Sun and Shadow Page 28

  He stayed for an hour. When he returned to his car he switched on his mobile phone and found that he had several messages. The first was from Ringmar. The boy had been trying to contact him, Patrik. He didn’t want to say what it was about. Ringmar had the kid’s phone number, in case Winter didn’t have it handy. Ringmar didn’t know if he’d been phoning from home, as he’d hung up so abruptly.

  Winter rang Ringmar, but there was no reply. In the bathroom, perhaps. Winter found the road home not too bad. It was still snowing, but more gently now. Traffic was moving faster than it had been when he’d driven south earlier. It was starting to get dark. The day was giving up the ghost, and he sympathized.

  The piled-up snow at the side of the road was sometimes high, but in places the wind had blown it into the fields. It was like a wall, a hundred yards long. The Wall. Wall. His mind was wandering as he drove back toward the metropolis. Wall. He’d thought about it briefly, for the first time in days, while in the dark house at Kungsbacka. Wall. Vall. Vallgatan. Desdemona wasn’t in Vallgatan, but it wasn’t far away. Those middle-aged men dressed in black, among all those piles of CDs and all those computers, posters. Wasn’t there a shop selling CDs in Vallgatan? Had it closed down? There was nothing in the case notes about a record shop in Vallgatan. It must have closed down. He remembered passing by a shop selling music in Vallgatan, years ago. He thought of Patrik, and his friend who’d had the Sacrament CD. Where had he bought it? Didn’t he say Haga? But that wasn’t certain. Had Winter been too excited to ask the right questions? Did he have any more questions?

  He came to the industrial district and turned off toward the docks. He phoned Ringmar and was given Patrik’s address.

  “Is he going to call back?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What did he sound like?”

  “Hard to say. It was so funn—”

  “Did he sound upset? Scared? Calm?”

  “A bit ... upset. Maybe.”

  “Surely he could have told you what it was about.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t try.”

  “This isn’t my personal case.”

  “The kid didn’t say anything. He hung up the moment I said you were out. He didn’t ask for your mobile number, and I didn’t have a chance to say anything else before he slammed the receiver down.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “What are you going to do now? Call in on him?”

  “I’m already on my way. I’m at Linnéplatsen now.”

  Ringmar mumbled a good-bye and Winter continued driving northward. Ringmar was the last person he wanted to fall out with. It was Winter’s own fault if Patrik was not keen to talk to anybody else. He must have given off the wrong signals, given the impression that this was Winter’s case and nobody else’s ... that it was essential for him, Winter, to be the one contacted first. This sort of thing could cause problems, delays.

  He parked illegally on the other side of the road and walked up the three flights of stairs. There was an aroma of cooking. The walls were painted, but a long time ago. Somebody somewhere was playing music, and the bass echoed around the stairwell. There was a bicycle on the second floor, and a plastic shopping bag full of empty bottles outside one of the doors on the third. Winter rang the bell, but could hear nothing from inside. He rang again. Still no response. He knocked on the door several times. There was a scraping noise from inside. Somebody opened the door slightly. The man was between fifty and sixty and looked like an alcoholic. Winter could smell the telltale old wine plus some more recent fuel. The man was drunk, possibly dead drunk.

  “Who ish it?” A woman’s voice could be heard from inside the apartment. “Ish it Perrer?” The voice was slurred. “Ish it the quack?”

  “Who are you?” the man snarled. “Wodduyawant?”

  “I’m looking for Patrik,” Winter said.

  “What the fu—Wotsie done?” the man asked, glaring at Winter and his ID.

  “He’s been trying to get in touch with us,” said Winter.

  “He‘sh not well,” the man said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He‘sh got nothing to shay,” the man said.

  “Is Patrik at home?” Winter said, raising his voice. He could see the woman now, in the hall. As she staggered toward the door, he could see the fear in her eyes, perhaps something else.

  “He‘sh got nothing to shay,” said the man again. Winter decided to act, entered the apartment, pushed the man out of his way and against the wall, and continued into the hall.

  41

  Patrik’s father collapsed in a heap behind Winter, and the woman had fallen into a doorway on the left. Winter went quickly through the long, narrow apartment. He could find no sign of the boy, so went back into the hall and looked down at the man, who didn’t raise his head.

  “Where’s Patrik?” Winter asked. “Where’s the boy?”

  “Eesh ... out.” Saliva was hanging from the side of his mouth. He seemed to be more drunk than ever and on the verge of passing out. “Eesh out.” He waved his hand in the direction of the door.

  “What’s the matter with him? Is he injured?” Winter took hold of his arm, but could feel only bone under the coarse shirt. “What have you done to him, you bastard?” Winter squeezed harder, had the feeling he was in danger of losing control. He let go of the arm, sank down on one knee, and tried to make eye contact with Patrik’s father, but it was no longer possible.

  The woman had reappeared, leaning against the wall, gaping at the intruder.

  Winter stood up.

  “When did Patrik leave here?”

  She shook her head, refused to answer such an obnoxious jerk who had broken into their lovely apartment. People couldn’t just burst into ...

  “I’ll be back,” Winter said, dashing down the stairs and into the street, at the same time dialing on his mobile phone the number he’d looked up in his address book.

  “Is that Hanne? Erik Winter here. Have you seen Patrik? In the last couple of hours or so?”

  “No. I can ask Maria. She’s just come home.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  He could hear the conversation in the background. Hanne returned to the phone.

  “No,” she said. “She was out with another friend. But they’re supposed to meet tomorrow afternoon.” There was a pause. “Here, I hope.”

  “Can I have a word with her?” Winter said, and waited until Hanne had handed over the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Maria. This is Erik Winter, from the police.”

  But she didn’t know what Patrik had wanted to say, didn’t know where he was at the moment. He might be at Java or one of the other cafés in Vasagatan. Or round at Jimmo’s. She had Jimmo’s number. Yes, she’d tell him to get in touch with Winter the moment she heard from him. And a happy New Year to you as well.

  Winter ended the call and tried the number he’d been given, but there was no reply.

  He drove home, parked in the garage, and went to Java. All the tables were occupied, but none by Patrik. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke. There was a strong smell of coffee and hot chocolate, damp clothes, and perhaps perfume. The average age was eighteen at most. There were handbags or shoulder bags on every table. Young men even carry handbags nowadays, Winter thought. Practical, no doubt, but not for him. He’d suggest to Halders that he should get one.

  He walked among the tables and felt like an alien.

  It was similar in some of the other places along the street, and still no sign of Patrik.

  He would call again but Winter was worried, and it was not primarily because of the investigation. He tried Patrik’s home number one last time, but nobody answered. The boy would phone again.

  The procession flowed through the center of town. The Goddess of Light was at the front, on a float. It’s like a catafalque, thought Winter, observing from his living room window. Habakkuk’s daughter. The procession wriggled like a glowworm down below in the
early evening, continued eastward over the crossroads. The mass of spectators was a black sea, filling all the streets and choking all the buildings.

  Not everybody has booked into the Empire State Building, not everybody is flying back and forth over the lines of longitude in order to fool time. We are having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers, he thought as one of the floats passed by under his window: a gigantic bouquet of flowers made of wood, or whatever it was, chipboard, surrounded by living flowers.

  He felt Angela’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go out?” he asked.

  “Absolutely certain,” she said, sniffing at the long-stemmed rose he’d given her a few minutes before. “We’re having a nice, peaceful time here and we can smell the flowers.”

  “All the rest of Gothenburg is down there,” he said.

  The phone rang. His mother answered in the hall.

  “Erik, it’s for you,” she shouted.

  Angela looked at him.

  He took the couple of strides necessary to get to the living room phone.

  “Hello ... er ... It’s Patrik.”

  “Hello, Patrik. How are things?”

  “Er ... all right, I guess.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m around at Ria’s place. What do you want?”

  “You were trying to get hold of me yesterday.”

  “Oh, it was nothing. I had an idea, that’s all.”

  “Tell me what it was, then.”

  “Well ... er ... that guy who came down in the elevator. You know, in that building where the mur—”

  “I’m with you, Patrik.”

  “I think he was wearing a uniform.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Under his overcoat, I mean.”

  “Why do you think he was wearing a uniform?”

  “I dunno, it just looked like that.”

  “What kind of a uniform?”

  “Well, it was sort of ... with things on. Dark blue ... with things on, maybe his shirt was light blue, and his overcoat sort of opened up a bit ... when he went out of the door and there was a flash of something sort of gold on his shirt. In front of it.”

  “You sound as if you’re describing a police uniform, Patrik.”

  “Yes, well.”

  “Did you think of a police uniform?”

  “Not then.”

  “Now, though?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see anything else that could be part of a uniform?”

  “Well ... it could have been a belt or a strap, but I’m not sure if I saw that.”

  “What about his head? Now that you’ve had time to think. Did he have anything on his head?”

  Winter watched the tail end of the procession wriggling away toward the Avenue. A snake. It looked like a snake now, thinner at the tail end, wriggling from side to side and followed by the black mass filling the street and the park.

  Angela was still standing at the window, rose in hand. It sounded as if his mother was filling the shaker with ice in the kitchen. Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny were playing “Message to a Friend” at low volume.

  “He didn’t have anything on his head,” Patrik said.

  “All right.”

  “There is one thing ... I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  Winter waited, said nothing. His mother looked into the room. Angela gave her a smile.

  “I think I’ve seen him somewhere else,” Patrik said.

  Bartram followed the procession at a distance, taking parallel streets and giving way to the crowds of people who seemed to be getting forced back from the center of activities.

  He waited at the corner. The Goddess had turned left and was coming toward him. There were twice as many people as usually turn out for special festivities.

  Some people near him were singing. Others were hugging one another with sudden, jerky movements. Everything was so tremendously big. The newspapers had almost killed themselves in their efforts to outdo each other in hyping the millennium. The television was even worse.

  Nobody thought any longer that all things electronic would break down. Everything would work just as badly as usual, he thought. The trams would continue not running. People would still get furious. People would still spit at him.

  He continued northward. The procession began to close up as it approached its destination at Lilla Bommen. There were still a few idiots who hadn’t caught on to what was happening, standing by their cars on the road, ringed in for the evening, and indeed the night, by the cheering crowds.

  People were keeping an eye on the sky over the river, waiting. It had grown cold again, and people’s breath formed clouds that slowly rose and grew denser. That could start it raining, thought Bartram, but the mist dispersed higher up and suddenly the sky over Hisingen exploded. Two thousand years of pyrotechnical skills came to a climax. It started with a fan of gold that covered the whole province.

  Winter was in the kitchen preparing the New Year’s dinner. He could hear his mother’s and Angela’s voices in the living room. He took a sip of the champagne he’d served earlier. Dry and light. The best champagne should be served early in the evening. Angela had sniffed at it, then drunk a little of the best table water on the market. Patrik was an observant boy and he was always strolling around town. Half a million people lived in Gothenburg, and that wasn’t all that many. You kept seeing faces. Once, twice, three times.

  They could talk to him after the holiday. It was an opening, possibly a beam of light.

  He decided to concentrate on the first course. The fish stock was ready and strained. It had been simmering for four hours the previous night, and had been made with fish bones, a leek, shallots, fresh ginger, white peppercorns, and water.

  He mixed the dressing and put it to one side: the stock, fresh lime juice, grated horseradish, sea salt, and a little freshly ground black pepper.

  He carefully stirred a teaspoon of freshly ground, unrefined sugar and half a teaspoon of sesame oil into three eggs, then fried thin omelets in a little rapeseed oil before letting them cool on top of one another. Then he rolled each of the omelets and cut the rolls into thin slices and put them on one side.

  He had just finished opening the oysters, two and a half dozen. He checked them again, then cut twenty-five rinsed sugar snap pea pods diagonally and blanched them in boiling water for thirty seconds before cooling them with cold water. Having drained them, he mixed them in a large bowl with finely chopped red onion, a little watercress, and some leaves of a lettuce known as upland cress that had a delicate, slightly hot, peppery taste. Finally he added the thin slices of omelet.

  He heated up some more oil in a deep frying pan and sautéed the oysters very quickly on both sides at a high heat. He repeated this several times, then placed them on top of the salad, one by one. When he had finished, he drizzled over the dressing. He carefully tossed the oyster salad, divided it onto three plates, endeavoring to be as fair as possible in distributing the oysters.

  He thought that should keep them going until the more substantial course, which was rack of veal with mashed garlic potato and pesto. The meat had started to turn brown and interesting smells were coming from the oven. It was spiced with coarsely chopped cloves of garlic, newly ground black pepper, and olive oil—he’d put the ingredients into the mixer and turned them into a paste, then rubbed it into the veal and allowed it to marinate for five hours.

  For Morelius, Gothenburg was like a sea of fire. No. It was the sky that was a sea of fire, constantly shifting shades of red, never still. The official fireworks display had been followed by the unofficial ones, everybody competing with everybody else. He’d heard that five or six people had had accidents with rockets already, and it wasn’t midnight yet. You could hear ambulance sirens occasionally, but as far as he knew, nobody had died so far.

  The slopes leading up to Sk
ansen were full of people, mainly youngsters. The police were in position. Many of them were in uniform. He saw a girl hanging around Ivarsson’s neck, trying to give him a kiss. Ivarsson allowed it to happen, then bowed graciously by way of thanks. All was calm. No panic. It was just after eleven. Skanstorget, below where he was standing, was starting to fill up, like a semiarctic Times Square. Morelius had never been to New York, but he’d seen pictures.

  He was a bit to one side of the worst crush when the couple emerged from the crowd. They recognize me, of course, he thought. This is a small town, really. They seem to be sober enough. Now they’re coming to me.

  “A happy New Year,” Maria said.

  Morelius nodded in acknowledgment.

  “You’re keeping calm, I see,” Morelius said.

  “Straight edge.”

  “Eh?”

  “We’re not getting carried away,” she said. “We’re taking nothing, drinking nothing.”

  “Very sensible.”

  “You enjoy everything all the more,” the boy said.

  “Exactly.”

  ‘Are you busy tonight?“ she asked. ”Is there a lot to do?“

  “It’s all been very quiet so far.”

  “But the fun will be starting soon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be working all night?”

  “Until four in the morning.”

  “All over town?”

  “In the town center. But they might call out the circus to somewhere else, of course.”

  “This is amazingly good,” Siv Winter said.

  “It was hard to find decent calamari,” explained Winter.

  “Just as well,” said Angela.

  “Oysters are even better when they’re cooked,” Winter’s mother said.

  “I agree.”

  “Anyway ...” Winter said. He raised his glass of Sancerre. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers,” said Angela and his mother, raising their glasses.

  They drank and put their glasses down again.