The Shadow Woman (38 page)

The bank occupied a building that looked as if it might have been a church erected in the late Middle Ages, though it had been a bank for as long as anyone in Ålborg could remember. The stones in the walls were rough-hewn. The windows were large and appeared to have been there for centuries. A telephone booth stood next to the gaping entrance, just opposite them, across the pedestrian street.

“I wonder how many times they walked past here and planned that job,” Winter said, turning to the Danish homicide detectives.

“It could have been done by others,” Bendrup said. “Or just one of them.”

“We also believe that the driver—the woman—first tried to drive east along Nytorv, but that way was blocked off,” Poulsen said. “I’ll show you when we go outside.”

“You mean that the escape route across the bridge wasn’t planned?”

She made a gesture with her hand. “It may have been, but perhaps from a different direction. We don’t really know. What I mean is that maybe everything wasn’t planned down to the last detail.”

“But the idea didn’t just occur to them as they happened to be walking past,” Bendrup said.

 

The bank was closed, and they were alone in there with two of the staff. The commotion outside the window intensified apace with the onset of evening. Winter reconstructed the events in his head, while Bendrup and his boss recounted and pointed.

They’d rushed in with their black masks, a repeat of so many robberies in the criminal history that united all countries.

Outside, the young police officer had been gunned down. Christiansen. And two of the robbers. Their names and background were in the files that Winter had brought along from the police station to read in his hotel room.

Bendrup indicated where people had stood and where they had fallen. Everything eventually flowed together from all different directions, and Winter felt the fatigue take hold, his consciousness dulled like the daylight that was seeping away into the walls of the buildings on this street corner of the world where people had died for money. Or was there something else too? He wondered if it might have been for an idea—an awful concept of power and control, of naked terror.

“And heading north,” Bendrup said.

Winter followed his gesture past something that seemed to be a copy of a British pub.

“We took off after them, but I already told you that,” Bendrup said. “It started to get dark, like it is now. It was almost the same time of year.”

Winter wished himself back at the hotel. An hour’s sleep and then work and a bit of food. He needed to be alone again.

“Well,” Bendrup said. “Is there anything else we can show you? That you want to see right now, that is.”

“Not right at the moment,” Winter said. “You’ve been very forthcoming, I must say.”

“Out of pure selfishness,” Bendrup said. “You solve the case, and we get the glory.”

“Of course,” Winter said. He was starting to get a little tired of Bendrup’s chatter.

“Well, maybe we’re trying to be a little more professional than that,” Poulsen said. “Let’s get going, then. We can drop you off at the hotel.”

“I’d prefer to walk,” Winter said. “It’s not very far, is it?”

“Not far at all,” Bendrup said. “Just follow this street and it’ll take you straight to the square next to the station. Kennedy Square. That’s where your hotel is.”

Winter raised his hand in farewell and started walking. “I’ll come by tomorrow morning.”

Poulsen waved and nodded.

 

He had dozed off for a while and was awakened by the sound of motors. Eventually you barely notice it, Michaela Poulsen had said. It gets to be like living next to a railroad. Here he had both. Motors and trains. He got out of bed and walked to the window. The room was half in darkness from the encroaching evening and half in light from John F. Kennedy Square, which was patchily lit from there to the station building, where two motorcycles stood revving their engines. After a few minutes they drove off to the right.

There was a rumbling from bus traffic at the far end of the square. To the right he could see the dim light from the Mallorca Bar. Two men staggered in and another staggered out.

Winter drew the curtains and took off his clothes and left them in a pile on the floor.

The water in the shower reached the right temperature almost immediately. He stood there for a long time before he lathered his body and rinsed the suds off with his face pointing into the stream.

 

There were still a lot of people on the streets in the center of town as Winter headed south along Boulevarden. He met with fewer as he neared the station. The evening was so mild that he could walk with his jacket unbuttoned.

Two men were standing outside the Boulevard-Caféen, opposite the hotel, but they went inside the bar when he drew closer. The windows were open and he heard the murmur of voices. Winter walked across the street and glimpsed a man through one of the windows. He lit a cigarillo as he walked, which allowed him to glance at the window of the bar, and the man was still standing there, with the half darkness behind him and half-hidden behind the thin curtains.

It might not be, thought Winter. But if those are the same men who were standing outside the Jyske Bank, talking over a hamburger, when I was there, this city isn’t actually very big.

He was standing next to his car now. He opened it and pretended to rummage around in the glove compartment. The man remained standing in the window, but his silhouette had moved, as if to follow Winter’s movements more closely.

Winter stepped out of the car, rounded the corner, and went into the hotel. He was handed his key. The elevator had gotten stuck somewhere, so he walked quickly up the stairs and waited in the hallway outside the door until the timer switched off the hall lights. Then he opened the door to his room and slid from darkness into darkness and shut the door at once behind him. The room was silver from the illuminated square and streets outside. Winter went down on his knees and crawled across the floor.

When he was below the window, he crawled off to the side and slowly stood up, concealed by the thick curtain that hung there. He heard a shout from the Mallorca Bar and saw a man move along unsteadily. He couldn’t see the door to the Boulevard-Caféen, but he waited and saw the man outside the Mallorca joined by another drunken lout, who shouted in Danish.

Then something moved in the right of his field of vision and he backed up a few inches into the room, but not far enough to prevent his seeing.

The two men came into view, moving away from the street and across the square. Winter saw that it was the same men he’d seen just before, outside the bar. He was certain he had also seen them up by Nytorv. More than certain, in fact.

The men looked up at the window as they walked past on the sidewalk below. They can’t see me, thought Winter. One of them kept his gaze fixed on the window, and Winter stayed still.

Then they had passed.

The most foolish thing now would be to go down and follow them, he thought. I don’t think they know that I know.

THE SOUNDS SEARED WINTER’S SLEEP LIKE RED-HOT COALS,
waking him from a state of deep unconsciousness. No dreams tonight. The exhaustion from the day before had taken its toll and given him rest. He lay still for two minutes and primed himself to get up, opening his eyes to a room washed out by the morning light from John F. Kennedy Square. As he climbed out of bed, the room began to vibrate from what he now identified as one hell of a racket coming from outside. For a second, he thought it was motorcycles, but the sound was different. He checked his watch. It was 6:30. Just then the alarm clock on the bedside table rang.

He drew the curtains and saw a tanker truck parked next to the phone booths, with thick hoses feeding from it into the ground. Sometimes the local sewage cleaners know when you’ve checked into a hotel and make a point of getting to work outside your window at the crack of dawn, he thought. But I was getting up anyway.

The sky encased his field of vision like dirty steel. The buses in front of the station departed with early-rising unfortunates. There were still soldiers in front of the station. Maybe it’s a permanent posting, he thought.

The vibrations ceased seconds after the racket, and the sewage cleaners pulled levers and pressed buttons and headed off for breakfast.

Winter could now take in the sounds of early morning, delicate and clear.

 

He was escorted to his temporary office on the second floor by a uniformed officer who didn’t say a word. Michaela Poulsen came in a minute later.

“I’m being followed,” Winter said.

“I’m not surprised,” she said. Winter noticed that she didn’t ask if he was sure. “Your arrival was no secret, after all.”

“Who are they?”

“Who’s following you? To know that I’d have to see a few faces.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to invite you out for dinner tonight,” Winter said. “You’ll have to discreetly glance over your shoulder.”

“Okay. But it’ll have to be after eight.”

“Could be that one of the gangs over here got a message from Sweden,” Winter said.

“Or an alarm,” Poulsen said.

“Yes. An alarm. That could tell us something. And there’s something else,” Winter said. “The name Andersen. Or Møller. The one who wound up dead afterward.”

“Kim Møller.”

“Let’s call him Kim Andersen. I read up on him yesterday in my hotel room. I couldn’t quite get my head around it. He seems to have been a reluctant member. A reluctant biker. There wasn’t much in there.”

“And he wasn’t known to us before.”

“First time?”

“First and last.”

“Are you talking bank robberies now?”

“The more serious stuff, yeah.”

“His parents weren’t especially forthcoming, as far as I could tell.”

“They were terrified,” Poulsen said. “Literally scared to death. The father died a few months later, and while it could have been his heart, it may well have been something else.”

“Is the mother still living?”

“Yes.” Poulsen looked at Winter. “Do you want to question her? That is, do you want us to question her again?”

“Where is she?”

“At home, I think.”

“Can you set it up?”

“We can try. If she doesn’t want to, we’ll have to go see a judge.”

“Try contacting her at home,” Winter said.

Poulsen left the room and returned five minutes later. “No answer and no answering machine.”

“Do you have the address?”

“Yes, but that’s not a good idea. If we just show up on her doorstep, she’s liable to just deny everything. And if she was afraid back then, she’s afraid now too. We’ve had some contact over the years.”

“Is she being watched? By them, I mean.”

“I would think so.”

Winter was alone in the room, studying the slip of paper that resembled the map he had first seen on Beier’s desk in Gothenburg, a copy of which he’d brought along and was now holding up for comparison. The handwriting was different but the message was the same. The lines were scrawled in the same directions. The letters and numbers could be references to times and quantities. People or money? Or both? Initials of places or names? On the desk before him and in the files on the computer were fragments of answers. As soon as he got home, he could sit down with all the documents and other materials and very slowly work his way through the preliminary investigation from August 18 to today. He looked at the photo of Kim Andersen that glistened through the plastic pressed over his face. From October 2, 1972, up to the present, thought Winter. Andersen’s face was alive and seemed painted with a heavy burden that could have been anything. Winter knew it was taken the year before Andersen died. He was a member then, in one way or another. He had a Harley 750. His eyes were black and his chin was in shadow. The shadow fell from the left and made his face indistinct. Winter knew what he was looking for, but he couldn’t find any direct resemblance to Helene Andersén in Kim Andersen’s youth of twenty-five years ago.

 

He drove across the bridge and turned left on Vesterbrogade. This was the route Brigitta had driven. Helene sat in the back or lay pressed against the floor. Or was held there. How frightened had the child been? The mother? Had she known where she was going? According to Bendrup, a few witnesses later came forward saying they’d seen a Fiat driving at high speed between the high-rises. The high-rises gave way to detached gray stone houses when the street turned into Thistedvej.

The traffic thinned out when fields began to open up along the roadside, and Winter could hear the wind. The light was transformed as he went from city to countryside, a paler hue now spanned the sky to the west, where the sea lay. Before Årbybro he looked to the right and saw mile-long stretches of tree-lined country roads rambling through ploughed fields.