winter saw no one moving around in there, but he knew there were police officers combing the lakeside for clues and people who lived along the water’s edge.

It was nearly twelve o’clock. Few cars could be heard from the highway above and beyond him. From where he stood, beneath the trees, he could count up to twenty different shades of green. Even the rays of sunlight shone green. The very sky to the east was green through the leaves and between the branches. Only the symbol painted onto the bark, eight inches from his nose, was red. Winter took it for just that, a symbol. A symbol for what?

Winter heard a noise behind him and turned around. The outline of a man was moving in his direction. When the silhouette stepped out of the sunlight, Winter saw that it was Halders.

“So you’ve got the time to stand around here, huh, boss?” Halders was wearing short sleeves, his shirt hanging outside his trousers, and his face was partly in the shade, but Winter could see the sweat glinting on the high forehead that continued upward into Halders’s close-cropped skull. “This is a pleasant spot, sort of still.”

“Did you come from Helenevik? I didn’t hear a car.”

“It’s standing right there,” Halders said, and turned around and pointed behind him as if he wanted to prove that he hadn’t trekked three miles in the intense heat. “I guess I had the same feeling you did. That I wanted a look at the place, seeing as I was in the area anyway.”

Winter didn’t answer. He turned his gaze to the tree. Halders came closer.

“So this is that damn marking. Couldn’t some kids have daubed it up there?”

“Sure. We just need to get that confirmed.”

“And it’s definitely paint?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no way it could be blood?”

“No.”

“But it may have been intended to be blood,” Halders said. “I mean, to look like it was blood and that we should think of it as blood.”

“That’s possible,” Winter said. “How were the folks in Helenevik?”

“Nice and friendly.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A couple in this huge house over there tried to invite me in for drinks.”

“That was nice, but they didn’t succeed?”

“I told them I was on duty.”

“You might have missed an opportunity to find out something really important.”

“About what? You want me to go back?”

Winter shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

“There was something else. But it’s probably my imagination. Might have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick, so to speak,” Halders said.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. Otherwise, going door-to-door around here has produced about as little as you might expect. No one’s seen or heard anything.”

“The kennel guy heard and saw something,” Winter said.

“He’s a nutcase.”

“They’re sometimes the ones that prove the most helpful.”

They both heard the sound of an outboard from the lake. A plastic boat with a ten-horsepower motor came from the north and steered in toward the inlet fifty yards from where they were standing. The motor cut out and the boat glided into shore, outside the cordon.

They could see two boys climb out, and Halders headed over to them along the path. He returned five minutes later with the two of them, who looked to be in their lower teens. They were carrying at least two fishing poles each, as if they refused to leave anything behind in the boat. Winter had heard Halders ask them why they’d left their boat there. They had said that it was their spot. Their usual spot.

“There wasn’t a boat there early yesterday morning,” Winter said.

“No, it was gone,” one of the boys said and both looked down at the ground.

“What did you just say?” Halders said, and the boys seemed to tremble inside their life vests.

“When was the boat missing?” asked Winter and discreetly gestured to Halders to back off.

“This morning,” said the one that was doing the talking.

“You came here this morning and noticed that the boat was missing?”

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“Eigh—quarter past eight, around there.”

Winter eyed his watch. That was exactly four hours ago.

“What did you do then?” Halders asked.

The boys looked at each other.

“We went looking for the boat, of course.”

“With all your gear?”

“What?”

“All your goddamn fishing gear,” Halders said. “Did you lug all that stuff around with you when you went out looking for your boat?”

“We left it here,” the talkative one said softly.

“Where did you find the boat?” Winter asked.

“On the other side,” the boy said, and gestured toward the water through the branches.

“So it was just lying there?” Halders said. “With the motor and everything.”

“No. We always take the motor with us.”

“How about the oars? Do you take those with you too?”

One of the boys, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, started to giggle nervously and fell silent after two seconds.

“So someone could have rowed the boat?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you have a lock on it?”

“It’s busted,” said the boy who had giggled. He had regained his ability to speak.

“Busted,” Halders repeated. “Does that happen often?”

“It hasn’t happened to us before. But others,” the boy said, and made a gesture that included all the other boat owners around the Big and Little Delsjö lakes.

“What did you do when you found the boat?” Winter asked.

“We rowed back here and put the motor on, and then we went out fishing.”

“You didn’t notice anything strange or out of place in the boat when you found it?” Halders asked.

“No. Like what?” the boy said, but Winter could see what he was thinking.

“Anything that didn’t belong there,” Halders said.

“Not that we could see.”

“Nothing lying around, no leaves or anything?”

“We probably didn’t check that carefully. But the boat’s right over there,” the boy said, and nodded toward the path and the boat beyond.