Room No. 10

by Ake Edwardson

  But perhaps Mario needed someone to talk to, to protect him from himself.

  “I really want to be alone,” he had repeated.

  “Don’t you have someone you can talk to?” Halders asked. “A friend or a relative.”

  Ney had shaken his head.

  Halders drove out of the tunnel. The October afternoon was slowly sinking into evening. The streetlights had already come on.

  “He shouldn’t be left alone,” Halders said.

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to send someone?”

  “Let me think for a minute.”

  Halders spun through the roundabout and turned onto the highway. The river became visible. A merchant vessel was gliding into the harbor. Winter thought he could see people on the deck, despite the long distance.

  “Your minute is up,” said Halders.

  “There was something about his reaction that made me react,” said Winter.

  “Didn’t he express enough sadness?” Halders turned toward Winter. “Or too much?”

  “What did you think?”

  “I’ve seen too many reactions like that,” Halders said. “I can’t decide until I see him again.”

  “No.”

  “Sadness shows up in a thousand different ways. Reactions, delayed reactions. Shock. You know that.”

  Winter nodded.

  “Soon he’ll call with all the questions he wants to ask,” Halders said.

  “We have enough already,” Winter said, changing position in his seat. His knee had been rubbing against the dashboard. “A mother and a daughter murdered.”

  “At least there’s a connection there,” said Halders.

  “Is that some kind of gallows humor?” Winter said.

  “No.”

  They passed the Stena terminal. The lines of cars to the ferry were long. The exhaust fumes rose like smoke from the semi trucks.

  “We’ve tried looking back in Paula’s life,” Winter said after a little while. “And we haven’t gotten very far. But Paula’s past probably isn’t enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her mother, Elisabeth. We have to trace her life backward, too.”

  Halders mumbled something Winter couldn’t hear.

  “What did you say?”

  “Soon we’ll be moving more backward than forward in this case. These cases.”

  “Is it the first time?” Winter said.

  Halders didn’t answer.

  “The whole family’s past,” Winter said. “There’s something we’re not getting at there. A big secret.”

  Halders nodded.

  “A big secret,” Winter repeated.

  “Maybe not just one,” said Halders.

  • • •

  Winter didn’t need to take out the white hand to look at it. He could see it already. It wasn’t like it was for Ringmar; it wasn’t waving at him. It was closed, clenched. Something he couldn’t reach. Like the remains of a statue.

  He was sitting at home with the whiskey in his glass. Statue. The remains of a statue. What do we have here? We have a hand from a body. It’s the opposite. What do you see when you look at an ancient statue? A body, a torso. No head. No hands. The opposite now. Hand. No torso. Something is wrong.

  The middle finger on Elisabeth Ney’s right hand had been painted white. The right middle finger. There hadn’t been any cans of paint in the white storage room.

  Just one white finger. Not a whole hand.

  Winter looked at the clock. There was someone at Ney’s house now. Maybe he wouldn’t make it through the night. Up to the emergency room. Maybe the same bay.

  Winter drank his Glenfarclas. There was a scent of whiskey around him. It was a good scent. It stood for the goodness in the world. In life, too. The word “whiskey” came from the Gaelic usquebaugh. The water of life. There had still been moisture on the floor in the storeroom where they found Elisabeth Ney. The cleaning rooms had to be cleaned, too. The maid had been there shortly before the murder. Oh God, he must have waited. With her? How could the timing work out like that? Winter looked at the clock again, almost midnight. The girls were sleeping. Elsa had woken herself up with her own snoring an hour ago. The polyps. She would have an operation soon, but he pushed that thought away. It was easier for Angela. She was a doctor, and she knew everything that could go wrong but didn’t say a word about it; maybe she didn’t even think about it. There must be something compulsive about doctors: Nothing happens to anyone, especially not those in one’s own family. Elsa would be okay by the time they were on the plane to Málaga. Would he be okay? Would he be there?

  “Aren’t you coming to bed, Erik?”

  He lifted his gaze from the whiskey glass. The liquor was a beautiful color when the flame of the candle shone right through the glass.

  “Come and sit down,” he answered, making room on the couch.

  She yawned over by the door.

  “I’m just going to get a glass of water.”

  He heard the tap out in the kitchen. He heard a car go by down on Vasaplatsen, and the hoarse protests from a gang of jackdaws that were breeding in the maples. Soon the last streetcar would clatter by and people would go to rest.

  Angela came back with the glass in hand.

  “Come here,” he said, opening his arms.

  “It smells like a distillery in here,” she said.

  “Yes, isn’t it lovely?”

  “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

  “I’m working now.”

  She cuddled up against him. Winter put down his glass and pulled her even closer.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “You smell like sleep,” he said.

  “What does that smell like?”

  “Innocent,” he answered.

  “Yes, I’m innocent.”

  “I know you are, Angela.”

  “Innocent until proven guilty.”

  “You don’t need any proof here.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “And you don’t need this, either,” he said, and he unbuttoned the top button of her nightgown, and then the other buttons.

  • • •

  He dreamed about two children swinging, each on their own swing, in perfect symmetry. He was standing alongside. There was no stand for the swings; they were flying free in the air, there didn’t seem to be any law of gravity. This is a lawless land, he thought. The children laughed. He couldn’t see their faces. They laughed again. He woke up. He fought it; it was an involuntary awakening. One of the children had said something to him just before he left them. He wanted to go back to hear clearly what he hadn’t understood. Now he didn’t remember.

  Winter placed his feet on the floor. The wood was soft and warm. Angela moved in the bed behind him and mumbled something. Maybe she was dreaming. He walked across the floor and into the living room and sat down on the sofa. It was dark and quiet out there, the hour of the wolf. November first tomorrow. Scandinavia was entering the hour of the wolf that would last until next year. The merciful snow usually blew past this city to fall farther inland. The gray winter was left behind. Nothing ought to be able to be hidden in it. There was nothing to use as cover. And yet, so much was hidden. Everything, more or less. There won’t be much more sleep tonight. There won’t be much more sleep until this is over. When will it be over? Angela had asked, just before she fell asleep. But it wasn’t a question. They were planning for the immediate future, and she didn’t say anything because he didn’t say anything. He didn’t say that he might come later. That he would leave the winter, green, white, gray, but that he would leave it later because he had something he had to do first. Someone he had to meet.

  Suddenly Lilly began to scream. Another dream in the night, a nasty one. It had happened a few times. He wondered what she was dreaming. What was there that was nasty in her life, or her dream life? What was it that threatened such a small person? What was it that was allowed to threaten someone so
little?

  He got up and quickly went to her and lifted her up and felt her tears against his cheek.

  “There there, sweetheart.”

  She quieted and snuffled and he carried her into the living room. She weighed nothing, a weightless daughter. She started to nod off right away as he rocked her back and forth in front of the big window that looked out onto the city that would soon awaken. He felt her hand move against his neck. It was weightless, too, like a feather.

  • • •

  The dreams didn’t want to come back. Winter got up out of the bed again and tried to sneak out into the kitchen without waking anyone. Elsa moved in her bed but didn’t wake up.

  He sat down at the table with a glass of water. He wasn’t thirsty. Maybe the water would help him nod off. It had become more difficult to sleep.

  The shadow on the facade of the building across the courtyard formed a pattern that could depict anything. A figure, two figures. He suddenly thought of Christer Börge. A figure on his way out of the church. Börge hadn’t looked in his direction, but Winter had sensed that Börge knew that he’d been sitting there. The way he didn’t move his head. As though he could only stare straight ahead.

  Börge hadn’t changed so much that he became someone else.

  Winter hadn’t sat next to Nina Lorrinder during their visit to the church. But he had exchanged a few words with her in there last time. He wondered now whether Börge had seen it.

  • • •

  The sun hung low above the hills. In the distance he could see the facade of the hospital. It cast a large shadow, but it didn’t reach this far. The room he was standing in was very bright in the sunlight. There was a worn-out expression that said that something was bathed in light, but he had never seen the image before him. Exactly how did things bathe in light? Today, in Paula’s apartment, everything was light; there were no differences. As he stood in the middle of the floor, it struck him that the sun out there had always been hidden during the three or four times he’d been here before. It had been that kind of autumn.

  Had Paula felt threatened? Was she hiding from someone? When did the threat begin? Did it exist? He had thought about it as he had held his daughter’s little bird-body close. Maybe he had begun to think about it even as he had held her mother’s body in the same way. A long threat. No. An earlier one. No. Recent? No. A current one? No. Yes. No. Yes. Her loneliness. Paula’s loneliness. She didn’t choose it herself. Winter looked around in the shrouded apartment. Soon the shrouds would be removed and someone else would receive permission to live her life here. To live her life. It was a right.

  He walked up to the window. He could see the house he’d lived in as a young man. The chief inspector as a young man. There had been winter and summer and winter again here, but he had hardly noticed wind and weather in those days. There wasn’t time for things like that in his life. His life flung him along toward the new challenges in his chosen career. That was his life. Crime. He had had a long way to go toward a method and an attitude. His whole world was discipline; he thought like a threshing machine; he was promoted. Yes, he was promoted. What had he thought when he became chief inspector? Didn’t they say that he was the youngest in the country? Thirty-seven years old. Had he cared? Yes. No.

  He turned away from the window and walked across the plastic mat on the floor. It was, in turn, covered by a layer of plastic.

  His cell phone rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you see anything I didn’t see?” Halders asked.

  “There’s better light this time,” Winter answered.

  “Blinding,” said Halders.

  “No, the opposite. But I don’t know what I should be looking for, Fredrik. We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Letters,” said Halders, “photos.”

  Words, pictures, things that could describe a life, a past. That’s what they always came back to. The before, as Elsa had said last week. Children created the concrete language that meant what it really meant. There was the now and the before and in Winter’s world, they existed simultaneously, and all the time.

  He walked out into the kitchen as he spoke to Halders on his cell phone. The kitchen wasn’t shrouded in the same way as the other two rooms in the apartment.

  “Maybe she kept a diary,” said Halders.

  “It could be in the suitcase,” said Winter, “if there is one.”

  “Everything we need is in that suitcase,” said Halders.

  “And yet here I stand,” said Winter, “and you’ve stood here, too.”

  “Look around again,” said Halders.

  He looked around. The white paint in there was whiter than ever, applied in another layer, or several. Along with the sunshine coming through the window, the color made the kitchen blinding. Had the murderer been here? Had he sat at this table? It was the same table. Everything in this kitchen was the same as before the renovation.

  “Who talked to the painters?” Winter asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “The painters. The ones who were doing the renovations when Paula was murdered? Who talked to them?”

  “Damned if I know, Erik. Wasn’t it Bergenhem?”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Of course. But if he got anything out of them, we would have known. Bergenhem doesn’t miss things like that.”

  Winter didn’t answer. One ray of sunlight reached farther than the others and shone against one of the cupboard doors above the stove. The door looked like a piece of a sun.

  “Do you mean that they saw something we ought to know?” Halders continued.

  “They were here,” said Winter. “I don’t know how much they had to clear away before they really got to work. But they were here before us.”

  24

  The conference room was just as illuminated as Paula’s apartment. The November sun hung above Ullevi as though it had gotten the wrong season and the wrong point of the compass. No one had lowered the blinds. Halders had put on his sunglasses.

  Djanali took her hand from her eyes, got up, walked over to the window, lowered the blinds, and shrugged her shoulders at Winter, who was still standing there. He saw an airplane on its way south through the friendly skies. People still had the sense to leave; their brains hadn’t frozen to their craniums yet.

  This wouldn’t last. The sun would come to its senses again and head south, too.

  Ringmar discreetly cleared his throat and Winter turned around.

  “Feel free to speak,” he said.

  “Well, thanks,” said Halders.

  Even Ringmar smiled. And Halders was right. It was a crappy expression. In this context, everyone should always feel free to speak. Free speech was like a tradition in this part of the world, he thought. It was different down south.

  “So take advantage of that freedom,” Djanali said, nudging Halders in the side with her elbow.

  “We have someone who seems to be obsessed with hotels,” said Halders.

  “Or rather, killing people in hotels,” said Bergenhem.

  “That kind of goes without saying,” said Halders.

  Bergenhem didn’t answer.

  “Room number ten,” said Djanali.

  “What?”

  “Paula was in room number ten,” Djanali repeated, and turned toward Halders. “And . . . Börge . . . Ellen Börge had checked into room number ten.”

  She looked at Winter, who was still standing by the window. He seldom left that position during these talks. It was good to stand a bit apart; the words sometimes worked better if they could fly a bit farther, and it might be the same with thoughts. The point was that the thoughts should fly. Sometimes it worked.

  “Yeah, yeah, her,” said Halders. “I guess she’s still missing, from what I understand.”

  “Is she still part of the background of this investigation?” Bergenhem asked.

  “Has she ever been part of it?” Halders said. “Erik? Are you still thinking about her?”

  “I haven’t
for a while,” said Winter.

  “That’s a coincidence,” said Halders.

  Winter didn’t answer.

  “She’s gone,” said Halders.

  “Elisabeth Ney is, too,” said Djanali.

  “What does that mean?” said Halders.

  “I don’t really know. But she’s the one we’re talking about here, first and foremost.”

  “You’re the one who mentioned room number ten,” said Halders.

  “You’re the one who mentioned hotels,” said Djanali.

  “How did he get in?” said Winter, and every head turned toward him. “Elisabeth’s murderer. He must have moved around the Hotel Odin. Presumably several times. How did he get in without anyone noticing him?”

  “Maybe someone did,” said Bergenhem. “We haven’t questioned everyone yet.”

  “A disguise,” said Halders.

  “How?” Bergenhem asked.

  Halders shrugged his shoulders.

  “It doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter what anyone saw. It wasn’t him, anyway.”

  “It was someone,” said Djanali. “That might be enough.”

  “The long coat?”

  “It works better in October, anyway,” said Ringmar, “compared to August.”

  “It’s November now,” said Djanali.

  “Of course, the question is also how she got in,” said Bergenhem.

  “And what shape she was in then,” said Halders.

  “She was murdered in there,” said Ringmar. “We know that much.”

  “How could he arrange a meeting with her in there?” said Bergenhem. “Why did she go along with meeting there?”

  “Maybe that’s not where she thought she was going,” said Ringmar. “He could have carried her, shoved her.”

  “So their rendezvous was out in the stairwell?” said Halders, looking around. “Well, if that’s the case, it clears this right up.”

  “Your sarcasm is really a big help to all of us, Fredrik,” said Djanali.

  “Rendezvous,” said Winter. “Do you know what that word actually means, Fredrik?”

  “Yeah, what about it? . . . It means meeting. A planned meeting.”