Room No. 10 Read Free Page A

between parents and children. There’s no old feud, or whatever you’d call it.”
    “Although we don’t know that,” said Winter.
    Ringmar didn’t answer. He got up and walked over to the window and looked out through the slits in the blinds. He could see the wind in the black treetops in front of Fattighusån. There was a weak light over the houses on the other side of the canal; it was something other than the clear glimmer of a high summer night.
    “Have you ever been involved in something like this before, Erik?” Ringmar said without turning around. “A letter from . . . the other side.”
    “The other side?”
    “Come on, Erik,” Ringmar said, turning around, “the poor girl knows she’s going to be murdered and she writes a letter about love and reconciliation and forgiveness, and then we get a call from that damn flea-ridden hotel and all we can do is go there and find out what happened.”
    “You’re not the only one who’s frustrated here, Bertil.”
    “So—have you ever been involved with something like this before? A suicide note like this one?”
    “No.”
    “Written by a hand that is then painted? Painted white? As though it were . . . separate from the body?”
    “No, no.”
    “What the hell is going on, Erik?”
    Winter got up without answering. He felt a sharp pain in his neck and across one shoulder blade. He had sat deep in concentration over the letter for too long and had forgotten to move his forty-five-year-old body, and that didn’t work anymore; he could no longer handle sitting still for very long. But he was still alive. He had his hands in front of him. He could lift them and massage his neck. He did so, lowered his hands, and walked over to Ringmar, who was still standing at the window. Winter opened it a few centimeters. He could smell the scents of the evening; there was a sort of freshness to them.
    Ringmar was furious. He was professional and furious, and that was a good combination. It invigorated the imagination, urged it on. A police officer without an imagination was a poor hunter, mediocre at best. Police officers who managed to turn everything off when they stepped out of the police station and went home. Perhaps it was good for them, but it wasn’t good for their work; an officer with no imagination could turn it all off after working hours—and then wonder why he never got results. Many were like that, Winter had thought many times during his career at the CID; there were plenty of barely competent second-raters who couldn’t think farther than to the top of the hill. In that way, they were related to psychopaths, lacking theability to think past their own noses: is there anything on the other side of the hill? Nah, I can’t see anything there, so there can’t be anything there. I think I’ll pass this car.
    “I don’t know if it’s a message to us,” Winter said. “The hand. The white hand.”
    “What was it about her hand?” said Ringmar.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Is there some . . . history surrounding her hand? Why did he paint her hand with that damn enamel paint?”
    The paint came from Beckers; it was called Syntem, and it was an antique white semigloss enamel paint for indoor carpentry, furniture, walls, and iron surfaces. All of this could be read on the liter can that stood in room ten. It was the technicians’ job to establish that the paint had also been used on a human body. There was no reason to doubt it, but they had to be certain. One thing was already certain: Paula Ney had never touched the paintbrush that lay next to the can, which was nearly full. The paint that had been used had been used to paint Paula’s hand. Then the shaft of the paintbrush had been carefully wiped off.
    “Nothing . . . abnormal about her hand, according to her parents,” Winter said.
    Good God. Her parents hadn’t seen her hand yet. Fröberg and Öberg weren’t done with it. Winter had had to keep it from her parents and simultaneously