Bendrup lied a little and spoke the truth where necessary. Winter sat there knowing some of the answers. Bendrup’s superiors spoke about what little they knew. “You always have to keep one last card up your sleeve,” Bendrup had said to Winter that morning.
In this case, they had truly done just that. The question was whether there was one, and where.
Winter continued reading but found nothing of any greater value than what he already knew. He stopped scrolling the film, and the blurred lateral movement halted before his eyes. He felt slightly nauseous. It may have been from the air in there and also the film in the reader, the different speeds that made it feel as though he were sitting in a car and staring out at the passing countryside printed on paper.
He walked over to the window again. The little crosswalk man was still red and the crossing long abandoned by the city’s pedestrians.
Winter walked back to the microfilm reader and sat down. He slowly scrolled through the past, the events of the day. What had it been like? How had it been when Helene and Brigitta were here? Had Brigitta read the same thing he was reading now?
He continued his slow journey through the time machine. Denmark was the world’s largest exporter of beer in 1972. An illustration showed how Alborg’s infrastructure was likely to look in 1990: subway, a raised monorail around a city that the artist seemed to have modeled on something taken from the Liseberg Amusement Park. Mass transport by helicopter. Winter envied that era’s faith in the future. He had been twelve years old back then, also on his way somewhere, and could always be found in the playhouse at the bottom of the garden in Hagen.
England’s manager, Alf Ramsey, was sticking with his old stars for the 1974 World Cup qualifier. There was a picture of Bobby Moore, and young Ray Clemence, and a twenty-one-year-old Kevin Keegan with sideburns that were even more flipped out than Jens Bendrup’s had been seven pages earlier.
Paul and Linda McCartney started writing “The Zoo Gang,” and the students’ abuse of power at the universities was squelched.
The flickering of the racing screen made Winter’s nausea worse. He looked at his watch. Time to quit and head north. He’d kept scrolling the film forward as he looked down, and when he looked at the screen again, he’d landed on a local page about Pandrup and the surrounding area. The name Blokhus was in the headline of an article that seemed to be covering the building of the big hotel he’d passed on the deserted square the day before.
There was another article about Blokhus on the same page. If Winter understood the headline correctly, it had something to do with reclaimed land. There was a photo taken from a spot just off the square. The photographer was standing on a street called Sonder i By. Winter studied the car.
He stiffened. He knew exactly where the photographer was standing when he took the picture, which was supposed to illustrate land-use zoning and partitioning from the street on down to the sea. Winter read the lead-in. He read the caption that explained the partitioning and the piece of land in question. There were seven or eight houses in the photo that showed the full length of Jens Baerentsvej. Winter knew which street it was because he recognized the third house on the right-hand side of the dirt road that led to the sea across the wind-battered grass. The plasterwork was gray and spotted, and the house was more like a garden shed than a home. There was no fence. No sign of life in the windows. The photograph could have been taken anytime within the past twenty-five years, but Winter knew that it had been taken in conjunction with the article, as generic accompanying artwork. He knew that. The pressure mounted in his head and his midriff. A car was parked on the road outside the crooked house. The distance was fifty yards or more. Two figures could be seen in front of the house, on their way in or out. You couldn’t make out their faces, but it was an adult and a child.
He had deliberated with himself and then driven to Frederikshavn. Before, he’d called straight to Michaela Poulsen and told her about the photo in the
“It must be possible to find out when it was taken,” Winter had said.
“Of course. I’ll contact the newspaper. And the photographer, if he’s still alive.”
“Would you please send me a good enlargement of it as quickly as possible? So we can continue working on it.”
“Of course,” she’d said again.
The wind grabbed at his hair. He was standing on deck, watching as Denmark grew smaller and disappeared. Dusk fell over the sea. It had stopped raining in international waters. Winter felt as if he had a fever, a heightened heart rate. They were halfway home. He went into the bar, which was full of glazed-eyed people who continued the drinking they’d started hours ago in Frederikshavn. A few of them were sitting in wheelchairs, which was convenient for anyone who really wanted to get tanked, he thought.
Mountains of bottles and cans took form on the tables. People’s contours seemed to dissolve, he thought, and become part of history in such a way that more and more of them now seemed to resemble some kind of medieval troupe of jesters or lepers.
The smoke smudged out the features of the bar guests still further. Winter went out again, to get enough fresh air to feel like smoking a Corps. The catamaran passed Vinga. Wild ducks flew black against the evening sky while the lighthouse swept cones of light across the water. He smoked and felt his pulse drop. They passed Arendal. The big North Sea ferries slammed against the Skandiahamnen docks, reminding Winter of the walls of high-rises around North Biskopsgarden-only the satellite dishes were replaced by a thousand eyes peering up toward outer space.
The drawings glowed on the wall of his office when he switched on the desk lamp and the ceiling light. The Danish flag in the depictions had taken on new meaning.
The road still ran through forest.
A windmill moved its vanes.
The streetcars went somewhere.
Ringmar knocked on the open door and entered. “Welcome home.”
Winter turned around. “Thanks. How’s it going?”
“I should be asking you that.”
“How’d it go with the bus driver?”
“It could have been her.”
“I had an odd experience,” Winter said. “I saw a photograph in a newspaper from back then, in 1972, of someone who could be Helene, and all I could think about was
“That’s not so strange,” Ringmar said.
“Don’t you see? Everything’s getting mixed up. Pretty soon I won’t know who’s who. Or else that’s just how it feels at the moment. Maybe I’m just tired.”
“You look pale. For Christ’s sake, Erik, go home and get some rest.”
Halders was drumming his fingers against the desktop. He hadn’t done all the work himself, but he was responsible.
The material lay neatly organized in translucent-gray plastic folders. He was the first to see it in its entirety: 124 owners of Fort Escorts with license plates that begin with the letter
They hadn’t arrested anyone. They hadn’t even seen anything out of the ordinary. One of the stolen cars had not been accounted for, but the owner had an alibi and a spotless record.
Not everyone had quite so spotless a record. One-eighth of those 124 people had been convicted of minor offenses and occasionally something a little more serious, but Halders had been a police officer long enough to be able to say whether that was a high or low number.
There was something else in the back of his head. It was one of the ex-felons, Bremer. Georg Bremer. The old man had once done time for burglary. Six months twenty years ago. Halders remembered his house out in the sticks. The road through the wilderness. The horses at the edge of the field. The airplanes coming in over Landvetter and Harryda, which sounded like lightning striking.
Christ, Halders thought. What was it? What was it I didn’t check? What was it I put off till tomorrow?
He flipped through the folders and read.
