picture wasn’t complete if he didn’t figure out what was missing.
What had he missed in this room a little bit ago, before he spoke to Winter? It was something you usually see in a room, especially in a bedroom. A bed? No, the bed was still there, still with its plastic canopy. A bureau? No.
Halders had stood in hundreds of bedrooms during his career as an investigator. He had investigated. He had registered. He had studied details; tried to think of the problem in a different situation, a different life.
What was it that was always in a room like this one? Something personal, even intimate. Something that the person who inhabited the room saw at night, in the morning; as the last thing, the first. It was usually hanging on a wall. Or it was on a nightstand. Nothing was hanging on the wall here. Right now, that was because the walls were daubed with primer. There was nothing on the little table next to the bed. There could have been; the plastic canopy protected everything in there.
There were no photographs in the room, not of Paula, not of anyone else. There were no photographs in frames anywhere in theapartment. It was as though loneliness was amplified in there and became emptier, more blank.
They had found some photo envelopes with regular prints, everyday pictures, but things like that always gave an impersonal impression; they were momentary scenes from momentary instants, things you could take or leave.
It was different with ones that were put in frames. That was somehow more for posterity. It was . . . intimate.
He hadn’t found any photographs like that in any of the boxes or on any of the shelves where things had temporarily been placed during the renovation.
He would have to ask her parents about that; Halders picked up his notebook and wrote. They would have to help identify all the faces in the prints anyway. Maybe nothing was framed. Maybe that wasn’t Paula Ney’s style.
What was her style?
Halders left the bedroom and stood in what he called the living room, which was a damn strange name; it was probably left over from the time when there was a parlor in people’s houses, cold and closed up, that was used only when people came to call—which might have been never—and wasn’t for living in. The room just stood there, like some sort of permanent lodger. At least, that’s how it had been in Halders’s childhood home; no one came to call and the door to the parlor was never opened; the table silver was never taken out of its chest. As a boy, Halders would sometimes stand outside its door and try to see the things in there through the milky glass. Everything was blurry, there were mostly fluid contours, as though he were nearsighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses, but still he wanted to know what was in there, what it might look like when it was sharp and clear. As though he could somehow find out why no one lived in there.
Suddenly he couldn’t remember if he had ever been in the parlor of his childhood. He ought to remember that. And later, while he was still a child, his parents got divorced and everyone went in different directions and the parlor became a memory, blurry from the start, butnever blurrier with time. The opposite happened, as though the image became clearer with time for the very reason that it had been so hard to see back then.
Her style; Halders had been thinking of Paula’s style. Her style was not being murdered. The murder proved that no one could escape. Soon, as they learned more about her life, her previous life, maybe that image would also change, become clear, or become dark as it became more and more obvious.
• • •
“How did we get on the topic of storage lockers?” Ringmar said.
They had decided to take a walk in the park, to the Shell station and back. It wasn’t much of a park. The station was bigger than the park.
“Aneta pointed us toward Central Station,” said Winter. “And of course there could be a suitcase down
What had he missed in this room a little bit ago, before he spoke to Winter? It was something you usually see in a room, especially in a bedroom. A bed? No, the bed was still there, still with its plastic canopy. A bureau? No.
Halders had stood in hundreds of bedrooms during his career as an investigator. He had investigated. He had registered. He had studied details; tried to think of the problem in a different situation, a different life.
What was it that was always in a room like this one? Something personal, even intimate. Something that the person who inhabited the room saw at night, in the morning; as the last thing, the first. It was usually hanging on a wall. Or it was on a nightstand. Nothing was hanging on the wall here. Right now, that was because the walls were daubed with primer. There was nothing on the little table next to the bed. There could have been; the plastic canopy protected everything in there.
There were no photographs in the room, not of Paula, not of anyone else. There were no photographs in frames anywhere in theapartment. It was as though loneliness was amplified in there and became emptier, more blank.
They had found some photo envelopes with regular prints, everyday pictures, but things like that always gave an impersonal impression; they were momentary scenes from momentary instants, things you could take or leave.
It was different with ones that were put in frames. That was somehow more for posterity. It was . . . intimate.
He hadn’t found any photographs like that in any of the boxes or on any of the shelves where things had temporarily been placed during the renovation.
He would have to ask her parents about that; Halders picked up his notebook and wrote. They would have to help identify all the faces in the prints anyway. Maybe nothing was framed. Maybe that wasn’t Paula Ney’s style.
What was her style?
Halders left the bedroom and stood in what he called the living room, which was a damn strange name; it was probably left over from the time when there was a parlor in people’s houses, cold and closed up, that was used only when people came to call—which might have been never—and wasn’t for living in. The room just stood there, like some sort of permanent lodger. At least, that’s how it had been in Halders’s childhood home; no one came to call and the door to the parlor was never opened; the table silver was never taken out of its chest. As a boy, Halders would sometimes stand outside its door and try to see the things in there through the milky glass. Everything was blurry, there were mostly fluid contours, as though he were nearsighted and wasn’t wearing his glasses, but still he wanted to know what was in there, what it might look like when it was sharp and clear. As though he could somehow find out why no one lived in there.
Suddenly he couldn’t remember if he had ever been in the parlor of his childhood. He ought to remember that. And later, while he was still a child, his parents got divorced and everyone went in different directions and the parlor became a memory, blurry from the start, butnever blurrier with time. The opposite happened, as though the image became clearer with time for the very reason that it had been so hard to see back then.
Her style; Halders had been thinking of Paula’s style. Her style was not being murdered. The murder proved that no one could escape. Soon, as they learned more about her life, her previous life, maybe that image would also change, become clear, or become dark as it became more and more obvious.
• • •
“How did we get on the topic of storage lockers?” Ringmar said.
They had decided to take a walk in the park, to the Shell station and back. It wasn’t much of a park. The station was bigger than the park.
“Aneta pointed us toward Central Station,” said Winter. “And of course there could be a suitcase down
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