Never End by Åke Edwardson Page A

drink?”
    “Will low-alcohol beer do?”
    Winter said it would and followed Halders into the house.
    “I hadn’t been here for four years or so.”
    “Not at all?”
    “Only to the gate.” Halders took a can out of the fridge. “Here you go.”
    Winter opened the can and drank.
    “I can get you a glass.”
    Winter shook his head and took another gulp. It was light in the kitchen. There were no piles of unwashed dishes on the draining board. No crumbs on the countertop. Hanging on the wall over the kitchen table was a framed poster from the sixties advertising a toothpaste that no longer existed. Next to the telephone in front of Winter was a tear-off wall calendar, and he noticed that the date was old. Nobody had torn off the pages from day to day. Winter knew what date it showed without needing to figure it out.
    “There’s something fishy about her dad,” said Halders. “Jeanette’s dad.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Or between the two of them. There’s something odd there.”
    “Can you be more specific?”
    “There are several details on which their versions of events don’t agree. The night she came home. After it had happened.”
    Winter had noticed the discrepancies. It wasn’t uncommon. It didn’t necessarily mean that one of them was lying, not consciously at least.
    “I wonder which one of them’s lying,” Halders said. “I think it’s her, and he knows but doesn’t want to say anything.”
    “It happens.”
    “We’ve got to be tougher on them.”
    “On him, in that case.” Winter emptied the can. “Jeanette needs to do some thinking. Get us off her back for a while.”
    “I wonder what time she got home,” Halders said. “I don’t think it was when she says.” He went to the fridge and got a beer for himself. “But then why doesn’t he say anything about it? I don’t think he was asleep.”
    They had a witness who’d seen Jeanette coming home around three hours later than she’d said.
    “She’s the key,” Halders said. He looked at Winter, came closer to him. “Jeanette Bielke is the key here. She went somewhere that night but doesn’t want to say where.”
    The key, thought Winter. One of the keys.
    “Her old man might know.”
    “We’ll question him again.”
    “ I’ll question him.”
    Winter could see how tense Halders’s face was. Not just the usual policeman’s pessimism. The question was, how would it affect his work? How would Halders react in a critical situation? It could end up in tragedy if he made a bad decision then.
    Should he take Halders off the case? What would be the right thing to do? Would it work itself out?
    “There’s another thing I’ve been wandering around thinking about,” said Halders, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Sit down.” Winter did as he was told. “Why haven’t we found the guy who put a bun in Angelika’s oven?
    “I can’t tell you why, Fredrik.”
    “It was a so-called rhetorical question.”
    “There’s nobody in her circle of friends who knows,” said Winter. “Of those we’ve talked to so far. Nobody who wants to say anything, at least.”
    “That’s really odd.”
    “She may have kept it secret. From everybody.”
    “Even from herself?”
    “She may not have known,” Winter said. “Or may have suppressed the thought that she was pregnant.”
    “Which amounts to the same thing,” said Halders. “But he does exist. The father.”
    “One of her friends knows,” Winter said.
    “She must have had a number one boyfriend?”
    “Not according to her parents.”
    “They know nothing about that kind of thing,” said Halders. “Parents don’t have a clue about what their former little children are up to.” He looked at Winter. “Am I right, or am I right?”
    “You are right in that parents might not always be completely reliable witnesses.”
    “We’ve got to find this guy,” Halders said, making a face. “He would have been a parent too.”
     
     
    They had to find him. Winter