Never End

by Ake Edwardson

  Now it's happened to me, he thought. Hit me with full force. This is no dipping into somebody else's misfortune. This is my very own.

  He stroked Margareta's cheek.

  There had been a first time.

  Damn the thought. He'd been nineteen ... no ... yes, nineteen. He'd been like the girls he and Winter had been talking about only half an hour ago.

  Then he was twenty-two, soon to be a fully qualified cop.

  He stroked her cheek again.

  The divorce hadn't meant anything. Not in that way. It didn't come between them in that way.

  Somebody spoke. He wasn't listening, kneeled by the side of the stretcher, intended doing so for a long time. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Winter.

  It was as light as day when Winter got home that evening. Light shone into the flat. There was a smell of food in the hall, but he wasn't hungry any more.

  He'd phoned Angela some hours previously.

  He went in to Elsa and wondered about waking her up, but contented himself with smelling her, and listening.

  Angela was waiting in the kitchen with a glass of wine.

  'I'll have a whisky,' said Winter and went over to the work surface, took one of the bottles and poured a few centimetres into a chubby glass. This wasn't the time for a delicate malt whisky glass.

  'Oh dear.'

  'You can have the rest if I can't manage to drink it all.'

  'Just because I've finished breastfeeding doesn't mean I'm ready to become an alcoholic.'

  'Cheers,' said Winter, taking a swig. Angela raised her wine glass.

  'Are you hungry?'

  Winter shook his head, felt the punch of the whisky reverberate through his body, sat down at the table and looked at Angela, who was a little flushed. It was hot in the kitchen.

  'How's Fredrik?' she asked.

  Winter absently waved his hand: Halders is still with us. He hasn't broken down altogether.

  'What'll happen to the children?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'What I say. How are the children?'

  You said "what'll happen to the children". That's obvious, surely. They're with Halders.'

  Angela said nothing.

  'Don't you think he can handle it?'

  'I didn't say that.'

  'It sounded a bit like it.'

  Angela didn't reply. Winter took another gulp.

  'They're in the house at Lunden,' he said. 'Halders thought that was best. For the moment.'

  'I agree.'

  'He was resolute, I suppose you could say,' Winter said. 'When we left the hospital. Drove to their school.'

  Angela took a sip of wine, thought about the children.

  'It was horrific,' Winter said. 'An horrific experience. A teacher stayed with them in the school until we got there.' He took another slug of whisky. It didn't taste of anything any more, apart from alcohol. 'It had happened while they were still in class and so ... well, they were still there.'

  'Did you drive them home?'

  'Yes.' Winter looked at the clock. 'It took a few hours.'

  'Of course.' She stood up, went to the cooker and switched off the fan. There was a different kind of silence in the kitchen. Winter could hear sounds from the courtyard. Glasses. Voices. 'But they're not on their own there now, I take it?'

  'Hanne's there,' Winter said. He'd phoned the police chaplain, Hanne Östergaard. She was good at talking to people. Consoling them, perhaps. He didn't know. Yes. Consolation. 'Halders didn't object when I suggested it.' He could hear the voices again, a bit louder, but no words that could be made out. 'Hanne was going to phone for a psychologist, I think. They talked about it in any case.'

  'Good.'

  'And Aneta came.'

  'Aneta? Aneta Djanali?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why?'

  'Halders phoned her. She came straight over.'

  'Do they work together a lot?'

  'Nearly all the time.'

  'Don't they have a bit of a strained relationship?'

  'Where do you get that idea from?'

  'Come on, Erik! We've spent a bit of time with them. You've said the odd thing ...'

  'Oh ... that was just the kind of thing you say.' He raised his glass and saw to his surprise that it was empty. He stood up and went over to the bottle. 'He evidently needs her now.' He poured. Three-quarters of an inch. 'It's not good to be alone. With the children.'

  'No relatives?'

  'Not in Gothenburg, it seems.'

  Angela looked out of the window when he sat back down. It was beginning to get dark out there, with yellow lines over the sky above the rooftops. She could hear voices and the clink of glasses from the courtyard.

  'I haven't been able to stop thinking about the children,' she said, turning to face Winter again. 'Were they completely devastated?'

  'No. Not superficially at least. Very quiet. The shock, I suppose.'

  Somebody burst out laughing in the courtyard below, others joined in. He stood up and went to the window. Four storeys down, a group of friends was making the most of the summer's night. He closed the window, but stayed where he was.

  What would happen now? He needed Halders, but he wouldn't dwell on that for a single minute if Halders decided to stay at home. It was up to him. Winter was not going to lean on him. We're people before anything else, after all.

  He went back to Angela and his whisky.

  6

  It was hot in his office, suffocated by summer. No wind outside, nothing to suck into the room that would change the air clinging to everyone's skin.

  Winter looked at the stack of files in front of him; papers, photographs. There were fresh print-outs made by Möllerström from the hard disks, but most of the stuff smelled of the past. Five years ago, another summer. Beatrice Wägner. The papers concerning her violent death had an odour of dust and dry darkness, gave a false impression of peace, so pervasive that it almost made him push aside these cold case notes and instead take up the newly begun file on Angelika Hansson.

  Reports on murder collected for eternal reading, over and over again. No peace. He'd had a special file of press cuttings brought to his office. The newsprint felt as if it were a hundred years old when he touched it.

  He stood up, went to the open window and lit a Corps. The cigarillo tasted pure and soft after leafing through the old documents. It was his third of the morning. He smoked more than twenty a day. Each one was going to be his last. No smoking at home any more, which was a good thing. Another good thing: Corps Diplomatique was a brand on its way out. His tobacconist had warned him. Every pack could be his last, but Winter was not in favour of hoarding. When Corps were no longer available, he'd stop smoking.

  He inhaled, and watched the flow of traffic on the other side of the river. Tram, bus, car, tram again, pedestrians. All bathed in sunshine that cast no shadows now, as lunchtime approached.

  When there are no Corps any more, I'll pack it in.

  When there are no corpses any more, I'll pack it in. Ha!

  He went back to his desk. He'd made up his mind to work his way through the files on the Beatrice Wägner case, from the very beginning. All the witness reports, all the summaries. If there was anything there that could be of use to the present investigation, he'd find it. Try to find it. No – find it.

  Beatrice Wägner had lived with her parents in a detached house in Påvelund, a western suburb of Gothenburg. Just over a kilometre south of the house in Långedrag where Jeanette Bielke lived. And it couldn't be much more than two kilometres south from Påvelund to the house in Önnerud when Angelika Hansson had lived, Winter noted. Due south.

  He stood up again, went over to the wall map of Gothenburg and traced with his finger a line running due north from the Hanssons' house through the Wägners' and ending up at Jeanette Bielke's home. A dead straight line. It was a peculiarity, but didn't necessarily mean anything. Probably didn't.

  He kept looking at the map. Beatrice Wägner had atte
nded the grammar school in Frölunda. Like Angelika and Jeanette, she'd passed her final exams. She'd stayed in Gothenburg when most of her friends had gone away on holiday. He recalled that she'd had some sort of summer job. Jeanette hadn't had a summer job. Angelika had worked in a warehouse.

  Three girls, all of them nineteen years old. Just left school. Two of them this summer, and the third in summer five years ago. Three different schools. Jeanette had said she didn't know Angelika. Had she known Beatrice? He must ask her about that. It wasn't impossible, after all. They lived quite close to each other, in up-market suburbs next to the sea.

  Had it always been the case? Had they attended the same primary school, perhaps? Junior school? Calm down, Erik. There's no time to find the answer to every question now.

  Had Beatrice and Angelika known each other?

  Three girls. One was still alive, the other two were dead.

  He remained standing by the map. If he boiled down all his questions to just one, to The Question, would it be: did they all fall foul of the same murderer? The same bastard, as Halders had put it in this very office. Jeanette too?

  Winter continued reading, smoking at his desk now. Followed Beatrice through her last hour, or hours. She'd been in the town centre with some friends. Had she been with them the entire time? That wasn't absolutely clear. They'd split up soon after one in the morning. Sunday morning. Five of them had gone off together and stopped off at a 7-Eleven five hundred yards from the park, and there, outside the shop, or inside it, something had happened to cause Beatrice to leave her friends.

  Winter read through the witness reports. There was a slight mist around the words, as if these young people had memories that weren't really functioning. Winter knew what the problem was, he'd seen it hundreds of times. They were simply drunk, or at least in various stages of inebriation, and now the alcohol had started to leave their bodies, but their senses were not properly sharp and such things can make a person irritable and nervous, and something like that had applied to the scene at the shop. Something had annoyed Beatrice and she'd left. Yes, they could recall that she'd been annoyed, but nobody could remember why. Perhaps she'd tried to light up a cigarette inside the 7-Eleven. Perhaps she just hated the whole world at that drunken moment. There had been alcohol in her blood, but not very much.

  She'd walked towards the park. Her friends had seen her go. Let her go. She'll be back in a minute. But when they left the shop Beatrice hadn't come back. They'd called for her, walked in the direction of the park and called out again.

  They'd turned back then. She'd turn up eventually. She'd be on the other side of the park by now. She'd have caught the night bus. She was already at Lina's, waiting for her. She'll be sitting there waiting for me, Lina had said, out there in the night, five years ago, and then the night bus came and ... well, they'd all jumped aboard and looked out of the window as they passed by the park and there was no sign of Beatrice, which meant that she must be waiting for them at Lina's, didn't it?

  Beatrice wasn't waiting for them. She was in among the trees all the time. Perhaps. She was definitely there at 11.45 on Sunday morning, behind the bushes in the shadow of the big rock: naked; murdered. The sun had been high in the sky, as high as it was now.

  Her clothes were in a heap by her side. Winter read the list of clothes she'd been wearing that evening, the clothes the murderer had pulled off her. They were all in the inventory, but that wasn't what he was looking for. He was looking for what was missing. Sometimes something was missing that the victim had had, but the murderer had taken away with him.

  In Beatrice's case, it was her belt.

  Winter found it in the interrogation of her friends, and, later, in the interview with her parents. Beatrice had been wearing a leather belt that had not been found in the untidy pile of clothes next to her body. One of the detectives who had conducted the interviews had referred to it as a waistbelt. The word jumped off the page when Winter saw it. It seemed a wry comment on a waste of a life.

  That could be what the murderer had strangled her with, wasted her life. They couldn't know for certain as they had never found the belt.

  Winter turned to the newer case notes. Angelika Hansson's. He searched for the inventory of her clothes: T-shirt, shorts, socks, pants, bra, hairband, trainers – basketball type, Reebok. But no belt. Would she have worn a belt with her shorts?

  Had anybody asked about her clothes? He couldn't see any reference to a belt. He read Pia Fröberg's report. Angelika could well have been strangled with a leather belt. He picked up the phone and dialled the direct number to Göran Beier on the SOC team. No reply. He phoned the main lab. Beier answered.

  'Ah, Göran, it's Erik. I hope I can disturb you for a couple of minutes?'

  'No problem.'

  'I'm sitting here with the Wägner case notes. Beatrice.'

  'OK.'

  'Were you on duty then?'

  'Beatrice Wägner? Let's see, that must be what ... four years ago? Five?'

  'Five years. Exactly five.'

  'Whatever, it's not a case you forget.'

  'No.'

  'We did what we could.'

  Winter thought he detected a hidden meaning in Beier's words.

  'I haven't given up,' he said.

  Beier made no reply.

  'That's why I'm ringing,' Winter said. 'Maybe there's a connection.'

  'Meaning?'

  'Do you remember that Beatrice had a belt that she evidently always used to wear, and that it couldn't be found after the murder?'

  'I do. One of her mates had made some comment about it the same night as she was murdered,' Beier said. 'I read that in the preliminary reports.' He paused. 'Now that I think about it, I seem to remember that it was you who signed it off. My memory's that good.'

  'I have it in front of me now,' said Winter, picking up the document. He could see his own signature. Erik Winter, Detective Inspector.

  'That was before the glory days of Chief Inspector,' said Beier. 'For both you and me.'

  Winter didn't reply.

  'I suppose it was Birgersson who was in charge of the investigation?'

  'Yes.'

  'I remember we had a chat about that belt,' Beier said.

  'What conclusion did you draw?'

  'Only that we thought the belt might have been used to choke her. But we never found it, of course.'

  'And now it's Angelika Hansson we're dealing with,' said Winter.

  'I heard from Halders that you thought there might be a link,' Beier said.

  'There could well be.'

  'Or not.'

  'There could also be a belt,' Winter said.

  There was a pause. 'I see what you mean,' Beier said, eventually.

  'Is it possible to find out if Angelika Hansson generally wore a belt with those shorts she had on that night?'