Frozen Tracks Read online

  He knew that it wouldn't be enough. He would have to make use of it.

  He closed his eyes and looked towards the wall and the bureau that stood next to the bookcase with the videos. He had that drawer in his bureau, with the boy's car and the girl's bird in silver. The car was blue and black, and the bird glistened and showed off a colour of its own that wasn't like anything else.

  He had in his hand the little ball that was in the other girl's pocket. It was green, like a lawn at the height of summer. Maja, her name was. That was a name that also suggested summer. Maja. It wasn't a name for this time of year. He didn't like the autumn. He felt calmer in the summer, but now – now he wasn't so calm any longer.

  He would go out driving, driving around. He drove around, didn't want to, but he couldn't help it. Playgrounds. Day nurseries.

  Being there and joining in the fun.

  He dropped the ball and it bounced up as high as the top drawer in the bureau, then down again, and he leaned to one side and caught it in one hand. A onehanded catch!

  When it was so dark outside that he didn't need to draw the curtains in order to watch the video recording, he switched on the television.

  Maja said something funny. He could hear himself laughing on the film. He smiled. He could see the rain on the car window behind her. The bare trees. The sky, empty. It looked so miserable out there, on the other side of the car windows. Grey. Black. Damp. Rotten. A sky that was grey or black or red like . . . like blood. No. Nasty. The sky is a nasty hole that's bigger than anything else, he thought, and he squeezed the ball hard in his hand. Things fall from the heavens that we are afraid of, run away from, hide from. The heavens are empty, but rain comes down from there and we can't get away from that and so heaven is here on earth, he thought again. He used to think about that when he was a child. Uncle had come to him when he'd been crying. The light had been out, and Uncle had asked him various things and then gone away. But later, he'd come back again.

  It had hurt so much. Who had it been? Uncle had comforted him afterwards.

  Comforted him so often.

  He turned to the television again. It had been warm and cosy in the car. He'd felt warm as he shot the film. He could hear the radio as well. Then came the voice, and a swear word. The child had heard it. Maja. Maja said that the man on the radio has used a rude word.

  Yes indeed. It was a very rude word.

  What a nice ball you have, Maja. Show it to me.

  Winter was sitting on the floor by the door in the long, narrow hall with his legs spread out, and he was rolling the ball to Elsa, who was sitting at the other end of the corridor. He managed to roll it all the way to her, but she couldn't roll it all the way back again. He stood up and settled down again a bit nearer.

  'Ball stupid,' Elsa said.

  'It's easier now,' he said, and rolled it to her again.

  'The ball, the ball!' she shouted as she succeeded in rolling it all the way to him. 'The ball, Daddy!'

  'Here it comes,' he said, rolling it back to her.

  Elsa was asleep when Angela got home after her evening shift. A long day on the ward. Morning shift. A short rest. Evening shift. He heard the lift clattering up to the landing outside, and opened the door before she had even reached it.

  'I heard the lift.'

  'So did everybody else for miles.' She took off her raincoat and put it on a hanger ready for transportation to the bathroom. 'That lift ought to have been pensioned off thirty years ago.' She took off her boots. 'It's scandalous that the poor thing has to keep on working.'

  'But Elsa likes Lofty being here and working for us,' said Winter.

  Lofty Lift was Elsa's name. Just think, all these years I've lived here and travelled up and down in this lift without knowing its name, Winter had thought when Elsa christened the old contraption. Lofty Lift. Old but cool: dressed in leather and chains.

  'How did it go today?' asked Angela, heading for the kitchen.

  'Another incident at the day nursery,' he said, following her.

  'What this time?'

  'I think it was the same little boy as before who ran off through the bushes, but this time he got out.'

  'Got out? Where? Who?'

  'August, I think his name is. Do you know who that is?'

  'Yes, I think so.'

  'There was a hole in the wire fence, and he got out into the street.'

  'Oh my God.'

  'I managed to catch up with him before anything happened.'

  'How the hell could there be a hole in the fence?'

  'Rusted away.'

  'Oh my God,' she said again. 'What are we going to do?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Where are we going to place Elsa? You don't think I'm going to leave her there when there's a hole in the fence leading out on to one of northern Europe's busiest roads?' She looked at him and raised a hand. 'It sounds like a hole leading from a protected haven into the cruel world outside.'

  'They've fixed it.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I checked.' He smiled. 'This afternoon.'

  'Have they replaced the whole fence?'

  'It looks like it.'

  'Looks? Aren't you any more worried than that?'

  'I rang the lady in charge, but I couldn't get through.'

  'Well I'm going to get through.'

  She marched over to the telephone and rang one of the numbers on a Post-it note stuck to the refrigerator.

  Angela bit his knuckle when she felt that he was as close as she was. He heard a spring complaining in the mattress underneath them, a noise that could in fact have come from Lofty on the landing, but he didn't think of that until afterwards.

  They lay still in the silence.

  'Could you get me some water, please?' she asked eventually.

  He got up and went to the kitchen. Rain was pattering on the window overlooking the courtyard. The wall clock showed a quarter past midnight. He poured out a glass of water for Angela, and opened a Hof for himself.

  'You won't be able to sleep now,' she said as he drank the beer on the edge of the bed.

  'Who said anything about sleeping?'

  'I can't come and go as I please like you,' she said. 'I have strict working hours.'

  'I can be creative any time of day or night,' he said.

  She took a drink of water and put the glass down on the wooden floor, which seemed to gleam in the glow coming in from the street lighting outside. A bus could be heard driving past, tyres on water. Then another vehicle. No ambulance at the moment, thank the Lord. A voice perhaps, but it could also have been a bird, hoarse from having stayed too long in the north.

  That thought triggered another: have we stayed here for too long? Isn't it time we moved out of this stone city?

  She looked at him. I haven't taken it up with him again. Perhaps that's because I no longer want to move away myself. You can lead a good life in Gothenburg. We are not country-dwellers. Elsa isn't complaining. She's even made friends with somebody on the same landing. The fence round the day nursery has been mended. We can always rent a house in the country for the summer.

  She looked again at Erik, who seemed to be lost in thought. Things between us are better now than they used to be, a year or so ago. I didn't know for certain then. I didn't know for certain for some time. I don't think he knew for certain either.

  We could have been in different worlds, or however you put it. I could have been in heaven, and Erik here on earth. I think I'd have gone to heaven. I'm not sure about him. Ha!

  I've forgotten about most of the experience. It was bad luck.

  She thought about what had happened during the months before Elsa was born. When she had been kidnapped by a murderer. How she had been kept in his flat. What thoughts had gone through her mind.

  I don't think he ever intended to hurt me.

  Things are different now. It's good. This is a good time to be on earth. A good place.

  She heard another noise from the street down bel
ow, a brittle sort of noise.

  'A penny for your thoughts,' she said to Erik, who was still sitting in the same position with an introspective look on his face, which she could make out even in the half-light.

  He looked at her.

  'Nothing,' he said.

  'I was thinking that we have it pretty good, you and me,' she said.

  'Hmm.'

  'Is that all you have to say?'

  'Hmm.'

  She grabbed a pillow and threw it at him, and he ducked.

  'Elsa will wake up if we start a fight,' he said, putting down his bottle of beer and throwing his pillow, which thudded into the wall behind her and knocked a magazine off her bedside table.

  'Try this for size,' she said, hurling his pillow back at him. He saw it coming.

  'We actually found a little decomposing pile of newspapers outside the entrance,' said Bergenhem, the first time he'd spoken at the day's morning prayers. 'It was underneath an even more unpleasant pile of leaves.'

  'How come you didn't find it earlier?' asked Halders.

  'We weren't looking, of course,' said Ringmar. 'We didn't know we should be looking for newspapers.'

  'Have we found any fingerprints?' asked Halders.

  He rubbed at the back of his head, which was feeling stiff again. Stiffer than usual, if you could call this bloody stiffness usual. He'd been cold out in the square the previous day.

  'Beier's team are looking into it now,' said Ringmar. 'They're also trying to see if they can make out the date on the newspapers. It ought to be possible.'

  The forensic officers had looked doubtful when they were handed the rotting bundle.

  'Pointless,' said Halders. 'Just as pointless as trying to find specific bicycle tyre marks at the places where the victims were clubbed down.'

  'Bicycle tyre marks?' said Bergenhem.

  'It's my own theory,' said Halders, sounding as if he were preparing for a DCI examination. 'The attacker zoomed in on them on a bike. Silent. Fast. Unexpected.'

  'Why not?' said Winter. He didn't say that the same thought had occurred to him as well.

  'It sounds like such a feasible alternative that all of us must have thought about it,' said Bergenhem.

  'Go on, rob me of my idea,' said Halders.

  'A newspaper boy on a bike,' said Aneta Djanali.

  'There doesn't need to be that connection,' said Halders.

  'Speaking of newspaper boys . . .' said Ringmar.

  'Yes, go on,' said Djanali.

  'It's a bit odd, in fact. The newspaper delivery person for the buildings around Doktor Fries Torg also phoned in sick the morning Stillman was attacked,' said Ringmar. 'Just as when Smedsberg was, well, very nearly clubbed down on Mossen.'

  'But Stillman didn't say a thing about seeing anybody carrying newspapers,' said Halders.

  'Nevertheless.'

  'Nevertheless what?' said Halders.

  'Let's leave that for the moment,' said Winter, starting to write on the whiteboard. He turned to face the group. 'We've been discussing another theory.'

  The evening had moved on quite a bit when Larissa Serimov sat down at the duty officer's desk. Moving on quite a bit was an expression her father liked to use about most things. He had moved on quite a bit himself, from the Urals to Scandinavia after the war, and managed to have a child at an age when others were having grandchildren.

  We'll go back there one of these days, Larissa, he always used to say, as if she had moved there with him. And so they did when it finally became possible, and when they got there she had realised, genuinely realised, that they had in fact moved together all those years ago. His return had been her return as well.

  He had stayed there, Andrey Ilyanovich Serimov. There were people still living there who remembered him, and whom he remembered. I'll stay on for a few months, he'd said when she left for Sweden, and she'd been at home for three and a half days when she received word that he'd fallen off a chair outside Cousin Olga's house, and his heart had probably stopped beating even before he hit the rough decking that surrounded the big lopsided house like a moat.

  The telephone rang.

  'Frölunda Police, Serimov.'

  'Is that the police?'

  'This is the police in Frölunda,' she repeated.

  'My name is Kristina Bergort. I'd like to report that my daughter Maja disappeared.'

  Serimov had written 'Kristina Bergort' on the sheet of paper in front of her, but hesitated.

  'I beg your pardon? You said your daughter disappeared?'

  'I realise that this might sound a bit odd, but I think she was, well, abducted by somebody, and then returned.'

  'You'd better start again at the beginning,' said Serimov.

  She listened to what the mother had to say.

  'Are there any marks on Maja? Injuries? Bruises?'

  'Not as far as I can see. We – my husband and I – have only just heard about this from her. I rang right away. We are borrowing a car from a neighbour – our own car's being repaired – and we're going straight to Frölunda hospital to let them examine her.'

  'I see.'

  'Perhaps you think that's a bit, er, hasty?'

  'No, no,' said Serimov.

  'We're going anyway. I believe what Maja has told us.'

  'Of course.'

  'By the way, she also told us he took her ball.'

  'He stole it? Her ball?'

  'Her favourite ball, a green one. He said he would throw it to her through the car window once she got out, but he didn't. And she hasn't got it now.'

  'Does Maja have a good memory?'

  'She's very observant,' said Kristina Bergort. 'Here comes my husband, so we're off to the hospital now.'

  'I'll meet you there,' said Larissa Serimov.

  10

  The hospital was suffused with a light that made people waiting in the A & E queues look even more ill. There seemed to be lots of waiting rooms. Half Gothenburg appears to be here, Larissa Serimov thought. Despite the fact that this is a welfare state. It's not in the Urals. She found it difficult not to laugh. Emergency treatment was not a term that existed in Russia any more. Emergency, yes – but treatment, no.

  At least there was a doctor here, even if the queue was long.

  The Bergort family were on their own in one of the side rooms. The girl was rolling a ball backwards and forwards, but her eyes were heavy. She'll sleep her way through the examination, Serimov thought, and shook hands first with the mother and then her husband. She could see that people were staring at her uniform, which was black with the word POLICE in grotesquely large letters on her back. What's the point of that? she had thought the first time she put it on. To avoid being shot in the back? Or to encourage it?