take it easy.”
“I am taking it easy.”
He took it easy for another hour while the sun outside crept slowly across a cloudless sky. The smoke lingered inside the room. He continued to trace the hours and the days after the murder of Beatrice Wägner.
Witnesses had seen cars leaving the scene. One car had seemed in a hurry to get away, according to one woman, but he knew that could be an impression she’d formed after the event, a dramatization because she so badly wanted to help them with their investigation, although most such efforts had the opposite effect.
Then, as now, the season had been a problem, because fewer people than usual were at home during the summer. He had now started reading the clippings from each case in parallel, and smiled at one sentence that jumped off the page, spoken by Sture Birgersson one summer’s day almost exactly five years ago: “The problem the police are up against in this murder investigation is the vacation period,” Birgersson had said.
Birgersson was Winter’s superior at the CID. Winter had an appointment with him this afternoon.
A house-to-house operation around the park had produced as little by way of results that summer as this, so far.
Winter paused at one detail from the night Beatrice Wägner was murdered. Two witnesses had independently observed that a man and a boy had been packing a car for some time in the early hours of the morning. That had been outside one of the three-story apartment buildings to the northeast of the park, a hundred meters away. The two witnesses had noticed the man and boy from different directions, but at more or less the same time. The man and the boy might have seen or heard something, but nobody knew, as they had never made themselves known to the police. They had issued an appeal, but nobody had come forward. They had simply been unable to find a man and boy in the building who matched the description they’d been given.
Just then, Winter’s desk telephone rang. He answered and recognized Birgersson’s voice.
“Could we meet a bit earlier than planned, Erik? I just found out I have to attend a meeting at four.”
“OK.”
“Can you come up now?”
“Give me fifteen minutes. I want to ask you a few things, but I have to do a bit of reading first.”
Birgersson stood smoking by his window as Winter asked his first question. Birgersson’s scalp was visible through his close-cropped gray hair, lit up by the rays of the sun. The boss would be sixty next year. Winter would be forty-two. Birgersson was more of a father to him than a big brother.
“I don’t know where it would have led us,” said Birgersson, flicking ash into the palm of his hand, “but we really did try to trace that pair: father and son, or whatever they were.” He looked at Winter. “You were involved, of course.”
“Reading about it now, I remember getting very angry at the time.”
“I got pretty worked up about it too.” The muscles in Birgersson’s lean face twitched. “But that was only natural. We didn’t have much to go on, and so that detail seemed to be more important that it might really have been.”
“Do you often think about the Beatrice case?” asked Winter, from his chair by the desk in the middle of the room.
“Only every day.”
“It hasn’t been like that for me. Not quite every day. Until now.”
“You’re still a young man, Erik. I run the risk of retiring with that bloody case still unsolved, and I don’t want to do that.” He pulled at the cigarette, but the smoke was invisible against the light from the window. “I don’t want to do that,” he said again, gazing out from the window, then looking back at Winter. “I don’t know if this is a sort of twisted wishful thinking, but I hope it is him who’s come back. That this business has never ended.”
“That’s why I’m scrutinizing the Beatrice case notes,” said Winter.
“The belt,” Birgersson said. “The belt is a
“I am taking it easy.”
He took it easy for another hour while the sun outside crept slowly across a cloudless sky. The smoke lingered inside the room. He continued to trace the hours and the days after the murder of Beatrice Wägner.
Witnesses had seen cars leaving the scene. One car had seemed in a hurry to get away, according to one woman, but he knew that could be an impression she’d formed after the event, a dramatization because she so badly wanted to help them with their investigation, although most such efforts had the opposite effect.
Then, as now, the season had been a problem, because fewer people than usual were at home during the summer. He had now started reading the clippings from each case in parallel, and smiled at one sentence that jumped off the page, spoken by Sture Birgersson one summer’s day almost exactly five years ago: “The problem the police are up against in this murder investigation is the vacation period,” Birgersson had said.
Birgersson was Winter’s superior at the CID. Winter had an appointment with him this afternoon.
A house-to-house operation around the park had produced as little by way of results that summer as this, so far.
Winter paused at one detail from the night Beatrice Wägner was murdered. Two witnesses had independently observed that a man and a boy had been packing a car for some time in the early hours of the morning. That had been outside one of the three-story apartment buildings to the northeast of the park, a hundred meters away. The two witnesses had noticed the man and boy from different directions, but at more or less the same time. The man and the boy might have seen or heard something, but nobody knew, as they had never made themselves known to the police. They had issued an appeal, but nobody had come forward. They had simply been unable to find a man and boy in the building who matched the description they’d been given.
Just then, Winter’s desk telephone rang. He answered and recognized Birgersson’s voice.
“Could we meet a bit earlier than planned, Erik? I just found out I have to attend a meeting at four.”
“OK.”
“Can you come up now?”
“Give me fifteen minutes. I want to ask you a few things, but I have to do a bit of reading first.”
Birgersson stood smoking by his window as Winter asked his first question. Birgersson’s scalp was visible through his close-cropped gray hair, lit up by the rays of the sun. The boss would be sixty next year. Winter would be forty-two. Birgersson was more of a father to him than a big brother.
“I don’t know where it would have led us,” said Birgersson, flicking ash into the palm of his hand, “but we really did try to trace that pair: father and son, or whatever they were.” He looked at Winter. “You were involved, of course.”
“Reading about it now, I remember getting very angry at the time.”
“I got pretty worked up about it too.” The muscles in Birgersson’s lean face twitched. “But that was only natural. We didn’t have much to go on, and so that detail seemed to be more important that it might really have been.”
“Do you often think about the Beatrice case?” asked Winter, from his chair by the desk in the middle of the room.
“Only every day.”
“It hasn’t been like that for me. Not quite every day. Until now.”
“You’re still a young man, Erik. I run the risk of retiring with that bloody case still unsolved, and I don’t want to do that.” He pulled at the cigarette, but the smoke was invisible against the light from the window. “I don’t want to do that,” he said again, gazing out from the window, then looking back at Winter. “I don’t know if this is a sort of twisted wishful thinking, but I hope it is him who’s come back. That this business has never ended.”
“That’s why I’m scrutinizing the Beatrice case notes,” said Winter.
“The belt,” Birgersson said. “The belt is a
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