the store, and the guy behind the counter looked up, and Winter nodded.
He walked past Karin Sohlberg’s office, which was closed. She’d called in sick, and he could understand that. Unfortunately, the police couldn’t call in sick after a distressing experience, and it was never enough just to get the rest of the day off. What they had was Hanne, and Winter suddenly missed the sound of her voice, or perhaps it was her words.
Hanne Ostergaard was a priest from Skar who worked part-time as a healer of souls at the Gothenburg Police Department. She tried to speak to the men and women who had gone through difficult experiences or had seen the consequences of them. The police turned out to be just as vulnerable as anyone else, and more often than not they carried their scars with them for a long time. Forever really.
Hanne had combined a vacation with a leave of absence in order to attend university, and she hadn’t been at the police station since the end of spring. Winter had spoken to her twice during the summer, but that had been by phone. Perhaps she would feel under too much pressure when she came back. That was sure to be the case. A part-time fellow human being and hundreds of scared police officers. An inspector who feared the worst for the coming weeks. He thought about the girl again, Jennie Andersen. He couldn’t keep those horrible thoughts at bay.
He stood in the courtyard, facing the building. They had staked out the apartment but avoided other forms of surveillance. The kitchen window was a dark rectangle against the light-colored brickwork. Black pigeons clung above and below, as if to signify that the silence within was forever. The pigeons sat clustered around her window, hugging the wall as they moved along-like winged rats, thought Winter. He entered the house and continued up to the door. Jennie’s drawing of the rain and sun was still there, an apt depiction of the past six weeks. He saw the ship in the drawing and thought of the boat in Big Delsjo Lake. They hadn’t made any more progress there. Had Helene Andersen and her daughter had access to a boat? Why else would the girl draw a ship or a boat-there were more drawings like it above her bed. When Beier’s men went through the apartment, they found even more children’s drawings, enough to fill a big paper sack.
Winter opened the door and stood in the hall. Someone had been here after Helene’s death. Was it just the rental slips he had come for? Winter pictured a man in order to focus his thoughts more clearly. They hadn’t found any personal letters-no surprise since there wasn’t a soul in the world who’d come asking for Helene Andersen when she’d disappeared. Or her daughter either. How immense could loneliness be? He carried the thought around with him in rooms that smelled of mute sorrow.
They knew the murder had not been committed here, so where had it taken place? In the vicinity of where the body was found? She had made a journey from the northwestern part of the city to the Delsjo lakes in the eastern expanse where all urban development came to an end. Had she made that trip of a dozen or so miles on her own? Had she already been dead?
Winter stood in the kitchen. He heard the sounds from the pigeons’ throats outside the window. A child’s drawing was attached to the refrigerator door by a magnet in the shape of a sailboat. The technicians had chosen to leave it there, and Winter wondered why.
The drawing showed a car with faces in the front window and the back. The car was white. It was raining in half the sky, and in the other the sun was shining. Winter had glanced at the drawing the first time he was here, yesterday. He now saw that the face in the front was drawn in profile and that there was a beard hanging off the man’s chin, like a goatee.
My God, he thought, and felt his blood rise to his head.
The face in the backseat had red hair in pigtails.
Someone with a beard driving a car that the girl is riding in, he thought. He thought of all the drawings they had removed from the apartment. Good Lord, he thought. The girl has drawn everything she’s seen and experienced. All children draw. They draw what they’re going through since they can’t write it down.
Jennie’s drawings are her diary, he thought. We have her diary.
He still felt the blood in his face and told himself that he needed to stay calm, that it was just one lead among many others, perhaps not even a lead at all. Still he felt the excitement.
He’s seen her drawing, thought Winter. He knows her. He knows this little family. Take it easy. Remember what Sture said about being too meticulous. The man with the beard could be somebody else-a friend. Or a taxi driver, or just any man from her imagination. I’ll have to go through her drawings one by one. How many are there? Five hundred? Is it usual to hold on to that many? Don’t ask me, he thought, I know nothing about children, and then, just as quickly as he thought that thought, he saw Angela’s face in his mind’s eye.
He stood still in the kitchen. There could be more from the basement, where Helene Andersen had kept a storage room without an apartment number or name. That wasn’t unusual. After a while they’d found it, locked with a little padlock. It contained a few boxes of clothes, a pair of children’s skis, and a chair.
33
Her hair was wet and her clothes too. She had spread out her dress underneath her, like a sheet, and it had gotten wet. She felt cold sometimes and pulled it on over her trousers and shirt, and then she felt hot and took it off again. The men came and looked at her when they thought she was asleep-only she was awake, but it was almost like being asleep. She was dizzy the whole time and she had all these goose bumps on her body, like when you’ve been swimming and the wind blows on you before you’ve put a towel around yourself.
The man, the one who always came up to her, brought some pills that he wanted her to swallow. But she couldn’t. He called to the other man.
“She’s not swallowing.”
“Tell her she has to.”
“It doesn’t do any good.”
“You’ll have to dissolve them.”
“What?”
“Dissolve them in water and it’ll be easier for her to swallow. Or put the powder in a cup of hot sugar water.”
The man had bent forward and laid his hand on her forehead again.
“She doesn’t feel so hot now.”
“Maybe she doesn’t need them.”
“What?”
“The pills, for Christ’s sake.”
“I think she needs them.”
“Then do what I told you.”
She’d tried to swallow the glass of water, and it tasted bad. Then she dozed off and heard sounds from outside, like a rumbling or a chugging, and then they were gone. And she listened for the cuckoo, but you couldn’t hear it anymore after the chugging came. She waited for the cuckoo, who was maybe always there.
She thought to herself, I’m not going to be here for long. I’m going to be at home in my new bedroom where it says Helene on the door. My name is Helene, and the men haven’t said it once, so I’ll just have to say it myself. She whispered and it hurt her throat, but she whispered Helene one more time and then it became lighter and all red in her eyes and then she thought she heard the cuckoo again.
