The Shadow Woman (39 page)

One ran parallel to the road that he was driving on. He looked to his right again: a flash of movement among the trees, keeping pace with his own. He looked again: the movement continued when the roads ran side by side through the Store Vildmose marshes. He guessed it was three hundred yards to the tree-lined road that paralleled his. The sun broke through the sky. His gaze returned to the road in front of him. There were no cars ahead, and he saw none in his rearview mirror. He looked to the right again, and now he was certain. The polished chrome of two motorbikes caught the sun at rhythmic intervals as they passed tree after tree.

Then the trees came to an abrupt end, as if an artist had tired of drawing them and lifted his pen from the paper. At that same moment, the motorcycles disappeared from view. Winter drove another half kilometer, but there was no longer any parallel movement. He slowed down suddenly and pulled into a parking space at the side of the road. With the engine running, he tried to see the line of trees in his rearview mirror. He saw the end of it and how it meandered back the way he’d come. They must have stopped right at the last tree, thought Winter. They knew how it looked. Maybe they didn’t notice that I’d spotted them. Perhaps it wasn’t
them
. I’ve got to stay calm.

He continued on, at Pandrup turning left toward Blokhus.

The resort town looked at first like a cautiously inhabited year-round community, but the impression of life dissipated the closer he got to the sea.

Winter turned right at an intersection and stopped two hundred yards farther on, in front of the Bellevue Hotel—all wood and glass that shook in the wind gusting from the sea, across the sand dunes that abutted the hotel. The balconies were abandoned zones waiting for the next season. A pennon was being ripped to shreds on one of the house’s yellow timber-framed towers.

He removed a piece of paper from his jacket’s inside pocket and read it.

They’d been seen leaving Blokhus on a path that ran between the dunes just as it does now.

He climbed out of the car and the wind lifted his hair up, slapping the collar of his jacket against his throat. Sand from the beach had been swept across the street like snowdrifts. It grew higher and ever closer to one of the few open shops, where clothes on hangers waved armless greetings from empty sleeves.

This is a ghost town, thought Winter.

 

A new square marked the center of Blokhus. There was a Cowboyland and a Sky Bar, whose windows were just shadowy black holes. Outside another clothing store, dresses and jackets swelled to twice their size in the wind. Winter saw no seabirds. Perhaps the grotesque scarecrows on the hangers in this town scared the shit out of birds.

The house lay behind the square, on Jens Bærentsvej—the third to the right on the dirt road that led to the sea across wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was an extension on the back of it that might be a room. There was no fence. A rusty lawn mower stood in the center of the little front yard, as if abandoned in miduse.

It was here. It was here, he thought to himself again. They had been here. Helene had been here. The little girl that was Helene had been here. And someone else besides. Maybe her mother, maybe not. Maybe her father, maybe not. Kim Andersen. Maybe a father. Thou shalt obey thy father. Honor thy father. Our father who art in heaven, thought Winter.

Had he been murdered here?

 

During the drive back to Ålborg, Winter thought about how much the Danes had been able to accomplish in their forensic examination of the house back then. The technicians found traces of Helene, but not of anyone else except the owners.

He would have liked to have gone right in, but that was an issue for the judge in Hjørring. The house had changed hands three times.

When he reached the tree-lined stretch again, all was still. The setting sun covered everything in gold leaf, and Winter put on his sunglasses for the drive into town. He parked outside the black police headquarters, which he thought looked more and more like a spaceship that had landed in the midst of this Danish urban agglomeration.

Michaela Poulsen was still in her office. The glow from her computer screen gradually caught up with the fading sun.

“Beate Møller wasn’t interested in being questioned,” she said, as she saved a document in the word-processing program and looked up.

“Not even in having a talk?”

“What she actually told us was to go to hell, using only slightly more genteel language.”

“I see.”

“Her son has never done anything bad. He’s only had bad things done to him.”

“Where does she live?”

“Why do you want to know? You’re not thinking of doing something foolish?”

“Never while on duty,” Winter said, and Poulsen laughed.

Winter asked about the things he had been thinking about in the car on the way back.

Poulsen listened. “I don’t know who owns the house now, but that can be checked out. If we’ve got enough to establish probable cause, we can get a search warrant from the judge in Hjørring. Where leads are concerned, I think it’s all there in the binders in your office. And I’m sure forensics conducted a thorough search of the house.”

“Even underneath the new wallpaper?”

“I don’t know about that specifically, but we can quickly find out. We can check with the National Center for Forensic Science in Copenhagen.”

The phone on the homicide inspector’s desk rang. She lifted the receiver and listened.

“It’s for you. From Sweden.”

WINTER HEARD RINGMAR’S BREATHING FROM ACROSS THE KAT
tegat before the man had even started speaking. The receiver crackled as if the phone line were swinging in a storm.

“Hi, it’s Winter.”

“Hi, Erik. It’s Bertil. I called your mobile but you didn’t answer.”

He picked up his mobile phone and looked at it. “It looks completely normal.”

“I’m not talking about how it looks. But how it sounds.”

“Something must have happened to it,” Winter said, and brought up the call list on the display. Nothing since he’d arrived in Denmark.

“Oh well. We’re speaking now anyway. And we haven’t found any Møller here,” Ringmar said. “No one who fits, anyway. Not yet. But that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve really had our hands full over the past twenty-four hours, sifting through all the tips about the girl—well, you know all about that, of course, but we have a couple of interesting ones here. One came in just an hour ago. A bus driver at Billdal says he’s sure that he’s seen the girl on his bus.”

“Alone?”

“He says she was accompanied by a woman. I’ve only spoken to him on the phone. He should be showing up here any minute.”

“When did he see the girl?”

Winter heard the overloaded phone line crackle again.

“He was going to try to remember on the way over here. He’s checking his driver’s log. It’s too early to tell. But it was a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Months. Could be in connection with the murder.”

“Or before.”

“What?”

“Nothing. We’ll have to discuss it later, when I get back.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow evening, I think. I really ought to stay longer, but I can always return.”

“How’d it go today?”

“I think the biker gang, or gangs, over here are keeping an eye on me. Somebody is.”

“They’re following you?”

“Possibly, but I think they want me to know about it. Or else they screwed up.”

“We’re working on that lead,” Ringmar said. “It’s gotten stronger.”

“What’s happening otherwise?”

“Halders had something—no, I think that had to do with the shoot-out. I don’t know, in that case it’s in the interrogation file. But I don’t know if I have time to read it to you right now, with everybody calling in with their information. You can read it later. It’s your job. You can’t go on eating
smørrebröd
forever.”

“I haven’t had a single bite.”

“Then there’s no reason to stay on. If you’re not planning on eating those tasty
smørrebröds.
”

“Good-bye, Daddy,” Winter said, and hung up.

 

A female police officer showed him the way out. He walked down the stairs. It was past sundown. Iron clanged against iron in the freight yard across Jyllandsgade. Winter followed the street westward toward his hotel.

He hesitated outside the entrance to the Park Hotel and instead headed left across Boulevarden. No one was standing in the window of the Boulevard-Caféen this time. He walked up a chipped stairway and opened the door to the beer hall. It smelled at once of alcohol and the smoke that enveloped its two large rooms in a great haze. The few tables by the windows were empty. Winter sat down and saw the hotel’s facade through a windowpane that was smeared in fat. He couldn’t see the window to his room. Few of the windows in the hotel’s facade were lit up.

The bar was located in the far room, and a few old men sitting at a table in front of the counter were in the midst of a sing-along about faith, hope, love, and alcohol. A woman wearing a white blouse and black skirt was sitting at the table, eating a meal. When she saw Winter sit down, she stood and wiped her mouth with a napkin that was fastened to the waistband of her skirt. The old men turned their heads toward Winter and then turned back again in midsong. The woman came up to his table. He ordered a Hof. She went back and fetched a bottle from a large refrigerator behind the bar and returned to Winter with the opened bottle and a glass. He paid the few kroner it cost.

He grabbed the bottle by the neck and drank it like a Dane, and realized as he drank how thirsty he was.

Sitting at a table at the very back of the bar was a man in a brown coat, with a beer and a bottle of aquavit in front of him. He was staring straight at the bottle of liquor and never moved his head except when he drank. Winter saw his elbow rise up at an angle at regular intervals. A professional. When the woman finished eating, she rose and fetched another beer for the man in the coat without his having made any sign that Winter was able to see. Winter finished his beer and stood up. The old men were still singing. No one seemed to pay any attention to him.

 

Michaela Poulsen called from the lobby. It was shortly past eight. Winter was ready and walked down the steps under the desolate landscapes that hung in frames on the walls.

They followed Boulevarden, which turned into Østerågade. There were a lot of people out. Winter heard Swedish and German. A street troubadour sang about eternal youth in an open square to the left and had just started “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” when they walked past.

The wind tore at Winter’s hair at the intersection of Bispensgade.

“I always feel a strong sense of dread right here,” Poulsen said.

“I can understand that.”

“Come to think of it, I often feel a sense of dread in this job.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Now I’m going to keep looking straight ahead while I speak to you, because I think there’s a guy standing over there by the bookstore who’s more interested in us than he is in the books in the shop window.”

Winter felt he had to make an effort not to turn his head to the left. He looked at the dark stone walls of the bank in front of him. People passed behind them on the sidewalk as they stood with their backs to La Strada.

“Do you recognize him?” he asked.

“It’s hard to tell from here, but I doubt it. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to send a celebrity after us. A celebrity to me, that is.”

They moved a bit to the side and gazed at the Jyske Bank.

“So let’s get back to talking about what we were talking about just now,” Poulsen said. “Do you remember what it was?”

“The strong sense of dread we feel in our work,” Winter said.

They continued looking at the Jyske Bank but in silence.

“I can now inform you that the guy over by the bookstore has gone,” she said. “You don’t have to look, but we can walk over there now. I’m starting to feel stiff from standing here.”

They passed the bookstore. Mannequins stood unclothed in the windows of the Nordjylland fashion house and gazed out with glassy eyes. The bookstore was displaying new books by best-selling Danish authors.

“He’s either been reading Ib Michael or Susanne Brøgger,” Poulsen said.

They continued along Bispensgade to the entertainment district around Jomfru Ane Gade. It was difficult to make headway among all the people moving between the restaurants and bars. Music was coming from every direction. Winter thought about the Gothenburg Party. It was the same atmosphere here, filled with an anxiety that was both hard and soft, or of that same old search for calm.

“Shall we grab a table somewhere, seeing as we’ve confirmed that we are being watched?” Poulsen asked.

“Let’s do that.”

“There’s a pretty good brasserie in the next street. Or should we try to force our way into the thick of things right here?”

“Might be best to be in the thick of things,” Winter said. “It’s easier to observe us without our seeing.”

“He’s been walking behind us for the past few minutes,” Poulsen said.

Winter looked around. A hundred brutal neon signs pummeled his eyes: “L.A. Bar,” “Fyrtøjet,” “Rock Nielsen,” “Down Under Denmark,” “Café Rendezvous,” “Faklen,” “Rock Caféen,” “Duty,” “Jules Verne,” “Sunrise,” “Dirch på Regensen,” “Fru Jensen,” “Gaslight,” “Pusterummet,” “Corner,” “Jomfru Ane’s Dansbar,” “Giraffen,” “Musikhuset,” “Spirit of America.”

They went into Sidegaden. The slogan for the place was: “The night belongs to us.”

Poulsen ordered two bottles of Hof, and they squeezed together in front of the bar.