Åke Edwardson - Never End

As long as I keep talking to the family, the case hasn't been shelved. Now we have a new opportunity.

His mobile rang on his desk. He could see on the display that it was from his mother, direct from Nueva Andalucia in the mountains beyond Marbella. A white house with three palm trees in the garden. Balcony, and sun and shadow. He'd been there two years ago, when his father had been buried under the Sierra Blanca.

"How are you surviving the heat?"

"How are you surviving yours?" Winter replied.

"They say on TV here that it's hotter in Scandinavia than it is in the south of Spain," she said.

"The flow of tourists will go into reverse, then," he said. "Spaniards will be coming here to get some sun."

"I hope so." He could hear a clinking of ice in the background, and glanced at his watch. Past five. The cocktail hour. Happy hour. Time for a very dry and very cold martini. I wouldn't mind one myself.

"What are you up to?" he asked. "Lotta said you were hoping we could come and visit in September."

His sister had told him the previous day. A family get-together on the Costa del Sol.

"You really must come. I just have to cuddle Elsa. And all the rest of you, of course."

"You need only come home."

"The children think it's so much fun to come here," she said.

"What children? Besides Elsa?"

"What do you mean? Lotta's, of course."

"They're teenagers."

"Don't be like that, Erik."

He heard the clinking of ice again, and thought of water and a bath and a drink.

"How is Elsa?"

"She's talking, and getting into all kinds of mischief."

"Does she talk much?"

"All day long."

"That's fantastic. She'll go far."

"Well, just this minute she's not going anywhere at all."

More clinking of ice. Coolness spread through his body. He needed a drink.

"Soon she'll be running all over the apartment."

Winter didn't respond.

"But you really must start thinking about a house now, Erik."

"Mmm."

"If only for Angela's sake. Surely you can understand that? She can't be jugging children and carriages and God knows what else up and down all those stairs."

"There's an elevator."

"You know what I mean."

"There are two of us doing the lugging."

"Erik."

"We like living in the center of town."

"Angela too? Really?"

He didn't answer. This wasn't a problem. The thoughts came flooding back. He had other problems.

The door opened. Halders walked in without knocking.

"I've got a visitor." Winter said his good-byes and hung up.

Halders’s forehead was redwhere his hairline had once been. He shut the door and ran his hand over his bald spot.

"The heat out there's breaking all the records," he said, sitting down opposite Winter. His ears were also red. They stuck out prominently and gave his face a softness, despite the hardness of his other features.

"Have you been sunbathing?"

"You could say that," said Halders, scratching his forehead. "With Jeanette Bielke. At her favorite spot out on the rocks." Halders looked at Winter and stroked his left ear. "Although it doesn't seem to be her favorite anymore."

"Did she say anything?"

"We talked about her boyfriend."

"And?"

"Or her ex-boyfriend. Though he doesn't seem to be able to grasp that. Mattias Berg. His name's Mattias Berg."

"I know."

"He doesn't want to let her go, but she's made up her mind to ditch him."

"Not exactly unusual," Winter said.

It's happened to me, Winter thought. A long, long time ago. I once stood banging away on a door that refused to open. At the time it seemed a matter of life and death.

"No," Halders said. "Not unusual. But I want to have a word with the kid."

"Of course," said Winter, standing up and walking to the sink. He took a glass from a shelf and filled it with water. "Would you like some?"

"Yes, please," Halders said. He reached over the desk when Winter held the glass out to him. He could see the forensic report on Angelika Hansson.

"I just received it," Winter said.

Halders nodded and drank.

"It wasn't a consummated rape."

"Just a murder."

"He tried. Or so it would seem."

"Couldn't get it up," said Halders.

Winter shrugged.

"So we're waiting to hear from SKL."

SKL, Winter thought. He'd waited for reports from the Swedish criminology lab in Linkoping before. DNA analyses that had produced the goods; analyses that hadn't. It was always worth waiting. His work involved waiting, and the hard part was finding new roads to go down while doing the waiting. Not being totally reliant on technical and chemical analyses to solve all the problems. He'd had technical solutions to riddles that explained how and who and where, but not why. He'd been left with the big why. As a memory impossible to forget.

"SKL can tell us if it's the same bastard," Halders said. He took another gulp of water, spilling a little as he changed his position in the chair. "Do you reckon it's the same guy? Who attacked both girls, I mean."

"Yes."

He hadn't intended to reply at all, but the "yes" slipped out, like a subconscious desire to have something to get right to work on.

"And the next question: the same bastard that murdered Beatrice Wägner?"

"I don't know," Winter said.

"I asked what you thought."

"I can't answer that yet," said Winter, picking up Pia Froberg's report. What I can say is that Angelika Hansson was definitely pregnant. Probably seven weeks along."

'That sounds early," Halders said. "Seven weeks."

"It is early. But she should have known herself by the fifth week."

"Always assuming she suspected anything," said Halders. He stood up, went to the sink and refilled his glass. Winter could see that the back of his neck was red too.

"I had a word with Pia," Winter said. "She says the girl hadn't had a period after the fifth week, so that she must surely have suspected something."

"Some people repress that kind of thing," said Halders.

"Her parents didn't know, so neither did she-is that what you mean?"

"I don't know. But she hadn't said anything, that's for sure. If she did know, she kept it to herself."

"Maybe not completely to herself," said Winter.

"You mean the father of the child?"

"Exactly."

The father, thought Halders. Probably some pale nineteen-year-old without a clue where his life is taking him. Unless he's something much worse, and the one we're looking for.

Winter thought about the father. They had so many people they could cross-question-friends, acquaintances, classmates. Family. Relatives. Witnesses. All kinds of witnesses. Taxi drivers who used to be good witnesses but were now useless because they'd seen nothing and heard nothing- because they shouldn't have been on that road that evening because they shouldn't have been driving at all because they were being employed illegally. And so on and so on.

"Perhaps he doesn't know," Winter said. "If she didn't know herself, then he can't know either. Or maybe she did know… had just found out, but kept it to herself, and was intending to keep it that way. If you get my meaning."

"Abortion," Halders said.

Winter nodded.

"But in any case, he knows she's dead," said Halders. "That couldn't have been kept a secret. He couldn't have missed hearing about that."

"Assuming he's in Sweden."

"Well, then he'll come to us when he gets back. If we don't get a name before then." He looked at Winter. "We need a name. We're going to get a name."

"Yes."

"If he doesn't come forward, he's in serious trouble."

Maybe more trouble than we realize right now, Winter thought.

Halders's mobile rang in his breast pocket. Winter glanced at the clock: just after four in the afternoon. He suddenly had the feeling he wanted to get away from there, longed to be with Angela and Elsa, yearned for a hot bath and something to give him hope. He wanted to get away from all these hypotheses about death and lives cut short. Angelika Hansson's life was like the first chapter in a book, and her unborn child was-