The Shadow Woman (25 page)

Had Helene ever bought anything here?

Sometime over the course of the day, one of his investigators would come by and ask questions. Winter left the store, and the guy behind the counter looked up, and Winter nodded.

He walked past Karin Sohlberg’s office, which was closed. She’d called in sick, and he could understand that. Unfortunately, the police couldn’t call in sick after a distressing experience, and it was never enough just to get the rest of the day off. What they had was Hanne, and Winter suddenly missed the sound of her voice, or perhaps it was her words.

Hanne Östergaard was a priest from Skår who worked part-time as a healer of souls at the Gothenburg Police Department. She tried to speak to the men and women who had gone through difficult experiences or had seen the consequences of them. The police turned out to be just as vulnerable as anyone else, and more often than not they carried their scars with them for a long time. Forever really.

Hanne had combined a vacation with a leave of absence in order to attend university, and she hadn’t been at the police station since the end of spring. Winter had spoken to her twice during the summer, but that had been by phone. Perhaps she would feel under too much pressure when she came back. That was sure to be the case. A part-time fellow human being and hundreds of scared police officers. An inspector who feared the worst for the coming weeks. He thought about the girl again, Jennie Andersén. He couldn’t keep those horrible thoughts at bay.

He stood in the courtyard, facing the building. They had staked out the apartment but avoided other forms of surveillance. The kitchen window was a dark rectangle against the light-colored brickwork. Black pigeons clung above and below, as if to signify that the silence within was forever. The pigeons sat clustered around her window, hugging the wall as they moved along—like winged rats, thought Winter. He entered the house and continued up to the door. Jennie’s drawing of the rain and sun was still there, an apt depiction of the past six weeks. He saw the ship in the drawing and thought of the boat in Big Delsjö Lake. They hadn’t made any more progress there. Had Helene Andersén and her daughter had access to a boat? Why else would the girl draw a ship or a boat—there were more drawings like it above her bed. When Beier’s men went through the apartment, they found even more children’s drawings, enough to fill a big paper sack.

Winter opened the door and stood in the hall. Someone had been here after Helene’s death. Was it just the rental slips he had come for? Winter pictured a man in order to focus his thoughts more clearly. They hadn’t found any personal letters—no surprise since there wasn’t a soul in the world who’d come asking for Helene Andersén when she’d disappeared. Or her daughter either. How immense could loneliness be? He carried the thought around with him in rooms that smelled of mute sorrow.

They knew the murder had not been committed here, so where had it taken place? In the vicinity of where the body was found? She had made a journey from the northwestern part of the city to the Delsjö lakes in the eastern expanse where all urban development came to an end. Had she made that trip of a dozen or so miles on her own? Had she already been dead?

Winter stood in the kitchen. He heard the sounds from the pigeons’ throats outside the window. A child’s drawing was attached to the refrigerator door by a magnet in the shape of a sailboat. The technicians had chosen to leave it there, and Winter wondered why.

The drawing showed a car with faces in the front window and the back. The car was white. It was raining in half the sky, and in the other the sun was shining. Winter had glanced at the drawing the first time he was here, yesterday. He now saw that the face in the front was drawn in profile and that there was a beard hanging off the man’s chin, like a goatee.

My God, he thought, and felt his blood rise to his head.

The face in the backseat had red hair in pigtails.

Someone with a beard driving a car that the girl is riding in, he thought. He thought of all the drawings they had removed from the apartment. Good Lord, he thought. The girl has drawn everything she’s seen and experienced. All children draw. They draw what they’re going through since they can’t write it down.

Jennie’s drawings are her diary, he thought. We have her diary.

He still felt the blood in his face and told himself that he needed to stay calm, that it was just one lead among many others, perhaps not even a lead at all. Still he felt the excitement.
He
hadn’t come there for the drawings. It’s not the first thing it occurs to you to take away, especially not if you’ve seen a child draw and know that all children draw, and when you’re trying to make it look like you haven’t been inside the apartment, you know it would look bare without any children’s drawings.

He’s seen her drawing, thought Winter. He knows her. He knows this little family. Take it easy. Remember what Sture said about being too meticulous. The man with the beard could be somebody else—a friend. Or a taxi driver, or just any man from her imagination. I’ll have to go through her drawings one by one. How many are there? Five hundred? Is it usual to hold on to that many? Don’t ask me, he thought, I know nothing about children, and then, just as quickly as he thought that thought, he saw Angela’s face in his mind’s eye.

He stood still in the kitchen. There could be more from the basement, where Helene Andersén had kept a storage room without an apartment number or name. That wasn’t unusual. After a while they’d found it, locked with a little padlock. It contained a few boxes of clothes, a pair of children’s skis, and a chair.

WHEN SHE LISTENED, IT WAS AS IF THE SAME CUCKOO WAS SIT
TING out in the forest hooting to her—at least for a few hours today and yesterday too.
Hoo hoo, hoo hoo,
it cried, like it was far away beyond the trees.

Her hair was wet and her clothes too. She had spread out her dress underneath her, like a sheet, and it had gotten wet. She felt cold sometimes and pulled it on over her trousers and shirt, and then she felt hot and took it off again. The men came and looked at her when they thought she was asleep—only she was awake, but it was almost like being asleep. She was dizzy the whole time and she had all these goose bumps on her body, like when you’ve been swimming and the wind blows on you before you’ve put a towel around yourself.

The man, the one who always came up to her, brought some pills that he wanted her to swallow. But she couldn’t. He called to the other man.

“She’s not swallowing.”

“Tell her she has to.”

“It doesn’t do any good.”

“You’ll have to dissolve them.”

“What?”

“Dissolve them in water and it’ll be easier for her to swallow. Or put the powder in a cup of hot sugar water.”

The man had bent forward and laid his hand on her forehead again.

“She doesn’t feel so hot now.”

“Maybe she doesn’t need them.”

“What?”

“The pills, for Christ’s sake.”

“I think she needs them.”

“Then do what I told you.”

She’d tried to swallow the glass of water, and it tasted bad. Then she dozed off and heard sounds from outside, like a rumbling or a chugging, and then they were gone. And she listened for the cuckoo, but you couldn’t hear it anymore after the chugging came. She waited for the cuckoo, who was maybe always there.

She thought to herself, I’m not going to be here for long. I’m going to be at home in my new bedroom where it says Helene on the door. My name is Helene, and the men haven’t said it once, so I’ll just have to say it myself. She whispered and it hurt her throat, but she whispered Helene one more time and then it became lighter and all red in her eyes and then she thought she heard the cuckoo again.

HE HEARD THE SOUNDS OF THE FOREST, BUT THEY WEREN’T
like they were before. Nothing was like that former calm. He barely heard the wind anymore.

She had stepped out of the past like a greeting from the devil. He’d tried to fend her off during that first call. You’ve got the wrong number, miss.

That voice. Like something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore, that wasn’t meant to be heard.

He had done what he could to forget. The others who could talk were gone.

Afterward, while he could still hear her voice, he had looked down at his hands and shut his eyes, and still those hellish visions taunted him. The house and the wind from the sea that blew right through that damned house. He had done what he had to. Though he’d planned it, he’d thought it wouldn’t be necessary—but then he understood that he had to do it. His hands did it.

This was the second time he’d driven to the bus stop and picked them up. It wasn’t the closest stop, but she understood why. Perhaps she was the one who’d suggested it. He was afraid now. He hadn’t been able to hang up when she called again. Come alone, he’d said. She refused.

 

No no no—who said anything about that? he’d asked. She eyed him with a crazed look that he recognized in himself. Terrified of what was going to happen, he’d looked up at the ceiling, thought about how he had one way out. It had been there the whole time. One option. Fear had stopped him.

There was screeching above their heads. It was the second time she’d come alone, and he didn’t know if she knew everything. As they walked through the field down to the other glade, animals ran off into the trees. She’d turned her face toward him, but he hadn’t wanted to look into her eyes. A shout came from far away and suddenly he wanted the child there. Next time she’d bring the child with her.

The sweat running down into his eyes blinded him, and he couldn’t hear any cars on the road. It never got really dark. He tried to blink away the sweat. Her arms . . .

When he turned around, he saw a white boat floating on the surface of the lake, without sound, as if it were waiting. She seemed to be following it with her eyes, her head turned to the side, but the boat lay still, trapped in the late-night fog. He couldn’t see anyone in the boat, and when he turned around again, for the last time, the surface of the water was empty and black.

THE APARTMENT WAS LOCATED IN A BUILDING WITH A VIEW
out toward Black Marshes. There was nothing outside to suggest that it housed a private day care with three rooms and a kitchen.

The architecture struck Winter as frozen music, crystallized chords, which carried a rough beauty within its walls but kept everything confined within. Nature was right up alongside it, but apart.

He’d received instructions from Karin Sohlberg, but she didn’t want to accompany him. He walked in through the building’s front entrance and rang the doorbell of the apartment to the left in the stairwell on the first floor. The door, covered with children’s drawings, was opened by a man who could have been seventy years old or eighty. He was wearing a brown khaki shirt and broad suspenders fastened to gray trousers that were big and comfortable. He had a white mustache and thick white hair, and Winter thought of a Santa Claus who had shaved off his beard and descended to live among humans for good. The old man was holding the hand of a little boy who was sucking his thumb and staring wide-eyed at the long-haired blond police officer in a black leather jacket.

“Hello,” Winter said, as he bent down a few inches toward the boy, who started to cry.

“There, there, Timmy,” the white-haired man said, holding his hand. The boy stopped crying and pressed his face against the man’s pant leg.

“Well, good afternoon,” Winter said, and held out his hand. He introduced himself and his reason for being there. The search for a missing person. Two missing persons, he thought. A child and a murderer.

“Ernst Lundgren,” the man said. He was tall and slightly bent forward. He must have been nearly seven feet tall when he was young, Winter thought.

“Could we speak for a moment?” he asked.

Lundgren turned around. Winter had heard children and adult voices, and he now saw several elderly people busy helping the children put on their coats.

“We’re just on our way out, as you can see,” Lundgren said. “In ten minutes or however long it takes, it’ll be quiet in here. If you can wait that long.”

“Certainly,” Winter said.

“We couldn’t just sit here and do nothing, seeing how difficult things are for them,” Lundgren said. “The young mothers, that is.”

Winter nodded. They sat in the kitchen. Through the window he could see the little troop move across the road and in among the trees. It might have been ten children and four adults.

“There are a lot of single mothers with small children living around here,” Lundgren said. “They have no jobs and no child care and hardly even any friends. Many are stuck in their loneliness and never get out of it.”

Winter nodded again.

“It’s dangerous,” the day-care manager said. “Nobody can survive for very long under those conditions.”

“How long have you been running this day care?” Winter asked.

“About a year. We’ll see how long we can keep it going. It’s not really a proper day-care center, in the strict sense of the word, if by that you mean an institution.”

“So what is it, then?”

“It’s a few old fogies trying to help the young and desperate, to put it bluntly.” Lundgren nodded toward the coffee machine. “Would you like a cup?” Winter accepted the offer, and Lundgren stood and prepared coffee for himself and Winter, then sat back down at the table. “Some of these poor girls don’t know which way to turn. They need, well, for want of a better word I guess I’d have to say alleviation. We try to provide them with a little alleviation in their daily lives.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That means a young mother can leave her child here with us for a few hours and go off to the hairdresser or into town to be by herself for a bit. Or just go home and take it easy.”