Death Angels

by Ake Edwardson

  The man’s hair was blond and appeared to be parted in the middle like that of a fifties actor. As they approached each other, Macdonald saw that he was tall, maybe his own height. There was a fussiness beneath his sartorial élan and a touch of arrogance in his step. He was clean shaven, his ears stuck out a little, his face was wide and a bit too handsome and Macdonald wasn’t looking forward to this at all.

  Winter was startled to hear his own name. The man could have been an inch taller than he was, maybe six foot four. His dark brown hair was in a ponytail and he had a day-old beard. He was wearing a tattered leather jacket, a blue-and-white plaid shirt, black jeans and pointed boots. He should have a holster on his hip, Winter thought. He looks lethal.

  “Inspector Winter?”

  He had an enigmatic smile and a few wrinkles around his mouth. There were no bags under his eyes but they were awash in a weariness that lent his gaze a dull fixity. At least he doesn’t have a ring in his ear, Winter thought. “Inspector Macdonald?” He stretched out his hand.

  “I thought we’d have a beer down at the Prince George,” Macdonald said. “It’s calm and peaceful there this time of day. Much more relaxing than the police station.”

  They retraced Winter’s steps across the intersection and onto High Street. He noticed that Macdonald had a slight limp.

  “I play on the pub’s soccer team every Sunday,” Macdonald explained before he could ask. “I’m always like this at the beginning of the week. People around here think it’s an old gunshot injury and that suits me just fine.”

  “I quit a few years back.”

  “Wimp.”

  The pub was empty. Dust danced in the sunlight that poured through a lone window. The bartender nodded at Macdonald.

  “Let’s go in there,” Macdonald said, pointing to a small, oblong lounge on the other side of the bar.

  Winter draped his coat over the back of a chair and sat down. Macdonald went off and came back with two glasses of ale, still cloudy from the tap.

  “Would you rather have a lager?” Macdonald asked.

  “I always drink ale when I’m in London.” Winter hoped he didn’t sound too urbane.

  “This is Courage Directors. They also have Courage Best here, which is pretty unusual.”

  “Directors is one of my favorites.”

  Macdonald studied him. Definitely a snob, he thought, but he might have good taste anyway. “Do you come to our proud city very often?” he asked.

  “Not so much recently. And I’ve never been to this pub before.”

  “We rarely see new faces here. For some reason, most tourists stick to the area around Leicester Square.”

  “They miss out on Mame Amisha’s yams.”

  “What?”

  “She sells fresh yams down the block from here.”

  “There’s Thornton Heath for you.”

  “I walked around for a while before I called.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “But not all the way to Selhurst Park.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Crystal Palace is a lousy team, but the fans love them.”

  “Are you a fan?”

  “Of Crystal Palace?” Macdonald laughed, drank his ale and looked at Winter. “Just because I work in this district doesn’t mean I have to be as loyal as all that. If there’s any English team I root for, it’s Charlton. They’ll never make it to the Premier League, but when I moved here a very long time ago, I ended up in Woolwich around the Valley, so that’s where my allegiance lies.”

  “I would have taken you for a Scot.”

  “That’s because I am.”

  Two men walked into the lounge and nodded at Macdonald. He nodded back, and they moved to the other room.

  “Like I said, not so many new faces. But they show up occasionally, and sometimes things get out of hand.”

  “I knew Per Malmström. That’s one reason I was anxious to come to London.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “We’ll drive down to the hotel in a while. We’ve left the room just the way it was.”

  “You do understand.”

  “I was planning to go to Gothenburg, but I wanted to wait until you had been here first.”

  “Has a foreign investigator ever come to see you before? Or vice versa?”

  “An American cop was here a couple of years ago,” Macdonald said, finishing his ale. “It was also a murder, up in Peckham, which is our northern border, more or less. And I went to Kingston on a case once.”

  “Jamaica?”

  “For two weeks. A murder here that led straight to Kingston. Not so unusual for our part of London. If we scent a trail, it often goes to the Caribbean, Jamaica in particular.”

  “What happened?”

  “The police down there weren’t particularly thrilled to see me, but I learned enough that we managed to solve the case once I got back.”

  “Let’s hope we have the same luck this time.”

  “One more?” Macdonald pointed at Winter’s glass, which was almost empty.

  Winter shook his head and took out his cigarillos.

  “Those things are deadly,” Macdonald said, standing up. “I’ll go get another one anyway and let you poison yourself in peace.”

  Winter lit a cigarillo and inhaled its fragrance. There were more customers now, but they had all stayed in the outer room. Macdonald must have some kind of say-so here, he thought, but how many pints of Directors did it cost him?

  “I made it Courage Best this time.” Macdonald had returned with two more cloudy glasses. He sat back down.

  Music was playing in the other room. Winter could tell it was reggae, but heavier than the kind he’d heard now and again.

  Macdonald broke a minute’s silence. “So you knew him?”

  “Not exactly, but he grew up on the same street I did. I saw him mostly when he was a young child.”

  That child never got much older, Macdonald thought. Can I stand to hear the shrieks in the walls of that cursed room another time?

  “How did you feel when you stood in his room?”

  He gets it too, Macdonald thought. “I heard cries and screams.”

  “That’s exactly the way it is.” Winter drank from the new glass. “I hear your kids and you hear mine.”

  26

  MACDONALD TOOK CROYDON ROAD NORTHWEST THROUGH Mitcham, Morden and Merton, then headed west on Kingston Road through Streatham to Wandsworth and Clapham. Mile upon mile of red and gray brick row houses were interrupted by parks, schoolyards and stores clumped earnestly together. Thruways had become cross streets. Double-decker buses peered out over the other vehicles and lurched around corners. Cars as far as the eye could see, drivers sitting on their horns. More stores with flower and vegetable stands out front. It went on and on.

  “London is more than just Soho or Covent Garden, and all this is my territory.” Macdonald gestured to the world outside.

  All that’s living, dead and everything in between, Winter thought. “It’s a big place,” he said.

  “It’s more complicated than that. Did I mention that Croydon is the tenth largest town in England?”

  “Yes, the first time you called.”

  “I should be keeping my hands off Clapham. I’m invading the turf of my colleagues on the southwest side. But it’s my old district and the bigwigs thought I was best suited for this investigation.”

  “What did your colleagues on the southwest side have to say about that?”

  “The murder of a white foreigner? They pounded me on the back and then laughed behind it.”

  “So you’re a popular guy.”

  “More than ever.” Macdonald swerved to avoid a fruit cart that had just rolled out of an alleyway to the left. He glared at the black man who emerged behind it, clinging to the handle as if he were being pulled along.

  “Did I tell you that this so-called thoroughfare is named Kingston
Road?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s no coincidence.”

  They drove through Tulse Hill. Winter heard a whistle and saw a train pass on a viaduct above them, then clatter to a halt in front of the station building.

  “Karen and Winston Hillier live in this neighborhood,” Macdonald said.

  Winter nodded. “I want to meet them.”

  “I’ll do what I can, but Winston just got back from the hospital after a nervous breakdown. It happened when I was at their house.”

  Macdonald drove west on Christchurch Road and crossed the intersection. “The street on the right is Brixton Hill,” he said. “Follow it and there you are in the Caribbean.”

  “Ah, Brixton.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No, but I’ve heard about it.”

  “ ‘ The Guns of Brixton.’ The Clash.”

  “What?”

  “The Clash.”

  “Is that a band or something?”

  Glancing over at Winter, Macdonald laughed and hit the brake to let a taxi pull away from the curb.

  “The Only Band That Matters.”

  “Not my kind of music.”

  “I knew right off there was something wrong with you.”

  Macdonald’s police radio chattered constantly with names of districts Winter had never heard of. He could hardly make out the words. The woman at the emergency hotline coordinated the calls as if she were reciting from a script.

  “Brixton is a fascinating place,” Macdonald said. “Lots of my friends live there.”

  The traffic was backed up on Poynders Road.

  “I was thinking about the passenger lists on my way to London.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s a hell of a job.”

  “That Jamaica case I told you about before? We went through three weeks of passenger lists, and that was bad enough.”

  “We asked for them anyway.”

  “Same here, but if—I’m saying if—you go to another country to kill someone, you’re hardly going to fly under your own name.”

  “Unless the murderer is actually looking to get caught.”

  “So all we have to do is eliminate the names on the lists one by one until we reach the murderer’s, and he’ll be sitting there waiting for us to knock on his door?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s an idea. Have you talked to a forensic psychologist about it?”

  “Not yet. It’s just one possibility.”

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  The traffic began to move again, forming a semicircle around a car that had been pulled over to the shoulder and was being hoisted onto a tow truck.

  “It was a Ford Fiesta too, did you see that car?” Macdonald nodded at the side of the road.

  “Of course.”

  “There was a murder in Peckham last Christmas, and all we had to go on were a few witnesses who saw a man drive away from the scene of the crime around the time it was committed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Some witnesses said that the car was silver, another that it was brightly colored. One guy swore that it was a Mark 1 Fiesta. He didn’t see it but he heard it drive away in the night and said, ‘I’ve owned Ford Fiestas all my life, and I know one when I hear it.’ ”

  “Was he trustworthy?”

  “As far as we could tell. So we decided to check all Mark 1 Fiestas. First we concentrated on southeast England. We identified ten thousand cars. No way. We didn’t have anywhere near the staff to track all of them down.”

  “So you decided to go by color?”

  “Good thinking. We settled on silver and narrowed it down to eighteen hundred cars. Still an impossible task, considering we only had ten people and they were following up other leads at the same time.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So we zeroed in on Peckham—East Lewisham, to be exact. That left us with about a hundred and fifty cars. We didn’t get very far, because some other information came to our attention that solved the case. As it turned out, the car was green. But, sure enough, it was a Fiesta.”

  “In other words, you can trust what people hear more than what they see.”

  “Yes, but my main point is that burying yourself in a bunch of lists isn’t necessarily the way to go. Still, we keep them on hand in case we need them.”

  Winter nodded.

  “Once we have a suspect, we can check the lists and say, Aha, he flew the day after his victim.”

  Winter heard voices from the hallway but not a sound from the adjacent rooms. A car zoomed from Cautley Avenue onto Clapham Common South Side. The afternoon sun sliced through the window and lit up the opposite wall, adding a luster to the dry blood that made Winter close his eyes and see Per in front of him. He had walked through that door over there, and the remnants of his life were now splattered on the walls and floor. Winter was sweating. He loosened his tie. He had a sour taste in his mouth from the cigarillo and the top-fermented ale.

  “Do you want to be alone?” Macdonald asked.

  “Yes, if you don’t mind.”

  Macdonald turned to leave.

  “Close the door, please,” Winter said.

  He shut his eyes again and saw the photographs. Macdonald had shown them to him at his office just a few minutes earlier. The similarities to what he had encountered in Gothenburg were frightening. Per was sitting in the same position, slumped against the chair with an eerie nonchalance, his back to the door as if he were reading a book. Opening his eyes, Winter walked over and stood behind the chair. Macdonald had left it exactly where it was when Per had sat in it.

  Had Per been placed here for a reason? Had he been tied to the chair so that he could watch something enacted on the wall? Was he still alive at that point?

  All of the victims had rope marks on their bodies, but it was as if the rope was there to keep them from falling off the chair, not to prevent them from escaping. No bruises or wounds to indicate a struggle, no signs that the thin strands had frayed.

  Had Per been forced to watch another murder? A movie? Geoff had been killed at around the same time in Gothenburg. Could the murderer really have made his way from one city to the other that quickly? Maybe. Assuming it was the same person. Were there more murders that they didn’t know about? Was Per watching a video of one of them just before he died? Did it matter which way he was facing?

  Winter looked at the floor. There were traces of blood that would have thickened even while the murder was taking place, sticking to shoes, footprints swirled across the linoleum as in a dance.

  He closed his eyes again. Was music playing? Macdonald hadn’t found a CD in the room, or anything to play one on. Nobody had heard music coming from the room, no screams. All that was left was this deafening roar from the walls and floor that almost made Winter stagger backward. When he opened his eyes, the sun was gone. The walls were dull and unseeing, and if it hadn’t been for the shrieks, he would have thought that they no longer remembered what they had witnessed.

  He went out into the hallway. Macdonald was waiting by the stairs.

  “It’s going to happen again,” Winter said.

  They stood outside the Dudley Hotel. Clapham Common pulsated with activity on the other side of the street, animating Battersea, Clapham, Balham and Brixton. Winter saw schoolchildren scattered around a pond and playground, their uniforms merging into large blue and red rectangles as the teachers lined them up.

  People just home from work were walking their dogs. The wind was still gentle in his face, and the scents of spring, more powerful here than north of the river, quickened his senses. The sun painted flames on the clouds between the trees in the park.

  “Much of Clapham is upper middle class,” Macdonald said. He had followed Winter’s gaze. “There’s money here, and you’re likely to find most of it around the Common. I worked the area for several years as a detective inspector, and I’m reaping the rewards now. Or paying for my sins.”

 
Two teenage girls passed by. Their backpacks, half as big as they were, wobbled a foot above their heads as they turned left and vanished behind the buildings.

  “And we still don’t know what Per was doing in London,” Winter said.

  “Unless his parents have come up with something new.”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Maybe he wanted to spend a few days checking out the music scene.”

  “Music?”

  “From what I understand, reggae is in again. Which makes Brixton the place to go. That might be what he had in mind.”

  “We found some reggae in his room at his parents’ house but no evidence that he was a big fan.”

  “It still could have been one of his reasons for coming here.”

  “In that case somebody should have remembered seeing him when you made your inquiries after the murder.”

  “People around here don’t admit to having seen anyone.”

  “They’re scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even in such extraordinary circumstances?”

  “Nobody’s behavior changes just because something like this happens. People are genuinely afraid of each other. Brixton and parts of Clapham are rife with drugs. A lot of the crime is tied to crack.”

  “So no one admits to having seen a white kid who went around looking for music?”

  “No, but it’s always possible that they actually don’t remember him. Whites, mostly teenagers, pour into Brixton every day on the train from Victoria Station. It’s the music that brings them.”

  “And having once spent so much time here hasn’t done you any good?”

  “Not yet anyway.”

  Winter ran his fingers across his forehead. The sweat had dried, matting down his hair. All the new impressions had compounded his exhaustion from the flight, and the fear he had felt in Per’s hotel room lingered in him like a chill.

  He was hungry, which felt inappropriate somehow. He hadn’t eaten anything besides some chicken salad and a jelly roll on the plane, and the ale had given him a headache. Or maybe it was just weariness.

  “Have you had anything to eat, by the way?” Macdonald asked.

  “Only on the plane. A little snack wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”