smells in the room. He saw that Halders sensed it too, his face set as if in plaster, his stubbled head a skull in the harsh light. Ringmar’s face was invisible, bent over the body, until he glanced up at Winter and pointed. Winter looked and saw the A4 sheet of paper that Bremer had fastened with pins through his shirt and into the skin of his chest. One of the pins had come off when they’d lowered the corpse, and the sheet of paper rested loosely against the body. Winter had to tilt his head in order to read what was written in capital letters with black marker: “I KILLED THE CHILD. GOD HAVE MERCY ON MY SOUL.” He read it twice without really understanding. Then he heard Ringmar’s high-pitched wheezing. He heard Halders’s stomach revolt onto the threshold of the room. He read it again and closed his eyes. Voices sounded from the ground floor below. He saw figures in the darkness outside the room. He saw Aneta Djanali lean over Halders, who was sprawled across the threshold with his head out in the hallway. He heard Ringmar speak to someone about something. He heard the words a second time: “Send down more units and machines. We have to dig. We have to dig up this place.”
60
When he drove between the cabin and the city, it was as if the world had lost all depth and become a shallow shroud of fog between life and death. Odegard was death and the other was life. You could just make out the lights of the city, ten miles off through the drizzle of the gray morning, like urine on dirty snow.
He went upstairs to Beier once he’d read the message on his desk. It was the last time.
Winter drove home and parked the car in the garage. He walked over the hill and rang the doorbell. Nobody opened. It was like last time. He pressed it again, and the door clicked and he saw her eyes glimmering inside, down low. He hadn’t heard the wheelchair.
“You again,” she said.
“You’ll have to let me in this time.”
“Why should I do that?”
“It’s over now, Brigitta.”
“That makes it a bit less conclusive,” Beier had said.
“But it’s enough, isn’t it?” Winter had asked.
“Yes. Otherwise the test wouldn’t be so expensive and take so much time.”
“How many have they done?”
“Don’t ask me. Come back when they’ve set up a database. That could happen this year, by the way.”
She rolled ahead of him into the room that shook from the streetcars outside. It wasn’t a room to live in. Maybe she doesn’t, Winter thought. Live. She lives, but hardly a life.
“What was it you called me?”
“Your real name. Brigitta.”
“Never heard of it.”
“I said it’s over now. You don’t need to feel afraid anymore.”
She didn’t answer. Her face bore a faint shadow from the day.
“Do you hear me, Brigitta?”
“Why are you calling me that?”
“That’s your name.”
“I mean, why are you suddenly calling me Brigitta? What makes you think that-”
“I don’t just think it,” Winter said. “I know.”
“How?”
“It’s not the falsified documents identifying you as Greta Bremer,” he said. “They’re excellent forgeries.”
She nodded. He thought it looked as if she nodded.
“And your appearance. You couldn’t possibly be the fifty-five-year-old Brigitta Dellmar.”
“There, you see? I can barely move, after all.”
“I wanted to believe that you were Brigitta,” Winter said. “But it felt impossible. And I found nothing to support that theory.”
She now turned her face toward him for the first time.
“Well? How do you know then?”
Winter took a step closer and came up next to her in the wheelchair. He slowly reached out and plucked something from the pillow behind her back.
“This,” he said, and held up a strand of hair that may have been visible in the light of the window.
“What is that? My hair?”
“A strand of your hair,” Winter said. “Ever heard of DNA?”
“No.”
“You’ve never heard of DNA?”
“Sure.”
Winter let the strand of hair drop from his hand and sat down in one of the armchairs.
“You took a strand of hair the first time you were here,” she said. “You stood behind me while I was sitting here.”
“Yes. I saw an opportunity.”
“This damned wheelchair.”
“You are Brigitta Dellmar?”
“You already said I am.”
“I’d like to hear it from you.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Yes.”
She rubbed her deformed legs.
“I am Brigitta Dellmar,” she said. “I am Brigitta Dellmar, but that doesn’t do anyone any good.”
“And Georg Bremer isn’t your brother.”
“He isn’t my brother.”
“Why did he tell us that you were his sister?”
“He thought that he could scare me. And I’ve passed for his sister all these years, without actually being it. I’ve had to play that role. It was their decision.” She looked straight at Winter. “But he couldn’t scare me.”
The telephone rang, and she lifted the receiver on the third ring and said yes and listened. She said, “Wait,” and turned to Winter. “Is this going to take long?”
Winter didn’t answer that insane question.
“I’ll call you back,” she said, and hung up.
“You called Bremer’s house two days ago,” Winter said.
“How do you know it was me?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was me. I called him after he’d returned from the police, the last time.”
“Didn’t you realize that we’d see who had called him?”
“Maybe.”
“Why did you call him?”
“It was time for him to die. He had lived for too long. He killed my baby,” she said, and her face cracked in front of him. She slumped to the side in her wheelchair and lay as if dead, with her ruined visage facing downward. She turned a hundred years old in front of Winter. She said something, but it was muffled by the fabric and stuffing.
She sat up again, and Winter saw the tears smeared across her face.
