Never End Read Free

rape every time a rape was reported. He’d been right on two previous occasions.
    Aneta Djanali eyed the park, Slottsskogen, as they drove past—the girl had told her mother and father it had happened in the park, they knew that. Djanali noticed the dog. Not something to play with. Nothing was to be played with. Three uniformed police officers were hovering around the parking lot. There were about ten cars there.
    “Do you think they’re checking the cars?” asked Halders, who was driving.
    “Not yet, from the looks of it.”
    “You get this big show every time.”
    “Show?”
    “They go crazy. Twenty-five cops with their hands in their pockets, and the bastard could have run off and left his car behind, that could be it there in the middle. That green Opel. Or that black Volvo.”
    “There are three of them, not twenty-five.”
    Djanali saw one of the officers take a notebook out of his pocket and start writing down the registration numbers.
    “They’re starting now.”
     
     
    The Bielkes’s house was set back from the road, within a walled garden. The sea glistened only a few hundred meters away. Halders could smell the salt, see the water, hear the gulls, see the sails, a couple of ferries, a catamaran, the oil storage tanks, three cranes in the abandoned wharf on the other side of the estuary. A horizon line.
    The house must be worth ten million, but he couldn’t let that affect him. People had a right to more money than he had. It might be newly built. Inspired by Greek architecture. The thing looked like a whole Greek village.
    He wiped the sweat from his brow, felt it on his back under his shirt. Aneta looked cool. Must have to do with genes or something. Black on the outside, cool on the inside.
    “OK, then,” he said, and rang the doorbell, which was a tiny button barely visible in the yellow-tinted plaster.
    The door opened immediately, as if the man inside had been waiting for the bell. He was wearing shorts and a shirt, barefoot, sunburned, maybe fifty, glasses with thin frames, thinning hair longer in the back. Thin all over in fact, Halders thought. Red eyes. Scared eyes. Something had invaded his home.
    Now reality was intruding for the second time: first a daughter who had been raped, then two plainclothes police officers. The two always go together. Hadn’t occurred to me before, Halders thought. We’re the ones who do the following up, the good after the bad; but for him we’re each as shitty as the other.
    They introduced themselves.
    Kurt Bielke ushered them in. “Jeanette is in her room.”
    “Yes.” Halders glanced up the stairs. “It won’t take long. Then she can go to East General.”
    “East General?”
    “The hospital. Women’s clinic.”
    “I know what it is,” said Bielke, stroking his high forehead. “But . . . does she really have to go?” He turned to face Aneta Djanali. “She says she doesn’t want to.”
    “It’s important,” Djanali said. For numerous reasons, she thought to herself.
    “Can we have a word with her now?” Halders asked.
    “Yes . . . Yes, of course,” said Bielke, gesturing toward the stairs. Then he just stood there, as if frozen, until his head moved once again. He wasn’t looking at them. “It’s up there.”
    They went up the stairs and came to a closed door. Djanali could hear the sounds of summer outside. A seabird laughed aloud, and the laughter was followed by more. The birds drifted off over the bay. A dog barked. A car tooted. A child shouted out in a shrill voice.
    Bielke knocked on the door. There was no answer, and he knocked again.
    “Jeanette?”
    They could hear a voice from inside, but no words.
    “Jeanette? The po . . . the police are here.”
    Some word or other from inside again.
    “Let’s go in now,” Halders said.
    “Should I come too?” Bielke asked.
    “No,” said Halders, knocking on the door himself. He turned the handle, the door opened, and they went in.
    The girl was in her robe, sitting on the