The Shadow Woman (30 page)

Jakobsson shrugged his shoulders.

“I guess ’cause of what you told me,” he said. “That’s some heavy shit. That’s not something you want to be involved in, hell no.” He looked around for an ashtray, and when Cohen nodded to a plate where some buns had been, Jakobsson flicked off a long pillar of ash. “I’m not involved. I haven’t done anything.”

“Why are you lying about this woman, then?”

“What the fuck is this now? I’m not lying, am I?”

“You told us that she came up to you when you got out of your car. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“You stood there facing each other, and she handed you the envelope and made you this offer?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh for Chri—How many times do I have to tell you? She asked if I wanted to make some cash and do them a favor at the same time.”

“Them?”

“What?”

“You said ‘them’ now. What do you mean by that?”

“I did? I don’t mean anything.”

“You don’t want to help us, Oskar. Should we break it off here and continue when you’ve had a chance to think it over?”

“I don’t need to think it over.”

“You want to continue?”

“You’re asking and I’m answering. That’s how it always is. Ask me a good question and I’ll give you a good answer.”

“This isn’t a game,” Winter said. “There’s a four-year-old girl somewhere out there who may still be alive, and we’ve already wasted a lot of time.”

She wasn’t five. They’d been able to establish that Jennie was four and a half.

Jakobsson was silent. The cigarette butt lay crumpled in the dish. Winter held his extinguished cigarillo in his hand.

“How this ends might depend on you,” Winter said. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Can I have another cigarette?”

Winter handed Jakobsson the pack and let him light one himself.

“Everybody knows that I would never have anything to do with murder,” Jakobsson said. “Everybody knows.”

“Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill the woman?”

“What the fu—”

“Just tell us and you’ll be doing us both a favor.”

“Oskar Jakobsson a murderer? People would laugh—”

“Where did you meet this woman?”

“What?”

“The woman you say made you the offer. Where did you meet her?”

“Christ, you guys are too much. I told you, the parking lot.”

“I don’t think you’re telling the truth. Unless you tell us where it was, I can’t believe anything else you say.”

Jakobsson looked at Cohen, who nodded encouragingly.

“Okay, okay.
Fuck!
There was this coffee shop there, and I got a call beforehand.”

“A call? A phone call?”

“Yes.”

“From whom?”

“From her. The woman I met later in the coffee shop.”

“She called you?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you then?”

“Where was I? At home, of course. I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Were you alone at home?”

“When I got the call? Well, my brother may have been out. I can’t remember.”

“What did she say?”

“That she had a proposal and that I could do her a favor and . . . For Christ’s sake, we’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“What do you mean?”

“She said what I said she said, only it was someplace else. At the coffee shop.”

“Which coffee shop?”

“Jacky’s Pub.”

“That’s a coffee shop?”

“To me it’s a coffee shop. Coffee’s the only thing I drink there. The beer’s too damn expensive, and anyways I’ve quit.”

“Who suggested that you meet there?”

“I did.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Nah. Maybe it was her. It’s so . . . Can we take that break soon? This is tiring me out.”

“We’ll break soon,” Winter said. “Try to remember who suggested that you meet there.”

“It was her.”

“What was the first thing she said?”

“I can’t remember a damn thing anymore.”

“What’s her name?”

“No idea. I told you several times before we sat down here. I’d never seen her before.”

“You know her.”

“No way.”

“Why else would she get in touch with you?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“You said before that you’re happy to lend a hand.”

“I said that? Well, maybe that’s why she got in touch.”

“Are you known for lending a hand?”

“Don’t ask me. But that could be the reason, like I said. She heard from somebody that I’m a good guy and she called me.”

“Who might she have heard that from?”

“What?”

“That you’re a good guy?”

“A hundred people at least,” Jakobsson said.

“List them,” Winter said, and took out a fresh notepad from his inside pocket, along with a stubby pencil.

“You’re out of your . . . I gotta go to the toilet.”

“In a minute.”

“You don’t get it. If I don’t get to a toilet in one minute, it won’t be much fun for anyone to sit in here.”

“What’s her name?”

“I said I don’t know. You can continue questioning me in the toilet if you want to but I can’t—”

“Give me a name.”

“I don’t know
for fuck’s sake
!”

“Who might have tipped her off that you’re ready to lend a hand?”

Jakobsson didn’t answer. He’d risen up to a half-standing position, and they could tell from the dark spot spreading out across his jeans that perhaps for the first time during the interview he had spoken the truth.

RINGMAR READ THE TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE SESSION WITH
Jakobsson. He too was struck by its significance, by the possibility that they were suddenly making progress. It was like catching a whiff of something you knew would smell a lot worse when you got closer.

“I don’t think he knows what he’s involved in,” Ringmar said.

“He’s a pretty tough character.”

“Not that tough,” Ringmar said. “Not for this. Jakobsson is small time.”

“Möllerström is working on his circle of associates.”

“There must be a lot of them,” Ringmar said.

“Not as many as you might expect.”

“That all depends. Did you know that Oskar used to ride a motorbike?”

“Yes,” Winter said, “but it’s hard to believe.”

“He was in a biker gang. Some local chapter of the Hells Angels, but even they kicked him out, I think.”

“I can hear the rumbling throughout this investigation,” Winter said.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. The sky’s rumbling.”

Ringmar sized up his younger superior. Winter had dark circles under his eyes, and in certain lighting he almost looked as if he were wearing war paint. His long hair reached his shoulders.

“Maybe I’m reading too much into it,” Winter said. “Maybe Jakobsson is just an innocent bystander.”

“Innocent messenger,” Ringmar said. “But there are no innocent messengers.”

Winter flipped through the printouts. The words struck at him from the paper. Over the last two or three years, he’d come to read interrogation transcripts with a vague feeling of dread, as if they were fiction taken from a reality he couldn’t penetrate. The exchanges were fiction and sport at the same time, and both parties knew it.

“He says that the woman could have been forty or twenty-five.”

“That may be because of the sunglasses,” Ringmar said. “That is, if she was wearing any. Or if she even exists.”

“It’s not unusual to have a proxy,” Winter said. “Someone like Jakobsson gets an assignment from someone who got it from someone else who in turn was contacted by the prime mover. The murderer.”

“Yeah, standard criminal procedure,” Ringmar said.

“So we have to work our way backward along the chain,” Winter said.

“If all he did was that one service, and didn’t think any more about it, then he would have said so straight off.”

“Yes.”

“That means he knows whoever it was that gave him the job. The woman, if it is a woman.”

“Could be.”

“We can’t even say for sure that there was any money involved.”

“No.”

“We’ll have to put the screws to him again,” Ringmar said. “But let him go empty his bladder this time.”

 

The nationwide APB had been issued. Wellman defended the delay and did a good job of it. Winter might see Wellman in a different light after this.

Everything from the past month came back. Winter could see his own investigation described in different varieties of newspaper prose. He read the newspapers and set them aside. Bülow’s article was fairly well informed, but that wasn’t so strange given that Winter had provided the facts. It was an agreement of sorts.

Winter had agreed to take part in a press conference the next morning. Tomorrow, not earlier.

Sitting alone in his office, he reached for the drawings, but first he closed his eyes so his mind would be as dark and still as possible.

They dragged Delsjö Lake. They walked through the forested areas along the water’s edge again. They were able to be more candid when they questioned the neighbors.

Photographs of Helene Andersén’s apartment had been disseminated through the media and printed on posters. They went through the census register. Helene Andersén had lived in the apartment at North Biskopsgården and before that in an apartment in Backa. Jennie had been born at Östra Hospital. The father had been listed as unknown. Helene had taken care of her child on her own from the start.

She’d been in contact with the social services or, rather, the other way around. They had evaluated her and visited her home, but she was apparently deemed fit to look after her little daughter. No one that Winter spoke to remembered anything.

She had no job and she was not getting any support from the welfare office. It didn’t make any sense. She had an unblemished credit history. Not even someone who lives simply can manage that. Winter opened his eyes again. She had money coming in from somewhere. She had stated in her tax returns that she had a minor sum of money put by, but they didn’t find any accounts or safe-deposit boxes. They had more to do there.

There were 145 Anderséns in the Gothenburg telephone book, but none had thus far been in touch.

Helene had had a telephone installed three months before, and she wasn’t registered as having had one before that.

It was October now, and her service had started on August 10. She’d bought a telephone, but they didn’t as yet know where. A twenty-nine-year-old woman who may have gotten her first phone ever. Why did she get a phone? Why had she decided not to have one earlier?

Something had happened that caused her to need a phone, thought Winter. She needed to get in touch with someone, maybe quickly if necessary. Was she afraid? Had she bought it for protection? Had she been told to be reachable?

Seven days after her phone was hooked up, she was dead. She’d made two calls, both to phone booths. One was at Vågmästarplatsen, which she had dialed at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of August 14. The other booth was at the bus terminal at the Heden recreation grounds, which she’d called the following evening, August 15.

Helene had in turn received three calls, two immediately preceding the calls she’d placed herself and from the same phone booths. Someone had apparently been waiting there for her to call back. Why?

The third call came from a number that was registered to an apartment in the Majorna district. Someone had phoned at four thirty on the afternoon of August 16. The conversation had lasted one minute. The dialer was a woman named Maj Svedberg, and she had no recollection whatsoever of the call. August 16? Had she even been in town? Could it have been when she dialed a wrong number? A child had answered and then a woman, and it was a wrong number. Whom had she intended to call? The public dental service, actually, and if they wanted to check her story, she had the number for the dentist, but she didn’t know anything about this other number.

They checked the number for the dental office, and it was identical to Helene’s except for one number.

“Check up on her,” Winter had said to Möllerström.

The pile of Jennie’s drawings had become smaller, and Winter continued to go through them. He could see that some were more accomplished or more detailed. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with age. Perhaps sometimes the girl just grew tired of drawing.

There were recurring elements: boats and cars, faces in a window a few times. A forest or just a few trees. A road that was brown or sometimes black. Sun and rain, nearly always sun and rain. Always outside. Winter had yet to see a single drawing of an interior.

He held up a drawing depicting a house with a pointed roof and a Danish flag on top.

A Danish flag, thought Winter. White cross on a red background. The house stood in a field indicated by a few green lines. The house had walls that were white like the paper.

Over the next half hour he worked his way through the rest of the pile of drawings, and found another with a Danish flag.

Two drawings with a Danish flag.

More than twenty of a boat on water.

Three drawings of a car driven by a man with a black beard that grew straight out from his chin.

He laid the two Danish flag pictures next to each other on the desk and studied them, one at a time. He searched for the signature “jeni” and suddenly stiffened. The drawing on the left was signed “helene.” He looked for the signature on the other. It was in the lower right-hand corner: “helene” again. He swallowed and started to go through the piles in front of him. One of the drawings of the car was signed “helene.” You couldn’t tell it apart from the other two. Five of the drawings depicting boats were signed “helene” in the same childish scrawl as “jeni.” The motifs were the same, their execution seemingly identical.