Åke Edwardson - The Shadow Woman

“When the temperature stays above seventy over a twenty-four-hour period, the climate is tropical,” Halders said, after a drawn-out silence.

“How do you know that?”

“Aneta told me. She oughta know,” Halders said.

Bergenhem turned toward him, but he couldn’t see if Halders was smiling.

Bergenhem looked up at the sky. It was getting lighter now, and the sun slid very slowly down the facade of the Social Insurance Agency on the other side of Smålandsgatan. A taxi drove past. A patrol car pulled up in front of the main entrance and sat there with its headlights pointed toward the front doors and the engine switched off.

“Why the hell don’t they turn their lights off?” Halders said, and audibly drew in air through his nostrils.

The patrol car started up again and sat with the engine idling. After two minutes Halders rose and walked over to the forecourt in front of the darkened police station. Bergenhem could hear him speaking, loud and clear in the stillness of morning: “What the hell are you doing, fucking cops?”

Bergenhem heard a mumbled reply and then Halders’s voice again: “Say that again!”

Bergenhem ran over and grabbed Halders from behind just as he was about to bury his fist in the head of the police officer who’d stepped out of his car.

“For Christ’s sake, Fredrik.”

“Want us to take him in?” the officer asked. “Is he drunk?” The officer was close to fifty, a self-assured man. He did a salute of sorts when Bergenhem declined, and then climbed back into the car. All along his colleague remained quiet in the passenger seat, as if he were asleep.

“There’s a one-minute idling limit in Gothenburg,” Halders shouted when the patrol car turned around and started back toward the street. The driver waved.

Three minutes later the call came in to dispatch and was immediately passed on to homicide, twenty-five yards from where Halders and Bergenhem were still standing.

The murdered woman lay on the edge of the Delsjö Forest. The summer was over. The season was beginning. The phone on Winter’s bedside table rang. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning on Thursday, August 18. He picked up the receiver and said his name.

WINTER COULD SEE THE BLUE LIGHTS EVEN BEFORE HE DROVE up the hill toward the Delsjö junction. They rotated above the eastern wilderness. The only thing missing is a helicopter, he thought.

He drove under the viaduct and passed the café and the parking lot at the Kallebäck recreation area and continued on J A Fagerbergs Väg until he saw the tunnel beneath the Boråsleden highway. He pulled over in front of the parking lot, to the side of the entrance, as far away as possible from where the body had been found. Far too many of his fellow police officers were gathered. There were two technicians and the deputy head of forensics, which was good, and the medical examiner, which maybe was a good thing too. But it was enough to have the crime scene unit and at most one curious uniformed officer. God knows how many of them had trampled around the victim.

A uniformed officer was waiting at the police cordon. He was young and pale.

Winter flashed his ID. “Were you the first one on the scene?”

“Yes. We got the call and came straight over.”

“The guy who called. Is he here?”

“He’s sitting over there.” The uniformed officer nodded toward the darkness.

Winter could see the silhouette of a head in the dawn light.

“Is everything cordoned off?” Winter asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. What about the cars?”

There were five cars in the parking lot, in addition to the two radio cars and the two cars that the forensic team and its boss had arrived in. Next to the entrance was a road sign prohibiting the parking of mobile homes.

“What?”

“Did you take down the plates?”

“Take dow-”

“Have you written down the license plate numbers and started running a check on the owners and put a cordon around the cars?” Winter asked, as gently as he could.

“Not yet.”

“Well, get to it,” Winter said. “Our fellow officers over there seem to need something to do.” He looked over toward the witness’s silhouette. “Were there any other people here when you arrived?”

“Just that guy over there.”

“Nobody driving off when you got here?”

“No.”

Winter felt a sudden chill in his body, as if it had only just occurred to him what he was here for and what lay ahead of him. He needed a cup of coffee.

“Where can I walk?”

“What?”

“Where’s the path in?”

The young officer didn’t understand. Winter looked around. All the activity was taking place about fifty yards away, maybe seventy. He raised a hand and someone broke away from the group and walked toward the spot where Winter was standing.

“I just arrived,” Detective Inspector Göran Beier said. “She’s lying over here.”

They walked between two cars and across the parking lot, carefully picking their way along the wide path, up to a ditch that was partially hidden by a pine tree and a few birches.

Winter heard the sound of a vehicle and looked around. He saw headlights whose usefulness was fast diminishing as daylight returned to the sky. Ringmar’s car.

Winter turned back toward the ditch. A woman was lying there, on her back, behind the pine tree. She might have been twenty-five or thirty or thirty-five years old. Her hair seemed fair, but it was hard to tell since it was damp from the morning dew. She was wearing a short skirt and blouse and a cardigan or a sweater, and her clothes didn’t seem to be in disarray. She was staring up at the pale sky. Winter leaned in even closer and thought he could see the red pinpoints on her ears and the hemorrhaging in her open eyes. He guessed that she’d been strangled, but he was no expert. It was light enough now that he could see that her face was discolored and probably swollen. Her teeth were exposed, as if she were about to say something.

The forensic technicians had immediately called for the medical examiner. Winter thought that was good, but he knew Ringmar wouldn’t like it. Ringmar felt that visiting the body dump site created preconceived notions, and that the medical examiner ought to meet a body for the first time on a steel table at the pathologist’s.

He nodded to Pia Erikson Fröberg, down in the ditch. She was studying a thermometer. It looked as if the corpse were waiting to be notified of the result, shifting its gaze from the sky to Pia’s accomplished movements. She’s in good hands, thought Winter. Her body is in good hands.

It was the most important moment of the investigation. The woman’s body lay close to a sign that warned of high voltage. Immediately to the right of the ditch was the four-and-a-half-mile circuit around Big Delsjö Lake, part of the Bohusleden hiking trail. On the other side of the jogging path lay the water’s edge. The lake glowed between the birch branches.

Winter heard a voice.

“What?”

“Eight or ten hours,” Fröberg said. “Wasn’t that your first question?”

“I haven’t asked it yet.”

“Well, there’s your answer anyway. It’s still a little uncertain, of course, since the heat causes rigor mortis to set in more quickly.”

“Right.”

“But I’m trying to factor that in.”

Winter looked at the dead woman’s face once again. It had an oval shape, rounded off. The eyes were set wide apart; the mouth was large. Her long hair looked unkempt, but Winter wasn’t sure. That sort of thing could have to do with the victim’s age, maybe with her style.

“She’s got nothing on her,” Beier said, standing next to Winter. “There’s nothing there. No papers or ID, nothing.”