“So she’s been missing ever since,” Ringmar said. “And you never found any leads, as I understand.”
“In a way we had a lot to go on,” Borg said. “That robbery didn’t exactly go down without a trace.”
“So she was identified in connection with that,” Winter said. “How certain were you?”
Borg looked at Winter as if the young dandy had asked a trick question. He’d left the force before the kid had made inspector, and maybe that was just as well. “How certain? Guess you’d better ask the Danes that. What can I say, of course we believed it. How certain is certain? I don’t know if it’s possible now to get further than we did. There was no video surveillance back then, but a couple inside the bank saw the car drive off and saw the woman. She’d turned around or something. I’m a little rusty on the details. You’ll have to look that up for yourselves in the files.”
“Of course,” Ringmar said.
“How did you tie her, Brigitta Dellmar, to the robbery?” Winter asked. “It wasn’t just because of the child, was it?”
“In part, of course. She was critical. But we followed the usual procedure when we got the call from Denmark. Started checking through our list of known criminals over here. She was among them, after all, though not one of the worst, you understand. A ways down the list, and I guess we hadn’t made it down that far when we were contacted by Sahlgrenska.”
“And you knew, of course, that there was a child involved over there. In Ålborg.”
“Well, it was in the report,” Borg said, “but it was by no means certain. In any case, the neighbors got in touch when they recognized the girl, and then we got right on it.”
“I see,” Ringmar said.
“Then, of course, it took a while to make the connection with the robbery in Denmark.”
“Yes,” Ringmar said.
“And by then she’d disappeared, of course,” Borg said.
“Yes,” Ringmar said.
“Executed,” Borg said.
“What?” Ringmar’s face had gone pale.
“Executed, of course,” Borg said. “Or possibly scared out of her wits. Or, as a third alternative, dead from injuries that we didn’t know about, but that she might have sustained during the robbery.”
“How was it that there were police on the scene,” Winter asked, “so soon after the robbery?”
“Something to do with the bank’s alarm system going off before the whole thing had really started. Something strange having to do with a short circuit or one of the employees—no, it was something technical. You’d better check about that with the Danes too, if need be. But a patrol car arrived on the scene just when the whole thing began, and the rest, as they say, is history. One hell of a history.”
“So what you’re saying is that she could have been killed by one of the other robbers?”
“Why not? Two of them escaped with her. They had the money. Then they dropped off the kid, because maybe there were certain things they weren’t willing to do. I don’t know. But I do know she never got in touch. She had a kid, after all, right?”
Ringmar nodded.
“You know those hard-core biker gangs were really staking out their territory big time around then, after a bit of a soft start. We never managed to prove it, but there’s no doubt they were the ones behind it.”
“I read about that in the file,” Winter said.
“That Dellmar woman had those sorts of contacts,” Borg said. “We did what we could to follow her sad life back in time, and she’d flirted a bit with the local bikers. How innocent it was then, I don’t know.”
Ringmar nodded again.
“But she wasn’t there later, as far as we could tell. The Danes worked at it from their end, but she was gone. Just vanished. And then this fairly well-known biker thug pops up in Limfjorden, or wherever the hell it was, and when the bank cashier gets a look at him, she says she’s sure that he’s one of them!”
“You have a good memory, Sven,” Ringmar said.
“There’s nothing wrong with the circulation in my head,” Borg said. “It’s getting clearer now as I’m thinking about it.”
“But no one ever managed to tie that guy to the robbery?”
“I don’t know. No. But we knew. Deep down we knew. He was Danish and disappeared at the time of the robbery and eventually turned up floating facedown in the water, like a dead fish.”
“Yeah.”
“Well. Then the kid ended up here in Gothenburg, and we had good reason to suspect that she had actually been along when it happened. There was a reason to try to speak to the girl. A number of reasons. So we did.”
“We read the transcripts,” Winter said.
“Well, then you’ve seen it for yourself. She didn’t actually say anything. She was clearly distressed by what had happened, that was obvious. But what exactly that was—you’ll have to talk with a psychiatrist about that. We had one sitting in back then. Have you spoken to him?”
“No,” Winter said.
Borg stretched out his left leg and massaged it. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the dust moving about the room disappeared with it.
“But you’ve read it yourself. There’s a section in there where she may have been trying to talk about how she’d been in some house or in a particular room. Maybe a basement somewhere for a while. The Danes talked about a house where they’d been.”
“They?” Winter asked. “The robbers?”
“Who else are we talking about?” Borg said. “I’m talking about the robbers. They had been in some house outside town. Preparing. Planning. You’ll have to ask the Danes about that.” Borg started to rub his leg again. “Could be that’s where they hid out again afterward. The ones who were still alive, that is. A little while longer. Maybe the child was along. I don’t know. Maybe the mother. We never found out.”
“You found out a fair bit,” Ringmar said.
“Most of what I’ve said you could have read in there yourselves. But you’ve got to speak to the Danes again.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go over there.”
“Yeah,” Winter said. “I’m starting to see that.”
“There’s one more chilling aspect to this, if you guys want to torment yourselves some more. At least I think there is. But I guess you’ve already seen it.”
“What are you talking about, Sven?” Ringmar leaned forward.
“In my day there was no such thing as video cameras, but back when this whole thing was going on we were testing out filming the questioning sessions in Super 8. That footage should still be lying around somewhere. Have you checked it out?”
“There’s a film?” Winter said.
“Of the questioning session. Tapes get recorded over, I guess, but maybe that film of us speaking to little Helene is still there.”
“There’s no mention anywhere,” Ringmar said.
“That we were filming? Or that we saved the film?”
“Neither,” Ringmar said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it in connection with this case.”
“Well, you weren’t with us back then,” Borg said. “I guess someone was sloppy and forgot to enter it or something, or else the film was simply discarded. That kind of thing does happen, far too often, unfortunately.”
They found the film among a group of cassettes containing stuff that had been transferred from Super 8 to video and then forgotten. There was an index, but not with the Dellmar case file.
They took the cassette into Winter’s office and popped it into the VCR. Ringmar made a gesture that looked like he was crossing himself. Winter felt a hood of steel slowly being screwed tight around his head.
Borg entered the frame, younger and with better circulation. The room could’ve been any in the station, at any time. Not much had changed.
The child sat across the table with barely more than her face visible. She said a few words and looked straight down at the table and then up and directly into the
camera, and at Winter and Ringmar. The pressure around Winter’s head mounted. That was perhaps the most appalling thing about it—sitting there with the answer sheet, knowing how things had turned out, and making this awful trip back in time, clutching the answer sheet like some kind of bridge spanning the long divide.
He thought about Helene’s face on the gurney.
“I don’t know if I can fucking handle this,” Ringmar said.
Winter saw the girl get up from the chair, and he wished that the tape had been destroyed.
Ringmar stood up.
“Now let’s go out there and find Jennie,” he said.
46
WINTER READ THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THE CONVERSATION THE child psychologist had with Helene. The experienced psychologist, who was now deceased, had tried to find something in her memory that she didn’t want to—or was unable to—talk about. It made short and painful reading, and as in the film, it was clear that she had been traumatized.
The assessment didn’t reveal much either. There was a note about the girl’s need for conversational therapy at the psychiatric clinic—continuing into adulthood. What would happen then? Winter wondered. Wasn’t that when the nightmarish memories worsened?
They hadn’t found anything to indicate that Helene had had such conversations as an adult. There’d been no follow-up as she became older, other than a routine checkup a few years after the event. Winter made a note about the foster parents at the time.
He read: “When she reaches adulthood, she may become aware of the ordeal she shows clear signs of having experienced, but it’s possible that she will only be able to recall a few specific images.”
Winter considered the lonely woman living with her child in the apartment he had wandered around in, and where he’d felt such a powerful sense of fear. There were few memories there. The memories were sealed, like hatches.
Long-repressed memories could open into an abyss.
There were examples of patients who’d had memory lapses in the middle of conversations. Suddenly the patient could become someone else. Memory disorders could cause a patient to split the self into different identities, Winter had read.
“Consciousness wants to protect the person from the memory of unbearable experiences.” It was an awful sentence. What was going on in the mind of a person like that? Had Helene been like that? The cursory investigation into her fate hinted at it, but Winter couldn’t find anything conclusive.
It was raining again, pattering rhythmically against the windowpane. Winter looked for a moment at the childish drawings attached to the wall opposite him. They showed flags, windmills, men in beards driving cars. It was raining and the sun was shining. The sky is displaying different identities, he thought.
“Once they reach their thirties, people who have been subjected to severely traumatic experiences as children can gain increased awareness of their ongoing torment.” Yet another awful sentence. “Once awareness returned, these people could find themselves in another place.”
She didn’t know how she got here.
Different identities. He read the words again: “another place.”
Was it possible that had happened to Helene? Who, then, had taken care of her child?
It struck him now that they hadn’t established the time of the daughter’s disappearance. They didn’t know when Helene and Jennie had been seen together for the last time. Had the child disappeared before Helene? Had Helene been aware of who she was? Maybe she’d been confused for a long time. Was that possible?
He made a note that he should speak to Ester Bergman again.
Halders switched on his bathroom light and leaned in closer to the mirror. His hair had started to grow out on the sides and he decided to go to the barbershop over the weekend and let the machine trim it down again.
He thought about running a bath, but that felt like a lot of effort. He thought about going out and sitting down at Bolaget and ordering a beer, but it was so far away. He thought briefly about making himself something to eat, but he didn’t have the energy.
Damn it, he thought. I barely have the strength to go into the bedroom to lie down.
He thought about calling somebody, but he couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to speak to or who would want to listen. It would be Aneta in the case of the former.
He went to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took a bottle of beer from the shelf in the door.
He sat down in front of the TV, with the remote in his hand. He debated whether to switch it on.
“We can’t hold Jakobsson any longer,” Ringmar said.
“I realize that,” Winter said. “It’s . . . Shit.”
“All he’s done is pay somebody else’s rent,” Ringmar said.
“We’ll have to keep him under surveillance.”
“After this, he’ll go to the liquor store and disappear for two weeks.”
“I think we can tie one of them to the weapon and the shoot-out,” Winter said.
“Excellent,” Birgersson said. “Bolander?”
“He’s not saying anything, of course, but he was there.”
“I still don’t understand why they did it. Unless it was yet another crazy display of power.”
“You might not be far off.”
“Or a reminder of power, though I guess that’s the same thing. In any case, it nearly cost us one of our officers.”
“Yes.”
“There’s been trouble down in Malmö again,” Birgersson said. “Seems those bastards were in the process of building up some scheme. There’s something really scary about this gang. Especially the control they have over their own.”
“It’s a little calmer in Denmark right now.”
“Speaking of which—I spoke to Wellman and he gave us the green light.”
“I’ll go as soon as I’ve read through a little more of the material they sent over,” Winter said.
Halders entered Winter’s office with the expression of someone pissed off as hell and yet at the same time a bit relieved.
“We can cross one of the leads off our list,” he said.
Winter was already standing. “Let’s hear it.”
“That marking on the tree. It was as I suspected. Did I mention that? Some punk kid put it up there.”
“Some punk kid?”
“The boys with the boat were, as you know, a little reluctant to help us out by remembering who they’d lent their boat to. There were quite a few of them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, okay. Two boys—younger than the ones with the boat—had borrowed it, and they’re the ones who put the marking on the tree.”
“Did they come in here and say so?”
“Like I said, we’ve worked our way through the list now. I spoke to one of them on the phone, and what he said sounded a little strange, so I went over to his school to chat with him. He was having one of his apparently innumerable free periods.”
“He confessed?”
“Came straight out with it. Said it was just a goof they got into their heads to do.”
“When did you find this out?”
“Just now, damn it. I know, it’s taken time to go through all this but it’s not like we didn’t have other things to—”
“Did we get round to checking whether there are any similar markings by any of the other lakes?”
“Yes. So far we haven’t found anything.”
“And he knew that we were looking for information about this?”
“He hadn’t seen it,” he said.
“Is he lying?”
“Of course he is. But I doubt he’s lying about the marking.”
The evening was dark and mild as Winter biked across Sandarna and through the center of Kungsten. Långedragsvägen was lit with dim streetlights. You could feel and hear the sea in the wind.
The road outside Lotta’s house was crowded with parked cars. He heard the party through the open windows. Bim and Kristina had put a sign that said “Happy Birthday
Mommy” above the open door, which was festooned with balloons and left ajar. The daughters had chosen white and blue. Winter removed the rubber bands from his pant leg and walked up the few steps.
He took a deep breath and stepped through the doorway.
Standing in the front hall were people he’d never met. He nodded to the three in the kitchen entrance and hung up his leather jacket on top of three thousand others. He smoothed out his jacket and stuffed his polo shirt down the back of his black pants. He was carrying a present under his arm.
“Erik!” Lotta had come out into the hallway from the kitchen.
“Hiya, sis.”
“So you made it after all!”
“I promised. And I wanted to.”
She hugged him and stroked his cheek. She smelled like the evening outside and faintly of wine.
“Happy birthday,” Winter said, and held out his present.
“There is a standing order that all presents be put in a pile and opened at the same time to the cheers and adulation of the masses,” Lotta said, and took the present.
“When?”
“Oh come on, what kind of a question is that?”
“Sorry.”
“It was the girls’ idea.”
“Come on. You like it too,” Winter said. “Being in the spotlight.”
“But Angela couldn’t come,” Lotta said.
“She was on call and got paged.”
“Well, that’s a shame. She called me.”
“Really?”
“She said to say hello to you. Seems I’m acting as go-between for you guys.”
“It’s not that bad. It’s better.”
“What do you want to drink?” She waved toward the kitchen. “There’s wine, beer, and the hard stuff.”
“No water?”
The Shadow Woman Page 27