The Shadow Woman (43 page)

“Uh-huh.”

“There were cigarette butts in the ashtrays, and there was also a butt wedged deep underneath the seat struts, and I wonder what it was doing there.”

“Say that again?”

“A small cigarette butt was stuck between the carpeting on the floor and the base of the seat strut, and it took some time to find it. You need professionals to find stuff like that.”

“You mean it was hidden there?”

“Maybe. It’s mostly filter. You don’t know which brand Helene Andersén smoked, do you?”

“No. So it could be hers?”

“I’m just trying to be optimistic here,” Beier said. Anyway, we found it and now it’s on its way over to the National Center for Forensic Science.”

“Jesus Christ,” Winter said. “It’ll take months for them to do a DNA analysis.”

“You want to do it yourself ?”

“We have to get top priority on this one. You’re well respected down in Linköping, Göran.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Beier said. “I am susceptible to flattery. But as you know, you normally have to wait in line.”

“We have something to compare it to, for Christ’s sake,” Winter said. “Tell them that. This isn’t a blind analysis. We don’t need to sit and wait for a prosecutor to issue a warrant for a DNA sample.”

We’ve got a body, he thought. We’ve had it for a long time now.

 

Winter went back to his room, sat down. Another thought in his head had grown apace with his fatigue that evening. Lately he hadn’t had much time to wonder why Helene had been left where they’d found her. Why in the ditch next to the lake? The dump site was far away from Helene’s apartment. It also lay far away from Bremer’s house. And now Bremer was a suspect. Winter closed his eyes and thought about the dump site, far away from Helene’s house and far from Brem—

He opened his eyes, got up, and left the room. Down the corridor in the situation room, he stood in front of the big map of Greater Gothenburg on the wall. He used a sticker to mark the approximate location of Helene’s apartment in North Biskopsgården. Then he looked eastward on the map and found Ödegård—Bremer’s house. He marked it.

He tagged the dump site by Big Delsjö Lake.

He measured the distance from Biskopsgården to the dump site. He then measured the distance from Ödegård to the same place.

As the crow flies, the distances were exactly the same.

 

Winter yielded to the streetcar on Västergatan and walked south between buildings that obscured each other. It was nine o’clock. At the front entrance he punched in the code he’d been given yesterday. The heavy door clicked, and he walked into the stairwell and up to the second floor. The mail slot said “Greta Bremer.” He rang the bell and waited. Steps sounded from inside, and the door was opened cautiously. All he saw was a shadow.

“Yes?”

“My name is Erik Winter. Inspector with the Gothenburg Police Department. Homicide squad. I called yesterday.”

“It’s him,” a voice said inside. “The one who was supposed to be coming.”

The door opened. The woman may have been fifty or somewhat younger. She was wearing an apron. Her hair was hidden beneath a scarf, and in her hand she was holding a little brush that might have been intended for clothes.

She backed up, and Winter stepped through the doorway. Three yards in sat a woman in a wheelchair. In the half darkness Winter couldn’t make out the features of her face. Her hair seemed long. The apartment smelled of the street outside. They’ve just aired it out, Winter thought hastily.

“Well, come in, then,” the voice in the wheelchair said. The woman gripped the wheels with an experienced hand and rolled backward.

Winter followed her into a living room, where the plant detritus on the floor attested to the fact that the room had indeed just been aired out. The windows opened inward. The woman who had opened the door for Winter excused herself.

“That’s my home helper,” Greta Bremer said. “When you can barely move, you can’t manage without a home helper.”

Winter could see her face now, or parts of it. She wore dark glasses that were more brown than black. He could just make out her eyes, but that was it. Her hair was gray and a little tousled. Her skin was thin and delicate, as if made up of cracks that had healed irregularly over a long period of time. Winter guessed that she was seventy, maybe older, but the illness she suffered from may have added many extra years to her face. He still didn’t know her age.

“So you’re here about my brother,” she said without looking at Winter. “Have a seat first.” She hadn’t yet turned her face toward him. She behaved as if she were blind, and Winter wondered if maybe she was. He didn’t want to ask. She would tell him. “You want to ask me questions about my brother. I doubt I can answer a single one of them.”

“I would like—”

“We haven’t seen each other in many years.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” She turned her face toward Winter, but he still couldn’t see her eyes. “How should I put it? We have nothing to say to each other. It’s best not to meet up when you have nothing to say.”

Her voice was impassive, which made it even more awful, Winter thought. There was no bitterness, only a voice that could just as well have come from the wall as from a living person.

“What happened?”

“Do I have to tell you that? It has nothing to do with what you’ve come here for.” Her profile was lit up by the window. “Why are you here, Inspector?”

“I mentioned a bit about it on the telephone.”

He explained a little more now—told her about the few leads they had and felt how tenuous it all sounded.

“I have nothing to say about all that,” she said. “I know nothing about him.”

“When did you last see each other?”

She was silent, but Winter couldn’t tell whether she was considering his question.

He repeated it.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“Is it more than ten years ago?”

“I don’t know.”

Winter glanced toward the entrance hall, where the home helper wasn’t quick enough pulling her head back into the shadows. She’s curious, thought Winter. I would likely have done the same.

“He’s been in prison,” Greta Bremer said. “But of course you know that.”

Winter nodded.

“Must you come here asking questions I can’t answer? Aren’t there any computer lists you can ask today? Don’t you have files?”

“We have files,” Winter said. This conversation is becoming increasingly bizarre, he thought to himself. She doesn’t want to say anything more, or else she can’t.

“I haven’t seen him in many years and I thank God for that,” she now said. She hadn’t moved.

“Have you visited his house?” Winter asked.

“Yes. But, like I said, that was a very long time ago.”

“When was it?”

“There’s no point in your asking. Ask the archives.”

Winter got up and walked closer, but Greta Bremer remained in the same position. He touched the wheelchair cautiously. “Is this one of the newer models?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I noticed that you had no trouble maneuvering it on your own.”

“It’s easier than having someone else push it. Try it out yourself and you’ll see how heavy it is to walk behind.”

Winter stood behind the chair and released a brake. Her hair moved below him. There were strands of it on the fabric and on the thin, broad pillow she had to support her back.

“Try pushing it around a little,” she said.

Winter rolled it back and then two yards forward into the room.

“Heavy, isn’t it?”

“Very,” he said.

“You can put me in the hall,” she said. “I assume you’re going to leave now.”

When he left, he saw the woman from the home-help service standing in the kitchen with her back to him, bent over the sink.

 

Busy on the phone, Ringmar waved to the chair in front of his desk. Winter waited, and the conversation came to a close.

“As far as we’ve been able to determine, they are brother and sister,” Ringmar said. “The documentation checks out. She’s sixty-six years old. Too old to be a suspect.”

“Sibling love,” Winter said.

“What? Yeah, well. There are many fates,” Ringmar said. “Must have been an odd conversation you had.”

“She seemed very distant.” Winter held up the copy of the slip of paper they’d found in the dress in Helene’s basement storage room. “But this is what I came in for. If I’ve read correctly, this was found on Helene when she was brought into Sahlgrenska Hospital?”

“Yes. Meticulous beyond the call of duty, they took it and put it in an envelope with her other possessions, which consisted of little more than a pair of pants, a shirt, and a dress.”

“And she’s had it with her throughout her life.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t let go of it, as you can see. I have it with me, here in my hand. And there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking about this code—but let’s leave that for a moment. I’ve also looked at these lines that might just be some kind of map.” Winter leaned forward and showed Ringmar.

“After we drove out to Bremer’s, I studied the big map in the situation room and compared it to the lines here on this one. You see? If you turn off at Landvetter township and drive parallel to the highway—on the old road—and turn left where we turned left, and assuming that the crossroads in the forest looked the same back then as they do now, then I’ll be damned if it doesn’t match up with Bremer’s house. It’s even marked, there in the upper-left corner, after the last cross.”

“And you’ve compared it to the map?”

“Carefully. I’ll show you later so you can see for yourself.”

“Well. I don’t know what to say.”

“You’d like to say that I have an active imagination. But that comes in handy sometimes.”

Winter considered the slip of paper again. “I don’t know what to say either. But it all tallies up. The
L
would stand for Landvetter and the
H
for Härryda.”

“And the
C
for
cabin
,” Ringmar said.

“Maybe.”

“A place to meet up again? Wouldn’t verbal instructions have sufficed?”

“If you speak the same language,” Winter said. “This was probably meant to be destroyed afterward.”

“But it didn’t turn out that way.”

“No. Helene’s fingerprints as a child are on it. That’s conclusive.”

“Jesus Christ.” Ringmar looked at the letters and the numbers.

“But what about the rest?”

“I don’t know. It could be the number of people, sums, dep—”

“What is it?” Ringmar asked.

“I was thinking—that 23 followed by a question mark. Could that be a departure time? The departure time for a ferry, for example?”

“They couldn’t have been stupid enough to think they could just drive onto the ferry after committing one of Denmark’s biggest bank heists ever?”

“No. But maybe someone else was going to take it. Someone who wasn’t along for the robbery or who wasn’t counting on being recognized. Can you check with the Stena Line to see if there were ferries leaving from Frederikshavn at around 2300 back then?”

 

A new enlargement arrived from Denmark later that afternoon. The figure in the window was a man who looked like he could have been a young Georg Bremer. It would never be enough to convince a prosecutor, much less to stand up in a court of law. But a court had nevertheless given the go-ahead. Winter got the news when Michaela Poulsen called.

“It was the enlargements that did it,” she said. “We’re going in this afternoon. There’s a guy here from the National Center of Forensic Services at the moment, so we won’t need to send things over there for analysis. If we find something, that is.”

“There could be several layers of wallpaper,” Winter said.

“The NCFS guy just shook his head. Stuff like that only makes you more determined as an investigator, right?”

 

Halders came running in, out of breath. It was like a confirmation. It was a confirmation.

“Let’s bring him in again,” Winter said.

GEORG BREMER SAT BENEATH THE INTERROGATION LAMP WITH
his head bowed over the table. He didn’t want to have a lawyer present. He hadn’t said a word since he’d been taken back into custody. Winter had decided to conduct the interrogation himself. Cohen had agreed. Gabriel Cohen wasn’t territorial like that.