Åke Edwardson: Frozen Tracks

“Even more flowers,” she said, and Ringmar could see that she would have liked to take a look at the card with the other bouquet but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She turned to face him.

“So you’re Moa’s dad, are you?”

Good. Moa had done her job.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we should go to the waiting room and have a little chat.”

“I suppose he was just unlucky,” she said. “Wrong man in the wrong place, or however you put it.”

They sat down by a window. The gray light of day outside seemed translucent. The room was in a strange sort of shadow cast by a sun that wasn’t there. A woman coughed quietly on a sofa by a low wooden table weighed down by magazines with cover photos of well-known people, smiling. Well-known to whom? Ringmar had wondered more than once. Visiting hospitals was part of his job, and he’d often wondered why

Hello and similar magazines were always piled up in dreary hospital waiting rooms. Maybe they were a kind of comfort, like a little candle burning on the tables of these huge wards. All of you in that magazine, who are photographed at every premiere there is, maybe used to be like us, and maybe we can be like you if we get well again and are discovered in the hectic search for new talent. That search was nonstop, never ending. The photos of those celebrities were proof of that. There was no room for faded Polaroids of crushed skulls.

“It wasn’t bad luck,” said Ringmar now, looking at the girl.

“You look younger than I expected,” she said.

“Based on Moa’s description of me, you mean,” he said.

She smiled, then turned serious again.

“Do you know anybody who really disliked Jakob?” Ringmar asked.

“Nobody disliked him,” she said.

“Is there anybody he dislikes?”

“No.”

“Nobody at all?”

“No.”

Maybe it’s the times we live in, Ringmar thought, and if so it has to be a good thing. When I was young we were always mad at everything and everybody. Angry all the time.

“How well do you know him?” he asked.

“Well… he’s my friend.”

“Do you have more mutual friends?”

“Yes, of course.”

Ringmar looked out of the window. Some fifty meters away two kids were standing at the bus stop in the rain, holding their hands up to the sky as if giving thanks. Not an enemy in the world. Even the damned rain was a dear friend.

“No violent types in your circle of friends?” asked Ringmar.

“Certainly not.”

“What were you doing when Jakob was attacked?”

“When exactly was it?” she asked.

“I’m not really allowed to tell you that,” he said, and proceeded to do so.

“I’d been asleep for about two hours,” she said.

But Jakob wasn’t asleep. Ringmar could see him in his mind’s eye, walking across the square named after Doktor Fries. Heading for the streetcar stop? There weren’t any streetcars at that time of night. And then somebody appeared out of nowhere, and one hell of a bash on the back of his head. No help from Dr. Fries. Left there to bleed to death, if the guy who’d called the police hadn’t passed by shortly after it had happened and seen the kid lying there.

Jakob, the third victim. Three different places in town. The same type of wound. Could have been fatal, really. But none of them actually had died. Not yet, he thought. The other two victims had no idea. Just a blow from behind. Saw nothing, just felt.

“Do you live together?” he asked.

“No.”

Ringmar said nothing for a moment. The two kids had just jumped aboard a bus. Maybe it was getting a bit brighter in the west, a slight glint of light blue. The waiting room was high up in the hospital, which itself was on top of a hill. Maybe he was looking at the sea, a big gray expanse under the blue.

“You weren’t worried about him?”

“What do you mean, worried?”

“Where he was that night? What he was doing?”

“Hang on, we’re not married or anything like that. We’re just friends.”

“So you didn’t know where Jakob was that night?”

“No.”

“Who does he know out there?”

“Where?”

“In Guldheden. Around Doktor Fries Square, Guldheden school, that district.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“Do you know anybody around there?”

“Who lives there, you mean? I don’t think so. No.”

“But that’s where he was, and that’s where he was attacked,” said Ringmar.

“You’ll have to ask him,” she said.

“I’ll do that, as soon as it’s possible.”

Winter had taken Elsa to the nursery school. He sat there for a while with a cup of coffee while she arranged her day’s work on her little desk: a red telephone, paper, pencils, crayons, newspapers, tape, string. He would get to see the result that afternoon. It would be something unique, no doubt about that.

She barely noticed when he gave her a hug and left. He lit a Corps in the grounds outside. He couldn’t smoke anything else after all those years. He’d tried, but it was no use. Corps were no longer sold in Sweden, but a colleague made regular visits to Brussels and always brought some back for him.

It was a pleasant morning. The air smelled of winter but it felt like early autumn. He took another puff, then unbuttoned his overcoat and watched children hard at work: building projects involving digging and stacking, molding shapes; every kind of game you could think of. Games. Not much sign of games in the sports grown-ups indulge in nowadays, he thought, and noticed a little boy running down the slope toward a gap in the bushes. Winter looked around and saw the two staff members were fully occupied with children who wanted something or were crying or laughing or running around in all directions, and so he strode swiftly down the hill and into the bushes where the boy was busy hitting the railings with his plastic shovel. He turned around as Winter approached and gave him a sheepish grin, like a prisoner who’d been caught trying to escape.

Winter shepherded the little boy back to the fold, listening to some story he couldn’t quite understand but nodding approvingly even so. One of the ladies in charge was standing halfway up the slope.

“I didn’t know there was a fence there,” said Winter.

“It’s a good thing there is,” she said. “We’d never be able to keep them on the premises otherwise.”

He caught sight of Elsa on her way out into the grounds: She’d clearly decided it was time to take a rest from all that paperwork.

“Hard to keep an eye on all of them at the same time, eh?” he said.

“Yes, it is now.” He detected a sort of sigh. “I shouldn’t stand here complaining, but since you ask, well, it’s a case of more and more children and fewer and fewer staff.” She made a gesture. “But at least we’ve got them fenced in here.”

Winter watched Elsa playing on the swings. She shouted out when she saw him, and he waved back.

“How do you manage when you take them out for trips? Or take the whole class to the park, or to a bigger playground?”

“We try not to,” she said.

Ringmar was with the student, Jakob Stillman. The latter had been living up to his name, but now he seemed able to move his head slowly, and with some difficulty he could focus on Ringmar from his sickbed. Ringmar had introduced himself.

“I’d just like to ask you a few questions,” he said. “I suggest you blink once if your answer is yes, and twice if it’s no. OK?”

Stillman blinked once.

“Right.” Ringmar moved the chair a bit closer. “Did you see anybody behind you before you were hit?

One blink.

“Ah, so you did see something?” Ringmar asked.