“What?”
“That you’re a good guy?”
“A hundred people at least,” Jakobsson said.
“List them,” Winter said, and took out a fresh notepad from his inside pocket, along with a stubby pencil.
“You’re out of your… I gotta go to the toilet.”
“In a minute.”
“You don’t get it. If I don’t get to a toilet in one minute, it won’t be much fun for anyone to sit in here.”
“What’s her name?”
“I said I don’t know. You can continue questioning me in the toilet if you want to but I can’t-”
“Give me a name.”
“I don’t know
“Who might have tipped her off that you’re ready to lend a hand?”
Jakobsson didn’t answer. He’d risen up to a half-standing position, and they could tell from the dark spot spreading out across his jeans that perhaps for the first time during the interview he had spoken the truth.
40
RINGMAR READ THE TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE SESSION WITH Jakobsson. He too was struck by its significance, by the possibility that they were suddenly making progress. It was like catching a whiff of something you knew would smell a lot worse when you got closer.
“I don’t think he knows what he’s involved in,” Ringmar said.
“He’s a pretty tough character.”
“Not that tough,” Ringmar said. “Not for this. Jakobsson is small time.”
“Mollerstrom is working on his circle of associates.”
“There must be a lot of them,” Ringmar said.
“Not as many as you might expect.”
“That all depends. Did you know that Oskar used to ride a motorbike?”
“Yes,” Winter said, “but it’s hard to believe.”
“He was in a biker gang. Some local chapter of the Hells Angels, but even they kicked him out, I think.”
“I can hear the rumbling throughout this investigation,” Winter said.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. The sky’s rumbling.”
Ringmar sized up his younger superior. Winter had dark circles under his eyes, and in certain lighting he almost looked as if he were wearing war paint. His long hair reached his shoulders.
“Maybe I’m reading too much into it,” Winter said. “Maybe Jakobsson is just an innocent bystander.”
“Innocent messenger,” Ringmar said. “But there are no innocent messengers.”
Winter flipped through the printouts. The words struck at him from the paper. Over the last two or three years, he’d come to read interrogation transcripts with a vague feeling of dread, as if they were fiction taken from a reality he couldn’t penetrate. The exchanges were fiction and sport at the same time, and both parties knew it.
“He says that the woman could have been forty or twenty-five.”
“That may be because of the sunglasses,” Ringmar said. “That is, if she was wearing any. Or if she even exists.”
“It’s not unusual to have a proxy,” Winter said. “Someone like Jakobsson gets an assignment from someone who got it from someone else who in turn was contacted by the prime mover. The murderer.”
“Yeah, standard criminal procedure,” Ringmar said.
“So we have to work our way backward along the chain,” Winter said.
“If all he did was that one service, and didn’t think any more about it, then he would have said so straight off.”
“Yes.”
“That means he knows whoever it was that gave him the job. The woman, if it is a woman.”
“Could be.”
“We can’t even say for sure that there was any money involved.”
“No.”
“We’ll have to put the screws to him again,” Ringmar said. “But let him go empty his bladder this time.”
The nationwide APB had been issued. Wellman defended the delay and did a good job of it. Winter might see Wellman in a different light after this.
Everything from the past month came back. Winter could see his own investigation described in different varieties of newspaper prose. He read the newspapers and set them aside. Bulow’s article was fairly well informed, but that wasn’t so strange given that Winter had provided the facts. It was an agreement of sorts.
Winter had agreed to take part in a press conference the next morning. Tomorrow, not earlier.
Sitting alone in his office, he reached for the drawings, but first he closed his eyes so his mind would be as dark and still as possible.
They dragged Delsjo Lake. They walked through the forested areas along the water’s edge again. They were able to be more candid when they questioned the neighbors.
Photographs of Helene Andersen’s apartment had been disseminated through the media and printed on posters. They went through the census register. Helene Andersen had lived in the apartment at North Biskopsgarden and before that in an apartment in Backa. Jennie had been born at Ostra Hospital. The father had been listed as unknown. Helene had taken care of her child on her own from the start.
She’d been in contact with the social services or, rather, the other way around. They had evaluated her and visited her home, but she was apparently deemed fit to look after her little daughter. No one that Winter spoke to remembered anything.
She had no job and she was not getting any support from the welfare office. It didn’t make any sense. She had an unblemished credit history. Not even someone who lives simply can manage that. Winter opened his eyes again. She had money coming in from somewhere. She had stated in her tax returns that she had a minor sum of money put by, but they didn’t find any accounts or safe-deposit boxes. They had more to do there.
There were 145 Andersens in the Gothenburg telephone book, but none had thus far been in touch.
Helene had had a telephone installed three months before, and she wasn’t registered as having had one before that.
It was October now, and her service had started on August 10. She’d bought a telephone, but they didn’t as yet know where. A twenty-nine-year-old woman who may have gotten her first phone ever. Why did she get a phone? Why had she decided not to have one earlier?
Something had happened that caused her to need a phone, thought Winter. She needed to get in touch with someone, maybe quickly if necessary. Was she afraid? Had she bought it for protection? Had she been told to be reachable?
Seven days after her phone was hooked up, she was dead. She’d made two calls, both to phone booths. One was at Vagmastarplatsen, which she had dialed at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of August 14. The other booth was at the bus terminal at the Heden recreation grounds, which she’d called the following evening, August 15.
Helene had in turn received three calls, two immediately preceding the calls she’d placed herself and from the same phone booths. Someone had apparently been waiting there for her to call back. Why?
The third call came from a number that was registered to an apartment in the Majorna district. Someone had phoned at four thirty on the afternoon of August 16. The conversation had lasted one minute. The dialer was a woman named Maj Svedberg, and she had no recollection whatsoever of the call. August 16? Had she even been in town? Could it have been when she dialed a wrong number? A child had answered and then a woman, and it was a wrong number. Whom had she intended to call? The public dental service, actually, and if they wanted to check her story, she had the number for the dentist, but she didn’t know anything about this other number.
