Frozen Tracks

by Ake Edwardson

  Carlström nodded. Winter asked his last question, the one he'd been waiting with.

  'Do you happen to have a copy of your mark, by the way?' he asked in an offhand tone. 'That symbol, or number combination, or whatever it was.'

  'Eh?'

  'What did your mark look like?' Winter asked.

  'I don't have a copy, if that's what you want to see,' said Carlström.

  'But you remember what it looked like?'

  'Yes, of course.'

  'Could you draw it for us?'

  'What for?'

  'In case it turns up.'

  'If it turns up, it'll turn up here,' said Carlström.

  'But we'd be grateful if you could help us even so,' said Ringmar. 'Then we could exclude your iron if we find the one that was used in the attacks.'

  'Why the blazes should my iron have been used?' Carlström asked.

  'We have no idea,' said Winter, 'and we don't think it was, of course. But it would be of help even so if we knew what it looked like.'

  'Yes, yes,' said Carlström. 'It's a square with a circle in it and a C inside the circle.' He looked at Winter. 'C stands for Carlström.'

  'Could you possibly draw it for us?'

  Carlström made that strange sucking noise again, but stood up and left the room without a word. He returned a minute later with a sketch that he handed to Ringmar.

  'Have you had it long?' Ringmar asked.

  'As long as I can remember. It was my father's.'

  'Many thanks for all your help,' said Winter.

  They went back through the hall and stood in the doorway. The darkness was compact now, there was no sign of any stars or moon in the sky. The only light Winter could see was the lighthouse on the horizon, brighter now.

  'What's that over there?' he asked, pointing. 'The light.'

  'Television mast,' said Carlström. 'Radio, television, those stupid computer contraptions, God knows what else. It's been there for some time.'

  'Anyway, many thanks,' said Ringmar, and they went back to the car and got in. Carlström was still in the doorway, a hunched silhouette.

  'Are you cold?' asked Winter as he started the car.

  'No. You weren't very long,' said Smedsberg in the darkness.

  'We were longer than intended.'

  Winter turned the car round and headed for the main road.

  'Were we on the veranda long enough for you to recognise him?' Winter asked as they turned right.

  'A few years have passed, but I've seen him now and again,' said Smedsberg. 'While I were sitting there I remembered his name as well. Carlström. Natanael Carlström. The kind of name you ought to remember.'

  'Is he religious?' asked Ringmar. 'Or rather, his parents?'

  'Dunno,' said Smedsberg. 'But there were a lot of God-fearing folk round here in the old days, so it ain't impossible.'

  They drove in silence. Winter wasn't familiar with the road. It was all darkness and narrow roads and trees lit up by his powerful headlights. Gloomy houses came and went, but they could have been different from the ones he'd seen earlier that afternoon.

  They drove over the plain, the mother of all plains. Flickering lights like solitary stars anchored to the earth. Another crossroads. No traffic.

  'He had a boy,' said Smedsberg without warning from the darkness of the back seat.

  'I beg your pardon?' said Winter, turning right towards Smedsberg's farm.

  'Carlström. He had a boy at the farm for a few years. I remember now. Nowt to do with it, I reckon, but I remembered just now as we turned in.'

  'What do you mean by "a few years"?' asked Ringmar.

  'A foster son. He had a foster son living with him. I never seed him misself, but Gerd said summat about him once or twice.'

  'Was she sure?' asked Ringmar.

  'That's what she said.'

  No children, Winter thought. Carlström had said no when asked if he had any children, but maybe he didn't count a foster child.

  'She said he were fed up with the lad,' said Smedsberg. They'd arrived. Smedsberg's house was in darkness. 'The old man were fed up with the lad and then he grew up and I reckon he never came back again.'

  'Fed up?' said Winter. 'Do you mean Carlström treated him badly?'

  'Yes.'

  'What was his name?' asked Ringmar. 'The boy?'

  'She never said. I don't think she knew.'

  They drove home on roads wider than the ones they'd made their way along earlier in the day.

  'Interesting,' Ringmar said.

  'It's a different world,' said Winter.

  They continued for a while in silence. It was almost a sensation to see lit-up houses and villages and towns passing by, to see other cars, articulated lorries. Another world.

  'The old bloke was lying,' said Ringmar.

  'You mean Carlström?'

  'I mean Natanael Carlström.'

  'That's the understatement of the day,' said Winter.

  'Lied through his teeth.'

  'That's a little bit closer to the truth,' said Winter, and Ringmar laughed.

  'But it's not funny,' said Ringmar.

  'I had bad vibes out there,' said Winter.

  'We've stumbled upon a secret here,' said Ringmar. 'Maybe several.'

  'We'd better check up on burglaries in the area.'

  'Is it worth the effort?' Ringmar asked. They were approaching Gothenburg now. The sky was a fiery yellow and transparent, lit up from underneath.

  'Yes,' said Winter. He couldn't forget the feeling he'd had when he was about to hammer on the old man's front door. There was a secret. He'd sensed it. He had sensed the darkness that was deeper than the heavens that fell down over the earth around the big farmhouse.

  24

  They were inside the city boundary now. Winter could still detect the rotten smell of the countryside in the car. With a bit of luck it would accompany him up to Angela and Elsa. Or bad luck. Angela would say something about the house in the country. Or good luck. She might be right.

  Coltrane was playing away on a CD. A pickup truck passed by, driven by a man wearing a Father Christmas hat. Coltrane's solo vibrated through the Mercedes and Winter's head. Another person wearing a Father Christmas hat drove past.

  'What the hell's going on?' said Ringmar.

  'Parade of the Father Christmases,' said Winter.

  'Don't you have any carols?' Ringmar asked, nodding towards the CD player.

  'Why not sing along?' said Winter. 'Make up your own words.'

  'While coppers watched their crooks by night too thinly on the ground, a villain slipped past with his swag and didn't make a sound.'

  He fell silent.

  'Encore,' said Winter.

  'Fear not, said Winter, we shall make your life a living hell. We'll track you down and sort you out and lock you in a cell.'

  'The best carol I've heard in years,' said Winter.

  'And it isn't even Christmas yet,' said Ringmar.

  Winter stopped at a red light. The Opera House was glittering like its own solar system. The river behind it was red in the self-confident glow. Well-dressed people crossing the road in front of him were on their way to see some opera or other he didn't even know the name of. Not his music.

  'It's not going to be much fun this Christmas,' said Ringmar softly as they set off again.

  Winter glanced at him. Ringmar was staring ahead, as if hoping to see more Father Christmases who might put him in a better mood.

  'Is it Martin you're thinking about?'

  'What else?' Ringmar was gazing out over the water, which had lost the glitter from the Opera House by now, and instead was reflecting the motionless cranes in the docks on the other side, rising skywards like the skeletons they were. 'I'm only human.'

  'I'll have a word with Moa,' said Winter. 'I've said that before, but I really will this time.'

  'Don't bother,' said Ringmar.

  'I mean that I shall speak indirectly to Martin. First Moa and then perhaps Martin.'
>
  'It's between him and me, Erik.'

  'From him to you, more like,' said Winter.

  Ringmar made a noise that could have been a quick intake of breath.

  'I sometimes lie awake at night and try to work out what particular incident caused all this,' he said. 'When did it happen? What started it? What did I do?'

  Winter waited for him to continue. He left the motorway in order to take Ringmar home. Mariatorg was the same small-town square it always was. Young people were loitering around the hot-dog stand. Trams came and went. There was the chemist's, as in all little towns, the photography shop, the bookshop where he sometimes called in to buy the occasional book for Lotta and the girls on his way to Långedrag.

  It had been Winter's own local square when he had been growing up in Haga, in the same house as his sister and her children now lived in.

  'I can't find it,' said Ringmar. 'That incident.'

  'That's because it doesn't exist,' said Winter. 'Never has existed.'

  'I think you're wrong. There's always something. A child doesn't forget. Nor does a teenager. Adults can forget, or regard whatever happened as something quite different from what it really was. In the child's eyes, at least.'

  Winter thought about his own child. All the years in store for them both. All the individual incidents.

  He drove up to Ringmar's house. It was illuminated by the neighbour's Christmas lights in the same way that the river had seemed to be ablaze with reflections from the Opera House.

  Ringmar looked at Winter, whose face looked as if it had been caught in searchlight beams.

  'Pretty, isn't it?' said Ringmar with a thin smile.

  'Very. And now I understand the real reason why you can't sleep at night.'

  Ringmar laughed.

  'Do you know him well?' Winter asked.

  'Not sufficiently well to march into his garden with my SigSauer and shoot out all the lights and be confident he would understand.'

  'Shall I do it for you?'

  'You're already going to do quite enough for me,' said Ringmar, getting out of the car. 'See you tomorrow.' He waved goodbye and walked up the path, which was lit up by the luminous forest outside the neighbour's house. You can get all the light therapy you need here, Winter thought. Light therapy. Ten more days or however many were left, and they would be lounging back in the Spanish garden with the three palm trees, overlooked by the White Mountain, and listening to the rhythmical music created by his dear mother as she mixed the second Tanqueray & Tonic of the afternoon in the kitchen bar. Some tapas on the table, gambas a la plancha, and jamón serrano, a dish of boquerones fritos, perhaps un fino for Angela and maybe one for him as well. A little cloud in the corner of his eye, but nothing to worry about.

  In the best of worlds, he thought as he drove past Slottsskogsvallen on the way home. I'm not at all sure that's the world I'm living in just now. I want to be sitting back in the plane before I believe anything at all.

  He drove back on to the motorway. This morning he'd been driving in the opposite direction. Good Lord, was it only this morning? He and Halders had been sitting in silence.

  'How are things, Fredrik?'

  'Better than last Christmas. That wasn't much fun.'

  Winter had noticed that Bertil had used the same expression as Fredrik: not much fun. Well, they had a point perhaps. When things were good it was fun.

  Last Christmas Fredrik Halders had been alone with his two children, Hannes and Magda, six months after Margareta had been killed in a hit-and-run accident.

  Aneta Djanali had spent a few hours with Halders that Christmas Eve. Winter had never discussed that with Fredrik, but Aneta had called in at Winter's home one autumn day similar to today, but about a month earlier. She hadn't come to ask for Winter's blessing, but she wanted to talk even so.

  They had talked for a long time. He was glad to have her in his team. The one he always wanted to have close at hand. He was glad that he had Fredrik Halders, and he thought that Fredrik and Aneta were glad that they had each other, even if he didn't know exactly what the relationship was.

  'Are you staying at home this year?' Winter had just negotiated the new roundabout east of Frölunda Torg. There was not much traffic.

  'Eh?'

  'Will you be celebrating Christmas at home?'

  Halders hadn't answered. Perhaps he hadn't heard, or preferred not to.

  They drove along the coast road, where seaside vegetation had stiffened in yellow and brown, belts of reeds like a forest of spikes. Birds circled overhead, searching for food. There had been very few people in the fields or in the streets. They hadn't seen many cars.

  Later the same day Winter would compare this countryside with the more remote solitude away from Gothenburg, where everything was so flat.

  'Have you bought a Christmas tree?' Halders asked out of the blue.

  'No.'

  'Nor have I. It feels like a major operation, a little job like that.' He looked up from out of his thoughts. 'But the kids want a tree.'

  'So does Elsa,' said Winter.

  'What about you? And Angela?'

  'If it's a little one,' said Winter.

  'All the dropped needles are a bloody nuisance,' said Halders. 'I always manage to get a tree that drops its needles before you can say Merry Christmas. By Boxing Day the whole living room has turned into a green field. All you need is twenty-two men and a referee's whistle.'

  'Did you see the Lazio match yesterday?' Winter asked as they turned right by the jetty. The houses seemed to have been carved out of the cliff. It was a long time since he'd last driven along here.

  'No, but I saw Roma.'

  Winter smiled.

  'Lazio's an old fascist gang with a neo-fascist salute,' said Halders. 'They can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.'

  'Here we are,' said Winter. The house was the last but one in a cul-de-sac. There was a Christmas tree on the front lawn, but the lights were not on.

  'The house on the right,' Winter said.

  'Looks very nice. Is Daddy at home now, do you think?'

  'Keep calm when we get inside, Fredrik.'

  'What do you mean? I'll be the good cop and you can be the bad one.'

  Magnus Bergort shook hands, firmly and warmly. There was a look of confidence and curiosity in his eyes, as if he had been looking forward to this visit. His eyes were blue, the transparent variety. Mentally unbalanced was Halders' reaction. Before long he'll make a chainsaw out of food-processor parts and mete out justice to his family.