The Shadow Woman

by Ake Edwardson

  “He’s either been reading Ib Michael or Susanne Brøgger,” Poulsen said.

  They continued along Bispensgade to the entertainment district around Jomfru Ane Gade. It was difficult to make headway among all the people moving between the restaurants and bars. Music was coming from every direction. Winter thought about the Gothenburg Party. It was the same atmosphere here, filled with an anxiety that was both hard and soft, or of that same old search for calm.

  “Shall we grab a table somewhere, seeing as we’ve confirmed that we are being watched?” Poulsen asked.

  “Let’s do that.”

  “There’s a pretty good brasserie in the next street. Or should we try to force our way into the thick of things right here?”

  “Might be best to be in the thick of things,” Winter said. “It’s easier to observe us without our seeing.”

  “He’s been walking behind us for the past few minutes,” Poulsen said.

  Winter looked around. A hundred brutal neon signs pummeled his eyes: “L.A. Bar,” “Fyrtøjet,” “Rock Nielsen,” “Down Under Denmark,” “Café Rendezvous,” “Faklen,” “Rock Caféen,” “Duty,” “Jules Verne,” “Sunrise,” “Dirch på Regensen,” “Fru Jensen,” “Gaslight,” “Pusterummet,” “Corner,” “Jomfru Ane’s Dansbar,” “Giraffen,” “Musikhuset,” “Spirit of America.”

  They went into Sidegaden. The slogan for the place was: “The night belongs to us.”

  Poulsen ordered two bottles of Hof, and they squeezed together in front of the bar.

  Winter was about to say something but was cut off by his Danish colleague.

  “He walked past and now he’s walking past again.”

  Winter raised the bottle to his mouth and turned his head slightly. He saw people out on the street and that was it.

  “I don’t recognize him,” Poulsen said. “But that bastard’s certainly keeping an eye on us.”

  “What conclusions should we draw from that?”

  “I suppose you should feel honored. And that this is serious. I think your arrival has stirred up a bit of dust.”

  “We’ve gotten closer to something.”

  “Yes, and it both frightens and pleases me.”

  “Now we’re going to find the last man in the group,” Winter said. “The group that visited the bank.”

  “You think he’s still alive?”

  “Yes. He killed Helene Andersén and he killed her father.”

  Poulsen gripped her half-finished bottle of Hof and looked at him. “After twenty-five years. Why?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to work out.”

  “He could have done it right away.”

  “No. That may have been the intention, but it didn’t work out. Maybe Kim Andersen got in the way.”

  “What happened to the mother, then? Brigitta.”

  “He killed her too,” Winter said. “He killed Kim Andersen and Brigitta Dellmar and the child was taken to Sweden. The idea was to get rid of any connection.”

  “So why kill Helene after all this time?”

  “I don’t know. Something happened. Something has happened. She found out something. She got to know who did it. She confronted him. The man who killed her mother and father. I’ve been looking for a single murderer all along.”

  “And another child,” Poulsen said. “It’s a horrific situation.” She set her bottle down on the bar. “They’re all possible theories. But the question is still whether our bikers are more than just indirectly involved.”

  “Look at the guy following us.”

  “Maybe they know,” Poulsen said. “But the question is whether more than just the original gang of five was involved in this from the beginning.”

  “Six,” Winter said. “You’re forgetting the child, Helene.”

  “Where’s your murderer, then? Did he go along to Sweden or is he still in Denmark? Maybe even here in Ålborg?”

  “He may have just walked by out there on the street,” Winter said. “I don’t know. The murder in August in Gothenburg doesn’t necessarily point to him living permanently in Sweden, but he was certainly there then.”

  “If it is a he,” Poulsen said.

  Winter nodded mutely.

  “Or there’s another possible theory,” she said. “That there’s still just one survivor left from that bank robbery—and I’m counting all six—but that it’s a woman. Brigitta.”

  Winter nodded again.

  “I think your face just went pale,” she said. “I’m probably just as pale as you are. That’s an even more horrific thought.”

  “That would have meant having her own child killed.”

  “Maybe she had no choice. Maybe she didn’t know. You know as well as I do that we’re treading along the very brink of human misery here.”

  “Yes,” Winter said, “that’s part of the job.”

  “But it’s also just a theory,” Poulsen said.

  53

  THE RAIN AGAINST THE WINDOWWOKE HIMBEFORE THE ALARM. There was no sky out there to light the path through the room from the bed to the toilet.

  Winter swung his legs over the side of the bed, and as he walked toward the john he stubbed his toe against the bedside table. It happened once every season.

  He swore and sat down to massage his toe. The pain shrunk to a dull ache, and he stood up in order to take care of his pressing need.

  When he was back in bed, he looked up at the ceiling and thought about Beate Møller, whom he hadn’t seen. Is that what he would end up doing? Would he drive out to her house in the east of the city only to park a ways off and see her walk in and walk out?

  He wouldn’t be alone. There would be another car parked out there or a motorbike that he would be able to see, or not. It would be a provocation. Perhaps from both sides. The woman would end up caught in the middle. What good could come of that?

  Better to let Michaela speak to her, he thought. I’ll probably just screw things up.

  “We have two unsolved murders gnawing at our souls,” Jens Bendrup said, as he sat on the desk in Winter’s office. “That wander like ghosts through the passageways of the soul.”

  “Excuse me?” Winter raised his gaze from the computer screen.

  “Old, unsolved murders,” Bendrup said. “Not to mention a couple of old armed robberies. Are you aware that the statute of limitations has run out on the Danske Bank robbery? It’s twenty years. Anything requiring a minimum sentence of eight years has a twenty-year statute of limitations here in Denmark. The same goes for murder. But stuff like that loses its meaning now that we’re linking the past and the present together, right?”

  “What unsolved murders are these?” Winter asked.

  “One of them, I believe, is a biker killing,” Bendrup said, “but as usual it’s impossible to find the evidence to back up the suspicions.”

  “What happened?”

  “A twenty-four-year-old woman was found with her throat slit in a toilet stall at the railroad station. She had a ticket to Frederikshavn in her purse. The train was scheduled to leave a half hour later, but she wasn’t on it. That was fourteen years ago, in ’84.

  “At some point every year, I take out the case file and go through it. The Jutte case. Her name was Jutte, the girl who had her throat cut at the railway station. It’s my case—I have the whole preliminary investigation and now it’s even being transferred to the computer. Maybe that’ll improve our chances. I never forget. The case is going nowhere, and I can’t forget.”

  “No new leads?”

  “Little things pop up every year, of course, but nothing solid to go on. Then there’s Pedersen from Ringsted who calls every so often to confess. He confesses to everything, but I guess you get that kind of thing too.”

  “Yeah.” Winter switched off his computer. “So you think that this murder of Jutte can be tied to the biker gangs?”

  “To the Bandidos,” Bendrup said. “She was what you might call a passive member. Her boyfriend was a mechanic and a passive member
too. But there’s no such thing when you’re dealing with these people. Maybe that was the message we—she—got in that damn toilet stall. But it wasn’t her boyfriend who did it.”

  “Any other suspects?”

  “Nothing solid or substantial.”

  “You mentioned another murder,” Winter said.

  “What? Yeah. A Mrs. Bertelsen. Four years ago. She was at a restaurant of the cheaper variety, left on her own, and disappeared. Eight months later somebody’s pet grubbed up a skeleton in an empty lot down by the docks. We found no personal belongings. Nothing. She was buried naked, and when we dug her up she was more than that. She’d been reported missing, and we ID’d her by her teeth. But that’s as far as we’ve come.”

  Winter thought about Helene. He saw the lake. The narrow ditch like an open grave. The mossy ground. A seagull that shrieked a warning.

  There was one more thing he wanted to do. First he called the Seacat office in Frederikshavn and changed his ticket, getting one of the last available seats on the 1515 boat home. He’d checked out from the hotel, and his suitcase was in his car parked in the lot opposite the Alcoholics Anonymous. It was just past noon.

  Winter walked down the corridor to Michaela Poulsen’s office. The door was open. He saw her through it, hunched over her desk. Her hair was hanging loose today. He knocked on the door, and she looked up and waved him in.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said.

  “Right. Anything new on the home front?”

  “Maybe. A bus driver claims he saw the girl. Could be. And then I’m dying to read through the preliminary investigation again.”

  “So you said yesterday.”

  “But we’ll be in touch soon again?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I’m trying to arrange to speak to Beate Møller. To start with. Then I’m going to speak to the judge, and the current owner, about the house in Blokhus.” She looked down at the papers in front of her and shook her head. “Once I’ve waded through all this mess.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a mess, literally. A mess of hooch! We found eighty thousand liters of the stuff on a farm halfway to Frederikshavn. Eighty thousand liters! That ain’t hay.”

  Winter sat alone in a room on the ground floor with a sign that read “Newspapers on Microfilm” on the door. He placed the rolls of film in the machine and then stood to open the window of the stuffy room. Outside lay a pedestrian crossing, and the crosswalk man was glowing red. Even after he’d hitched open the window, it was still red. He read the first page of the Aalborgs Stiftstidende. It was dramatically type-set, with the news about the bank robbery plastered across more than half of the front page: “GUNMAN KILLS OFFICER.” The subheadings told of the other deaths.

  Jens Bendrup was interviewed, and Winter couldn’t help but smile at the young Bendrup with long hair and flipped-out sideburns. All the men he saw in the photos had flipped-out sideburns on October 3, 1972.

  Bendrup lied a little and spoke the truth where necessary. Winter sat there knowing some of the answers. Bendrup’s superiors spoke about what little they knew. “You always have to keep one last card up your sleeve,” Bendrup had said to Winter that morning.

  In this case, they had truly done just that. The question was whether there was one, and where.

  Winter continued reading but found nothing of any greater value than what he already knew. He stopped scrolling the film, and the blurred lateral movement halted before his eyes. He felt slightly nauseous. It may have been from the air in there and also the film in the reader, the different speeds that made it feel as though he were sitting in a car and staring out at the passing countryside printed on paper.

  He walked over to the window again. The little crosswalk man was still red and the crossing long abandoned by the city’s pedestrians.

  Winter walked back to the microfilm reader and sat down. He slowly scrolled through the past, the events of the day. What had it been like? How had it been when Helene and Brigitta were here? Had Brigitta read the same thing he was reading now?

  He continued his slow journey through the time machine. Denmark was the world’s largest exporter of beer in 1972. An illustration showed how Ålborg’s infrastructure was likely to look in 1990: subway, a raised monorail around a city that the artist seemed to have modeled on something taken from the Liseberg Amusement Park. Mass transport by helicopter. Winter envied that era’s faith in the future. He had been twelve years old back then, also on his way somewhere, and could always be found in the playhouse at the bottom of the garden in Hagen.

  England’s manager, Alf Ramsey, was sticking with his old stars for the 1974 World Cup qualifier. There was a picture of Bobby Moore, and young Ray Clemence, and a twenty-one-year-old Kevin Keegan with sideburns that were even more flipped out than Jens Bendrup’s had been seven pages earlier.

  Paul and Linda McCartney started writing “The Zoo Gang,” and the students’ abuse of power at the universities was squelched.

  The flickering of the racing screen made Winter’s nausea worse. He looked at his watch. Time to quit and head north. He’d kept scrolling the film forward as he looked down, and when he looked at the screen again, he’d landed on a local page about Pandrup and the surrounding area. The name Blokhus was in the headline of an article that seemed to be covering the building of the big hotel he’d passed on the deserted square the day before.

  There was another article about Blokhus on the same page. If Winter understood the headline correctly, it had something to do with reclaimed land. There was a photo taken from a spot just off the square. The photographer was standing on a street called Sønder i By. Winter studied the car.

  He stiffened. He knew exactly where the photographer was standing when he took the picture, which was supposed to illustrate land-use zoning and partitioning from the street on down to the sea. Winter read the lead-in. He read the caption that explained the partitioning and the piece of land in question. There were seven or eight houses in the photo that showed the full length of Jens Baerentsvej. Winter knew which street it was because he recognized the third house on the right-hand side of the dirt road that led to the sea across the wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was no fence. No sign of life in the windows. The photograph could have been taken anytime within the past twenty-five years, but Winter knew that it had been taken in conjunction with the article, as generic accompanying artwork. He knew that. The pressure mounted in his head and his midriff. A car was parked on the road outside the crooked house. The distance was fifty yards or more. Two figures could be seen in front of the house, on their way in or out. You couldn’t make out their faces, but it was an adult and a child.

  He had deliberated with himself and then driven to Frederikshavn. Before, he’d called straight to Michaela Poulsen and told her about the photo in the Aalborgs Stiftstidende.

  “It must be possible to find out when it was taken,” Winter had said.

  “Of course. I’ll contact the newspaper. And the photographer, if he’s still alive.”

  “Would you please send me a good enlargement of it as quickly as possible? So we can continue working on it.”

  “Of course,” she’d said again.

  The wind grabbed at his hair. He was standing on deck, watching as Denmark grew smaller and disappeared. Dusk fell over the sea. It had stopped raining in international waters. Winter felt as if he had a fever, a heightened heart rate. They were halfway home. He went into the bar, which was full of glazed-eyed people who continued the drinking they’d started hours ago in Frederikshavn. A few of them were sitting in wheelchairs, which was convenient for anyone who really wanted to get tanked, he thought.

  Mountains of bottles and cans took form on the tables. People’s contours seemed to dissolve, he thought, and become part of history in such a way that more and more of them now seemed to resemble some kind of medieval troupe of jesters or lepers.

 
The smoke smudged out the features of the bar guests still further. Winter went out again, to get enough fresh air to feel like smoking a Corps. The catamaran passed Vinga. Wild ducks flew black against the evening sky while the lighthouse swept cones of light across the water. He smoked and felt his pulse drop. They passed Arendal. The big North Sea ferries slammed against the Skandiahamnen docks, reminding Winter of the walls of high-rises around North Biskopsgården—only the satellite dishes were replaced by a thousand eyes peering up toward outer space.

  The drawings glowed on the wall of his office when he switched on the desk lamp and the ceiling light. The Danish flag in the depictions had taken on new meaning.

  The road still ran through forest.

  A windmill moved its vanes.

  The streetcars went somewhere.

  Ringmar knocked on the open door and entered. “Welcome home.”

  Winter turned around. “Thanks. How’s it going?”

  “I should be asking you that.”

  “How’d it go with the bus driver?”

  “It could have been her.”

  “I had an odd experience,” Winter said. “I saw a photograph in a newspaper from back then, in 1972, of someone who could be Helene, and all I could think about was her.” He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “The girl I saw was Jennie.”

  “That’s not so strange,” Ringmar said.

  “Don’t you see? Everything’s getting mixed up. Pretty soon I won’t know who’s who. Or else that’s just how it feels at the moment. Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “You look pale. For Christ’s sake, Erik, go home and get some rest.”

  Halders was drumming his fingers against the desktop. He hadn’t done all the work himself, but he was responsible.

  The material lay neatly organized in translucent-gray plastic folders. He was the first to see it in its entirety: 124 owners of Fort Escorts with license plates that begin with the letter H.