The Shadow Woman (34 page)

“Still clear in the head, as far as I know. But he could hardly have been expected to sound the alarm about this.”

“If we had gotten a name earlier.”

“I’ll give him a call,” Ringmar said.

“Ask him to get down here as soon as he can.” Winter read the file while Ringmar dialed, but he was distracted by the call.

Ringmar covered the receiver and turned to Winter. “He’s got a pain in his leg, but we’re welcome to come by and see him. He lives in Påvelund.”

 

The light over the river was stronger than ever. They drove along Oskarsleden, and the cranes on the other side were ablaze in the glare from the Kattegat. Two ferries met out at sea, and Winter thought about Denmark.

“She drew a Danish flag,” he said to Ringmar.

“Who? Helene?”

“Yes. And her daughter, Jennie. They drew Danish flags.”

The distance between the ferries was growing. The larger one continued out across the sea.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Winter described the two different signatures.

“Have you sent them in for analysis?” Ringmar asked.

“On their way.”

“Christ.”

Winter followed the ferry’s westward progress. It grew ever smaller.

“Maybe they went there,” Ringmar said. “To Denmark. Anything’s possible now.”

 

Aneta Djanali introduced herself and Halders, and the man in the doorway invited them in. The house looked a hundred years old. Through the windows she saw the forest and beyond it a field. Two horses walked along the edge of the clearing with their heads bowed down to the ground. They were chestnut and sleek. There was a serenity in what she saw.

“Nice view,” she said.

The man followed her gaze as if it were the first time he had seen the forest and the field. They knew from their search at the Swedish Road Administration that he was sixty-nine years old. They had names, addresses, and personal identity numbers. According to the vehicle registration database, he owned a white Ford Escort with plates that began with the letter
H
. That was what they knew about this man. But he looked like a nice old man. Georg Bremer’s head was as bare as Fredrik Halders’s, but he had a mustache that was dark and didn’t look dyed. His shirt was light blue and open to a neck wizened with age. He wore black trousers held up by a brown belt.

He seems almost withered, Djanali thought.

Bremer continued to look out through the window, and his profile hardened suddenly when the sun disappeared. Seconds later the sun reemerged from behind a cloud and the light softened his face again.

That was strange, thought Djanali. The shadow sort of sliced off his jaw. How silly. I’ve become obsessed with jawlines since getting my own smashed.

“We’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” Halders said. “Don’t you listen to your answering machine?”

“I’ve been away for a while. Got home yesterday and just haven’t gotten round to it.”

Damn courteousness, thought Halders. We shouldn’t bother calling ahead. We ought to come barging in just when the family is sitting down to dinner and ask what the hell Daddy or Mommy’s car was doing in the vicinity of Delsjö Lake in the dead of night. Make people choke. On their shame if nothing else.

“It’s about your car,” Halders said. “It’s just routine, as I’m sure you understand.”

“Don’t you want to take a seat?”

“Thank you,” Djanali said.

She sat down on a couch that was green and worn. Halders remained standing, as did their host.

“What about my car?” Bremer asked.

“You drive a white ’92 Ford Escort?”

“A ’92? Is that when it’s from? I really don’t know. I’ll have to look at the registration.”

“See, we’re checking up on the owners of a certain type of car, who might be able to help us solve a case.”

“What case is that?”

“A murder.”

“And a Ford Escort is involved?”

“One was seen close to where the body was found on the night in question. We’re hoping that the driver of that car may have seen something.”

“Like what? And where?”

Halders looked at Djanali, who sat in the couch with her notepad.

“The night we’re talking about was August 18,” Halders said. “Back when it was still hot summer.”

“That’s not something you forget. I sweated half to death out here.”

“Guess we pretty much all did, every man jack of us.” Halders eyed Aneta again. “And woman.”

“I was here then anyway,” Bremer said. “And so was the car.”

“Okay,” Halders said.

“I didn’t see any car out front,” Djanali said.

“It’s been at the shop since last Friday. Started leaking oil like a sieve. You can probably see for yourselves out there on the driveway.”

“When did you take it in to get fixed?”

“Day before yesterday. I tried to have a look at it myself, but it’s probably the oil pan. And I get dizzy if I spend too much time under the car.”

“But you said you were away yesterday?”

“Yeah, so? What is this, an interrogation?”

“No no. I was just wondering since it’s a little out of the way—you need some kind of vehicle to get out here, don’t you?”

“Well, you sure don’t walk all the way from the bus. But I have a motorbike that I dust off from time to time. It’s out in the barn, if you want to have a look-see.”

“Where is the car?” Djanali asked.

Bremer named the repair shop.

Djanali wrote down the address. “That’s pretty far away from here,” she said.

“That’s how it is sometimes. You gotta go to the ones that offer the best prices.”

“So you’ve checked around?” Halders asked.

“Well, you pick up on these things. Found it through a friend of a friend, you might say.”

“How far is your closest neighbor?”

“You gonna ask me about their cars too?”

“We didn’t see any houses on the way here.”

“I guess there are a few out in the forest at the end of the road, but I’m pretty much on my own out here. There’s a farm to the right a few miles up the road. I think it’s more of a summerhouse. I knew the last owner, but the new ones I only wave to a few times a year when I see them.”

SVEN-ANDERS BORG OPENED THE DOOR, PROPPED UP ON A
crutch.

“Been playing football?” Ringmar asked.

“I wish. Bad circulation. If it continues like this, they’ll probably have to take it off.” He looked down at his left leg.

“It’s not that bad, is it, Sven?”

The retired homicide detective shrugged. “And now I’m back in horrible reality. Guess you better come in.”

They walked through the hall and into a room lit up from the garden out back. Unwashed windows couldn’t block out the sunlight, only dampen it. Dust swirled in the air. It smelled of tobacco and fried onions. A radio was speaking in some other part of the house.

Borg sat down heavily on one of the armchairs and waved to the couch opposite. “Have a seat, guys.”

They sat and Ringmar started to speak.

“I was thinking about it,” Borg cut in. “It’s one hell of a case. A real nightmare investigation. Nothing at first, then everything all at once. You don’t even have time to sort through all the stuff.”

“No,” Ringmar said. “We were talking about that on the way out here.”

“Had I known before, I would have gotten in touch. Maybe I would have made the connection between the name, Helene, and that last name. What was it again? Dellmer?”

“Dellmar.”

“Dellmar. Right. But you haven’t released it.”

“We haven’t had the chance,” Winter said. “We’re busy sorting through everything, like you said.”

Borg sounded like he sighed, then looked up at the ceiling and then at Ringmar. “Here’s more or less how the whole thing went down. We heard about the kid being left at the hospital—well, and then we got the name of the mother. Dellmar, that is. And she had a record. Once we had her name we started looking, but she wasn’t at the apartment out in Frölunda and nowhere else either. Vanished into thin air.”

“So she’s been missing ever since,” Ringmar said. “And you never found any leads, as I understand.”

“In a way we had a lot to go on,” Borg said. “That robbery didn’t exactly go down without a trace.”

“So she was identified in connection with that,” Winter said. “How certain were you?”

Borg looked at Winter as if the young dandy had asked a trick question. He’d left the force before the kid had made inspector, and maybe that was just as well. “How certain? Guess you’d better ask the Danes that. What can I say, of course we believed it. How certain is certain? I don’t know if it’s possible now to get further than we did. There was no video surveillance back then, but a couple inside the bank saw the car drive off and saw the woman. She’d turned around or something. I’m a little rusty on the details. You’ll have to look that up for yourselves in the files.”

“Of course,” Ringmar said.

“How did you tie her, Brigitta Dellmar, to the robbery?” Winter asked. “It wasn’t just because of the child, was it?”

“In part, of course. She was critical. But we followed the usual procedure when we got the call from Denmark. Started checking through our list of known criminals over here. She was among them, after all, though not one of the worst, you understand. A ways down the list, and I guess we hadn’t made it down that far when we were contacted by Sahlgrenska.”

“And you knew, of course, that there was a child involved over there. In Ålborg.”

“Well, it was in the report,” Borg said, “but it was by no means certain. In any case, the neighbors got in touch when they recognized the girl, and then we got right on it.”

“I see,” Ringmar said.

“Then, of course, it took a while to make the connection with the robbery in Denmark.”

“Yes,” Ringmar said.

“And by then she’d disappeared, of course,” Borg said.

“Yes,” Ringmar said.

“Executed,” Borg said.

“What?” Ringmar’s face had gone pale.

“Executed, of course,” Borg said. “Or possibly scared out of her wits. Or, as a third alternative, dead from injuries that we didn’t know about, but that she might have sustained during the robbery.”

“How was it that there were police on the scene,” Winter asked, “so soon after the robbery?”

“Something to do with the bank’s alarm system going off
before
the whole thing had really started. Something strange having to do with a short circuit or one of the employees—no, it was something technical. You’d better check about that with the Danes too, if need be. But a patrol car arrived on the scene just when the whole thing began, and the rest, as they say, is history. One hell of a history.”

“So what you’re saying is that she could have been killed by one of the other robbers?”

“Why not? Two of them escaped with her. They had the money. Then they dropped off the kid, because maybe there were certain things they weren’t willing to do. I don’t know. But I do know she never got in touch. She had a kid, after all, right?”

Ringmar nodded.

“You know those hard-core biker gangs were really staking out their territory big time around then, after a bit of a soft start. We never managed to prove it, but there’s no doubt they were the ones behind it.”

“I read about that in the file,” Winter said.

“That Dellmar woman had those sorts of contacts,” Borg said. “We did what we could to follow her sad life back in time, and she’d flirted a bit with the local bikers. How innocent it was then, I don’t know.”

Ringmar nodded again.

“But she wasn’t there later, as far as we could tell. The Danes worked at it from their end, but she was gone. Just vanished. And then this fairly well-known biker thug pops up in Limfjorden, or wherever the hell it was, and when the bank cashier gets a look at him, she says she’s sure that he’s one of them!”

“You have a good memory, Sven,” Ringmar said.

“There’s nothing wrong with the circulation in my head,” Borg said. “It’s getting clearer now as I’m thinking about it.”

“But no one ever managed to tie that guy to the robbery?”

“I don’t know. No. But we knew. Deep down we knew. He was Danish and disappeared at the time of the robbery and eventually turned up floating facedown in the water, like a dead fish.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. Then the kid ended up here in Gothenburg, and we had good reason to suspect that she had actually been along when it happened. There was a reason to try to speak to the girl. A number of reasons. So we did.”

“We read the transcripts,” Winter said.

“Well, then you’ve seen it for yourself. She didn’t actually say anything. She was clearly distressed by what had happened, that was obvious. But what exactly that was—you’ll have to talk with a psychiatrist about that. We had one sitting in back then. Have you spoken to him?”

“No,” Winter said.

Borg stretched out his left leg and massaged it. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the dust moving about the room disappeared with it.

“But you’ve read it yourself. There’s a section in there where she may have been trying to talk about how she’d been in some house or in a particular room. Maybe a basement somewhere for a while. The Danes talked about a house where they’d been.”

“They?” Winter asked. “The robbers?”

“Who else are we talking about?” Borg said. “I’m talking about the robbers. They had been in some house outside town. Preparing. Planning. You’ll have to ask the Danes about that.” Borg started to rub his leg again. “Could be that’s where they hid out again afterward. The ones who were still alive, that is. A little while longer. Maybe the child was along. I don’t know. Maybe the mother. We never found out.”

“You found out a fair bit,” Ringmar said.