The Shadow Woman (42 page)

HALDERS DROVE AND ANETA DJANALI SAT NEXT TO HIM. WIN
TER was in the back. They turned off the highway and made their way through the forest.

The clear-cut was in the process of growing back, until the next time. Old growth survived in narrow reserves. They came to yet another crossroad.

“That’s the last one,” Halders said, and turned to the left. After about half a mile, or a little less, the road opened out onto a slope and ended in front of the house, which was crooked but stable. Winter thought he recognized it. The garden consisted of the hillside in front, and behind the house Winter could see the forest and parts of a field. Now he heard the gloomy sound of hooves against the earth. Horses were running somewhere back there, perhaps startled by the sound of Halders’s Volvo. They’d parked next to Bremer’s Escort. It was covered in mud, hardly pearl white anymore beneath the crud, since it was being driven on forest roads in late October.

Winter couldn’t make out the license plate.

To the left of the house, ten yards away and an equal distance from the edge of the forest, stood a windmill.

It was yellow and the vanes weren’t moving. It was about four and a half feet high.

Halders knocked on the door, which had a window with a curtain. No one opened up.

They hadn’t called ahead.

“What is it?” The man had stepped out from behind the house. “You again.” He approached them and pointed. “The car’s standing right there, in case you’re wondering.” He looked at Aneta Djanali and Halders. “I recognize you.”

Winter shook his hand. Bremer was tall and his hand dry. His eyes looked past Winter. He was wearing rubber boots, and Winter saw that one of them had a gash above the foot. Winter knew that beneath the knitted cap on his head the sixty-nine-year-old was bald. His mustache was dark. He was skinny and wizened, as Aneta had said in the car on the way out.

“May we come in for a moment?” Winter asked. He looked up at the sky, low above the glade. “Looks like it’s starting to rain.”

“A little rain never hurt anybody,” Bremer said. “But sure, we can go inside.”

Aneta Djanali met Winter’s eyes as they stepped up onto the porch. The hall inside was dark. Bremer took off his boots, and the police took off their shoes and followed him into a room with windows facing the back of the house.

Winter looked out, and the horses were gone. He turned toward Bremer and took a step forward. “It’s about your car again,” he said. “And a few other things.”

“What about my car?”

“We’re talking to all the owners of this kind of car. To see if maybe they can remember anything else that might help us.”

“Help you with what?”

“Aren’t you aware that we’re investigating a murder?” Winter asked. “And a disappearance in connection with that murder?”

Bremer looked at Halders. “He mentioned something about it.”

“Is that all you’ve heard of it?” Winter asked.

“Maybe something on the radio or TV. I don’t know. I mind my own business.”

Winter made up his mind when he saw the horses emerge from the bushes. They were moving in perfect symmetry, floating above the high grass.

“Do you know Jonas Svensk?”

“Svensk? Well, he owns the repair shop where I leave my car when it’s acting up. Why do you ask?”

“We’re in the process of looking into any potential connections here,” Winter said, expressing himself as cryptically as he could.

“What connections? What’s my car got to do with it?”

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“You didn’t? You were talking about the auto repair shop.”

Winter took a breath. “I’d like you to accompany us back to the police station so we can discuss this further.”

“What’s this all about? If you think I’m using my car to move around stolen goods or something, you’re welcome to take a look.”

Winter didn’t answer.

“You think you can go around harassing people like me just as you please, huh? I’ve behaved myself ever since I got out. Ask anyone, you’ll see. Is it Svensk? He hasn’t done anything. Is it that shoot-out? Is that why you’re here?”

“We’d like you to come with us,” Winter said.

Bremer looked at Halders and Aneta Djanali as if they had the authority to reverse Winter’s decision. He took another step and stopped. It’s as if his body is shrinking, Winter thought. His skin is sinking inward.

“For how long?” Bremer asked, suddenly resigned to it.

Maybe he was resigned to it all along, thought Djanali.

Winter didn’t answer.

“Six hours,” Bremer said, but not to anyone in particular.

Six plus six, Djanali thought. If not more.

 

Ringmar was waiting. He entered Winter’s office when they’d left Bremer alone for a moment.

Winter held up his hands. “I’m just exercising my legal authority.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“The car’s still at the house, along with Aneta. I want you to send someone out there straightaway to pick it up and pull it apart.”

“I won’t ask if you think they rode in that car.”

“Now let’s look at the tape.” Winter inserted the cassette with the footage of the traffic on Boråsleden.

The car drove past and then came back. There and back.

“If that is him, then he shouldn’t be driving toward town but toward his house,” Ringmar said.

“He was visiting someone,” Winter said. “No. He drove to her apartment.”

“Whoever it is,” Ringmar said. “After all, they weren’t Bremer’s prints we found in her apartment.”

“It won’t be that easy,” Winter said. He froze the frame. He pressed play again and froze it again. “There’s still a guy sitting in there and it’s still a Ford.”

“Now we have a car to compare it to,” Ringmar said. “That could give us something. We’ll have to take apart this film as thoroughly as we’re taking apart the car.”

“I want everything on Svensk,” Winter said. “Everything.”

“I want everything about the biker brotherhoods,” Ringmar said. “Everything.”

“I want to know where Jakobsson is,” Winter said.

“Do you want us to search Bremer’s house?”

Winter shook his head.

“Too early?”

“We’ll wait. I want a search warrant first, and then we’ll tear the place apart.”

 

Michaela had been quick, as quick as the photographer and the copyist. The photos were flown to Copenhagen and on to Landvetter.

Winter closed his eyes, wanting to put off opening the envelope for half a minute. He took a drag and stubbed it out. Maybe for good. There was no room for smokers in a modern world.

He lit a fresh cigarillo before he stood and went over to the wall where the drawings hung.

Landvetter. As they were leaving Bremer’s, a Boeing jet had roared through the space barrier above Bremer’s house. Bremer hadn’t shown the slightest reaction.

He’d seen it in one of Jennie’s drawings—in her diary. It wasn’t hanging on the wall. He went to the desk where the drawings lay sorted into piles, and in the third one from the left, the one containing all kinds of vehicles, there were two drawings with a long cylindrical object floating above the forest and the house. It was a good drawing. Winter could almost hear the roar as the airplane cut through the rain and sunshine.

He sat back down in his chair and opened the envelope. There were five photos. The top one showed the two people level with the house, on their way in. The woman was holding the child by the hand. They were looking straight ahead. You couldn’t see their faces.

In the second, they had moved closer to the house. The child was turned toward the camera or in that direction. Perhaps she’d seen the photographer. It was Helene. You still couldn’t see the woman’s face.

The third photograph was taken closer to the two figures. The girl became more distinct. The woman was in profile. He wanted to put a name to that profile, but he wasn’t certain.

There was something else that made him go cold and still. Between the woman and the door was a window, and in that window he could discern a third figure. Winter shut his eyes and looked again, sharpened his gaze. The contours of the figure were still there, behind a thin curtain: a face and an upper body.

He studied the contours. Had they picked up on this in Denmark? Of course they had. Winter rummaged through the envelope and found the accompanying letter, a single sheet that had gotten stuck inside. He read it quickly. She had written about the figure in the window. “We don’t know who it is.”

The fourth photo was taken seconds later, when the woman and the child had reached the door. The figure in the window was gone. Winter saw the backs of the pair outside.

The fifth showed the house and was the most enlarged of the prints, rough and grainy. It must have been taken about a minute later, maybe, the local photojournalist having taken a break in his coverage of future land partitions. Then he had pressed the shutter release one last time. In the window a man had pulled aside the curtains in order to be able to see more clearly what was going on outside. He did it without thinking, exposing himself.

The man could have been a young Georg Bremer. He had a mustache, a cap pulled down over his brow.

The phone rang. It was his mother.

“Your father’s ill,” she said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” He slipped the photos back into the envelope and filed the accompanying letter in a folder inside the desk drawer. “What’s happened?”

“He was feeling a bit under the weather this afternoon and we asked Magnergår—he’s a doctor who lives in the area—to come over, and he thought that we ought to take him to the clinic in town.”

Winter tried to imagine Marbella but failed. He had only seen a map of the city on the Internet.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“That’s where I’m calling from right now. The doctors have examined him and done an EKG, but it didn’t show anything.”

“He’s probably just overexerted himself,” Winter said. On the golf course, he thought. He tried to think light thoughts, but the nausea was growing.

“He hasn’t overexerted himself,” his mother said. “We haven’t done anything out of the ordinary.”

“No.”

“I’m worried, Erik. If something happens, you have to come down.”

He didn’t answer. Someone rapped on the door. He called out, “Just a minute,” and listened again.

“What is it?” she said.

“Just somebody at the door.”

“Are you at the office? Well, I guess you must be since it’s only evening.”

“Yes.”

He heard footsteps walk away outside his door. She said something.

“Sorry, Mother. I didn’t hear what you said.”

“If something happens, you have to come down.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll just have to take it easy for a while, that’s all. No more spur-of-the-moment trips to Gibraltar.”

“You promise, Erik? You promise you’ll come if he gets worse? I spoke to Lotta, and she also thinks you should come. You both have to come.”

“I promise,” he said.

“Now you’ve promised. I’ll call later this evening. You can call too.” She told him the number to the clinic. “I’m going to be here the whole time.”

“Maybe you’d better come home soon.”

“I have to go now, Erik.”

He sat with the cell phone in his hand. There was a rapping at the door again. He called out, “Come in,” and Ringmar appeared in the doorway.

“His sister lives on Västergatan,” Ringmar said, and sat down. “That’s in Annedal.”

Winter checked his watch—nearly six o’clock. Georg Bremer had reluctantly mentioned his one relation, his sister, Greta. Nothing about anyone else. They could keep him for the rest of the evening, and shortly after midnight they’d have to let him go. It was pointless to go to the prosecutor now.

“Seriously, Erik.”

“Seriously?”

“We’ve got to let him go.”

“He can go at midnight. How’s it going with the car?”

“They’re going at it hammer and tongs.”

“I don’t want to speak to him anymore right now,” Winter said. “We let him go home, and the day after tomorrow we haul him back in again.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“No.”

“Want to know what I’ve been waiting to happen for the past month?”

“Tell me.”

“For the girl’s father to get in touch. Christ. His ex is dead and his daughter is missing. We’re searching, and the whole country knows about it. But he doesn’t get in touch.”

“Maybe he can’t.”

“I’ve thought about that, but I’m not sure. He may be dead, sure.”

“Or afraid.”

“Fear feels like a recurring theme in this investigation.”

“Or else he doesn’t know that he has a child.”

Ringmar changed position. “It’s not easy to trace her past,” he said. “It virtually doesn’t exist.”

“There you have it,” Winter said. He sat up straighter. “That’s what this is all about. Her past hadn’t existed, but then all of a sudden it does exist. It comes to her. It becomes part of what later transpires. It precipitates.” He breathed in deeply.

Ringmar was still.

“She comes to this city and her life comes to an end. Her life as an adult. First her understanding of life ended, and then life itself.”

A FEW MINUTES AFTER MIDNIGHT, BREMER DROVE HIS CAR
off into the night. He said nothing, and Winter didn’t accompany him to the garage. Beier came down to homicide in person. He’d remained at the station the whole time.

“There was a lot of junk in the car,” he said.

“So it’s impossible?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said there was a lot of junk in the car. In the trunk, on the floor, in the glove compartment, et cetera, et cetera.”