She didn’t answer. Her face bore a faint shadow from the day.
“Do you hear me, Brigitta?”
“Why are you calling me that?”
“That’s your name.”
“I mean, why are you suddenly calling me Brigitta? What makes you think that-”
“I don’t just think it,” Winter said. “I know.”
“How?”
“It’s not the falsified documents identifying you as Greta Bremer,” he said. “They’re excellent forgeries.”
She nodded. He thought it looked as if she nodded.
“And your appearance. You couldn’t possibly be the fifty-five-year-old Brigitta Dellmar.”
“There, you see? I can barely move, after all.”
“I wanted to believe that you were Brigitta,” Winter said. “But it felt impossible. And I found nothing to support that theory.”
She now turned her face toward him for the first time.
“Well? How do you know then?”
Winter took a step closer and came up next to her in the wheelchair. He slowly reached out and plucked something from the pillow behind her back.
“This,” he said, and held up a strand of hair that may have been visible in the light of the window.
“What is that? My hair?”
“A strand of your hair,” Winter said. “Ever heard of DNA?”
“No.”
“You’ve never heard of DNA?”
“Sure.”
Winter let the strand of hair drop from his hand and sat down in one of the armchairs.
“You took a strand of hair the first time you were here,” she said. “You stood behind me while I was sitting here.”
“Yes. I saw an opportunity.”
“This damned wheelchair.”
“You are Brigitta Dellmar?”
“You already said I am.”
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Yes.”
She rubbed her deformed legs.
“I am Brigitta Dellmar,” she said. “I am Brigitta Dellmar, but that doesn’t do anyone any good.”
“And Georg Bremer isn’t your brother.”
“He isn’t my brother.”
“Why did he tell us that you were his sister?”
“He thought that he could scare me. And I’ve passed for his sister all these years, without actually being it. I’ve had to play that role. It was their decision.” She looked straight at Winter. “But he couldn’t scare me.”
The telephone rang, and she lifted the receiver on the third ring and said yes and listened. She said, “Wait,” and turned to Winter. “Is this going to take long?”
Winter didn’t answer that insane question.
“I’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up.
“You called Bremer’s house two days ago,” Winter said.
“How do you know it was me?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was me. I called him after he’d returned from the police, the last time.”
“Didn’t you realize that we’d see who had called him?”
“Maybe.”
“Why did you call him?”
“It was time for him to die. He had lived for too long. He killed my baby,” she said, and her face cracked in front of him. She slumped to the side in her wheelchair and lay as if dead, with her ruined visage facing downward. She turned a hundred years old in front of Winter. She said something, but it was muffled by the fabric and stuffing.
She sat up again, and Winter saw the tears smeared across her face.
“I told him that he had killed my child. That I knew. He didn’t know I knew,” she said, and now she cried out, a soft wail that came from deep within and intensified. “He didn’t know that it was all my fault.” She fell silent and looked at Winter.
I can only wait, he thought.
She sat with her chin against her chest, then raised her head again.
“I told him that he had killed his own child. I said that!”
Winter was silent. A streetcar passed by outside without sound. The clock on the wall had stopped.
“I told him that he had killed his own child, that Helene was his child.” She looked straight at Winter. “There is nothing more heinous than killing another human being. What does it mean, then, to kill your own child?”
“You told him that Helene was his daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Was she? Was it true?”
“No.”
“But you said it to him?”
“I wanted him to suffer for what he had done. He hadn’t suffered. He doesn’t know what suffering is. He doesn’t know. He didn’t know.”
“What do you mean when you say that it’s all your fault?”
“She was my girl,” Brigitta Dellmar said now, lost in another time. “Helene was my girl. She wasn’t like anyone else. We were never like anyone else.”
“She is your girl,” Winter said.
“She’s had it so tough.” Brigitta Dellmar suddenly reached out and grabbed hold of Winter’s hands with hers. “She’s suffered, and it’s been all my fault, and in the end I couldn’t stop myself from telling her. I told her.”
“What did you tell her? That you were her mother?”
“What? That I…? She knew I was her mother. She knew that I was her mother.”
Winter felt her fingers grasp at his. Her grip was hot and cold, and he could feel her pulse.
“When did she find out?” Winter leaned forward. “When did she findo out?”
“She’s always known. She’s always… Ever since she was a little girl.”
“But she was a foster child for many years,” Winter said. “She was alone when she came back here.”
“She knew,” Brigitta Dellmar said. “Inside she knew. When she came back here and was a big girl she found out again.”
Winter asked, and she told him everything. She had been wounded. They had kept her hidden, and then she had kept herself hidden away from the world for such a long time that she had ceased to exist. She didn’t know how many years. They had let her keep some of the money and created a new identity for her and she had returned to Sweden, to her so-called brother. Ha-ha!
When the girl tried to make a life of her own, and bore a child, she was there. Suddenly she was there.
“Who is Jennie’s father?” Winter asked.
“Nobody knows.”
“Not even you?”
“It was as if she wanted me to be the last to know.”
“Why?”
She shrugged her shoulders. Winter’s breathing now started to return. The hairs on the back of his neck were damp with sweat.
“It was all my fault. I contacted her again. She had been having a difficult time connecting with other people, and now it became impossible. She turned in on herself more and more.”
“How often did you see each other?”
“Just occasionally. I helped her to get her memory back, and that was the death of her.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her memory. It caused her death.”
“How do you mean?”
“I told her things she didn’t know anymore. And things she never knew and yet thought a lot about. What happened.”
Winter nodded.
“Bremer murdered her father. He carried it out.”
“Her father?”
“Kim. My Kim.”
“Kim Andersen? You mean Kim Andersen? The one who was also known as Kim Møller?”
“Bremer murdered him.”
“You told Helene that?”
“I told her everything. I told her everything. And she went to see him. I knew where he was. She made several trips down there. In the end she knew enough that she told him. But he thought she was lying. He was sure that he was her father. I was afraid, terribly afraid. Helene seemed to be beside herself with fear when she found out what had happened to her father, Kim. That Bremer had murdered him. What had happened to her…” Brigitta Dellmar dropped her head forward. She seemed exhausted from having spoken for so long. “I wanted my money too, and it scared me, but I needed… Helene needed… We had a right to our money. And Jennie too.”
Winter breathed harder, steeled himself.
“Where’s Jennie?”