She had given them a description of him.
Another day passed. They had hoped to make a public appeal. But the information was so vague. They didn't have a face yet.
'If he's in the country he'd have been in touch by now,' Bertil Ringmar said at the morning meeting.
Winter's right-hand man, older than he was, was sitting on a chair at the edge of the group. There'll be fewer and fewer of us for every week that passes, Winter thought, for every week with nothing to show, but we won't know for certain until we can come up with something resembling a key to it all.
'Have we covered everybody she knew?' Bergenhem asked.
'We've interviewed everybody we know about, yes,' said Ringmar. 'Those that are at home, that is, and we're pretty sure we've seen the whole lot. We're not so sure about those who are abroad.'
'It might just have been a casual acquaintance,' said Djanali. 'It might not even have been the same boy on both occasions. Cecilia might have been mistaken.'
'Why didn't Angelika say anything about it?' Bergenhem asked.
The phone rang after she'd dozed off. She answered sleepily.
'Yes ... Hello?'
'I hope I didn't wake you up?'
'Well, you did.' Anne sat up. It was almost dark outside, which meant it must be the middle of the night. There was a smell of flowers and seaweed through the half-open window.
'Sorry about that.'
'What do you want?'
'Can you work tomorrow? Just one more time.'
'I've told you that I don't want to.'
'Anne.'
'No.'
'OK, OK.'
'Don't phone here any more.'
'I might.'
She felt afraid now. It was in her voice. She knew that he knew.
'You don't need to be scared of anything,' he said. 'But I want you to come here tomorrow.'
'I don't want to work. And I'm not scared. What should I be scared of?'
'Just come here. We have to talk.'
'There's no point. I've told you.'
'Hmm.'
'A thousand times.'
'See you, then.'
He hung up.
12
Hannes was waiting in his teacher's office. Halders hugged him. The teacher was standing next to them. She removed her hand from Hannes' shoulder after a while.
'Magda wants to stay until the end of lessons,' the boy said. 'I asked her.'
Halders hugged his son even tighter.
'Can we go now, Dad?'
They drove home through the rain. It had started raining during the afternoon.
'I hope you aren't angry with me, Dad.'
'Why should I be angry?'
'Because you had to leave work and collect me before lessons were finished.'
'If you don't want to be there, you don't have to be there,' said Halders, giving his son's shoulder a squeeze with his right hand. 'And I don't need to be at work either.'
The boy seemed satisfied with that reply, and said nothing for the rest of the drive home. Halders parked the car, and they went in. He'd moved some of his things there from his flat. He wasn't at all sure where his home was now, apart from with his children.
'I'm tired,' Hannes said.
'Go and lie down for a bit. I'll be here in the living room.'
'Do you get more tired when you're sad, Dad?' 'Yes.' The thought had never occurred to him before, but now he knew it was true. He knew now. He was bloody well certain of it. 'Let's both have a lie-down before we go to collect Magda.'
'I don't know exactly what she was doing every second of the night,' said Kurt Bielke. 'I've never kept that sort of track of her.'
There's something fishy about her dad, Halders had said. Jeanette's dad. Or between them. Something funny going on there. Can you be a bit more concrete? Winter had asked. There are several details on which their versions of events don't agree, Halders had replied. The night when she came home. After it happened.
'But you're sure that she was back home before three?'
'Round about then. I've said that lots of times now.'
'Not two hours later?'
'No. Who says that?'
'We have witnesses who saw Jeanette come home.'
'Really? They must have seen wrongly.'
They were sitting in the living room. It was very light, despite the heavy rain outside.
'You've spoken to my wife as well. Jeanette got home about three, and I can't understand why the hell you are trying to suggest otherwise.' He glared at Winter. 'She's told you that herself, hasn't she? Why on earth would she lie? It's absolutely ridiculous.'
'Tell me again about the telephone call you had that evening,' said Winter.
Kurt Bielke sighed loudly.
'Inspector Winter, I'm doing my best to be patient. But you must forgive me if I start to get a bit impatient. Or become reluctant to answer your questions. We're a family that's been dealt a heavy blow ... Jeanette has had a shattering blow ... And you come here and start quibbling with me about my statement.'
'We are investigating a serious crime,' said Winter.
'You almost make it sound as though I'm guilty,' said Bielke.
'Why do you say that?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Why do you say it sounds as if you are guilty?'
'Because that's the way it does sound, almost.'
'Tell me about that telephone call.'
'She phoned at about eleven to ask whether anybody had called her,' Bielke said.
'Anybody in particular?'
'No, just anybody.'
'And had anybody?'
'No.'
'She'd borrowed a friend's mobile,' Winter said.
'That's what you tell me.'
'You couldn't hear the difference?'
'No. But I do remember that there was a different sort of background noise,' Bielke said.
'She said she was outdoors.'
'Yes.'
'Anything to confirm that?'
'The call only lasted a few seconds.'
Her own mobile was being repaired. Winter had had that confirmed.
'It's not clear who lent her a mobile,' Winter said.
'Does it matter?'
'We're not clear about where Jeanette was for a few hours that night,' said Winter. 'Maybe even longer.'
'You'll have to ask her. Again. I don't like it, but if you have to, you have to.'
'I'm asking you, now.'
'Wrong person.'
Winter noticed that the man had changed during the course of the conversation. Or the interrogation. And he noted how much Bielke had changed since they'd met for the first time. He'd become ... more aggressive. That could be due to Winter, or to Halders. Or it could be due to something entirely different.
'Don't you want to know?' Winter asked.
'What do you think?'
Winter didn't reply. He'd heard something from upstairs, footsteps. Soft footsteps, even a stumble. Perhaps she'd been listening, but he ought to have noticed in that case. At that point Jeanette came into the room from the kitchen. It had been somebody else upstairs. Irma Bielke wasn't at home, according to what Bielke had said when Winter arrived.
It was raining outside. Harder now. The garden was a mass of wet greenery. The temperature had fallen, but it was still warm. The sound of waves breaking against the rocks could be heard from the west.
Winter drove southwards. He'd have to change his passenger-side windscreen wiper. His vision to the right was blurred and greasy, like looking at houses and trees through a thin layer of jelly.
He had to wait at a crossroads where a section of road was being filled with tarmac. His thoughts were faster than the efforts of the workmen.
The girls had been to the same place. Beatrice and Angelika. That's where they'd been found, where they'd been murdered. Or within a few metres of there. And that's where Jeanette had been attacked. She'd said it was there. And why doubt her?
What did it mean? What w
as the significance of the location?
He'd been delving backwards into the case ... to Beatrice ... but had somebody else been doing the same thing? Was there a copycat? He hated the word. But it was no secret what had happened to Beatrice. Nor where it had happened. Was that knowledge being exploited by somebody? Was he approaching the case from the wrong point of view? Should he be looking forwards instead of backwards?
One of the workmen waved him on, past the vehicle that looked like a field kitchen for an army battalion, or something out of a Mad Max film. The hot tarmac was simmering in the rain, giving off steam. It smelled like an infantry attack coming through the car windows.
They had traced the three girls' last hours in as much detail as they could. He was including Jeanette in this aspect of the investigation. There was another peculiarity. She was still alive, but what had happened to her that evening before the crime was hardest of all to work out. There were fewer witnesses. Several couldn't remember.
He'd spent ages poring over the map, trying to work out if they'd followed the same route to the park, to the rock, the opening, the bushes. Maybe there was a common route, or something that amounted to the same thing. If you added up all the evidence from friends about where they'd been and what they'd done
and what they were going to do that night, there was something like a route that Beatrice, Angelika and Jeanette might have taken before they came up against the rapist. It started to the north of the city centre, and everybody knew where it ended.
North of the city centre. What had they been doing there? It must have been near the river, the old harbour, or around the Opera House. Or on the other bank, perhaps? Winter had read the case notes backwards and forwards and over and over again, but hadn't found a place mentioned where they might all have started off on the same journey. Was it all a coincidence? He didn't know, but he would keep at it. He would force his way into the reality of the map, into the very spot.
He'd been looking for some connection between the cases, and here one was – extremely vague at the moment, but even so. What else was there for him to do?
Winter turned left. Angelika Hansson's father was at the door waiting for him, just like last time.
'Leave me on my own in here for a while,' said Winter, and Lars-Olof Hansson closed the door on him. Winter started looking round Angelika's room. He needed to start from the beginning all over again. He opened the left-hand door of the wardrobe.
13
There was nothing in the wardrobe he hadn't seen before. Nobody had moved the clothes since he and Bergenhem had been there on their first search and removed jumpers and trousers, a job he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. He had an inbuilt reluctance to touch dead people's clothes. He wasn't cut out to be a forensic officer. Those clothes would never be worn again. He'd seen it before: they'd lie there for years on their shelves and in their drawers, just as all the furniture would stay exactly where it had been, the papers would still be on the desk, the books on their shelves, the few ornaments would be untouched.
They were all concrete memories now, memories they didn't want in that house, but they didn't have the strength to obliterate them. Or the will. Or both, he thought as he closed the wardrobe door.
What am I looking for? If he knew, he wouldn't be here, intruding on the despairing parents in the next room. If he knew, he'd already have found it, taken it away to be examined under a brighter light.
A secret.
The thought had been in the back of his mind since he'd spoken to Jeanette's father that first time. There was a secret. Either the father or the daughter was hiding something. Maybe both of them. Something they hadn't said. It wasn't something he could point to like a physical piece of evidence, but it had to do with the crime committed on the daughter, the rape. He couldn't pin it down, not yet. But he could sense it. And Halders could sense it. He needed Halders. This was a case for Halders as well, a complicated case that required a sort of thinking that aimed straight for the target, without too many sidetracks.
And here he was now, in this room that would only ever allow in a mixture of half-light and half-darkness through the closed Venetian blinds.
He sat down at the desk and looked at a photo of Angelika on a jetty by the sea. A young black body and a smile as big as the horizon, and just as white.
These confounded photographs that took no account of the future. He had already stared at a thousand pictures similar to this one, like a clairvoyant predicting a tragedy that is going to happen. Everything in photographs like these acquires a significance different from what one sees on the surface, it seemed to him. When I look at this picture, it's as if I'm coming to that jetty from the future, with a death announcement.
Angelika's father had no secret of that kind. Winter could hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. Her father – an adoptive father but her father even so – had been genuinely ignorant about his daughter's pregnancy and possible boyfriends.
But did Angelika have a secret? Who was it she had come up against in the night? Just like Beatrice she'd split off from her friends and been alone. Or had she met the man who'd made her pregnant some eight weeks earlier?
What had she done then? She had almost finished her twelve years of schooling and was on her way out into the big wide world. Did she bump into a rapist and murderer who lay in wait for his victims in the summer night? A coincidence. Bad luck, to put it mildly. Or was there a motive behind it? Was it a planned crime?
The location could have been carefully selected ... in either case. By the madman. Or by the murderer who was waiting for somebody in particular, only for her.
But then this wasn't about Beatrice Wägner, or Jeanette Bielke. Or was it, in fact?
Perhaps the three girls had something in common that had led to their attacks, perhaps it wasn't just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had they done something that ... linked them? Could that be it? For God's sake, I must concentrate on this particular murder. It's possible to find common denominators in everything.
Winter sat with his head in his hands, thinking, then stood up and opened one of the desk drawers. He needed a cigarillo, but controlled his craving. It had got stronger since he'd become a father. He had thought it would grow weaker, or maybe disappear altogether; but it had become worse. He was smoking more than ever. That meant it was time to stop. Angela's discreet hints had slowly developed into something else. Not nagging. Never that. But maybe ... irritation. It wasn't just the doctor in her. It was healthy common sense. Healthy.
He stood up, walked through the house and as soon as he was outside he lit a Corps.
When he came back he searched the room methodically. He spent some time studying the photograph again, her skin against the water. He opened the desk drawer and took out the eight bundles of photographs he'd just been through. He started once again, sorted them into small piles, re-sorted them. Angelika in various locations, mostly outdoors. Smiling, not smiling. He put the outdoor pictures together, the indoor ones together. Summer snaps. Winter snaps. The bright colours of autumn leaves. Angelika in a snowdrift, black, black, white, white. Angelika on a hillside in spring with wood anemones gleaming white. Angelika with her mother and father, on the same hillside: her parents so pale after the winter they looked almost ill.
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