The Shadow Woman (23 page)

“And Helene’s rent could have been paid either with the rent slip sent out from your office or a regular blank deposit slip?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know which it was?”

“It’s not specified. The computer only indicates that it’s been paid.”

“But if someone paid without the preprinted rent slip—that is, with a blank deposit slip, manually or whatever—then you would have a copy?”

“I think so.”

“And someone would have had to write her name in order for you to see that it’s specifically for that apartment.”

“It’s enough to just write the apartment number.”

“Is there someone at this district office now?”

Sohlberg checked her watch. “Yes, I think so. Lena is the one who handles that and she should be there. I can call and check.”

Winter nodded, and she punched in a number on her desk phone. He waited while she spoke.

“She’s there,” Sohlberg said, and put down the receiver.

Winter called Ringmar on his cell phone and learned that Bertil was about to start the interview with Ester Bergman. He hung up and slipped the phone into his blazer’s inner pocket.

Outside, one group had dispersed and another had formed, closer. Winter saw the dark faces, perhaps from Southeast or East Asia. Like the woman walking next to him. He hadn’t asked about her background.

“There are a lot of nationalities in this area,” he said.

“Over fifty percent are non-Swedish,” Karin Sohlberg said.

Winter looked down at her. She was a full head shorter.

“But I am,” she said. “Swedish.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“South Korea,” she said. “Adopted, though some call it abducted.”

Winter didn’t comment.

“I know who my real parents are,” she said.

“You haven’t been back there?”

“Not yet.”

 

Lena Suominen was waiting for them at the district office. She had already taken out a copy of the deposit slip that was used to pay Helene Andersén’s latest rent: 4,350 kronor for a 750-square-foot, three-room apartment.

Winter looked at the paper.

“So this is a copy?”

“Yes.”

“Where is the original?”

“Of these manually filled-out slips?”

“Yes.”

“At the direct deposit processing center, I would imagine. In Stockholm. Just like the preprinted slips. They end up there too.”

Winter looked at the copy in front of him. Someone had written the property management company’s seven-digit direct deposit number, 882000-3, and then another number in the box for messages to the payee. There was no reference to name or address.

“Is this the apartment number?” he asked, and pointed at the three digits on the copy.

“Yes, 375. That’s the apartment.”

“So you don’t have to write the name?”

“No.”

“Is it usual for tenants to pay their rent this way?”

Lena Suominen looked as if she was smiling, or maybe it was just a movement in her face. “Well, of course, there are those who lose their rent slips and call here asking for the direct deposit number. And then we give it to them. But that’s a different number.”

“Excuse me?”

“For manual direct deposits—that is, for a blank payment slip filled out by hand—we use another number.”

“This one, you mean: 882000-3?”

“No. That’s the property manager’s regular one.”

“So it works anyway? Someone making a payment can use this number for the manual payment slips as well?”

“Yes.”

“But then you’d have to know it—copy it from a regular rental slip, for example.” He was talking to himself. “Does this number apply to all your apartments in Gothenburg?”

“Yes.”

“How many are there at North Biskopsgården? Apartments, I mean.”

Lena Suominen thought for a moment. Around fifty years old, with a wide intelligent face, she spoke with a Finnish-Swedish accent that softened her formal tone. “Approximately twelve hundred.”

“And many of your tenants pay their rent at the post office, I understand? Even with the preprinted slips?”

“Yes.”

“And some by direct deposit from their personal accounts?”

“Yes, and some don’t use the rent slips since they can’t pay the whole rent all at once. Unfortunately, that’s how it is, and that’s problematic for them as well as for—”

“They pay in installments?”

“Yes, well, at least in a first installment. Sometimes that’s all we get.”

“Is that common?”

“Increasingly common.”

Winter thought again about loneliness and poverty. How did it feel when you’d paid only part of the rent for your apartment? Did you stop going into the living room?

“And sometimes you can’t see who’s paid. You can’t read the name or the address or the apartment number. But money’s come in.”

Winter read the copy he was holding in front of him. So they might be able to find the original at the post office’s direct deposit processing center up in the capital. They would have to call them up and ask them to find it and put it in a plastic bag. It was a lead.

At the very bottom of the slip was a string of numbers. Winter could identify the payment date—the first weekday in September, just as Karin Sohlberg had said earlier. By then Helene Andersén had been dead for thirteen or fourteen days.

He couldn’t decipher the other numbers.

“What’s this?” He held out the copy and pointed.

Suominen took the paper, and he saw Sohlberg standing next to her.

“That’s the post-office code number,” Suominen said. “I think the same figures appear on the receipt they give to the person making the payment.”

“You don’t have the phone number of the post office, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Hand me that telephone book behind you,” he said. “The one with the pink pages.” He looked up the number to the Länsmansgården post office, and a woman answered after two rings.

“Hello, my name is Erik Winter and I’m a homicide inspector. We’re investigating a crime, and I was wondering if you could help me with a few factual details. No. Just a fact—No, you’ll do just fine, I think. It’s about the code numbers that appear on your recei—Yes, that’s right, the series of num—No, I just want to ask you about one I have he—
Please
, just listen to me now. I have a question about the following numbers.” He eventually managed to tell her what those numbers were and where he had obtained them.

He listened.

“So the first one refers to the type of transaction? The 01 indicates that this payment was made by direct deposit? Thank you. The four subseq—Yes, immediately following. The
P
number? The post office where the payment was made. That number indicates where the transaction took place? I have the number here. I’ll give it to you again. Can you tell me where it is? Get it then. I’ll wait.”

Winter moved the receiver a few inches away from his ear. “These first four numbers say where the payment was made,” he said to the two women. “She’s gone to get some kind of reference catalog.” He heard a voice in the receiver and put it up to his ear again. “Yes, 2237, that’s right. Mölnlycke! Are you sure? Yes, those are the numbers. And then the oth—Okay, what does that me—The cashier, you say? So these numbers, 0030, indicate which cashier handled the transaction? So this number combination indicates that the rent payment for the apartment with this number was made on September 2 at the Mölnlycke post office at this particular cashier’s service window? Is that right? Thank you.”

 

Winter was on his way into the courtyard when his cell phone vibrated in the inner pocket of his blazer.

“Winter here.”

“Bertil here. Where are you?”

“On my way into the courtyard. You?”

“Outside the apartment. Andersén’s apartment.”

“I’ll be there in one minute.”

Ringmar was waiting in the stairwell. “Beier’s team says someone’s been inside her apartment recently.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably sometime within the past few weeks. After her death.”

“How can they know that?”

Ringmar shrugged his shoulders. “They’re wizards, aren’t they? But I think they said something about the dust. Stay tuned. They also say it looks like someone rummaged through all the stuff in there and then tried to put it back more or less the way it was.”

“That sounds clumsy.”

“Could be a red herring. The vic—Helene Andersén may have had some kind of special system for organizing her stuff.”

“Or else someone was in there and rummaged around and wasn’t particularly worried about it being discovered.”

“There’s going to be one hell of a commotion when this gets out,” Ringmar said.

“Then we’ll have to see to it that it doesn’t get out,” Winter said.

“How do you mean?”

“A few days from now, someone might walk into the Mölnlycke post office and pay the rent again. We’re going to be there waiting for them.”

“My God,” Ringmar said. “I wonder if it’s even possible. I’m a bit surprised that there aren’t a few TV vans parked out here already.”

 

They conducted an internal search for Helene Andersén, now that they had her name. Yet another round of searching, only this time with better chances of success.

In a few days we’ll release her name and distribute a real live picture of her, thought Winter. There are photos of the little girl too, on her own and together with her dead mother. If we don’t get any response, that means we’ve come across the loneliest people on earth. They’ve existed but almost only in name.

All the different agencies had to be contacted. Winter hadn’t gone through the mail that was lying in the hall, but the technicians had yet to find any letters from the social services. Perhaps they had disappeared together with the rental slips. Still, there were other ways to find out if she was receiving money from the state or from a job. Soon they would know.

She had a telephone. Winter remembered it, on the little bedside table. Now that they knew her identity, they could pull her phone records and get some history. She’d chosen to have a phone in order to speak to someone.

THE POST OFFICE’S DIRECT DEPOSIT PROCESSING CENTER HAD A
special department for dealing with “police matters.” A man answered reluctantly. Winter explained.

“Then you’re screwed,” the post-office official said.

“Excuse me?”

“The slips are discarded after two weeks or something. Didn’t you say this rent was paid more than three weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re screwed.”

“You better do something about that attitude of yours, you smug son of a bitch. I’m investigating a murder and I want my questions answered. So, what do you mean when you say that the slips are discarded?”

“They’re shredded.”

“And that happens after two weeks?”

“Sometimes after a few days. It depends on how much we have to do.”

“Then what’s the point of sending them to you in the first place?”

“I really don’t know. I’ve asked myself the same question. We don’t have any space here, after all.”

“So there’s a possibility that a consignment of canceled deposit slips sent over to you from some post offices still hasn’t been processed?”

“Not for three weeks. Unless it’s ended up at the very bottom or something, or we’ve been short staff—” Something had suddenly occurred to him. “We actually have been understaffed for the past few weeks. So it’s possible we did fall behind. Where did you say the payment was made, again? Gothenburg, I know, but which office? Can you repeat the direct deposit number and the amount? And the apartment number as well.”

Winter realized he was speaking to someone who hadn’t initially been listening. He repeated what he’d said before.

“Hang on,” the drawling voice said, like one of those jazz musicians who come down from Stockholm for a gig at Nefertiti’s. They play better than they speak.

There was a fumbling sound in the receiver, and the voice returned.

“Can you hang on a bit longer? There might be something else here.”

“I’ll hang on,” Winter said.

“I’ve got it here.”

“You’ve found it?”

“Yes, actually. I’m surprised myself.”

So I wasn’t screwed, thought Winter. “I want you to put that slip into a new envelope right away and put it in a safe place. Lock it in a cabinet.”

“Okay.”

Winter looked at his watch.

“Are you going to be there for another two hours?”

“Yes.”

“Another police officer will be by there within the next two hours to pick up the envelope. He’ll ask for you,” Winter said, and looked at the name he’d written down. “Ask him to identify himself.”

“Okay.”

“And thanks for your help. I apologize for swearing at you before. Good-bye.”

He pressed down on the cradle and waited for the dial tone and called Stockholm again, getting a security consultant who asked if he could call Winter back in half an hour.

He put down the phone and stood up, his left shoulder blade stiff from sitting while speaking on the telephone. Much of his time was spent in stiff positions on the telephone. He ought to do calisthenics in his office. Tonight he would go to Valhalla and sit in the wet sauna, if he had time for it. A sauna and a beer at home and the silence and his thoughts. He ought to call Angela. He ought to—

The phone rang, blared. The tone was turned up loud so that he’d be able to hear it if he was out of the office but still close by.

“Okay,” the security consultant said. “This is proving a little complicated. We have routines when it comes to payments made to a blocked account, but flagging a specific payment, well, that’s actually something new.”