head.
The man returned with a tray and three bottles of beer.
15
“I heard you solved it-the attack on your colleague.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“You haven’t become naive, now, have you, Inspector?”
Winter thought of his hands around Vennerhag’s jaw.
“I’m still in pain,” Vennerhag said.
“What?”
“The brutality of the police force. What you did to me the other day? I could-”
“I may need your help again soon,” Winter said mellifluously.
“I don’t like that tone in your voice,” Vennerhag said. “And in that case it’ll have to be over the phone.” He waited but Winter said nothing more. “What do you need help with?”
“I don’t know yet, but I might be in touch soon.”
“What if I leave town?”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not allowed to leave town?”
“When did you last leave town, Benny?”
“That’s beside the point, Inspector.”
“You haven’t been outside the city limits in four years, Benny.”
“How do you know that?”
“You haven’t become naive, now, have you, Master Thief?”
Vennerhag snickered. “Okay, okay. I know what it is anyway. I read the papers. But I don’t see how I can be of any help to you when I don’t know anything about it. Who is she, by the way?”
“Who?”
“The dead woman, for Christ’s sake. The body. Who is she?”
“We don’t know.”
“Come on, Winter. There’s no such thing as an unknown body anymore.”
“Maybe not in your world.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Winter was tired of Vennerhag’s voice. He wanted to end the conversation.
“I honestly don’t know who she is,” he said. “I may end up needing your help. And you will help me then, won’t you, Benny?”
“Only if you’re nice.”
“The police are always nice.”
Vennerhag’s laugh cut through the phone line again. “And everybody else is mean. How’s Lotta doing, by the way?”
“She told me that you called and complained.”
“I didn’t complain. And it was for your own good. What you did was out of order. It may be hot as hell, but you keep your emotions in check.”
“Don’t call her anymore. Stay away from her.”
“How far away? You said I wasn’t supposed to leave town, remember?”
“I’ll be in touch, Benny,” Winter said, and hung up the receiver. His hand was sticky.
He stood and pulled off his blazer and hung it over the back of the chair, then rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, missing his summer outfit of T-shirt and cutoffs. Donning an expensive suit of armor for work sent out signals. What signals were those?
“They’re signals of weakness,” his sister had said the night before. “Anyone who has to take cover behind an Armani or Boss suit isn’t really comfortable in his own skin.”
“Baldessarini,” he had said. “Cerutti. Not Armani or Boss-that’s what you wear when you’re working on your car. Could just be that I like to be well dressed,” he had said. “That there’s nothing more to it.”
“There is more to it,” she had said.
And he had told her: About the fear that took hold of him when he came close to evil’s darkest core, about how that fear had intensified his own fragility like a bubble expanding with air. The knowledge that he couldn’t do anything else with his life, didn’t want to do anything else, became a burden when he knew what that involved. When nighttime came around he couldn’t set aside the day, just take it off and hang it up like one of his jackets and pull on a comfy tracksuit and think about something else. That goddamn Cerutti suit stayed with him all the way into bed.
But there was also something else there. His beautiful clothes were at the same time a form of protection against the apprehension that constantly threatened to force its way into his body.
“That could be one interpretation,” she had said. The problem was that his exterior seldom helped with his interior. “Think about that when you’re ironing your armored shirts,” she had said in the waning night that was moving toward morning.
The surface of the water was a sparkling layer of silver, with glints that looked as if they had been strewn by hand across the lake. It stung Winter’s eyes when he looked to the north.
He walked along the wooded path to the edge of the bog. Crickets were chirping all around him: the sound of intense prolonged heat. A faint breeze brought with it a damp smell from the nearly dried-out bog holes within the dark terrain. Winter saw no one moving around in there, but he knew there were police officers combing the lakeside for clues and people who lived along the water’s edge.
It was nearly twelve o’clock. Few cars could be heard from the highway above and beyond him. From where he stood, beneath the trees, he could count up to twenty different shades of green. Even the rays of sunlight shone green. The very sky to the east was green through the leaves and between the branches. Only the symbol painted onto the bark, eight inches from his nose, was red. Winter took it for just that, a symbol. A symbol for what?
Winter heard a noise behind him and turned around. The outline of a man was moving in his direction. When the silhouette stepped out of the sunlight, Winter saw that it was Halders.
“So you’ve got the time to stand around here, huh, boss?” Halders was wearing short sleeves, his shirt hanging outside his trousers, and his face was partly in the shade, but Winter could see the sweat glinting on the high forehead that continued upward into Halders’s close-cropped skull. “This is a pleasant spot, sort of still.”
“Did you come from Helenevik? I didn’t hear a car.”
“It’s standing right there,” Halders said, and turned around and pointed behind him as if he wanted to prove that he hadn’t trekked three miles in the intense heat. “I guess I had the same feeling you did. That I wanted a look at the place, seeing as I was in the area anyway.”
Winter didn’t answer. He turned his gaze to the tree. Halders came closer.
“So this is that damn marking. Couldn’t some kids have daubed it up there?”
“Sure. We just need to get that confirmed.”
“And it’s definitely paint?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no way it could be blood?”
“No.”
“But it may have been intended to be blood,” Halders said. “I mean, to look like it was blood and that we should think of it as blood.”
“That’s possible,” Winter said. “How were the folks in Helenevik?”
