Never End

by Ake Edwardson

  'We've already established that,' said Beier.

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'Don't you read the reports? What's the point —'

  'When did you send them?'

  'Yesterday, I think. It sho ... Hang on, somebody's telling me something here.' Winter could hear Beier talking to a colleague. Then he spoke in the phone again. 'I apologise, Erik. Pelle says he hasn't sent them off yet. He wanted to che—'

  'OK, OK. But she did have a belt in fact?'

  'There had at one time been a belt in the waistband, so the answer is yes. Of the shorts lying in the heap by her body. We can say that for sure. It's not complicated at all.'

  'But I can't find any mention of a belt in the inventory of what was in that pile of clothes,' said Winter.

  'No, because it wasn't there.'

  'So he took it with him,' said Winter, mainly to himself.

  Beier said nothing.

  'Angelika Hansson could have been strangled with her own belt, then,' Winter said.

  'That's a possibility.'

  'Just like Beatrice Wägner.'

  'I understand what you're getting at,' Beier said. 'But take it easy.'

  'I am taking it easy.'

  He took it easy for another hour while the sun outside crept slowly across a cloudless sky. The smoke lingered inside the room. He continued to trace the hours and the days after the murder of Beatrice Wägner.

  Witnesses had seen cars leaving the scene. One car had seemed in a hurry to get away, according to one woman, but he knew that could be an impression she'd formed after the event, a dramatisation because she so badly wanted to help them with their investigation, although most such efforts had the opposite effect.

  Then, as now, the season had been a problem, because fewer people than usual were at home during the summer. He had now started reading the cuttings from each case in parallel, and smiled at one sentence that jumped off the page, spoken by Sture Birgersson one summer's day almost exactly five years ago: 'The problem the police are up against in this murder investigation is the holiday period,' Birgersson had said.

  Birgersson was Winter's superior at the CID. Winter had an appointment with him that afternoon.

  A house-to-house operation around the park had produced as little by way of results that summer as this, so far.

  Winter paused at one detail from the night Beatrice Wägner had been murdered. Two witnesses had independently observed that a man and a boy had been packing a car for some time in the early hours of the morning. That had been outside one of the three-storey apartment blocks to the north-east of the park, a hundred metres away. The two witnesses had noticed the man and boy from different directions, but at more or less the same time. The man and the boy might have seen or heard something, but nobody knew as they had never made themselves known to the police. They had issued an appeal, but nobody had come forward. They had simply been unable to find a man and boy in the building matching the description they'd been given.

  Just then, Winter's desk telephone rang. He answered and recognised Birgersson's voice.

  'Could we meet a bit earlier than planned, Erik? I now find I have to attend a meeting at four.'

  'OK.'

  'Can you come up now?'

  'Give me quarter of an hour. I want to ask you a few things, but I must do a bit of reading first.'

  Birgersson stood by his window smoking as Winter asked his first question. Birgersson's scalp was visible through his close-cropped grey hair, lit up by the rays of the sun. The boss would be sixty next year. Winter would be forty-two. Birgersson was more of a father to him than a big brother.

  'I don't know where it would have led us,' said Birgersson, flicking ash into the palm of his hand, 'but we really did try to trace that pair: father and son or whatever they were.' He looked at Winter. 'You were involved, of course.'

  'Reading about it now, I recall getting very angry at the time.'

  'I got a bit worked up about it as well.' The muscles in Birgersson's lean face twitched. 'But that was only natural. We didn't have much to go on, and so that detail seemed to be more important than it might really have been.'

  'Do you often think about the Beatrice case?' asked Winter, from his chair by the desk in the middle of the room.

  'Only every day.'

  'It hasn't been like that for me. Not quite every day. Until now.'

  'You're still a young man,' Erik. I run the risk of retiring with that bloody case still unsolved, and I don't want to do that.' He pulled at the cigarette, but the smoke was invisible against the light from the window. 'I don't want to do that,' he said again, gazing out of the window, then looking back at Winter. 'I don't know if this is a sort of twisted wishful thinking, but I hope it is him who's come back. That this business has never ended.'

  'That's why I'm scrutinising the Beatrice case notes,' said Winter.

  'The belt,' Birgersson said. 'The belt is a key.'

  'It could well be.'

  'Did the Bielke girl have a belt?' Birgersson asked.

  'That's one of the things I wanted to check before I came here,' said Winter. He lit another Corps, stood up and went to keep Birgersson company by the window. 'But she didn't have one. She doesn't wear one.'

  'Maybe that's what saved her,' said Birgersson. He looked Winter in the eye. 'What do you think, Erik? Maybe she wasn't as interesting as a victim when there was no belt for her to be strangled with. No belt to take home, as a trophy.'

  7

  She felt a prick in her right foot, under her toes. She'd been feeling her way forward, but the bottom was covered in seaweed here, a sort of long, thick grass that swayed with the current. It was brown and nasty. Like dead flowers.

  Now she was standing on a small sandbank. She balanced on one leg and examined her right foot: she could see it was bleeding, but only a little. It wasn't the first time this summer. Par for the course.

  She heard shouts from the rocks. Leapt into the water, which was warmer than ever, like a second skin, soft, like a caress.

  'Anne!'

  They were shouting again. Somebody held up a bottle, but all she could see was a silhouette against the sun, which was on its way down. Could be Andy. As far as he was concerned the party had begun the minute they got here, or even in the car, still in town.

  'Anne! Paaarty!'

  She could see him now, wine bottle in hand, a grin on his face. Party. Why not yet another party? She deserved that. Three years of school at Burgården. Who wouldn't be worth a few parties after that?

  There was something else that made her deserving of it. She didn't want to think about it now.

  'Anne!'

  She clambered over the rocks, hung onto a projecting stone, and felt the sting in her foot again.

  She had reached the top, checked her foot. Half a metre of seaweed had wrapped itself around her shin. She pulled it off. The seaweed felt slippery.

  'Here comes the little mermaid,' said Andy.

  'Give me a drink.'

  'Have you ever seen an evening as beautiful as this?'

  'A drink. Now!'

  Fredrik Halders was sitting on a sofa he didn't recall seeing the last time he'd been there. He looked around him like a stranger. The house was more foreign to him than ever.

  He'd begun to feel unreal in the house immediately afterwards. Immediately after the divorce. He'd seemed to be wandering around in a dream. Everything was familiar, but he no longer recognised it. Couldn't touch anything. He was an outsider. That's how it had seemed. He'd been standing outside his own life. That's how it had felt. The divorce had made him stand outside his own life, and things hadn't improved much since.

  Maybe that was why he'd been so angry those past few years. In a rage. He'd woken up in a rage and gone to bed in a rage and been in even more of a rage in between. Just living had been a pain, you might say.

  But that had been nothing. Nothing at all compared to this.

  Hannes and Magda were asleep. Magda had sobbed herself t
o sleep. Hannes had stared at the wall. He'd tried to talk to them about ... about ... What had he tried to talk to them about? He'd forgotten.

  It was past midnight. The patio door was open, letting in scents from the garden he didn't remember. He could see Aneta Djanali's face in the doorway, which was lit up by the lamp on a shelf to the left.

  'Don't you want to come outside?'

  He shook his head.

  'It's lovely out here.'

  'I'll fetch a beer,' he said, getting up and going to the kitchen.

  'It'll start getting light soon,' Djanali said when he'd come out and sat down on the bench next to the house.

  He took a swig and looked up at the sky. It was already light enough for him. If he could stop the passage of time, now would be the moment. Let there be darkness. Forever darkness, and rest. No children to wake up in the morning and remember. With the whole of their lives ahead of them. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, he suddenly thought. Then he thought of Margareta.

  He took another swig and looked directly over the patio at his colleague. And friend.

  'Shouldn't you go home now, Aneta?' He could make out her silhouette, but no more. At any other time he'd have joked about it, as he usually did; her black skin was not much of a contrast to the night. Not now.

  'I don't mind staying.'

  'I'll manage.'

  'I know that.'

  'So, why not go home and rest? You're on duty tomorrow morning, aren't you?'

  He couldn't see if she'd nodded.

  'Will you have to get up early?' he asked.

  'Yes. But I've never needed much sleep.'

  'Me neither.' He emptied the bottle and put it down on the table. 'In that case, we can sit here a bit longer.'

  'Yes.'

  She saw that he'd put a hand over his face. She heard a muffled sound. She went to sit on the bench beside him, and put her arm round him, or as far round as she could. He was ever so slightly shaking.

  'I need to work.'

  They were still sitting on the bench. It was morning now, a few minutes past three. The light had come back. The shadows in Halders' face were like bays of the sea, formed in the last few hours. Djanali could hear the shrieks of seagulls. A car passed by on the road behind the hedge. Some small birds flew up out of a bush, perhaps disturbed by the car. She didn't feel tired. That would come later, that afternoon, in the car patrolling up and down in the heat.

  'Do you understand what I mean?' Halders turned to look at her. A blood vessel had burst in his left eye. 'It's not because I want ... to get away. Not in that sense.' He rubbed his face, under the base of his nose. 'But I think it's best ... for everybody ... if I go to work.'

  'If you feel up to it, OK.'

  'Why shouldn't I feel up to it?'

  She shrugged.

  'Do you think I don't understand myself?'

  'No.'

  'Do you think I'm not taking the children into consideration?'

  'Certainly not.'

  Halders stroked his face again. He could hear the rasping from his stubble, which now seemed longer and thicker than his crew-cut hair.

  'We must get back to normal just as soon as possible,' he said, looking as if he were seeking support in the far distance. 'The important thing is that we all try to get back to normal as soon as we possibly can.'

  But first have a breakdown, thought Aneta Djanali. It's imminent.

  Winter was still searching through the two sets of case notes, one thick, the other thin.

  He'd asked Bergenhem to read them as well. Lars Bergenhem was a young and talented detective who'd just come back to work after being off sick with severe headaches and listlessness, but Winter knew what was really wrong. Even police officers were affected by depression at times.

  I sometimes wonder if I am at risk myself. It could be the heat, or this case that is so difficult to wash off with a dip in the sea after work.

  They drove to the park. The air conditioning was on in Winter's Mercedes. The streets were almost deserted.

  'I sometimes come here,' Winter said when they'd walked to the spot. The trees were still. You could hardly see the rock. The area was still cordoned off. Anybody who didn't look closely might think there was some new gardening project under way, thought Bergenhem. There is a new project, but not of that sort.

  He could see children swimming in the pond. The flamingos were standing on one leg, studying the splashing.

  'I've come here several times over the past few years,' Winter said. He looked around. 'Do you understand what I mean?'

  'Yes.'

  'What do I mean?'

  'They always return to the scene of the crime.'

  Winter nodded and watched two young girls walk past, glancing at him and Bergenhem as they stood in front of the cordon.

  'He's been here at least as many times as I have,' said Winter. 'That's the way it goes. He's been here all right.'

  'Maybe at the same time,' Bergenhem said.

  'No.' Winter looked at his colleague. 'I would have known.'

  All we can do is keep at it, he thought. That's the way it goes.

  He'd been here spring, summer, autumn and winter after the murder of Beatrice Wägner. Not every day, of course, but he made it his business to pass here at weekends and in the evening, sometimes at night.

  Late one evening he'd seen a shadowy figure standing by the rock and had gone to investigate, his heart beating a bit faster, and found himself face to face with Birgersson when the shadow turned round.

  And he knew that Halders sometimes came here too.

  He didn't think they'd scared anybody off. They didn't walk into the park hip-swinging with guns drawn, silhouetted against the sunset.

  'The girl's our best bet,' Bergenhem said. 'Jeanette. The one who got away.'

  'Maybe that was the intention,' said Winter.

  'What do you mean? That she got away?'

  Winter shrugged. 'Could be.'

  'If it is him, she's seen him, touched him. Heard him.'

  'Yes.'

  'Those sounds. Some sort of mantra.'

  'Hmm.'

  'She said he repeated something she couldn't understand. The same thing. She thought he'd said the same thing maybe three times.'

  'Yes.'

  'While he was raping her.'

  'Yes,' said Winter, watching the two girls who'd passed a couple of minutes before walking back again, each holding an ice-cream cornet. They looked curiously at the cordon. 'While he was raping her.'

  'Maybe there's more,' Bergenhem said.