“So I heard.”
“You’ve spoken to her?”
“Yes. Just now.”
“You saw her?”
“It was on the phone.”
“She wants you to go see her more often. But I guess I’ve already been on your back about that.”
“Yes.”
“Now, she’s going to have a little party anyway to celebrate her big day. You’re not going to miss that, are you?”
“No.”
“Promise? Lotta needs her little brother.”
“I know. We have to look out for each other up here while you two are occupied elsewhere.”
“Don’t be like that now, Erik. We’ve talked about that. Your father has tried…”
Winter was standing in his office. He looked at the CD player and the desks covered with drawings. It was quiet.
“Someone’s trying to call me on my work line,” he said.
“I can’t hear it ringing.”
“It blinks. Good-bye, Mother.”
He hung up and walked over to the window and picked up a CD case from the sill, took out the disc, and slipped it into the player.
Beier called down to Winter.
“Come up here right away, please.”
“What is it?”
“Just come up as quickly as you can.”
Winter passed through the security gate and entered the fingerprint lab, where Beier and Bengt Sundlof were waiting. The slip with the map or whatever it was, and the codes or whatever they were, was lying on a table.
“One thing is clear now,” Beier said. “There are two sets of prints from Helene Andersen here.”
“What do you mean?”
“As a child and as an adult.”
“As a child?” Winter said.
“Yes. They’re the same lines, only smaller. She held this slip of paper when she was a child of around four or five.”
“So she’s the one who held on to it. Why?”
“It’s your job to find that out, Erik,” Beier said.
“So then we do have at least some kind of time frame for the paper.”
“I didn’t say that,” Beier said. “We know that she held it in her hand about twenty-five years ago.”
“Are there any other prints on it?” asked Winter, and he looked at the paper that seemed younger now that he knew more about its history.
“That’s where it gets trickier,” Beier said. “We can see some traces of fingerprints but only partials. I can’t help you there yet.”
“Okay.”
“You want us to continue?”
Winter blew air out through his mouth and thought. He studied the faint characters and lines.
“Maybe she had a reason for saving it. I don’t know. I really don’t know, Goran.”
“I’m only asking because we have a whole apartment’s worth of evidence to go through. And this isn’t exactly the only case we’re working on.”
“Keep working on this one whenever you get a little time left over, then.” Winter eyed the slip of paper again. “But what can you do with the partial prints?”
“For us to be able to conclusively establish identity, there have to be twelve points of comparison, minimum. You follow me?”
Winter followed him, in theory. But practically was another matter. The computer didn’t know what a fingerprint looked like-it simply registered the ridge endings, bifurcations, and dots.
There were twenty fingerprint experts in Sweden. Two in Gothenburg. One of them was Bengt Sundlof and he was still standing there next to Beier and Winter.
“It does kind of give me itchy fingers, so to speak,” Sundlof said of the slip of paper.
“A challenge,” Beier said.
“You sit there and peer into those two microscopes and search-and make sketches.”
“For days on end,” Beier said. “And get bad back pains from working so intensely in a hunched-over posture.”
“And you carry on like that until you find twelve points that match,” Sundlof said.
“Know what you say then?” he asked Winter.
“Bingo?” Winter said.
“We’re going to help you,” Sundlof said. “You appreciate knowledge and experience despite your youth and long hair.”
“In France they require a fourteen-point match for a positive ID,” Beier said.
“Maybe we’re taking risks up here in the north.”
“The Americans have the largest fingerprint database in the world, naturally,” Sundlof said. “The FBI has millions to choose from and compare to. They once found a seven-point match. Only they were different people!”
“I think I’ve lost you now,” Winter said.
“They had two sets of prints, and seven of the minutiae points in the two fingerprints were identical,” Beier said. “They were completely identical. And yet it turned out they came from two different people. No one’s ever found so many matching points in two separate individuals. Never.”
“Not yet anyway,” Winter said. “So twelve gives us a pretty good margin, then?”
“You can be pretty sure,” Beier said.
“Then do the same with the print on the drawer in Helene’s apartment,” Winter said.
“That’s a partial print,” Sundlof said. “And a faint one, probably deposited through a tear in a woolen glove, judging from the fiber sample. We’re analyzing that right now.”
“So, difficult in other words?” Winter asked.
Beier and Sundlof nodded simultaneously.
“How about the others? In the apartment?”
“We’re still working at it, Inspector,” Beier said.
“I’m sure you’ll find all there is to find,” Winter said, and took a step toward the door. “Thanks for the lesson, by the way.”
Winter passed through the security gate. He wanted to get back to his office to go through the drawings, to sort them.
He also wanted to study his copy of the slip of paper again. Here in forensics it was as if the numbers and letters had become more distinct, the lines longer, sharper. It meant something to him. It was a map.
It had meant something to Helene too. Or had she simply forgotten the slip of paper twenty-five years ago in that pocket, after some kind of game? It was possible-for those who believed in coincidences.
But she hadn’t written the numbers and drawn the lines herself. It was a grown-up’s hand that had guided the pen.
He felt warm and the inside of his head felt sort of swollen. A cold shower was in order.
38
