Room No. 10 (18 page)

“There you wear a uniform,” Bergenhem said.

“Aren’t there soldiers who wear plainclothes?” Djanali said.

“Yes, then you’re in the CIA,” Halders said.

“Or the KGB,” said Bergenhem.

“The KGB no longer exists,” said Halders.

“What’s it called now, then?”

“The national murder squad.”

“Just like we have in Sweden?”

“Yes. Same name, different meaning. There, the squad commits murder on the national level; here, ours tries to solve them.”

“Perhaps we should try to solve our own murder,” Ringmar said.

“Have we committed a murder of our own?” Halders said.

No one answered. It sounded as though Bergenhem sighed, or maybe it was just an exhalation.

“There’s something in her apartment that we haven’t noticed,” Halders said.

“What do you mean?” Ringmar asked.

“I don’t know if I mean anything,” Halders answered, “It’s mostly a thought, or a hunch, or whatever it’s called.”

“In your case it’s probably a hunch,” Bergenhem said.

“What?”

“Are you thinking of a postcard, Fredrik?”

That was Winter. He thought he understood what Halders meant. It was the same thought, or hunch, he’d had himself when it came to Ellen Börge. Something he hadn’t seen.

“Not exactly a postcard,” Halders answered. “It’s just something I feel when I’m standing in that lonely fucking apartment.” He looked around. “You should all stand there, too.”

“Not all at once, though,” Bergenhem said.

“I’m going to get sick of you soon, Lars,” said Halders.

“I have stood there,” Winter said. “I understand what Fredrik’s saying.”

“Finally,” Halders said.

“Should we turn the place upside down one more time?” Djanali said.

“That’s not what it’s about,” Halders said.

“Is there something that’s there and not there at the same time?” Djanali said.

No one answered.

“I think we’ll see it,” Halders said after a little while. “And then we’ll understand.”

•   •   •

Ringmar followed Winter into his office. Winter was having a harder and harder time being in his office. It was starting to become difficult to think there, to give his imagination a chance. He had been there for many hours; the walls were like the ones up in the jail. They didn’t let anything out; they gave no peace. He thought of Öberg’s office. There was space up there. You could see the sea.

Ringmar stood by the window. He was starting to become like Birgersson.

“I called Paula’s parents,” Ringmar said. “The mom answered. Elisabeth.”

Winter nodded.

“The question is whether she’s getting over the shock.”

Winter didn’t comment on that. The injured and the shocked belonged together; they often came from the same family. Violence often ran in the family. In any case, it affected them forever. There were no exceptions. A simple break-in affected a person for a long time. Everything had an effect.

“Why did you call?” Winter asked.

“I want to see them again,” Ringmar said. “Soon.”

Winter nodded again.

“It’s like what Fredrik was saying,” Ringmar said. “There’s something about them that we’re not seeing. When we see it, we’ll understand. Something they’re keeping to themselves.”

“It isn’t necessarily something that will be useful to us,” Winter said.

“What is useful to us, then?” Ringmar said.

“Everything,” Winter said, smiling.

Ringmar looked out the window. Winter saw the drops of rain on the glass. It was a light rain; he couldn’t hear it. It would be heavier in October, thud-thud-thud-thud against his windowpane.

“There was something breathless about her when she answered,” Ringmar said, still looking out, his profile toward Winter. It was lit up by the gray light. Winter could see Ringmar’s soft chin, or maybe it was the beginning of a double chin. He hadn’t noticed it before. It wasn’t visible from the front. Ringmar’s face was starting to collapse, but only like a shadow, and only in a certain light.

It’s worse with Birgersson. And then it’s my turn.

“And it wasn’t like she’d been running up the cellar stairs or anything,” Ringmar said.

“She didn’t expect it to be you,” Winter said.

“Exactly. She didn’t think she’d hear from us again so soon.” Ringmar turned to Winter and his chin became taut, almost narrow. “She was expecting someone else entirely.”

“Was her husband home?” Winter asked.

“I asked to have a word with him; I made something up. And yes, he was there.”

“They have relatives, friends. Could be anyone who was supposed to call.”

“I don’t know,” Ringmar said. “I don’t know.”

Winter got up from the chair. He didn’t want to sit there, never wanted to sit there again. He closed his eyes suddenly so he wouldn’t have to see the door, the walls, the desk. He felt his pulse. He wasn’t feeling very well. Is it a life crisis? he thought. I didn’t have a forty-year crisis that I noticed. I’m forty-five now; that’s right in the middle; I’m having my forty- and fifty-year crises at the same time.

“Let’s go to their house,” he said.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

•   •   •

The sun was shining through the clouds as they drove down Allén; a yellow glow through the leaves, which were starting to change color. Winter still felt ill at ease, like a premonition of being sick. Ringmar was driving. Winter rolled down the window, let the air come in. It felt good on his face. It smelled like autumn, a wet smell. He felt a ray of sun in his eye, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. He closed his eyes again.

When had he and Ringmar been out on their first job together? Winter couldn’t remember.

He remembered the second job they were out on together.

She had called in herself. Winter had taken the call in the car. It had been transferred from the county communications center; they had been in the vicinity of her home. She had had a breathless voice. Very frightened. They had heard her screams inside as they stood outside. The sound of the family. The screams of a woman.
It wasn’t the girl. It was the mother; they realized this later. The girl didn’t want to do as her dad said. She had been out late a few nights. Now she wanted to go out again. Her dad reprimanded her with a kitchen utensil. Winter saw her face as he blinked his way through Allén. Why the hell did I start thinking about her? Mariana? What was her name? Maria? Bertil knows; he’s good at names, better than I am. But I won’t ask him. We thought we had her. She was alive in the ambulance. They came so quickly; I was surprised. The dad was gone, in another world now. The knife ended up in the courtyard. The window was open; it was the second floor. It had all happened in the kitchen. I noticed the color of the tablecloth; I would still be able to draw the pattern. Their dinner was still on the table; they had hardly started. He was the one who had asked. Where are you going? Where are you going now? If only he hadn’t asked, the mom said afterward. If only he’d let it go and hadn’t asked again. Shock, she was in shock, and why should she come out of it? She would never come out of it, of course. Elisabeth Ney wouldn’t either.

“There’s a draft,” Ringmar said.

“It’s mostly drafting on me,” Winter said.

“Are you clearing your thoughts?”

“My memories. I’m clearing my memories.”

“Good,” Ringmar said. “That’s good for you.”

“Do you have an idea of what we should ask the Ney couple about when we get there?”

“Do you see them as a couple?”

“That’s the question,” Winter answered.

“And what’s the answer?”

Winter looked at the shore on the other side of the river. It had been developed with condos, would be developed more until the balconies tipped into the muddy water. Just the balcony was worth more than the lifelong earnings of the shipyard workers who had built vessels in that same place a few decades ago. Winter had been a boy then, and he’d heard the racket that came from there when he took the ferry across the river. He had seen the ships, not built, half-built, finished.
He had stood on the pier at Nya Varvet and watched the ships glide away, out toward Vinga, off across the sea, toward the equator, even farther away, the South Pacific, Australia. They glided away as though they owned the whole world.

A person who passed the equator on a ship underwent a ritual christening. He had thought about that as a boy, thought a lot about it, but he had never done it; he had lived on the earth for nearly half a century, but he hadn’t yet passed the midline of the globe on a ship.

“You should never look at a couple as a couple,” he answered at last. “If you do, you’re guilty of generalization.”

“Some grow together,” Ringmar said.

“Sorry?”

Winter turned his eyes to Ringmar.

“Some couples become like one,” Ringmar continued. “It’s like they grow together.”

“That sounds horrible. You mean that as years go by they become like Siamese twins?”

“Yes.”

“One can’t even go to the john without the other?”

“That’s what happens,” Ringmar said. “It sneaks up. And one day it’s a fact. Not one step without the other.”

“I hope you’re not speaking from experience, Bertil.”

“I’m sitting here by myself, aren’t I?”

“Nice.”

“But it’s worth thinking about.”

They drove through Kungssten to avoid the rush-hour traffic out on the main roads. They were nearly crushed by a bus; they saw it coming, but there wasn’t space for both of them. Ringmar heaved the car up onto a bit of sidewalk that was suddenly there. There were no pedestrians on it. In the rearview mirror, Winter saw the bus reeling forth toward the roundabout. Ringmar rolled back onto the street again.

“If we’d had a marked car, that hypocritical bastard would have driven like a normal person,” he said.

“I got the number.”

“Forget it. We don’t have time.”

Ringmar swung off onto Långedragsvägen. They passed Hagen School. Ringmar turned left at the intersection after the soccer field and crossed Torgny Segerstedtsgatan. Mario and Elisabeth Ney’s apartment was in one of the apartment buildings in Tynnered. The redbrick buildings stood like walls facing the sea, far down in Fiskebäck. The wind was strong over the flat land; it was always windy here. Winter saw the buildings when they were up on the main road.

Ringmar swung into the OK station to fill up.

Winter went into the store and came back with an evening paper, the
GT.
He flipped ahead a few pages and held the spread up in front of Ringmar’s nose as Ringmar pulled the receipt from the gas pump.

“Isn’t that your bad side?” Ringmar said.

“I was thinking more of the headline,” said Winter.

“
POLICE WITHOUT CLUES IN HOTEL MURDER
,” Ringmar read from above the picture of Winter turning around, presumably after a short interview. “Is that proper Swedish?”

“Is that a proper conclusion?” Winter said.

“Essentially, yes,” Ringmar said, “if we don’t count the videotapes.”

“And the hand,” Winter said. “And the rope. And the shoe print.”

“They actually should have had all of that already,” Ringmar said. “What’s his name, your friend at
GT
? Bry . . . Bru . . .”

“Bülow,” Winter answered, “but he’s not my friend.”

“Anyway, he usually sniffs most things out. But not this.”

“Our commissioner must have sealed up the cracks,” Winter said.

“You mean by quitting?” Ringmar said. “You’re talking about the Sieve, right?”

Winter nodded. Einar “the Sieve” Berkander, ex-police commissioner, had hooked up with a divorced reporter from
Göteborgs-Posten
during his ruling years. It got out, as did most of what the Sieve said in the woman’s arms. The Sieve was also divorced nowadays.

“We can’t forget that we often get help from the press,” Ringmar said.

“Exploit it, you mean?”

“We need it,” Ringmar said, studying the spread again.

“Is there anything there that’s of use to us?”

“I don’t know,” Winter said, folding up the paper and throwing it into the backseat.

They drove out from the gas station and in among the houses. Ringmar parked. Winter checked the address.

It smelled like food in the stairwell, some indeterminate dish, almost no spices. It was the old stairwell smell. The new one was noticeably spicier, spices from all over the world, people from all over the world.

Ringmar rang at the door. No one opened it. He rang again. They thought they heard footsteps. They realized they were being observed through the peephole.

The door was opened a tiny crack. They saw Elisabeth Ney’s face.

“Yes?”

“May we come in for a little while, Mrs. Ney?”

This was Ringmar. They didn’t need any ID at this point.

“Well . . . what is it?”

They didn’t answer. They had already asked to come in. A little while, Winter thought. What an expression. A little while could mean days.

“My husband isn’t home,” she said.

So they’re separated right now, Winter thought. We’re in luck.

“That’s okay,” Ringmar said.

•   •   •

How do you act when you’re about to try to ask a mother what her relationship with her murdered daughter was really like? How do you act in a conversation like that when it’s actually an interrogation?

Winter could see the courtyard through the kitchen window. A young mother was pushing her little daughter on a swing. The girl laughed as the speed increased. He wasn’t unfamiliar with that. He had been pushing Elsa for years, and now it was Lilly’s turn.

Elisabeth Ney couldn’t be unfamiliar with that.

It couldn’t be good that she was standing here and looking out this window.

The window in the living room was better, with its view of the gas station, the highway, the industrial area on the other side of the highway.

Ringmar had asked about Paula’s long trip almost ten years ago.

“I don’t understand why it’s of so much interest,” Elisabeth Ney said. “It was so long ago.”

“Maybe that trip meant more than we understand,” Ringmar said.

Ney didn’t answer. She sat at the kitchen table in a stiff pose, as though she didn’t know what she was doing there. As though she could have been anywhere. It didn’t matter.