The Shadow Woman (28 page)

“It was on the phone.”

“She wants you to go see her more often. But I guess I’ve already been on your back about that.”

“Yes.”

“Now, she’s going to have a little party anyway to celebrate her big day. You’re not going to miss that, are you?”

“No.”

“Promise? Lotta needs her little brother.”

“I know. We have to look out for each other up here while you two are occupied elsewhere.”

“Don’t be like that now, Erik. We’ve talked about that. Your father has tried . . .”

Winter was standing in his office. He looked at the CD player and the desks covered with drawings. It was quiet.

“Someone’s trying to call me on my work line,” he said.

“I can’t hear it ringing.”

“It blinks. Good-bye, Mother.”

He hung up and walked over to the window and picked up a CD case from the sill, took out the disc, and slipped it into the player.

 

Beier called down to Winter.

“Come up here right away, please.”

“What is it?”

“Just come up as quickly as you can.”

Winter passed through the security gate and entered the fingerprint lab, where Beier and Bengt Sundlöf were waiting. The slip with the map or whatever it was, and the codes or whatever they were, was lying on a table.

“One thing is clear now,” Beier said. “There are two sets of prints from Helene Andersén here.”

“What do you mean?”

“As a child and as an adult.”

“As a child?” Winter said.

“Yes. They’re the same lines, only smaller. She held this slip of paper when she was a child of around four or five.”

“So she’s the one who held on to it. Why?”

“It’s your job to find that out, Erik,” Beier said.

“So then we do have at least some kind of time frame for the paper.”

“I didn’t say that,” Beier said. “We know that she held it in her hand about twenty-five years ago.”

“Are there any other prints on it?” asked Winter, and he looked at the paper that seemed younger now that he knew more about its history.

“That’s where it gets trickier,” Beier said. “We can see some traces of fingerprints but only partials. I can’t help you there yet.”

“Okay.”

“You want us to continue?”

Winter blew air out through his mouth and thought. He studied the faint characters and lines.

“Maybe she had a reason for saving it. I don’t know. I really don’t know, Göran.”

“I’m only asking because we have a whole apartment’s worth of evidence to go through. And this isn’t exactly the only case we’re working on.”

“Keep working on this one whenever you get a little time left over, then.” Winter eyed the slip of paper again. “But what can you do with the partial prints?”

“For us to be able to conclusively establish identity, there have to be twelve points of comparison, minimum. You follow me?”

Winter followed him, in theory. But practically was another matter. The computer didn’t know what a fingerprint looked like—it simply registered the ridge endings, bifurcations, and dots.

There were twenty fingerprint experts in Sweden. Two in Gothenburg. One of them was Bengt Sundlöf and he was still standing there next to Beier and Winter.

“It does kind of give me itchy fingers, so to speak,” Sundlöf said of the slip of paper.

“A challenge,” Beier said.

“You sit there and peer into those two microscopes and search—and make sketches.”

“For days on end,” Beier said. “And get bad back pains from working so intensely in a hunched-over posture.”

“And you carry on like that until you find twelve points that match,” Sundlöf said.

“Know what you say then?” he asked Winter.

“Bingo?” Winter said.

“We’re going to help you,” Sundlöf said. “You appreciate knowledge and experience despite your youth and long hair.”

“In France they require a fourteen-point match for a positive ID,” Beier said.

“Maybe we’re taking risks up here in the north.”

“The Americans have the largest fingerprint database in the world, naturally,” Sundlöf said. “The FBI has millions to choose from and compare to. They once found a seven-point match. Only they were different people!”

“I think I’ve lost you now,” Winter said.

“They had two sets of prints, and seven of the minutiae points in the two fingerprints were identical,” Beier said. “They were completely identical. And yet it turned out they came from two different people. No one’s ever found so many matching points in two separate individuals. Never.”

“Not yet anyway,” Winter said. “So twelve gives us a pretty good margin, then?”

“You can be pretty sure,” Beier said.

“Then do the same with the print on the drawer in Helene’s apartment,” Winter said.

“That’s a partial print,” Sundlöf said. “And a faint one, probably deposited through a tear in a woolen glove, judging from the fiber sample. We’re analyzing that right now.”

“So, difficult in other words?” Winter asked.

Beier and Sundlöf nodded simultaneously.

“How about the others? In the apartment?”

“We’re still working at it, Inspector,” Beier said.

“I’m sure you’ll find all there is to find,” Winter said, and took a step toward the door. “Thanks for the lesson, by the way.”

Winter passed through the security gate. He wanted to get back to his office to go through the drawings, to sort them.

He also wanted to study his copy of the slip of paper again. Here in forensics it was as if the numbers and letters had become more distinct, the lines longer, sharper. It meant something to him. It was a map.

It had meant something to Helene too. Or had she simply forgotten the slip of paper twenty-five years ago in that pocket, after some kind of game? It was possible—for those who believed in coincidences.

But she hadn’t written the numbers and drawn the lines herself. It was a grown-up’s hand that had guided the pen.

He felt warm and the inside of his head felt sort of swollen. A cold shower was in order.

THE LIGHT OVER THE SQUARE WAS JUST AS HARSH AS ON PRE
VIOUS days, though the air had grown warmer. Winter was sitting on one of the benches, eyes trained on the entrance to the post office. He’d been sitting there for half an hour and was about to stand. It was a quarter to one. Lots of people were walking in and out through the doors along the arcade—the time of the month when salaries and pensions were paid out and bills came due. A group of men were waiting outside for the doors of Jacky’s Pub to open. I’ll go in there later, Winter thought. I can see from in there.

 

Sara Helander had relieved Bergenhem an hour and a half ago and was sitting on one of the benches by the window, with a brochure on the art of borrowing.

She glanced down at it and tried at the same time to keep an eye on what was going on over at the service windows. She could see them, but perhaps she ought to stand. I’ll rest my legs a minute longer, she thought.

She’d lifted her gaze and stood when she saw the women at window number 3 raise a hand. Helander quickly moved closer, crossing between a baby carriage and a child. The woman behind the counter looked pale, as if she was about to fall off her swivel chair. She lowered her hand and pointed toward the doors.

Helander saw the light signal flashing at short intervals above the service window, like a reminder of her negligence. A man as broad as the poster above him had already positioned himself in front of the window, expecting to be served. Helander thrust him aside, thrashing her way forward, intense nausea surging in her chest.

“What the he—”

“He was here!” the woman behind the glass said. “I tried to catch your eye. He was here thirty seconds ago. Didn’t the light go on?”

Reflexively Helander looked up once again at the angry signal from the warning light mounted above the service window. Fuck, I’m gonna get fired! Oh my God, I didn’t even think . . . But she pulled herself together.

“Was it the same number?”

The woman held up a deposit slip.

Helander grabbed hold of the little woven basket on the counter. It was half-filled with slips.

“Put these somewhere safe,” she shouted, and tried to squeeze the basket through the far-too-narrow gap beneath the window. “Open up and put these inside!”

“He went ou—” The woman in navy blue and pinstripes felt her voice crack.

I bet he fucking did. Helander almost tripped over the fold in the carpet but regained her balance and avoided breaking her nose against the shatterproof glass.

 

Winter was just lighting a Corps when he saw Sara Helander fly out through the doors of the post office and look around wildly.

Something’s gone wrong. He threw away his cigarillo and ran to where Helander was standing. She saw him.

“He was here!” she said breathlessly. “The cashier processed a deposit—”

“Which way?”

“I don’t know.”

“When?”

“Just now. A few minutes ago. I’m sor—”

“Forget about that now. What does he look like?”

“I don’t know. It happened so fa—”

“Bergenhem is eating over in the bar. Go over there and tell him to come over to the post office right away, to the room at the back where we’ve got the video machine. You come back here with him. But first call Bertil and tell him to send over two cars with extra manpower. I’ll call the officers watching the parking lots.”

He dialed a number for one of the cars stationed at the western parking lot and spoke into his cell phone.

“They’re standing by,” he said, and hung up. “We’ll see if we can’t pick him up.”

Damn it, he thought to himself. “I’m going inside to check the CCTV footage. Come as quickly as you can. Which window was it?”

“Number 3.”

Inside the post office, life went on as usual. The postmaster was waiting by the door to the back room.

“I’ll go in and rewind the tape,” Winter said. “He was in here. Have someone relieve the girl at window 3 and send her back here to the video room.”

“But I’ve got no one else!”

“What’s the matter with you? We’re investigating a mur—” But he calmed down. “Look, just close it or sit there yourself if you have to. I want her in here immediately.”

The camera was connected directly to the video recorder, which was connected to a monitor in a room with no windows. Winter stopped the machine and looked at his watch. He rewound the tape to a half minute before the time Helander had put down that the man had been there. The woman from window 3 came in. Winter pressed play. The film scraped to life and the interior of the post office appeared.

Winter had chosen the camera location at the very back of the premises, and from there it looked like a thousand people were gathered. The woman now standing next to him could be seen in angled profile close by. A female customer left the window. A man wearing a baseball cap and a long, heavy jacket was next in line and then stepped forward.

Winter saw the man drop his slip in the basket on the counter, like a reflex action. Winter couldn’t see his face—just his profile, at an angle, from behind.

“That’s him,” the cashier said.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course it’s him. He was wearing that same cap,” she said, as if the footage they were watching wasn’t a replay but a live take in a reality show.

Winter saw how the man handed something over and how the cashier took it and shifted her gaze in front of her, still angled down, and how she then looked up at the man and seemed to look past him. Winter followed that gaze right across the room to Helander, who was sitting on a bench, looking down at a brochure.

The light above the service window started flashing. The woman said something to the man.

“I tried to keep him there, but he didn’t want a receipt.”

The man in the cap left the counter and moved toward the door. The cashier raised her arm and waved her hand. Another man stepped up to the window and looked at the cashier gesturing. Winter saw how Helander jumped up and forced her way up to the window. The man in the cap walked out through the double doors without tripping over Bergenhem’s fold in the carpet.

Bergenhem and Helander had entered and were standing next to the cashier.

“My God,” she said. The idiot’s caught on film, she thought when she saw herself.

Winter stopped the tape and backed it up. The man in the cap came back into frame.

“That’s him,” Winter said. He won’t be the only one out there with one of those fucking caps, he thought to himself. But his has some big, pale lettering on the front.

“Yes, that’s him,” the cashier said.

Winter spoke on his cell phone, repeated the description.

“They’re searching for him,” he said to Helander and Bergenhem as he held the phone to his ear, waiting for someone else to pick up. “Hello? Yes, seal everything off. Forge—What? No, no sirens for Christ’s sake. And don’t forget the bus station. Yes. The bus station. Send someone over there
now
!”

He hung up and headed for the door.

“Is Bertil bringing more men?”

“Yes,” Bergenhem said. “What do we do now?”

“You all know what he looks like.” Winter checked his watch. “Less than ten minutes have passed since he was in here. He may have jumped into a car and driven off, but there’s a chance he’s still around, and we’ve got the big parking lots and the bus station covered. I don’t think he suspects anything. And call Bertil again, right away.”

“Okay,” Bergenhem said.

“He’s still here,” Winter said. “I think he’s still here. One of the female officers has taken up position outside the doors to Konsum. I want you to go into the department store and see if you can spot him. And if you do, call me and go outside and wait there with the others.”