“What?”
“It’s like-I don’t know. I need something else.”
“And now you’ve got a fresh murder on your hands.”
“Yes.”
“So the assault case, or whatever the expression is, you guys have solved that? Or put it aside?”
“The assault case?”
“Your colleague, Agneta, with the foreign last name.”
“Aneta.”
“That’s the one. Well, apparently she was beaten up, and you know who called me just now?”
Winter saw a swimming pool, a naked man, sun glittering in the water, and he could almost smell the stench of tanning oil again.
“I think so.”
“How could you be so stupid as to drive over to that scumbag’s house and threaten to beat the crap out of him?”
“Is that what he said?”
“He said that you came over to his house and tried to strangle him.”
“I needed information.”
“Not the right way to get it, Erik.”
Winter didn’t answer.
“I haven’t heard from Benny in years,” Lotta said. “And I could almost say the same about you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes I wonder when it was you stopped being my brother. No, that sounds pathetic. And crabby. I just mean that I need to speak to you sometimes.”
“I’m trying.” Winter knew that his sister was right. When her life hit the skids, he didn’t have a thought for anything other that his own career. Or whatever it is I consider my work to be, he thought. He had been immature. She’s right, he thought again.
“But we were speaking about Benny Vennerhag,” she said. “He called and complained and asked me to keep you away from him.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Can’t the police manage without their peculiar contacts on the other side? Or haven’t you caught the ones who hurt your colleague?”
“We’ve caught them. But that bastard shouldn’t be calling you.”
“Well, at least somebody’s calling me.”
“Now you’re exaggerating, Lotta.”
“Am I?”
“I promise to do better. Ake isn’t causing any more trouble, is he?”
His sister had gotten divorced from Ake Deventer, and it had been an ordeal filled with bitterness. Now she lived alone with her two kids in the house where they had grown up.
“He stays away, and that means he isn’t causing any trouble,” she said. “But I had pretty much forgotten the great mistake of my youth, Benny Vennerhag, until I heard his voice yesterday.”
“You hadn’t even turned twenty-five, I think.”
“My God. You’re supposed to be considered an adult at that age.”
“He must have been rattled.”
“What?”
“Benny. I must have scared him.”
“You did try to kill him, after all.”
Winter said nothing.
“Did it feel good?” she asked.
“What?”
“Trying to murder somebody? Was it a good feeling?”
The room had grown darker. Winter thought about his hands around Benny Vennerhag’s jaw. He no longer remembered what it had felt like. They hadn’t been his hands.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“I’m here.”
“How are you doing, really?”
“I’m not sure. A woman who’s no more than thirty years old is dead, and we don’t know who she is. That makes me more depressed than I ought to be, at least this early on.”
“Why don’t you come over here for a bit? It’s been months.”
Yeah, why not. Everything would still be there when he came back. His anonymous gloomy office at the police station was in that sense bigger than life itself. It was here before he showed up and it would remain after he was gone. “Should I bring something along?”
“No. But you are coming, then?”
“Are you alone?”
“Bim and Kristina are out but only for the moment. They really want to see you, Erik.”
Winter thought about his nieces. He was an awful uncle. Awful.
“It’s true,” his sister said. “They haven’t forgotten you.”
He walked down the empty corridors of the homicide department. Someone had forgotten to switch off the lights in the situation room. He stood in front of the board and considered his own vague lines and arrows, circles and
He thought once again of the lake, the water. How many people owned boats on Delsjo? Had anyone’s boat been stolen, even for a few hours? Maybe the fishing club knew.
The possibilities were infinite, the disappointments even more numerous. He thought about the child again. She was like something out of a dream or some kind of a message from a distant and frightening land that he had no choice but to visit. We have to find out your name, Helene.
The parking lot was deserted, and he felt dizzy when he emerged from the police station, like a split-second gap in the middle of his thoughts. As if he wasn’t there.
A radio car pulled in, and the man behind the wheel gave him a quick nod. Winter raised his hand and continued over to his Mercedes. The Shell station beyond was an amusement park, a loud glare of neon that gave the surroundings a cheerful tinge. Winter caught a whiff of fried sausages and overheated late summer.
On the other side of the gas station, the traffic was backed up by the cars outside Ullevi Stadium-the whole city was probably gridlocked. Staring stupidly at the keys in his hand, Winter turned back to the front entrance and continued on to the bicycle stand, where he always had a bike parked, in reserve, for situations just like this.
He pedaled past the central train station and on down to the river. Heading west, he had to weave his way through throngs of people milling about the beer tents at Lilla Bommen.
He leaned his bike against the iron fence and walked the short path up to the front steps. It had been months since he was last here, and he’d wondered why that was as he biked through the quiet streets of Hagen, taking in the smell of fresh-cut grass. There were no lights on at the house next door, on the left. Six months earlier he’d investigated the murder of a nineteen-year-old boy who’d grown up there.
The front door of his sister’s house stood ajar. He rang the doorbell.
“Go round the back,” he heard from inside. He guessed that she was sitting out on the terrace.
He made his way back down the steps and through the grass to the rear of the house. She stood and gave him a hug. He could smell twilight and wine. Her hair was shorter than he remembered and maybe a little darker, and she felt thin around her arms and chest. He knew that she was going to be turning forty in two months, on
