Never End (13 page)

“Tell me again about the telephone call you got 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 called 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 would have noticed in that case. At that point Jeanette came into the room from the kitchen. It had been somebody else up the stairs. 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 southward. He’d have to change his passenger-side windshield 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 paved. 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 meters 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 was the significance of the location?

He’d been delving into the case backward . . . to Beatrice . . . but had somebody else been doing the same thing? Was there a copycat? He hated the word. But what had happened to Beatrice was no secret. Nor where it had happened. Was that knowledge being exploited by somebody? A copycat? Was he approaching the case from the wrong point of view? Should he be looking forward instead of backward?

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 asphalt 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 figure 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 center, and everybody knew where it ended.

North of the city center. What had they been doing there? It must have been near the river, the old harbor, or around the opera house. Or on the other bank, perhaps? Winter had read the case notes backward and forward 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 around Angelika’s room. He needed to start from the beginning all over again. He opened the left-hand door of the wardrobe.

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 sweaters and pants, a job he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. He had an innate reluctance to touch dead people’s clothes. He wasn’t cut out to be a forensics 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 would 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, just for her.

But then this wasn’t about Beatrice Wägner, or Jeanette Bielke. Or was it? Maybe the three girls had something in common that had led to their attacks, maybe 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 need to 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 cigarello, but controlled his craving. It had gotten 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, resorted them. Angelika in various locations, mostly outdoors. Smiling, not smiling. He put the outdoor pictures together, the indoor ones together. Summer snapshots. Winter snapshots. The bright colors 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.

There were no dates on the photos, but they all seemed to have been taken during the last year. It was a guess, but became more than that when he checked the dates on the envelopes. There were nearly three hundred pictures. It was like an open diary of her last year. Summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer again. Her last summer, or half summer, he thought, and turned to a series of photographs taken at her graduation party. Flowers, balloons, all the traditional things, a one-year-old Angelika enlarged eighteen times on a poster hanging above their heads.

There were a lot of people standing around, in a wide semicircle, a lot of faces. Winter recognized her parents, but nobody else. Angelika was wearing her white cap and laughing at the camera.

That was six weeks ago.

Winter continued sorting the photos into different piles. Why am I doing this? Is it a sort of private therapy because this case is so goddamn distressing? A sort of patience game? Patience. It was all a matter of patience.

The birds were singing outside the window. After a break, the rain was now pattering against the panes once again. Winter had been sitting with a photograph of Angelika in some kind of room with an exposed brick wall behind her. The brick was . . . well, brick colored. She was looking straight at the camera, but not smiling. Her face was actually expressionless, it seemed to him. There were a glass and some bottles on a table in front of her. A few empty plates with what could be some food leftovers. There was a shadow of something in the top left-hand corner of the picture. A lamp shade, perhaps, or something hanging on the wall.

It was definitely indoors, the light was coming from all directions, and he could see no suggestion of daylight. Maybe there was a faint, shadowy outline of the photographer.

He put the picture down and picked up another one with Angelika in half profile at the same table in front of the same wall, but with no shadow in the top left-hand corner. It was taken from a different angle.

A restaurant, maybe, Winter thought. A bar.

The photos had been in the same envelope as the winter pictures. Maybe they had been taken around the same time. He hadn’t found any negatives with them.

Perhaps it was a place she often went to. Maybe one of her regular haunts. Did they have any information about the places she used to go to in her free time? Yes. There were some. Was this brick wall in any of them?

There were no other photographs of places of entertainment or restaurants or bars among the three hundred pictures Winter had sifted through and laid out in about a dozen piles on the table. Not one taken indoors. There were a few of sidewalk cafés. There was a waiter making a face in one of them.

He stood up, left the room, and went to look for Lars-Olof Hansson, who was sitting by himself in the dining room, watching the rain trickle down the windowpane.

“There’s something I’d like you to take a look at,” said Winter. “If you’ve got a minute.”