Åke Edwardson - Never End

Angelika's father had no secret of that kind. Winter could hear him clearing his throat somewhere in the house. Her father-an adoptive father, but her father even so-had been genuinely ignorant about his daughter's pregnancy and possible boyfriends.

But did Angelika have a secret? Who was it she had come up against in the night? Just like Beatrice she'd split off from her friends and been alone. Or had she met the man who'd made her pregnant some eight weeks earlier?

What had she done then? She had almost finished her twelve years of schooling and was on her way out into the big wide world. Did she bump into a rapist and murderer who lay in wait for his victims in the summer night? A coincidence. Bad luck, to put it mildly. Or was there a motive behind it? Was it a planned crime?

The location could have been carefully selected… in either case. By the madman. Or by the murderer who was waiting for somebody in particular, just for her.

But then this wasn't about Beatrice Wägner, or Jeanette Bielke. Or was it?

Maybe the three girls had something in common that had led to their attacks, maybe it wasn't just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had they done something that… linked them? Could that be it? For God's sake, I need to concentrate on this particular murder. It's possible to find common denominators in everything.

Winter sat with his head in his hands, thinking, then stood up and opened one of the desk drawers. He needed a cigarello, but controlled his craving. It had gotten stronger since he'd become a father. He had thought it would grow weaker, or maybe disappear altogether, but it had become worse. He was smoking more than ever. That meant it was time to stop. Angela's discreet hints had slowly developed into something else. Not nagging. Never that. But maybe… irritation. It wasn't just the doctor in her. It was healthy common sense. Healthy.

He stood up, walked through the house, and as soon as he was outside he lit a Corps.

When he came back he searched the room methodically. He spent some time studying the photograph again, her skin against the water. He opened the desk drawer and took out the eight bundles of photographs he'd just been through. He started once again, sorted them into small piles, resorted them. Angelika in various locations, mostly outdoors. Smiling, not smiling. He put the outdoor pictures together, the indoor ones together. Summer snapshots. Winter snapshots. The bright colors of autumn leaves. Angelika in a snowdrift, black, black, white, white. Angelika on a hillside in spring with wood anemones gleaming white. Angelika with her mother and father, on the same hillside: her parents so pale after the winter they looked almost ill.

There were no dates on the photos, but they all seemed to have been taken during the last year. It was a guess, but became more than that when he checked the dates on the envelopes. There were nearly three hundred pictures. It was like an open diary of her last year. Summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer again. Her last summer, or half summer, he thought, and turned to a series of photographs taken at her graduation party. Flowers, balloons, all the traditional things, a one-year-old Angelika enlarged eighteen times on a poster hanging above their heads.

There were a lot of people standing around, in a wide semicircle, a lot of faces. Winter recognized her parents, but nobody else. Angelika was wearing her white cap and laughing at the camera.

That was six weeks ago.

Winter continued sorting the photos into different piles. Why am I doing this? Is it a sort of private therapy because this case is so goddamn distressing? A sort of patience game? Patience. It was all a matter of patience.

The birds were singing outside the window. After a break, the rain was now pattering against the panes once again. Winter had been sitting with a photograph of Angelika in some kind of room with an exposed brick wall behind her. The brick was… well, brick colored. She was looking straight at the camera, but not smiling. Her face was actually expressionless, it seemed to him. There were a glass and some bottles on a table in front of her. A few empty plates with what could be some food leftovers. There was a shadow of something in the top left-hand corner of the picture. A lamp shade, perhaps, or something hanging on the wall.

It was definitely indoors, the light was coming from all directions, and he could see no suggestion of daylight. Maybe there was a faint, shadowy outline of the photographer.

He put the picture down and picked up another one with Angelika in half profile at the same table in front of the same wall, but with no shadow in the top left-hand corner. It was taken from a different angle.

A restaurant, maybe, Winter thought. A bar.

The photos had been in the same envelope as the winter pictures. Maybe they had been taken around the same time. He hadn't found any negatives with them.

Perhaps it was a place she often went to. Maybe one of her regular haunts. Did they have any information about the places she used to go to in her free time? Yes. There were some. Was this brick wall in any of them?

There were no other photographs of places of entertainment or restaurants or bars among the three hundred pictures Winter had sifted through and laid out in about a dozen piles on the table. Not one taken indoors. There were a few of sidewalk cafes. There was a waiter making a face in one of them.

He stood up, left the room, and went to look for Lars-Olof Hansson, who was sitting by himself in the dining room, watching the rain trickle down the windowpane.

"There's something I'd like you to take a look at," said Winter. "If you've got a minute."

"Only one," said Hansson. "I'm waiting for the rain to run down this Windowpane." He pointed. "It can't make up its mind."

Winter nodded, as if he understood.

"What is it?" Hansson asked.

"Some photos," said Winter. "I'd like you to take a look at them." He gestured toward the hall. "In Angelika's room."

"I'm not going in there." Hansson tore his eyes away from the windowpane. There was a smell of both heat and dampness in the room, like the air outside. The wind was making the trees sway. It was like dusk both inside the room and in the garden on the other side of the glass, which was streaked with rain. "I haven't been in there since it happened."

"I'll bring them here," said Winter, going out and returning with the photographs. He handed them to Hansson. The man looked at them, but didn't seem to take them in.

"What's this?" he asked.

"I don't really know," said Winter. "Some kind of a bar. A restaurant, maybe. Don't you recognize it?"

"Recognize what?" asked Hansson, looking at Winter.

"The place. The wall in the background. Or anything else. Angelika's sitting there after all, and I wondered if you knew where it is."

Hansson took another look at the photo he was holding in his hand.

"No," he said. "I've never been there."

"Angelika was there," said Winter. "There were a few pictures in her desk drawer taken there."

"I have no idea where it is," said Hansson. "And… does it make the slightest difference?"

"I don't know," said Winter.

"I mean, she used to go to several different places, the way young people do. I never kept a check on them." He looked at the picture again. "Why should it be important to know where that brick wall is?"

"It depends on who else was there," Winter said.

"Angelika was obviously there," said Hansson. "Maybe she was alone."

"Somebody must have been holding the camera," said Winter.

"Timer control," said Hansson, producing a series of cough-like chuckles. It sounded like an explosion in the enclosed room. "Sorry," he said, when he finished.