Frozen Tracks (15 page)

Winter could see the boy through the door. He was
asleep. Or more likely anaesthetised on compassionate
grounds. Angela was standing beside Winter. They'd
taken a taxi from the bistro. I want to be present this
time, she'd said. You shouldn't have to face up to everything
on your own. Besides, it's my workplace. Even
my ward. And Elsa's asleep.

'He could have frozen to death,' said Ringmar, who
was standing on the other side of Winter.

'That, or some other awful fate,' said Winter. He'd
read the reports, not that there were many of them so
far. One by the hospital doctors, and one by Pia Fröberg,
the forensic pathologist.

'When was the alarm raised?' Winter asked.

'It can't have been long after he disappeared,' said
Ringmar.

'When was that? When did he disappear?'

'Soon after four.' He checked his notes. 'About a
quarter past four. But that timing hasn't been confirmed.'

'Is that information from the day nursery staff?'

'Yes.'

'What exactly happened? What did they do? What
did he do?'

'Nobody can say for certain.'

'So he was wandering around on his own?'

Ringmar didn't respond.

'Is that what he was doing?'

'I don't know, Erik. I haven't interrogated the—'

'OK, OK. Anybody determined to kidnap a child can
do it, no matter what.'

Angela gave a start.

There was a woman dressed in white sitting beside
the boy. Machines were humming away. Sounds that
didn't sound natural. Lights that were anything but
pretty.

'Let's go to that other room,' said Winter.

A room had been placed at their disposal.

'Where are the parents?' Winter asked as they walked
down the corridor.

'With one of the doctors.'

'I expect they'll be staying overnight?'

'Of course.'

'I'm going home now,' said Angela.

They hugged, and Winter kissed her. He looked
Ringmar in the eye over Angela's shoulder. Ringmar's
face looked hollow.

The room was as naked as the trees outside the window
and the streets below. Winter leaned against the wall.
The three glasses of wine he'd drunk had given him a
headache that he was now trying to rub away from his
forehead with his left hand. A radio in the distance was
playing rock music. He could just about hear it. 'Touch
me', he thought he heard. And something about being
taken to another place. But there was no other place.
It was here, everything was here. He didn't recognise
the song. Halders would have recognised it immediately,
as would Bergenhem. And Macdonald. When was Steve
supposed to be visiting them?

The boy in the other room wasn't that much older
than Elsa.

'What happened next?' Winter asked.

'They sent out a car, and then another one,' said
Ringmar.

'Where to?'

'First to the Plikta playground at Slottskogen Park.
Then, well . . .'

'Groping in the dark,' said Winter.

'They were six miles apart,' said Ringmar.

Six miles between Plikta and the place where he was
eventually found.

'Who found him?'

'The classical set-up. A dog, and then the dog's owner.'

'Where is he? The dog's owner, I mean.'

'At home.'

Winter nodded.

'So four hours had passed,' he said.

'Just over.'

'How much do we know about the injuries?' he asked.

Ringmar made a gesture that suggested everything
and nothing. It was as if he could barely raise his hand.
The guitars had stopped resounding in the corridor. Who
the hell had been playing rock music in the hospital?

'There are obvious injuries to the boy's torso,' said
Ringmar. 'And his face. Nothing under, er, below his
waist.'

'I saw his face,' said Winter.

'I saw one of his arms,' said Ringmar.

'Does anything in life surprise you any more?' Winter
asked, prising himself away from the wall and massaging
his forehead again. 'In this life we're living just now?'

'There are questions you can't answer with a yes or
a no,' said Ringmar.

'Where were the parents when the alarm was raised?'

'The man was at work – he has lots of colleagues –
and his wife was drinking coffee with a friend.'

And I was drinking wine in a restaurant, Winter
thought. A brief moment of calm and warmth in a
protected corner of life.

'He must have had a car,' he said. 'Don't you think?
Driving through the rush-hour traffic when everybody
else is staring straight ahead and looking forward to
getting home.'

'He parked inside the park,' said Ringmar. 'Or close
by.' He scratched his chin and Winter could hear the
rasp from the day-long stubble. 'The crime-scene boys
are out there now.'

'Good luck to them,' said Winter, without conviction.

A million tyre tracks one on top of the other in a
car park. With a bit of luck a soft and wet patch of
grass, otherwise there would be no chance.

We'll have to check up on the usual suspects, he
thought. To start with. Either we find him there, or we
don't. This could be a long journey.

'I'll have to talk to the day nursery staff as well,' he
said. 'How many of them are there now? Or rather, how
few?'

But first the parents. They were sitting in an office
that Winter recognised. It was Angela's. She'd
arranged for them to be installed there before going
home. There was normally a photograph of himself
with Elsa on her desk, but she had removed it before
Paul and Barbara Waggoner arrived, bringing their
desperation with them. Good thinking. Angela was
sensible.

The man was standing, the woman seated. They radiated
a sort of restrained restlessness that Winter knew
all too well from his numerous other meetings with the
relatives of victims – they were also victims, of course.
A restlessness that was a sort of tangible desire to reach
back in time and preserve the past for ever. Of course.
The victims of crimes were always searching for a life
in the past. Perhaps they were not the only ones. He
himself would have liked to remain in Bistro 1965, an
hour ago, which could easily have been another era in
another world. The protected corner. Strictly speaking
Bertil hadn't needed to phone him, but he'd known
that Winter would want to be there. Bertil's intuition
on this occasion had scared Winter, but his colleague
was never wrong in such matters: this was going to be
a long, dark journey and Winter needed to be there
from the very beginning. It wasn't the sort of thing you
could explain to others. He noticed that Ringmar was
standing beside the woman, who was sitting on the
little visitors' sofa. It's something between Bertil and
me. He rubbed his forehead again. My headache has
gone.

'Will he be able to see again?' asked Barbara without
looking up.

Winter didn't respond, nor did Ringmar. We are not
doctors, Winter thought. If you look up you'll see that.

'They are not doctors, Barbara.' The words came out
more like an exhalation. 'We've just finished speaking
to the doctor.' Winter detected a slight but unmistakable
foreign accent, possibly English. His name suggested
that.

'He couldn't say anything about that for sure,' she
said, as if she were transferring her hope to the new
specialists who had just entered the room.

'Mrs Waggoner,' said Winter, and she looked up. Winter
introduced himself and Ringmar. 'May we ask you a few
questions?' He looked at her husband, who nodded.

'How can anybody do something like that to a child?'
she said.

Winter couldn't answer that. He asked the hardest
question first: 'Why?'

'Isn't that your job? Isn't that what you are supposed
to find out?' Paul Waggoner asked with the same intonation
as before, an aggressiveness lacking in energy. Winter
knew it could become much more forceful if he didn't
play his cards right. He must be an Englishman, he thought.

'We shall do everything we can to find whoever did
this, of course,' he said.

'What kind of a fucking monster is this?' Yes,
Englishman.

'We shall—'

'Don't you have a register of scum like this? So you
only need to look him up?' His accent had suddenly
become more marked.

'We shall do that,' said Winter.

'Why are you sitting here, then?'

'We have to ask some questions about Simon,' said
Winter. 'It will—'

'Questions? We can't say any more than what you've
seen for yourself.'

'Paul,' said his wife.

'Yes?'

'Please calm down a bit.'

Paul looked at her, then at Winter, and then looked
away.

'Ask your questions, then,' he said.

Winter asked about times and routines and clothes.
He asked if Simon had had anything with him.
Something it wasn't possible to talk to the boy himself
about at the moment.

'What do you mean, anything with him?'

'Have you noticed anything missing? Something he
had before but doesn't have now?' Winter asked.

'A toy or something of the sort,' Ringmar said. 'A
toy animal. An amulet, anything at all that he used to
have with him or on him.'

'A keepsake?'

'Yes.'

'Why do you want to know that?'

'I understand why,' said Barbara Waggoner, who was
sitting up straight now. Winter could hear a slight accent
when she spoke now, very slight. He wondered if they
spoke English when they were at home together, or
Swedish, or both for Simon's sake.

'Oh yes?' her husband said.

'If he's lost something,' she said. 'Don't you see? If
he . . . if the one that . . . if he'd taken something off
Simon . . .'

'Was there anything to take?' Winter asked.

'We haven't thought about that,' said Paul. 'We
haven't checked it.'

'Checked what?' asked Winter.

'His watch,' said Mrs Waggoner, raising her hand to
her mouth. 'He never took it off.' She looked at her
husband. 'I didn't see it.'

'It's blue,' said Paul, looking at his wife.

'A child's watch,' she said.

Ringmar left the room.

'Would you like me to make some coffee or something?'
Winter asked. 'Tea?'

'We've already had some, thank you,' said Barbara.

'Is this a common occurrence?' asked her husband.
'Does this happen to many children?'

Winter didn't know if his question referred to the
city of Gothenburg, or to Sweden, or to child abuse
in general, or the type of crime they were up against
now. There were various possible answers. One was
that it was common for children to be abused by
adults. Children and young people. It was most
common inside families. Nearly always inside families,
he thought, and looked at the Waggoners, who
seemed to be about thirty, or possibly younger, in view
of the sharp lines and hollows that marked their faces
in their distress. Fathers and mothers beat their children.
He'd come across a lot of children who'd been
beaten by their parents. He'd been in many such homes
and tried to hide the experience away in his memory
until the next such occasion. Children who were handicapped
for life. Some of them could no longer walk.
Or see, he thought, thinking of little Simon lying in
the ward with eyes that were no longer like they used
to be.

Some of them died. The ones who lived never forgot
it. None of them forgot anything. God, he had met
victims who had become adults but the damage was
still there, always present in their eyes, their voices.

In their actions. Sometimes there was a pattern that
carried on. A terrible inheritance that wasn't really an
inheritance but something much worse.

'I mean here in Gothenburg,' said Paul. 'That children
can be abducted by somebody just like that, and
abused, and . . . dumped, and maybe . . . maybe . . .' He
couldn't bring himself to go on. His face had collapsed
a little bit more.

'No,' said Winter. 'It's not common.'

'Has it happened before?'

'No. Not like this.'

'How do you mean? Not like this?'

Winter looked at him.

'I don't really know what I mean,' he said. 'Not yet.
First we must find out more about what actually
happened.'

'Some unknown madman kidnapped our son when
he was at a playground with his daycare people,' said
Paul Waggoner. 'That's what happened.' He looked at
Winter but there was more resignation than aggression
in his eyes now. 'That's what actually happened. And I
asked you if anything like that had actually happened
before.'

'I shall soon know more about all this,' said Winter.

'If it's happened before, it can happen again,' said
Waggoner.

'Isn't it enough for you to know that it's happened,
Paul?' said his wife, getting to her feet and walking over
to them and putting her arm round her husband's shoulders.
'It's happened to us, Paul. It's happened to Simon.
Isn't that enough for you? Can't we . . . can't we concentrate
on trying to help him? Can't you understand? Can't
you just let the police get on with what they have to
do while we do what we have to do? Paul? Do you
understand what I'm saying?'

He nodded, abruptly. Perhaps he did understand.
Winter heard Ringmar open the door behind him. He
turned round. Ringmar shook his head.

'Did you find the watch?' asked Paul.

'No,' said Ringmar.

* * *

Larissa Serimov adjusted the strap and felt the weight
of her gun against her body. Or perhaps it was more
the knowledge of what it could do that she felt. A
SigSauer wasn't heavy; anything of a similar weight could
be forgotten about; but that didn't apply to guns.

This early December day was mild, as if they were
in a more southerly land. Signs of Christmas everywhere
but a temperature of eleven degrees, maybe twelve.
Brorsson was driving with his window more than halfdown.

'Mind you don't get a stiff neck,' she said.