The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  “Okay.”

  “You want us to continue?”

  Winter blew air out through his mouth and thought. He studied the faint characters and lines.

  “Maybe she had a reason for saving it. I don’t know. I really don’t know, Göran.”

  “I’m only asking because we have a whole apartment’s worth of evidence to go through. And this isn’t exactly the only case we’re working on.”

  “Keep working on this one whenever you get a little time left over, then.” Winter eyed the slip of paper again. “But what can you do with the partial prints?”

  “For us to be able to conclusively establish identity, there have to be twelve points of comparison, minimum. You follow me?”

  Winter followed him, in theory. But practically was another matter. The computer didn’t know what a fingerprint looked like—it simply registered the ridge endings, bifurcations, and dots.

  There were twenty fingerprint experts in Sweden. Two in Gothenburg. One of them was Bengt Sundlöf and he was still standing there next to Beier and Winter.

  “It does kind of give me itchy fingers, so to speak,” Sundlöf said of the slip of paper.

  “A challenge,” Beier said.

  “You sit there and peer into those two microscopes and search—and make sketches.”

  “For days on end,” Beier said. “And get bad back pains from working so intensely in a hunched-over posture.”

  “And you carry on like that until you find twelve points that match,” Sundlöf said.

  “Know what you say then?” he asked Winter.

  “Bingo?” Winter said.

  “We’re going to help you,” Sundlöf said. “You appreciate knowledge and experience despite your youth and long hair.”

  “In France they require a fourteen-point match for a positive ID,” Beier said.

  “Maybe we’re taking risks up here in the north.”

  “The Americans have the largest fingerprint database in the world, naturally,” Sundlöf said. “The FBI has millions to choose from and compare to. They once found a seven-point match. Only they were different people!”

  “I think I’ve lost you now,” Winter said.

  “They had two sets of prints, and seven of the minutiae points in the two fingerprints were identical,” Beier said. “They were completely identical. And yet it turned out they came from two different people. No one’s ever found so many matching points in two separate individuals. Never.”

  “Not yet anyway,” Winter said. “So twelve gives us a pretty good margin, then?”

  “You can be pretty sure,” Beier said.

  “Then do the same with the print on the drawer in Helene’s apartment,” Winter said.

  “That’s a partial print,” Sundlöf said. “And a faint one, probably deposited through a tear in a woolen glove, judging from the fiber sample. We’re analyzing that right now.”

  “So, difficult in other words?” Winter asked.

  Beier and Sundlöf nodded simultaneously.

  “How about the others? In the apartment?”

  “We’re still working at it, Inspector,” Beier said.

  “I’m sure you’ll find all there is to find,” Winter said, and took a step toward the door. “Thanks for the lesson, by the way.”

  Winter passed through the security gate. He wanted to get back to his office to go through the drawings, to sort them.

  He also wanted to study his copy of the slip of paper again. Here in forensics it was as if the numbers and letters had become more distinct, the lines longer, sharper. It meant something to him. It was a map.

  It had meant something to Helene too. Or had she simply forgotten the slip of paper twenty-five years ago in that pocket, after some kind of game? It was possible—for those who believed in coincidences.

  But she hadn’t written the numbers and drawn the lines herself. It was a grown-up’s hand that had guided the pen.

  He felt warm and the inside of his head felt sort of swollen. A cold shower was in order.

  38

  THE LIGHT OVER THE SQUARE WAS JUST AS HARSH AS ON PREVIOUS days, though the air had grown warmer. Winter was sitting on one of the benches, eyes trained on the entrance to the post office. He’d been sitting there for half an hour and was about to stand. It was a quarter to one. Lots of people were walking in and out through the doors along the arcade—the time of the month when salaries and pensions were paid out and bills came due. A group of men were waiting outside for the doors of Jacky’s Pub to open. I’ll go in there later, Winter thought. I can see from in there.

  Sara Helander had relieved Bergenhem an hour and a half ago and was sitting on one of the benches by the window, with a brochure on the art of borrowing.

  She glanced down at it and tried at the same time to keep an eye on what was going on over at the service windows. She could see them, but perhaps she ought to stand. I’ll rest my legs a minute longer, she thought.

  She’d lifted her gaze and stood when she saw the women at window number 3 raise a hand. Helander quickly moved closer, crossing between a baby carriage and a child. The woman behind the counter looked pale, as if she was about to fall off her swivel chair. She lowered her hand and pointed toward the doors.

  Helander saw the light signal flashing at short intervals above the service window, like a reminder of her negligence. A man as broad as the poster above him had already positioned himself in front of the window, expecting to be served. Helander thrust him aside, thrashing her way forward, intense nausea surging in her chest.

  “What the he—”

  “He was here!” the woman behind the glass said. “I tried to catch your eye. He was here thirty seconds ago. Didn’t the light go on?”

  Reflexively Helander looked up once again at the angry signal from the warning light mounted above the service window. Fuck, I’m gonna get fired! Oh my God, I didn’t even think . . . But she pulled herself together.

  “Was it the same number?”

  The woman held up a deposit slip.

  Helander grabbed hold of the little woven basket on the counter. It was half-filled with slips.

  “Put these somewhere safe,” she shouted, and tried to squeeze the basket through the far-too-narrow gap beneath the window. “Open up and put these inside!”

  “He went ou—” The woman in navy blue and pinstripes felt her voice crack.

  I bet he fucking did. Helander almost tripped over the fold in the carpet but regained her balance and avoided breaking her nose against the shatterproof glass.

  Winter was just lighting a Corps when he saw Sara Helander fly out through the doors of the post office and look around wildly.

  Something’s gone wrong. He threw away his cigarillo and ran to where Helander was standing. She saw him.

  “He was here!” she said breathlessly. “The cashier processed a deposit—”

  “Which way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. A few minutes ago. I’m sor—”

  “Forget about that now. What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know. It happened so fa—”

  “Bergenhem is eating over in the bar. Go over there and tell him to come over to the post office right away, to the room at the back where we’ve got the video machine. You come back here with him. But first call Bertil and tell him to send over two cars with extra manpower. I’ll call the officers watching the parking lots.”

  He dialed a number for one of the cars stationed at the western parking lot and spoke into his cell phone.

  “They’re standing by,” he said, and hung up. “We’ll see if we can’t pick him up.”

  Damn it, he thought to himself. “I’m going inside to check the CCTV footage. Come as quickly as you can. Which window was it?”

  “Number 3.”

  Inside the post office, life went on as usual. The postmaster was waiting by the door to the back room.

  “I’ll go in and rewind the tap
e,” Winter said. “He was in here. Have someone relieve the girl at window 3 and send her back here to the video room.”

  “But I’ve got no one else!”

  “What’s the matter with you? We’re investigating a mur—” But he calmed down. “Look, just close it or sit there yourself if you have to. I want her in here immediately.”

  The camera was connected directly to the video recorder, which was connected to a monitor in a room with no windows. Winter stopped the machine and looked at his watch. He rewound the tape to a half minute before the time Helander had put down that the man had been there. The woman from window 3 came in. Winter pressed play. The film scraped to life and the interior of the post office appeared.

  Winter had chosen the camera location at the very back of the premises, and from there it looked like a thousand people were gathered. The woman now standing next to him could be seen in angled profile close by. A female customer left the window. A man wearing a baseball cap and a long, heavy jacket was next in line and then stepped forward.

  Winter saw the man drop his slip in the basket on the counter, like a reflex action. Winter couldn’t see his face—just his profile, at an angle, from behind.

  “That’s him,” the cashier said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course it’s him. He was wearing that same cap,” she said, as if the footage they were watching wasn’t a replay but a live take in a reality show.

  Winter saw how the man handed something over and how the cashier took it and shifted her gaze in front of her, still angled down, and how she then looked up at the man and seemed to look past him. Winter followed that gaze right across the room to Helander, who was sitting on a bench, looking down at a brochure.

  The light above the service window started flashing. The woman said something to the man.

  “I tried to keep him there, but he didn’t want a receipt.”

  The man in the cap left the counter and moved toward the door. The cashier raised her arm and waved her hand. Another man stepped up to the window and looked at the cashier gesturing. Winter saw how Helander jumped up and forced her way up to the window. The man in the cap walked out through the double doors without tripping over Bergenhem’s fold in the carpet.

  Bergenhem and Helander had entered and were standing next to the cashier.

  “My God,” she said. The idiot’s caught on film, she thought when she saw herself.

  Winter stopped the tape and backed it up. The man in the cap came back into frame.

  “That’s him,” Winter said. He won’t be the only one out there with one of those fucking caps, he thought to himself. But his has some big, pale lettering on the front.

  “Yes, that’s him,” the cashier said.

  Winter spoke on his cell phone, repeated the description.

  “They’re searching for him,” he said to Helander and Bergenhem as he held the phone to his ear, waiting for someone else to pick up. “Hello? Yes, seal everything off. Forge—What? No, no sirens for Christ’s sake. And don’t forget the bus station. Yes. The bus station. Send someone over there now!”

  He hung up and headed for the door.

  “Is Bertil bringing more men?”

  “Yes,” Bergenhem said. “What do we do now?”

  “You all know what he looks like.” Winter checked his watch. “Less than ten minutes have passed since he was in here. He may have jumped into a car and driven off, but there’s a chance he’s still around, and we’ve got the big parking lots and the bus station covered. I don’t think he suspects anything. And call Bertil again, right away.”

  “Okay,” Bergenhem said.

  “He’s still here,” Winter said. “I think he’s still here. One of the female officers has taken up position outside the doors to Konsum. I want you to go into the department store and see if you can spot him. And if you do, call me and go outside and wait there with the others.”

  He looked at Helander. “You come with me.”

  She didn’t answer as he hurried her out of the post office.

  “You circle around the edge of the square, to the left, and we’ll meet up at the corner over there,” Winter said.

  He entered the savings bank and came out again. The man in the cap wasn’t in the flower shop, nor was he in the Bella Napoli Pizzeria. Not in the real estate office on the corner.

  “Nothing,” Helander said when they met.

  They walked down the pedestrian tunnel. They walked past the newly built high school and stood in front of the cultural center. To the left Winter could see a bridge over a stream. The path forked in two after the bridge, and then again farther on, and once more after that. He thought about the fingerprint, his heart pounding.

  They entered the cultural center and continued through the library and the other public spaces. They saw two teenagers wearing caps.

  “He was at least forty,” Helander said.

  “Yes.”

  They went out and the wind hit them from the left. They continued into the wind, half-running. Up ahead lay the bus station. Winter could see the back entrance to the supermarket and the parking lot below, toward the street. Fredrik and Aneta—back on duty—moving around among the cars. Halders’s scalp was self-illuminating.

  There were police officers standing by the buses. He could make out Ringmar speaking to Börjesson. Bergenhem approached from the arcade next to Konsum and shook his head when he saw Winter. We’re all here, thought Winter, the whole hardworking team, but what good is it?

  He continued west across the bus station. On the other side of the road was the health clinic, and in front of him was yet another big parking lot. As he drew closer he saw a man, thirty yards away, leaning forward to unlock a red Volvo 740. He was wearing a black cap with white text and a green oilskin coat that Winter could only see the upper part of since the man was standing on the other side of the car. Winter started to run.

  The man looked up, black cap pulled down over his brow. He was wearing a red scarf. It’s like watching a black-and-white film transform into color, Winter thought as he ran.

  The man saw him and turned around to see if anything was happening behind him, and that’s when the others approached. A police car tore out from the bus station and accelerated toward him. The blond guy in the leather jacket sprinting toward him was now shouting something. He threw himself into the car and jammed the key into the ignition, and the Volvo roared to life. When he sent the car surging backward, the guy in the leather jacket clung to the door, but then flew off when he popped the clutch and shot forward. It would have worked if the back end of a cop car hadn’t smashed right into his front on the exit ramp and then been dragged halfway across the damn street on the hood of his Volvo before he finally came to a stop. He couldn’t get the door open, so he threw himself to the passenger side and stepped out onto the asphalt, which was when that goddamn skinhead came at him and barreled into his stomach skull-first, and the air just exploded out of him and he crumbled to the ground after two steps, and the skinhead flew onto him again.

  “You okay?” Halders asked.

  “Just a little scratch,” Winter said, peering at his elbow through the hole in his leather jacket. “Nice work, Fredrik.”

  “So that’s him,” Halders said, and looked at the man sitting in the backseat of one of the radio cars.

  “He’s the one who paid the rent.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Guess we’ll have to torture him,” Halders said. “This is just the beginning. Aren’t you happy, Winter?”

  “Happy?”

  “It could have all gone to shit.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Come on, this is a big breakthrough for homicide. Look at him. He knows he’s going to come clean.”

  “Nice takedown there,” Winter repeated. “I’m going to have a quick chat with Sara before we head back.”

  Halders nodded and walked toward Aneta and the car
. It looked as if he were going for a stroll.

  Helander was waiting by the station building.

  “I was negligent,” she said. “Criminally negligent.”

  “We should have practiced a bit,” Winter said. “But there’s no guarantee it would have turned out differently anyway. There were a lot of people in there and he was quick.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Winter lit up a Corps. It tasted good. “Okay. But we had a preparedness that worked.”

  “He wasn’t suspicious,” Helander said. “Not even when you came running toward him. Isn’t that strange?”

  “We’ll have to see what he says and who he is,” Winter said. “If his name matches what his driver’s license says—that is, if he’s got one.” He took a drag and studied the smoke that followed the wind up toward the sky.

  39

  THE MAN’S NAME WAS OSKAR JAKOBSSON AND HE HAD HIS own registration number at the station. They’d pulled the fingerprints from the slip and compared it to the ten-print database and the system found a match. Oskar Jakobsson had a criminal background. Nothing big.

  He’d done time for larceny and battery against friends and had been convicted of car theft, and he had done stuff they didn’t know about, Winter thought as he sat in front of Jakobsson, who looked worried but not desperate. He was prepared for a detention lasting twelve hours and maybe longer, but not a lot longer. He claimed that he knew what he had done, but not why.

  “Of course you help someone out when they ask you. Of course you do.”

  Beneath the baseball cap his hair was dark brown and disheveled. Jakobsson had declined the offer of a comb, but had said yes to coffee. He had a scar above his chin, like a proper criminal who’s had broken bottles shoved in his face in his time.

  “You’re happy to lend a hand?” Winter asked.

  “People help me out.”

  “Tell us again from the beginning.”

  “From when?”

  “From when you were asked if you’d be willing to help out.”

  The tape recorder was turning on the table between them. The interrogating officer, Gabriel Cohen, sat next to Winter and was silent. No one else was in the room. There were no windows. The ventilation system droned from the walls. When Jakobsson asked if he could smoke, Winter said no.