The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  “To Lindome,” Winter said. “But now it’s returned, and I would like to set up a camera again.”

  “Now?”

  “Today, if possible. As soon as possible.”

  “You have to submit a formal applic—”

  “I know what has to be submitted and to whom. But this is extremely important. And it’s gotta happen quickly.”

  “You’re talking surveillance of a public place,” Fahlander said. “That means there have to be signs put up informing the public that the premises are under video surveillance.”

  Whose side are you on? Winter wondered. But of course the post-man was right. “Of course,” he said. “Maybe the old ones are still there. Otherwise we can take care of it.”

  “Would it be possible to do it a little discreetly?” Fahlander asked.

  There were more police officers in the situation room now than when the investigation began what felt like two hundred years ago. It was hot and damp. Ringmar was just opening a window. Winter hung his blazer over the swivel chair and turned to face the group.

  “So we’re going to be doing something highly irregular over the next three days—a discreet door to door in North Biskopsgården, but only as part of the preliminary investigation. We keep quiet about the other stuff.”

  Ringmar stood up and continued. “If anybody asks what we’re doing there, we just say that we’re slowly making our way through the whole city, searching for the woman’s identity.”

  “Her key,” Bergenhem said. “The one who paid her rent has the key to her apartment.”

  “That’s right,” Ringmar said. “Either someone has gone in there and looked around thoroughly for something or Helene Andersén kept her things in an odd sort of order.”

  “What else is missing?” Sara Helander asked.

  “Her rent slips,” Winter said.

  “So the crime—the murder—wasn’t committed in her apartment?”

  “Not as far as Beier’s men have been able to determine.”

  “Would that be realistic, given how far it is to Delsjö Lake?” Börjesson asked.

  “Would what be realistic?”

  “For her to have been murdered in her apartment and then taken down to Delsjö Lake.”

  “In terms of time, it might be possible, but so far we haven’t found any evidence in her apartment to suggest that.”

  “Didn’t it attract a lot of attention when we found out where she lived? Enough that the secret could already be out?” Halders asked.

  “There were a few curious onlookers, but it’s not unusual for the police to come calling,” Ringmar said. “I didn’t say anything to anyone anyway.” He looked at Winter, who shook his head. “We have to hope our witnesses will keep their oath of confidentiality.”

  “How do we deal with the press, then? It would be strange if they didn’t pick up the scent,” Halders said.

  “I haven’t heard anything yet,” Ringmar said.

  “It would be strange,” Halders said, “if they didn’t already know something.”

  “I’ll handle all contact with the press,” Winter said. “I’ve spoken to Sture and Wellman.”

  “That’s a damn good idea,” Halders said. “I would have given the exact same order.” He saw that Winter understood that he was serious.

  “So where are we now?” Helander asked.

  “I’ve spoken to the post office in Mölnlycke,” Winter said. “The camera’s all set. We might even get two. We’re going to try to give the impression that it’s always been there.”

  “Who’s going to be in position inside the post office?” Bergenhem asked.

  “I was going to suggest that you do it,” Winter said.

  “Me?”

  “We need to have someone who looks as ordinary as possible,” Halders said.

  “Yeah, well we can’t have someone who scares away the customers, can we?” Bergenhem said, and turned toward Halders. “When do you want me to head over there?” he asked, turning back to Winter.

  “Now. I’ll talk to you just as soon as we’re done here. And you will be relieved.”

  “How’s the search going?” Bergenhem asked.

  Winter gazed at his database expert.

  “Nothing so far,” Möllerström said. “We’re still working through the central criminal-records database.”

  “Has surveillance gotten busy on this yet?” Halders asked. “With the latest, I mean? The names.”

  “Of course,” Ringmar said.

  “There’s always an informant who knows something,” Halders said. “Take the shoot-out at Vårväderstorget. That could get solved using your stoolie. Someone knows somebody else who knows something more.”

  “I know,” Ringmar said.

  Winter took the floor again.

  “We’re waiting for the list of everyone she’s called.”

  “Then it’s in the bag,” Halders said.

  She may have only called out for pizza, thought Helander, but she didn’t say it.

  Winter felt the team’s impatience, the urge to work and the frustration at having to wait for documents and lists and results to provide a little guidance for the way forward. Another name could pave the way to greater clarity. A new address. A fingerprint. He thought of the technicians leaning over their instruments.

  “How’s it coming along with the fingerprints from her apartment?” Bergenhem asked.

  “Her daughter’s are there, we presume, since there’s a set that belongs to a child,” Winter said. “There were at least two other unknown sets of prints. In addition to Helene’s, of course.”

  “At least?”

  “That’s what we know so far. There’s also a partial print. But they’re not done with the whole apartment yet. Then there’s the basement storage room.”

  “What do you mean by partial?” Bergenhem asked.

  “According to Beier there’s a partial fingerprint on a dresser drawer, I think he said it was. I don’t know how big it is yet, or whether it’s big enough to be used to establish full identity at some point. Forensics doesn’t know yet. But it’s there.”

  “Was it a torn glove?” Helander asked.

  “Probably,” Winter said, and looked at her. “That was good thinking. There was a piece of fiber next to the print. It could come from the apartment or from anywhere, but someone may have torn a little hole in their glove. Against the edge of the drawer. That’s where the print is.”

  32

  WINTER PARKED THE CAR NEXT TO FRISKVÄDERSTORGET AND walked north. Thin paper blew across the square toward the southeast. The morning was dry, no rain. Outside the ICA supermarket someone had tipped over a trash can, and three headless bottles lay on the ground. People walked past saying words Winter heard but didn’t understand.

  Two police officers he barely knew were there. They weren’t wearing uniforms, but they stood out in the surroundings, strangers in a foreign land.

  He went over and said hello. Before them lay the remains of a small fireworks rocket, in red and gold paper with blackened tasseled edges that were slowly being eaten away by the wind gusting from the north-west. The spent paper canisters rolled back and forth.

  “Probably another damn ethnic group celebrating its own damn New Year,” one of the officers said, and gestured at the ground. The other sniggered. “Or else they have to set some off every day, to remind them of home back in Kurdistan.”

  “What was that?” Winter said.

  “What?”

  “What you said just now. About the New Year. And Kurdistan.”

  “What’s the big deal?” He turned to his partner. “It was just a joke, right?” He looked at Winter. “You got a problem or something?”

  “It wasn’t funny,” Winter said. “I can’t have officers with prejudices against the people who live here working this assignment. This investigation is way too important.”

  “Oh give me a—”

  “I don’t want you here,” Winter said. “Get out of here.”r />
  “This is craz—”

  “I decide who does what around here. And I’m ordering you to go back to the station and report to Inspector Ringmar. He’ll assign you new duties. I’ll call him.”

  Winter had already started walking away and called Ringmar as he walked. Ringmar answered after the second ring, and Winter explained.

  “You can’t do that, Erik.”

  “It’s already done. You’ll have to try to send down a couple more guys. We need them.”

  It sounded like Ringmar sighed.

  “What should I say to those two jugheads when they show up?”

  “Just give them something else to do. Put them on the cars.”

  “Yeah, maybe they’re better suited to that,” Ringmar said. “Assuming none of the owners is of foreign extraction.”

  As Winter neared Helene Andersén’s apartment he heard children’s voices. The temperature had dropped during the night, and on his way into the shop that lay a hundred or so yards from Karin Sohlberg’s residential services office he zipped up his leather jacket.

  Immediately upon entering he caught the smell of exotic herbs and spices. The shelves to the right were filled with glass jars of pickled foodstuffs and tin cans containing southern European and oriental dishes.

  A sign with “Halal” written on it hung above the meat counter, which was half-filled with sausages, lamb shoulder, and tripe. The vegetable counter was stuffed to the brim with ten different kinds of bell peppers, big spotted tomatoes, strange-looking root vegetables, thick bunches of coriander, and other fresh herbs. The selection was bigger and more interesting than in any of the delicatessens in the city center or the indoor market.

  Had Helene ever bought anything here?

  Sometime over the course of the day, one of his investigators would come by and ask questions. Winter left the store, and the guy behind the counter looked up, and Winter nodded.

  He walked past Karin Sohlberg’s office, which was closed. She’d called in sick, and he could understand that. Unfortunately, the police couldn’t call in sick after a distressing experience, and it was never enough just to get the rest of the day off. What they had was Hanne, and Winter suddenly missed the sound of her voice, or perhaps it was her words.

  Hanne Östergaard was a priest from Skår who worked part-time as a healer of souls at the Gothenburg Police Department. She tried to speak to the men and women who had gone through difficult experiences or had seen the consequences of them. The police turned out to be just as vulnerable as anyone else, and more often than not they carried their scars with them for a long time. Forever really.

  Hanne had combined a vacation with a leave of absence in order to attend university, and she hadn’t been at the police station since the end of spring. Winter had spoken to her twice during the summer, but that had been by phone. Perhaps she would feel under too much pressure when she came back. That was sure to be the case. A part-time fellow human being and hundreds of scared police officers. An inspector who feared the worst for the coming weeks. He thought about the girl again, Jennie Andersén. He couldn’t keep those horrible thoughts at bay.

  He stood in the courtyard, facing the building. They had staked out the apartment but avoided other forms of surveillance. The kitchen window was a dark rectangle against the light-colored brickwork. Black pigeons clung above and below, as if to signify that the silence within was forever. The pigeons sat clustered around her window, hugging the wall as they moved along—like winged rats, thought Winter. He entered the house and continued up to the door. Jennie’s drawing of the rain and sun was still there, an apt depiction of the past six weeks. He saw the ship in the drawing and thought of the boat in Big Delsjö Lake. They hadn’t made any more progress there. Had Helene Andersén and her daughter had access to a boat? Why else would the girl draw a ship or a boat—there were more drawings like it above her bed. When Beier’s men went through the apartment, they found even more children’s drawings, enough to fill a big paper sack.

  Winter opened the door and stood in the hall. Someone had been here after Helene’s death. Was it just the rental slips he had come for? Winter pictured a man in order to focus his thoughts more clearly. They hadn’t found any personal letters—no surprise since there wasn’t a soul in the world who’d come asking for Helene Andersén when she’d disappeared. Or her daughter either. How immense could loneliness be? He carried the thought around with him in rooms that smelled of mute sorrow.

  They knew the murder had not been committed here, so where had it taken place? In the vicinity of where the body was found? She had made a journey from the northwestern part of the city to the Delsjö lakes in the eastern expanse where all urban development came to an end. Had she made that trip of a dozen or so miles on her own? Had she already been dead?

  Winter stood in the kitchen. He heard the sounds from the pigeons’ throats outside the window. A child’s drawing was attached to the refrigerator door by a magnet in the shape of a sailboat. The technicians had chosen to leave it there, and Winter wondered why.

  The drawing showed a car with faces in the front window and the back. The car was white. It was raining in half the sky, and in the other the sun was shining. Winter had glanced at the drawing the first time he was here, yesterday. He now saw that the face in the front was drawn in profile and that there was a beard hanging off the man’s chin, like a goatee.

  My God, he thought, and felt his blood rise to his head.

  The face in the backseat had red hair in pigtails.

  Someone with a beard driving a car that the girl is riding in, he thought. He thought of all the drawings they had removed from the apartment. Good Lord, he thought. The girl has drawn everything she’s seen and experienced. All children draw. They draw what they’re going through since they can’t write it down.

  Jennie’s drawings are her diary, he thought. We have her diary.

  He still felt the blood in his face and told himself that he needed to stay calm, that it was just one lead among many others, perhaps not even a lead at all. Still he felt the excitement. He hadn’t come there for the drawings. It’s not the first thing it occurs to you to take away, especially not if you’ve seen a child draw and know that all children draw, and when you’re trying to make it look like you haven’t been inside the apartment, you know it would look bare without any children’s drawings.

  He’s seen her drawing, thought Winter. He knows her. He knows this little family. Take it easy. Remember what Sture said about being too meticulous. The man with the beard could be somebody else—a friend. Or a taxi driver, or just any man from her imagination. I’ll have to go through her drawings one by one. How many are there? Five hundred? Is it usual to hold on to that many? Don’t ask me, he thought, I know nothing about children, and then, just as quickly as he thought that thought, he saw Angela’s face in his mind’s eye.

  He stood still in the kitchen. There could be more from the basement, where Helene Andersén had kept a storage room without an apartment number or name. That wasn’t unusual. After a while they’d found it, locked with a little padlock. It contained a few boxes of clothes, a pair of children’s skis, and a chair.

  33

  WHEN SHE LISTENED, IT WAS AS IF THE SAME CUCKOO WAS SITTING out in the forest hooting to her—at least for a few hours today and yesterday too. Hoo hoo, hoo hoo, it cried, like it was far away beyond the trees.

  Her hair was wet and her clothes too. She had spread out her dress underneath her, like a sheet, and it had gotten wet. She felt cold sometimes and pulled it on over her trousers and shirt, and then she felt hot and took it off again. The men came and looked at her when they thought she was asleep—only she was awake, but it was almost like being asleep. She was dizzy the whole time and she had all these goose bumps on her body, like when you’ve been swimming and the wind blows on you before you’ve put a towel around yourself.

  The man, the one who always came up to her, brought some pills that he wanted her to swallow. But she
couldn’t. He called to the other man.

  “She’s not swallowing.”

  “Tell her she has to.”

  “It doesn’t do any good.”

  “You’ll have to dissolve them.”

  “What?”

  “Dissolve them in water and it’ll be easier for her to swallow. Or put the powder in a cup of hot sugar water.”

  The man had bent forward and laid his hand on her forehead again.

  “She doesn’t feel so hot now.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t need them.”

  “What?”

  “The pills, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I think she needs them.”

  “Then do what I told you.”

  She’d tried to swallow the glass of water, and it tasted bad. Then she dozed off and heard sounds from outside, like a rumbling or a chugging, and then they were gone. And she listened for the cuckoo, but you couldn’t hear it anymore after the chugging came. She waited for the cuckoo, who was maybe always there.

  She thought to herself, I’m not going to be here for long. I’m going to be at home in my new bedroom where it says Helene on the door. My name is Helene, and the men haven’t said it once, so I’ll just have to say it myself. She whispered and it hurt her throat, but she whispered Helene one more time and then it became lighter and all red in her eyes and then she thought she heard the cuckoo again.

  PART 2

  HE HEARD THE SOUNDS OF THE FOREST, BUT THEY WEREN’T like they were before. Nothing was like that former calm. He barely heard the wind anymore.

  She had stepped out of the past like a greeting from the devil. He’d tried to fend her off during that first call. You’ve got the wrong number, miss.

  That voice. Like something that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore, that wasn’t meant to be heard.

  He had done what he could to forget. The others who could talk were gone.

  Afterward, while he could still hear her voice, he had looked down at his hands and shut his eyes, and still those hellish visions taunted him. The house and the wind from the sea that blew right through that damned house. He had done what he had to. Though he’d planned it, he’d thought it wouldn’t be necessary—but then he understood that he had to do it. His hands did it.