“I think it’s going to be a lovely year,” his mother said. She looked at them. Winter hadn’t noticed any difference in her voice or movements. She had drunk two glasses of champagne earlier and said no to a Tanqueray and tonic, which was a good thing, good for the taste buds apart from anything else. Anybody who drinks liquor before a gourmet meal should have it injected intravenously. “Is it awful of me to say that? After what’s happened ... your father and the ...”
“It’s good that you can say that, Mom.” He could still taste the trace of dry earthiness after the wine. “It is going to be a lovely year.”
“It hasn’t even started yet,” Angela said, looking at the clock and thinking about fate again. She took a sip of bottled water. The baby was calm just at the moment. She ate a little more and thought about all the things that were going to happen in the next few months. Nothing would be the same as before. It’s going to be a new life. I’m not sentimental, but there’s something special about New Year this year. The millennium coincides with us.
The new millennium boomed its way over Gothenburg, the churches sang. Two thousand people stood arm in arm in Skanstorget and sang “Auld Lang Syne” in exactly the same way as they were doing in Ab erdeen, in a straight line westward over the North Sea.
Twenty jet planes appeared as the clocks struck. One for every century after Christ. Two thousand people held their hands over their ears and screamed in delight. The jets crisscrossed the sky in a series of highly dangerous maneuvers, then headed off back to the south.
Patrik and Maria were holding hands, and some of the people around them burst into tears. One girl threw up into a snowdrift. Two men fell backward into the snow and made snow angels. That tempted several more to start a sort of wave of snow angels. After three minutes there was a long line of people making angels in the snow. The fireworks display seemed never-ending. The angels shone red and gold.
“Do you feel anything special?” Patrik yelled.
“I feel a bit older,” Maria yelled back.
“We’re a thousand years older,” Patrik yelled, and a gang of revelers who had set up a meal on some stones started cheering.
“A happy New Year, Angela,” he said, kissing her. She tasted of the four drops of Lanson champagne she’d allowed to moisten her tongue. “A happy New Year, Mother,” he said and bent down over his mother, who had lain down and was crying.
The twelfth chime from the radio died away. The apartment seemed to change its proportions as the red sky was shattered by all the shooting stars from the fireworks display. They heard the jet planes.
Then they heard an ambulance in the street below, the first of the night.
Angela kissed him.
“A happy New Year, Erik.”
“It will be the best yet, I can promise you that.”
When the door opened he said what he’d intended to say and the man smiled, or gave a laugh. Then he kicked the door in and hit the man twice in the stomach and the chest with his baton. He put on the mask.
She shouted something from inside and he walked through the hall that was striped from the explosions outside, the wall was changing all the time, new patterns were appearing. He heard the man groaning on the floor behind him. Hard to breathe.
She was getting up from the sofa but he was there before she could stand up and he did the same to her. She made the same kinds of noise after half a minute, groaning, gasping for breath. A wheezing sound from somewhere farther down.
He was panting so much himself that he thought he’d be forced to take the mask off in order to get some oxygen to his brain. He turned to the window, pulled his mask halfway up, and gulped in air. The world out there was a glittering slit through his almost-closed eyes. His headache was getting worse.
JANUARY
42
He was driving southward. There were thousands of people in the streets, staggering from pub to pub. Singing to one another. Last night I dreamed something I’ve never dreamed before. He braked suddenly when a group of revelers ignored a red light and reeled across the road ahead. Waved two fingers at him. They had become immortal.
The dashboard clock said four-thirty as he navigated the roundabout at Korsvägen. Liseberg amusement park was ablaze with light, as if it were another time of year. The first buses were stopping for people who had decided to go home.
As he turned off Bifrostgatan it looked as if thousands of people were standing outside the apartment building. The flashing lights of the police cars had taken over from the fireworks. Reality had returned. Police officers were dealing with the crowds, sealing off the road. An ambulance drove off with a roar, hurtling out of the side street into the main road.
He parked carelessly in Häradsgatan and walked over the patio again, in through the front door. He’d been here recently. It seemed like only yesterday, but it was in another millennium.
The newspaper boy was outside the door with one of the public order officers from Mölndal.
“How many are there inside?” Winter asked.
“Only the pathologist.”
“Don’t let anybody else in. When the other crime unit officers arrive, ask them to wait here.”
“Okay.”
“Keep the boy here as well,” Winter said, nodding at the boy who was cowering against a wall, shaking. Pale face, seventeen, maybe sixteen. He could be Patrik’s cousin. Same thin body, same staring eyes.
It was quiet inside the apartment. No metal music, and Winter wasn’t sure whether he’d expected any. Perhaps the silence was worse.
A ceiling light was on. There were streaks on the walls in the hall, lines, patches, specks; a pattern that reminded him of the sky that night, as if somebody had tried to re-create the last big sky before the world renewed itself.
“It’s blood,” said Pia Fröberg, who was standing in a doorway at the other end of the hall. She was an outline in the same way that the police officer had been in the apartment in Aschebergsgatan.
“I saw an ambulance.”
“She was still alive when they left here.”
“Good God!”
“I give her little hope,” Fröberg said. “Very little.” Winter had moved closer. The experienced pathologist looked scared, her face was as if sculpted in marble. Not scared. Tense, on guard.
She backed up a couple of paces and Winter went into the room and looked around. “It’s the same,” she said. “It must be the same murderer.”
Bengt Martell was sitting on the sofa. His clothes were in a heap on the floor in front of him.
“He was holding her hand,” the doctor said.
“Yes.”
“The paper boy had a mobile phone. I don’t understand how he could have acted so quickly. That he had the presence of mind.” She gestured toward the hall. “The door was standing open when he arrived.”
“Did she say anything?” Winter asked, turning to Fröberg. “Was she able to say anything?”
She looked at him as if she didn’t know how to formulate her reply. She looked again at the sofa. Winter had sat there. Bengt Martell had sat there and Siv Martell had sat in the armchair, which was still where it had been the last time.
“She’ll have difficulty ever speaking again,” Fröberg said. “Irrespective of how it goes.”
He looked at the body on the sofa. The same position as Christian Valker had been in.
“Where is his ... where is his ....” asked Winter, but couldn’t bring himself to say the word. “Maybe it isn’t ... him sitting there. Martell. Is it him sitting there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But where the hell is it then?” Winter said, his voice getting louder and louder.
“With ... her,” said the doctor. Winter watched her face changing, growing whiter.
“What? What the hell ... what do you mean?”
“It was with her. When we took her to hospital. We weren’t ...”
“Holy Moses,” Winter said.
He paused in front of the sofa. Perhaps it was his
imagination, but he thought he could see the exact outline of the woman’s body. It wasn’t only the blood.
Every second was like a millennium. Fröberg had left him now and he refused entry to everyone else.
There was no cassette player there. There hadn’t been one there then, and nobody had brought a stereo system since he, Winter, had been there.
There’s always a first time for everything, he thought. I’ve never been to visit people in their home and then returned later to find ... this. To find them in this state.
The writing on the wall was clear in the light from the streetlamps outside.
Capital letters. Six of them.
STREET
Nothing else. STREET. The letters seemed to be pressed into the wall, but even so had started to trickle down from the bottom, to dissolve away. STREET. As in WALL STREET.
Winter could feel a shudder coming, but fended it off. “Street” was the English for the Swedish “gatan,” and since V and W are the same letter in Swedish, did it mean Vallgatan? Was Wall Street Vallgatan? Were you leading my thoughts in the right direction, God, yesterday or the day before or whenever it was? Is it Vallgatan we’re looking for? Is that where the answer is? Don’t lead me astray here.
Fröberg had come back. He could hear her behind him, but he didn’t turn around.
“She’s still alive,” she said. “They just phoned.”
Winter nodded.
“But she’s not awake, if you were thinking of that.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that.”
43
“Go through the place with a fine-tooth comb three times over,” Winter said to Beier when the forensic officers had begun their work.
“Don’t insult me, Erik.”
The deputy head of the technical squad looked focused, sober. Beier had celebrated the New Year in moderation.
“I suppose the new millennium has to begin somehow or other,” he’d said when they first arrived, and it was not meant as a joke. There was nothing to joke about here.
The forensic officers were moving carefully around the man on the sofa with his right hand extended, as if in greeting.
Beier came back from the kitchen.
“There seems to have been three of them around the table.”
“The same as at the Valkers‘,” Winter said.
Beier nodded, then nodded again at Ringmar, who came in from the hall with snow in his hair. Winter could see that there was a heavy snowfall outside in the dawn.
“She’s still alive,” Ringmar said, “but not exactly thanks to her own efforts.”
“No more detailed prognosis?” Winter asked.
Ringmar shook his head.
“I saw him there,” Ringmar said, looking at the man on the sofa. ‘At the hospital.“
Nobody wanted to comment on that.
“I’d like to have him now if I may,” said Fröberg, who had been waiting patiently to take the body away for the postmortem.
“Okay,” Winter said.
“If she survives, we’ve got the bastard,” Ringmar said.
They assembled at eight-thirty. The room smelled of damp and perhaps also day-after breath. The whole of Gothenburg had a hangover, but in that conference room they all needed to be alert.
“Is Bergenhem ill again?” Halders asked as he came into the room.
Winter nodded.
“That’s some goddam headache he’s got.”
Everybody sat down apart from Winter.
“I don’t need to remind you how important the next few hours are,” he said.
The photographs were passed round. Here we are again, Djanali thought, sitting here like Peeping Toms.
“It’s the same bastard,” Halders said. He was red in the face and smelled of spirits when he leaned over Djanali, and took one of the pictures with his right hand. He had phoned her at about one-thirty, but didn’t seem to remember. Or maybe he’s just pretending, she thought. “Of course it’s the same bastard, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know yet,” Winter said.
“Oh, come off it.” Halders looked at Winter. Halders’s eyes were clear from a distance, as wide open as they’d go. A sure sign of a man trying hard to be sober. “You surely don’t think it’s a copycat?” Halders said.
“This isn’t an exact copy, is it?” Sara Helander said.
“No,” Winter said. “Beier’s looking more closely at the writing as we speak, but obviously it’s very reminiscent of the previous murders.”
“How much detail has there been in the press, in fact?” Djanali asked.
“We’ve managed to keep the writing quiet,” said Möllerström, the registrar, rising to his feet. ‘And the music, too. I haven’t seen that mentioned anywhere in the newspapers. Nor on the radio or television.“ He wasn’t looking at anybody in particular. ”It’s actually a bit odd.“
Winter thought about the men in black at Desdemona. They didn’t appear to be chatterboxes. On the other hand, it might not have been flattering for the genre if the murderer’s choice of music had become public knowledge.
“No music this time, then,” Halders said. “If we can call it that.”
“No.”
“No music while you work.”
Djanali groaned.
“One thing I do know,” Halders said, waving the photograph in his hand. “About reactions to this.” He looked around the room. “When it becomes known that another couple has been in the wars, if you can put it like that.”
“What do you know?” Ringmar asked.
“When this comes out there’ll be a mad dash for the divorce courts,” Halders said, looking around the room again. It sounded as though somebody sniggered, but Djanali saw Winter stiffen. “Who wants to be married or living with some ...”
“That’s enough, Fredrik,” Winter said.
Djanli thought about Winter. He used to live alone but now he had a partner and would soon be a father. On the other hand, Fredrik was already a parent, but lived alone. When had he last seen his son? He’d tried to talk about that last night, but had had trouble finding the words.
“So they didn’t have a very big party,” Helander said.
“Three people, it seems.”
“The same as last time.”
“Yes.”
“So we’re waiting for Siv Martell to tell us. They must have been planning to dine with the murderer.”
Winter said nothing.
“How is she?” Djanali asked.
“Still unconscious,” Ringmar said. “Or perhaps they’re keeping her anesthetized.”
“Exactly what happened to her?” Halders asked.
Winter told him. Several of those present breathed in sharply, there was a sort of whisper all around the room.
“Oh, hell,” Halders said. “And they think she’s going to be able to give evidence?”
“Meanwhile, we have a job to do,” Winter said.
“Wall Street,” Halders said.
“Yes?”
“Vallgatan. That’s where the record shop is. It’s still there, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t that kid buy the CD there?”
“That’s right,” Winter said. “He was there. We’ve checked.”
“Did they have several copies?”
“We’re checking that now,” Ringmar said. ‘Again, I should add. The question’s been asked before.“
“He must have bought the crap somewhere,” Halders said. He turned to Ringmar. “But it doesn’t have to have been there.”
“No. But what are you getting at exactly?”
“It could have been bought in the USA. That’s where the CD comes from, isn’t it?”
“Canada.”
“Canada. All right. That’s not far from the USA. What’s in the USA? Wall Street’s in the USA. New York, to be exact. Manhattan, to be even more exact.”
“Are you saying we should start looking in Manhattan?” asked Börjesson, one of the younger d
etectives.
“Manhattan,” Winter said.
“Yes ...” said Halders.
“Manhattan ...” Winter said again. “Janne, could you get a copy of the words for the Sacrament CD, please?”
Möllerström hurried off to his office, but was soon back. Winter took the paper and started reading.
It had been somewhere toward the end—there. He looked up, then down again. There it was. In two places.
He read the lines out loud, two lines from each location in order to make the connection clear. They were about Manhattan. Short visits to the earth.
“Sonofabitch,” Halders said. “I was right.”
“But it could be a coincidence,” Winter said. “We must keep reminding ourselves that all these clues, or whatever they are, might be pure misinformation.”
“But we shouldn’t take any risks,” Halders said. “I hereby volunteer to go and check on the spot.”
You’re already on your way to the seventh century B.C., Winter thought, and read the lines again. Manhattan was there, albeit as a place deep down in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
“This only makes matters worse,” Djanali said. She looked at Winter. “How could we check if it’s relevant? Are you really going to send Fredrik to Manhattan?”
Everybody burst out laughing. Winter cleared his throat.
“This is only one part of a bigger picture,” he said. “Manhattan or not.”
“There are Manhattans all over the world,” Djanali said. “A newsstand could call itself Manhattan. Or a pizzeria.”
“What does it mean?” Möllerström said. “The word must mean something.”
“It’s Indian,” Ringmar said. “We’ll check up on that.”
“Why did he let her live?” Djanali asked out of the blue.
“A good question,” Halders said.
“What does it mean? The fact that she’s still alive?” Djanali looked at Winter. “Have you spoken to Lareda about that?”
“Not yet.”
“Something disturbed him,” Halders said.
“Any ideas?” asked Winter.
“The newspaper boy.”
Sun and Shadow Page 29