The Shadow Woman

“Was there anything else, Henrik?”

“No. You know your business.”

“As long as I don’t get disturbed all the time,” Winter said.

Still no one had emerged from the bus. Winter saw a woman walk up to it and stop next to the driver’s window. It looked as if she was speaking to the driver. He saw how she suddenly took a few steps backward and then turned around and started running away, out toward Skanegatan and across the parking lot toward the police station-straight for the building in which he was standing-and he saw how her features became more distinct. She disappeared beneath him. She had looked horrified.

“Excuse me,” Winter said, and left the room and took the elevator down to the lobby.

23

THE WOMAN WINTER HAD SEEN RUN ACROSS SKANEGATAN WAS hanging halfway through the glass window in reception. Winter could see the precinct commander, with a contingent of five or six men around him, on his way forward. A couple of homicide detectives were loafing next to them. Otherwise the hall and waiting room were filled with the usual mix of bicycle messengers, uniformed patrol officers, reception staff, lawyers, and their clients-a mixture of high and low: junkies on their way up or down, whores, car thieves, shoplifters from all social classes, half-drunken petty criminals, deputy directors who’d been tossed out of bars and returned later with a crowbar, hungover female executives who in frustration had violently resisted the police. Then there were the ones who’d just come by to fill out a form, who were applying for a passport and had lost their way, who’d been missing someone long enough, or who’d just wandered in there, God knows why.

The woman pointed at the bus outside Ullevi. Winter moved closer. He wasn’t doing anything just then anyway.

She explained that there was a man sitting in the bus with a little boy and that he was threatening to shoot the child and himself and at the same time blow up the bus. He had shown her the weapon and a string or something that he said he could pull and then the bus would explode.

“Cordon off the area,” the PC said to a uniformed woman standing next to him.

Winter could see the order getting passed on, the movement intensifying in the cramped space next to the reception desk, and the police officers preparing to go outside and join up with their colleagues who had been called back from elsewhere in the city. He saw the bus, now from a different perspective. It looked smaller, as if the sun had shrunk it as it stood unprotected out there in the empty square.

“Contact Bertelsen at immigration,” Winter heard the PC shout to someone who was already heading off into the bustle. He had now heard enough to know that sitting in the bus was a desperate man who’d finally made a choice, when he no longer had any choice. He guessed it was yet another man who wasn’t welcome in Sweden, about to be sent out into orbit around the world, if he survived that long. Yet another space refugee, a stateless human being circling the planet in rusting hulks that never put into port-or in cattle cars that clattered through all the marshlands and deserts of the earth without ever stopping at any its oases. He might shoot himself and the boy, Winter thought. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Skanegatan was quickly cordoned off and the traffic redirected. The curious were congregating, as if the tragedy had already been beamed out by the fastest media. And maybe it had. The police station’s tasteful lobby was teeming with reporters.

Winter walked out. Onlookers came from all directions and had to be forcibly removed since the police officers hadn’t yet managed to get all the cordon tape put up. The Gothenburg Party has been replaced by a new spectacle, and I’m no better than all the other bystanders, he thought, and walked back inside and rode the elevator up to his office, which faced the canal.

He glanced out the window and saw people coming across the grass, a sudden accretion of matter where there had previously been nothing but wind and heat. It was like someone crumbling a loaf of bread in the middle of the empty sea and thousands of seagulls suddenly shrieking down from the sky.

The phone on Winter’s desk rang.

“Yes?”

“Bertil here. There are some people shooting at each other over at Varvaderstorget.”

“What?”

“The witness who called three minutes ago said that it’s like an all-out gang war, and now we have a car out there confirming that shots have been fired.”

“Busy day today.”

“Did I miss something else?”

“There’s a hostage situation out front, or whatever you want to call it.”

“I’ve been on the phone the whol-Are you serious? A hostage situation?”

“A bus. But never mind that now. Have you had a chance to send someone to-Where did you say it was again?”

“Varvaderstorget square. In His-”

“I know where it is.”

“Like I said, there’s a radio car on the scene, but no one from the department. I don’t have a single fucking officer-”

“Let’s go,” Winter said. “Do you have a car ready?”

“Yes.”

They drove out via Smalandsgatan. Winter heard the megaphones and thought about the boy sitting with the man on the bus. Maybe they were father and son. He felt a sudden rage, a nausea that punched at his chest.

“What’s going on?” Ringmar was looking in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know much more than you do. Except that there’s a man sitting in a bus intent on killing himself and the boy he has with him. There may be other people there too.”

Ringmar sounded like he let out a sigh.

“He may also have an explosive device,” Winter said.

“And here we are on our way to another corner of the event center,” Ringmar said.

Winter looked at him askance just as the radio crackled to life with an update about Varvaderstorget. Four shots had been fired from the roofs of the buildings surrounding the square. And it seemed that two men had been shooting at each other but had disappeared. The police were now searching along the rooftops and on the ground.

“What the fu-Now somebody’s shooting again!” the voice was heard to say, and then the radio cut out.

“What the hell.” Ringmar pounded on the radio. It crackled but there was nothing intelligible. “That sounded like Jonne Stalnacke.”

They drove across the bridge and continued down Hjalmar Brantingsgatan. As they neared Varvaderstorget, Winter made out two patrol cars and people lying on the ground. When they got closer, he realized they were people who had taken cover, but he saw no blood around the cars or the people.

They stopped the car and ran, hunched over, to the two police officers who’d crawled down behind their car. One was holding a walkie-talkie and nodded when he recognized Ringmar and Winter. It was Sverker. A few days ago they’d seen him investigating an accident on Korsvagen. Winter thought about Sverker’s cancer and his return to the job.

“Fucking gangsters,” Sverker said.

“What happened?” Winter asked.

“Somebody started shooting-that’s what happened,” the police sergeant said, and suddenly a shot rang out close by.

“It’s a fucking war,” Sverker said.

Someone started screaming somewhere up ahead. The voice went silent and soon started up again, more softly and drawn out.