'I heard about it.'
'Them trees are clean now, anyway.'
'How did he get away, then?'
'Ran, I suppose. Or drove. You'd better ask forensics. But I doubt there'll be any tracks. Everything's so bloody dry.'
Halders looked round. Djanali was watching the SOC team. The police dog was scrutinising first Halders, then the SOC team. Halders looked round again, walked a few paces.
'Have you been here before?' he asked the dog handler.
'How do you mean? For another crime?'
'I'm not talking about your private life, Sören. Have you ever been called out here after a rape?'
'To this park, you mean?'
'Yes. And to this very spot.'
Halders was standing just outside the police enclosure: it looked out of place, as if it had been made by the kids who were staying on to watch. The pond was to the right. It reflected pink from the flamingos standing on one leg by the water's edge.
The SOC team was crawling around in some shrubbery.
Next to it were two trees. Two metres or so to there. Maples? There was a passage between them, wide enough to get through. It was shady inside. A rock sticking out turned it into a hollow, almost a cave behind the trees. The forensic officers were moving around there now, on their way into the cave.
A perfect place to commit rape.
Good God! Halders thought. He could see it all now. It was HERE.
The tarmacked path was about ten metres away, but it might as well have been a hundred. A thousand. There was a minor road the other side of the car park. A hedge between the cars and the park itself. The lighting in the park was a joke. He'd walked there hundreds of times at night, and the lighting was more of a hindrance than a help. They hadn't improved it, in spite of what had happened here.
A perfect place. It was as if the shadow between the trees was lying in wait. He hadn't caught on at first.
'This spot?' asked the dog handler. He looked round. 'I don't think so.' He looked at Halders. 'What are you getting at?'
'It's happened before,' Halders said.
'I'm not with you.'
'This is where it was.' Halders looked at his colleague. 'Bloody hell, Sören, it's the very same spot. The same spot!'
'I don't get what you're on about.'
'Weren't you based in Gothenburg five years ago?'
'I came here four years ago.'
'But you've heard about the Beatrice Wägner case, surely?'
The dog handler looked at Halders.
'Beatrice? That girl who was murdered?'
'Five years ago. She was raped too. Raped and murdered.'
'I know about it ... course I do. I read about it at the time. We'd —'
'It was here,' Halders said.
'Here?'
'This is where it happened,' Halders said to Sören and Djanali, who had just joined them. 'This is where Beatrice was found. This very spot. She was in that hollow,' he said, nodding towards where the SOC team was still combing the ground. 'Lying between the trees, she was. It's like a cave in there.'
Raped, and strangled, he thought.
He noticed the dog following his gaze towards the cave and then back again. It jerked at its lead, then was calm again.
3
Winter could feel the tiny hand gripping his finger. Elsa gurgled a greeting. He kissed her behind her ear, she laughed, he blew gently on her neck and she laughed again.
He still hadn't got used to that laugh and that gurgle; they could be floating around in the flat for ages. His daughter would soon be fifteen months old. Her sounds tore the silence from the walls like old wallpaper. Amazing that such a tiny body could make such a loud noise.
Angela came in from the kitchen and sat down in one of the armchairs, unbuttoned her checked blouse and looked at Winter and Elsa on the blanket on the floor.
'Breakfast,' she said.
Winter blew behind Elsa's ear.
'Time for breakfast,' Angela said.
Elsa laughed.
'She doesn't seem hungry,' Winter said, looking at Angela.
'Bring her here and you'll see. This is going to be the last time, though. I can't go on breastfeeding her any longer for God's sake.'
He carried the little girl over to Angela in the armchair. She seemed to barely weigh anything at all.
Winter saw the files lying on his desk when he entered his office. The sun had already warmed the room, and there was a smell of summer. Two more months, and then it would be some time before he saw this office again. A year. He was going to take a year's leave, and who would he be the next time he stepped into this gloomy office where nearly all thoughts were painful to think?
Would he ever come back at all?
Who would he be then?
He went to the washbasin and drank a glass of water. He felt thoroughly rested. At an early stage Elsa had decided to sleep from 8.00 at night till 8.00 in the morning. He and Angela were very lucky.
Sometimes Angela would cry, at night. Her memories would come flooding back, but more and more rarely now. He hadn't asked her what happened in that room in that flat the day before he got there. Not at first, not directly. She used to talk about it, night after night, in mangled sentences. Now it had more or less stopped. She slept soundly for hours on end.
It wasn't even eighteen months ago.
He sat down at his desk, opened the first of the files and took out the documents and photographs. He held up one of the pictures. The rock. The trees. The lawn and the path. It was all very familiar in a ... depressing sort of way, like an illness that recurs after several years. A cancerous tumour that has been cut away, but continues to grow.
Still, Jeanette Bielke was alive, and they were waiting for her test results.
He stood up, with the photograph in his hand, and opened the window. The sun was on the other side of the city. He could smell the light, almost weightless scents of summer. He thought of Elsa. There was a knock at the door and he shouted, 'Come in.' Halders was in the doorway. Winter gestured towards the visitor's chair, but stayed by the window.
'It was completed intercourse,' Halders said. 'I've just had the report. Purely technical, that is. But it is rape.'
'What else does it say?'
'That the girl is probably telling the truth.'
'Probably?'
Halders shrugged. 'You know how it is.'
Winter didn't reply. Halders looked at the files on the desk.
'You sent down for them I see.'
'Yes.'
'Have you had time to read through them?'
'No. Only this photograph,' said Winter, holding it up.
Halders could see a picture of Beatrice Wägner on one of the newspaper cuttings by Winter's elbow.
'Is it a coincidence?' Halders said.
'The place? Well ... it's not the first time somebody's been attacked in Slottsskogen Park.'
'But not at that particular spot.'
'Not far away.'
'Never at that particular spot,' Halders said. 'You know it. I know it.'
It's true, Winter thought. He knew that part of the park. Since Beatrice Wägner's murder he'd been back there regularly. Would stand there watching people milling around. Halders had done the same. They'd occasionally bumped into one another. You're not among the suspects, Halders had muttered on one occasion.
They were looking for a face, a movement. An action. A voice. An object. A belt. A noose. A dog lead.
They always return to the scene of the crime. Every policeman knew that. Every one. Somehow or other, at some time or other, they always go back. They go back after ten years, or five. To carry on. Or just to be there, to breathe, to remember.
Just being there was the thing. If he was there and the man who'd done the deeds came down the path at that moment, he, Winter, would know, really know, and so it wouldn't be a coincidence. It had nothing to do with luck. Nothing to do with chance. And at that very moment – when he was still holding the photog
raph in his hand and looking at Halders and the damp patch on his shirt under his left armpit – at that very moment he had the feeling that it really would happen. He would see the man and it would be as if a nightmare had turned into reality. It would happen.
'That bastard's back,' Halders said.
Winter didn't reply.
'Same modus operandi.' Halders ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. 'Same spot.'
'We'd better talk to the girl again.'
'She's going home this afternoon.'
'Then go and see her there. How were her parents?'
'Desperate.'
'Nothing funny?'
'Aneta had a look around, of course, when we went to talk to the girl.' Halders' left eye twitched slightly, as if he had a tic. 'No. The old man had the shakes – clearly hung over – something like this isn't exactly going to help him recover.'
Halders looked at Winter. 'He's back, Erik. How many did he manage last time? Three victims, one of which died?'
'Mmm.'
'Maybe we'd better talk to the other two girls again.'
'I've already done that. They don't remember any more now than they did back then.' Halders stood up.
'Fredrik?'
'Yes?'
'I feel just the same as you do about this. I can't forget Beatrice either.'
'No.'
'It's not just because it's on the unsolved list.'
'I understand.' Halders sat down again. 'It's the same with me.' He scratched his head. Winter could see a patch of damp under Halders' other armpit as well. 'You can feel it all over the station. Everybody's talking about it.'
'I'll have a look at the old pattern,' said Winter, gesturing towards the documents on his desk.
'There'll be another one,' Halders said. 'The same again.'
'Take it easy now.'
'Yes, yes, OK. One rape at a time.'
The sound of sirens drifted in from the east. Somebody was shouting underneath Winter's window. A car started. Halders ran his hand over his hair.
Winter suddenly made up his mind.
'Let's go there. Now.'
Everybody was wearing shorts or lightweight skirts. It was over 30 degrees. There seemed an unusually high number of people in town, he thought – they ought to be down by the water.
'It's sales time,' said Halders, pointing to the shopping centre. 'Summer Sale, where the prices are a dream and buying is one long party.'
Winter nodded.
'I ought to go myself,' Halders said.
'Oh yes?'
'It's nothing for you, I suppose, but things can seem a bit on the dear side when you're separated and have two children.' He turned to look at Winter. 'Maintenance, heavy stuff. Not that I'm complaining.'
'How old are your kids now?' Winter asked.
Halders looked surprised. 'Seven and eleven,' he said, after a moment's hesitation.
'A boy and a girl, is that right?' Winter was driving along the Avenue. He was the only one in the middle lane. All other traffic seemed to have disappeared. He blinked, and all the cars came back again. He blinked once more, and stopped at an amber light, after glancing in his rear-view mirror.
'Er ... yes. It's the boy that's the youngest.'
'Are you sharing custody?' Winter asked.
Halders looked at him.
'They live with Margareta, but come to me every other weekend.' He looked away, towards the river, then back at Winter. 'Sometimes they stay a bit longer with me. Or maybe we go away somewhere. It depends.' Halders had gone into his shell. Winter cast him a sideways glance. 'I always try to think of something interesting.'
Winter stopped at an amber light again. A large family in Gothenburg for the day was crossing the road: map, wide eyes, comfortable shoes. A boy, maybe ten, and a girl, about seven, looked at them, then caught up with their parents who were preoccupied with a pushchair containing two small children.
'How's it going for you?' Halders asked. 'With the baby. Does she keep you up all night?'
'Not at all.'
'Hannes had colic,' Halders said. 'It was horrible. Four months of terror.'
'I've heard about it,' said Winter.
That sounded almost apologetic, Halders thought. As if he'd got away with things too lightly.
'That was the beginning of the end,' said Halders, as they arrived.
The place was just as sorry a sight as ever. There, five years ago, the SOC team had carefully collected leaves, grass, pieces of bark. Then as now. Winter was still waiting for his promotion back then, and impatient. Halders had been an Inspector too, but slightly less impatient, and still married. Home every day to a house full of life.
At least it isn't murder this time, Winter thought. Two women went past, pushing prams. The sun was hidden behind the trees. Voices of children swimming in the pond. A man was lying flat out on the grass, fifty metres from the scene of the crime. Winter watched the man stagger to his feet then stumble forward a few metres before sitting down again, producing a carrier bag and drinking in classic wino style, without taking the bottle out of the bag.
'And no witnesses,' Halders said.
Winter was observing the drunk.
'Have we thought about the homeless?' he said, mainly to himself.
'Then? There weren't any then,' Halders said.
'Now.'
'I've no idea,' Halders said.
'No doubt there are some sleeping rough around here.' Winter watched the man make another effort to move, and this time he managed a few paces more. 'Especially now, in summer.'
Halders followed his gaze and reached for his mobile phone.
Five minutes later a patrol car turned up and Halders pointed out the drunk, who was still attempting to walk the tightrope down the wide gravel path. They watched as the man was escorted to the car.
'Shall we hear what he's got to say right now?' Halders asked.
'It can wait,' said Winter. He walked over to the rock in the trees, entered through the passage. Same place, same cave.
He knew what it was even before he was even fully awake, and he reached for the telephone on the bedside table. It was all still part of his dream, a continuation of the night that one could touch, smell. It was as if he knew what the voice in the receiver was going to say.
He watched Angela as he listened. He could see the top of Elsa's little head snug in her cot.
Never End Page 3