He drew the curtains and saw a tanker truck parked next to the phone booths, with thick hoses feeding from it into the ground. Sometimes the local sewage cleaners know when you’ve checked into a hotel and make a point of getting to work outside your window at the crack of dawn, he thought. But I was getting up anyway.
The sky encased his field of vision like dirty steel. The buses in front of the station departed with early-rising unfortunates. There were still soldiers in front of the station. Maybe it’s a permanent posting, he thought.
The vibrations ceased seconds after the racket, and the sewage cleaners pulled levers and pressed buttons and headed off for breakfast.
Winter could now take in the sounds of early morning, delicate and clear.
He was escorted to his temporary office on the second floor by a uniformed officer who didn’t say a word. Michaela Poulsen came in a minute later.
“I’m being followed,” Winter said.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. Winter noticed that she didn’t ask if he was sure. “Your arrival was no secret, after all.”
“Who are they?”
“Who’s following you? To know that I’d have to see a few faces.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to invite you out for dinner tonight,” Winter said. “You’ll have to discreetly glance over your shoulder.”
“Okay. But it’ll have to be after eight.”
“Could be that one of the gangs over here got a message from Sweden,” Winter said.
“Or an alarm,” Poulsen said.
“Yes. An alarm. That could tell us something. And there’s something else,” Winter said. “The name Andersen. Or Moller. The one who wound up dead afterward.”
“Kim Moller.”
“Let’s call him Kim Andersen. I read up on him yesterday in my hotel room. I couldn’t quite get my head around it. He seems to have been a reluctant member. A reluctant biker. There wasn’t much in there.”
“And he wasn’t known to us before.”
“First time?”
“First and last.”
“Are you talking bank robberies now?”
“The more serious stuff, yeah.”
“His parents weren’t especially forthcoming, as far as I could tell.”
“They were terrified,” Poulsen said. “Literally scared to death. The father died a few months later, and while it could have been his heart, it may well have been something else.”
“Is the mother still living?”
“Yes.” Poulsen looked at Winter. “Do you want to question her? That is, do you want us to question her again?”
“Where is she?”
“At home, I think.”
“Can you set it up?”
“We can try. If she doesn’t want to, we’ll have to go see a judge.”
“Try contacting her at home,” Winter said.
Poulsen left the room and returned five minutes later. “No answer and no answering machine.”
“Do you have the address?”
“Yes, but that’s not a good idea. If we just show up on her doorstep, she’s liable to just deny everything. And if she was afraid back then, she’s afraid now too. We’ve had some contact over the years.”
“Is she being watched? By them, I mean.”
“I would think so.”
Winter was alone in the room, studying the slip of paper that resembled the map he had first seen on Beier’s desk in Gothenburg, a copy of which he’d brought along and was now holding up for comparison. The handwriting was different but the message was the same. The lines were scrawled in the same directions. The letters and numbers could be references to times and quantities. People or money? Or both? Initials of places or names? On the desk before him and in the files on the computer were fragments of answers. As soon as he got home, he could sit down with all the documents and other materials and very slowly work his way through the preliminary investigation from August 18 to today. He looked at the photo of Kim Andersen that glistened through the plastic pressed over his face. From October 2, 1972, up to the present, thought Winter. Andersen’s face was alive and seemed painted with a heavy burden that could have been anything. Winter knew it was taken the year before Andersen died. He was a member then, in one way or another. He had a Harley 750. His eyes were black and his chin was in shadow. The shadow fell from the left and made his face indistinct. Winter knew what he was looking for, but he couldn’t find any direct resemblance to Helene Andersen in Kim Andersen’s youth of twenty-five years ago.
He drove across the bridge and turned left on Vesterbrogade. This was the route Brigitta had driven. Helene sat in the back or lay pressed against the floor. Or was held there. How frightened had the child been? The mother? Had she known where she was going? According to Bendrup, a few witnesses later came forward saying they’d seen a Fiat driving at high speed between the high-rises. The high-rises gave way to detached gray stone houses when the street turned into Thistedvej.
The traffic thinned out when fields began to open up along the roadside, and Winter could hear the wind. The light was transformed as he went from city to countryside, a paler hue now spanned the sky to the west, where the sea lay. Before Arbybro he looked to the right and saw mile-long stretches of tree-lined country roads rambling through ploughed fields.
One ran parallel to the road that he was driving on. He looked to his right again: a flash of movement among the trees, keeping pace with his own. He looked again: the movement continued when the roads ran side by side through the Store Vildmose marshes. He guessed it was three hundred yards to the tree-lined road that paralleled his. The sun broke through the sky. His gaze returned to the road in front of him. There were no cars ahead, and he saw none in his rearview mirror. He looked to the right again, and now he was certain. The polished chrome of two motorbikes caught the sun at rhythmic intervals as they passed tree after tree.
Then the trees came to an abrupt end, as if an artist had tired of drawing them and lifted his pen from the paper. At that same moment, the motorcycles disappeared from view. Winter drove another half kilometer, but there was no longer any parallel movement. He slowed down suddenly and pulled into a parking space at the side of the road. With the engine running, he tried to see the line of trees in his rearview mirror. He saw the end of it and how it meandered back the way he’d come. They must have stopped right at the last tree, thought Winter. They knew how it looked. Maybe they didn’t notice that I’d spotted them. Perhaps it wasn’t
He continued on, at Pandrup turning left toward Blokhus.
The resort town looked at first like a cautiously inhabited year-round community, but the impression of life dissipated the closer he got to the sea.
Winter turned right at an intersection and stopped two hundred yards farther on, in front of the Bellevue Hotel-all wood and glass that shook in the wind gusting from the sea, across the sand dunes that abutted the hotel. The balconies were abandoned zones waiting for the next season. A pennon was being ripped to shreds on
