Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson

  “Okay,” said the police inspector at the wheel, braking outside of the main entrance.

  “Thanks,” said Winter, and he climbed out and the car drove off, turning back out into the October night. A fog had suddenly swept in from the sea. The car disappeared off into the gray before Winter had made it through the doors. He inhaled the moist air. It didn’t feel good. He would exchange it for cigar smoke later.

  The air was lighter in the interrogation room, as though someone had opened a window that looked out onto a different evening.

  The guy was sitting on the chair. His hair hung down over his eyes, as though he had combed it forward to hide his identity. But it was known. His name was Jonas. The name didn’t tell Winter anything; first names seldom did. He didn’t recognize the guy, or the man: Winter knew that he was thirty years old.

  The question was what he was doing here.

  “My name is Erik Winter,” he introduced himself. “I’m a detective chief inspector.”

  The man nodded without saying his name.

  Winter picked up the form that lay on the table and read the topmost lines. The man’s name was indeed Jonas. He had a relatively unusual last name, which didn’t tell Winter anything either. Yet he read it again, along with the first name. There was something vaguely familiar about the name. He lifted his gaze and observed the man. There was nothing in his face that Winter recognized.

  “Why am I sitting here?” said Jonas Sandler.

  “We just want to ask a few questions.”

  “That’s what your colleague said, too. Now you’re saying the same thing. But I still don’t understand why I’m sitting here.”

  “It’s quieter here,” said Winter.

  “Surely you don’t think that I had anything . . . anything to do with Paula being murdered?”

  Winter didn’t answer. He observed the man’s face again. It wasn’t just the name. There was something else, too.

  “Do you really think that?” Sandler repeated. “Then you’re crazy.”

  “Have I seen you before?” Winter asked.

  “What?”

  “Have we met before?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I’m saying.” Winter sought the man’s eyes. “I think I recognize you.”

  “You think I’m some old thief, you mean?”

  “No.”

  “Is this a new method of interrogation?”

  “Have you ever had anything to do with the police?” Winter asked. “Before. When you were younger, maybe.” He put down the form. “Where you were . . . a witness to something, for example?”

  Then he saw it. Then he remembered. The boy’s face, and his name, and the place they had stood. A few quick pictures came into his head, click, click: The dusk. The grove of trees. The dog. The hand.

  It’s him. This is that boy.

  “Now that you mention it . . .” Sandler said, looking up. “When I was ten or so I talked to a policeman about something . . . that I’d seen.”

  “It was me,” Winter said.

  “That was almost twenty years ago,” said Sandler.

  Winter nodded.

  “I don’t remember what you looked like,” said the boy who had now become a man. Winter remembered the boy. He would be able to describe his face now.

  “I don’t remember the faces of any adults from when I was a child.” The boy swept out with his hand. “I have to look at a picture.”

  “It’s like that for me, too,” said Winter.

  “But how could you remember me?” Sandler asked. “Isn’t it the same if you turn it around?”

  Watch out now, Erik. This is an interrogation. You can’t let it meander off into different sorts of memories.

  “I was working,” he said. “There was something to connect it with.” He stood up from his chair. “We had gone out to investigate something.”

  “I remember,” said Sandler. “But what happened? What was it that happened in that apartment in our stairwell?”

  “We never found out,” Winter answered.

  “Hadn’t there been some kind of fight?”

  “We never found that out, either.”

  “They said that there was blood in there. In the apartment.”

  “Who said that?” Winter asked.

  “The neighbors.”

  Winter nodded without saying anything more. At the moment, this was a conversation, not an interrogation. Maybe that was good.

  “So nothing happened, you mean?” Sandler asked.

  “Not that we know of.”

  “What about the blood?” The boy leaned forward. Winter saw him as “the boy.” “You’re not allowed to answer that, are you?”

  “According to the man who lived in the apartment, there had been an accident,” Winter said.

  “So you found him? The guy who had an accident?”

  “Yes. The same night.”

  “What about his wife? I remember that he had a wife.”

  The boy made that gesture again, as though he were wiping away something in the air. “I don’t remember what she looked like, but there was someone.”

  “We found her, too.”

  “What kind of accident was it?”

  “Kitchen accident,” said Winter. “I won’t say any more.”

  “Kitchen accident,” Sandler repeated. “Did someone die?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good.”

  It was as though the boy was saying it to himself. But he should know. He lived there.

  “We didn’t find the hand, either,” said Winter.

  The boy gave a start.

  “We didn’t find any hand,” said Winter.

  “No,” said the boy curtly, as though it went without saying that it couldn’t be found.

  “Did you really see it?” Winter asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It could have been your imagination. Or something else that you saw. A tree branch.”

  “No.”

  “We didn’t find it.”

  “I saw it. Zack saw it. It was like he went crazy. I don’t know if you remember that. If you remember Zack. My dog.”

  “Of course I remember.”

  Sandler didn’t say anything more. He had once said everything he knew about the hand he’d seen.

  “How is Zack?” Winter asked.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Winter repeated his question.

  “He disappeared,” the boy answered.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. He was just gone one day.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Don’t try to be polite.”

  “I’m not trying to be polite.”

  “Zack was old even then.”

  Winter nodded.

  “I looked for him for a long time. I was still little then. But I never found him. And no one else did either.” Sandler looked Winter straight in the eye. “Maybe he just forgot where he lived.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Weren’t there stains on those stones in that grove of trees?” the boy asked. “Or whatever it was. I know I remember some stains.”

  “I can’t say anything about that,” said Winter.

  “So there were stains.”

  “Where do you live now, Jonas?”

  “Not far from there.” He named an address. “We people from Hisingen don’t leave the island.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “That’s how it is with island folk.”

  “I’ve heard that, too.”

  The boy was moving in a slightly spasmodic way now. He was speaking spasmodically, nervously. More than usual, Winter guessed.

  “But not everyone knows that it’s actually an island. Sweden’s third largest, I think.”

  “And yet there are bridges and ferries to and from it,” Winter said.

  “There are bridges on the mainland, too.”

  “How is your mother?” Winter asked.

  �
��Good.”

  “Does she still live on Hisingen, too?”

  “In the same apartment.”

  Winter nodded.

  “It looks the same out there. Even the grove of trees is still there.”

  “Did you ever show it to Paula?” Winter asked.

  “Oh, that’s what this was all about,” Sandler said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You asked about Zack and Mom and all of that before just so you could ask about this.”

  Winter tried to watch the boy’s face. He didn’t look paranoid. It seemed more like just a statement.

  “I didn’t know that it was you sitting here when I came into the room,” Winter said.

  “I don’t believe that,” said Sandler.

  “Did you show her the grove?” Winter asked again.

  “Why would I?” The boy looked even more like a boy now. It was as though he had changed in the last few minutes. His facial features had become more vague and simultaneously more clear.

  Winter thought about the boy’s story, the one from before. He thought about Paula. He hadn’t seen any connection between Paula’s hand and the hand Jonas had told him about eighteen years ago. He hadn’t even thought of it before. Why would he have? He had thought about Ellen Börge. That was a more concrete connection back in time. No, not concrete. He couldn’t find the right word. Maybe there wasn’t one.

  “Why would I?” the boy repeated.

  • • •

  Winter was smoking outside the front doors. The fog had lifted. The silhouette of Ullevi was visible on the other side of Skånegatan. The pillars of the floodlights rose toward the sky like the abandoned cranes on the other side of the river. The Hisingen side.

  I’ll have to go over there, he thought, and he blew the smoke out into the air, which had become clearer, as the boy’s face had inside. He thought of him only as the boy. He couldn’t picture him with a woman, not that way. Maybe because there was nothing to see. I’ll have to go over there. Hisingen. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ll know when I get there.

  He heard someone come out through the door and turned around.

  “What did he say?” Halders asked.

  “Do you remember the Martinssons?” Winter asked back.

  “No. What’s that? Who?”

  “The Martinsson couple. Their kitchen in Hisingen. We went out there eighteen years ago. Some guy had reported a fi—”

  “Yeah, yeah, now I remember,” Halders interrupted him. “He had cut his wrist.”

  “So he said.”

  “It was his blood.”

  “Not all of it,” said Winter.

  “That sure was old,” Halders said.

  “What do you mean, Fredrik?”

  “Another old kitchen injury,” Halders said.

  “With who involved?”

  “Hell, Erik, we’re talking about a generation back.”

  “The new generation is sitting in there. The guy. Jonas.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Winter explained.

  “I never met him as a boy,” Halders said.

  “He’s sitting in there.”

  “What do you mean, Erik?”

  “It’s like the boy he was is sitting in there now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you know what I mean?”

  “No, but you don’t need to explain.”

  Winter smiled.

  “I remember the hand, of course,” Halders said. “Or rather, the boy imagining it.”

  “You think it was his imagination?”

  “Erik, we didn’t find anything.”

  “Like this time,” Winter said under his breath.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Like now,” Winter said, “we can’t figure out what the hand means. Paula’s hand.”

  Halders didn’t say anything. He seemed to be studying the concrete arms that held the floodlights in place up in Ullevi’s sky. Within the next few nights they would shine like the sun.

  Halders turned toward Winter.

  “There are coincidences in the world, Erik.”

  “Like this boy, you mean? He’s a walking coincidence?”

  “I don’t know what he is. I guess that’s what he’s going to tell us, right?”

  • • •

  Winter could see a film of sweat at the boy’s hairline. This time it couldn’t be left over from his workout. It wasn’t particularly warm in the room. The air in there was not so good now. It had a particular smell, like nowhere else. Many people had sweated in this room. Maybe there was the scent of everything that had been said here, all the words that had been spoken. All the lies, excuses, evasions. A library of lies? Why not? Without books, with just the stench of sleazy words.

  Once in a while the truth had been spoken. Had sprung forth like a sudden light in the darkness. A floodlight. After that, everyone had been able to go home, to their cells, to their apartments, to houses in the suburbs. To their graves, he thought suddenly. The real protagonists were always there at the interrogations. The dead. The victims. When the rare truth was illuminated, they were at peace.

  “How did you meet Paula, Jonas?”

  “I’ve told you, haven’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Haven’t you asked?”

  “How did you meet?” Winter kept his voice neutral. “Just answer the question.”

  “Meet . . . we talked to each other a few times. A couple of times. I did say that to your . . . colleague.” Jonas looked up after having studied the surface of the table for a long time. “I told him everything I knew.”

  “How did it happen, when you met?” Winter asked.

  “I don’t actually remember. It was probably in the café. Maybe we were sitting at the same table.” He looked around the room, as though it had transformed into the café and he was trying to find the table where they’d sat. “Yes, that’s how it was. I was sitting there and she came up and sat down. It was probably the only free chair.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yes . . . I think there was just one chair free.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Happened . . . nothing happened. I guess we said something, I don’t remember what. Just being polite. I don’t know. And then I guess I left. Or maybe she did.”

  “When did you meet the next time?”

  “We didn’t meet, as I’ve told you a hundred times. We ran into each other a few times over there. At Friskis & Svettis. That’s all. How many times do I need to say it?”

  A hundred times, Winter thought. You might need to say it one hundred times, and then a hundred more.

  “But you became acquainted with each other, didn’t you?”

  “Not more than that we talked a little. About like the first time.”

  “Being polite?”

  “What?”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing that I actually remember.”

  “Did you talk about seeing each other another time? Outside of Friskis & Svettis?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that.”

  “Weren’t you interested?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Winter met his eyes. The boy didn’t look like he was challenging him. He didn’t look stupid, either.

  He wants to buy time. He’s trying to think. Think about what?

  “Interested in seeing her without workout clothes,” Winter said. “Or without any clothes at all.” He leaned forward. “You know what I’m talking about, for God’s sake.”

  “We . . . didn’t get that far.”

  “Did you see her talking with anyone else?”

  Winter switched tactics, tried another one, a looser one. He could see the boy relax; his body became looser, hardly noticeably, and yet it was body language. Sometimes it was a hundred times more obvious than t
he other language. It was like a voice. It reveals a hundred times more than the words themselves. But Jonas Sandler’s voice didn’t reveal much. Maybe it was just revealing the truth, or parts of it.

  “Others? No . . . not that I saw.”

  “What about her friend?”

  “Didn’t see.”

  “You never saw her together with her friend?”

  “I said no. I never saw her with anyone.”

  He looked at Winter again. “Although there were always a lot of people, of course, so you couldn’t say that someone was alone, exactly.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend, Jonas?”

  “What . . . no.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Please answer it.”

  “No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m not gay.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “If I don’t have a girlfriend, then I guess I live alone, don’t I?”

  “You can share an apartment. Rent out half the floor. Rent a room. Live in a co-op.”

  “I live alone,” Sandler said. “And you know the address.” He moved his shoulders, as though to show that he’d become stiff from sitting there. “I want to go home now. When can I go home?”

  “What were you doing the night Paula disappeared?” Winter asked.

  “I don’t actually know.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know what night it was.”

  • • •

  “What are you saying?”

  Halders was sitting on the other side of Winter’s desk. The desk lamp illuminated the lower portion of his face. He didn’t look nice. Soon it would be Halloween, a new tradition of fear in Scandinavia. Halders wouldn’t need a mask.

  “We’re letting him go home.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “But we’re not letting him go.”

  “So he doesn’t have an alibi,” Halders said.

  “There’s something I can’t put my finger on,” said Winter.

  “When isn’t there?”

  “It’s about . . . then. The past.”

  “When isn’t it?”

  “Have you thought any more about that trip to Hisingen? Eighteen years ago?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “I never met the witness,” Winter said. “The one who called it in.”

  “Not much to meet,” Halders said. “He had walked by the door and heard the racket and called. He didn’t know the Martinssons.”