“I don’t know what to say. I’m not hanging my head. You’re not hanging your head.” Bergenhem entered the coffee room. “Lars isn’t hanging his head.”
48
He went inside and passed through the bar. The wrinkly ones were already in position, with their first beer of the day. Smoke wafted in clouds across their faces, which were slowly becoming smoothed out by the alcohol.
Winter sat in an armchair in a lone row of seats facing the windows. The catamaran accelerated when it reached Dana Fjord and he saw how the sun hit the cliffs with a sharp glare. The archipelago was all nuances of rock, which shone in the early morning sunlight and was transformed into steel and earth and granite. The sky pushed the thin clouds downward and outward.
Two boats met and their red sails slid into one another over a sea of congealed lead. The world was reflected through the window. These were northern waters, increasingly viscous as winter approached.
He took the E45 to Alborg and turned off toward the city, following the tunnel underneath Limfjorden. It was years since he’d last been there and the city seemed bigger than he remembered it. The route in passed through docks where the warehouse buildings blocked the sun. The steam from the distillery turned the sky white, as if it had been chalked.
Winter parked outside the railway station and walked straight across John F. Kennedy Square to the Park Hotel. His room was small and infused with the sour smell of tobacco. It looked out onto a dark courtyard where a pile of boxes was stacked halfway up the wall and stood level with Winter’s room. There was a low humming from the ventilation system that clung to the wall outside his window like ivy made out of aluminum. The sound reminded Winter of the vibrations from the catamaran.
He took his bags and went back to the antique elevator and rode it down to reception.
“I want another room,” he said to the young clerk, who nodded as if it was to be expected for a guest to return like that five minutes later.
“We don’t have any more single rooms,” he said.
“Then give me a double.”
“That’ll cost-”
“I don’t care what it costs,” Winter said. “But I want one on the third floor, with a view.” He gestured through the lobby and out toward Kennedy Square.
The guy at reception studied something on the counter in front of him and then turned toward the board behind, where the keys hung from row upon row of hooks fixed on red felt. I crossed a time zone in the middle of the Kattegat and have landed in the nineteenth century, Winter thought, closing his eyes. When he opened them again the young man was holding out a key.
“You’re in luck,” he said. “Third floor, double room, facing the square.”
The room seemed clean. Winter went up to the window and through the thin curtains saw the square below and the state railway building on the other side of it. Two soldiers stood outside the station, as if guarding his car from the buses driving back and forth. Winter saw a man pass by holding a hot dog and he felt hungry. There was a bar in the station building, level with his Mercedes, so he pulled the door closed and left the key with a new man behind the counter. Outside the sun stood right above the square. It was still a warm October.
Winter ordered two red
Diagonally off to the right was the bus station, and in the adjacent parking lot stood four motorcycles, as if chained together in the middle of the entrance. The owners were standing next to them and talking. They wore black leather and blue denim and black boots with sharp heels-all men with black beards and hair as long as Winter’s. Two had a ponytail. All were drinking beer. The cars were forced to skirt around the campsite the biker gang had set up, but Winter didn’t hear or see any of the drivers honk their horns and tell them to get the hell out of the way. What he saw was just a natural part of city life. Perhaps this was a place where everyone lived happily side by side.
Winter finished off his lunch and went out to his car. Following directions from the guy at the hotel, he drove around the block and back onto Boulevarden from the right and parked on the one-way street alongside the hotel. He got out and locked the car and walked back across the square, past the station. The motorbikes had disappeared in a low rumble that could still be heard above the fjord. Winter followed Jyllandsgade for two blocks, and the police headquarters loomed up on the left like a futuristic palace of coal and silver.
Inside the police HQ everything was black leather and steel and marble floors. The walls of glass brought in the city.
He reported his arrival at a short counter to the right, where a uniformed officer asked him to have a seat in a steel chair and wait.
Instead he walked into a big airy public reception area where the counter was at least fifteen yards long. People were standing at pulpits, filling out forms. This place is full of space and light, Winter thought, conjuring in his mind the cramped hovel in Gothenburg that was supposed to accommodate all the citizenry in need of assistance from the police.
He went back to the big hall, and a woman in a black shirt and black jeans was standing at the counter, next to the uniformed officer. She was thin and had thick, slicked-back fair hair. Winter could see a pack of cigarettes sticking halfway out of her left breast pocket. She had blue eyes, which he could detect because the light was reflected in them from the glass walls. She seemed even younger than he was. It can’t be possible for someone in such an exposed position to be younger, Winter thought, as he took the hand that was held out to him.
“Welcome, Inspector Winter.”
“Thank you, Inspector… Poulsen?”
“That’s right. Michaela. So now we can dispense with the titles.”
She followed Winter’s gaze out through the glass wall. “Pretty sleek, huh? I’m not talking about those wrecked railcars out there. But this building. The police station.”
“I’m impressed,” Winter said.
“We’re all impressed,” Poulsen said. “We’re impressed by the audacity of our superiors. We’re short on computers, but we’ve sure got a beautiful building to not house them in.” She looked at Winter. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”
“No. But the last time was many years ago.”
49
She showed him into a chamber at the far end of the corridor. Inside was a computer on a table and some binders on a desk. There was also a telephone. Through the window he could see the local Alcoholics Anonymous.
“If you Swedes can help us with this old case, we’ll be thrilled,” Michaela Poulsen said. “I wasn’t around back
