further.”
“What’s this all about? If you think I’m using my car to move around stolen goods or something, you’re welcome to take a look.”
Winter didn’t answer.
“You think you can go around harassing people like me just as you please, huh? I’ve behaved myself ever since I got out. Ask anyone, you’ll see. Is it Svensk? He hasn’t done anything. Is it that shoot-out? Is that why you’re here?”
“We’d like you to come with us,” Winter said.
Bremer looked at Halders and Aneta Djanali as if they had the authority to reverse Winter’s decision. He took another step and stopped. It’s as if his body is shrinking, Winter thought. His skin is sinking inward.
“For how long?” Bremer asked, suddenly resigned to it.
Maybe he was resigned to it all along, thought Djanali.
Winter didn’t answer.
“Six hours,” Bremer said, but not to anyone in particular.
Six plus six, Djanali thought. If not more.
Ringmar was waiting. He entered Winter’s office when they’d left Bremer alone for a moment.
Winter held up his hands. “I’m just exercising my legal authority.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“The car’s still at the house, along with Aneta. I want you to send someone out there straightaway to pick it up and pull it apart.”
“I won’t ask if you think they rode in that car.”
“Now let’s look at the tape.” Winter inserted the cassette with the footage of the traffic on Borasleden.
The car drove past and then came back. There and back.
“If that is him, then he shouldn’t be driving toward town but toward his house,” Ringmar said.
“He was visiting someone,” Winter said. “No. He drove to her apartment.”
“Whoever it is,” Ringmar said. “After all, they weren’t Bremer’s prints we found in her apartment.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Winter said. He froze the frame. He pressed play again and froze it again. “There’s still a guy sitting in there and it’s still a Ford.”
“Now we have a car to compare it to,” Ringmar said. “That could give us something. We’ll have to take apart this film as thoroughly as we’re taking apart the car.”
“I want everything on Svensk,” Winter said. “Everything.”
“I want everything about the biker brotherhoods,” Ringmar said. “Everything.”
“I want to know where Jakobsson is,” Winter said.
“Do you want us to search Bremer’s house?”
Winter shook his head.
“Too early?”
“We’ll wait. I want a search warrant first, and then we’ll tear the place apart.”
Michaela had been quick, as quick as the photographer and the copyist. The photos were flown to Copenhagen and on to Landvetter.
Winter closed his eyes, wanting to put off opening the envelope for half a minute. He took a drag and stubbed it out. Maybe for good. There was no room for smokers in a modern world.
He lit a fresh cigarillo before he stood and went over to the wall where the drawings hung.
Landvetter. As they were leaving Bremer’s, a Boeing jet had roared through the space barrier above Bremer’s house. Bremer hadn’t shown the slightest reaction.
He’d seen it in one of Jennie’s drawings-in her diary. It wasn’t hanging on the wall. He went to the desk where the drawings lay sorted into piles, and in the third one from the left, the one containing all kinds of vehicles, there were two drawings with a long cylindrical object floating above the forest and the house. It was a good drawing. Winter could almost hear the roar as the airplane cut through the rain and sunshine.
He sat back down in his chair and opened the envelope. There were five photos. The top one showed the two people level with the house, on their way in. The woman was holding the child by the hand. They were looking straight ahead. You couldn’t see their faces.
In the second, they had moved closer to the house. The child was turned toward the camera or in that direction. Perhaps she’d seen the photographer. It was Helene. You still couldn’t see the woman’s face.
The third photograph was taken closer to the two figures. The girl became more distinct. The woman was in profile. He wanted to put a name to that profile, but he wasn’t certain.
There was something else that made him go cold and still. Between the woman and the door was a window, and in that window he could discern a third figure. Winter shut his eyes and looked again, sharpened his gaze. The contours of the figure were still there, behind a thin curtain: a face and an upper body.
He studied the contours. Had they picked up on this in Denmark? Of course they had. Winter rummaged through the envelope and found the accompanying letter, a single sheet that had gotten stuck inside. He read it quickly. She had written about the figure in the window. “We don’t know who it is.”
The fourth photo was taken seconds later, when the woman and the child had reached the door. The figure in the window was gone. Winter saw the backs of the pair outside.
The fifth showed the house and was the most enlarged of the prints, rough and grainy. It must have been taken about a minute later, maybe, the local photojournalist having taken a break in his coverage of future land partitions. Then he had pressed the shutter release one last time. In the window a man had pulled aside the curtains in order to be able to see more clearly what was going on outside. He did it without thinking, exposing himself.
The man could have been a young Georg Bremer. He had a mustache, a cap pulled down over his brow.
The phone rang. It was his mother.
“Your father’s ill,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He slipped the photos back into the envelope and filed the accompanying letter in a folder inside the desk drawer. “What’s happened?”
“He was feeling a bit under the weather this afternoon and we asked Magnergar-he’s a doctor who lives in the area-to come over, and he thought that we ought to take him to the clinic in town.”
Winter tried to imagine Marbella but failed. He had only seen a map of the city on the Internet.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“That’s where I’m calling from right now. The doctors have examined him and done an EKG, but it didn’t show anything.”
“He’s probably just overexerted himself,” Winter said. On the golf course, he thought. He tried to think light thoughts, but the nausea was growing.
“He hasn’t overexerted himself,” his mother said. “We haven’t done anything out of the ordinary.”
“No.”
“I’m worried, Erik. If something happens, you have to come down.”
He didn’t answer. Someone rapped on the door. He called out, “Just a minute,” and listened again.
“What is it?” she said.
“Just somebody at the door.”
“Are you at the office? Well, I guess you must be since it’s only evening.”
“Yes.”
He heard footsteps walk away outside his door. She said something.
“Sorry, Mother. I didn’t hear what you said.”
“If something happens, you have to come down.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll just have to take it easy for a while, that’s all. No more spur-of-the-moment trips to Gibraltar.”
“You promise, Erik? You promise you’ll come if he gets worse? I spoke to Lotta, and she also thinks you should come. You both have to come.”
“I promise,” he said.
