Sun and Shadow (44 page)

“Once ...” she said, then fell silent.

“Go on.”

Winter could feel the tension in his body, could see it in Halders. Per Elfvegren seemed to be paralyzed. His wife appeared to be calmer now. She’d been working her way toward this.

“She ... she said they’d met a man a few times. That’s all, really ...”

Halders stared at her. The penny dropped.

“It never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with ...”

“Tell me exactly what she said.”

“I’ve already told you ...”

“In what connection did it crop up?”

“I can’t really remember.” She looked at her husband. “But it was when we were alone.”

“What did she say?”

“That they’d been visited ... a few times ... by a man.”

“And?”

“I had the impression that he was ... exciting.”

“How did they meet?”

“I don’t know ...”

“Through an ad?”

“Yes, perhaps she did say that.” She seemed to be thinking. “Something about them having been lucky ... yes, that they’d been lucky with their advertisements.”

“Had that man answered an ad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Had the man placed an ad?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Did you know him?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did Louise Valker say what he looked like?”

“No.”

“Nothing ... personal about him?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

“His clothes?”

“No. Nothing about that.”

“She just mentioned him, and that was all?”

“Yes...”

Winter heard a slight hesitation. Halders had heard it as well, waited.

Winter phoned Möllerström. The registrar answered after the first ring.

“Could you please get me the latest issue of Aktuell Rapport, Janne.”

“You mean the men’s magazine?”

“That’s what I said.”

Winter hung up and turned to the list of forty extras who were wearing police uniforms in the film based on the adventures of a detective chief inspector in Gothenburg. Why not an inspector’s? Halders wanted to know. You’ll be in it as well, Ringmar assured him. We’ll all be in it.

“Should we do that, then?” asked Ringmar, who was sitting opposite Winter. “Have you spoken to Sture?”

“He says we should go ahead if we think it’s worth the effort.”

“Forty people,” Ringmar said. “That means ten to fifteen officers tied up for perhaps a week. How long will we need per extra? An hour and a half? An hour? We’ll have to track them down, check their addresses, arrange a meeting, interrogate them.”

“And compare,” Winter said.

“That’s your job.”

“I can get ten officers,” Winter said. He lit a Corps. It was still reasonably light outside. The snow was still there. He looked Ringmar in the eye.

‘Are we heading in the right direction here ... the police trail? The uniform trail?“

“I’m damned if I know, Erik.”

“Say what you think.”

Ringmar screwed up his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and produced a noise like sandpaper on rough timber. His features became more marked in the twilight, his wrinkles seemed deeper when the sun was reflected into the room from the buildings on the other side of the river. There wasn’t going to be any leave for Ringmar this February either. Perhaps when the grandchildren came. But the best time for skiing was already past.

“There has been talk of police officers—or police uniforms—a bit too often for us to simply ignore it,” he said in the end.

“I agree.”

“What Börjesson had to say about the record shop was most interesting.”

“I agree.”

“We’ve checked places where there are uniforms, but nobody has reported any missing.”

“No.”

“None at all.”

“No.”

“That only leaves the filmmakers.”

“I agree.”

“Perhaps it’s an omen.”

“A good omen?”

“Are there any good ones? I once saw a film called Omen. It wasn’t exactly teeming with benevolence.”

“There were several,” Winter said. “Parts one and two, et cetera.”

Ringmar rubbed his forehead again.

“I think we ought to get going on that.”

“Will you take charge, please?”

Ringmar agreed, took the list, and went to his own office in order to start organizing the work. A messenger arrived with an internal mail envelope and the secretary raised her eyes heavenward. The girl on the front cover was scantily dressed. A big headline in red and yellow explained the best way to get sex at work. Winter turned the pages until he came to the personal column with the subheading “Make It Quick.” There were a lot of ads. Several pictures of naked genitalia and faces with thick black censor lines over the eyes. Why not the other way around? he wondered.

At the end was a coupon for the text of an advertisement. The Valkers must have filled in one of these and posted it, he thought. Maybe the Elfvegrens as well. And the Martells.

Maybe somebody else.

What did you have to do?

He read on until he came to information about answers. Telephone replies, postal replies. They hadn’t asked the Elfvegrens about which type of ad it was. Or ads. Replies. That was careless and showed lack of knowledge and perhaps it was also creditable. Not even Halders had asked.

They had lists of all their telephone calls, so they could check.

They hadn’t found any filled-in ad coupons at the Valkers’ nor at the Martells‘. No ad texts, no replies.

Winter phoned the editorial office of
Aktuell Rapport.
A woman answered and he explained who he was.

“The coupons with the text for the ads are kept for three months,” she said.

“Does that mean that you have the addresses of all the people who’ve advertised over the last three months?” Winter asked.

“Yes. Generally speaking.”

“Generally speaking? What does that mean?”

“Sometimes we don’t manage to keep up with the shredding. There are so many of them ...”

Shredding, he thought. That damn shredding. There should be a law against shredding. In order to assist police investigations into serious crimes.

“How long could they be saved in those circumstances, then?”

“Six months, perhaps. But that would be exceptional.”

“How?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are the addresses saved?”

“We keep the coupons people send in. We also have a computer record that we erase when the paper is shredded.”

‘Are they mainly home addresses?“

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have anonymous box numbers that a lot of people use?”

“No, we don’t allow that. When we did, the ads turned out to be ... not serious enough.”

Winter didn’t dig any further into that.

“Can you see who replies?”

“No. The respondent puts the reply into an envelope, seals it, and writes the contact number of the advertisement on it. Then he or she puts that envelope in another envelope and sends it to us at return postage rates that include a handling charge. We then pass the replies on to the advertiser.”

“And the respondent has three months in which to react?”

“Yes.”

Winter thought that over. With a bit of luck the Valkers’ ad coupon might be in the records at the editorial office, or their home address confirming that they’d put in an advertisement. He would phone his colleagues in Stockholm, which was where the magazine’s editorial office was based.

They might also find a coupon from the Martells. Or the Elfvegrens. The Martells. He thought about the Martells again. They had been murdered less than three months ago.

If the Martells had advertised, they wouldn’t have received their replies yet. There could be replies being kept by the editorial staff. He recalled Erika Elfvegren’s story about “a man.”

That was how the man got in. Winter had wanted to know how he got into the apartments, and this could be the answer, the solution.

But the ads could have been put in at any time, several years ago. Calm down now.

He asked the woman a few practical questions, hung up, then phoned Stockholm again and talked to a DCI colleague.

No answer from Matilda Josefsson, who had worked at Krokens Livs. Djanali tried the other number, and a man answered by repeating the numbers she had just keyed in.

She said who she was, and why she was ringing.

“That was ages ago.”

“What was?”

“When I worked there. The fool was out of his mind.”

“The fool?”

“Andréasson. Claimed I couldn’t count. So I quit. Of my own free will.”

Djanali asked some more questions about regular customers.

“I suppose there were a few who came in quite often. It would have been odd if that hadn’t been the case.” Pause. ‘And then there were the shoplifters.“

“Excuse me?”

“We used to get a few shoplifters. A few little things kept disappearing. I never noticed anything myself, but there were a few incidents.”

“When?”

“I can’t remember exactly. I didn’t write it down in my diary or anything. But the girl who worked there at the same time as me knows more about it.”

“Matilda? Matilda Josefsson?”

“Exactly. That was her name.”

“Did she tell you about shoplifters?”

“She said something about shoplifters when she was on shift. You’ll have to ask her.”

“We will. But she’s left as well.”

“There you see. And she could count. Ha, ha.”

“We’re trying to contact her now.”

“She was always going on about running off to where the sun is. Try there.”

Winter checked up on where the sun is. His mother didn’t know anybody called Ake. He probably didn’t live in Nueva Andalucia, but that wasn’t the only colony. The Swedish consul in Fuengirola answered after the third ring. Winter could picture the town in his mind’s eye, the motorway looking like a black wound, the houses that seemed to have been hurled down the mountain at the sea.

“Of course I know Åke,” said the consul, who was a Swede. ‘And your name also sounds familiar.“

There was no reply from Killdén in the Elviria colony. That was to the east of the hospital, on the other side from Marbella. He could remember restaurants, hotels, golf courses, little whitewashed houses.

Passing through by taxi one night on the way to Torremolinos. The taste of wine lingering on his palate.

Winter drove out to the Sahlgren Hospital. Siv Martell was still in a merciful coma. He didn’t need to drive out there to discover that, but he wanted to escape the confines of his office. Her body was a sort of reminder of something.

He studied her through the glass. Would she be able to provide any answers if she came around? Or was allowed to come around? He felt a cold flush. As if he had a layer of ice underneath his clothes.

He went out. The new and old buildings at the hospital gave the impression of being a stage set. Ambulances and police cars drove backward and forward over the stage. Nurses in white hurried over the stage, doctors. Angels. He was on the stage himself, but there was no limelight.

He had no script. Just the feeling that a catastrophe was on its way.

Bartram bought the magazine and rented a war film. The woman gave him a friendly smile. He didn’t know if she recognized him from one time to the next. She should. That kind of thing was the same even at the other end of the world, or wherever she came from.

She was pretty new. They’d come and gone. He didn’t like the young man. Not suited to work involving service. If you’re going to provide a service you have to make an effort to help your customers. Otherwise you’re better off doing something else.

He’d seen the old man one evening. Presumably he owned the place. He didn’t look like a service type either. Seemed to have a bonfire under his backside when he sat on the chair. Couldn’t keep still.

He’d liked the girl. Then one day she’d gone. She could have said something the previous week. But there again, why should she say anything to him? Just because he liked her didn’t mean that she had to like him. Perhaps she laughed at him when he’d gone. Or behind his back. He’d spun around quickly and she hadn’t been laughing then, but maybe that was because she didn’t dare. She knew that he was a police officer sometimes. When he had his uniform on he was a policeman and he would come in here and be a policeman. Now he wasn’t a policeman because he was wearing civilian clothes. Now he couldn’t go around telling people to put their seat belts on and expect to be taken seriously.

She’d been there when he stood in the way of the boy who stole some videos. He thought it was better to see it like that. He’d stood in the way. The boy had intended to pay, he said. Just forgotten.

He’d made a concession. He’d written down the boy’s name and address but that was mainly because the girl was watching. She didn’t want to report him. He could give the boy a second chance. Why not? The boy produced his ID card. That meant he’d been identified and could be arrested. Bartram let him sweat a bit, then allowed him to go. Don’t do it again. That kind of crap. The boy seemed a bit odd. You almost felt sorry for him. Stared at the uniform as if the man wearing it was a general, as if it were covered in glittering medals. Mumbled something.

He’d asked her if she knew the boy and she’d just shrugged. He didn’t ask her what that meant.

Outside, the wind was making the posters flap. Must be goddam terrific films to be popular for so long. He glanced at the apartment building a bit farther on.

He crossed the street and walked through the silence. The clifflike hill on the left shut out the noise from the city center, and the slope up toward the church muffled the traffic noise from the main road.