“I’m having trouble hearing you,” said Halders in a loud voice, rising to his feet. His forehead was striped white when he frowned. “Say that again, please.”
Winter could see Halders’s expression change as he began to understand what the voice was telling him.
“Wh—” said Halders. “What the hell . . .”
His face twitched as if he’d lost control of his muscles. It was unnerving. Winter could tell that something serious had happened. Something unconnected with the investigation.
“Yes . . . Yes, of course,” said Halders. “I’ll go there right away.” He hung up and looked at Winter with a new expression on his red face, which had turned pale. Almost gray.
“It’s my ex-wife,” he said in a voice Winter had never heard before. Halders was still staring at him. “My ex-wife. Mar—Margareta. She was run over and killed an hour ago. On the sidewalk.”
He ran his hand over his head, scratched the red patch on his brow again; it was as if the last time he did it had been in another age. Nothing would be the same again.
“On a goddamn sidewalk. On a sidewalk outside a supermarket in Lunden.” He gestured toward the window. “That’s just down the street.” His face muscles were twitching again, out of control.
“What happened?” asked Winter. He had no idea what to say.
“Run over,” said Halders, still in the strange voice. “Hit and run.” He stared past Winter into the beautiful afternoon light. “Of course, it would be hit and run.”
“Is it . . . definite? That she’s . . . dead?” Winter asked. “Who called?”
“What?” said Halders. “What did you say?”
“Where are we going?” said Winter, getting to his feet. Halders stood motionless. His face still twitching. He tried to say something, but no words came. Then he looked at Winter, his eyes became fixed.
“East General,” he said. “I’m going now.”
“I’ll drive,” said Winter.
“I can manage,” Halders said, but Winter was already halfway out the door. They jumped into the elevator and hurried into the parking lot. Halders sat beside Winter without a word, and they drove off in an easterly direction.
A cruel message, Winter thought. Couldn’t they have said that she’d been badly hurt? Who was it that had given Halders the news?
He’d once heard a joke on this theme. He suddenly thought of it as the car was plunged into the shadows cast by the tall buildings on either side of the road.
The joke was about a man who is traveling abroad. He calls home and his brother says right out: Your cat’s dead. The man calling from abroad tells him you shouldn’t come out with such cruel news in such a direct manner. You could say the cat was on the roof . . . yes, that the fire brigade had arrived, and that the police and everybody had done all they could to get the cat down, and in the end they managed to capture it but it wriggled out of their grasp and jumped and landed awkwardly and they took it to the animal hospital and a team of vets operated throughout the night but in the end they had to concede that it was impossible to save the cat’s life. That’s the way you should tell somebody about a tragic event like this. Tone it down a bit. His brother says he understands now, and they hang up. A few days later the man calls home again and his brother says a tragic event has just taken place. What? wonders the man. His brother says, Mom was on the roof . . .
Winter didn’t laugh. Halders said nothing. They came to a roundabout and turned off for the hospital. Winter could feel the sweat gathering at the base of his spine. Traffic was dense, with vacationers returning after a day on the rocks on the big islands to the north, or by the lakes to the east.
“The children haven’t been told yet,” Halders said.
Winter waited for him to elaborate as he drove into the hospital parking lot. The shadows were sharp and long.
“I have two children,” Halders said.
“I know.”
They’d talked about it, but Halders had forgotten.
“They’re at their after-school clubs now.
For God’s sake!
” Halders suddenly blurted out.
Winter parked. Halders was out of the car before it had even stopped moving, and started half running toward one of the hospital buildings.
He was a stranger to Winter, and yet like a member of the family at the same time.
That’s exactly what Winter thought as he watched Halders hurry over the asphalt through the sunlight, then into darkness as he came to the Emergency Room entrance. Halders had become more distant, and yet more close, simultaneously. Winter had a new feeling of unreality, like he had entered into a dream. He could no longer see Halders, and didn’t know what to do.
He’d been here just the other day, had accompanied the Hansson girl from Slottsskogen Park to her postmortem. Now he was here again.
Halders stood by the stretcher. Margareta’s face was just as he remembered it, from the last time he’d seen her.
Only three days ago. Sunday. He’d been to Burger King with Hannes and Magda, and Margareta had opened the door with a smile, and he’d muttered something, then left without even going in. Not this time. Not that they weren’t on friendly terms. It was all so long ago. So long ago that he’d been an idiot. He was still an idiot, but back then he’d been one in a different way.
He couldn’t see the rest of her body underneath all that white, and he didn’t want to, either. He thought about Hannes and Magda as he thought about Margareta. He thought about the dead girls, too, and that was sufficient to make him start slumping toward the floor, lose his balance, recover it, hold on to the stretcher, bend down toward Margareta’s face, cling to the moment that he knew would be the last.
Now it’s happened to me, he thought. Hit me with full force. This is no dipping into somebody else’s misfortune. This is my very own.
He stroked Margareta’s cheek.
There had been a first time.
Damn the thought. He’d been nineteen . . . no . . . yes, nineteen. He’d been like the girls he and Winter had been talking about only half an hour ago.
Then he was twenty-two, soon to be a fully qualified cop.
He stroked her cheek again.
The divorce hadn’t meant anything. Not in that way. It didn’t come between them in that way.
Somebody spoke. He wasn’t listening and kneeled by the side of the stretcher, intended doing so for a long time. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Winter.
It was as light as day when Winter got home that evening. Light shone into the flat. There was the smell of food in the hall, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.
He’d called Angela some hours earlier.
He went in to Elsa and wondered about waking her up, but contented himself with smelling her, and listening.
Angela was waiting in the kitchen with a glass of wine.
“I’ll have a whiskey,” said Winter, and went over to the countertop, took one of the bottles, and poured several inches into a chubby glass. This wasn’t the time for a delicate malt whiskey glass.
“Oh, dear.”
“You can have the rest if I can’t drink it all.”
“Just because I’ve finished breast-feeding doesn’t mean I’m ready to become an alcoholic.”
“Cheers,” said Winter, taking a swig. Angela raised her wineglass.
“Are you hungry?”
Winter shook his head, felt the punch of the whiskey reverberate through his body, sat down at the table, and looked at Angela, who was a little flushed. It was hot in the kitchen.
“How’s Fredrik?” she asked.
Winter absently waved his hand: Halders is still with us. He hasn’t broken down altogether.
“What’ll happen to the children?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. How are the children?”
“You said, ‘What’ll happen to the children?’ That’s obvious, surely. They’re with Halders.”
Angela said nothing.
“Don’t you think he can handle it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
Angela didn’t reply. Winter took another swig.
“They’re in the house in Lunden,” he said. “Halders thought that was best. For the time being.”
“I agree.”
“He was resolute, I suppose you could say.” Winter said. “When we left the hospital. Drove to their school.”
Angela took a sip of wine, thought about the children.
“It was horrific,” Winter said. “A horrific experience. A teacher stayed with them in the school until we got there.” He took another slug of whiskey. It didn’t taste of anything anymore, apart from alcohol. “It happened while they were still in class and so . . . well, they were still there.”
“Did you drive them home?”
“Yes.” Winter looked at the clock. “It took a few hours.”
“Of course.” She stood up, went to the stove, and switched off the fan. There was a different kind of silence in the kitchen. Winter could hear sounds from the courtyard. Glasses. Voices. “But they’re not alone there now, I take it?”
“Hanne’s there,” Winter said. He’d called the police chaplain, Hanne Östergaard. She was good at talking to people. Consoling them, perhaps. He didn’t know. Yes. Consolation. “Halders didn’t object when I suggested it.” He could hear the voices again, a bit louder, but no words that he could make out. “Hanne was going to call for a psychologist, I think. They talked about it, in any case.”
“Good.”
“And Aneta came.”
“Aneta? Aneta Djanali?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Halders phoned her. She came right over.”
“Do they work together a lot?”
“Nearly all the time.”
“Don’t they have kind of a strained relationship?”
“Where do you get that idea from?”
“Come on, Erik! We’ve spent some time with them. You’ve said the occasional thing . . .”
“Oh . . . that was just the kind of thing you say.” He raised his glass and saw to his surprise that it was empty. He stood up and went over to the bottle. “He evidently needs her now.” He poured. Three quarters of an inch. “It’s not good to be alone. With the children.”
“No relatives?”
“Not in Gothenburg, it seems.”
Angela looked out of the window when he sat back down. It was beginning to get dark out there, with yellow lines over the sky above the rooftops. She could hear voices and the clink of glasses from the courtyard.
“I can’t stop thinking about the children,” she said, turning to face Winter again. “Were they completely devastated?”
“No. Not superficially at least. Very quiet. The shock, I suppose.” Somebody burst out laughing in the courtyard below, others joined in. He stood up and went to the window. Four stories down a group of friends was making the most of the summer’s night. He closed the window but stayed where he was.
What would happen now? He needed Halders, but he wouldn’t dwell on that for a single minute if Halders decided to stay at home. It was up to him. Winter was not going to lean on him. We’re people before anything else, after all.
He went back to Angela and his whiskey.
6
IT WAS HOT IN HIS OFFICE, SUFFOCATED BY SUMMER. NO WIND
outside, nothing to suck into the room that would change the air clinging to everyone’s skin.
Winter looked at the stack of files in front of him: papers, photographs. There were fresh printouts made by Möllerström from the hard disks, but most of the stuff smelled of the past. Five years ago, another summer. Beatrice Wägner. The papers concerning her violent death had an odor of dust and dry darkness—giving a false impression of peace—so pervasive that it almost made him push aside these cold case notes and instead take up the newly begun file on Angelika Hansson.
Reports on murder collected for eternal reading, over and over again. No peace. He’d had a special file of press clippings brought to his office. The newsprint felt as if it were a hundred years old when he touched it.
He stood up, went to the open window, and lit a Corps. The cigarillo tasted pure and soft after leafing through the old documents. It was his third of the morning. He smoked more than twenty a day. Each one was going to be his last. No smoking at home anymore, which was a good thing. Another good thing: Corps Diplomatique was a brand on its way out. His tobacconist had warned him. Every pack could be his last, but Winter was not in favor of hoarding. When Corps were no longer available, he’d stop smoking.
He inhaled, and watched the flow of traffic on the other side of the river. Streetcar, bus, car, streetcar again, pedestrians. All bathed in sunshine that cast no shadows now, as lunchtime approached.
When there are no Corps any more, I’ll quit.
When there are no corpses any more, I’ll quit. Ha!
He went back to his desk. He’d made up his mind to work his way through the Beatrice Wägner files, from the very beginning. All the witness reports, all the summaries. If there was anything there that could be of use to the present investigation, he’d find it. Try to find it. No—find it.
Beatrice Wägner had lived with her parents in a detached house in Påvelund, a western suburb of Gothenburg. Just over a kilometer south of the house in Långedrag where Jeanette Bielke lived. And it couldn’t be much more than two kilometers south from Påvelund to the house in Önnerud when Angelika Hansson had lived, Winter noted. Due south.
He stood up again, and went over to the wall map of Gothenburg and traced with his finger a line running due north from the Hanssons’ house through the Wägners’ and ending up at Jeanette Bielke’s home. A dead straight line. It was a peculiarity, but didn’t necessarily mean anything. Probably didn’t.
He kept looking at the map. Beatrice Wägner had attended the grammar school in Frölunda. Like Angelika and Jeanette, she’d passed her final exams. She’d stayed in Gothenburg when most of her friends had gone away on holiday. He recalled that she’d had some sort of summer job. Jeanette hadn’t had a summer job. Angelika had moved into a warehouse.