On the way back to her unit, she walked past the property management office. A sign outside said “Residential Services.” Was that something new? There was also something about a “district superintendent” who manned the office during opening hours. What was a district superintendent? She didn’t know, but it must be someone who knew something about the area or the buildings. She could pay a visit to that district super and ask. It’s not good to go around thinking all the time. She could ask when that mother and her little girl moved away and where they went.
26
THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED LATE IN THE NIGHT. WHEN WINTER awoke, the air in the apartment smelled different-of green instead of white. It was colder and darker, like a lingering sadness at the long summer’s passing, finally expired at a record old age.
He put his feet on the sanded fir floor, its coolness soft beneath the arches of his feet. Then he yawned, a leftover from burning the midnight oil with his head bowed over the PowerBook he could now see through the bedroom doorway, screen still open. Today it was a different apartment. He’d grown used to four months of almost constant sunshine and a home that offered no protection from the light.
In the kitchen he raised the blinds without getting dazzled. The sky had no opening. An invisible rain made the awnings across the park glisten. The streetcars passed beneath him with a sound reminiscent of a ship.
Winter walked back into the living room in his robe and opened the door to the balcony. The wet became more audible, as if he’d stepped out of a wheelhouse and found himself at sea.
He drew air into his lungs, as much as he could manage. It felt good. He felt good. The fatigue from the night before was gone, and he realized that the heavy heat had had an adverse effect on him, on his work.
It was like a depression, he thought. Everything started to crumble to bits. We saw the proof. Things exploded. People went crazy and shot each other. A man and his son were at the end of their tether.
A week earlier, the dramatic standoff outside Ullevi had had an undramatic resolution. The man left his gun on the bus and stepped off, holding his son by the hand. Winter heard that the son seemed happy and perky, waving to his mother, who was standing there-she who had pleaded with her husband.
The family’s lawyer had submitted a new application for a residence permit. But the government was following a hard line. Desperation was to be regarded as threat and coercion. Despair, though it may move the hearts of the weak, had no effect on the authorities’ judgment.
It was nine o’clock in the morning and it was Saturday. The dizziness had returned for two split seconds on Friday afternoon, so Winter had decided to stay home in the shadows today.
Now the shadows were gone, as was that nagging sensation of losing his footing. He knew he would not feel dizzy again, not for a very long time. I’m more of a northerner than I realized, he thought. Surround me with crispness and cold and I function better.
Winter stepped back inside and lingered by his desk. He looked at the computer screen but didn’t turn it on. Last night he’d tried to sort through all the various sidetracks, as if he were working in a rail yard. He’d followed different leads until they ended, then reversed course to see if he could spot anything that had fallen off along the way, in a ditch or in the grass.
A lot of time had been spent following up on every public sighting of thirty-year-old fair-haired women at “mysterious” locations or who’d appeared generally confused or suspicious. Winter had sent all the documentation to Interpol. It was a new tack, and he hadn’t received any usable information from there as yet. He didn’t think she came from another country. The fillings in her teeth were done in Sweden, even the ones that were done when she was a little girl. She could have been living abroad, but that was another matter.
He’d called up other police precincts throughout the country.
His staff had continued to question the boys about the boat, and they were telling the truth. But their boat had been used for something. Maybe it was the boat that Andrea Maltzer saw out on the lake. If she really had seen a boat. Winter had thought about her, and her lover, von Holten. There was something-he didn’t know what it was-something that made him not quite swallow her whole story. Why hadn’t she called a cab right away? Had she planned on borrowing the car? Was she there alone? All these questions ran through Winter’s mind, and he’d typed them on his screen before the temperature outside had dropped.
Two officers had spent almost a week trawling through the vehicle registration database in search of the owners of the Ford Escorts located within the geographical area he had decided they should limit themselves to. They would start with all the license plates beginning with the letter H. Not even then could they be sure. I don’t know, he’d thought to himself the night before, with the blue glow from the screen on his face. Is this therapy? He’d thought about the woman again. Helene with no name. Inside he knew they wouldn’t make any progress without her identity. He knew that the others knew.
He raised his gaze from the PowerBook and returned to the kitchen to put on the electric kettle for tea. He poured the leaves into the pot and toasted two slices of French bread from the day-old loaf he’d bought at a convenience store on the way home. He could have pulled on his trousers and shirt and taken the elevator down to the bakery across the park. Why don’t I do that, he thought, and left the bread where it was and went back into the bedroom and threw off his robe and put on a pair of shorts and a shirt.
He bought fresh poppy-seed buns and a brioche, returning across the grass and feeling his sandaled toes get wet. Back upstairs he made himself a café au lait instead of tea and squeezed three oranges and poured the juice into a glass. He ate the still-warm bread with butter and cherry jam, and with a boiled egg that he peeled and sliced up and ground black pepper over. He drank two cups of coffee and read the paper. He felt ready for anything.
Ester Bergman cautiously stuck her hand out the window and felt the dampness. It was good for the skin. She kept her hand there long enough that tiny droplets of water formed in the folds of her palm. She thought the world looked dark when the sun wasn’t there to wash everything out.
She’d stayed indoors for several days because she hadn’t been feeling well. She hadn’t had the energy to go to residential services, or whatever it’s called. Then the woman from the home-help service had come-the new one whose name she didn’t know-and had futzed around the apartment as if she were cleaning. But Ester knew she wasn’t actually cleaning, that everything looked almost the same when she left as it had when she arrived. Sometimes she does the dishes even though I’ve already done them, Ester thought. When she thinks I’m not looking, she takes out the glasses and washes them again, as if I couldn’t look after myself.
She may be nice, but she’s not family. Ester Bergman had thought about that sometimes, but there was no point in thinking like that. No family was going to drop in for a visit, no matter how much she wished for it. That’s just the way it was. An old woman couldn’t have a family if she’d had an old man who didn’t want more people in the house.
“Seems like you’ve got a little fever, Ester,” the home-help woman had said, and put her hand on her forehead.
“I’m lying here thinking about something.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Do you notice the people who live around this courtyard?”
“How do you mean, Ester?”
“Do you recognize them, you people who work around here, visiting with old people and such?”