Three girls, all of them nineteen years old. Just finished with school. Two of them this summer, and the third during a summer five years ago. Three different schools. Jeanette had said she didn’t know Angelika. Had she known Beatrice? He must ask her about that. It wasn’t impossible, after all. They had lived fairly close to each other, in upmarket suburbs next to the sea.
Had it always been the case? Had they attended the same elementary school, perhaps? Middle school? Calm down, Erik. There’s no time to find the answer to every question now.
Had Beatrice and Angelika known each other?
Three girls. One was still alive, the other two were dead.
He remained standing by the map. If he boiled down all his questions to just one, to The Question, would it be: did they all get mixed up with the same murderer? The same bastard? as Halders had put it in this very office. Jeanette, too?
Winter continued reading, smoking at his desk now. Followed Beatrice through her last hour, or hours. She’d been in the town center with some friends. Had she been with them the entire time? That wasn’t absolutely clear. They’d split up soon after one in the morning. Sunday morning. Five of them had gone off together and stopped off at a 7-Eleven five hundred meters from the park, and there, outside the shop, or inside it, something had happened to cause Beatrice to leave her friends.
Winter read through the witness reports. There was a slight mist around the words, as if these young people had memories that weren’t really functioning. Winter knew what the problem was, he’d seen it hundreds of times. They were simply drunk, or at least in various stages of inebriation, and the alcohol had started to leave their bodies, but their senses were not properly sharp, and such things can make a person irritable and nervous, and something like that had applied to the scene at the shop. Something had annoyed Beatrice and she’d left. Yes, they could recall that she’d been annoyed, but nobody could remember why. Perhaps she’d tried to light up a cigarette inside the 7-Eleven. Perhaps she just hated the whole world at that drunken moment. There had been alcohol in her blood, but not very much.
She’d walked toward the park. Her friends had seen her go. Let her go. She’ll be back in a minute. But when they left the shop Beatrice hadn’t come back. They’d called for her, walked in the direction of the park, and called out again.
They’d turned back then. She’d turn up eventually. She must be on the other side of the park by now. She must have caught the night bus. She was already at Lina’s, waiting for them. She’ll be sitting there waiting for us, Lina had said, out there in the night, five years ago, and then the night bus came, and . . . well, they’d all jumped aboard and looked out of the window as they passed by the park, and there was no sign of Beatrice, which meant that she must be waiting for them at Lina’s, didn’t it?
Beatrice wasn’t waiting for them. She was in among the trees all that time. Perhaps. She was definitely there at 11:45 on Sunday morning, behind the bushes in the shadow of the big rock: naked; murdered. The sun had been high in the sky, as high as it was now.
Her clothes were in a heap by her side. Winter read the list of clothes she’d been wearing that evening, the clothes the murderer had pulled off her. They were all in the inventory, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. He was looking for what was missing. Sometimes something was missing that the victim had had, but the murderer had taken away with him.
In Beatrice’s case, it was her belt.
Winter found it in the interrogation of her friends, and, later, in the interview with her parents. Beatrice had been wearing a leather belt that had not been found in the untidy pile of clothes next to her body. One of the detectives who had conducted the interviews had referred to it as a “waist-belt.” The word jumped off the page when Winter saw it. It seemed a wry comment on the waste of a life.
That could be what the murderer had strangled her with, wasted her life. They couldn’t know for certain as they had never found the belt.
Winter turned to the newer case notes. Angelika Hanssons’s. He searched for the inventory of her clothes: T-shirt, shorts, socks, panties, bra, hairband, sneakers—basketball type, Reebok. But no belt. Would she have worn a belt with her shorts?
Had anybody asked about her clothes? He couldn’t see any reference to a belt. He read Pia Fröberg’s report. Angelika could well have been strangled with a leather belt. He picked up the phone and dialed the direct number to Göran Beier on the SOC team. No reply. He called the main lab. Beier answered.
“Ah, Göran, it’s Erik. Can I disturb you for a couple of minutes?”
“No problem.”
“I’m sitting here with the Wägner case notes. Beatrice.”
“OK.”
“Were you on duty then?”
“Beatrice Wägner? Let’s see, that must be, what . . . four years ago? Five?”
“Five years. Exactly five.”
“Whatever, it’s not a case you forget.”
“No.”
“We did what we could.”
Winter thought he detected a hidden meaning in Beier’s words.
“I haven’t given up,” he said.
Beier made no reply.
“That’s why I’m calling,” Winter said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”
“Meaning?”
“Do you remember that Beatrice had a belt that she evidently always used to wear, and that it couldn’t be found after the murder?”
“I do. One of her friends had made some comment about it the same night she was murdered,” Beier said. “I read that in the preliminary reports.” He paused. “Now that I think about it, I seem to remember that it was you who signed off on it. My memory’s that good.”
“I have it in front of me now,” said Winter, picking up the document. He could see his own signature. Erik Winter, Detective Inspector.
“That was before the glory days of chief inspector,” said Beier. “For both you and me.”
Winter didn’t reply.
“I suppose it was Birgersson who was in charge of the investigation?”
“Yes.”
“I remember we had a talk about that belt,” Beier said.
“What conclusion did you draw?”
“Only that we thought the belt might have been used to choke her. But we never found it, of course.”
“And now it’s Angelika Hansson we’re dealing with,” said Winter.
“I heard from Halders that you thought there might be a link,” Beier said.
“There could very well be.”
“Or not.”
“There could also be a belt,” Winter said.
There was a pause. “I see what you mean,” Beier said, eventually.
“Is it possible to find out if Angelika Hansson generally wore a belt with those shorts she had on that night?”
“We’ve already established that,” said Beier.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t you read the reports? What’s the point—”
“When did you send them?”
“Yesterday, I think. It sho . . . Hang on, somebody’s telling me something here.” Winter could hear Beier talking to a colleague. Then he spoke into the phone again. “I apologize, Erik. Pelle says he hasn’t sent them off yet. He wanted to che—”
“OK, OK. But she did have a belt?”
“There had at one time been a belt in the waistband, so the answer is yes. Of the shorts lying in the heap by her body. We can say that for sure. It’s not complicated at all.”
“But I can’t find any mention of a belt in the inventory of what was in that pile of clothes,” said Winter.
“No, because it wasn’t there.”
“So he took it with him,” said Winter, mainly to himself.
Beier said nothing.
“Angelika Hansson could have been strangled with her own belt, then,” Winter said.
“That’s a possibility.”
“Just like Beatrice Wägner.”
“I understand what you’re getting at,” Beier said. “But take it easy.”
“I am taking it easy.”
He took it easy for another hour while the sun outside crept slowly across a cloudless sky. The smoke lingered inside the room. He continued to trace the hours and the days after the murder of Beatrice Wägner.
Witnesses had seen cars leaving the scene. One car had seemed in a hurry to get away, according to one woman, but he knew that could be an impression she’d formed after the event, a dramatization because she so badly wanted to help them with their investigation, although most such efforts had the opposite effect.
Then, as now, the season had been a problem, because fewer people than usual were at home during the summer. He had now started reading the clippings from each case in parallel, and smiled at one sentence that jumped off the page, spoken by Sture Birgersson one summer’s day almost exactly five years ago: “The problem the police are up against in this murder investigation is the vacation period,” Birgersson had said.
Birgersson was Winter’s superior at the CID. Winter had an appointment with him this afternoon.
A house-to-house operation around the park had produced as little by way of results that summer as this, so far.
Winter paused at one detail from the night Beatrice Wägner was murdered. Two witnesses had independently observed that a man and a boy had been packing a car for some time in the early hours of the morning. That had been outside one of the three-story apartment buildings to the northeast of the park, a hundred meters away. The two witnesses had noticed the man and boy from different directions, but at more or less the same time. The man and the boy might have seen or heard something, but nobody knew, as they had never made themselves known to the police. They had issued an appeal, but nobody had come forward. They had simply been unable to find a man and boy in the building who matched the description they’d been given.
Just then, Winter’s desk telephone rang. He answered and recognized Birgersson’s voice.
“Could we meet a bit earlier than planned, Erik? I just found out I have to attend a meeting at four.”
“OK.”
“Can you come up now?”
“Give me fifteen minutes. I want to ask you a few things, but I have to do a bit of reading first.”
Birgersson stood smoking by his window as Winter asked his first question. Birgersson’s scalp was visible through his close-cropped gray hair, lit up by the rays of the sun. The boss would be sixty next year. Winter would be forty-two. Birgersson was more of a father to him than a big brother.
“I don’t know where it would have led us,” said Birgersson, flicking ash into the palm of his hand, “but we really did try to trace that pair: father and son, or whatever they were.” He looked at Winter. “You were involved, of course.”
“Reading about it now, I remember getting very angry at the time.”
“I got pretty worked up about it too.” The muscles in Birgersson’s lean face twitched. “But that was only natural. We didn’t have much to go on, and so that detail seemed to be more important that it might really have been.”
“Do you often think about the Beatrice case?” asked Winter, from his chair by the desk in the middle of the room.
“Only every day.”
“It hasn’t been like that for me. Not quite every day. Until now.”
“You’re still a young man, Erik. I run the risk of retiring with that bloody case still unsolved, and I don’t want to do that.” He pulled at the cigarette, but the smoke was invisible against the light from the window. “I don’t want to do that,” he said again, gazing out from the window, then looking back at Winter. “I don’t know if this is a sort of twisted wishful thinking, but I hope it is him who’s come back. That this business has never ended.”
“That’s why I’m scrutinizing the Beatrice case notes,” said Winter.
“The belt,” Birgersson said. “The belt is a key.”
“It could well be.”
“Did the Bielke girl have a belt?” Birgersson asked.
“That’s one of the things I wanted to check before I came here,” said Winter. He lit another Corps, stood up, and went to keep Birgersson company by the window. “But she didn’t have one. She doesn’t wear one.”
“Maybe that’s what saved her,” said Birgersson. He looked Winter in the eye. “What do you think, Erik? Maybe she wasn’t as interesting as a victim when there was no belt for her to be strangled with. No belt to take home, as a trophy.”
7
SHE FELT A PRICK IN HER RIGHT FOOT, UNDER HER TOES. SHE’D
been feeling her way forward, but the bottom was covered in seaweed here, a sort of long, thick grass that swayed with the current. It was brown and nasty. Like dead flowers.
Now she was standing on a little sandbank. She balanced on one leg and examined her right foot: she could see it was bleeding, but only a little. It wasn’t the first time this summer. Par for the course.
She heard shouts from the rocks. Leaped into the water, which was warmer than ever, like a second skin, soft, like a caress.
“Anne!”
They were shouting again. Somebody held up a bottle, but all she could see was a silhouette against the sun, which was on its way down. Could be Andy. As far as he was concerned the party had begun the minute they got here, or even in the car, still in town.
“Anne! Paaarty!”
She could see him now, wine bottle in hand, a grin on his face. Party. Why not yet another party? She deserved that. Three years of school at Burgården. Who wouldn’t deserve a few parties after that?
There was something else that made her deserving of it. She didn’t want to think about it now.
“Anne!”
She clambered over the rocks, hung onto a projecting stone, and felt the sting in her foot again.
She reached the top, and checked her foot. Half a meter of seaweed had wrapped itself around her shin. She pulled it off. The seaweed felt slippery.
“Here comes the little mermaid,” said Andy.
“Give me a drink.”
“Have you ever seen an evening as beautiful as this?”