The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  The phone in his breast pocket rang. He answered with his name.

  “It’s Walter here again. That was good thinking, Winter. It turns out that they were out last night and this morning in the video cars in the eastern part of town.”

  “Okay,” Winter said. “Were they set up along the Boråsleden?”

  “You bet. And a couple of the cameras that were used last night haven’t been reused since.”

  “Is that all the cameras?” asked Winter.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “You said that there were a couple of cameras. Were there more than that being used in the area we’re talking about?”

  “No, not as I understood it.”

  “I need to see those tapes.”

  “Where?”

  “Can you get them over to homicide by this afternoon?”

  “Absolutely. We have special courier cars set aside just for that kind of thing,” Kronvall said, and Winter gave a short laugh.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “If this solves the case, then we want credit.”

  “Of course.”

  “Chief Walter Kronvall of the traffic department provided the crucial assist. Something like that.”

  “Here at homicide we don’t forget our friends,” Winter said, then hung up and lingered next to the timetable.

  He thought once again about the woman who just a short time ago lay so close by and had been carried there like a slaughtered animal. A victim—and perhaps quarry. Her nameless body was itself a message about what happened. Why? He thought of her half-open mouth and exposed teeth. Like a silent plea. A distant cry.

  Winter drove back to the area where the woman was discovered. The grass in the ditch still looked flattened from the weight of her body. He turned around and followed his own tracks with his gaze. It was a long way to carry someone, dead or alive. A dead body was heavy but offered no resistance.

  Whoever carried her need not have been a giant. Fear of discovery could make a murderer strong, assuming that he even cared, that is. Or had several people walked there in the sparse light of dawn? More people filled with madness, rage, adrenaline.

  She could have been carried over the rough fields, through the fog. Why not?

  The police tried to work their way through the terrain within a reasonable radius, but they couldn’t go stomping around haphazardly. If there were too many of them, everything became haphazard.

  A shot made Winter start. Another shot shattered the early afternoon silence of the forest and disturbed the low drone of the cars driving alongside. The hard sounds sent echoes above the birch trees and across the water beyond. The shooting ranges were back in use.

  “And the sun also rises,” Ringmar said, knocking on the open door before Winter had had a chance to wring his shirt dry.

  “I like the sun.”

  “When you’re ready, the gentlemen of the press are waiting.”

  “It’ll have to be quick. I want to look at these tapes as soon as I’m done.”

  Winter explained the videocassettes to Ringmar as they walked down the corridors. The representatives of the media looked like they were on their way to the beach: shorts, thin shirts, someone in sunglasses. Cool guy, Winter thought, and took his place in front of a lectern at the far end of the room.

  “We don’t know who she is yet,” he answered to the first question. “And we may need your help to find that out.”

  “Do you have a photo?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hans Bülow from the Göteborgs-Tidningen was one of the few journalists Winter knew by name.

  “We’ve taken photos of the victim’s body. We don’t usually release pictures like that to the public, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  “But if you have to?”

  “We’ll get back to you on that.”

  “But she was murdered?”

  “I can’t answer that yet. It could be suicide.”

  “So she took her own life and then drove out to Delsjö Lake and lay down in a ditch?” said a woman from the local radio news.

  “Who said anything about her dying anywhere else?” he said.

  The woman looked at Hans Bülow out of the corner of her eye. The latest issue of GT had an article that speculated about what might have happened.

  “We have not yet been able to determine the exact sequence of events leading up to the . . . death,” Winter said.

  “When will we know whether she’s been murdered?”

  “Later this afternoon I will be getting a report from the medical examiner.”

  “Are there any witnesses?”

  “I can’t comment on that.”

  “How was the body found?”

  “We received a call.”

  “From a witness, you mean?”

  Winter made a gesture with his arms that was open to interpretation.

  “Is she Swedish?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you know what she looks like, right? Does she appear to be of Swedish or Nordic origin? Or does she look like she comes from somewhere else?”

  “I can’t speculate on that yet.”

  “If she doesn’t look Nordic, then it’s gotta make it easier to speculate where in Gothenburg she may have lived,” said a young journalist that Winter hadn’t seen before, as far as he could remember.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Don’t you know where all the immigrants live?”

  Winter didn’t answer. He thought of the northern suburbs and thought that that was an oversimplification.

  “Any more questions?”

  “How old would you say she is?”

  “Obviously, we’re not sure about that either. But maybe around thirty.”

  The journalists wrote, held microphones. A summer murder in Gothenburg.

  “What are you doing now?”

  “An extensive investigation was launched early this morning. We are securing evidence at the site where the body was found and focusing our efforts on identifying the victim,” Winter said.

  “When did it take place?”

  “What?”

  “The murder. Or the death. When did it happen?”

  “It’s hard to say right now. But sometime late last night. I can’t be any more precise than that.”

  “When was she found?”

  “Early this morning.”

  “When?”

  “At around four.”

  “Have you spoken to people who were in the vicinity at that time?”

  “We are seeking to question anyone who may have seen anything. Anyone who thinks they may have seen something is invited to contact the police.”

  “How about motive?”

  “Impossible to answer that right now.”

  “Was she raped?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “Are there any similarities here?” asked Hans Bülow.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Are you looking into any other cases, either here or elsewhere, that bear a resemblance to this one?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t answer that, due to the ongoing investigation.”

  “So the victim was not already known to the police?”

  “I think I just said that we don’t know her identity.”

  “Is that usual?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is it usual for the identity to be unknown? I mean, after this long.”

  “It’s been,” Winter looked at his watch, “less than twelve hours since we found her. That’s not a long time.”

  “Sure it’s a long time,” the journalist in the sunglasses said.

  “Any more questions?” Winter asked, knowing that the cool guy was right.

  9

  IT RAINED ALL DAY AND SHE SAT AT ANOTHER WINDOW. THE MEN weren’t there. She was scared but she was more scared when the men were there. She had cried out once in the car, and one of them
had looked like he was about to hit her. He hadn’t done anything, but he looked like somebody who hits.

  This house was somewhere else; she could see that the trees outside were different. There were no other houses and nobody walking along the road. She couldn’t hear the sound of any cars or trains. Once she heard a rumbling overhead that could have been an airplane.

  If there were a phone, she could lift the receiver, press the buttons, and speak to Mommy. She knew how.

  Maybe the men were out looking for Mommy. They had driven off and come back and driven off and come back again. Now one of them was gone, and the other was also gone, only he hadn’t left in the car. She thought that he was in another room, but then she saw him outside the house. It was just a short distance between the house and the forest, and he came out of the forest and looked right at her through the window, and she crawled down from the chair and went in toward the room because she thought it was scary.

  She was lying on the floor the next time she thought about anything. She felt sort of sleepy in her head, and there was a strange smell in the room. She looked around, and there was steam rising from a dish on the floor.

  “Eat this now.”

  She rubbed her eyes and looked, but everything was blurry. She rubbed her eyes again. Now she saw that there was a lot of steam coming from the plate.

  “It’s soup. You have to eat it while it’s hot.”

  She saw shoes and legs and asked for her mommy.

  “Your mommy will be here soon.”

  She asked where her mommy was, but he didn’t answer and she asked again.

  “Eat your soup now. Here’s a spoon.”

  She said she was thirsty.

  “I’ll bring you some water if you start eating.”

  She took the spoon and dipped it into the soup and tasted it, but it was too hot. She couldn’t taste anything.

  She waited for the soup to cool off. She felt something crinkly in her clothes when she sat on the floor. She thought about the slip of paper she had in the secret pocket of her pants.

  “You have to eat now.”

  She looked down into the dish, but it still looked too hot. She closed her eyes.

  Suddenly she felt a pain at her ear and she opened her eyes and saw the hand right next to her. It hurt again.

  “I’ll pull your ear again if you don’t eat.”

  Then the hand was gone, and she dipped the spoon into the steaming dish again. She started to cry. He would hit her again, pull her ear. Mommy used to smack her, but that was Mommy.

  10

  WINTER READ THE AUTOPSY REPORT PAGE BY PAGE. PIA ERIKSON Fröberg described each organ in detail.

  Strangulation. The woman had been murdered. She had defensive wounds on her arms, her chest, and her face from a sharp instrument. A knife, a screwdriver, anything. There was no evidence of needle marks on her body, but in some of the photographs he could see lacerations in the skin.

  Winter thought about what he’d just read. She had had a child, but it was impossible to say when. Nursery school? Day care? School? Babysitter? Playmates who talked about why a friend didn’t come out to play anymore? Was there even a child anymore? Or was the child a teenager?

  Her body had no scars from operations, but there were small scars on her face, around the ears, and she had at some point in her childhood gotten second-degree burns on the inside of her left thigh. Winter hadn’t noticed that in the blue light of the autopsy room.

  She was a smoker. Her liver was normal. He had to wait for the results from toxicology. The lab would find any traces of alcohol or drug use there might be.

  He was also waiting to hear from the missing persons department of the National Criminal Investigation Department in Stockholm. If she had been reported missing anywhere in the country, Stockholm would identify her.

  They hadn’t managed to find her among the local missing person reports or criminal-records databases.

  The clothes she had been wearing didn’t have brand labels. Winter thought of the H&M posters he saw every time he walked down the street and of the poster he might have to put up himself.

  She hadn’t been wearing any shoes. The police at the body disposal site had found shoes and a whole bunch of other odds and ends from times gone by, but not her shoes.

  Her short white tube socks had been wet, or at least very damp. From the grass? It had been relatively dry. From the water? He saw a boat gently gliding through the water, oarlocks wrapped in cloths to muffle the sound.

  He rose and stretched his tall body. Fatigue had taken hold of him while sitting.

  He walked across the floor to a cabinet and took down a can of shaving cream and a razor from the top shelf and went to the bathroom, where he wet his face and spread the cream on. The light was dim and his eyes glowed in his face, which was like a mask. He leaned in closer and saw that the whites of his eyes had cracked into small red threads.

  But the shave perked him up and back in his room he switched on the VCR and TV with the remote. The light of the first film sequence was dim and grainy, and he tried to use the contrast button on the remote to compensate.

  The film looked like a photo negative, with the darkness cast in a false silvery hue by the camera’s night vision. You could see everything, but the subject took on a surreal quality.

  Two cars drove past in the foreground. They came along the road and had not pulled out from the Kallebäck recreation area. The time was displayed in the lower corner of the screen: 2:03 a.m. Another car passed in the foreground, moving toward town. No motion on the other side. The officer who was holding the camera was standing near the top of the hill, hidden from the sparse traffic, with the lens pointing east. Winter could see the side road that led down toward the Delsjö Lake area, but the visibility was poor. The tape kept rolling but no vehicles appeared heading east. Then suddenly a car emerged at the extreme right of the screen, but as soon as he registered the movement, the screen went blank.

  He backed up the tape and watched the sequence again. There a car appeared, driving along. There he saw the outline of it. There it went blank.

  Winter watched the clip four more times without really seeing anything more than he had to begin with. He removed the tape and inserted the other one into the VCR. Four seconds in, two cars came driving along at high speed from Mölnlycke. He wondered if the drivers were about to be pulled over.

  Now he saw a car drive by on the other side and continue beyond the turnoff. Ten minutes had passed since the first time code on the previous cassette.

  The camera moved and then stabilized again. The road was empty in both directions. There was a flicker in the right-hand corner of the screen, and a car passed by driving east. Winter saw a turn signal come on, and the car turned off toward Delsjö Lake. He couldn’t make out what the make was. He waited and another car appeared on the highway and also turned off to the right. It looked like one of the smaller Ford models, but he was far from certain.

  The time ticked away at the bottom of the screen. Several cars passed by from the left, heading toward the city. The camera was steady. Maybe he had a tripod, thought Winter.

  Another flash of movement at the bottom of the screen and a car came out from the recreation area. Winter waited until the road was clear again and then rewound the tape.

  The car had driven past at three minutes to three, in the direction of town. He studied the sequence again. It could be the same car he had seen coming in toward Delsjö Lake earlier. That was fourteen minutes before. It didn’t take more than a minute to drive from the turnoff to the parking lot, one and a half, tops. Just as long to drive back, maybe a little less. That would give someone at least eleven minutes down by the lake: to open the car door, walk to the back of the car, haul out the body, carry it fifty yards, lay it in the ditch, look around, and go back the way he came.

  He watched the whole tape through to the end but saw nothing more of interest, so he returned to the sequences where the same car seemed to drive off the
highway and back on within the space of fourteen minutes.

  “You’re still here?” Ringmar had opened the door.

  “Come here for a minute, Bertil.”

  Ringmar walked up to Winter, who pointed at the TV.

  “Look at this. Wait a minute. See the car across the road?”

  “Is this the tape from Kallebäck?”

  “Yes. See the car driving up the hill?”

  “I’m not blind. Despite this light.”

  “Now. See how it turns off toward Delsjö Lake? I’ll back it up.”

  Neither of them said anything while Winter fiddled with the remote. The car came back into view.

  “Can you make out what kind of car it is?”

  “Well . . . Can you freeze-frame it?”

  Winter pressed pause, and the car stopped and jiggled on the highway.

  “It could be a Ford. Maybe,” Ringmar said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. Are you sure? You know more about cars than I do.”

  “No, I’m not sure. But it looks like an Escort. Fredrik knows more about cars than anyone.”

  “It comes back later on,” Winter said, and fast-forwarded the fourteen minutes.

  “It’s closer, but it’s no easier to tell what make it is from this angle,” Ringmar said.

  “There’s someone in the front seat.”

  “If there weren’t, that would be pretty sensational.”

  “You can just about make out the face.”

  “You’re gonna have a harder time with the tags.”

  “It’s hard but not impossible,” Winter said. He turned toward Ringmar.

  Ringmar saw a strange light in his eyes. Could be the reflection of the screen.

  “Someone was in the vicinity of the disposal site after the body was put there. Or shortly before—or at the same time.”

  “We’ll have to track down that car,” Ringmar said. But that went without saying, so he continued, “How sophisticated is our equipment for making this footage visible?”