Ringmar didn't respond.
'Is that what he was doing?'
'I don't know, Erik. I haven't interrogated the—'
'OK, OK. Anybody determined to kidnap a child can do it, no matter what.'
Angela gave a start.
There was a woman dressed in white sitting beside the boy. Machines were humming away. Sounds that didn't sound natural. Lights that were anything but pretty.
'Let's go to that other room,' said Winter.
A room had been placed at their disposal.
'Where are the parents?' Winter asked as they walked down the corridor.
'With one of the doctors.'
'I expect they'll be staying overnight?'
'Of course.'
'I'm going home now,' said Angela.
They hugged, and Winter kissed her. He looked Ringmar in the eye over Angela's shoulder. Ringmar's face looked hollow.
The room was as naked as the trees outside the window and the streets below. Winter leaned against the wall. The three glasses of wine he'd drunk had given him a headache that he was now trying to rub away from his forehead with his left hand. A radio in the distance was playing rock music. He could just about hear it. 'Touch me', he thought he heard. And something about being taken to another place. But there was no other place. It was here, everything was here. He didn't recognise the song. Halders would have recognised it immediately, as would Bergenhem. And Macdonald. When was Steve supposed to be visiting them?
The boy in the other room wasn't that much older than Elsa.
'What happened next?' Winter asked.
'They sent out a car, and then another one,' said Ringmar.
'Where to?'
'First to the Plikta playground at Slottskogen Park. Then, well . . .'
'Groping in the dark,' said Winter.
'They were six miles apart,' said Ringmar.
Six miles between Plikta and the place where he was eventually found.
'Who found him?'
'The classical set-up. A dog, and then the dog's owner.'
'Where is he? The dog's owner, I mean.'
'At home.'
Winter nodded.
'So four hours had passed,' he said.
'Just over.'
'How much do we know about the injuries?' he asked.
Ringmar made a gesture that suggested everything and nothing. It was as if he could barely raise his hand. The guitars had stopped resounding in the corridor. Who the hell had been playing rock music in the hospital?
'There are obvious injuries to the boy's torso,' said Ringmar. 'And his face. Nothing under, er, below his waist.'
'I saw his face,' said Winter.
'I saw one of his arms,' said Ringmar.
'Does anything in life surprise you any more?' Winter asked, prising himself away from the wall and massaging his forehead again. 'In this life we're living just now?'
'There are questions you can't answer with a yes or a no,' said Ringmar.
'Where were the parents when the alarm was raised?'
'The man was at work – he has lots of colleagues – and his wife was drinking coffee with a friend.'
And I was drinking wine in a restaurant, Winter thought. A brief moment of calm and warmth in a protected corner of life.
'He must have had a car,' he said. 'Don't you think? Driving through the rush-hour traffic when everybody else is staring straight ahead and looking forward to getting home.'
'He parked inside the park,' said Ringmar. 'Or close by.' He scratched his chin and Winter could hear the rasp from the day-long stubble. 'The crime-scene boys are out there now.'
'Good luck to them,' said Winter, without conviction.
A million tyre tracks one on top of the other in a car park. With a bit of luck a soft and wet patch of grass, otherwise there would be no chance.
We'll have to check up on the usual suspects, he thought. To start with. Either we find him there, or we don't. This could be a long journey.
'I'll have to talk to the day nursery staff as well,' he said. 'How many of them are there now? Or rather, how few?'
But first the parents. They were sitting in an office that Winter recognised. It was Angela's. She'd arranged for them to be installed there before going home. There was normally a photograph of himself with Elsa on her desk, but she had removed it before Paul and Barbara Waggoner arrived, bringing their desperation with them. Good thinking. Angela was sensible.
The man was standing, the woman seated. They radiated a sort of restrained restlessness that Winter knew all too well from his numerous other meetings with the relatives of victims – they were also victims, of course. A restlessness that was a sort of tangible desire to reach back in time and preserve the past for ever. Of course. The victims of crimes were always searching for a life in the past. Perhaps they were not the only ones. He himself would have liked to remain in Bistro 1965, an hour ago, which could easily have been another era in another world. The protected corner. Strictly speaking Bertil hadn't needed to phone him, but he'd known that Winter would want to be there. Bertil's intuition on this occasion had scared Winter, but his colleague was never wrong in such matters: this was going to be a long, dark journey and Winter needed to be there from the very beginning. It wasn't the sort of thing you could explain to others. He noticed that Ringmar was standing beside the woman, who was sitting on the little visitors' sofa. It's something between Bertil and me. He rubbed his forehead again. My headache has gone.
'Will he be able to see again?' asked Barbara without looking up.
Winter didn't respond, nor did Ringmar. We are not doctors, Winter thought. If you look up you'll see that.
'They are not doctors, Barbara.' The words came out more like an exhalation. 'We've just finished speaking to the doctor.' Winter detected a slight but unmistakable foreign accent, possibly English. His name suggested that.
'He couldn't say anything about that for sure,' she said, as if she were transferring her hope to the new specialists who had just entered the room.
'Mrs Waggoner,' said Winter, and she looked up. Winter introduced himself and Ringmar. 'May we ask you a few questions?' He looked at her husband, who nodded.
'How can anybody do something like that to a child?' she said.
Winter couldn't answer that. He asked the hardest question first: 'Why?'
'Isn't that your job? Isn't that what you are supposed to find out?' Paul Waggoner asked with the same intonation as before, an aggressiveness lacking in energy. Winter knew it could become much more forceful if he didn't play his cards right. He must be an Englishman, he thought.
'We shall do everything we can to find whoever did this, of course,' he said.
'What kind of a fucking monster is this?' Yes, Englishman.
'We shall—'
'Don't you have a register of scum like this? So you only need to look him up?' His accent had suddenly become more marked.
'We shall do that,' said Winter.
'Why are you sitting here, then?'
'We have to ask some questions about Simon,' said Winter. 'It will—'
'Questions? We can't say any more than what you've seen for yourself.'
'Paul,' said his wife.
'Yes?'
'Please calm down a bit.'
Paul looked at her, then at Winter, and then looked away.
'Ask your questions, then,' he said.
Winter asked about times and routines and clothes. He asked if Simon had had anything with him. Something it wasn't possible to talk to the boy himself about at the moment.
'What do you mean, anything with him?'
'Have you noticed anything missing? Something he had before but doesn't have now?' Winter asked.
'A toy or something of the sort,' Ringmar said. 'A toy animal. An amulet, anything at all that he used to have with him or on him.'
'A keepsake?'
'Yes.'
'Why do you want to know that?'
'I understand why,' said Barbara W
aggoner, who was sitting up straight now. Winter could hear a slight accent when she spoke now, very slight. He wondered if they spoke English when they were at home together, or Swedish, or both for Simon's sake.
'Oh yes?' her husband said.
'If he's lost something,' she said. 'Don't you see? If he . . . if the one that . . . if he'd taken something off Simon . . .'
'Was there anything to take?' Winter asked.
'We haven't thought about that,' said Paul. 'We haven't checked it.'
'Checked what?' asked Winter.
'His watch,' said Mrs Waggoner, raising her hand to her mouth. 'He never took it off.' She looked at her husband. 'I didn't see it.'
'It's blue,' said Paul, looking at his wife.
'A child's watch,' she said.
Ringmar left the room.
'Would you like me to make some coffee or something?' Winter asked. 'Tea?'
'We've already had some, thank you,' said Barbara.
'Is this a common occurrence?' asked her husband. 'Does this happen to many children?'
Winter didn't know if his question referred to the city of Gothenburg, or to Sweden, or to child abuse in general, or the type of crime they were up against now. There were various possible answers. One was that it was common for children to be abused by adults. Children and young people. It was most common inside families. Nearly always inside families, he thought, and looked at the Waggoners, who seemed to be about thirty, or possibly younger, in view of the sharp lines and hollows that marked their faces in their distress. Fathers and mothers beat their children. He'd come across a lot of children who'd been beaten by their parents. He'd been in many such homes and tried to hide the experience away in his memory until the next such occasion. Children who were handicapped for life. Some of them could no longer walk. Or see, he thought, thinking of little Simon lying in the ward with eyes that were no longer like they used to be.
Some of them died. The ones who lived never forgot it. None of them forgot anything. God, he had met victims who had become adults but the damage was still there, always present in their eyes, their voices.
In their actions. Sometimes there was a pattern that carried on. A terrible inheritance that wasn't really an inheritance but something much worse.
'I mean here in Gothenburg,' said Paul. 'That children can be abducted by somebody just like that, and abused, and . . . dumped, and maybe . . . maybe . . .' He couldn't bring himself to go on. His face had collapsed a little bit more.
'No,' said Winter. 'It's not common.'
'Has it happened before?'
'No. Not like this.'
'How do you mean? Not like this?'
Winter looked at him.
'I don't really know what I mean,' he said. 'Not yet. First we must find out more about what actually happened.'
'Some unknown madman kidnapped our son when he was at a playground with his daycare people,' said Paul Waggoner. 'That's what happened.' He looked at Winter but there was more resignation than aggression in his eyes now. 'That's what actually happened. And I asked you if anything like that had actually happened before.'
'I shall soon know more about all this,' said Winter.
'If it's happened before, it can happen again,' said Waggoner.
'Isn't it enough for you to know that it's happened, Paul?' said his wife, getting to her feet and walking over to them and putting her arm round her husband's shoulders. 'It's happened to us, Paul. It's happened to Simon. Isn't that enough for you? Can't we . . . can't we concentrate on trying to help him? Can't you understand? Can't you just let the police get on with what they have to do while we do what we have to do? Paul? Do you understand what I'm saying?'
He nodded, abruptly. Perhaps he did understand. Winter heard Ringmar open the door behind him. He turned round. Ringmar shook his head.
'Did you find the watch?' asked Paul.
'No,' said Ringmar.
* * *
Larissa Serimov adjusted the strap and felt the weight of her gun against her body. Or perhaps it was more the knowledge of what it could do that she felt. A SigSauer wasn't heavy; anything of a similar weight could be forgotten about; but that didn't apply to guns.
This early December day was mild, as if they were in a more southerly land. Signs of Christmas everywhere but a temperature of eleven degrees, maybe twelve. Brorsson was driving with his window more than halfdown.
'Mind you don't get a stiff neck,' she said.
'I only get that in summer,' he said. 'For some reason or other.'
'I know the reason,' she said as they turned off towards the sea. She could hear sea birds through Brorsson's open window.
'What?'
'You get a stiff neck in the summer because you drive with the window open,' she said, and saw the glint of water beyond the field that appeared to be almost as full of water as the sea.
'But it isn't summer now,' he said.
She laughed loudly.
'Although it's pretty warm,' he said. 'From a purely statistical point of view, the average temperature today is high enough for it to count as summer.'
'In that case it must be summer, Billy,' she said.
'Yes, you're right,' he said, turning to look at her.
'And so it follows that you'll soon get a stiff neck,' she said, looking out at the rocks and the sea, both of which were totally motionless.
Brorsson wound the window up.
'Straight on,' she said at the roundabout.
They drove to a turning space, parked and stepped out of the car. The modern terraced houses on the right were built in steps, like some of the rocks. There were hills behind them. The bay was open here, and the ocean lay in wait beyond the archipelago. There were sailing boats still moored to jetties as if to confirm what Brorsson had just said: summer refused to die this year. No snow this year, and Larissa Serimov liked snow. Snow on the ground and snow on the ice. That's my heritage. A white soul in a white body.
'It's open,' said Brorsson.
They could see the interior of the restaurant through the glass doors. It looked inviting. The horizon appeared to cut right through the building, making it seem like a tower, or a lighthouse. The placidity of the coast this newly born December felt as restful as it was. But not for them.
'We've just had lunch,' she said. 'Have you forgotten?'
'Yes, I know, but I thought we could get the customers to blow into the bag when they come out.' She noticed his eyes, apathetic and exhilarated at the same time. 'Just a little puff. I need to book a few more drunks before Christmas.' He looked at her. 'The statistics are important as far as I'm concerned.'
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