The Shadow Woman (36 page)

It was becoming increasingly obvious that what had transpired in Ålborg played a role in the murder that had recently happened here, maybe even a decisive role, like a long shadow reaching from the past into the future, like a distant cry or a voice. Helene’s voice, or her mother’s, and in a ghastly repetition of history, also that of the girl, Jennie.

It was nearly twelve o’clock, and the sun shone into the room through the big windows. Winter had opened the balcony door to the sound of the sparse Sunday traffic. A flock of seagulls passed by engaged in eager discourse in the wind.

He studied the photograph in front of him. Brigitta Dellmar. The photo had been taken three weeks before she vanished. She disappeared on October 2, 1972, sometime just after five in the afternoon, and this photograph was taken in a studio in west Gothenburg three weeks before that, almost to a day. It was found in her apartment in Frölunda. Hers and Helene’s. Was there any particular reason why she’d had her picture taken at that time? She seemed to be looking past the lens at something standing next to it. Her gaze was lowered. Was she looking at her daughter? Was Helene standing there and consequently also in this photograph?

There was a clear likeness between mother and daughter. Their mouths were broad and their lips full. Their eyes were spaced widely apart. Their hair was blonde, their cheekbones high. They were beautiful women. They disappeared at the same point in their lives.

Jennie had inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s face and someone else’s hair. What sort of person could abandon their child? Where was Jennie’s father? Was he dead? Who was Helene’s father? One of the men killed during the robbery? Or did he disappear? The man found floating in Limfjorden?

Who was Helene’s father?

Hidden within that question was part of the solution to the riddle—that much Winter realized. Perhaps even the entire solution. The past cast its stark shadow over the future.

Brigitta wore a tight-fitting sweater typical of the time, but the photo cut off where the shoulders gave way to the arms. Her face was angled slightly downward in the photo, as if she couldn’t hold her head higher. It wasn’t a furtive look, but Winter got that impression. There was something evasive in her posture. She was alone in the photo. No props. The studio she was sitting in glowed with a harsh loneliness. The picture was black and white but there wouldn’t have been any color in it anyway, thought Winter. He didn’t think in color when he thought about Helene’s mother. When he saw Helene, he thought in red and in the ice blue that hovered mutely in the cold rooms of the morgue. When he imagined Jennie, he saw in black.

 

Winter biked across Heden and saw students playing football in the mud.

A fax was waiting for him in the basket in his office. His Danish colleagues were looking forward to his arrival. They may well have meant it. The unsolved robbery and killing of an officer had plagued the Ålborg police over the years.

“When are you going?”

“Tomorrow morning, with the catamaran.”

Ringmar poked in his coffee cup with a spoon.

“I have to go, Bertil. It feels like I can do more good over there than here right now.”

“I think you’re right. It’s just that, well, it’s as if you’re going over there to confirm that this thing happened, while we keep on working without finding the right lead.” Ringmar looked around. “We’re starting to shrink down to a skeleton crew. Even the search for the little girl is going cold. People are hanging their heads.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m not hanging my head. You’re not hanging your head.” Bergenhem entered the coffee room. “Lars isn’t hanging his head.”

WINTER DROVE ON BOARD AND PARKED IN THE SEACAT’S BELLY.
He locked his Mercedes and gripped his briefcase and wandered up to the passenger deck, standing at the stern as the catamaran put out to sea. The remains of the devil’s hour floated across the river from the south and disappeared among the run-down buildings by the northern bridge pylon.

He went inside and passed through the bar. The wrinkly ones were already in position, with their first beer of the day. Smoke wafted in clouds across their faces, which were slowly becoming smoothed out by the alcohol.

Winter sat in an armchair in a lone row of seats facing the windows. The catamaran accelerated when it reached Dana Fjord and he saw how the sun hit the cliffs with a sharp glare. The archipelago was all nuances of rock, which shone in the early morning sunlight and was transformed into steel and earth and granite. The sky pushed the thin clouds downward and outward.

Two boats met and their red sails slid into one another over a sea of congealed lead. The world was reflected through the window. These were northern waters, increasingly viscous as winter approached.

 

He took the E45 to Ålborg and turned off toward the city, following the tunnel underneath Limfjorden. It was years since he’d last been there and the city seemed bigger than he remembered it. The route in passed through docks where the warehouse buildings blocked the sun. The steam from the distillery turned the sky white, as if it had been chalked.

Winter parked outside the railway station and walked straight across John F. Kennedy Square to the Park Hotel. His room was small and infused with the sour smell of tobacco. It looked out onto a dark courtyard where a pile of boxes was stacked halfway up the wall and stood level with Winter’s room. There was a low humming from the ventilation system that clung to the wall outside his window like ivy made out of aluminum. The sound reminded Winter of the vibrations from the catamaran.

He took his bags and went back to the antique elevator and rode it down to reception.

“I want another room,” he said to the young clerk, who nodded as if it was to be expected for a guest to return like that five minutes later.

“We don’t have any more single rooms,” he said.

“Then give me a double.”

“That’ll cost—”

“I don’t care what it costs,” Winter said. “But I want one on the third floor, with a view.” He gestured through the lobby and out toward Kennedy Square.

The guy at reception studied something on the counter in front of him and then turned toward the board behind, where the keys hung from row upon row of hooks fixed on red felt. I crossed a time zone in the middle of the Kattegat and have landed in the nineteenth century, Winter thought, closing his eyes. When he opened them again the young man was holding out a key.

“You’re in luck,” he said. “Third floor, double room, facing the square.”

The room seemed clean. Winter went up to the window and through the thin curtains saw the square below and the state railway building on the other side of it. Two soldiers stood outside the station, as if guarding his car from the buses driving back and forth. Winter saw a man pass by holding a hot dog and he felt hungry. There was a bar in the station building, level with his Mercedes, so he pulled the door closed and left the key with a new man behind the counter. Outside the sun stood right above the square. It was still a warm October.

Winter ordered two red
pölser
sausages in a bun, with roasted onions, and a Carlsberg Hof. He stood at a bar table and started eating. He was alone inside the bar. It smelled of bacon and other fried food and malt.

Diagonally off to the right was the bus station, and in the adjacent parking lot stood four motorcycles, as if chained together in the middle of the entrance. The owners were standing next to them and talking. They wore black leather and blue denim and black boots with sharp heels—all men with black beards and hair as long as Winter’s. Two had a ponytail. All were drinking beer. The cars were forced to skirt around the campsite the biker gang had set up, but Winter didn’t hear or see any of the drivers honk their horns and tell them to get the hell out of the way. What he saw was just a natural part of city life. Perhaps this was a place where everyone lived happily side by side.

Winter finished off his lunch and went out to his car. Following directions from the guy at the hotel, he drove around the block and back onto Boulevarden from the right and parked on the one-way street alongside the hotel. He got out and locked the car and walked back across the square, past the station. The motorbikes had disappeared in a low rumble that could still be heard above the fjord. Winter followed Jyllandsgade for two blocks, and the police headquarters loomed up on the left like a futuristic palace of coal and silver.

Inside the police HQ everything was black leather and steel and marble floors. The walls of glass brought in the city.

He reported his arrival at a short counter to the right, where a uniformed officer asked him to have a seat in a steel chair and wait.

Instead he walked into a big airy public reception area where the counter was at least fifteen yards long. People were standing at pulpits, filling out forms. This place is full of space and light, Winter thought, conjuring in his mind the cramped hovel in Gothenburg that was supposed to accommodate all the citizenry in need of assistance from the police.

He went back to the big hall, and a woman in a black shirt and black jeans was standing at the counter, next to the uniformed officer. She was thin and had thick, slicked-back fair hair. Winter could see a pack of cigarettes sticking halfway out of her left breast pocket. She had blue eyes, which he could detect because the light was reflected in them from the glass walls. She seemed even younger than he was. It can’t be possible for someone in such an exposed position to be younger, Winter thought, as he took the hand that was held out to him.

“Welcome, Inspector Winter.”

“Thank you, Inspector . . . Poulsen?”

“That’s right. Michaela. So now we can dispense with the titles.”

She followed Winter’s gaze out through the glass wall. “Pretty sleek, huh? I’m not talking about those wrecked railcars out there. But this building. The police station.”

“I’m impressed,” Winter said.

“We’re all impressed,” Poulsen said. “We’re impressed by the audacity of our superiors. We’re short on computers, but we’ve sure got a beautiful building to not house them in.” She looked at Winter. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“No. But the last time was many years ago.”

THE HOMICIDE DEPARTMENT’S OFFICES CONSISTED OF LONG
corridors and small rooms—akin to Winter’s workplace in Gothenburg in that respect.

She showed him into a chamber at the far end of the corridor. Inside was a computer on a table and some binders on a desk. There was also a telephone. Through the window he could see the local Alcoholics Anonymous.

“If you Swedes can help us with this old case, we’ll be thrilled,” Michaela Poulsen said. “I wasn’t around back then, of course. But there are people here who haven’t forgotten. Jens Bendrup is one of them, and he’ll be happy to speak to you as soon as you like.”

“Thank you,” Winter said.

“No problem. It was a nasty business.”

Poulsen sat down on one of two austere chairs by the window. She waved her hand toward her hair, as if to push away bangs that weren’t there. The black-and-white border tartan jacket she’d popped into her office to grab took on another color in the glow from outside. Her eyes were just as blue when they met Winter’s.

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. “It would be great if you could fill me in on a few details.”

“Let’s bring in Jens first,” she said, and stood up and walked out.

From the desk Winter picked up a binder with a registration number on its spine. He counted five binders and also some brown A4 envelopes that might contain photographs or other materials.

When he looked up, Poulsen was back with Detective Jens Bendrup. Casually dressed in a shirt and sweater with jeans, he was a burly man, broad across the neck but shorter than Poulsen. Winter guessed he had only two or three years left to go before retirement, and he smelled of cigar smoke when Winter greeted him—along with a whiff of the two beers he’d had with lunch.

“Welcome to the scene of the crime,” Bendrup said.

“I’m grateful for the reception.”

“I need a smoke,” Bendrup said. “This is your room, so I guess it’s your call.”

Bendrup had pulled out a cigar that looked life threatening and Poulsen nodded. “The boss is usually restrictive,” Bendrup said, waving toward Poulsen with the match he’d just used to light his cigar. “Better do the same while you have the chance.”

Winter shook his head and let his Corps remain where they were in his jacket pocket. He would relish the secondhand smoke. Bendrup sat down.

“A young police officer sacrificed his life,” Bendrup said, and his face was no longer soft. “I was the one who had to deliver the news to his fiancée, and that’s something you never forget. She was pregnant as well.”

“What happened?” Winter asked.