Room No. 10 Read Free Page B

tell them about it, ask questions about it. What a fucking job this is.
    “I have all the family photos in my office,” Ringmar said.
    “We won’t find anything there,” Winter said.
    Ringmar didn’t answer.
    “What was he going to do with it, then?” said Ringmar. “The hand?”
    “You make it sound like he was carrying it with him.”
    “Well, doesn’t it feel like that?”
    “I don’t know, Bertil.”
    “There is some reason for this. That bastard wants to say something to us. He wants to tell us something.” Ringmar flung one handinto the air. “About himself.” He looked at Winter. “Or about her.” He looked out through the window. Winter followed his gaze. There was only darkness out there. “Or about both of them.”
    “They knew each other?” Winter said.
    “Yes.”
    “They had planned to meet at an out-of-the-way hotel? And to be on the safe side they didn’t bother to announce their arrival in the lobby?”
    “Yes.”
    “And we believe this?”
    “No.”
    “But she knew the murderer?”
    “I think so, Erik.”
    Winter didn’t answer.
    “I have been in this damn line of work ten years longer than you, Erik, I’ve seen almost everything, but I’m having trouble putting this together.”
    “We’ll put it together,” said Winter.
    “Naturally,” said Ringmar, but he didn’t smile.
    “Speaking of before,” said Winter. “When I was really green, it was my first year as a detective, I think, I worked on something that involved Hotel Revy.”
    “This is definitely not the first time that place has been involved in an investigation,” said Ringmar. “You know that as well as I do.”
    “Yes . . . but the case . . . or whatever I should call it, was special.”
    Winter contemplated the night outside, a dim darkness and a dim light, as though nothing could make up its mind out there now that summer was nearly over and autumn was slowly sliding up out of the earth with the mist.
    “It was a missing person,” said Winter. “I remember it now.”
    “At Hotel Revy?”
    “It was a woman,” said Winter. “I don’t remember her name right now. But she disappeared from her home. Was going to run some errand.She was married, I think. And as I recall she had checked in at Hotel Revy the night before she disappeared.”
    “Disappeared? Disappeared to where?”
    Winter didn’t answer. He sank down into his thoughts, into his memory, as the darkness out there sank over roof ridges and streets and parks and harbors and hotels.
    “What happened to her?” Ringmar asked. “I guess I’ve investigated too many missing persons; they run together.”
    “I don’t know,” Winter said, staring at Ringmar’s face. “No one knows. I don’t think she was ever found. No.”
    •   •   •
    Winter had been twenty-seven and a green detective, and the late summer had been greener than usual because it had rained more than usual all summer. Winter had moved through the city every day without a thought of vacation, but he had thought of the future, this future, the future of a detective; he had cut his legal studies short before they really even started in order to become a police officer, but after his training and one year in uniform and six months in plainclothes he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to devote his life to penetrating the underworld. There was so much aboveground that was so much brighter. Even when it rained. In his six months or so on the force he had seen things that normal people never see, even if they live for a hundred years. That was how he thought: normal people. The people who lived aboveground. He lived there, too, sometimes; he came and went, crawled up and crawled down again, but he knew that his life would never be “normal.” We have our own world down here, we police officers, along with our thieves and murderers and rapists. We understand. We understand one another.
    He had begun to understand what understanding involved. When he did, it