Åke Edwardson - Never End

Now, standing in front of the silent house by the lake, hope had faded away like the stars over the forest. There was a red shimmer beyond the lake that could be seen glinting in places on both sides of the house. Why go in there in a couple of seconds when they could wait for the army of police officers that would encircle the place and shoot their way in.

"Let's go," said Winter.

Ringmar nodded and set off. It had nothing to do with loyalty. He's not trigger happy. Bertil thinks like me. Now's the moment. He hasn't come with me to wait for Lars and Aneta and sunrise.

They crept between the car and the house. The grass brushed against their knees, but silently. Winter didn't listen for any noise from the grass. A shade was pulled down behind the window to the left of the verandah. A hat was hanging on a hook. A pair of boots stood by the door. There was a tool on the bench to the right, a screwdriver.

And now? Winter tried the door handle, pressed it down, and pushed gently, and the door slid open a few centimeters without creaking. He looked at Ringmar, who was ready. Winter pushed and the door opened and they walked quickly and quietly inside, finding themselves in a hallway with the outline of a staircase straight ahead and the pale rectangles of two doors. I'm too old for this sort of thing, Ringmar thought.

There was a dark hole to the right that might be the entrance to a cellar. Winter took another step forward. Another table along one of the walls with some items of clothing on it. Two chairs. There was a mirror over the table and Winter looked at it and saw the eyes staring at him from the side of the room opposite the entrance and he could see the knuckles in front of the face at the end of the outstretched arm, holding something: a gun, a big gun, and he didn't move a muscle, he heard nothing, no barked command, no breathing, nothing from Ringmar, who was also motionless and staring at the same thing but not through the mirror. Winter waited for the impact of the bullet that would pass right through him and smash the glass and wipe out the picture of Samic who was pointing the gun at them and waiting for the movement that would come and…

The shot broke the odious silence, another shot immediately after the first. Winter was still staring at the mirror, which hadn't been shattered, he hadn't been shattered. Ringmar was just as immobile, with his eyes fixed on something Winter couldn't see, he couldn't drag his eyes away from the mirror and the world inside it.

Sarnie's arm started sinking. Winter could see his eyes, still open. There was no longer a pistol in Sarnie's hand. It was lying on the floor in front of him. Samic grasped hold of the hand that had held the pistol, but he didn't seem to be injured. He fell, slowly, revealing the woman standing diagonally behind him with a gun in her hand. Possibly Halders's Sig Sauer. She had shot the gun out of Sarnie's hand. Samic whimpered. She dropped her own weapon onto his body.

Winter had seen her face before, in profile and full face.

"That's enough," she said. "That's enough now."

Winter finally dragged his eyes away from the mirror. She was wearing a nightdress, angel white. Winter took a step toward her.

"Yes," she said, "I'm Mattias's mother.

Ringmar started moving.

"He's upstairs," she said. She knew they knew who she meant. She was looking straight at Winter.

"Is there anybody else here?" Ringmar asked. "Aside from… our colleague?"

"What do you think?" she said, looking down at her gun lying between Sarnie's legs.

Winter rushed up the stairs. All at once he saw a searchlight through an upstairs window. He could hear Ringmar downstairs talking into a mobile telephone. He could hear car engines outside, doors opening, the rattling of a helicopter in the sky.

There were two doors, both of them closed. He opened the one on the left and saw a double bed, unmade. There were clothes on the floor.

The door on the other side of the landing creaked as he opened it. There was a bed in there, too. The light from the helicopter was swinging around and around as if at some carnival, sending circles of light into the room. There was a figure in the bed, its head tied down with straps of some kind. Winter bent over it.

Halders's face was patchily lit up by searchlights, or maybe it was the rising sun. Winter could hear footsteps downstairs now, voices, car doors slamming.

Halders opened his eyes.

Åke Edwardson is a Swedish author of detective fiction, and a professor at Gothenburg University, the city where many of his Inspector Winter novels are set. Edwardson has had many jobs, including a journalist and press officer for the United Nations, and his crime novels have made him a three-time winner of the Swedish Crime Writers' Award for best crime novel. His first novel to be translated into English, in 2005, was Sun and Shadow. The second, Never End, followed in 2006.