Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson

  “I have a card of those photo-booth pictures I have to show you later,” Winter said as they walked down the stairs.

  “Why?”

  “Is it possible to tell when someone took their picture in a booth? What time the pictures were taken?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, but can you determine which booth the pictures were taken in?”

  “Yes. We can do that; we know our machines’ idiosyncrasies.”

  “Good,” Winter said.

  The area down there was bathed in a green color that the contractor had perhaps thought restful. Maybe calming, therapeutic. It was green everywhere, like in a tropical forest. People came and went in the restful light. Maybe it was too restful, too sloping for them to be able to see anything useful in the pictures. If there was anything to see that they wanted to see.

  “But the time depends on the level of activity in here,” Bengtsson continued. “The camera doesn’t start until someone moves.”

  Seventy-two hours, Winter thought. They might get lucky, or have made a big mistake. Or else it didn’t mean anything.

  “Every corner in here is caught by the camera,” Bengtsson said. “No one gets away.”

  “If there’s any image left,” said Winter.

  “Sometimes there can be film left from five days back. Like I said, it depends on the level of activity in here.”

  “Isn’t it still possible to get it back anyway?” said Winter. “Even if the disk has been erased?”

  “I’m an expert in photo booths and storage lockers,” Bengtsson said, “not in computers. But I know that your computer experts at the police station have tried and failed.” He smiled. “Call me Roffe, by the way.”

  • • •

  The level of activity by the lockers had been so low that there were still images from four and a half days back. Winter felt a rush of warmth for the counter mechanism. It made certain that they would likely be able to see whether Paula Ney had put a suitcase into a locker. And if she, or someone else, had taken it out during the last few days. The victim. The murderer.

  Roffe Bengtsson showed Winter into the control and storage room inside the small office to the left of the stairs. Two people were working there, on cleaning, storage, reception, monitoring. They were a younger man and a younger woman. They had a lot to do. People were coming and going out there. There were lots of people upstairs; it was the day’s peak time.

  The woman introduced herself as Helén and shook his hand. She nodded toward the display to the right, on the wall.

  “Have you been here before?” she asked.

  “No, not since it was redone,” Winter said, and he walked over to the flat display. It looked like a board, divided into six squares. An installation. In the squares, people moved with strangely jerky motions, and not only because they were heaving suitcases up and down out there. Everyone in the images looked like cases for an orthopedist. Winter knew that was the price the viewer paid for digitization.

  “How many cameras do you have?” he asked.

  “Eight.” She nodded toward the display. “The other two are running, too, of course. One of them is filming people on their way up the stairs. That one’s what we call our secret camera.”

  “Good,” Winter said, studying the pictures in real time. “The decoys look good, by the way.”

  “One of them was stolen last week,” she said, smiling.

  “Where are the cameras?”

  “In the sprinklers and the fire alarms.”

  “I did think there were a lot of those.”

  “You can never be too careful,” she said, smiling again.

  • • •

  Winter sat in front of the display and studied the films from the evening of Paula’s disappearance. Just for a first look. They would get copies from the hard drive down here and run everything in magnification on their own monitors up at the police station. Or take the whole computer from here. It had happened before.

  He concentrated on women at first. He saw women in summer clothes opening lockers, closing lockers, locking them, unlocking them, walking back and forth in the strangely jerky resolution on the display. It was like a silent film, but these pictures were in color, surprisingly sharp, but at the same time it was as though they were coated by the green tint that overshadowed everything down there. Shadows fell over the far corners of a few of the aisles; it wasn’t as easy to see what was happening over there, who was doing what.

  But Winter saw a man starting to undress in one of the corners, which seemed to be a dead end.

  “There’s no decoy over there,” Helén said, nodding toward the display. “People think they can do whatever they want over there.”

  Winter looked at the man. He was completely naked now, and he looked around, as though to find more clothes to take off. His face was partly in shadow. His dick swung in time as he moved back and forth.

  “What happened with that guy?” Winter asked.

  “Your colleagues came and got him.”

  Winter read the display. Mr. Naked had stripped at twenty-eight minutes past eight the evening before Paula disappeared. But at that time she had been at the movie.

  “When they took him away he shouted something about how it was unseasonably warm.”

  “He was right about that,” Winter said, studying the squares again. He would need compound eyes for this. He concentrated on the women again. There weren’t many of them. And somehow, oddly, the cameras didn’t show faces straight on. Maybe this was out of respect for people’s integrity. An absurd adjustment that could only happen in this country, he thought: monitor but don’t reveal anything; ascertain whether someone was in a particular place but protect personal integrity. Criminal integrity.

  “It’s hard to see any faces,” he said.

  “The secret camera above the stairs is best for that,” Helén answered. “That’s where we get all the faces.” She pointed toward the green room. Winter could see the stair railings. “They pull off their masks halfway up the stairs.”

  4

  They took the computer to the police station. Ringmar and Djanali were waiting in a larger conference room, with a larger monitor. Other colleagues were waiting in other rooms.

  “Does everyone have a clear idea of what she looks like?” Winter had said.

  “What she looks like in the pictures they got, at least,” Ringmar had said. He had held up a few photos of Paula. “But it’s a different matter on worthless videotape.”

  “Should we try to be a little bit positive?” Djanali had said.

  “It’s not worthless,” Winter had said.

  • • •

  They had been positive, all the police in the room. There were a few guesses, but nothing definite.

  Winter was sitting in his room and looking at the guesses now. The women in late-summer clothes. He knew how Paula had been dressed that last night, but it didn’t have to mean anything.

  First they would try to find Paula in the shimmery green images.

  Then they would look for someone who might be retrieving a suitcase from the same locker it had been put in.

  Winter had six possibilities in front of him, six possible Paulas. He looked at the images over and over again, six-seven-eight-nine-ten times. All of these women were lifting a suitcase that looked like Paula’s, a black Samsonite. Some had trouble lifting them. Others just heaved the suitcase in, no matter the height.

  He compared them with the photographs they had of the twenty-nine-year-old woman. Almost thirty-year-old. She hadn’t really reached that age when some people suddenly feel old.

  They had a span of a few hours when she could have left the suitcase, as long as she hadn’t done it days earlier. But if it had happened the evening she disappeared, earlier that evening, or rather during the afternoon, then any of the six anonymous profiles in the images could have been Paula’s. The magnification hadn’t given him the guidance he’d hoped for. There was something about the light, and the colors
underground. The way in which people held their heads.

  • • •

  Winter called the prosecutor for a decision on a search warrant.

  They identified the numbers of the six lockers with Roffe Bengtsson’s help.

  They opened the lockers right on the spot.

  There were orderly luggage tags on the outside; in some cases on the inside.

  They could quickly identify all the owners.

  None of them was Paula Ney.

  • • •

  Once again Winter left Bengtsson’s office, which was hidden behind rows upon rows of lockers. It looked as though the whole world had something to store. As though the whole city were on a journey. There’s no place like elsewhere. Or maybe they hadn’t had any choice in the matter. Winter knew that more people than anyone would guess were evicted from their homes and moved their belongings to Central Station. They had to get everything into a few plastic bags, maybe a suitcase.

  He heard Bengtsson behind him.

  “How many lockers do you have?”

  “Three hundred and ninety-four,” Bengtsson said, and looked around, as though to count through them again.

  “And how many of them would fit a suitcase of the size we’re looking for?”

  Bengtsson laughed. It echoed through the room. A woman ten meters away turned around and gave them a sharp look.

  “You know how there are world records for how many people would fit in a Volkswagen bug?” Bengtsson said, following the woman with his eyes as she left the room. She walked quickly, as though she had just been subjected to an insult. “Back when they existed, I mean. The old kind.” Bengtsson gestured with his hand. “That’s what it’s like here. It’s crazy how much crap people can cram into a storage locker. They try to break records every day.”

  Winter nodded. As though to confirm what Bengtsson had said, a family came into the room dragging trunks that would each require its own truck, if not a cargo plane. The group came to a halt in the middle of the shining floor and the man began to look for open lockers.

  Bengtsson laughed again. The man looked up and smiled. He was of Indian origin. He turned back to the lockers again.

  “That one will have to rent thirty lockers and also cut the suitcases into five parts,” Bengtsson said. “Maybe there are engine blocks in them. Some foreigners try to carry home cars in construction kits.”

  “I want you to open all the lockers down here,” Winter said as he watched the man out there return to his family and fling out his arms.

  • • •

  Ringmar had bought a shrimp sandwich that looked like it had been lying in a locker for seven days. Winter told him this before he had time to stop himself.

  “Why seven?” Ringmar asked, wiping mayonnaise from his upper lip.

  “That’s when the time runs out,” Winter said. “There’s a counter mechanism for up to seven days, and when it’s counted down and no one has collected his things from the locker, Bengtsson opens it and checks it out.”

  Ringmar looked at his shrimp sandwich.

  “So he found this?”

  They were sitting at one of the new cafés in Central Station. Bengtsson had called for help, locker-opening help. The search warrant was still in effect.

  “Where is he?” Ringmar asked, setting down the sandwich on the plate, placing his napkin over it, and looking around.

  “I was just kidding, Bertil,” Winter said, looking at the plate. “I’m sorry. The sandwich looks wonderful. So fresh. You don’t need to hide it.”

  “Then you can eat the rest,” Ringmar said, pushing the plate over.

  “I don’t have much of an appetite right now.”

  “I did have one,” Ringmar said. “You pulled me away from my lunch on the town.”

  “I’m sorry, Bertil, it was just something Bengtsson said.”

  “Are you blaming him now? He’s not even here.” Ringmar looked around again. “Where is he?”

  “Coming soon. But what he said was that pretty often they have to open lockers because of food smells. Or whatever they call it.”

  Ringmar got up and grabbed the plate with his half a shrimp sandwich and carried it over to the cart of dishes.

  “I’ll buy you a new one,” Winter said when Ringmar had returned.

  “Not here.”

  “It’s even worse than it sounds,” Winter said. “The food comes from someone’s pantry. When people are evicted they take what they can with them and lock it in here. Some photographs. Some knickknacks. Some clothes. Food from the fridge.” He flung one hand out. “It’s their living room and kitchen all in one.”

  “Room number three hundred,” said Ringmar. “Or number ten.”

  “Soon we’ll get to see what it looks like for ourselves.”

  Winter had asked Bengtsson whether he had ever checked all the boxes at the same time before. Almost, Bengtsson had answered; one time when a horrible smell was driving all living things out of Central Station. They finally found food that some poor evicted bastard had brought from his fridge. The owner never came back. Maybe he, or she, had jumped in front of a train. That was common. The tracks were nearby, after all.

  “What does he do with all the things that people never retrieve?” Ringmar asked, drinking the last of his café latte. There was no regular coffee here. “And I’m not talking about rotten cheese.”

  “Keeps most of it for a few months,” Winter answered. “If there’s space. If no one calls, he gives the things to the Salvation Army. Which then gives some of it away to the homeless.”

  “So you could say that it’s a cycle,” Ringmar said.

  He knew that many of Bengtsson’s customers were vagrants. Many died with the key in their pocket, or disappeared in other ways. Some actually left on a train.

  “He empties ten or fifteen deserted lockers every day,” Winter said. “Here he comes, by the way.”

  • • •

  Halders couldn’t find any postcards in Paula Ney’s apartment. Not from ten years ago. Not from any year at all. Apparently no one thought about her, not even with the hasty thoughts that fit on a postcard, or else they had also been removed from the apartment, along with the photographs.

  The bag, he thought, the suitcase. She never traveled away, but the suitcase has to be somewhere. I don’t think it’s been emptied. Someone has saved it for some special reason.

  A painted right hand. What the hell kind of sick shit was that? Never seen such a thing. Can’t have to do with identification. Birthmarks. We don’t need that. Is there a photo of the hand in the suitcase now? Why am I thinking like this? Is the white hand on its way somewhere? Why did that bastard need her hand? A hand collector? Good God. Halders walked over to the window and looked out. These thoughts. What a job. Occupying your intellect with thoughts about painted dead hands. Dead people. He could have been a nuclear physicist, a disc jockey, a hockey coach. Could have watched the sun go down over the city without wondering what kind of shit it would bring up the next morning.

  Now it was on its way down again, farther and farther down, and gone. At the end of October next year he would take Aneta and the kids to Cyprus; they had already planned on it. It was still warm there in October, and a bit into November, too; he knew this because he had done winter battalion exercises down there in the eighties. An MP with a severe crew cut who still had his hair. Now he had a severely bald head. That was better; he wouldn’t scratch someone if he head-butted him. But he didn’t head-butt anyone, not even the car-borne drunk murderer. Cyprus. He would show them Cyprus for the first time. He hadn’t been back, himself. But it was still there. He didn’t think Larnaca had changed too damn much. He knew that Fig Tree Bay had. There had been nothing there then, only a bay they went to in an old piece-of-shit bus, a shed that sold drinks. Aiya Napa, not much then. A tired fishing village, hungover UN soldiers, Nissi Beach. A few dips in the salt water, a siesta in the shade of the palm grove near the entrance, two beers at the Pelican Bar and you were
ready for everything again.

  October. This one, or the next. Would they have caught Paula Ney’s murderer by then? He looked out through the window; it was the same view that Paula had seen for the past few years. In October, the trees on that hill would be as good as bare. There wouldn’t be much color left in this city. And that would just be the beginning of winter hell. It would be time to leave it. To travel. Traveling. This case was about traveling, in a way they didn’t yet understand. He turned around. It wasn’t just the suitcase.

  Halders’s cell phone rang. The sound was muffled in the half-finished apartment. He thought of it as half.

  “What are you doing?” said Djanali.

  “Thinking about Cyprus, actually.”

  “During working hours?”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Maybe she was on her way to the sunshine,” said Djanali.

  “Or anywhere.”

  “Are you still in the apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Found anything?”

  “No. Nothing personal.”

  “We don’t know much about Paula Ney’s personal life,” said Djanali.

  “Surprisingly little.”

  “She doesn’t seem to have had any friends at work. Not that I met, anyway.”

  “Not so easy with headphones over your ears day after day,” said Halders.

  “She was working on other things, at least just now.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Thanks. Can’t be more precise than that.”

  “It was services. Upgrading services for the customers.”

  “Oh, shit. I thought it was all about degrading customers,” Halders said, turning in toward the room, the living room. The parlor. “Ex-customers.”

  “That’s a bit retrograde of you,” said Djanali.

  “Yes, I can understand that.”

  “But anyway, she didn’t have headphones over her ears.”

  “We’ll have to have a good talk with her service-upgrading friends,” said Halders. “Anything else new?”