Death Angels

by Ake Edwardson

  “Black hair, did he have black hair?” Macdonald pulled on the strands that hung over the right side of his forehead. James gave a start.

  Macdonald removed the rubber band from his ponytail and let his hair fall over his shoulders. “Long black hair?” he asked, tugging on his own. James twitched, continuing to sway from side to side like a mourner. His eyes resembled caves.

  “Bla-a-ack,” he said again and pointed to Macdonald.

  “And white?” Macdonald asked, running his fingers across his face and pinching his cheeks. “White? A white man? White skin?”

  “Whi-i-ite.”

  36

  THEY SAT lN MACDONALD’S OFFlCE, ALONE FOR THE FlRST TlME in twelve hours. Macdonald’s eyes were nuggets of coal. The skin of his face looked like it had been taped to his cheekbones. His hair still hung loose over his shoulders.

  Winter was wearing a sport jacket and black jeans, a gray button-down shirt without a tie, and dark boots. His chin and cheeks were unshaven.

  So much for Scandinavian elegance, Macdonald thought. “I hope you realize that you’re more than an observer now,” he said.

  “When does your team get together?”

  Macdonald held his wrist up and looked at his watch. “In an hour.”

  It was dusk. The dying light filtered through the blinds and shredded Macdonald’s face into blue strips.

  “We’re never going to be this close again,” Winter said.

  “Assuming he’s our man.”

  “If not, we have a brand-new problem, right?”

  “Then he’s got to be our man.”

  A stack of papers started to vibrate. Macdonald brushed them aside and picked up the phone. Winter noticed that the papers came from a printout of Macdonald’s policy file. I follow the policy to a T, Macdonald had told him. It gives me cover for everything I do. That way I can justify my decisions when the top brass call me in for my monthly grilling.

  “Hello?” Macdonald picked up a pen and asked a few short questions, taking notes.

  Winter studied Macdonald as he played his role in the eternal cycle of evil that both of them and every other homicide investigator around the world were part of. He could have been sitting there himself with the receiver pressed against a sore ear, Macdonald could have been in Winter’s chair, or they could have been two other detectives in a crowded room in Singapore, Los Angeles or Stockholm. Or Gothenburg. It was all the same, and everyone was interchangeable. It’s bigger than life, he thought. It was there before we came, and it will be there after we’re gone.

  Macdonald clenched his pen harder. “That was the lab—at Lambeth.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “He went about it the same way.”

  “Exactly the same?”

  “As far as they can tell right now.”

  “Marks on the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “All of a sudden he was in a hurry to get out of there.”

  The sun had set and Winter saw Macdonald’s face in silhouette.

  “Our poor witness pounded on the door and howled like a baby,” Macdonald said. “The murderer didn’t panic, but he stopped whatever he was doing.”

  “But it might have made him a little careless.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was just wondering if he slipped up at that point.”

  “Actually, he did.”

  “How?”

  “They found a loose metal sleeve from one leg of the tripod.”

  Winter felt like he’d been locked inside a walk-in freezer. The roots of his hair tingled and his fingers turned to rubber. “The Lord is with us after all,” he said.

  “So you believe in a merciful God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he’s looking down on us right now.”

  “That metal sleeve. It’s not just something that happened to be in the room?”

  “You’re selling some of the world’s best forensic specialists short.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There’s a streak of defiance in this,” Macdonald said. “It makes me wonder if it really was sloppiness.”

  “That’s occurred to me too.”

  “The defiance?”

  “Yes, and that it could be a message of some kind, or a greeting.”

  “Or a cry for help. But we’ll have to leave that up to the forensic psychologist.”

  “Not help. It’s something else, more intimate. I can’t find the word for it.”

  “Just as long as you can say it to yourself—the Swedish word, I mean.”

  “I can’t find it in any language.”

  The north wind had risen and Bergenhem felt the boat rock from side to side for the first time. The porthole was whistling like a flute. “The porthole is drafty,” he said.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Marianne said. “I’m used to it.”

  “I can fix it.”

  “I’d probably be nervous without it.”

  “When you’re Angel . . .”

  “What?”

  “When you’re working.”

  “Yes?”

  “When somebody follows you into the other room.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “What do you do there behind the bar, or wherever it is?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I just want to know what goes on back there.”

  “If I fuck them?”

  “No, I was just wondering if they say any—”

  “You want to know whether I’m an honest-to-goodness hooker.”

  “No!”

  “You think I’m a hooker.”

  “No way.”

  “I’m not a hooker. I’ve never done it for money, not what you’re talking about.”

  There was only one thought in Bergenhem’s head—that he had become someone else. His fists were clenched, and they didn’t belong to him.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” Marianne edged toward him.

  “Stay right where you are.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t come any closer.”

  “So you think I’m a hooker after all.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “What are you talking about then?”

  He drank some more wine. They were on their second bottle. He was off duty tonight, but Martina thought he was working. I wish you could stay home, she had said. It feels like my water is about to break any minute.”

  “I dance for those poor bastards,” Marianne said. “All I do is dance.”

  Bergenhem had lost interest in his question. He closed his eyes and saw a child on a table. He and Martina were watching through a screen. Angel danced for them and smiled at something she was holding in her hand.

  The hull surged, as if a gale had lashed the boat, lifted it up and hurled it back into the river. Suddenly he felt sick to his stomach. His hands throbbed, the blood storming through his fingers. They weren’t his hands. His head was somebody else’s.

  “Like when I was little,” Marianne continued. “Did I ever tell you how much fun I had?”

  She had told him about the child she had once been, and that was one of the reasons he stayed. He thought about the privileged and the underprivileged. There was no justice anywhere, and it wasn’t going to get any better. All the signals that flashed on the road to the future were red as could be, with the same glare as at the strip joints, a light that led the human race on its pilgrimage to perdition.

  “I was the star of my parents’ dinner parties,” she said.

  Bergenhem lunged off the bed, dashed up to the deck, leaned over the gunwale and vomited. Tears filled his eyes and all he saw was a black hole. He felt a hand on his back. Marianne said something he didn’t catch.

  “Don’t lean any farther or you’ll fall over.”

  He breathed more easily now and he could see again. Below him the river ran dark between the boat and the stone of the wharf. The boat bumped up against th
e stone. Down there—that wasn’t any way out.

  She wiped his forehead with a damp towel. He was drenched from the rain, his shirt clinging to his body as if he had fallen into the water. She steadied him as they walked back below deck. His feet slipped back and forth on the boards.

  Winter poured hot water from the coffeepot. It was eight in the morning and birds he didn’t know the names of had already warbled themselves hoarse in the courtyard below his open window.

  Just a few more hours and he would be sitting in a television studio with Macdonald and a bunch of reporters. The producers of Crimewatch had called a second time and Macdonald had accepted without hesitation.

  Winter and thirteen other investigators had met the night before in one of the big offices on Parchmore Road. A bottle of whisky was on the table. Everybody said what they had been thinking. Macdonald tried to draw out the best in each of them.

  Could they distill what had been said and communicate it to the public? Winter wasn’t nervous, and he hoped and prayed they would get calls after the program.

  “Now’s the time to go for it,” Macdonald had said to Winter. “We’ve just got to keep our fingers crossed that someone out there in the anonymous public has seen something.”

  “I agree.”

  “Television is a paradoxical medium.”

  “The anonymous public.”

  Winter spread butter and orange marmalade on two slices of toast. Earlier in the morning, he had walked down Hogarth Road to a newspaper stand on Earl’s Court Road and bought the Guardian, the Independent, the Times and the Daily Telegraph.

  His cell phone rang.

  “I know you’re an hour behind us,” Ringmar said, “but I assumed you’d be up anyway.”

  “It’s broad daylight here.”

  “We just got another letter from our burglar friend.”

  It took a few seconds for Winter to follow the chain of thought backward: burglar, apartment, bloody clothes—far-fetched, so goddam far-fetched.

  “Erik?”

  “I’m still here.” Winter washed down his toast with a mouthful of tea.

  “He was insistent, as if he wanted to make up for his procrastination and set the record straight.”

  “And?”

  “So we took a closer look at the guy who rents the apartment. Halders and Djanali had a little extra time when—”

  “For God’s sake, Bertil, skip the chronology and tell me what happened.”

  “We called him in for questioning.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t respond right away, but finally we heard from him.”

  “Bertil!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming to it. Listen carefully now. We couldn’t get hold of him in Gothenburg at first because he was in London.”

  “What?”

  “I told you to listen carefully. He was in London.”

  “How the hell can you know something like that?”

  A chilliness began to creep through Winter’s body. His scalp was prickly. Sweeping the newspapers off the table, he took three steps over to the counter and picked up his notepad. He sat down again, pen in hand.

  “That wasn’t so hard to figure out,” Ringmar said. “He’s a flight attendant, often on the Gothenburg-London route.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “And that’s not all. He has an apartment in London. He lives there and has an overnight apartment in Gothenburg, or the other way around.”

  “Is he British?”

  “Swedish through and through. Not to mention his name—Carl Vikingsson.”

  “Vikingsson?”

  “Yes. And the name of the aircraft he usually works on is Viking something.”

  “Does he have a record?”

  “Nope, clean as a whistle.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “We’ve got him here.”

  Winter’s throat was dry. He drank his lukewarm tea but it might as well have been kerosene or blueberry soup.

  “We haven’t had a chance to question him yet,” Ringmar went on.

  “No alibi?”

  “Like I said, we don’t know at this point. It could get pretty complicated.”

  “Where is his London apartment?”

  “The address I’ve got is 32 Stanley Gardens.”

  “Hold on.” Winter put down the phone and walked over to the coffee table. He picked up a London A-Z street atlas and checked the index. “London has six streets named Stanley Gardens,” he told Ringmar when he returned.

  “Shit.”

  “I need the postal code—NW7 or something like that.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  Winter took another gulp of kerosene and felt the hunter’s instinct rise in his gut. He heard fumbling at the other end of the line.

  “We have his business card here. Let me see . . . it’s Stanley Gardens W11.”

  Winter looked in the index. W11. The address was at 7 H 59. He flipped to page 59 and found 7 H: Notting Hill, Kensington Park Road, Stanley Crescent . . . there. It was a little cross street. “Up in Portobello.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Hold him for six hours, and make sure to get an extension for another six.”

  “Okay; remember, we haven’t questioned him yet.”

  Winter had made up his mind. They had the legal right to keep him that long—with necessary rest and food. “And screw any alibis he comes up with,” he said.

  “Fine with me. Cohen is raring to go with the interrogation.”

  No doubt Cohen had read everything he could get his hands on.

  “Don’t turn Cohen loose on him just yet,” Winter said.

  “What?”

  “Keep it low-key at first. Start off yourself.”

  “But Cohen has to be there.”

  “Just as an onlooker. We can’t afford to make any mistakes.”

  “Easy does it.”

  “No screwups.”

  “Don’t underestimate me. Odds are we’ll still be discussing the weather forecast when you get here tomorrow.”

  “Good—I have faith in you.”

  “What time are you getting back, by the way?”

  “I don’t know yet. The television program I told you about yesterday is this afternoon. We’ve got to check out the address you gave me right away. I’ll let you know in an hour or two.”

  “Erik?”

  “Yes?”

  “One thing we know for sure. Vikingsson was in London when Christian was killed.”

  “Not on a plane?”

  “Shit, that’s possible. But he wasn’t in Sweden.”

  They hung up. Winter dialed the eleven-digit number to the Thornton Heath police station. “This is Chief Inspector Erik Winter. May I speak to Steve Macdonald?”

  “Just a minute please.”

  Macdonald came on the line.

  “It’s Erik, I just heard from Gothenburg. They’ve called a guy in for questioning, and he has an apartment here in London. It might be a long shot, but we should take a look.”

  “An apartment here?”

  “Up in Notting Hill.”

  “Nice area.”

  “I don’t know anything about the guy. But I think we need to see his apartment.”

  “From the outside?”

  “What?”

  “I know a couple of sympathetic judges, but neither of them is going to let us search an apartment without a little more to go on.”

  “I want to head over there anyway. I’m leaving now. See you at the corner of Kensington Park Road.”

  “Kensington Park Road and what?”

  “Sorry, the apartment is on Stanley Gardens.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “I’m out the door.”

  37

  WlNTER FLAGGED DOWN A NORTHBOUND TAXl ON EARL’S COURT Road. It was fifteen minutes to Notting Hill Gate on the narrow streets past Holland Park. He had hiked around there occasionally in his younger days.


  The houses on Kensington Park Road shone like marble. At the Pembridge intersection, a café owner was putting checkered tablecloths on the outdoor tables. People were already waiting for the first cappuccino of spring.

  The buildings on Stanley Gardens were surrounded by silence and shade. Number 32 had an entrance where anybody could go in and out. Winter continued down the street and then turned back to Kensington Park Road. He stood still on the corner. A couple his own age stopped before him.

  “How do we get to Portobello Road?” the man asked with a Swedish accent.

  “It runs parallel to this street. Just turn right down there.”

  “Thank you very much,” the couple said in unison and Winter flashed them his best British smile. I’m a member of the anonymous public, he thought.

  It was a Swedish area of sorts. Within walking distance to his east was the Bayswater district, whose hotels around Queensway Street were the favored accommodations of Scandinavian tourists.

  A taxi pulled up and Macdonald wriggled out. “A train and then a cab from Victoria Station,” he said. “It’s the fastest way.”

  “It’s over there.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve issued an order for the building to remain under 24/7 surveillance from the moment we leave.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I had a chat with a judge, who said no, of course, so that investigation of yours needs to turn up something pretty damn quick.”

  They went over to the building, and Winter read the nameplates. He tugged on the heavy door to the northern stairway. It was locked. “I assume you have the entry code,” he said.

  Macdonald nodded. “We can always count on the janitors.”

  The hallway had the cool smell of polished wood. The light spiraled up the stairs to the roof. They followed the light and stopped on the third floor. Macdonald put on a pair of gloves and tapped on the door with the lion-faced knocker. “A custom left over from our colonial era.”

  No answer. Macdonald tapped again, brass against wood. “Nobody’s subleasing the apartment,” he said.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Whatever. Nobody’s home right now.”

  Winter heard a clatter beneath them. The elevator hissed, went down and stopped. A minute later it passed by on the way back up. The passenger couldn’t have seen Winter or Macdonald, who stood in the blind corner of the staircase.