Åke Edwardson - Frozen Tracks

“Not good,” he said again, because he knew what he was talking about.

The boy was asleep. He’d made up a bed for him on the sofa. He had a Christmas tree that he was decorating. It was made of plastic, which was good because it didn’t shed any needles. He was longing for the boy to wake up so that he could show him the pretty Christmas tree.

He had phoned work and told them he was ill. He couldn’t remember what he’d claimed was wrong with him, but the person who received his call simply said, “Get well soon,” as if it didn’t matter if he was at work or not.

He had shown the boy how you drive a streetcar, and drawn the tracks and the route he was most familiar with.

That was where he always went back to when he wanted to talk to children and look after them. He had seen the places from his driver’s window, and thought, this is where I want to come back to.

Just as he liked to go back to the Nordstan shopping center when there were a lot of people around, the brightly lit windows looking festive, the families, the moms and dads with children in strollers that they didn’t look after properly but just left in any old place, in any old place, as if the stroller and its contents were a sack of trash that didn’t matter. What would happen if he were not there? Like on this occasion? What would have happened to Micke?

It was hardly worth thinking about.

When most of the Christmas holiday was over he and Micke would go back there, like everybody else would be doing, Micke in his stroller and him pushing it.

He’d shown Micke his Billy Boy.

The press conference was as chaotic as usual, but worse than ever on this occasion: Winter could smell the stench of fear that would spread once the idio… the journalists assembled here had published their articles.

There were honest people here. But what could they do? The moment they had left this room their influence would be over. Come to that, it was over even before they entered it.

He saw Hans Bülow two rows back. So far Bülow had behaved honorably. It could be that his colleagues would consider him to be a traitor, but his willingness to compromise had made his articles better than the others, and more truthful, if such an expression still existed.

Winter was dazzled by three flashbulbs going off simultaneously.

He was on the stage once again. The show must go on.

Birgersson had backed out at the last moment. An important meeting with the chief of police. At the same time as the press conference. I wonder what that means.

“What traces have you found of the boy?” asked the woman who always asked the first questions at shows like this, and always wrote articles without an ounce, without a single gram of fact or credibility.

“At the moment we are working on information we have received from the general public,” said Winter. “A lot of people contacted us as a result of our appeal.”

Far too many, he thought. Thousands of Gothenburgers had seen men with small boys in strollers, in cars, on the way into and out of buildings, into and out of shops, department stores, cars, streetcars, buses, even more than usual because so many people were out doing last-minute Christmas shopping.

“Do you have a suspect?” asked the same woman, and somebody in the pack of journalists smirked in the same cynical way that Halders sometimes did.

“No,” said Winter.

“You must have a long list of pedophiles and others who go after children,” said the woman. “Who abduct children.”

“We don’t know if Micke has been abducted,” said Winter.

“Where is he, then?”

“We don’t know.”

“So are you saying he got out of the stroller and wandered off on his own?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

“We know we are doing all we can to make sure this boy returns home,” said Winter.

“So that his mother can abandon him again?” asked a male journalist sitting next to Hans Bülow.

Winter said nothing.

“If she hadn’t left the boy, this would never have happened, would it?”

“No comment,” said Winter.

“Where is she now?”

“Any other questions?” said Winter without looking at the man.

“How are you ever going to be able to find this boy?” asked a woman who was young and wore her hair in pigtails. It’s a long time since I last saw an adult in pigtails, Winter thought. They make everybody look younger.

“Like I said, we are doing everything we can,” he said.

A man in the fourth row raised his hand. Here it comes, Winter thought. Until now this has been kept away from the public, but not anymore. I can see it in his face. He knows.

“What connection does this disappearance have with the other children who have had contact with a strange man this last month?” asked the man, and several heads turned to look at him.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Winter.

“Isn’t it a fact that several children have been approached by a man at playgrounds in various parts of Gothenburg?”

“There have be-”

“In one case a little girl was actually kidnapped and was eventually found with injuries,” said the man.

Boy, Winter thought. Not girl.

Winter said nothing.

“Why don’t you answer my question?”

“It sounded more like a statement to me,” said Winter.

“Then I’ll ask it again: Have children been picked up by a man at playgrounds? Or simply approached? Are the police aware of any such cases?”

“I can’t answer that question at this moment for reasons connected with the case,” said Winter.

“Well, that’s a pretty clear answer, isn’t it?” The male reporter looked at Winter. He was wearing a leather jacket and had long black hair and a black mustache, and his whole body language expressed an attitude that Winter often came across in journalists, a sort of rueful arrogance that suggested that the truth wouldn’t make anybody happier, just as lies wouldn’t make people all that much unhappier. Perhaps in fact it was better to take lies with you on a journey that wasn’t anything special, and life wasn’t anything special.

“So there is a link?” the reporter persisted.

“No comment,” said Winter.

“Have children been kidnapped from day nurseries here in Gothenburg?” asked another reporter, a woman Winter didn’t recognize as an individual but was familiar with as a type.

Winter shook his head.

“What kind of cover-up is this?!” shouted a young man who seemed to have wandered into the room from a film, and with exaggerated gestures he started making his way toward the stage where Winter had hitherto been the only entertainer: “What are you trying to conceal from the public?”

“We are not concealing anything,” said Winter.

“If you’d laid your cards on the table from the start, Micke Johansson might not have been kidnapped,” said the young reporter who was now only a meter away from Winter, and looked up at him. Winter could see that the man’s eyes were bloodshot, and it might not have been only from excitement.

“Cards on the table? This is not a game of cards,” said Winter.

He also thought about the man in the checked cap who had been filming the children as they crossed the soccer field. They had good enlargements now, but he had waited before making the pictures public. Had that been a mistake? He hadn’t thought so thus far. The flood of tips would be even more overwhelming and difficult to oversee, running off in all directions. Who would be able to absorb all this, sort it, filter it? He didn’t have the resources, the staff. Perhaps he could borrow this big group of people in front of him, a onetime thing. No, he didn’t have the time to coach them.