The Shadow Woman (41 page)

 

He had deliberated with himself and then driven to Frederikshavn. Before, he’d called straight to Michaela Poulsen and told her about the photo in the
Aalborgs Stiftstidende
.

“It must be possible to find out when it was taken,” Winter had said.

“Of course. I’ll contact the newspaper. And the photographer, if he’s still alive.”

“Would you please send me a good enlargement of it as quickly as possible? So we can continue working on it.”

“Of course,” she’d said again.

The wind grabbed at his hair. He was standing on deck, watching as Denmark grew smaller and disappeared. Dusk fell over the sea. It had stopped raining in international waters. Winter felt as if he had a fever, a heightened heart rate. They were halfway home. He went into the bar, which was full of glazed-eyed people who continued the drinking they’d started hours ago in Frederikshavn. A few of them were sitting in wheelchairs, which was convenient for anyone who really wanted to get tanked, he thought.

Mountains of bottles and cans took form on the tables. People’s contours seemed to dissolve, he thought, and become part of history in such a way that more and more of them now seemed to resemble some kind of medieval troupe of jesters or lepers.

The smoke smudged out the features of the bar guests still further. Winter went out again, to get enough fresh air to feel like smoking a Corps. The catamaran passed Vinga. Wild ducks flew black against the evening sky while the lighthouse swept cones of light across the water. He smoked and felt his pulse drop. They passed Arendal. The big North Sea ferries slammed against the Skandiahamnen docks, reminding Winter of the walls of high-rises around North Biskopsgården—only the satellite dishes were replaced by a thousand eyes peering up toward outer space.

 

The drawings glowed on the wall of his office when he switched on the desk lamp and the ceiling light. The Danish flag in the depictions had taken on new meaning.

The road still ran through forest.

A windmill moved its vanes.

The streetcars went somewhere.

Ringmar knocked on the open door and entered. “Welcome home.”

Winter turned around. “Thanks. How’s it going?”

“I should be asking you that.”

“How’d it go with the bus driver?”

“It could have been her.”

“I had an odd experience,” Winter said. “I saw a photograph in a newspaper from back then, in 1972, of someone who could be Helene, and all I could think about was
her
.” He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “The girl I saw was Jennie.”

“That’s not so strange,” Ringmar said.

“Don’t you see? Everything’s getting mixed up. Pretty soon I won’t know who’s who. Or else that’s just how it feels at the moment. Maybe I’m just tired.”

“You look pale. For Christ’s sake, Erik, go home and get some rest.”

 

Halders was drumming his fingers against the desktop. He hadn’t done all the work himself, but he was responsible.

The material lay neatly organized in translucent-gray plastic folders. He was the first to see it in its entirety: 124 owners of Fort Escorts with license plates that begin with the letter
H
.

They hadn’t arrested anyone. They hadn’t even seen anything out of the ordinary. One of the stolen cars had not been accounted for, but the owner had an alibi and a spotless record.

Not everyone had quite so spotless a record. One-eighth of those 124 people had been convicted of minor offenses and occasionally something a little more serious, but Halders had been a police officer long enough to be able to say whether that was a high or low number.

There was something else in the back of his head. It was one of the ex-felons, Bremer. Georg Bremer. The old man had once done time for burglary. Six months twenty years ago. Halders remembered his house out in the sticks. The road through the wilderness. The horses at the edge of the field. The airplanes coming in over Landvetter and Härryda, which sounded like lightning striking.

Christ, Halders thought. What was it? What was it I didn’t check? What was it I put off till tomorrow?

He flipped through the folders and read.

It was the repair shop.

Aneta had taken notes. He had written his report, but who had checked out the shop where Bremer left his car for repairs? Should he have done it himself ? No. Someone else had been assigned that task. Who was it? It wasn’t recorded here. It didn’t say the name of the repair shop either. Halders had written down the name. It was something generic, like Joe’s Car Repair or something. But the job wasn’t done. Or else it was done but hadn’t been entered. He checked his watch and called Möllerström, who answered on the third ring.

“It’s Fredrik. Can you help me with something?”

 

Halders sat with his interrogation transcript. Veine Carlberg had checked out the repair shop. Nothing strange about it. The time matched what Bremer claimed in his statement. It was a little odd that he had taken his rust bucket all the way in from the outback, and driven it across town, but the guy who owned the repair shop was an acquaintance.

Still, Halders was also acquainted with the guy who owned the repair shop. He’d brought him in for questioning once: Jonas Svensk. He remembered it, managed to reconstruct most of it with the help of his memory and the report in front of him. Svensk had a past he claimed to have put behind him. Halders hadn’t believed him.

Should he talk to Winter about Bremer and Svensk? Or should he check up on it himself a little more first?

He tried to think. They had leads going in different directions, and they had to pull back on one and focus more on something else. Right now it was the lead through the Billdal bus company. During the briefing this morning, Winter spoke about the house in Denmark and the connection or the link or whatever the hell you want to call it to that Andersen guy.

Halders thought about it. Bremer had a large plot. Aneta had thought of it as a vacation home.

ALONE IN HIS OFFICE ONCE AGAIN, WINTER SLOWLY MADE HIS
way through the preliminary investigation while he waited for Michaela Poulsen’s call.

The telephone rang, and the switchboard informed him the call was from Ålborg.

“I thought for a while that we’d bungled things even more than I’d thought, and I’ve turned out to be right,” she said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“The photographer is retired but living. It was the local bureau of the paper that took the photo—i.e., not a professional photographer. Anyway, I’ve spoken with him and he remembers the story about the land partitioning and all that. But he couldn’t remember the photograph itself. I went over there and showed him a copy of the newspaper, but he still couldn’t remember taking it, although he must have, he said.”

“When was it?” Winter asked.

“He didn’t know the exact day, but it must have been shortly before the article was published. The vote in the town council came just before it, and that was three days before the article went to print, so he must have taken the photo during those two or three days.”

“Does he have copies?”

“No. That’s where the next link in this chain comes in. Every afternoon he used to hand over his roll of film to the pig truck or some other farmers’ transport—sometimes to the intercity bus—and it would be developed at the main bureau in Ålborg, where the prints were made. Everything is filed away in the archives of the newspaper. They have it all in good order. I know because that’s where I’m calling from now.”

“Have you seen a print?”

“They made me a quick print, and I’ve got the negatives. There are several frames. I’ll take them back to the station and let the photographer down in forensics work on them. Once we have some good enlargements, I’ll give you a call.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ll let you know,” Poulsen said, and hung up.

 

“Jakobsson has disappeared,” Ringmar said. “His brother thinks he’s been the victim of a crime.”

“The man himself is a crime,” Halders said. “He’s probably holed up somewhere drinking himself into a stupor.”

“But he’s gone,” Winter said. “He went home the day before yesterday and now his brother has reported him missing.”

“What do we think about that?” Bergenhem said to no one in particular.

“We think the worst,” Ringmar said.

 

Halders stayed behind after the late-afternoon meeting. He’d said a few words to Winter beforehand.

“Let’s go into my office,” Winter now said.

Halders eyed the drawings in the office but said nothing about them. He rubbed his hand over his scalp as if to emphasize the difference between his own crew cut and Winter’s long hair. Winter stroked his hair back behind his ears.

“Have you had a chance to go through all the reports on the owners of the cars yet?” Halders asked.

“No. They’re lying here.” Winter nodded toward the desk piled high with binders and document stacks of varying sizes. In and out trays were a thing of the past.

“There’s one name...”

 

Georg Bremer. Winter read his rap sheet while Charlie Haden played a solo from the shadow beneath the window: the volume was on low and Haden’s bass was part of the office walls.

Bremer had done time for burglary and criminal damage and had behaved himself while serving out his sentence at Härlanda Prison. No conspicuous drug use. After his release, he disappeared from the world of cops and robbers. He owned a Ford Escort, but that was no crime. He was acquainted with one former biker, as he himself put it. His car may or may not have driven along Boråsleden on the night of the murder. Winter grabbed hold of the lamp and directed it toward his new shelf, where he’d placed the VHS cassette. The sphere of light was reflected in the TV screen.

He walked over to the shelf and pulled out the telephone book, flipping to the
B
section of the Hindås district. There was one Bremer, Georg.

He picked up the phone and sat there with his finger poised over the buttons. No. Better to wait until tomorrow. All he really wanted was to hear the guy’s voice. Perhaps determine whether this was yet another distraction that they didn’t have time for. And yet he knew he would drive out there the next morning.

 

“You look like you could do with some sleep,” Angela said.

“Give me a hug,” he said. “No, on second thought, a massage.”

“First I’ll give you a hug,” she said, and did so. They stood still for half a minute. “Now sit down.”

She began to knead his neck and shoulders.

Winter was silent and closed his eyes and felt her strong fists get his blood flowing and make him a little more supple.

She continued.

“I think that’s enough,” he said. “Now you can fetch my slippers.”

“I’m not your housewife,” she said. “Masseuse, yes. Housewife, no.”

“You wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he said.

“So we’re back there again,” she said.

“Angela.”

“No. I know that you came home from Denmark with a fresh batch of horrendous things on your mind and that you’re searching for that little girl and the murderer. All that, I know. I’m trying to stay out of the way.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t want to keep going on about it—you know that’s not what I want. But now it’s serious. It’s serious again,” she said, and her hands disappeared from his shoulders.

He’d remained seated while she spoke. Now he stood. She was still turned away.

“I’m going home now,” she said. “I want you to make up your mind. This can’t come as a surprise.”

She turned around, and he saw that her eyes were glistening.

“It’s always the wrong moment,” she said. “You’re tired. You have a lot of stuff to work out. But I also have a lot of stuff to work out. We have a lot of stuff to work out. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I don’t want to.”

She walked out into the hall, and Winter called her name but got no answer.

THE WIND BEAT AGAINST HER FACE AS SHE STOOD ON DECK.
The sun was low in the sky, a line on the edge of the earth. It was the final voyage. Suddenly the rain came, but she only noticed when she shifted her gaze from the day slipping down behind the horizon. There was a lightning flash, and then another, like her own flashes of memory that came just as suddenly and then left behind great gaps in her thoughts, as if she had surged out of a dream and woken up in another life. The shouts remained in her head like echoes.

 

Seek out evil in order to destroy it. There was a voice inside her. It came back and told her things. Told all!

The courtyard was in darkness. Behind the window stood the old lady, who lifted her hand like a bird raising its wing. She heard a noise from the swings.

The first few days she had paced in circles around the living room table. It was hot, but she didn’t open the windows. She had been in the basement and come back upstairs. She couldn’t be there.

 

The sun was here; then it was gone. Everything happened at the same time. I’m cold, Mommy. It’ll be better soon. It smelled of night and rain, and then it became easier to move around again.

 

She had sat with Mommy a long time. She had slept for a while in the backseat and then crawled up front. It was cold there, and Mommy started up the car and let it run for a while and then turned it off again. Mommy hadn’t answered when she had asked, and she asked again and Mommy’s voice was hard. Then she went quiet. He stood close to her. He had taken the scissors out of her hands. She had one question left and then no more. The cuckoo called. His hands held her. She heard the cuckoo and its wings beating against the wind. There was a scream from the sky.