The Shadow Woman (18 page)

 

It was so hot, so it was strange that the little girl didn’t come outside for a dip in the wading pool. Many days had passed. It had been hot for such a long time now, but she didn’t know when she had last seen the girl. Nor the mother, but she wasn’t so far gone as not to realize that she couldn’t quite keep track of time the way she used to. Elmer wasn’t around anymore. He used to wind up the clock or say when it was getting on toward evening. It was hard to know what time it was when it took so long for it to get dark. But now it went quicker because the skies were turning toward fall.

Ester Bergman heard the children’s voices through the window she’d cracked open. She didn’t believe in keeping the windows wide open when it was hot. It just made it hotter inside. She had a good temperature in there.

The children jumped into the water, but there wasn’t much water to speak of. So close to the sea and still they couldn’t go there. Perhaps they didn’t want to, but nor could they; she understood that much. Perhaps there wasn’t any sea where they came from. Desert maybe, mountains and such.

The girl didn’t have black hair, and not all the children in the courtyard did either.

She thought the girl lived in one of the units to the left, on the short end of the yard, but she hadn’t seen her go in or out of it, because the gable blocked the entrance from view. Maybe it was because the girl had red hair that she remembered her and wondered where she was. A few of the other children had light hair, but none of them had red hair.

The girl had walked past her window on the way to the playground. She never ran.

The girl’s mother had light hair and always sat by herself. Perhaps that was another reason why she remembered the girl, because the mother never spoke to anyone. They were never in the courtyard for very long. After a while the mother would take the girl, and they would go back inside again or leave the building altogether. She had wondered several times where it was they went. But what business is it of mine? she had thought.

The mother had smoked, and she hadn’t liked seeing that. There weren’t many other mothers in the courtyard who smoked, as far as she could tell.

A couple of times over the past week she had thought she’d seen the girl, but it wasn’t her. She didn’t know what her voice sounded like. And she’d never heard the mother speak to the girl either.

I guess I miss that little moppet, she thought. They must have moved out, but I didn’t see any moving van.

SHE WAS GIVEN OTHER CLOTHES BUT SHE DIDN’T WANT TO PUT
them on. The man said that she had to change clothes when he went out, and so she took off the old ones she’d had on for a long time.

She coughed. She felt hot in her face and on her body.

Where did the dress come from? It wasn’t hers, but it didn’t look new. It didn’t smell of anything.

The man wasn’t there. She had the slip of paper in her hand. Was it because they were looking for the slip of paper that she had to take off her pants? They hadn’t said anything. She looked around, but there was no place where she could put the slip of paper. She felt inside the dress for a pocket and found one. She’d had a dress before, so she knew to look for it.

She pulled the dress over her head. If she crumpled up the paper a little, it fit right into the pocket and she could sort of put a flap of the fabric over it. She patted it on the outside and couldn’t feel the paper.

It seemed like they were back where they had been before, except it didn’t look exactly the same. Had the windows been moved? Can you move a window like a table or a chair?

Mommy was out there. She thought about Mommy, but it was hard without getting sad.

“Have you slept?”

She tried to say she had slept, because she thought that’s what he wanted her to say. But no sound came out and she had to try again, and then it worked. After that she coughed. She was sweating.

“Sit still,” he said, and took hold of her shoulder with one hand and held the other to her forehead. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear. Then he said a bad word. “You’re hot,” he said again, and she coughed again. He shouted something to someone else, and she heard an answer.

“The kid’s got a fever.”

Someone said something from somewhere else.

“I said the kid’s sick!”

She heard something that sounded like another bad word.

He left and she thought about how her dress was a little damp under her arms and along her back because she was so hot. She lay down on the mattress and that felt good, so she closed her eyes. It sounded like the man was back, but she didn’t want to look up. Then he took hold of her again.

“You have to sit up and drink this,” he said.

She didn’t want to, but he lifted her.

“You have to drink this while it’s hot,” he said, and she opened her eyes and saw the cup. “Then you can lie down again.”

She took a sip but her throat hurt when she swallowed. Then it felt a little better, but when she tried to drink again it hurt.

“Does it hurt?”

She nodded.

“Do you have a sore throat?”

She nodded again.

“It’ll feel better afterward,” he said.

She said that she wanted to lie down. He laid her down and took the cup with him. She closed her eyes. She started to dream.

HALDERS ENTERED THE COFFEE ROOM AND POURED HIMSELF A
fresh cup. He sat down at Ringmar’s table and lifted his gaze toward the window. “What a circus.”

It was the second day of what the city’s tabloids had been calling, among other things, “Terror!” Two hundred thousand issues had been sold, and there was nothing strange about that. Gothenburg
had
exploded—at least parts of it. The smart-asses said it had come as no surprise. “To think we’re the ones who are supposed to stay one step ahead of these guys,” Ringmar said to Halders.

“What did you say?”

“Surveillance department. We’re supposed to have our ear to the ground. To be monitoring developments. Be a step ahead.”

“Who could have seen this coming?” Halders raised his hand toward Ullevi and the drama that was still unfolding out there.

“I was mainly thinking about Vårväderstorget.”

“How’s Stålnacke doing?”

“He lost a lot of blood,” Ringmar said, “but he’ll pull through. He’ll be able to walk.”

“The question is whether he’ll be able to take a piss again, let alone be able to—”

“We can’t exactly have people everywhere, can we?” Ringmar interrupted.

“And now we’re going to spread our resources even more thinly.”

“We’re going to bring in the ones who shot Stålnacke.”

“That seems like a concrete assignment,” Halders said. “Something you can really sink your teeth into.”

“How do you mean?”

“The murder at Delsjö is going cold. You know it is. It’s going cold, no matter what Winter says.”

“The cars,” Ringmar said. “That’s something.”

“A shot in the dark,” Halders said, “but okay. A Ford Escort. That’s concrete all right. But more to the point, it’s a hell of a lot of work.”

Ringmar seemed to prick up his ears when the megaphone bawled again outside. “It’s awful,” he said.

“What is?”

Ringmar gestured at the window but didn’t answer.

 

The friendly match between Sweden and Denmark, scheduled for that evening at Ullevi Stadium, had to be postponed. The management of the Swedish Football Association had made discreet inquiries with the police about whether the “incident” might be over in time but had been given no guarantees.

The man on the bus was a Kurd, and the boy at his side was his son. After seven years in Sweden, they were going to be deported. The boy had lived in Sweden for six years. The Migration Board was certain the man and his family were from northern Iran, and that’s where he was going to be deported to. Turkey was an alternative. The man claimed that he risked being imprisoned or even put to death in both countries, in different ways, for different reasons. Different forms of execution. The state authority, which an increasing number of people dubbed the Emigration Board, displayed pride and emotional zeal for doing what is right and proper. When the man arrived, he was given another name and another nationality because he feared being sent back to the terror. But he had lied, and now he was going to be deported.

Winter stood at the edge of the mass of onlookers. Maybe someone ought to put up some bleachers, he thought. Charge admission.

He knew that the man sitting in that bus, a hundred yards away, had committed an emergency lie to make it into Sweden. Maybe he’d left a job as a consultant and a seven-room house in Diyarbakir or Tabriz just because he felt like trekking through Syria with his family before hopping a cruise to Scandinavia. Perhaps the family was just having a hard time explaining why they didn’t want to return to the fertile land they had left behind. There is no room here in any case. Sweden is too built up, Winter thought. The forests are full of towns and densely populated villages.

He closed his eyes and saw a forest in front of him. Water glittered between the trees. Everything was green to his unseeing eyes. He saw a path and someone walking along that path. He recognized himself. He was holding a child by the hand.

He opened his eyes again and everything was black and white. The asphalt was black beneath his feet, and it turned increasingly white as he raised his gaze toward the bus, which stood right in the sun. It must be 120 degrees in there, he thought. Not even a man who’s grown up in the hottest country in the world could hold out for much longer. It must be a question of hours, perhaps minutes. Let there be an end to it.

A small negotiating team moved toward the bus. The people all around were very quiet. A helicopter hovered overhead. Winter heard radio and TV reporters speaking nearby. He heard the events taking place in front of him described to him.

Ringmar said something. He’d come outside and seen Winter and was standing next to him.

“What?”

“I think this will be over soon,” Ringmar said.

“Yes.”

“We might also have a lead on the shooters at the square.”

“Was it an internal settling of scores?” Winter asked.

“Depends on how you look at it. Essentially, it’s the same desperation we’re experiencing here,” Ringmar said. “We’re headed toward the end of the century and the end of the world as we know it.”

 

His cell phone vibrated in his inner pocket as he stepped out of the elevator.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Erik. I thought it was about ti—”

“Hello, Mother.”

“What’s going on over there? We just had the newspapers delivered, and it looks just terrible.”

“Yes.”

“First that murder. And then those people shooting at each other. And now a kidnapping too!”

“There’s no kidnapping.”

“There isn’t? Someone’s kidnapped a boy and is hold—”

“They’re father and son,” Winter said.

“Father and son? I don’t understand.”

“No.”

“Father and son? How awful.”

He had reached his office. The phone on his desk rang.

“Hang on, Mother,” he said, and lifted the receiver and put the cell phone down. “Winter,” he said.

“Janne here. We’ve received a few more phone calls and letters in response to the poster. You want the copies and transcripts now or are you coming over here?”

Winter considered his office chair. He felt that he needed to sit down for a moment and think about his murder investigation. Möllerström would put together a nice package of all the witnesses’ statements. “Send it up,” he said. He hung up the receiver and retrieved his cell phone.

“Here I am again,” he said to his mother, who was sitting in a house in Marbella. He couldn’t hear his father in the background, but he guessed that he was close by, with a glass in his hand and a weary gaze directed out at the dusty palm trees and the foreign wind. Winter didn’t really know how the place looked, apart from the photographs that his mother had sent and he’d only glanced at. The house was white and stood next to several other houses in the same style. In one picture his mother sat on a veranda built out of white stone. It looked lonely. The sun behind her was on its way down, the sky so blue that it looked black against the whiteness. His father may have taken the photo, since he wasn’t there on the veranda. His mother looked as though she were searching for something in the eye of the camera. She was smiling, but he had looked at the photograph long enough to see that it wasn’t a happy smile. She looked like someone who had reached a goal and become confused or disappointed.

“I heard from Lotta that you’d been to see her,” she said. “It made me so happy. And her too, I can tell you.”

“Yes.”

“It means so much to her. She’s more alone than you know.”

Then why don’t you come home? he thought.

“She’s coming down to see us in October with the girls.”

“That’ll do her good.”

“It’s her fortieth birthday. Imagine.”

“A big day.”

“Your big sister.”

“Mother, I—”

“I don’t dare ask you to come down here anymore. It’s a crying shame, Erik. We’d so like for you to come down. Your father especially.”

He didn’t answer. He thought he heard something close to her, a voice, but it might have been a Spanish wind or a Spanish seabird.

“I don’t know what to do about it,” his mother said.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“I can’t do more.”

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“Can’t you call next time? On the weekend?”

“I’ll try.”

“You never call. It’s pointless my even asking. It’ll be just the same as it always is. How’s Angela?”