The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  This was the second time he’d driven to the bus stop and picked them up. It wasn’t the closest stop, but she understood why. Perhaps she was the one who’d suggested it. He was afraid now. He hadn’t been able to hang up when she called again. Come alone, he’d said. She refused.

  No no no—who said anything about that? he’d asked. She eyed him with a crazed look that he recognized in himself. Terrified of what was going to happen, he’d looked up at the ceiling, thought about how he had one way out. It had been there the whole time. One option. Fear had stopped him.

  There was screeching above their heads. It was the second time she’d come alone, and he didn’t know if she knew everything. As they walked through the field down to the other glade, animals ran off into the trees. She’d turned her face toward him, but he hadn’t wanted to look into her eyes. A shout came from far away and suddenly he wanted the child there. Next time she’d bring the child with her.

  The sweat running down into his eyes blinded him, and he couldn’t hear any cars on the road. It never got really dark. He tried to blink away the sweat. Her arms . . .

  When he turned around, he saw a white boat floating on the surface of the lake, without sound, as if it were waiting. She seemed to be following it with her eyes, her head turned to the side, but the boat lay still, trapped in the late-night fog. He couldn’t see anyone in the boat, and when he turned around again, for the last time, the surface of the water was empty and black.

  34

  THE APARTMENT WAS LOCATED IN A BUILDING WITH A VIEW out toward Black Marshes. There was nothing outside to suggest that it housed a private day care with three rooms and a kitchen.

  The architecture struck Winter as frozen music, crystallized chords, which carried a rough beauty within its walls but kept everything confined within. Nature was right up alongside it, but apart.

  He’d received instructions from Karin Sohlberg, but she didn’t want to accompany him. He walked in through the building’s front entrance and rang the doorbell of the apartment to the left in the stairwell on the first floor. The door, covered with children’s drawings, was opened by a man who could have been seventy years old or eighty. He was wearing a brown khaki shirt and broad suspenders fastened to gray trousers that were big and comfortable. He had a white mustache and thick white hair, and Winter thought of a Santa Claus who had shaved off his beard and descended to live among humans for good. The old man was holding the hand of a little boy who was sucking his thumb and staring wide-eyed at the long-haired blond police officer in a black leather jacket.

  “Hello,” Winter said, as he bent down a few inches toward the boy, who started to cry.

  “There, there, Timmy,” the white-haired man said, holding his hand. The boy stopped crying and pressed his face against the man’s pant leg.

  “Well, good afternoon,” Winter said, and held out his hand. He introduced himself and his reason for being there. The search for a missing person. Two missing persons, he thought. A child and a murderer.

  “Ernst Lundgren,” the man said. He was tall and slightly bent forward. He must have been nearly seven feet tall when he was young, Winter thought.

  “Could we speak for a moment?” he asked.

  Lundgren turned around. Winter had heard children and adult voices, and he now saw several elderly people busy helping the children put on their coats.

  “We’re just on our way out, as you can see,” Lundgren said. “In ten minutes or however long it takes, it’ll be quiet in here. If you can wait that long.”

  “Certainly,” Winter said.

  “We couldn’t just sit here and do nothing, seeing how difficult things are for them,” Lundgren said. “The young mothers, that is.”

  Winter nodded. They sat in the kitchen. Through the window he could see the little troop move across the road and in among the trees. It might have been ten children and four adults.

  “There are a lot of single mothers with small children living around here,” Lundgren said. “They have no jobs and no child care and hardly even any friends. Many are stuck in their loneliness and never get out of it.”

  Winter nodded again.

  “It’s dangerous,” the day-care manager said. “Nobody can survive for very long under those conditions.”

  “How long have you been running this day care?” Winter asked.

  “About a year. We’ll see how long we can keep it going. It’s not really a proper day-care center, in the strict sense of the word, if by that you mean an institution.”

  “So what is it, then?”

  “It’s a few old fogies trying to help the young and desperate, to put it bluntly.” Lundgren nodded toward the coffee machine. “Would you like a cup?” Winter accepted the offer, and Lundgren stood and prepared coffee for himself and Winter, then sat back down at the table. “Some of these poor girls don’t know which way to turn. They need, well, for want of a better word I guess I’d have to say alleviation. We try to provide them with a little alleviation in their daily lives.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That means a young mother can leave her child here with us for a few hours and go off to the hairdresser or into town to be by herself for a bit. Or just go home and take it easy.”

  “Yes,” Winter said. “I think I understand.”

  “Having the chance to be by themselves for just a little while a couple of times a week,” Lundgren said. “Can you imagine what it’s like never to have a moment to just be by yourself ?”

  “No,” Winter answered. “I’m more familiar with the opposite.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The opposite. Spending too much time by myself.”

  “Aha. But you see that’s also a problem these girls face. They don’t get to socialize with anyone their own age.” Lundgren rolled up one sleeve of his khaki shirt, and Winter saw that the hair on his arm grew like white moss all the way down to the middle of his knuckles. “And don’t forget that some of them have more than one child.”

  “Are there many wanting to come here?”

  “A few, but we can’t handle any more. We’d need a bigger apartment and there’d have to be more of us, but we’re already dependent on charity as it is. No doubt the municipal authorities see us as pirates. Fine by me.”

  “You’re doing a good job,” Winter said.

  “You gotta do something before you die. And it’s fun. It’s the most fun I’ve had for a long time.”

  Winter finished his coffee. It was still warm.

  “There’s always a lot of crap being said about the city’s outlying suburbs, but one thing is true,” Lundgren explained. “There’s a hell of a lot of loneliness in areas like this. The little lonely people are being pushed out to the margins. It’s strange out here. On the one hand, you’ve got the immigrant families, who after all do have a sense of community. It can be a little fragile sometimes. But still. And wedged in among them you’ve got these young Swedish mothers with their little kids. Almost never boys. Young girls and their children. It’s a strange mix.”

  “Yes.”

  “And many people keep their distance.” Lundgren’s eyes were still fixed on the group from the day care outside. “That may be why I haven’t seen this woman you’re asking about. Helene, was that her name?”

  “Yes. Helene Andersén. The little girl’s name was Jennie.”

  “I don’t recognize it. Of course, I can ask my staff, or whatever it is we’re called.”

  “It’s possible,” Ringmar said, eyeing the big pile of children’s drawings on the table in Winter’s room.

  “A diary,” Winter said. “It could be like a diary.”

  “Then we’ll have to get lucky.”

  “Luck is often a question of seeing the opportunity when it presents itself,” Winter said. That was a real smart-ass remark, he thought to himself.

  “And you think that opportunity lies here.” Ringmar held up a picture depicting a lone tree in a field. The drawing was divided in two. Rain. Shi
ne. “There’s both rain and sunshine in this one.”

  “It’s like that in a number of the drawings I’ve seen so far,” Winter said.

  “Seems like a case for a child psychologist.”

  “I’ve thought about that too.”

  “And then there are the locations.”

  “And the figures.”

  “This can really give you the creeps. I was thinking about my own kids’ drawings. What stuff like that can mean.”

  “The fact is that kids draw a lot, right? And what is it that they draw? They draw what they see. What we have lying here in front of us is what she saw.”

  “Rain and sun and trees,” Ringmar said. “A boat and a car. Where is this taking us?”

  “Well, we can at least go through them, can’t we? Beier isn’t finished with all the drawings upstairs.”

  “What else does he have to say?”

  “They’re just test firing the rifle into the water tank.”

  “Aha. Does the rifle match up?”

  “He doesn’t know yet,” Winter said.

  They had empty shells from the shoot-out at Vårväderstorget and a suspected weapon. Beier had procured similar ammunition of the same make and fired it into a water tank in order to compare the bullets with the casings.

  “What are you thinking about?” Ringmar said.

  “Right at this moment? A bullet traveling through water, and a motorcycle crashing through a roadblock somewhere in Scandinavia.”

  “I’m thinking about the little girl,” Ringmar said. “And the mother.”

  “I’m still waiting for the reports from child services,” Winter said. “And the hospital.”

  “She seems not to have any family or friends.”

  “Sure she did. We’re slowly getting closer to them. It won’t be long.”

  He grabbed his jacket from the chair and put it on.

  “Where are you going now?” Ringmar asked.

  “I thought it was about time I agreed to meet with a reporter. Don’t you think?”

  “Go and get a haircut before you meet the press. Birgersson mumbled something this morning about a Beatles wig.”

  “He’s still living in the good old days,” Winter said, heading toward the elevators.

  Hans Bülow was waiting at a bar in the center of town. It was getting dark outside, and the candles on the tables were lit. People on the Avenyn were walking briskly, on their way home or out.

  “Can I buy you a beer, seeing as you’ve taken the time?” Bülow said.

  “A Perrier will do just fine.”

  “You’re increasingly becoming one of those straight-edge types.”

  “Do they drink Perrier?”

  “Water. No alcohol.”

  “Straight edge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds good,” Winter lit up a Corps. “It has a ring to it.”

  “They don’t smoke either.”

  Winter looked at his cigarillo.

  “Then I guess I may as well have a light beer. Hof on tap, if they’ve got it.”

  Bülow went over to the bar and came back with two tall glasses. He nodded to a familiar face and sat down. “That’s a colleague of yours, isn’t it?” he said, and took a sip from his glass.

  “Where?”

  “Behind me, off to the right. The one I said hello to.”

  Winter looked over the reporter’s shoulder and saw Halders’s close-cropped head. Halders didn’t turn around. Winter couldn’t tell if he was sitting with anyone.

  “You know Halders?”

  “You kidding me? As a reporter embedded at the police station, you get to know the forces of good,” Bülow said.

  “And you count Halders among them?”

  “He’s got the best reputation of anyone.”

  “With whom?”

  “With the press, of course. He doesn’t put on an act. If he has nothing to say, he doesn’t say anything.”

  Winter took a sip of his beer.

  “So what’s going on?” Bülow asked.

  “We’re still trying to determine the dead woman’s identity. And possibly looking for a child as well, but we don’t know for sure. It scares me.”

  “What if I say that you’ve found her?”

  “You can say whatever you like. But what do you mean? Of course we found her.”

  “Her identity. That you know who she is. But you don’t want to release it.”

  Winter sat silently. He took another sip of his beer, to keep himself occupied. The bartender played music at two-thirds volume. It sounded like rock.

  “Why not, Erik?”

  “I agreed to meet with you because I want to sort out a few things,” Winter said. “But there are certain questions I simply cannot answer.”

  “For reasons pertaining to the ongoing investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  “By virtue of the statutory confidentiality of the preliminary investigation?”

  Winter nodded. Halders still sat with his back to him. Perhaps it’s a doppelgänger, thought Winter.

  “Paragraphs 5:1 and 9:17 of the Swedish Penal Code,” Bülow said.

  “Are you a lawyer too?”

  “It’s enough to be a legal reporter.”

  “I see.”

  “So what can you tell me, then?”

  35

  IT WAS DARKER NOW. WINTER WAS BACK IN HIS OFFICE. BÜLOW was ready to hold off on writing certain things. You owe me a favor, he said when they parted. I just did you one, Winter had answered.

  The music from the CD was louder than the other sounds in the room. Michael Brecker was blowing ice-cold notes from the tenor sax on “Naked Soul” from Tales from the Hudson.

  He thought about Helene’s face and body. Her soul had left her body. Thinking about her name now was no different than it had been before. He had known. How had she let him know? How had she communicated her name to him?

  He picked the topmost drawing from the pile on his desk. It showed a figure, who might be a child, with its arms reaching upward. There was no ground. The figure was hovering in the air.

  Winter studied the next image. In the middle of the picture, a car was driving along a road that went through trees. There were no faces in the windows of the car, since it didn’t have any. The car had no color, was white like the paper. The trees were green and the road brown. Winter picked up the next drawing, which also showed a car. It was driving among houses that were drawn like tall blocks with windows that were irregularly square. The road was black. Winter flipped through the drawings until he found another with a car in it. It was driving on a brown road. In five drawings the car was driving along a black road. The cars were uncolored, left white like the paper. He saw a person with red hair in one of the windows. None of the cars had any drivers.

  He looked for any letters or numbers on the cars. She had written her name, “jeni.” She could recognize and copy a letter or a number. Weren’t there five-year-olds who could read and write fluently?

  He closed his eyes. The music helped his concentration.

  He opened his eyes and laid the drawings with cars in them to the right. There were also other vehicles—something that looked like it could be a streetcar, in some of the drawings. The carriages were long and lined with windows, like the high-rises he had seen earlier, only lying down. One drawing showed something that could have been a streetcar seen from the front. The number 2 was drawn at the top, above a large window.

  Winter laid the drawing aside and looked for more streetcars in the pile. After ten drawings, he found one. It didn’t have a number. He flipped past a few more and saw the number 2 written on yet another streetcar, only this time on the side. A face with red hair could be seen in one of the windows. Eyes, nose, mouth.

  Checking his watch, he reached for the pink commercial section of the telephone book and looked up the number for the public transport information center. The office at Drottningtorget was still open. He called and waited. A woman answered. He
asked about the route of the number 2 streetcar, was told, and hung up.

  It fit. That number 2 passed North Biskopsgården. Clearly they would have taken it. Maybe on a daily basis. Or else the number 5, which he’d learned also went through there. Maybe he would see a 5 in the drawings. He’d started sweating, a thin film he could feel from his hairline to his eyebrows. He stood and went out to the toilet without turning the light on and splashed cold water on his face.

  The telephone rang. He walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver.

  “Winter.”

  “It’s Beier here. I figured you’d still be there.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s a slip of paper that’s centuries old. Or pretty old, anyway.”

  “A slip of paper?”

  “A piece of paper with something written on it. We took everything that was in her storage room back with us, including two boxes of clothes. One of them had some children’s clothes in it, and we found this slip of paper in the pocket of one of the dresses.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s an old dress and an old slip of paper.”

  “You’ve already been able to determine that?”

  “Yes, but no more than that. We haven’t started analyzing it yet, so we haven’t established exactly how old it is.”

  “You sound like a doubtful archeologist.”

  “That’s just what you are in this job. But coming up with a precise age is very difficult. So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want to come up and take a look at it? I’m leaving pretty soon.”

  Winter looked at the drawings that he had started to sort into piles. He felt interrupted. “Should I?”

  “It’s up to you. It’s not going anywhere. But—it’s a little odd—I’m feeling some kind of vibes here.”

  “Intuition,” Winter said.

  “An impulse,” Beier said.

  “Then I’d better come up.”