Winter was driven to the Bielkes’ house because Irma Bielke had asked to see him—only him, nobody else would do. It was just as hot as before the thunderstorm. He played Halders’s Julie Miller CD, just slipped it in, smelled the sea air after two kilometers, and heard a scratchy but clear voice, like low-grade sandpaper.
She was waiting on the familiar verandah. Winter held out his left hand for her to shake in greeting.
“What happened?” she asked, and broke down before he had chance to answer.
“How long is this going to go on for?” she asked ten minutes later. They were sitting on the tropical-looking furniture at the far end of the verandah.
What? Winter thought. Tell me what.
She looked at him. There were lots of tears still to come.
“I went . . . I went to see Jeanette today.” Tears burst forth. “For God’s sake.” She looked at Winter. “Why wasn’t I here?”
“Where were you?”
“Out . . . driving around.” She blew her nose and put the handkerchief in a pocket in her calf-length skirt. “I’ve been out driving around a lot recently.”
Winter allowed it to seep away, down through the garden that would never be the same again for this family.
“We’re getting divorced,” she said out of the blue.
Winter waited. More was to come.
“I’ve spoken to a real estate agent. About the house.” She turned to Winter. “Would you want to stay here?”
“What does your husband say?”
“Eh.” She said it in a neutral tone, no exclamation mark.
“You visited him yesterday, didn’t you?”
“That’s why I wanted to . . . to talk to you.” She took out her handkerchief again and carefully blew her nose. Winter didn’t move, and she looked at him as if she couldn’t see him sitting on the bamboo chair with the flowery cushions. “What should I do?” she said. “It’s so hopeless. So awful. What should I do?”
“Tell me about it.”
She said nothing, seemed to have forgotten.
“
Fru
Bielke? Irma?”
“Mattias is Kurt’s son,” she said, staring straight ahead.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Mattias. Jeanette’s boyfriend. Or ex. He’s Kurt’s son from another relationship.”
Winter’s mind was racing. Was Irma Bielke just as sick as her husband?
“You’re telling me that Mattias is Kurt Bielke’s son?” Winter asked.
“Everybody knew except me,” she said.
“Everybody knew?”
“He told Mattias when he found out that . . . that he and Jeanette were seeing each other. They were seeing each other . . . long before we knew anything about it. And then . . . then he told her. Jeanette.”
“When?”
She shrugged.
“Just before she told him. It must have been,” she said.
“She? Who’s
she?
The ‘she’ who told Kurt. Mattias’s mother. Who’s she?”
“No, I mean that Jeanette told Mattias.”
“But surely your husband had already told him by then?”
She looked Winter in the eye.
“Neither of them believed it,” she said.
“What’s the situation now, then?” he asked.
“Apparently he could prove it,” she said.
“How?”
“I don’t know.” She looked Winter in the eye again. “You’d better ask him.”
Winter heard a lawn mower starting up. He heard a helicopter and looked up to see it flying westward, out to sea. He tried to catch her eye again.
“When did he tell you?”
“He hasn’t told me,” she said, lifting up a book lying on the table. Underneath it was a handwritten letter that had been folded then smoothed out again, thousands of times.
“Hasn’t told you?” said Winter, looking at the letter.
“I took this with me from your police station yesterday,” she said. “It’s from Kurt, and I smuggled it out.” She looked at Winter. “He said I shouldn’t show it to anybody.”
“Go on.”
“He knew full well that I would.”
“Why . . . now?” Winter leaned forward. “Why tell you now?”
“Haven’t you noticed what he’s been like since he heard about . . . about Jeanette? When he heard about her attempted suicide?”
We’ve been trying to exploit it, Winter thought. Now we’ve succeeded, it seems, just a little bit. Everything’s collapsing for the Bielke family, and we’re exploiting it.
“Do you know where Mattias is now?” Winter asked. She didn’t reply, seemed to be gazing into other worlds that she hoped could mitigate the disaster her life was turning out to be. “Irma. Where’s Mattias? It’s extremely important that we find him.”
“He’s where she is.”
“What . . . what did you say?”
“He’s done what she did. He’s done the same as my little Jeanette diiid . . .” she screamed, sobbed, her head on her knees, bared as her skirt worked its way up.”
“Do you
know
that?” Winter asked, leaning over her, trying to help, holding her shoulders.
“What else could he have done? How could he li . . . live with that . . .”
“Jeanette isn’t dead,” said Winter.
She said nothing. Then mumbled something he couldn’t hear.
“I couldn’t hear what you said.”
“My little girl,” she said.
“I have to ask you,” said Winter, “if you know what your husband has done.”
“What has he done?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t want to live with that man any more, never again, but I can’t believe that. That he killed anybody. He might have gone to some porno club or whatever it was, but not the rest of it.” She shook her head. “But it’s enough for me even so.” She shook her head again. “Jeanette and I are going to move.”
“May I read the letter?” Winter asked.
“It’s there.”
He picked it up and read it, handwriting that flew over the page like black seagulls. It said no more than she’d told him.
Could it all be lunatic fantasies?
“Who’s the mother?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. Winter repeated the question.
“I told you, he hasn’t told me anything.” She looked up. “He kept that secret between him and her all these years, and I don’t know who she is.
I don’t want to know.
I could . . . I could . . . ,” but she let it drop without explaining what she could do to the woman who had shared her husband all those years ago.
Winter needed to get back to the police station, to Kurt Bielke, before he sank into eternal silence.
He took out the photograph from Angelika’s graduation party. Irma Bielke looked away.
“You must look,” said Winter.
She looked at the woman’s profile. Winter could see the relief in her face. Note how important it has been over the whole span of our evolutionary history to be able to recognize other individuals and to read intentions and emotions in their faces, he thought.
“I’ve never seen her before,” said Irma Bielke, turning to Winter. “I don’t know her. Who is she?”
“I don’t know. So far, it’s just a face we’ve got. We don’t yet know where it fits in.”
“There’s something I’ve forgotten all about,” she said suddenly. “Good Lord. That was really
why.
”
“Why what?”
“Why I wanted to talk to you. Or why I wanted to meet you.”
Is there more? he thought. The floodgates are evidently not yet completely open.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thank you. You saved her life. OK, I know she’s not yet out of danger; but she’s still alive, and she’s going to live. I’ll make sure that she lives.”
Winter didn’t know what to say. She reached out and put her hand on his right shoulder. He gave a start.
“You’re a good man.”
A good man in the right place. He could feel the pain in his elbow. It had started again, at this very moment. Time for another Voltaren.
She dried her eyes, blew her nose, stood up. Something was over. Over and out, but there was hope there. He could see it. There would be something else after hell, something cooler and stronger.
“You must have something to drink before you go. And your police officer waiting outside as well.”
His mobile rang on the way back. His elbow was aching something awful, even though he used his other hand to answer the phone.
“I’ve managed to produce a few more words,” said Yngvesson. “The same voice, more words.”
“What words?” Winter asked.
“You’ll have to come here and listen. I’ve gotten about as far as I can go.”
“I’m on my way.”
He hung up and found himself having to squint as the sun suddenly shone straight into his eyes. One more hour, maybe two. One day. He could see Halders’s damned face in his mind’s eye. There was no other face. I’ll be seeing you.
37
THE APB ON
SAMIC
HAD GONE OUT SEVERAL DAYS AGO. THE
HEADLINES
on the news placards filled all the available space, black on yellow, like dark clouds obscuring the sun. There were reporters everywhere. Winter tried to ignore the media attention as something that didn’t affect him, had nothing to do with him, with
his
world. He wanted to think his way into a world that was bright and full of summer, evenings spent in cafés where the buzz of activity increased then declined as darkness set in. Playful dips in the sea with salt left in your eyebrows afterward on the rocks when the waves had dried on your body. All that kind of thing.
A group of reporters was waiting in the newly renovated foyer. Notebooks and pens and large and small cameras. Winter walked straight past them staring fixedly ahead. It was like a movie, only worse.
Yngvesson’s tape was spinning around like the course of time. Winter remained standing. There was a scraping noise in the loudspeakers. Yngvesson had added an extra pair to amplify the roaring. He looked tired, or worse.
“Here it comes,” he said.
Winter was now able to make out words from what had previously been an atonal cacophony:
“I xkxkbl before! Before! Xblbsff have toglcxbl before! Before! Aaiii!”
Yngvesson stopped the tape.
“Is that all?” asked Winter. He could feel something in the back of his head. Something inside.
“All? It’s quite a lot, I would think.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Winter. “I was just asking if there’s any more.”
“No.”
“Play it again.”
Winter listened.
“Before! Before! Aaiii!”
“Before,” said Yngvesson. “He’s said something to her before.”
“Or to somebody else.”
“Or done something before.”
“Sounds like an old codger,” Yngvesson said.
“What did you say?” Winter asked.
“It sounds like an elderly man.”
Winter had heard it before. Before. Jesus, he’d heard it before. No,
read
it before. It was in the cold case files.
He went to his office and phoned Möllerström, the invaluable officer in charge of computer files. Everything was on the hard disk. Run a word search. Möllerström had gone home early for once. Children’s party.
“Get him on the phone.”
Sorry about that, Mölli.
Bergenhem was still around. Winter filled him in. Bergenhem didn’t recognize the words.
“What are you doing right now?” Winter asked.
“Setter and I started that check on Samic’s business interests. Names. Old business contacts.”
“Addresses?”
“Tons. But we can’t go checking to see if he’s with every one of his old contacts, Erik. We’ve made a start nevertheless.”
“Bielke?”
“Well . . . his name’s there as well. Some property deals. Co-ownership of some third-rate diner. But we knew that already. And at least we know where he is at the moment. And also where he lives.”
Not for much longer, thought Winter, and he could picture Irma Bielke, crushed and yet unbroken at the same time, on her way to the real estate agent’s.
She wasn’t crazy.
He’d offered to go with her. He could help her to move into a hotel. Or to a relative’s, or a friend’s. She’d declined. She was already on her way to somewhere else, somewhere better.
Bergenhem stood up.
“If that’s all . . .”
Winter thought about Halders. About Angela and Elsa, and how he ought to stand in the window and have a smoke and turn up the sound of Michael Brecker’s
Time Is of the Essence
that was spinning around in the Panasonic, in its usual place on the floor.
He thought about the paternity claim. As far as he was concerned it was just a claim; there could be hidden intentions behind it. Bielke hadn’t made any such confession to him.
He stood by the window. Long shadows again, black spears floating along the river on the other side of the park lying silently below his office. The park, park, park, park, park, park . . .
He put his cigarillo in the ashtray, returned to his desk, and dialed Mattias’s number. No reply. The boy might have hanged himself from a tree or be at the bottom of a river after all. Or he might be wandering around the baking-hot houses.
Winter stood up, went to Möllerström’s computer, and started the search. The telephone rang, but he let it ring. As he was searching he remembered, suddenly remembered. It wasn’t just the word. It was the voice as well.
Bergenhem drove. They had to weave their way cautiously through the mass of pedestrians and the sidewalk cafés. Everybody was in the streets, which were glowing in the heat: children, teenagers, the middle-aged, senior citizens, gigolos, tourists, newlyweds, divorcées, families with children, whores, pimps, drunks, police, junkies, the Salvation Army, lunatics, all on their way from nothing to nowhere.