He was driving southward. There were thousands of people in the streets, staggering from pub to pub. Singing to one another. Last night I dreamed something I’ve never dreamed before. He braked suddenly when a group of revelers ignored a red light and reeled across the road ahead. Waved two fingers at him. They had become immortal.
The dashboard clock said four-thirty as he navigated the roundabout at Korsvägen. Liseberg amusement park was ablaze with light, as if it were another time of year. The first buses were stopping for people who had decided to go home.
As he turned off Bifrostgatan it looked as if thousands of people were standing outside the apartment building. The flashing lights of the police cars had taken over from the fireworks. Reality had returned. Police officers were dealing with the crowds, sealing off the road. An ambulance drove off with a roar, hurtling out of the side street into the main road.
He parked carelessly in Häradsgatan and walked over the patio again, in through the front door. He’d been here recently. It seemed like only yesterday, but it was in another millennium.
The newspaper boy was outside the door with one of the public order officers from Mölndal.
“How many are there inside?” Winter asked.
“Only the pathologist.”
“Don’t let anybody else in. When the other crime unit officers arrive, ask them to wait here.”
“Okay.”
“Keep the boy here as well,” Winter said, nodding at the boy who was cowering against a wall, shaking. Pale face, seventeen, maybe sixteen. He could be Patrik’s cousin. Same thin body, same staring eyes.
It was quiet inside the apartment. No metal music, and Winter wasn’t sure whether he’d expected any. Perhaps the silence was worse.
A ceiling light was on. There were streaks on the walls in the hall, lines, patches, specks; a pattern that reminded him of the sky that night, as if somebody had tried to re-create the last big sky before the world renewed itself.
“It’s blood,” said Pia Fröberg, who was standing in a doorway at the other end of the hall. She was an outline in the same way that the police officer had been in the apartment in Aschebergsgatan.
“I saw an ambulance.”
“She was still alive when they left here.”
“Good God!”
“I give her little hope,” Fröberg said. “Very little.” Winter had moved closer. The experienced pathologist looked scared, her face was as if sculpted in marble. Not scared. Tense, on guard.
She backed up a couple of paces and Winter went into the room and looked around. “It’s the same,” she said. “It must be the same murderer.”
Bengt Martell was sitting on the sofa. His clothes were in a heap on the floor in front of him.
“He was holding her hand,” the doctor said.
“Yes.”
“The paper boy had a mobile phone. I don’t understand how he could have acted so quickly. That he had the presence of mind.” She gestured toward the hall. “The door was standing open when he arrived.”
“Did she say anything?” Winter asked, turning to Fröberg. “Was she able to say anything?”
She looked at him as if she didn’t know how to formulate her reply. She looked again at the sofa. Winter had sat there. Bengt Martell had sat there and Siv Martell had sat in the armchair, which was still where it had been the last time.
“She’ll have difficulty ever speaking again,” Fröberg said. “Irrespective of how it goes.”
He looked at the body on the sofa. The same position as Christian Valker had been in.
“Where is his… where is his…” asked Winter, but couldn’t bring himself to say the word. “Maybe it isn’t… him sitting there. Martell. Is it him sitting there?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But where the hell is it then?” Winter said, his voice getting louder and louder.
“With… her,” said the doctor. Winter watched her face changing, growing whiter.
“What? What the hell… what do you mean?”
“It was with her. When we took her to hospital. We weren’t…”
“Holy Moses,” Winter said.
He paused in front of the sofa. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he could see the exact outline of the woman’s body. It wasn’t only the blood.
Every second was like a millennium. Fröberg had left him now and he refused entry to everyone else.
There was no cassette player there. There hadn’t been one there then, and nobody had brought a stereo system since he, Winter, had been there.
There’s always a first time for everything, he thought. I’ve never been to visit people in their home and then returned later to find… this. To find them in this state.
The writing on the wall was clear in the light from the streetlamps outside.
Capital letters. Six of them.