The Shadow Woman (26 page)

“Yes,” Winter said. “I think I understand.”

“Having the chance to be by themselves for just a little while a couple of times a week,” Lundgren said. “Can you imagine what it’s like never to have a moment to just be by yourself ?”

“No,” Winter answered. “I’m more familiar with the opposite.”

“What did you say?”

“The opposite. Spending too much time by myself.”

“Aha. But you see that’s also a problem these girls face. They don’t get to socialize with anyone their own age.” Lundgren rolled up one sleeve of his khaki shirt, and Winter saw that the hair on his arm grew like white moss all the way down to the middle of his knuckles. “And don’t forget that some of them have more than one child.”

“Are there many wanting to come here?”

“A few, but we can’t handle any more. We’d need a bigger apartment and there’d have to be more of us, but we’re already dependent on charity as it is. No doubt the municipal authorities see us as pirates. Fine by me.”

“You’re doing a good job,” Winter said.

“You gotta do something before you die. And it’s fun. It’s the most fun I’ve had for a long time.”

Winter finished his coffee. It was still warm.

“There’s always a lot of crap being said about the city’s outlying suburbs, but one thing is true,” Lundgren explained. “There’s a hell of a lot of loneliness in areas like this. The little lonely people are being pushed out to the margins. It’s strange out here. On the one hand, you’ve got the immigrant families, who after all do have a sense of community. It can be a little fragile sometimes. But still. And wedged in among them you’ve got these young Swedish mothers with their little kids. Almost never boys. Young girls and their children. It’s a strange mix.”

“Yes.”

“And many people keep their distance.” Lundgren’s eyes were still fixed on the group from the day care outside. “That may be why I haven’t seen this woman you’re asking about. Helene, was that her name?”

“Yes. Helene Andersén. The little girl’s name was Jennie.”

“I don’t recognize it. Of course, I can ask my staff, or whatever it is we’re called.”

 

“It’s possible,” Ringmar said, eyeing the big pile of children’s drawings on the table in Winter’s room.

“A diary,” Winter said. “It could be like a diary.”

“Then we’ll have to get lucky.”

“Luck is often a question of seeing the opportunity when it presents itself,” Winter said. That was a real smart-ass remark, he thought to himself.

“And you think that opportunity lies here.” Ringmar held up a picture depicting a lone tree in a field. The drawing was divided in two. Rain. Shine. “There’s both rain and sunshine in this one.”

“It’s like that in a number of the drawings I’ve seen so far,” Winter said.

“Seems like a case for a child psychologist.”

“I’ve thought about that too.”

“And then there are the locations.”

“And the figures.”

“This can really give you the creeps. I was thinking about my own kids’ drawings. What stuff like that can mean.”

“The fact is that kids draw a lot, right? And what is it that they draw? They draw what they see. What we have lying here in front of us is what she saw.”

“Rain and sun and trees,” Ringmar said. “A boat and a car. Where is this taking us?”

“Well, we can at least go through them, can’t we? Beier isn’t finished with all the drawings upstairs.”

“What else does he have to say?”

“They’re just test firing the rifle into the water tank.”

“Aha. Does the rifle match up?”

“He doesn’t know yet,” Winter said.

They had empty shells from the shoot-out at Vårväderstorget and a suspected weapon. Beier had procured similar ammunition of the same make and fired it into a water tank in order to compare the bullets with the casings.

“What are you thinking about?” Ringmar said.

“Right at this moment? A bullet traveling through water, and a motorcycle crashing through a roadblock somewhere in Scandinavia.”

“I’m thinking about the little girl,” Ringmar said. “And the mother.”

“I’m still waiting for the reports from child services,” Winter said. “And the hospital.”

“She seems not to have any family or friends.”

“Sure she did. We’re slowly getting closer to them. It won’t be long.”

He grabbed his jacket from the chair and put it on.

“Where are you going now?” Ringmar asked.

“I thought it was about time I agreed to meet with a reporter. Don’t you think?”

“Go and get a haircut before you meet the press. Birgersson mumbled something this morning about a Beatles wig.”

“He’s still living in the good old days,” Winter said, heading toward the elevators.

 

Hans Bülow was waiting at a bar in the center of town. It was getting dark outside, and the candles on the tables were lit. People on the Avenyn were walking briskly, on their way home or out.

“Can I buy you a beer, seeing as you’ve taken the time?” Bülow said.

“A Perrier will do just fine.”

“You’re increasingly becoming one of those straight-edge types.”

“Do they drink Perrier?”

“Water. No alcohol.”

“Straight edge?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds good,” Winter lit up a Corps. “It has a ring to it.”

“They don’t smoke either.”

Winter looked at his cigarillo.

“Then I guess I may as well have a light beer. Hof on tap, if they’ve got it.”

Bülow went over to the bar and came back with two tall glasses. He nodded to a familiar face and sat down. “That’s a colleague of yours, isn’t it?” he said, and took a sip from his glass.

“Where?”

“Behind me, off to the right. The one I said hello to.”

Winter looked over the reporter’s shoulder and saw Halders’s close-cropped head. Halders didn’t turn around. Winter couldn’t tell if he was sitting with anyone.

“You know Halders?”

“You kidding me? As a reporter embedded at the police station, you get to know the forces of good,” Bülow said.

“And you count Halders among them?”

“He’s got the best reputation of anyone.”

“With whom?”

“With the press, of course. He doesn’t put on an act. If he has nothing to say, he doesn’t say anything.”

Winter took a sip of his beer.

“So what’s going on?” Bülow asked.

“We’re still trying to determine the dead woman’s identity. And possibly looking for a child as well, but we don’t know for sure. It scares me.”

“What if I say that you’ve found her?”

“You can say whatever you like. But what do you mean? Of course we found her.”

“Her identity. That you know who she is. But you don’t want to release it.”

Winter sat silently. He took another sip of his beer, to keep himself occupied. The bartender played music at two-thirds volume. It sounded like rock.

“Why not, Erik?”

“I agreed to meet with you because I want to sort out a few things,” Winter said. “But there are certain questions I simply cannot answer.”

“For reasons pertaining to the ongoing investigation?”

“Yes.”

“By virtue of the statutory confidentiality of the preliminary investigation?”

Winter nodded. Halders still sat with his back to him. Perhaps it’s a doppelgänger, thought Winter.

“Paragraphs 5:1 and 9:17 of the Swedish Penal Code,” Bülow said.

“Are you a lawyer too?”

“It’s enough to be a legal reporter.”

“I see.”

“So what can you tell me, then?”

IT WAS DARKER NOW. WINTER WAS BACK IN HIS OFFICE. BÜLOW
was ready to hold off on writing certain things. You owe me a favor, he said when they parted. I just did you one, Winter had answered.

The music from the CD was louder than the other sounds in the room. Michael Brecker was blowing ice-cold notes from the tenor sax on “Naked Soul” from
Tales from the Hudson
.

He thought about Helene’s face and body. Her soul had left her body. Thinking about her name now was no different than it had been before. He had known. How had she let him know? How had she communicated her name to him?

He picked the topmost drawing from the pile on his desk. It showed a figure, who might be a child, with its arms reaching upward. There was no ground. The figure was hovering in the air.

Winter studied the next image. In the middle of the picture, a car was driving along a road that went through trees. There were no faces in the windows of the car, since it didn’t have any. The car had no color, was white like the paper. The trees were green and the road brown. Winter picked up the next drawing, which also showed a car. It was driving among houses that were drawn like tall blocks with windows that were irregularly square. The road was black. Winter flipped through the drawings until he found another with a car in it. It was driving on a brown road. In five drawings the car was driving along a black road. The cars were uncolored, left white like the paper. He saw a person with red hair in one of the windows. None of the cars had any drivers.

He looked for any letters or numbers on the cars. She had written her name, “jeni.” She could recognize and copy a letter or a number. Weren’t there five-year-olds who could read and write fluently?

He closed his eyes. The music helped his concentration.

He opened his eyes and laid the drawings with cars in them to the right. There were also other vehicles—something that looked like it could be a streetcar, in some of the drawings. The carriages were long and lined with windows, like the high-rises he had seen earlier, only lying down. One drawing showed something that could have been a streetcar seen from the front. The number 2 was drawn at the top, above a large window.

Winter laid the drawing aside and looked for more streetcars in the pile. After ten drawings, he found one. It didn’t have a number. He flipped past a few more and saw the number 2 written on yet another streetcar, only this time on the side. A face with red hair could be seen in one of the windows. Eyes, nose, mouth.

Checking his watch, he reached for the pink commercial section of the telephone book and looked up the number for the public transport information center. The office at Drottningtorget was still open. He called and waited. A woman answered. He asked about the route of the number 2 streetcar, was told, and hung up.

It fit. That number 2 passed North Biskopsgården. Clearly they would have taken it. Maybe on a daily basis. Or else the number 5, which he’d learned also went through there. Maybe he would see a 5 in the drawings. He’d started sweating, a thin film he could feel from his hairline to his eyebrows. He stood and went out to the toilet without turning the light on and splashed cold water on his face.

The telephone rang. He walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Winter.”

“It’s Beier here. I figured you’d still be there.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a slip of paper that’s centuries old. Or pretty old, anyway.”

“A slip of paper?”

“A piece of paper with something written on it. We took everything that was in her storage room back with us, including two boxes of clothes. One of them had some children’s clothes in it, and we found this slip of paper in the pocket of one of the dresses.”

“I see.”

“It’s an old dress and an old slip of paper.”

“You’ve already been able to determine that?”

“Yes, but no more than that. We haven’t started analyzing it yet, so we haven’t established exactly how old it is.”

“You sound like a doubtful archeologist.”

“That’s just what you are in this job. But coming up with a precise age is very difficult. So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want to come up and take a look at it? I’m leaving pretty soon.”

Winter looked at the drawings that he had started to sort into piles. He felt interrupted. “Should I?”

“It’s up to you. It’s not going anywhere. But—it’s a little odd—I’m feeling some kind of vibes here.”

“Intuition,” Winter said.

“An impulse,” Beier said.

“Then I’d better come up.”

 

“So, what do you say?” Beier said.

Winter looked at the dress and the slip of paper lying next to it on the illuminated examination table. The dress could be Jennie’s, but it had an old-fashioned feel to it, as if it belonged to another time. Winter couldn’t say which one, but that kind of thing wasn’t hard to establish.

The paper was four by four inches and looked like it had been folded a thousand times. It was yellowed with age and seemed incredibly delicate. A Dead Sea Scroll, thought Winter. “It certainly looks old,” he said. “Do you have the copy?”

Beier handed it to him.

“It’s still legible,” he said.

“Is it ballpoint?”

“Felt-tip, we think. But don’t ask me anything difficult yet. We’re going to check it out, just like everything else. If there’s any point.”

“Well,” Winter said. “People hang on to old stuff sometimes. There’s nothing unusual about that per se.”

“No.”

“Then they get murdered or disappear and suddenly we’re poring over their personal effects.”

“That’s when a child’s dress becomes interesting,” Beier said. “Or a piece of paper with a mysterious message.”

Like a cry from the past, thought Winter. He held the copy in his hand. Written on it was “5/20.” On the line below was a dash about a quarter of an inch long followed by “1630.” The third line read “4—23?” and after that came a blank space of an inch or so and then “L. v—H, C.” The
C
had been circled. On the right side of the paper were lines that looked to Winter like some kind of map. Next to one line, in the upper left-hand corner, was something that could be a cross or short lines.