Winter phoned Åke Killdén in Fuengirola. No reply. When he put the receiver down the picture inside his head changed. From small whitewashed houses on a roasting-hot slope to glass and steel monsters shooting up through the clouds from a Manhattan he once had a good view of from a twenty-seater airplane as it circled on hold, waiting to land at La Guardia on the other side of the river.
Perhaps they were on the wrong track altogether. No. It was no coincidence that there had been a shop called Manhattan Livs and that it was still there: 150 yards from the seven-story apartment building where the Martells had lived. Not a skyscraper, but the highest building within a mile or so. Three or four miles from the Gothia skyscraper in the center of Gothenburg. Mölndal’s Manhattan: the apartment buildings with their attractive entrances.
There was a key somewhere. But where?
The phone rang.
“It’s Matilda Josefsson,” Mollerstrom said. “She used to work in the minimarket.”
Winter waited for her to be put through. Here she came.
“Er, hello?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter here.”
“Yes ... I’ve had a message saying that I should get in touch ...”
“Good. Can you come to see me?”
“I’ve just this minute gotten home.... Will tomorrow do?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I can come around to your place if you’d prefer that.”
“I don’t know ...”
“I’ll have my ID on prominent display,” Winter said.
He heard a giggle.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“We’re investigating some very serious crimes, and we’d like to speak to you about when you worked in a minimarket in Mölndal.”
“Krokens Livs? What’s happened to the old shit-heap?”
“Can I come around in about half an hour?”
“Er ... all right. You’ve got my address.”
Winter drove over the bridge. The huge oil tanks glinted, as they always do when the sun is shining. There was a clear view to the west, to far beyond Vinga. The sea was calm, like blue oil.
She lived behind Backaplan. Winter drove past roses growing through the asphalt as he pulled up. He closed his eyes and let his memory of the catastrophe linger there.
Matilda Josefsson was brown-haired and blue-eyed, and about twenty-five. Her apartment was full of heaps of clothes. There was a set of golf clubs in the hall, and a smell of sea and sand in all the rooms. Winter recognized the smell immediately.
“Golf on the Costa del Sol,” she said, without his needing to ask. “I work now and then as a golfing instructor. The high season down there is coming to an end now.”
“Do you know Åke Killdén?” Winter asked, who had sat down on a chair in the kitchen.
“Who?”
“Åke Killdén. He lives down there. Fuengirola. He used to own the shop you worked in. Man—Krokens Livs.”
“I don’t know him. The owner who employed me was called An dersson.”
“Andréasson.”
“If you say so. What did you say your name was? Winter?”
“Yes.”
“There was a Winter who used to play on the golf course I worked for. Las Brisas. That was last season. I remember a Winter. Tall. Elderly gentleman. Bengt Winter. A Swede, of course.”
Winter nodded.
“A relative of yours? Winter isn’t that common a name.”
“He was my father.”
“Really? It’s a small world sometimes.” Then she looked as if she was thinking about what Winter had just said. He was my father.
“When did you finish working at Krokens Livs?”
She was watching him as she replied. She’d noted the rapid change of subject.
“I take any job that’s going when I’m at home,” she said. “As you can tell—I mean, Krokens Livs!”
Winter explained some of the background to why he was there. Asked a few questions.
She’d seen the photograph of Manhattan Livs. But the only thing she could remember clearly as being of any interest at all was when the policeman caught the shoplifter.
“I beg your pardon?”
“There was a police officer in the shop, in uniform, and he caught a shoplifter who was on his way out with a handful of videos. He said he’d forgotten to pay, and, of course, you always believe that!”
“But he was a petty thief?”
“I think he’d stolen a few things before. I recognized him, or at least I think I did.”
“What happened?”
“The police officer asked me if I wanted to make a formal complaint, as he put it. But he looked so wretched ... I said no.”
“So you didn’t report him?”
“The officer said he would see to it. The thief had produced his ID card, I saw that.”
“Then what happened?”
“He just showed his ID, sort of.” She held up her hand as a demonstration. “The officer made some notes and then they left and that’s all I know.”
“So you didn’t make a formal complaint?”
“No, like I said. He was going to see to it.”
“Why was he there? This police officer?”
“I can’t remember. I suppose he was buying something. Or renting a video. He’d done that before.”
“So you recognized the police officer?”
“Yes ... he’d been in a few times. Sometimes in uniform and sometimes in civvies.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I did when that shoplif—”
“Any other time, I mean?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You don’t know his name?”
“No. Is it important?”
I don’t know, Winter thought. It could be extremely important, or just an everyday occurrence.
“Is it so important?” she asked again.
“Would you recognize this police officer if you saw him again?”
“I don’t know. I’m not very good at faces.”
“You recognized the shoplifter.”
“Yes ... because that was different. It was sort of ... a crime. I looked at him more than I did the policeman.”
“Did you see the shoplifter again?”
“Not in the shop.”
“But somewhere else?”
“In the street on one occasion, when I was either coming to work or leaving. I suppose he lived nearby. He looked the other way when he saw me.”
“You don’t remember his name?”
“I never heard what it was. The policeman wrote it down.”
“Was there a squad car outside? Did the police officer have a patrol car outside the shop?”
“Good question. No, I can’t remember. But I didn’t look out of the window just then.” She looked Winter in the eye. “Police officers are all the same anyway. Tall, fair-haired. It’s hard to distinguish between them.”
Morelius was on his way to see his mother. The road was very icy.
The traffic got worse as he came to Söderleden, and came to a standstill at the golf club. Idiots in thick anoraks and woolly hats were waiting to tee off and hit balls into thirty-foot snowdrifts.
“This is a surprise,” his mother said.
“I felt like getting away.”
“You’ve lost weight, Simon.”
“Not a lot.”
He noticed the photograph of his father over the piano in the drawing room. He was looking solemn, as always, an expression made more austere by his clerical collar. White against all the black.
51
He sat in the dark. After last time he thought they might have fitted a new lock, but it was still the same one. Not that it would have mattered.
People passed to and fro. There was a special kind of echo in there. Sounds traveled through the cubbyhole as if along a tunnel, from the noisy stairwell where all hell was let loose when the elevator went up or down and the front door slammed shut. You needed to p
ut your fingers in your ears for that.
Perhaps those were his footsteps out there now. Awkward. Who was in control now, then? Whoever has control now, put your hand up.
He raised his right arm, and as far as he could see, there was nobody else in there holding up their own hand. Control.
It was obvious when he arrived that he was in control. Anybody with eyes to see could see that.
He wept.
He missed her. Her face once when she turned around on her bicycle and laughed.
He repeated the prophet’s name as a mantra. Repeated it over and over again. He kept the other god at bay. He kept the faces away and if he continued doing that they would disappear.
He wept.
Where were they? He was sitting here after all.
Perhaps those were his footsteps again out there. Or hers.
He’d gone past when there was a car parked outside the shop that could have been his. Then he’d run home. His heart in his mouth.
He stood up now, in the dark. He had nothing to drink with him this time.
Outside in the street the sun felt hot on his face.
Somebody looked at him as if he still had ... as if he was in charge. You couldn’t see it from his clothes now, but you could see it about him even so. Now.
He walked uphill all the way, then down the slope to the hospital. He stood outside, waiting. Saw her. He knew exactly.
It had gotten to 5:00 P.M. There were six couples who had just introduced themselves. The man sitting to Winter‘sright felt a great need to describe his work.
The group of parents was mixed, some of them already had children. Winter recognized the midwife. It was the same one he’d met before, with Angela. Elise Bergdorff. She gave them ten minutes to write down what they wanted to know, what they hoped to get out of the meetings. There would be five meetings. By the end of March. Just before the event.
“Ask about reducing the pain,” Winter said.
“Ask yourself,” said Angela, giggling.
“Clothes,” Winter said. “What we should buy. How much you have to plan beforehand.” ,
“But we’ve said we’re not going to plan anything.”
“No harm in asking.” He continued writing.
“What are you writing?” asked Angela, looking happy. Everybody looked happy, except for the man who wanted to go on about his work as if he couldn’t wait to get back to it.
I’ve never longed to get back to work, Winter thought. Not like that. This is more important.
“How do we know when the baby is hungry and when it’s full?”
“Good, Erik.”
“How much sleep?”
“For whom?”
“For me, of course,” he said. He started writing again after a short pause.
“What are you writing now?”
He looked up with a different expression on his face.
“Let me look,” Angela said, grabbing his notepad and reading it. She looked at him: “Are my eyes deceiving me? ‘Check police force addresses against the pornography replies.’ Is that one of the questions you want to ask the midwife?”
“I thought of something.”
“Erik ...”
“Maternity care,” he said quickly. “You’ve talked about maternity care after the reorganization.”
“Write it down,” she said. He didn’t. “I mean it literally,” she said.
The midwife offered them coffee, as this was the first time. In future perhaps they might like to take turns in bringing something nice with them, if they felt like it.
I can bake some brownies, he thought.
The midwife talked about relationships, how things change during pregnancy and after the birth. The men and women looked at one another.
“The woman is more busy with the baby,” the man said on his right, who had a job to get back to. “The man feels that she’s devoting a lot of time to the baby.”
“Surely the man is busy with the baby as well?” Winter said. Was that really me speaking? he wondered.
It’s a matter of keeping your love alive after the baby’s come, Angela thought. What this is all about is meeting others who are in the same boat. It could be of benefit to us.
There was a brief discussion. Perhaps the idea was that they would get help in improving their roles, Winter thought. As parents. Being mothers and fathers. Roles. Could you call it that? Some people never played a role, ever.
They walked home. The smell of winter had started to fade away, together with the smell of the New Year rockets and Bengal lights. The name kept coming back to him: Bengal lights. Pretty.
“What did you think of the group?”
“Hmm ...”
“We’ll meet again when we’ve all had our babies.”
“Do you think the advertising chap will be there then?”
“Will you be there then?”
“You shouldn’t answer a question with another question.”
They waited for a green light before crossing over the Allé.
“He’ll be there,” she said. “I’ve heard it’s quite usual for the groups to carry on meeting afterward. Celebrate a one-year anniversary, a two-year anniversary, and suddenly we’re all great friends.”
We must first get through what lies ahead unscathed, he thought.
“Sounds nice,” he said.
“Do you really think so?”
“I think I do.”
They had reached the entrance. It was a clear evening, like so many others that winter. The Pressbyrå newsstand near the old university building created the atmosphere of a small-town square, Winter had sometimes thought. He didn’t know much about small-town squares, but he could recognize the feeling. He’d sometimes felt that when he’d come home alone late in the evening. Perhaps it was a vague yearning deep down.
Angela took a deep breath.
“What terrific air,” she said. “For a big town.”
“This is a little town,” Winter said. People were shopping at Pressbyrå. He could hear music coming from the restaurant on the corner. The buildings on the other side of the park loomed skyward. Trams looked like jerky sparklers shooting off in all directions. A few youngsters walked past and their voices reached them as fragments of words borne along by the breeze. They vanished into the Java café at the crossroads. “So, let’s go in and have a café con leche,” he said.
They couldn’t find any report about a shoplifter in Manhattan Livs, also known as Krokens Livs.
“There are circumstances when it’s better to give a caution rather than to report somebody,” Ringmar said.
“There’s something that doesn’t add up,” Winter said.
“Calm down now, Erik.”
“I could have used that report.”
“You have other stuff to read.”
He had the text of the advertisements in front of him. It wasn’t the best piece of writing he’d ever come across:
We are an average couple coming up to middle age in the Gothenburg area who still have a healthy curiosity and appetite for sex. We are looking for a man as she is going to be the main attraction. 100% discretion. We are lovers of soap and water. Completely healthy of course. If the personal chemistry is right we can have a really juicy time together.
“A really juicy time together,” Ringmar said, who could see that Winter had read the whole text.
“Lovers of soap and water!”
“Fucking perverse, that’s what it is. Sex with a bar of soap.”
Winter smiled, then turned serious.
“I’m beginning to wonder about this line of investigation,” he said. “There’s nothing to indicate that the man we’re after replied to this.”
“No.”
“The Valkers must have destroyed the replies,” Winter said. “Why?”
“Perhaps it was the murderer.”
“Yes.”
“He—assuming it’s the same guy—was looking for something in the Martells’ flat.”
&n
bsp; “Yes.”
“What do you think about the replies?”
The pile of responses to the Martells’ ad was next to the two ads themselves. The one submitted by the Martells was worded roughly the same as that from the Valkers, possibly a bit more cautiously. A quick read-through might suggest that they were looking for somebody to have coffee with.
“That there are lots of them.”
“I was afraid we might find somebody we knew among them,” Ringmar said.
“Our chief of police?”
“Or the mayor of Gothenburg.”
“The editor in chief of GP.”
“I don’t recognize any of them.”
“Me neither.”
“We’d better get started on them.”
“Yes.”
“But we haven’t finished with the film extras yet.”
“Well, nearly.” Winter looked at the files with transcripts of all the interviews. Nearly forty of them.
“It will be ... delicate.”
“What we’re faced with here is delicate.”
Halders was worried.
“Have you talked to Molina?”
“We can’t arrest them, Fredrik.”
“I appreciate that. But what does he want? Something concrete?”
“Something clear-cut,” Winter said. “We’ve got to pry out something more.”
Concrete rhymes with secrete, thought Halders. Cut is very nearly cu—.
“We’ll bring them in again,” Winter said.
“Good.”
Åke Killdén answered after the third ring. It sounded as if he were on the beach, with a wind blowing.
“Hang on a minute while I close the veranda door,” he said. “Someone’s cutting my hedge,” he said when he came back.
Winter explained what the call was about.
“That’s awful.” Killdén was breathing fast, as if he’d been the one doing the gardening. “It’s the deadest spot in the northern hemisphere usually.” He coughed. “I mean ... the quietest spot. The most boring spot.”
Unlike Fuengirola, Winter thought, and asked Killdén about his employees.
“I only had three. All of them part-time.”
“Can I have their names?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have their addresses?”
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