Room No. 10 (7 page)

Outside, the trees swayed in the wind; elms, lindens, maples, twenty-five-meter-high crowns, hundred-year-old giants that would still be standing here when he was gone, too, along with all the others who had sat around the coffee table this morning; the whole gang would be gone from this earthly paradise, some earlier, some later, and all that green halfway up in the sky would keep on swaying in the
sweet summertime. He had started thinking about existence during the last few years, had become an existentialist because it was only a matter of time in this line of work. He worked in the middle of the end of existence, the premature end. It was hard work, delicate work, and he sometimes wondered why God and the minister of justice had given it to the police in particular.

He shook off his thoughts, or whatever they were, and went into the bedroom for the second time.

There was something he hadn’t seen when he was in there the first time. Something he had expected to find but without knowing what it was. It often happened that way—he knew that he was missing something, but not what. It might be in a room, on a person, at a discovery site, at a crime scene. What wasn’t there could be more interesting than what he could see or hold. The picture wasn’t complete if he didn’t figure out what was missing.

What had he missed in this room a little bit ago, before he spoke to Winter? It was something you usually see in a room, especially in a bedroom. A bed? No, the bed was still there, still with its plastic canopy. A bureau? No.

Halders had stood in hundreds of bedrooms during his career as an investigator. He had investigated. He had registered. He had studied details; tried to think of the problem in a different situation, a different life.

What was it that was always in a room like this one? Something personal, even intimate. Something that the person who inhabited the room saw at night, in the morning; as the last thing, the first. It was usually hanging on a wall. Or it was on a nightstand. Nothing was hanging on the wall here. Right now, that was because the walls were daubed with primer. There was nothing on the little table next to the bed. There could have been; the plastic canopy protected everything in there.

There were no photographs in the room, not of Paula, not of anyone else. There were no photographs in frames anywhere in the
apartment. It was as though loneliness was amplified in there and became emptier, more blank.

They had found some photo envelopes with regular prints, everyday pictures, but things like that always gave an impersonal impression; they were momentary scenes from momentary instants, things you could take or leave.

It was different with ones that were put in frames. That was somehow more for posterity. It was . . . intimate.

He hadn’t found any photographs like that in any of the boxes or on any of the shelves where things had temporarily been placed during the renovation.

He would have to ask her parents about that; Halders picked up his notebook and wrote. They would have to help identify all the faces in the prints anyway. Maybe nothing was framed. Maybe that wasn’t Paula Ney’s style.

What was her style?

Halders left the bedroom and stood in what he called the living room, which was a damn strange name; it was probably left over from the time when there was a parlor in people’s houses, cold and closed up, that was used only when people came to call—which might have been never—and wasn’t for living in. The room just stood there, like some sort of permanent lodger. At least, that’s how it had been in Halders’s childhood home; no one came to call and the door to the parlor was never opened; the table silver was never taken out of its chest. As a boy, Halders would sometimes stand outside its door and try to see the things in there through the milky glass. Everything was blurry, there were mostly fluid contours, as though he were nearsighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses, but still he wanted to know what was in there, what it might look like when it was sharp and clear. As though he could somehow find out why no one lived in there.

Suddenly he couldn’t remember if he had ever been in the parlor of his childhood. He ought to remember that. And later, while he was still a child, his parents got divorced and everyone went in different directions and the parlor became a memory, blurry from the start, but
never blurrier with time. The opposite happened, as though the image became clearer with time for the very reason that it had been so hard to see back then.

Her style; Halders had been thinking of Paula’s style. Her style was not being murdered. The murder proved that no one could escape. Soon, as they learned more about her life, her previous life, maybe that image would also change, become clear, or become dark as it became more and more obvious.

•   •   •

“How did we get on the topic of storage lockers?” Ringmar said.

They had decided to take a walk in the park, to the Shell station and back. It wasn’t much of a park. The station was bigger than the park.

“Aneta pointed us toward Central Station,” said Winter. “And of course there could be a suitcase down there.” He looked up, as though he was determining the time with the help of the sun. His black glasses suddenly shimmered with gold. “I called and asked for the guy who’s responsible for the lockers.”

“And?”

“They were going to find him.”

Ringmar nodded.

Winter followed the path of the sun again. He looked at his own watch.

Suddenly he realized that they were about to make a mistake.

“They have security cameras down there now, don’t they, Bertil? I mean, twenty-four hours a day?”

“I think so.”

“When do they erase those pictures from the hard disk?”

•   •   •

“After seventy-two hours,” said Rolf Bengtsson, branch manager of Speed Services AB, which had taken over the storage lockers from Swedish Railways. “Sometimes sooner.”

Winter had driven down to Central Station. It took five minutes, including parking illegally in the taxi zone. He walked into the
building quickly. The locker area in there had recently been rebuilt, just like everything else. He had to ask the way. The lockers were now in the underworld of Central Station. The stairs down were steep. Winter heard the elevator swish behind him. He made note of the security cameras on the ceiling. They were convincing decoys.

“I have a card of those photo-booth pictures I have to show you later,” Winter said as they walked down the stairs.

“Why?”

“Is it possible to tell when someone took their picture in a booth? What time the pictures were taken?”

“No.”

“Okay, but can you determine which booth the pictures were taken in?”

“Yes. We can do that; we know our machines’ idiosyncrasies.”

“Good,” Winter said.

The area down there was bathed in a green color that the contractor had perhaps thought restful. Maybe calming, therapeutic. It was green everywhere, like in a tropical forest. People came and went in the restful light. Maybe it was too restful, too sloping for them to be able to see anything useful in the pictures. If there was anything to see that they wanted to see.

“But the time depends on the level of activity in here,” Bengtsson continued. “The camera doesn’t start until someone moves.”

Seventy-two hours, Winter thought. They might get lucky, or have made a big mistake. Or else it didn’t mean anything.

“Every corner in here is caught by the camera,” Bengtsson said. “No one gets away.”

“If there’s any image left,” said Winter.

“Sometimes there can be film left from five days back. Like I said, it depends on the level of activity in here.”

“Isn’t it still possible to get it back anyway?” said Winter. “Even if the disk has been erased?”

“I’m an expert in photo booths and storage lockers,” Bengtsson
said, “not in computers. But I know that your computer experts at the police station have tried and failed.” He smiled. “Call me Roffe, by the way.”

•   •   •

The level of activity by the lockers had been so low that there were still images from four and a half days back. Winter felt a rush of warmth for the counter mechanism. It made certain that they would likely be able to see whether Paula Ney had put a suitcase into a locker. And if she, or someone else, had taken it out during the last few days. The victim. The murderer.

Roffe Bengtsson showed Winter into the control and storage room inside the small office to the left of the stairs. Two people were working there, on cleaning, storage, reception, monitoring. They were a younger man and a younger woman. They had a lot to do. People were coming and going out there. There were lots of people upstairs; it was the day’s peak time.

The woman introduced herself as Helén and shook his hand. She nodded toward the display to the right, on the wall.

“Have you been here before?” she asked.

“No, not since it was redone,” Winter said, and he walked over to the flat display. It looked like a board, divided into six squares. An installation. In the squares, people moved with strangely jerky motions, and not only because they were heaving suitcases up and down out there. Everyone in the images looked like cases for an orthopedist. Winter knew that was the price the viewer paid for digitization.

“How many cameras do you have?” he asked.

“Eight.” She nodded toward the display. “The other two are running, too, of course. One of them is filming people on their way up the stairs. That one’s what we call our secret camera.”

“Good,” Winter said, studying the pictures in real time. “The decoys look good, by the way.”

“One of them was stolen last week,” she said, smiling.

“Where are the cameras?”

“In the sprinklers and the fire alarms.”

“I did think there were a lot of those.”

“You can never be too careful,” she said, smiling again.

•   •   •

Winter sat in front of the display and studied the films from the evening of Paula’s disappearance. Just for a first look. They would get copies from the hard drive down here and run everything in magnification on their own monitors up at the police station. Or take the whole computer from here. It had happened before.

He concentrated on women at first. He saw women in summer clothes opening lockers, closing lockers, locking them, unlocking them, walking back and forth in the strangely jerky resolution on the display. It was like a silent film, but these pictures were in color, surprisingly sharp, but at the same time it was as though they were coated by the green tint that overshadowed everything down there. Shadows fell over the far corners of a few of the aisles; it wasn’t as easy to see what was happening over there, who was doing what.

But Winter saw a man starting to undress in one of the corners, which seemed to be a dead end.

“There’s no decoy over there,” Helén said, nodding toward the display. “People think they can do whatever they want over there.”

Winter looked at the man. He was completely naked now, and he looked around, as though to find more clothes to take off. His face was partly in shadow. His dick swung in time as he moved back and forth.

“What happened with that guy?” Winter asked.

“Your colleagues came and got him.”

Winter read the display. Mr. Naked had stripped at twenty-eight minutes past eight the evening before Paula disappeared. But at that time she had been at the movie.

“When they took him away he shouted something about how it was unseasonably warm.”

“He was right about that,” Winter said, studying the squares again. He would need compound eyes for this. He concentrated on the
women again. There weren’t many of them. And somehow, oddly, the cameras didn’t show faces straight on. Maybe this was out of respect for people’s integrity. An absurd adjustment that could only happen in this country, he thought: monitor but don’t reveal anything; ascertain whether someone was in a particular place but protect personal integrity. Criminal integrity.

“It’s hard to see any faces,” he said.

“The secret camera above the stairs is best for that,” Helén answered. “That’s where we get all the faces.” She pointed toward the green room. Winter could see the stair railings. “They pull off their masks halfway up the stairs.”

T
hey took the computer to the police station. Ringmar and Djanali were waiting in a larger conference room, with a larger monitor. Other colleagues were waiting in other rooms.

“Does everyone have a clear idea of what she looks like?” Winter had said.

“What she looks like in the pictures they got, at least,” Ringmar had said. He had held up a few photos of Paula. “But it’s a different matter on worthless videotape.”

“Should we try to be a little bit positive?” Djanali had said.

“It’s not worthless,” Winter had said.

•   •   •

They had been positive, all the police in the room. There were a few guesses, but nothing definite.

Winter was sitting in his room and looking at the guesses now. The women in late-summer clothes. He knew how Paula had been dressed that last night, but it didn’t have to mean anything.

First they would try to find Paula in the shimmery green images.

Then they would look for someone who might be retrieving a suitcase from the same locker it had been put in.

Winter had six possibilities in front of him, six possible Paulas. He looked at the images over and over again, six-seven-eight-nine-ten times. All of these women were lifting a suitcase that looked like Paula’s, a black Samsonite. Some had trouble lifting them. Others just heaved the suitcase in, no matter the height.

He compared them with the photographs they had of the twenty-nine-year-old woman. Almost thirty-year-old. She hadn’t really reached that age when some people suddenly feel old.

They had a span of a few hours when she could have left the suitcase, as long as she hadn’t done it days earlier. But if it had happened the evening she disappeared, earlier that evening, or rather during the afternoon, then any of the six anonymous profiles in the images could have been Paula’s. The magnification hadn’t given him the guidance he’d hoped for. There was something about the light, and the colors underground. The way in which people held their heads.