The Shadow Woman (46 page)

Ringmar didn’t answer.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Winter said, and went back to inform the others.

“I’ll go with you,” Halders said.

They climbed the steps. Every third one creaked. “Georg Bremer,” Winter called out. He held his gun in his hand. Steel glinted in Halders’s hand too, as they stood in the hallway at the top of the stairs, and suddenly a moonbeam shot between them and lit up their weapons. Winter followed the beam with his eyes, from right to left. It shone a few feet down the hall and in through a door a bit farther on and came to rest on two bare feet that floated in the air above the floor.

“Damn it!” Ringmar shouted, and set off down the hallway and in through the door ahead of the others. Winter ran and saw him lift the feet and legs and body in the darkness of the room.

“Where’s the light switch?” Halders yelled, fumbling at the door.

The room exploded in light from a bulb dangling from the ceiling. Winter blinked and forced his eyes to see. Ringmar held up the body hanging by a rope from a thick iron eyebolt that had been drilled into the ceiling next to the light fixture.

Halders tried to lift the rope over Georg Bremer’s blackened face, but he couldn’t. He took out his knife and cut it through, and together Winter and Ringmar laid the body down on the floor. Only now did Winter register the smells in the room. He saw that Halders sensed it too, his face set as if in plaster, his stubbled head a skull in the harsh light. Ringmar’s face was invisible, bent over the body, until he glanced up at Winter and pointed. Winter looked and saw the A4 sheet of paper that Bremer had fastened with pins through his shirt and into the skin of his chest. One of the pins had come off when they’d lowered the corpse, and the sheet of paper rested loosely against the body. Winter had to tilt his head in order to read what was written in capital letters with black marker: “I KILLED THE CHILD. GOD HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL.” He read it twice without really understanding. Then he heard Ringmar’s high-pitched wheezing. He heard Halders’s stomach revolt onto the threshold of the room. He read it again and closed his eyes. Voices sounded from the ground floor below. He saw figures in the darkness outside the room. He saw Aneta Djanali lean over Halders, who was sprawled across the threshold with his head out in the hallway. He heard Ringmar speak to someone about something. He heard the words a second time: “Send down more units and machines. We have to dig. We have to dig up this place.”

THE MACHINES ROARED AT ÖDEGÅRD. THEY FOUND THE CLOTHES
beneath the concrete floor in the basement. Everyone tried to prepare themselves, mentally and otherwise.

When he drove between the cabin and the city, it was as if the world had lost all depth and become a shallow shroud of fog between life and death. Ödegård was death and the other was life. You could just make out the lights of the city, ten miles off through the drizzle of the gray morning, like urine on dirty snow.

He went upstairs to Beier once he’d read the message on his desk. It was the last time.

Winter drove home and parked the car in the garage. He walked over the hill and rang the doorbell. Nobody opened. It was like last time. He pressed it again, and the door clicked and he saw her eyes glimmering inside, down low. He hadn’t heard the wheelchair.

“You again,” she said.

“You’ll have to let me in this time.”

“Why should I do that?”

“It’s over now, Brigitta.”

 

“That makes it a bit less conclusive,” Beier had said.

“But it’s enough, isn’t it?” Winter had asked.

“Yes. Otherwise the test wouldn’t be so expensive and take so much time.”

“How many have they done?”

“Don’t ask me. Come back when they’ve set up a database. That could happen this year, by the way.”

She rolled ahead of him into the room that shook from the streetcars outside. It wasn’t a room to live in. Maybe she doesn’t, Winter thought. Live. She lives, but hardly a life.

“What was it you called me?”

“Your real name. Brigitta.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I said it’s over now. You don’t need to feel afraid anymore.”

She didn’t answer. Her face bore a faint shadow from the day.

“Do you hear me, Brigitta?”

“Why are you calling me that?”

“That’s your name.”

“I mean, why are you suddenly calling me Brigitta? What makes you think that—”

“I don’t just think it,” Winter said. “I know.”

“How?”

“It’s not the falsified documents identifying you as Greta Bremer,” he said. “They’re excellent forgeries.”

She nodded. He thought it looked as if she nodded.

“And your appearance. You couldn’t possibly be the fifty-five-year-old Brigitta Dellmar.”

“There, you see? I can barely move, after all.”

“I wanted to believe that you were Brigitta,” Winter said. “But it felt impossible. And I found nothing to support that theory.”

She now turned her face toward him for the first time.

“Well? How do you know then?”

Winter took a step closer and came up next to her in the wheelchair. He slowly reached out and plucked something from the pillow behind her back.

“This,” he said, and held up a strand of hair that may have been visible in the light of the window.

“What is that? My hair?”

“A strand of your hair,” Winter said. “Ever heard of DNA?”

“No.”

“You’ve never heard of DNA?”

“Sure.”

Winter let the strand of hair drop from his hand and sat down in one of the armchairs.

“You took a strand of hair the first time you were here,” she said. “You stood behind me while I was sitting here.”

“Yes. I saw an opportunity.”

“This damned wheelchair.”

“You are Brigitta Dellmar?”

“You already said I am.”

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Yes.”

She rubbed her deformed legs.

“I am Brigitta Dellmar,” she said. “I am Brigitta Dellmar, but that doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“And Georg Bremer isn’t your brother.”

“He isn’t my brother.”

“Why did he tell us that you were his sister?”

“He thought that he could scare me. And I’ve passed for his sister all these years, without actually being it. I’ve had to play that role. It was their decision.” She looked straight at Winter. “But he couldn’t scare me.”

The telephone rang, and she lifted the receiver on the third ring and said yes and listened. She said, “Wait,” and turned to Winter. “Is this going to take long?”

Winter didn’t answer that insane question.

“I’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up.

“You called Bremer’s house two days ago,” Winter said.

“How do you know it was me?”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was me. I called him after he’d returned from the police, the last time.”

“Didn’t you realize that we’d see who had called him?”

“Maybe.”

“Why did you call him?”

“It was time for him to die. He had lived for too long. He killed my baby,” she said, and her face cracked in front of him. She slumped to the side in her wheelchair and lay as if dead, with her ruined visage facing downward. She turned a hundred years old in front of Winter. She said something, but it was muffled by the fabric and stuffing.

She sat up again, and Winter saw the tears smeared across her face.

“I told him that he had killed my child. That I knew. He didn’t know I knew,” she said, and now she cried out, a soft wail that came from deep within and intensified. “He didn’t know
that it was all my fault
.” She fell silent and looked at Winter.

I can only wait, he thought.

She sat with her chin against her chest, then raised her head again.

“I told him that he had killed his own child.
I said that!
”

Winter was silent. A streetcar passed by outside without sound. The clock on the wall had stopped.

“I told him that he had killed his own child, that Helene was his child.” She looked straight at Winter. “There is nothing more heinous than killing another human being. What does it mean, then, to kill your own child?”

“You told him that Helene was his daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Was she? Was it true?”

“No.”

“But you said it to him?”

“I wanted him to suffer for what he had done. He hadn’t suffered. He doesn’t know what suffering is. He doesn’t know. He didn’t know.”

“What do you mean when you say that it’s all your fault?”

“She was my girl,” Brigitta Dellmar said now, lost in another time. “Helene was my girl. She wasn’t like anyone else. We were never like anyone else.”

“She is your girl,” Winter said.

“She’s had it so tough.” Brigitta Dellmar suddenly reached out and grabbed hold of Winter’s hands with hers. “She’s suffered, and it’s been all my fault, and in the end I couldn’t stop myself from telling her. I told her.”

“What did you tell her? That you were her mother?”

“What? That I...? She knew I was her mother. She knew that I was her mother.”

Winter felt her fingers grasp at his. Her grip was hot and cold, and he could feel her pulse.

“When did she find out?” Winter leaned forward. “When did she findo out ?”

“She’s always known. She’s always . . . Ever since she was a little girl.”

“But she was a foster child for many years,” Winter said. “She was alone when she came back here.”

“She knew,” Brigitta Dellmar said. “Inside she knew. When she came back here and was a big girl she found out again.”

Winter asked, and she told him everything. She had been wounded. They had kept her hidden, and then she had kept herself hidden away from the world for such a long time that she had ceased to exist. She didn’t know how many years. They had let her keep some of the money and created a new identity for her and she had returned to Sweden, to her so-called brother. Ha-ha!

When the girl tried to make a life of her own, and bore a child, she was there. Suddenly she was there.

“Who is Jennie’s father?” Winter asked.

“Nobody knows.”

“Not even you?”

“It was as if she wanted me to be the last to know.”

“Why?”

She shrugged her shoulders. Winter’s breathing now started to return. The hairs on the back of his neck were damp with sweat.

“It was all my fault. I contacted her again. She had been having a difficult time connecting with other people, and now it became impossible. She turned in on herself more and more.”

“How often did you see each other?”

“Just occasionally. I helped her to get her memory back, and that was the death of her.”

“Excuse me?”

“Her memory. It caused her death.”

“How do you mean?”

“I told her things she didn’t know anymore. And things she never knew and yet thought a lot about. What happened.”

Winter nodded.

“Bremer murdered her father. He carried it out.”

“Her father?”

“Kim. My Kim.”

“Kim Andersen? You mean Kim Andersen? The one who was also known as Kim Møller?”

“Bremer murdered him.”

“You told Helene that?”

“I told her everything. I told her everything. And she went to see him. I knew where he was. She made several trips down there. In the end she knew enough that she told him. But he thought she was lying. He was sure that he was her father. I was afraid, terribly afraid. Helene seemed to be beside herself with fear when she found out what had happened to her father, Kim. That Bremer had murdered him. What had happened to her...” Brigitta Dellmar dropped her head forward. She seemed exhausted from having spoken for so long. “I wanted my money too, and it scared me, but I needed . . . Helene needed . . . We had a right to our money. And Jennie too.”

Winter breathed harder, steeled himself.

“Where’s Jennie?”

She looked at him, past him. Her gaze had melted away. “He could murder again. He did it.”

“He did it? He murdered Jennie?” Winter’s mouth was so damn dry he couldn’t hear whether he had uttered the words.

“He could do it again,” Brigitta Dellmar said. “He was crazy. He killed Oskar. Poor Oskar. That was also my fault. He must have done it.”

“Oskar? Oskar Jakobsson? Bremer killed Jakobsson?”

Winter couldn’t tell how much of her was actually there in the room with him. She had started to move her head back and forth.

“Did Bremer kill Jakobsson?” Winter repeated.

“He must have. Oskar was still a threat. Just like Helene. Helene got in touch with Bremer, but I’m not sure exactly when. He must have regretted that he hadn’t—”