Death Angels

by Ake Edwardson

  Chunks of ice floated below the bridge. The setting sun struck the water and turned the river into a trail of broken glass.

  A cutter cleaved the surface on the way to the sea as if it had diamonds in its propeller. West of the bridge, it met the Catfish, soaring above the water on its way in from Denmark. He heard nothing, the hovercraft a burst of movement without sound.

  He left the bridge behind and found himself surrounded by the silence that wafted through the city from the sea.

  It must be possible to get hold of a sailboat at a decent price, he thought. Martina would be glad for some time alone, wouldn’t she?

  He put a tape on and turned up the volume until it was just short of unbearable. The traffic flowed soundlessly outside the window.

  The sign was lit up, just like the last time. He parked in the same spot. The door looked different now that he knew what it was like inside. He walked quickly past the racks of magazines, through the curtain and into the club proper. There were men at all the tables except the one closest to the door, and that’s where he sat down.

  A woman was dancing on a table next to the stage at the far end of the room. The customers clapped every once in a while. No music was playing this time.

  Tina Turner deserves a break, he thought. A waiter in a white shirt and dark bow tie came and took his order, returning a couple of minutes later with his Coke. He raised his glass and sucked an ice cube into his mouth to chew on.

  “Back already?” The owner stopped halfway through the curtain.

  “You don’t waste any time.”

  The owner didn’t respond.

  “I had a couple more questions for you.”

  The owner stayed where he was, cigarette in hand.

  “This is fine right here. We don’t have to go into your office.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Isn’t the curtain bothering you?”

  “Is that the first question?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “It’s a great curtain, exotic, just like our dancers.”

  “It looks like something out of a silent movie.”

  The owner held up his hand in resignation and sat down across from Bergenhem. He peered over at the glass on the table. “We can spike your drink if you like.”

  Bergenhem asked himself what Winter would have done in this situation. He sipped his Coke, feeling the icy cold on his tongue. “With what?” he asked, though it was obvious he was being offered any substance of his choice. “How about rum?”

  The owner went off and talked to the bartender, then returned, and soon the waiter appeared with a couple of drinks. “For our friends only,” the owner said, lifting his glass once the waiter was gone.

  This is an innocent enough game, Bergenhem thought. He’s testing me, but for what? “I just remembered I’m driving,” he said.

  “A few sips won’t hurt you.”

  This is pure strategy on my part, Bergenhem thought, raising the glass to his lips.

  “Was there something you wanted from me?” the owner asked.

  The music started to pound like a pile driver through rock. The low bass made Bergenhem’s forehead throb. Is this another test? he wondered.

  The owner studied him. The volume was lowered and the treble turned up. Two women climbed onto the stage. Tina Turner again.

  The owner leaned over the table. “I’m still waiting.”

  “Is Tina Turner the only thing you’ve got here?”

  The owner glanced over at the stage, then fixed his eyes on Bergenhem once more. He was wearing an open-neck plaid shirt, suspenders and dark pants with cuffs. The painted floodlights along the wall lent a red tinge to everything in the room. “It’s the best music to dance to,” he said after half a minute.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Are you trying to make me angry?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then what did you come for?”

  “Last time I was here, I forgot to ask you about the kinds of customers you have, whether there’s any difference between them and the ones who patronize other clubs.”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”

  “Are you sure? Every club’s got its own little specialty, right?”

  “I have no idea what you’re getting at.”

  Bergenhem eyed the stage. He recognized both women. The younger one looked even thinner than before. Her lips were crimson. He suddenly wished the owner weren’t there.

  “You’re mistaken if you expect to find anything here,” the owner said. “Just take a look around. I see you’re already checking out the show.”

  Bergenhem managed to take his eyes off the women. The song ended, and another one started up after a few seconds. You’re simply the best, Tina Turner thundered, better than all the rest.

  “This isn’t a gay club,” the owner said.

  “You’ve had a drag show or two in your time.”

  “Is that so. Were you here?”

  “That’s not the question. We’re not prejudiced against anyone.”

  The owner shook his head in bafflement and stood up. “Feel free to finish your drink.” He rustled his way back through the curtain.

  The show continued for another ten minutes. The women left the room. Bergenhem sat quietly, sniffed his drink once but didn’t touch it again. He didn’t want to leave the car outside overnight. He’d assumed the owner would hang around for a while if he was drinking, but that had turned out to be a miscalculation. Perhaps just as well, he thought.

  The younger woman stepped out of the doorway by the stage and walked to the closest table, where three men got up and pulled over a chair for her. Her black dress glistened in the red light. She took a cigarette out of her purse. One of the men flicked open a lighter even before she could put the cigarette between her lips. He said something and she laughed. Bergenhem studied their every move.

  The woman stood up and went back out through the door, followed by the man who had lit her cigarette. Other women sat at a number of the tables, but there were more men. Bergenhem waited.

  25

  WlNTER TOOK THE ELEVATOR UP FROM THE UNDERGROUND AND passed through the gates with his London Regional Transport ticket. Out on Earl’s Court Road, he was assaulted by the odors of the city: gasoline fumes, deep-fried fish, rotting garbage and that pungent blend of cobblestone and dusty streets you encounter only in truly old places.

  Spring was lurking somewhere. The sun shone through the fog, making it warmer here than in Gothenburg. Along the Piccadilly Line—which stretched eastward through Hounslow, Osterley, Ealing and Acton—the maples were about to sprout, the gardens wakening. Children were chasing balls across Osterley Park. Children chased balls all year round, but never as when spring flirted with them like this.

  He had seen it all before. He was a stranger, but less of one each time he returned. London was his city too.

  The mood in the train had been the usual mixture of anticipation and jadedness. The passengers who’d boarded at the airport were back-packing teenagers, middle-aged couples and a few solitary travelers who studied their maps for the entire forty-five minutes to Kensington and beyond. He heard Italian, German and something he thought was Polish, not to mention Swedish and Norwegian.

  As they approached downtown, Londoners got on. White men in chalk-stripe suits and briefcases, the Daily Telegraph under their arms. Black women with children who stared wide-eyed at all the foreigners. Thin young women with skin as translucent as the hazy sky shivered in their short skirts, and he had suddenly felt awkward in his camel hair coat.

  When the walk signal appeared, Winter crossed Earl’s Court Road with his suitcase rolling behind, turned left and then right onto Hogarth. He continued a couple of blocks to Knaresborough Place. Crossing the quiet intersection, he heard the low rumble of traffic on Cromwell Road to the left. Just a stone’s throw farther and you could actually stand still and listen to the birds sing.

  He rang the bell
next to a door with a big 8 on it. Arnold Norman, the manager of the little apartment hotel, opened the door with his hand already outstretched.

  “Inspector Winter! It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  “The feeling is mutual, Arnold.”

  “Where have you been all this time?”

  “I was wondering the same thing.”

  When Norman stepped aside, a younger man who had been standing behind him took Winter’s suitcase. He walked quickly toward a stairway that cast a long shadow across the lobby.

  Winter had stayed here often over the past ten years, whenever he was in London. The location was superb, a little way from the din up in Piccadilly and walking distance to King’s Road in Chelsea, not to mention Kensington High Street and Hyde Park.

  They took their seats in Norman’s tiny office. “I’ve held suite T2 for you.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You look terrific.”

  “But older,” Winter said.

  Norman was a survivor, his rustic establishment a mere half block from Cromwell Road. “All our worries will soon be over,” he said.

  “You’re only ten years older than me.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about a bunch of crazy Scots who have started to clone sheep up in the Highlands.”

  “Isn’t it against the law?”

  “To clone sheep?”

  “To clone at all.”

  “I don’t think they bothered asking.”

  “What does that have to do with old age?”

  “They’re going to create an immortal race, and what bothers me is that every one of them will be a Scot. It’s bad enough they’re all going to look alike, which they already do, but now the world will be stuck with them forever.”

  “So it would have been a different story if the experiments had been conducted in England?”

  Norman eyed him with feigned incredulity. “You’re not implying I’m a chauvinist or something, are you?”

  Winter smiled and got up. “Take me to my rooms.”

  The suite was on the second floor, its windows overlooking a tranquil courtyard to the east. It consisted of a bedroom, a living room and a large kitchenette with a dining alcove. The bathroom actually worked, a rarity in England—you could turn on the faucets without attending a crash course in the aqueducts of ancient Rome.

  He took off his jacket and shirt and was about to splash some water under his armpits but decided to shower instead. It could be a long day.

  A towel around his waist, he lifted the wall phone off the hook and dialed, opening the drapes while he waited. It was one-thirty, and the sunlight that flooded the room was unlike anything he’d ever seen in this hotel. Maybe spring had arrived after all. A patch of blue sky framed the sooty buildings in the distance.

  “Four Area Southeast, Major Investigation Pool, Detective Constable Barrow,” a woman answered.

  “Chief Inspector Erik Winter from Sweden here. May I speak to Steve Macdonald?”

  “Hold on, please,” she said flatly.

  There was a murmur at the other end. The constable was talking to somebody seated nearby. Winter heard a shuffling sound.

  “Macdonald.”

  “It’s Erik Winter.”

  “Ah, Winter. Delayed again?”

  “I’m in London.”

  “Good to hear it. Where exactly?”

  “At my hotel on Earl’s Court Road.”

  “I can send someone to pick you up, but it will take a while.”

  “Isn’t British Rail just as fast?”

  “Depends.”

  “If you’re down in Thornton Heath, I know how to get there. My timetable says the train leaves from Victoria Station.”

  “It takes twenty-five minutes, and you’ll see some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.”

  “That clinches it.”

  “Take the District Line from Earl’s Court to Victoria Station. It’s only a couple of stops.”

  “I know.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Winter could tell Macdonald had already made up his mind: Mr. Scandi-know-it-all has arrived.

  “You’re starting to figure me out.”

  “Call when you get to Thornton Heath Station and I’ll send someone for you,” Macdonald said and hung up.

  Victoria Station felt like the center of the world. If only I could get on the Orient Express right now, he thought. A quiet investigation onboard, all suspects assembled in the bar car.

  The city never felt so close as at this station. Winter was standing by the southern exits, looking up at the information that flapped onto the departure board. The train to Tattenham Corner, which stopped at Thornton Heath, had just arrived.

  There was hardly anyone else in his car as the train jolted its way out of the station. The sky was incandescent behind the chimney tops that hovered over the river. They crossed the water and stopped at Battersea Park Station: red brick, graffiti, but less than he would have imagined. People waiting on the benches. Not a sound to be heard. There’s a wall of silence around people who are traveling, Winter thought. They’re in a state of suspension, not at home and not somebody else’s guest either—a no-man’s-land whose chief occupation is waiting.

  The purpose of the trip, even the altered slant of the sun at this latitude, saddened him. He had come to London, and to the south side of the river specifically, because death was his constant companion. The premonition plaguing him from the start of the investigation continued to nag—that they had seen only the beginning, that evil was preparing its next inscrutable assault. Whatever direction he took, menace was his journey and his destination. He was alone, and he had no faith in anything.

  South London—never described in guidebooks, rarely visited by foreigners—stretched out to his right. He had been on this side of the river only a couple of times, and then no farther than the Putney and Barnes areas to take in some jazz.

  Buildings of medieval brick composed an eternal city in which nothing rose above two stories as far as he could see. A man in shorts jogged across Wandsworth Common. When the train pulled out of the station again, he watched some schoolchildren playing soccer on a little gravel field. Their jackets were bright green like the buds of spring.

  This part of the city was lusher than he’d expected, with more open fields than north of the river, as though the buildings had sprung up in total ignorance of the metropolis.

  At Streatham Common he saw the tower of a mosque. Veiled women sat and waited on rough-hewn benches. Two black men, both wearing leather jackets and knit caps, entered the train, the music from their headphones an audible murmur.

  He got off at the next station. Thornton Heath was immersed in shadow; the platform itself was below street level. As he climbed the stairs, a newspaper flapped by his ankle on its way down.

  The station building was untended. Three black girls stood in a corner waiting for something to happen. Cars swished by outside the open entranceway, and when he came out on Brigstock Road, he felt as though he were in a faraway country, light-years from London. The passersby were Indian, Pakistani, Caribbean, Chinese, Korean and African.

  He walked down a little hill, continued on High Street to an intersection and followed Whitehorse Lane for a block or two. He knew if he went another couple of blocks, he would come to Selhurst Park, a refuge for the ragged soccer fans in the poor sections of Croydon. He had seen a few matches in London, but only at the large stadiums on the north side.

  He turned before the viaduct and passed Mame Amisha’s Foreign Foods, which advertised “new puna yams” on a handwritten cardboard sign. The yams lay in plaited baskets outside the store. Bananas hung on poles in the window. He walked by the Prince George pub and was back at the station. He took out his phone and called Macdonald, who answered on the first ring.

  “I’m by the flower stand outside the station.”

  “If you go down the hill and turn left again at Woolworth’s, you’
ll find yourself on Parchmore Road. I feel like taking a stroll myself, so if you stay on the right side of the street, you’ll run into me in ten minutes or so.”

  “Okay.”

  It occurred to him that Macdonald hadn’t bothered to ask him what he looked like. He’ll know you’re a policeman by the way you walk, he thought.

  He headed back toward the intersection and was just about to turn in front of Woolworth’s when he saw a white man grab a young black guy by the scruff of his neck outside the main entrance.

  “The little shoplifter is back, I see,” the man said. Winter noticed a badge on his chest. Several black men stood in a circle around the security guard and his prey.

  “I didn’t do anything,” the young guy said.

  “What’s this, then?” The security guard held up an electric shaver.

  “I didn’t take it.”

  “Let’s go.” The security guard shoved his way through the circle, hulking over the culprit.

  Winter crossed Parchmore Road, turned left and weaved his way north between the gravel heaps and the road workers.

  Macdonald walked down the stairs, through the garage and out onto the street, the sun warming his head. He let his leather jacket hang open and left his gloves in his pocket. London is putting on its best face for its Swedish visitor, he thought. He’s going to get the wrong impression.

  He headed south. He was stiff after a morning bent over witness statements, and his eyeballs felt like they’d been glued to their sockets. His body was too heavy, his spirit too anxious.

  Half a block before him was a man in an unbuttoned camel hair coat. The suit underneath was somewhere between blue and steel gray, with trouser cuffs.

  It must be him, Macdonald thought. He walks just like he talks. It’s a miracle he hasn’t been mugged. Has he held his badge out in front of him the whole way from the station?