The Shadow Woman Read Online Free PDF

up among the guests sitting next to them. One of them turned to Bergenhem and threw a punch, but Bergenhem ducked and stood his ground. He cast a quick glance to the side and saw Qvist bend down over something that lay on the ground. Damn it, Bergenhem thought.
    The man who’d botched the punch remained standing there, as if paralyzed or mesmerized by Bergenhem’s gaze. I won’t blink, thought Bergenhem.
    The commotion had caught the attention of others, and a circle formed around the two police officers and the two suspects at the table. The rock music had cut out. The dance band had stopped playing right in the middle of a barre chord. The Gothenburg Party was holding its collective breath.
    One of the suspects broke the stillness, throwing himself backward through the thin line of onlookers and plunging into the water. The splashing down below sounded like swimming strokes. The man in front of Bergenhem sat down again and started to throw up with his head propped between his legs. Halders rushed to the edge of the canal and saw the fugitive paddling awkwardly toward the brightly lit Storan Theatre on the other side. The spotlight from the bar had caught him. He stopped swimming and splashed around in confusion, with his arms above the surface, before he started to sink.
    “He’s drowning,” Bergenhem shouted, but Halders had already dived in.
     
    Halders—once those fucking scumbags were apprehended—changed into dry underwear. He didn’t bother to pull anything over his torso but sat on a park bench outside the police station with Bergenhem, who was more tired than he could ever remember being.
    “When the temperature stays above seventy over a twenty-four-hour period, the climate is tropical,” Halders said, after a drawn-out silence.
    “How do you know that?”
    “Aneta told me. She oughta know,” Halders said.
    Bergenhem turned toward him, but he couldn’t see if Halders was smiling.
    Bergenhem looked up at the sky. It was getting lighter now, and the sun slid very slowly down the facade of the Social Insurance Agency on the other side of Smålandsgatan. A taxi drove past. A patrol car pulled up in front of the main entrance and sat there with its headlights pointed toward the front doors and the engine switched off.
    “Why the hell don’t they turn their lights off?” Halders said, and audibly drew in air through his nostrils.
    The patrol car started up again and sat with the engine idling. After two minutes Halders rose and walked over to the forecourt in front of the darkened police station. Bergenhem could hear him speaking, loud and clear in the stillness of morning: “What the hell are you doing, fucking cops?”
    Bergenhem heard a mumbled reply and then Halders’s voice again: “Say that again!”
    Bergenhem ran over and grabbed Halders from behind just as he was about to bury his fist in the head of the police officer who’d stepped out of his car.
    “For Christ’s sake, Fredrik.”
    “Want us to take him in?” the officer asked. “Is he drunk?” The officer was close to fifty, a self-assured man. He did a salute of sorts when Bergenhem declined, and then climbed back into the car. All along his colleague remained quiet in the passenger seat, as if he were asleep.
    “There’s a one-minute idling limit in Gothenburg,” Halders shouted when the patrol car turned around and started back toward the street. The driver waved.
    Three minutes later the call came in to dispatch and was immediately passed on to homicide, twenty-five yards from where Halders and Bergenhem were still standing.
    The murdered woman lay on the edge of the Delsjö Forest. The summer was over. The season was beginning. The phone on Winter’s bedside table rang. It was exactly four o’clock in the morning on Thursday, August 18. He picked up the receiver and said his name.

6
    WINTER COULD SEE THE BLUE LIGHTS EVEN BEFORE HE DROVE up the hill toward the Delsjö junction. They rotated above the eastern wilderness.