one of the house’s yellow timber-framed towers.
He removed a piece of paper from his jacket’s inside pocket and read it.
They’d been seen leaving Blokhus on a path that ran between the dunes just as it does now.
He climbed out of the car and the wind lifted his hair up, slapping the collar of his jacket against his throat. Sand from the beach had been swept across the street like snowdrifts. It grew higher and ever closer to one of the few open shops, where clothes on hangers waved armless greetings from empty sleeves.
This is a ghost town, thought Winter.
A new square marked the center of Blokhus. There was a Cowboyland and a Sky Bar, whose windows were just shadowy black holes. Outside another clothing store, dresses and jackets swelled to twice their size in the wind. Winter saw no seabirds. Perhaps the grotesque scarecrows on the hangers in this town scared the shit out of birds.
The house lay behind the square, on Jens Baerentsvej-the third to the right on the dirt road that led to the sea across wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was an extension on the back of it that might be a room. There was no fence. A rusty lawn mower stood in the center of the little front yard, as if abandoned in miduse.
It was here. It was here, he thought to himself again. They had been here. Helene had been here. The little girl that was Helene had been here. And someone else besides. Maybe her mother, maybe not. Maybe her father, maybe not. Kim Andersen. Maybe a father. Thou shalt obey thy father. Honor thy father. Our father who art in heaven, thought Winter.
Had he been murdered here?
During the drive back to Alborg, Winter thought about how much the Danes had been able to accomplish in their forensic examination of the house back then. The technicians found traces of Helene, but not of anyone else except the owners.
He would have liked to have gone right in, but that was an issue for the judge in Hjorring. The house had changed hands three times.
When he reached the tree-lined stretch again, all was still. The setting sun covered everything in gold leaf, and Winter put on his sunglasses for the drive into town. He parked outside the black police headquarters, which he thought looked more and more like a spaceship that had landed in the midst of this Danish urban agglomeration.
Michaela Poulsen was still in her office. The glow from her computer screen gradually caught up with the fading sun.
“Beate Moller wasn’t interested in being questioned,” she said, as she saved a document in the word- processing program and looked up.
“Not even in having a talk?”
“What she actually told us was to go to hell, using only slightly more genteel language.”
“I see.”
“Her son has never done anything bad. He’s only had bad things done to him.”
“Where does she live?”
“Why do you want to know? You’re not thinking of doing something foolish?”
“Never while on duty,” Winter said, and Poulsen laughed.
Winter asked about the things he had been thinking about in the car on the way back.
Poulsen listened. “I don’t know who owns the house now, but that can be checked out. If we’ve got enough to establish probable cause, we can get a search warrant from the judge in Hjorring. Where leads are concerned, I think it’s all there in the binders in your office. And I’m sure forensics conducted a thorough search of the house.”
“Even underneath the new wallpaper?”
“I don’t know about that specifically, but we can quickly find out. We can check with the National Center for Forensic Science in Copenhagen.”
The phone on the homicide inspector’s desk rang. She lifted the receiver and listened.
“It’s for you. From Sweden.”
52
“Hi, it’s Winter.”
“Hi, Erik. It’s Bertil. I called your mobile but you didn’t answer.”
He picked up his mobile phone and looked at it. “It looks completely normal.”
“I’m not talking about how it looks. But how it sounds.”
“Something must have happened to it,” Winter said, and brought up the call list on the display. Nothing since he’d arrived in Denmark.
“Oh well. We’re speaking now anyway. And we haven’t found any Moller here,” Ringmar said. “No one who fits, anyway. Not yet. But that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve really had our hands full over the past twenty-four hours, sifting through all the tips about the girl-well, you know all about that, of course, but we have a couple of interesting ones here. One came in just an hour ago. A bus driver at Billdal says he’s sure that he’s seen the girl on his bus.”
“Alone?”
“He says she was accompanied by a woman. I’ve only spoken to him on the phone. He should be showing up here any minute.”
“When did he see the girl?”
Winter heard the overloaded phone line crackle again.
“He was going to try to remember on the way over here. He’s checking his driver’s log. It’s too early to tell. But it was a long time ago.”
“How long?”
“Months. Could be in connection with the murder.”
“Or before.”
“What?”
“Nothing. We’ll have to discuss it later, when I get back.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow evening, I think. I really ought to stay longer, but I can always return.”
“How’d it go today?”
“I think the biker gang, or gangs, over here are keeping an eye on me. Somebody is.”
“They’re following you?”
“Possibly, but I think they want me to know about it. Or else they screwed up.”
“We’re working on that lead,” Ringmar said. “It’s gotten stronger.”
“What’s happening otherwise?”
“Halders had something-no, I think that had to do with the shoot-out. I don’t know, in that case it’s in the interrogation file. But I don’t know if I have time to read it to you right now, with everybody calling in with their information. You can read it later. It’s your job. You can’t go on eating
“I haven’t had a single bite.”
“Then there’s no reason to stay on. If you’re not planning on eating those tasty
