She could see Halders getting to his feet. It had all gone as usual. Rape. Report. First interview. Request for legal documentation. Car to the women’s clinic.
This was real. Not just imagination.
Jeanette Bielke was being taken to the clinic: Aneta Djanali and Fredrik Halders drove to the park where it had happened.
“What do you think about the description?”
Halders shrugged.
“Big. Strong. Dark coat. No special smell. Armed with some kind of noose. Made strange sounds. Or said something incomprehensible.”
“Could be any man on the street,” Halders said.
“Do you think she’s reliable?”
“Yes.”
“I would have liked to ask her more.”
“You got what information you could, for now.”
Djanali looked out at the summer. People weren’t wearing much. Their faces were beaming, trying to outdo the sun. The sky was blue and cloudless. Everything was ice cream and lightweight clothing and an easy life. There was no headwind.
“Let’s hope it isn’t the beginning of something,” said Halders, looking at her. “You know what I mean.”
“Don’t say it.”
Halders thought about what Jeanette had said regarding the man’s appearance, insofar as she could see anything. The rapist. They’d have to wait for the tests, but he was sure they were dealing with rape.
They could never be sure about appearances. Getting a description was the hardest thing. Never put your trust in a description, he’d said to anybody who cared to listen. None of it is necessarily related to the facts. The same person could vary between five foot ten and six foot three in a witness’s eyes and memory. Everything could vary.
Last year they’d had a madman running round and knocking people down from behind, no obvious pattern, just that he knocked them down and stole their money. But he did have a habit of introducing himself from the side, that was the nearest to a pattern: some greeting or other to get his victim’s attention, then wham.
The victims all agreed on one thing: he’d reminded them of the hunch-back of Notre Dame—stocky, hunchbacked, bald, dragged one foot . . .
When they eventually caught up with him, in the act, he turned out to be six foot two with thick, curly hair, and he could have landed the job of Mr. Handsome in any soap opera you care to name.
It all depended on so much. What they saw. How dark it was. Where the light came from. Fear and terror. Most of all the terror.
He turned into the park and stopped the car. The uniforms weren’t there any more. The scene was roped off; two forensics officers were crawling on the ground. There was a bunch of kids hanging round the far barrier, whispering and watching. Some adults came past and stopped, then walked on.
“Found anything?” Halders shouted. The scene-of-crime boys looked up, then down again, without answering. Halders heard a short bark, and saw the dog and its handler.
“Found anything?” he said to the handler.
“Zack picked up something over there, but it melted away into the wind.”
“Or up a tree,” said Halders, looking up.
“Were you there when we caught that bastard the other year who tried to hide up a tree?” the dog handler asked.
“I heard about it.”
“Them trees are clean, now, anyway.”
“How did he get away, then?”
“Ran, I suppose. Or drove. You’d better ask forensics. But I doubt there’ll be any tracks. Everything’s so damn dry.”
Halders looked around. Djanali was watching the SOC team. The police dog was scrutinizing first Halders, then the SOC team. Halders looked around again, walked a few paces.
“Have you been here before?” he asked the dog handler.
“What do you mean? For another crime?”
“I’m not talking about your private life, Sören. Have you ever been called out here after a rape?”
“To this park, you mean?”
“Yes. And to this very spot.”
Halders was standing just outside the police enclosure: it looked out of place, as if it had been made by the kids who were sticking around to watch. The pond was to the right. It reflected pink from the flamingos standing on one leg by the water’s edge.
The SOC team was crawling around in some shrubbery.
Next to it were two trees. Two meters or so away. Maples? There was a passage between them, wide enough to get through. It was shady inside. A rock sticking out turned it into a hollow, almost a cave behind the trees. The forensic officers were moving around there now, on their way into the cave.
A perfect place to commit rape.
Good God! Halders thought. He could see it all now. It was
here.
The paved path was about ten meters away, but it might as well have been a hundred. A thousand. There was a minor road on the other side of the parking lot. A hedge between the cars and the park iself. The lighting in the park was a joke. He’d walked there hundreds of times at night, and the lighting was more of a hindrance than a help. They hadn’t improved it, in spite of what had happened here.
A perfect place. It was as if the shadow between the trees was lying in wait. He hadn’t caught on at first.
“This spot?” asked the dog handler. He looked around. “I don’t think so.” He looked at Halders. “What are you getting at?”
“It’s happened before,” Halders said.
“I don’t follow.”
“This is where it was.” Halders looked at his colleague. “Damn it, Sören, it’s the very same spot. The same
spot!
”
“What are you talking about?”
“Weren’t you based here in Gothenburg five years ago?”
“I came four years ago.”
“But you’ve heard about the Beatrice Wägner case, surely?”
The dog handler looked at Halders.
“Beatrice Wägner? That girl who was murdered?”
“Five years ago. She was raped too. Raped and murdered.”
“I know about it . . . course I do. I read about it at the time. We’d . . .”
“It was here,” Halders said.
“Here?”
“This is where it happened,” Halders said to Sören and Djanali, who had just joined them. “This is where Beatrice Wägner was found. This very spot. She was in that hollow,” he said, nodding toward where the SOC team was still combing the ground. “Lying between the trees. It’s like a cave in there.”
Raped, and strangled, he thought.
He noticed the dog following his gaze toward the cave and then back again. It jerked at its leash, then was calm again.
3
WINTER COULD FEEL THE TINY HAND GRIPPING HIS FINGER TIGHTLY.
Elsa gurgled a greeting. He kissed her behind her ear, she laughed, he blew gently on her neck, and she laughed again.
He still hadn’t gotten used to that laugh and that gurgle; they could be floating around in the apartment for ages. His daughter would soon be fifteen months old. Her sounds tore the silence from the walls like old wallpaper. Amazing that such a tiny body could make such a loud noise.
Angela came in from the kitchen and sat down in one of the armchairs, unbuttoned her checked blouse, and looked at Winter and Elsa on the blanket on the floor.
“Breakfast,” she said.
Winter blew behind Elsa’s ear.
“Time for breakfast,” Angela said.
Elsa laughed.
“She doesn’t seem hungry,” Winter said, looking at Angela.
“Bring her here and you’ll see. This is going to be the last time, though. I can’t go on breast-feeding her, for God’s sake.”
He carried the little girl over to Angela in the armchair. She seemed to weigh barely anything at all.
Winter saw the files lying on his desk when he entered his office. The sun had already warmed the room, and there was a smell of summer. Two more months, and then it would be some time before he saw this office again. A year. He was going to take a year’s leave, and who would he be the next time he stepped into this gloomy office where nearly all thoughts were painful to think?
Would he ever come back at all?
Who would he be then?
He went to the sink and drank a glass of water. He felt thoroughly rested. At an early stage Elsa had decided to sleep from 8:00 at night till 8:00 in the morning. He and Angela were very lucky.
Sometimes Angela would cry, at night. Her memories would come flooding back, but more and more rarely now. He hadn’t asked her what happened in that room in that apartment the day before he got there. Not at first, not directly. She used to talk about it, night after night, in mangled sentences. Now it had more or less stopped. She slept soundly for hours on end.
It wasn’t even eighteen months ago.
He sat down at his desk, opened the first of the files, and took out the documents and photographs. He held up one of the pictures. The rock. The trees. The lawn and the path. It was all very familiar in a . . . depressing sort of way, like an illness that recurs after several years. A cancerous tumor that has been cut away but continues to grow.
Still, Jeanette Bielke was still alive, and they were waiting for her test results.
He stood up, with the photograph in his hand, and opened the window. The sun was on the other side of the city. He could smell the light, almost weightless scents of summer. He thought of Elsa. There was a knock at the door, and he shouted, “Come in.” Halders was in the doorway. Winter gestured toward the visitor’s chair, but stayed by the window.
“It was completed intercourse,” Halders said. “I’ve just had the report. Purely technical, that is. But it is rape.”
“What else does it say?”
“That the girl is probably telling the truth.”
“Probably?”
Halders shrugged. “You know how it is.”
Winter didn’t reply. Halders looked at the files on the desk.
“You sent down for them, I see.”
“Yes.”
“Have you had time to read through them?”
“No. Only this photograph,” said Winter, holding it up.
Halders could also see a picture of Beatrice Wägner on one of the newspaper clippings by Winter’s elbow.
“Is it a coincidence?” Halders said.
“The place? Well . . . it’s not the first time somebody’s been attacked in Slottsskogan Park.”
“But not at that particular spot.”
“Not far away.”
“Never at that particular spot,” Halders said. “You know it. I know it.”
It’s true, Winter thought. He knew that part of the park. Since Beatrice Wägner’s murder he’d been back there regularly. Would stand there watching people milling around. Halders had done the same. They’d occasionally bumped into one another. You’re not among the suspects, Halders had muttered on one occasion.
They were looking for a face, a movement. An action. A voice. An object. A belt. A noose. A dog leash.
They always return to the scene of the crime. Every policeman knew that. Every one. Somehow or other, at some time or other, they always go back. They go back after ten years, or five. To carry on. Or just to be there, to breathe, to remember.
Just being there was the thing. If he was there and the man who’d done the deeds came down the path at that moment, he, Winter, would know,
really
know, and so it wouldn’t be a coincidence. It had nothing to do with luck. Nothing to do with chance. And at that very moment—when he was still holding the photograph in his hand and looking at Halders and the damp patch on his shirt under his left armpit—at that very moment he had the feeling that it really would happen. He would see the man and it would be as if a nightmare had turned into reality. It would happen.
“That bastard’s back,” Halders said.
Winter didn’t reply.
“Same modus operandi.” Halders ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. “Same spot.”
“We’d better talk to the girl again.”
“She’s going home this afternoon.”
“Then go and see her there. How were her parents?”
“Desperate.”
“Nothing funny?”
“Aneta had a look around, of course, while I was talking to the girl.” Halders’s left eye twitched slightly, as if he had a tic. “No. The old man had the shakes—clearly hung over—something like this isn’t exactly going to help him recover.”
Halders looked at Winter. “He’s back, Erik. How many did he manage last time? Three victims, one of which died?”
“Mmm.”
“Maybe we’d better talk to the other two girls again.”
“I’ve already done that. They don’t remember any more now than they did back then.” Halders stood up.
“Fredrik?”
“Yes?”
“I feel just the same as you do about this. I can’t forget Beatrice Wägner either.”
“No.”
“It’s not just because it’s on the unsolved list.”
“I understand,” Halders sat down again. “It’s the same with me.” He scratched his head. Winter could see a damp patch under Halders’s other armpit as well. “You can feel it all over the station. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“I’ll have a look at the old pattern,” said Winter, gesturing toward the documents on his desk.
“There’ll be another one,” Halders said. “The same again.”
“Take it easy now.”
“Yes, yes, OK. One rape at a time.”
The sound of sirens drifted in from the east. Somebody was shouting underneath Winter’s window. A car started. Halders ran his hand over his hair.
Winter suddenly made up his mind.
“Let’s go there. Now.”
Everybody was wearing shorts or lightweight skirts. It was over ninety degrees. There seemed to be an unusually high number of people in town, he thought—they ought to be down by the water.
“It’s sales time,” said Halders, pointing to the shopping center. “Summer sales, where the prices are a dream and buying is one long party.”
Winter nodded.