The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  “No,” Winter said. “The others got away.”

  “They got away. Two men and the driver and maybe the kid. The driver was a woman. Two detectives and a uniformed officer swore they’d seen a child’s face lying on the floor of the getaway car when the doors were opened before they took off.”

  “They were sure of it,” Poulsen said. “Just as sure as they were that the driver was a woman.”

  “Brigitta Dellmar,” Winter said.

  “Apparently she was later identified as such,” Poulsen said.

  “She was unknown here,” Bendrup said.

  “So they got away.” Winter kept his voice neutral.

  Bendrup looked at him suspiciously. “That’s the story, in broad strokes. The epilogue is that they hid out in a holiday home in Blokhus. And that the third robber floated up in the fjord a few weeks later. At least it’s believed that it was him. He was buddies with the two who died. Or one of them anyway.”

  “What was their connection to the biker gangs?” Winter asked.

  “Well...” Bendrup tried to light up his cigar again.

  Winter waited. Michaela Poulsen, irritated by the noise, walked over to the window. It quieted down just as she looked out.

  “Well, the organization was being built up here back then. They’d come over from California, like the Beach Boys and all kinds of other crap. Somehow they got a stronger foothold here in Denmark than in other European countries. I think. In any case, there were a few trail-blazers, and two of these hapless bank robbers were among them. At least two. But that’s about all we know, which, of course, isn’t the same thing as what we think.”

  “So, what do you think?” Winter asked.

  “We think—or I think anyway—that it was a straightforward attempt to raise funds. Seven million was a lot of money back in ’72. Anyone wanting to build up a strong organization needs capital. Bear in mind that the Danske Bank heist wasn’t the only one that took place at the time, nor the first. It was probably just one in a series of planned robberies, even if it was the biggest. And the bloodiest.”

  “Supporting that theory,” Poulsen added, “is the fact that one of the robbers was probably killed by his own—”

  “How do you mean?” Winter asked.

  “He was executed since he was no longer needed. That may sound shocking, but things got pretty nasty around here. Or else he was weak—according to their definition, that is—a weak person whom they couldn’t trust.”

  “Or else they simply had a falling-out over something,” Bendrup said. “They may just have been hired hands. Connected to the organization, yes. Sent out by the gang leadership, no. Could be.”

  “You said they may have had a falling-out,” Winter said. “Over what?” He felt a cold surge through his head and hair. Suddenly his pulse was racing.

  “I can almost see what you’re thinking,” Bendrup said. “I can see it now. And it’s not a very nice thought.”

  “Is it possible that the woman and the child had to disappear?” Winter asked.

  “Well,” Bendrup said. “I’ve thought a lot about it, and that’s one potential explanation. Either there was an order handed down from above that the weak had to be gotten rid of, or else something happened between the robbers afterward. Maybe the men fought over the lives of the woman and child. Perhaps all their lives were in danger. Maybe it was just a coincidence that things turned out the way they did, but I don’t think so. All you can say for sure is that it was a nightmare.”

  “Turned out the way they did?” Winter asked. “You mean that the one guy was murdered?”

  “Yeah. He was shot, but why him?”

  “Okay,” Winter said, and lit up a Corps. “They escape and get away. They hold out somewhere. Maybe others in some organization know where they are, maybe not. Then something happens. It’s possible they’ve already gone their separate ways, but let’s assume that one of the men is killed in the presence of the others. That leaves a man and a woman and possibly the child. The woman is from Sweden. They manage to make it back to Sweden—”

  “Yeah, fucking hell,” Bendrup said. “We did what we could, but that wasn’t good enough. They must have had contacts and been taken across by some smuggler.”

  “Or else they got themselves a contact,” Poulsen said. “They had money, after all, right?”

  “If there was any money left,” Bendrup said. “With them, I mean. The money might already have been in the coffers.”

  “But if the girl was actually along during the robbery, and we also know that she came to Sweden and was eventually found at a hospital in Gothenburg,” Winter said, “then the question is, who else made the trip over?”

  “Maybe no one,” Bendrup said. “It’s not unthinkable that the woman and the last remaining man, if we call him that—that they’re dead too. That they died soon after the robbery. Executed.”

  “Or else they came across too,” Poulsen said.

  “So the last man was never identified?” Winter asked.

  “No. He may have been a Swede. The woman was Swedish. The man might have been Swedish too.”

  “Then why did they come over here in the first place?” Winter said. “Why did they specifically take part in this robbery?”

  “Maybe there was a sister organization in Gothenburg, but we never managed to determine that,” Bendrup said. “That is, after we heard about the child and the hospital and the connection to Brigitta Dellmar. And that she’d been seen during the heist.”

  “You found no link between her and any of the Danish men who were killed?”

  “Nothing. Nor with anyone else in the fledgling organization. But there may have been. Maybe cross-border love. Just like cross-border collaboration. Spread the risk.”

  “We really searched for them,” Poulsen said. “The woman and the man.”

  “She’s never been heard from again,” Bendrup said. “And she had a little child, after all. That really points to only one possibility.”

  “So, what was the deal with that house? Where was it? I can’t remember the name from the file.”

  “Blokhus. On the North Sea. It’s a seaside resort.”

  “You were able to establish that they’d been in a house there?”

  “According to some witnesses, they had. We checked out the house, but it was empty. Empty as a tomb.”

  “Of course this was long after the robbery,” Poulsen said.

  “What?”

  “They’d picked the lock or something and gotten inside. Or else they’d had a key. No one saw anything suspicious back then. The house was a bit isolated, given that there were no year-round residents. Now it’s different, but back then there were nothing but holiday homes along the whole street. They left no trace behind. Then the owners came along a few weeks later and continued renovating the house, which they’d already been in the process of doing for some time. New wallpaper. Fresh coat of paint. And finally someone living up the road reacted to all the commotion following the robbery. In other words, it all went very slowly.”

  “How did they connect the robbers to that specific house?”

  “They found something,” Bendrup said. “The owners of the house, that is.” He stood and picked up the binders. He found the one he was looking for and started flipping through it. “They were busy working on the house.” Bendrup put down the binder and picked up another one. “It should be here.”

  “It was really just a small slip of paper wrapped up in a little child’s sweater,” Poulsen said. “It was when they were getting started on the flooring and were about to access the crawl space underneath. There was a loose floorboard in the corner, over by the window. Lying inside was a sweater, and that slip of paper fell out when they picked it up. It was a slip of paper with symbols on it. Like a map.”

  “Here it is,” Bendrup said, and held out the binder. Winter felt sick to his stomach and excited at once. “Don’t you feel well?”

  Winter shook his head. He took the binder. Lying
in a plastic folder was a copy of the same map, or message, as the one he had studied several times in Gothenburg, with the same letters and numbers and a similar drawing that could be a set of instructions or anything at all: 5/20,—1630, 4—23?, L. v—H, C.

  “I recognize this,” he said, and explained the connection to them.

  “Good God,” Poulsen said. She’d removed her jacket.

  “Well, we never managed to decipher it,” Bendrup said. “But this is a step forward nevertheless.”

  “Did you find any fingerprints?” Winter asked.

  “Mostly from those who touched the stuff afterward,” Bendrup said. “But we did come up with one set that belonged to Andersen.”

  “Andersen? I haven’t seen anything about an Andersen in the files,” Winter said.

  “What? Oh shit, sorry, I was unclear,” Bendrup said. “The robber we later found, the one who was floating in Limfjorden, his name was Møller and that’s how he appears on all official documents, but when we checked with his buddies here in town, it turns out he had some kind of a code name, and that was Andersen. They all had double names, every one of them.”

  Winter’s mouth was dry. He had trouble swallowing, but he felt that he had to swallow before he could speak. “The dead woman in Gothenburg, her name is Andersén,” he said. “Helene Andersén. She adopted that name a few years ago. So she may well have been that little girl.”

  “Good God,” Poulsen repeated.

  “When did you find that out?” Bendrup asked. “Her identity, I mean. That name. Andersén.”

  “Just a few days ago,” Winter said. “Everything’s gone so quickly after that. Didn’t you get the name from us? My registry clerk was supposed to send over most of the material ahead of my arrival.”

  Poulsen looked at Bendrup.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Bendrup said. “I’ve been off work for the past three days and only came back this afternoon. The stuff was lying on my desk. It must have been there since it arrived, without anyone taking a look.”

  “That’s my fault,” Poulsen said. “I should have checked the mail earlier. But maybe we’ve made some progress here after all.” She eyed Winter. “If you’d like, we can all head downtown now so you can have a firsthand look at where it happened.”

  “But first we’re going to have a beer,” Bendrup said.

  50

  WINTER AND BENDRUP EACH SAT WITH A CARLSBERG HOF AT LA Strada opposite Danske Bank, on the corner of Østerågade and Bispensgade. Michaela Poulsen was drinking a club soda with lemon. They were alone in the bar, but there was a lot of hustle and bustle on the pedestrian street outside.

  The bank occupied a building that looked as if it might have been a church erected in the late Middle Ages, though it had been a bank for as long as anyone in Ålborg could remember. The stones in the walls were rough-hewn. The windows were large and appeared to have been there for centuries. A telephone booth stood next to the gaping entrance, just opposite them, across the pedestrian street.

  “I wonder how many times they walked past here and planned that job,” Winter said, turning to the Danish homicide detectives.

  “It could have been done by others,” Bendrup said. “Or just one of them.”

  “We also believe that the driver—the woman—first tried to drive east along Nytorv, but that way was blocked off,” Poulsen said. “I’ll show you when we go outside.”

  “You mean that the escape route across the bridge wasn’t planned?”

  She made a gesture with her hand. “It may have been, but perhaps from a different direction. We don’t really know. What I mean is that maybe everything wasn’t planned down to the last detail.”

  “But the idea didn’t just occur to them as they happened to be walking past,” Bendrup said.

  The bank was closed, and they were alone in there with two of the staff. The commotion outside the window intensified apace with the onset of evening. Winter reconstructed the events in his head, while Bendrup and his boss recounted and pointed.

  They’d rushed in with their black masks, a repeat of so many robberies in the criminal history that united all countries.

  Outside, the young police officer had been gunned down. Christiansen. And two of the robbers. Their names and background were in the files that Winter had brought along from the police station to read in his hotel room.

  Bendrup indicated where people had stood and where they had fallen. Everything eventually flowed together from all different directions, and Winter felt the fatigue take hold, his consciousness dulled like the daylight that was seeping away into the walls of the buildings on this street corner of the world where people had died for money. Or was there something else too? He wondered if it might have been for an idea—an awful concept of power and control, of naked terror.

  “And heading north,” Bendrup said.

  Winter followed his gesture past something that seemed to be a copy of a British pub.

  “We took off after them, but I already told you that,” Bendrup said. “It started to get dark, like it is now. It was almost the same time of year.”

  Winter wished himself back at the hotel. An hour’s sleep and then work and a bit of food. He needed to be alone again.

  “Well,” Bendrup said. “Is there anything else we can show you? That you want to see right now, that is.”

  “Not right at the moment,” Winter said. “You’ve been very forthcoming, I must say.”

  “Out of pure selfishness,” Bendrup said. “You solve the case, and we get the glory.”

  “Of course,” Winter said. He was starting to get a little tired of Bendrup’s chatter.

  “Well, maybe we’re trying to be a little more professional than that,” Poulsen said. “Let’s get going, then. We can drop you off at the hotel.”

  “I’d prefer to walk,” Winter said. “It’s not very far, is it?”

  “Not far at all,” Bendrup said. “Just follow this street and it’ll take you straight to the square next to the station. Kennedy Square. That’s where your hotel is.”

  Winter raised his hand in farewell and started walking. “I’ll come by tomorrow morning.”

  Poulsen waved and nodded.

  He had dozed off for a while and was awakened by the sound of motors. Eventually you barely notice it, Michaela Poulsen had said. It gets to be like living next to a railroad. Here he had both. Motors and trains. He got out of bed and walked to the window. The room was half in darkness from the encroaching evening and half in light from John F. Kennedy Square, which was patchily lit from there to the station building, where two motorcycles stood revving their engines. After a few minutes they drove off to the right.

  There was a rumbling from bus traffic at the far end of the square. To the right he could see the dim light from the Mallorca Bar. Two men staggered in and another staggered out.

  Winter drew the curtains and took off his clothes and left them in a pile on the floor.

  The water in the shower reached the right temperature almost immediately. He stood there for a long time before he lathered his body and rinsed the suds off with his face pointing into the stream.

  There were still a lot of people on the streets in the center of town as Winter headed south along Boulevarden. He met with fewer as he neared the station. The evening was so mild that he could walk with his jacket unbuttoned.

  Two men were standing outside the Boulevard-Caféen, opposite the hotel, but they went inside the bar when he drew closer. The windows were open and he heard the murmur of voices. Winter walked across the street and glimpsed a man through one of the windows. He lit a cigarillo as he walked, which allowed him to glance at the window of the bar, and the man was still standing there, with the half darkness behind him and half-hidden behind the thin curtains.

  It might not be, thought Winter. But if those are the same men who were standing outside the Jyske Bank, talking over a hamburger, when I was there, this city isn’t actually very big.

  He was standing
next to his car now. He opened it and pretended to rummage around in the glove compartment. The man remained standing in the window, but his silhouette had moved, as if to follow Winter’s movements more closely.

  Winter stepped out of the car, rounded the corner, and went into the hotel. He was handed his key. The elevator had gotten stuck somewhere, so he walked quickly up the stairs and waited in the hallway outside the door until the timer switched off the hall lights. Then he opened the door to his room and slid from darkness into darkness and shut the door at once behind him. The room was silver from the illuminated square and streets outside. Winter went down on his knees and crawled across the floor.

  When he was below the window, he crawled off to the side and slowly stood up, concealed by the thick curtain that hung there. He heard a shout from the Mallorca Bar and saw a man move along unsteadily. He couldn’t see the door to the Boulevard-Caféen, but he waited and saw the man outside the Mallorca joined by another drunken lout, who shouted in Danish.

  Then something moved in the right of his field of vision and he backed up a few inches into the room, but not far enough to prevent his seeing.

  The two men came into view, moving away from the street and across the square. Winter saw that it was the same men he’d seen just before, outside the bar. He was certain he had also seen them up by Nytorv. More than certain, in fact.

  The men looked up at the window as they walked past on the sidewalk below. They can’t see me, thought Winter. One of them kept his gaze fixed on the window, and Winter stayed still.

  Then they had passed.

  The most foolish thing now would be to go down and follow them, he thought. I don’t think they know that I know.

  51

  THE SOUNDS SEARED WINTER’S SLEEP LIKE RED-HOT COALS, waking him from a state of deep unconsciousness. No dreams tonight. The exhaustion from the day before had taken its toll and given him rest. He lay still for two minutes and primed himself to get up, opening his eyes to a room washed out by the morning light from John F. Kennedy Square. As he climbed out of bed, the room began to vibrate from what he now identified as one hell of a racket coming from outside. For a second, he thought it was motorcycles, but the sound was different. He checked his watch. It was 6:30. Just then the alarm clock on the bedside table rang.