Åke Edwardson - Sun and Shadow

As he turned off Bifrostgatan it looked as if thousands of people were standing outside the apartment building. The flashing lights of the police cars had taken over from the fireworks. Reality had returned. Police officers were dealing with the crowds, sealing off the road. An ambulance drove off with a roar, hurtling out of the side street into the main road.

He parked carelessly in Häradsgatan and walked over the patio again, in through the front door. He’d been here recently. It seemed like only yesterday, but it was in another millennium.

The newspaper boy was outside the door with one of the public order officers from Mölndal.

“How many are there inside?” Winter asked.

“Only the pathologist.”

“Don’t let anybody else in. When the other crime unit officers arrive, ask them to wait here.”

“Okay.”

“Keep the boy here as well,” Winter said, nodding at the boy who was cowering against a wall, shaking. Pale face, seventeen, maybe sixteen. He could be Patrik’s cousin. Same thin body, same staring eyes.

It was quiet inside the apartment. No metal music, and Winter wasn’t sure whether he’d expected any. Perhaps the silence was worse.

A ceiling light was on. There were streaks on the walls in the hall, lines, patches, specks; a pattern that reminded him of the sky that night, as if somebody had tried to re-create the last big sky before the world renewed itself.

“It’s blood,” said Pia Fröberg, who was standing in a doorway at the other end of the hall. She was an outline in the same way that the police officer had been in the apartment in Aschebergsgatan.

“I saw an ambulance.”

“She was still alive when they left here.”

“Good God!”

“I give her little hope,” Fröberg said. “Very little.” Winter had moved closer. The experienced pathologist looked scared, her face was as if sculpted in marble. Not scared. Tense, on guard.

She backed up a couple of paces and Winter went into the room and looked around. “It’s the same,” she said. “It must be the same murderer.”

Bengt Martell was sitting on the sofa. His clothes were in a heap on the floor in front of him.

“He was holding her hand,” the doctor said.

“Yes.”

“The paper boy had a mobile phone. I don’t understand how he could have acted so quickly. That he had the presence of mind.” She gestured toward the hall. “The door was standing open when he arrived.”

“Did she say anything?” Winter asked, turning to Fröberg. “Was she able to say anything?”

She looked at him as if she didn’t know how to formulate her reply. She looked again at the sofa. Winter had sat there. Bengt Martell had sat there and Siv Martell had sat in the armchair, which was still where it had been the last time.

“She’ll have difficulty ever speaking again,” Fröberg said. “Irrespective of how it goes.”

He looked at the body on the sofa. The same position as Christian Valker had been in.

“Where is his… where is his…” asked Winter, but couldn’t bring himself to say the word. “Maybe it isn’t… him sitting there. Martell. Is it him sitting there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But where the hell is it then?” Winter said, his voice getting louder and louder.

“With… her,” said the doctor. Winter watched her face changing, growing whiter.

“What? What the hell… what do you mean?”

“It was with her. When we took her to hospital. We weren’t…”

“Holy Moses,” Winter said.

He paused in front of the sofa. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he could see the exact outline of the woman’s body. It wasn’t only the blood.

Every second was like a millennium. Fröberg had left him now and he refused entry to everyone else.

There was no cassette player there. There hadn’t been one there then, and nobody had brought a stereo system since he, Winter, had been there.

There’s always a first time for everything, he thought. I’ve never been to visit people in their home and then returned later to find… this. To find them in this state.

The writing on the wall was clear in the light from the streetlamps outside.

Capital letters. Six of them.

Nothing else. STREET. The letters seemed to be pressed into the wall, but even so had started to trickle down from the bottom, to dissolve away. STREET. As in WALL STREET.

Winter could feel a shudder coming, but fended it off. “Street” was the English for the Swedish “gatan,” and since V and W are the same letter in Swedish, did it mean Vallgatan? Was Wall Street Vallgatan? Were you leading my thoughts in the right direction, God, yesterday or the day before or whenever it was? Is it Vallgatan we’re looking for? Is that where the answer is? Don’t lead me astray here.

Fröberg had come back. He could hear her behind him, but he didn’t turn around.

“She’s still alive,” she said. “They just phoned.”

Winter nodded.

“But she’s not awake, if you were thinking of that.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“Go through the place with a fine-tooth comb three times over,” Winter said to Beier when the forensic officers had begun their work.

“Don’t insult me, Erik.”

The deputy head of the technical squad looked focused, sober. Beier had celebrated the New Year in moderation.

“I suppose the new millennium has to begin somehow or other,” he’d said when they first arrived, and it was not meant as a joke. There was nothing to joke about here.

The forensic officers were moving carefully around the man on the sofa with his right hand extended, as if in greeting.

Beier came back from the kitchen.

“There seems to have been three of them around the table.”

“The same as at the Valkers‘,” Winter said.

Beier nodded, then nodded again at Ringmar, who came in from the hall with snow in his hair. Winter could see that there was a heavy snowfall outside in the dawn.

“She’s still alive,” Ringmar said, “but not exactly thanks to her own efforts.”

“No more detailed prognosis?” Winter asked.

Ringmar shook his head.

“I saw him there,” Ringmar said, looking at the man on the sofa. ‘At the hospital.“

Nobody wanted to comment on that.

“I’d like to have him now if I may,” said Fröberg, who had been waiting patiently to take the body away for the postmortem.

“Okay,” Winter said.

“If she survives, we’ve got the bastard,” Ringmar said.

They assembled at eight-thirty. The room smelled of damp and perhaps also day-after breath. The whole of Gothenburg had a hangover, but in that conference room they all needed to be alert.

“Is Bergenhem ill again?” Halders asked as he came into the room.

Winter nodded.

“That’s some goddam headache he’s got.”

Everybody sat down apart from Winter.

“I don’t need to remind you how important the next few hours are,” he said.

The photographs were passed round. Here we are again, Djanali thought, sitting here like Peeping Toms.

“It’s the same bastard,” Halders said. He was red in the face and smelled of spirits when he leaned over Djanali, and took one of the pictures with his right hand. He had phoned her at about one-thirty, but didn’t seem to remember. Or maybe he’s just pretending, she thought. “Of course it’s the same bastard, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know yet,” Winter said.

“Oh, come off it.” Halders looked at Winter. Halders’s eyes were clear from a distance, as wide open as they’d go. A sure sign of a man trying hard to be sober. “You surely don’t think it’s a copycat?” Halders said.