Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson

  “When was the last time Paula had a boyfriend?” Winter asked.

  Mario didn’t answer. His wife didn’t hear. Winter heard sirens outside, an ambulance on its way here or there. A little while ago, he had considered calling one himself, when Elisabeth seemed to disappear far into herself, away from herself. He looked at her. She looked like she was on her way off again. Her husband looked at her. He didn’t answer Winter’s question.

  Winter repeated it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Try to think.”

  “There’s no point.”

  “Why not?”

  “She didn’t date anyone.”

  “Sorry?”

  Mario looked at his wife. She didn’t hear, didn’t see.

  “I never met any boyfriend,” Mario said. He seemed to have trouble pronouncing the word. “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “Aren’t you listening to me?” He looked straight at Winter. “Do I have to repeat it a thousand times?”

  “Paula hasn’t ever introduced a boyfriend to you?” Winter asked.

  Mario shook his head.

  “Mario?”

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  Winter looked at Ringmar, who raised an eyebrow. Elisabeth didn’t move on the edge of the sofa. The siren came back out there in the growing darkness, howling from the other direction this time. Winter again felt as though he were sitting on a stage. But he had no script. No one had written down what he should say. And what he said was important, perhaps crucial. What he asked. In that way, he wrote his own script, based on experience and emotion. Maybe it was sympathy.

  “Did you talk about it?” Winter asked.

  “I really don’t understand,” said Mario. “What do you mean by that?”

  Winter looked at Elisabeth. He meant whether the parents had talked about it between themselves. He didn’t want to say it. He wanted them to say it.

  “Did Paula want to talk about it?”

  “No,” said Mario.

  “Did you want to talk about it? You and your wife?”

  “With whom? With her?”

  “Yes.”

  “No . . . we didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  Mario looked at his wife. She didn’t seem to be listening. She couldn’t help him.

  “She didn’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why, why, why . . . that was a lot of damn whys.”

  “Paula was twenty-nine years old,” Winter said. “According to you she’d never dated anyone. She never wanted to talk about it. You never asked her about it. You never talked about it. Is that right?”

  Mario nodded.

  “But you and Elisabeth must have talked about it?”

  “Yes . . . I guess we did.”

  “Did you believe Paula? Did you believe her?”

  “Why would she lie about it?”

  Winter didn’t say anything.

  “That’s not really something you lie about, is it? Isn’t it more the opposite?”

  “What do you mean?” Winter asked.

  “Don’t you get it? Why would she keep quiet if she had a boyfriend?” Mario looked at his wife. “We wouldn’t protest, would we? What do you say, Elisabeth? We wouldn’t have anything against it, would we?”

  Elisabeth burst into tears. Winter couldn’t tell whether it was because of what her husband was saying or whether it was something that had been coming anyway. On the other hand, he could tell that she needed help now, professional help. He took a cell phone from the inner pocket of his jacket and called.

  • • •

  A siren howled from down on Vasaplatsen, a police car. Winter had come in, hung up his jacket, sat down in the dark and had time to sit twilight for one minute before he heard the siren, and then the phone ringing.

  He couldn’t see the display in the dark. It could be anyone.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, you.”

  “Hi, Angela.”

  The sound of the siren became louder, climbed up the buildings, came into the room.

  “What is that noise in the background? Is there a fire?”

  “An ambulance,” he answered.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Right now? I just got home. I hung up my jacket and was about to grab the bottle of whiskey.”

  “You have to eat first,” Angela said.

  “I bought a little rack of lamb at Saluhallen.”

  “What did you do today?”

  “Sent a woman off to the hospital,” he answered, and told the story.

  The siren disappeared up Aschebergsgatan, on its way to Sahlgrenska University Hospital.

  “This girl, Paula, must have been very lonely,” Angela said.

  “If it’s true,” Winter said. “It doesn’t have to be. Her friend didn’t think it was.”

  “And you believe that there’s a secret boyfriend?”

  “If there is, we would really like to meet him.”

  “How will you find him?”

  “We will, soon,” Winter said. “If he exists.”

  “It could take time.”

  “Yes. It could take a lot of time. That, and the other thing. Lots of work.”

  “I have three days left down here before we travel home,” Angela said. “I have time to let the clinic know.”

  “What? About what?”

  “That I can’t take the job, of course. That you don’t have time to take paternity leave. Although I don’t have to tell them that last part.”

  “Angela . . .”

  “I have time to cancel the apartment, too. It will be easy, because I haven’t signed the contract yet. That wasn’t going to happen until tomorrow.”

  “I didn’t know about the apartment. You didn’t tell me that.”

  “I was going to now. And now I have.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Marbella.”

  “Balcony? Terrace?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “We have a plan,” Winter said. “Let’s stick to it.”

  “Others might not,” she said. “I don’t need to say who.”

  No, he knew. The others were victims and perpetrators and parents and boyfriends and people who had disappeared. Maybe a winter on the sunny coast was a dream. Or maybe it was a good future working method to turn over a case in the middle of the preliminary investigation. Maybe the solution was near, the resolution, the dissolution. He knew even though he didn’t know; it was like he had thought, and Halders—there was something they hadn’t seen, hadn’t understood. When they’d seen and understood, he could fly through the friendly skies straight to the sun.

  • • •

  He heard the siren again at night, after a dream. In the dream, he had met someone who had said that he’d chosen the wrong road at the crossing behind him. He couldn’t see any face. Help me, he had said. You have to help yourself, the voice had said. Only you can help yourself. It was like it came from a silhouette. I have to turn on a light, he had thought. Then I’ll see what he looks like. That voice seems familiar. It’s someone I know. If I see the face, I can solve the case. I’ll have time to solve the case before I have to go back to the crossing and take the other road.

  • • •

  When he woke up, the memory of the dream was still there. The siren was howling down there.

  He lay awake with his eyes closed. What case had he been working on when he encountered the silhouette? There was no room for that information in the dream. Or who the stranger was. Except it wasn’t a stranger.

  Winter sat up in the bed. He wasn’t really awake yet. This wasn’t an unusual situation for him. His brain worked while he slept, while he dreamed. But could dreams show him the way at a crossroads? He didn’t know; he still didn’t know.

  He had never seen the face he was looking for in his dreams.

  The sound of the sirens moved off in the night. Winter leaned to the side and lifted his watc
h, which he had placed on the nightstand. Quarter past three; the night was on its way into the hour of the wolf.

  He knew that he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again if he didn’t get up and drink a glass of water and maybe stand on the balcony and smoke. It wouldn’t be the first time. And he wouldn’t really be alone out there. He had seen the glow of a cigarette on a balcony on the other side of Vasaplatsen a few times. It was always in the hour of the wolf.

  The wood floor was soft and warm against the soles of his feet. He had refinished all the floors in the whole apartment during a week of vacation many years ago and given them three layers of varnish the week after, and after that he had immediately left for the sun, still drunk on sawdust and lethal fumes. In the sun, he had switched that out for a different drunkenness, mild but constant intoxication.

  He had gone for a swim in the hour of the wolf, but it looked different on a beach on the Mediterranean. The moon was bigger.

  Angela hadn’t looked different on the beach. She was beautiful in any light, at any hour of the day.

  They hadn’t moved in together yet, then. But it was time. The floor was part of it. There was so much else. He didn’t want to be alone anymore.

  The loneliness was no longer an eternal and faithful friend. That’s what he had thought as he drove the sander over his lonely floor.

  Now he walked across it. There were a few toys here and there.

  In the kitchen, he poured a glass of water from a pitcher with slices of lemon in it. He heard a siren again. The last twenty-four hours must involve some sort of record. He hadn’t heard of any big accident. A sudden epidemic. He sat at the kitchen table. He tried to think of nothing for a second, but he failed. He thought of Mario Ney. What would happen to him when the shock subsided? What had happened to his wife had become clear yesterday evening.

  Who would Mario become then? Who was he now? There was something about him that didn’t have anything to do with shock. He refused any form of conversation with any form of therapist. The only conversations he was forced to have were with Winter, and even there the spaces between the words were too large. Like trapdoors. There was something about the Ney family that was a big, dark secret. Maybe many people had such things. But they seldom led to murder. Had the Ney family’s secret led to murder? Directly or indirectly? He thought of Paula. He could see her face. A lonely face, if there was such an expression. Everyone was alone, faces, bodies, lives. You had to drag your own life around as well as you could. Winter had met too many people who couldn’t handle it to be convinced about life. Life was a burden. Only an idiot would believe anything different. It was unbearable. It showed up in many ways. No, I haven’t become a cynic. I still believe. Sometimes I even still believe in God, even go to church once in a while. What kind of self-professed cynic does that?

  Winter didn’t believe in Satan. He believed in people. It might have been the same thing. That was the awful thing about his job. The faces, bodies, lives, like him, like Angela, like the children, like his friends, the police. And still. Satan. The incidents were there. A face without life in a fucking hotel room in a small big city at the edge of the world. Good God, the white hand. There was a message there that he couldn’t read. None of the fingers had pointed in any particular direction.

  Yet he knew that he would find out. There would be an answer in the end, or part of an answer, part of a solution to the riddle. That’s how it went. He trembled at the thought of that moment. He was already afraid of what he would find out then. It was something he didn’t want to know in his lifetime, never, ever. Why am I thinking like this? How can I think like this? What is it I suspect? I don’t want to know, he thought, looking up at the wall clock in the kitchen. It was the hour of the wolf again.

  A group was playing morning soccer as he biked across Heden. The September sun was mild, and the light made the contours of the city rounder, almost like the ball; it flew into the air in his direction and aimed and bounced right against his front tire.

  “Give the ball here, Winter!”

  He looked up from the ball and the tire.

  The goalie was waving. Winter recognized him again, and a few of the other players in their blue tracksuits. The SWAT team was taking a break from their kamikaze operations. But “break” was relative for this gang. It was always serious for them. Several of them would be injured on the field in the next half hour; knees to the tender ribs, elbows to the spleen, cleats to the wrist.

  “Better for your health that I keep this,” Winter shouted, picking up the ball.

  “Watch out so your tie doesn’t get stuck in your spokes, man!” one of the outfield players shouted.

  A few of the others grinned.

  Winter wasn’t wearing a tie today, or even a jacket or a coat. But he had a reputation.

  He threw the ball back onto the field without saying anything.

  “Tell Halders we’re ready when he is,” his colleague shouted.

  A few of the others grinned again.

  Winter knew what he was referring to. The homicide unit had had a team in the intercompany league, but it had all ended after ten minutes. Halders had protested a call by kicking the referee in the ass. The team had been eliminated, and Halders had been banned for two years.

  “He can play in two years,” Winter called.

  “He knows where we are!”

  “He’s longing for you guys,” Winter called.

  “You can play with us if you want, Winter!”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  He heard a couple of laughs again. The SWAT team was a cheerful group.

  As he was placing his bike outside the police station, he met Ringmar, on his way in from the parking lot.

  “That’s not such a bad idea,” Ringmar said.

  “Then do it.”

  “Is it that simple?”

  They moved past a marked car. Their colleague at the wheel lifted a hand in greeting. We’re like one big family, Winter thought. And we have no secrets from each other.

  He smiled.

  “What are you grinning at?”

  “Nothing, Bertil.”

  “It’s not good when a person smiles at nothing.”

  “I was just thinking that we’re like a big happy family at this station.”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful.”

  “How’s it going with our family in Tynnered? Did you go by Sahlgrenska?”

  “She was sleeping. The pills were still working.”

  “How had the night been?”

  “It was quiet. She hasn’t said a word.”

  “Is she going to?”

  “Say a word? I don’t know, Erik.”

  Ringmar moved past another police car. The driver waved, the passenger waved, Winter and Ringmar waved.

  “Maybe she has something to tell us,” Ringmar said, following the car with his gaze as it swung out onto Skånegatan.

  “This is her way of doing it,” Winter said.

  “Mm-hmm. And not doing it.”

  • • •

  There was a message waiting for Winter on his desk.

  He heard a cough inside the door before he knocked.

  Birgersson was sitting behind his desk. That was unusual.

  “Sit down, Erik.”

  “I think I’ll stand by the window for a change.”

  Birgersson didn’t smile.

  “I got a phone call from Mario Ney half an hour ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “He says that you and Bertil evoked a nervous breakdown in his wife.”

  “Was that his expression? Evoked?”

  “What happened?” Birgersson asked.

  “We made a mistake. But not yesterday. We should have made sure that she, Elisabeth, got help immediately.”

  “He says he’s going to report us. You.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to say about that?”

  “You could say something about how we should comment on this when the press starts writing about it.�
��

  “We? It’ll be me, as usual.”

  “Why did you two go there again, Erik? Without making an appointment first?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  Winter took a step away from the window and leaned over the desk.

  “I have the impression that this is one of your methods. Don’t give them a ring beforehand. Just ring at the door.”

  “Depends,” Birgersson said.

  “It really did depend this time,” Winter said. “There’s something about the Ney family that we have to get at. Soon, maybe immediately. Bertil and I didn’t go there to give him a thrashing. His wife let us in. We asked a few questions. She agreed we could. He came home from God knows where and looked at us like we were burglars.”

  “Where had he been?”

  “We didn’t ask.”

  “How is his wife doing now?”

  “She’s sleeping. We’re going to try to talk with her again. We have to, Sture.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I don’t think he’ll make any report. You don’t think he will either.”

  “He has made one. To me.”

  “Let it stop with you.”

  Birgersson nodded.

  Winter straightened his back. He got ready to leave.

  “Erik?”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh . . . that thing we talked about the other day. Let’s just forget it, huh?”

  “What thing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh, that,” Winter said in the doorway. “It was just a little jabbering about life.”

  13

  The morning meeting was about Paula’s loneliness. The list of her acquaintances was short. That didn’t necessarily mean that she was a lonely person, but no one they’d met seemed to have been really close to her.

  “It would be Nina Lorrinder if anyone,” Halders said.

  “Doesn’t seem to be,” Ringmar said.

  “I was planning on talking to her this afternoon,” Halders said.

  “About what?”

  That was Bergenhem.

  “Her best pasta recipe,” Halders answered.

  “I’m serious,” said Bergenhem.

  “Don’t always believe the worst of everyone, Fredrik.”

  That was Djanali.

  “I think she knows more than she’s saying,” Halders said. “Both about Paula and her boyfriend. Or boyfriends.”