The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

“They may have gone away on vacation. Or to visit someone.”

  “For so long?”

  The woman made a gesture signaling that stuff like that could happen.

  “I thought perhaps they had moved,” Ester Bergman said.

  “No. They haven’t moved.”

  “I see. But they’re not here anymore.”

  “I know what we can do. I can go over there and ring the doorbell and see if anyone’s home.”

  “What are you going to say if somebody answers?”

  “I’ll have to think of something,” the girl said, and smiled.

  Ester Bergman didn’t want to go along, so Karin Sohlberg entered the stairwell alone and walked up to the second floor. She rang the doorbell and waited. She rang the doorbell again and listened to the echo inside the apartment. It was still echoing when she opened the letter slot and saw the little pile of junk mail and other correspondence she couldn’t identify. You couldn’t see how much was lying there.

  She headed back down the stairs and a minute later rang on Ester Bergman’s door. The old woman opened up at once, as if she’d been standing just inside the door.

  “Nobody’s home.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying the whole time.”

  “There was some mail lying just inside the door, but that could have a number of explanations.”

  “I just want one,” Ester Bergman said.

  “There’s one more thing I can do for you, Mrs. Bergman.” And for myself, she thought. I want to know too. “I can go to the district office and see if the rent has been paid.”

  “You can see that?”

  “We’re far enough into September now that we can see whether the rent has been paid or if a reminder has been sent out to Helene Andersén.”

  “I’m mostly concerned about the little girl.”

  “Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Bergman?”

  “I’m not stupid and I’m not deaf,” Ester Bergman said. “You go to that office. That’s fine.”

  Karin Sohlberg walked to the district office in the old central heating facility on Dimvädersgatan and checked on the computer whether Helene Andersén’s last rent had been paid. It had, on the second of the month. Technically one day late, but it had been a weekend. In any case, the rent had been paid at the post office less than two weeks ago. Just like usual. Helene Andersén apparently always took her preprinted payment slip to the post office and paid first thing. Many people did this, and most of the tenants in the area used the post office at Länsmanstorget, thought Karin Sohlberg.

  Ester Bergman had said the mother and the girl had been gone a long time. That sort of measure was relative. Old people could say one thing and mean something else. In that sense perhaps they’re not much different from anybody else—but to them a week can feel like a month. Time could pass slowly and yet all too quickly. Karin Sohlberg had sometimes thought about the elderly who sat there all alone with their thoughts, with so much inside of them that has to come out or else get bottled up.

  She stood outside her office again. It was past opening hours. She tried to remember the face that belonged to the apartment, but she couldn’t recall seeing anyone with fair hair. Maybe a little girl with red hair, but she couldn’t be sure. She’d just had a long vacation with a lot of different faces around her.

  Ester Bergman wasn’t confused. Her eyesight may not have been what it once was, but it was still sharp in its way. She wasn’t the type to go around jabbering about things for no reason. It must have taken her a long time to decide to come to the service office. What she’d said—that the little family hadn’t been there for a long time—might well be true. The question was what this meant. The rent was paid. But that didn’t mean they had to live there every single day.

  She may have met a man, thought Karin Sohlberg. She met a man and they moved in with him, but she’s not ready yet to let go of her apartment because she’s unsure. She doesn’t trust men because she’s been burned before. Maybe. Probably. It’s probable because it’s common, Karin Sohlberg thought, glancing down at her left ring finger, where a thin band of white skin still shone against her tanned hand.

  She walked over and looked at the notice. It was laminated, which suggested the police wanted it to be able to hang there through all kinds of weather. At first she didn’t understand what the connection was to this area, but then she thought about Ester Bergman: If she can see a possible connection, then I suppose I can too. But still, the rent was paid. She read about the missing woman again then unlocked the door to her office. She didn’t have time. If she remained sitting there, someone was bound to come in and then she’d have even less time.

  She walked back to the courtyard and entered Helene Andersén’s stairwell and stood once again at her door and rang. The echo of the doorbell chime never faded out completely. Through the letter slot she could only see the brightly colored junk mail and a few brown and white envelopes. They look like bills, but I can’t be sure, she thought. But I can be sure that nobody in there has opened the mail for quite some time.

  She didn’t see any newspapers, but that didn’t mean anything. Many people couldn’t afford a morning paper anymore, or had given it up for something else instead.

  Eventually it felt strange standing there, sort of spooky—as if she expected to see a pair of feet come toward her. She recoiled with that thought and returned to the courtyard and looked up toward Helene Andersén’s kitchen window. The blinds were drawn, and that distinguished her window from those adjacent, above, and below. During the heat wave, the blinds in all the windows had been down, but now the window she was looking at was virtually the only one.

  She exited through the building’s main entrance and tried to locate Helene Andersén’s window from the outside. It wasn’t difficult, since the blinds were down on that side too. It was a natural thing to do when you went away. After half a minute she had that same unsettling feeling and closed her eyes in order not to see a shadow suddenly appear in the window. My God, here I am getting myself all worked up, she thought, and looked away in order not to see that movement, the shadow. It was a powerful sensation, this dread, as if she’d lost her skin in a split second. Then it was over and she was herself again.

  Sohlberg felt foolish as she rang the doorbell of the Athanassiou family in the apartment immediately below. Mr. Athanassiou opened the door, and it was a familiar face. She asked as simply as she could about the woman and the girl upstairs. The man responded by shaking his head. They hadn’t seen them for a while, but who could know when the last time had been? No, they hadn’t heard anything. They had always been quiet up there, the whole time they had been living there. The girl may have run around a little sometimes, but nothing they had reason to complain about. My ceiling is someone else’s floor, after all, the man said, and when he pointed upward, Karin Sohlberg thought about the Greek philosophers.

  She was drawn to the notice board again but stopped at Ester Bergman’s window when she saw the old lady through the glass. Mrs. Bergman opened the window, but Sohlberg said nothing to her about the rent having been paid. Perhaps she wanted to keep the mystery alive a little longer for the old lady. Maybe I want to keep it alive for myself too, she thought.

  Now she stood in front of the notice board and wrote down the phone numbers for the district CID’s homicide department.

  At the window, Mrs. Bergman had said she wanted to write a letter to the police. Could the young lady help her?

  “If you would like to contact the police, Mrs. Bergman, then maybe you can call them,” Sohlberg had answered. “I could help you.”

  “I don’t like the telephone. Nothing gets said.”

  28

  SITTING WITH ESTER BERGMAN WHILE THE RAIN BEAT AGAINST the kitchen window, Karin Sohlberg imagined that this, more or less, must be the old lady’s world. Or was that a preconceived notion? She was often here in the kitchen, at her window. She must notice quite a lot in her world of faces and voices that she saw and heard
but didn’t know.

  The shouts from the children sounded far away. Sohlberg could see them moving in the playground like blurred little splotches of color. When the rain came, the colors came too, she thought, and turned away from the window toward Mrs. Bergman. “What should I write, then?”

  “Write that we’re wondering where the mother is, and her little girl.”

  “Perhaps we should mention the notice about the dead woman.”

  “You can write that we read it on the bulletin board. And that the mother is fair haired.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t forget to put down which courtyard it is.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t need to put down my age.”

  Karin Sohlberg smiled and looked up from the sheet of letter paper Mrs. Bergman had taken out of a beautiful writing desk in her living room. “No, we don’t need to write your age.”

  “You can write down the age of the mother and daughter.”

  “I’ll start now.”

  “Don’t forget to say they’ve been gone since well before the rains came.”

  “Maybe we don’t really—”

  “I know what you’re trying to say. But I know that to be the case.”

  “Yes.”

  Karin Sohlberg thought to herself, What right did she actually have to write her way into Helene Andersén’s private life? Maybe she wanted to be left in peace. That was normal. And the girl wasn’t old enough that she had to be in school.

  It occurred to her that she could ask around to find out if the girl had been attending day care or nursery school in the area. But was that her job? Or was she just curious?

  “You can sign it with your own name if you want,” Ester Bergman said.

  “Why would I do that, Mrs. Bergman?”

  “You’ll do a better job of talking to the police when they come here in their cars.”

  “But you’re the one who’s most convinced that they’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I still say you’ll do a better job of talking. And I don’t like it when too many people come here in their cars and with their dogs. Or horses, for that matter.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be that many. Maybe just one or two, asking a few questions. And it might take a while before they come. If they come at all.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Sohlberg didn’t know what to say. She looked outside, as if hoping the mother and her red-haired girl would walk past holding hands. “How about we say that I’ll be with you when you speak to the police? I can sit next to you, Mrs. Bergman.”

  “I guess we could say that.”

  “Then I’ll seal this and send it.”

  “Read it to me again.”

  As she read she thought about how it would end up at the bottom of some pile. The police must receive hundreds or thousands of tips like this about missing people.

  Winter pulled a report from the increasingly voluminous preliminary investigation, a pile of papers that grew on his desk. He sat wearing his blazer and worked with the window open.

  There was a grand total of 124 white Ford Escort 1.8 CLX three-door hatchbacks dating from ’91 to ’94 with license plates beginning with the letter H in the districts of Gothenburg, Kungälv, Kungsbacka, and Härryda. Peculiarly, none began with HE.

  He’d sat again for a long time in front of the blurred video footage and was sure the first letter on the plate was an H. There was no doubt in his mind.

  One of the cars on the new list was the car on the screen. What had it been doing there?

  It really wasn’t a manageable number, 124, even if he had, along with the plate numbers, the name, address, and personal identity number of all the owners.

  Of the 124 cars, 2 had been reported stolen at the time of Helene’s murder. One had been found, badly parked with a bone-dry gas tank, in the parking lot in front of Swedish Match. There was no sign of the other.

  Questioning people about their whereabouts at certain times in their lives was always a process of elimination—of listening and, on the basis of what was said, deciding who was lying and how much and, possibly, why.

  The most problematic were those who lied, not because they had done anything illegal—their actions may well have been immoral, unethical, or deceitful toward someone close to them, yet nothing that was against the law—but because under no circumstances did they want to reveal what they had done in secret. They’d rather let murderers go free.

  He felt restless. He wanted to wander out into the field again but instead played Coltrane on his portable Panasonic perched on a bench by the window. Still, “Trane’s Slo Blues” brought him no peace. He tapped the rhythm against the edge of the desk with the middle finger of his left hand and looked through the files while Earl May busted out his bass solo from a studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, on August 16, 1957. Winter had never been there. You have to save some things for later.

  His thoughts drifted to “Lush Life,” and for a few seconds he became absorbed by the powerful melody. Janne Möllerström stepped into the room just as Red Garland began his piano solo.

  “Well, isn’t this cozy,” Möllerström said.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?” Möllerström nodded toward the CD player.

  “The Clash.”

  “What?”

  “The Clash. A British rock—”

  “That’s not the Clash, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got the Clash.”

  “Just yanking your chain. Can’t you hear who it is?”

  “All I hear is some nice piano. And here comes a trumpet. Must be Herb Alpert.”

  Winter laughed.

  “Tijuana Brass,” Möllerström said. “My dad liked it too.”

  “Really.”

  “Just yanking your chain,” Möllerström said. “Since you’re the one listening to it, I’ll hazard a wild guess that it’s John Coltrane.”

  “Naturally. But I don’t suppose that’s why you stopped by.”

  “I have a letter here that I think you should look at,” Möllerström said.

  “Okay.” Winter took the Xerox and read it, then turned his gaze back to his registry clerk. “What makes you think this might be something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because they’re two of them—that older lady and the girl writing on her behalf, so to speak.”

  “There’s something hesitant about it.”

  “Exactly. Or restrained, as if they’re doing their duty or something. Not trying to get attention.”

  “Not wackos, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one who wrote the letter—Karin Sohlberg—she’s added that we can call her if it’s worth investigating. That’s what she writes, ‘worth investigating.’ ”

  “I saw that.”

  “What do you think, Janne?”

  “About what?”

  “Is this letter worth investigating? Should we call her?”

  “That’s why I came by.”

  “Good.” Winter reached for the telephone.

  It wouldn’t be the first time in the past week they’d gone out to speak with the family of someone who’d been reported missing, only to discover a natural explanation for the “disappearance.” The most natural one being that no one had disappeared. In the most drastic instance, a young woman had been in the hospital without her neighbors knowing about it.

  “Hello? Karin Sohlberg? This is Inspector Erik Winter at district CID, homicide division.” He waved at Möllerström to turn down the volume. “Yes, we received the letter. That’s why I’m calling. Leave that for us to decide. It’s never wrong to be vigilant. But Ester’s the one who’s particularly concerned? That could be a good thing. Yes. One should always care about others.” Winter nodded to Möllerström to turn off the music completely.

  “Helene Andersén actually hasn’t been seen for a while,” Karin Sohlberg said on the telephone from Hisingen.

  Winter thought at first that he had misheard. Tha
t it was his own thoughts he had perceived, that the old dreams were suddenly back again. He saw his Helene, her face in the obscene light over the gurney. “Excuse me?” he said. “What did you say her name was?”

  “Helene Andersén. She’s the one we’re concerned about, but I didn’t want to wri—”

  “So this woman that you haven’t seen for a while, her name is Helene?” Winter felt that the incredulity in his voice was far too obvious. He had spoken gruffly, his throat constricted.

  “Is there something wrong? Was it a mista—”

  “No no,” Winter said. “It’s just fine. We’ll be happy to come out and talk with you about this. Could we meet,” he looked at his watch, “in half an hour? In the courtyard you referred to in your letter?”

  “Do you always proceed this way?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you always investigate things this promptly?”

  “The important thing is to meet up and talk about it.”

  “In that case we can do it at my office,” she said. “It’s just next door. You’ll see it when you come up from the parking lot.” She gave them an address. “Should I ask Mrs.—Ester Bergman to come here?”

  “No. We’ll come by and talk with you, and then we can go to her house together.” Winter thought for a moment. “Could you let her know that we would like to ask her a few questions today? It won’t take long.”

  “She’s probably a little anxious about that. That a lot of people might come, for example.”

  “I understand. But it’ll just be me.”

  “She has this image of uniforms and dog leashes. And dogs too, for that matter.”

  “It’ll just be me,” Winter repeated. “A nice young man who’d love to come in for a cup of coffee.”

  Halders tried not to think about whether the man sitting in front of him was lying because he was just nervous in general or because he had something to hide. It was nothing big, just little lies that flickered in the corner of his eye every time he shifted his gaze. It was easy to see. Each time he told a little lie, he looked away. Halders wondered if they should be clearer in their questioning. Have a clearer intention.