The Stranglers Honeymoon

by Håkan Nesser

  If these things have to be weighed up and compared. Balanced.

  He closed the bedroom door and returned to the kitchen. Put the kettle on and flopped down at the table with the heap of newspapers in front of him. Copies of the Allgemejne for the last twenty days.

  I might as well start working my way through them, he thought. They ought to be able to keep him occupied until his tiredness hit him once again, if nothing else. He adjusted the pile and started chronologically from the back. It was now eleven minutes to six. There was a scratching at the door, but he was damned if he was going to make it up with that confounded cat already.

  An hour and three cups of tea later the lack of sleep had caught up with him. He had also given way and allowed Stravinsky back in: the cat had miaowed reproachfully and gone back to the same window ledge, presumably hoping against hope for the arrival of the next delicacy on this day of miracles when grilled swallows were flying around all over the place.

  Or perhaps he’s forgotten all about it already, Van Veeteren thought. Cats’ memories are short. Enviably short. What he had done with the bird – or the remains of it – seemed to be written in the stars.

  The newspapers were nothing special. He read at most two or three articles to the end, but leafed dutifully through every copy and glanced at every single page. He cut out the chess columns and put them in a pile, and by the time he had dealt with the fifteenth copy of the Allgemejne he could tell by the gravelly feeling behind his eyes that he wouldn’t be able to keep going for much longer. And there wasn’t much point anyway. He folded the newspaper up, placed it on top of the bundle of those he had read already and glanced at the first page of the one on top of the pile of unread copies.

  Then his heart missed a beat.

  The priest was glaring at him.

  Glaring. There was no other word for it. His eyes were prominent under the long quiff of hair carefully combed to one side. His expression had something reproachful and at the same time aggressive in it. His dark beard was slightly better trimmed than Van Veeteren recalled it from the visit to the antiquarian bookshop. Presumably a little shorter as well, because his dog collar could be seen quite clearly.

  He shook his head and stared at the headline.

  PRIEST FELL UNDER A TRAIN

  The text was only about ten lines long, and there was no continuation on an inside page.

  The 29-year-old priest Tomas Gassel was killed late yesterday evening when for some unknown reason he fell down onto the lines just as a local train was pulling into Maardam Central Station. There were no witnesses, the platform where the accident happened was empty at the time and it has not yet been possible to interrogate the driver as he was in severe shock and was taken immediately to the New Rumford hospital. The police say there is no reason to suspect foul play. Tomas Gassel was a curate in Leimaar parish, and a special mass in his memory will take place next Sunday.

  Van Veeteren stared at the photograph once more. His tiredness had disintegrated.

  Bloody hell, he thought. This is a black Sunday if ever there was one.

  It was not easy to wake Ulrike up, but he managed to do so.

  ‘What time is it?’ she muttered, without opening her eyes.

  ‘Er,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Just turned seven . . . Getting on for half past, in fact. Quite a lot has been happening.’

  ‘Been happening? We haven’t slept for more than four hours.’

  ‘I know. You have an amazing ability to avoid waking up, no matter what’s happening in the world. Stravinsky killed a swallow.’

  ‘Oh dear. But these things happen.’

  She rolled over and placed a pillow over her head.

  ‘In here,’ said Van Veeteren.

  Time passed without her saying anything, and he began to wonder if she had fallen asleep again.

  ‘There aren’t any swallows in here,’ she maintained in the end.

  ‘It came in.’

  ‘Came in?’

  ‘Through the window. Stravinsky grabbed it. I must say it’s odd that they have to torture their prey so horribly. There’s a degree of cruelty in that old lazy-bones that is beyond comprehension. It makes you think . . .’

  ‘What did you do about it?’ asked Ulrike, without removing the pillow.

  ‘I managed to get him outside in the end. There was a right shemozzle – he lay first under the sofa and then up on the bookcase.’

  ‘Ugh,’ said Ulrike. ‘But the poor bird is out of the flat now, I hope?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Then there was that business with the priest.’

  There was silence for three seconds.

  ‘The priest?’

  ‘Yes, I think I told you about him. He called in at the bookshop the day before we went on holiday, and wanted me to help him with something. And now he’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘As dead as the swallow, although it went a bit more quickly in his case. He fell under a train. I reckon we could do with quieter mornings when we get home in the middle of the night. Cats and priests and the devil and his grandmother. I wonder what he wanted.’

  Ulrike removed the pillow and looked at him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The priest, of course. Don’t you think it’s a bit odd that he should fall under a train only a week after he came to see me?’

  Ulrike continued looking at him, with a furrow between her prettily arched eyebrows. Stretched, and pulled the covers up under her chin. Five more silent seconds passed.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked.

  ‘To be honest,’ she said.

  ‘To be honest what?’

  She diverted her gaze to Stravinsky, who was curled up fast asleep on the window ledge.

  ‘Just a thought. Can it be that you’ve been dreaming all this? It sounds a bit on the bizarre side, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’

  ‘What the hell?’ exclaimed Van Veeteren. ‘It’s in the newspaper – do you want me to go and fetch it?’

  She hesitated a moment.

  ‘Not just now. I think we ought to get a bit more sleep, no matter what . . . Then we can talk it over when we wake up again. Come back to bed and give me a hug.’

  Van Veeteren had several valid objections on the tip of his tongue, but after a brief internal struggle he gave up and did as he was bidden.

  11

  In the early hours of Monday morning he dreamt about a train hurtling at high speed through the world and running over hordes of black cats with white patches; and early the following morning he woke up in a cold sweat after being chased through a deserted and unlit town by a mad, bearded priest with a gigantic dead swallow in his mouth and a carpet-beater in his hand.

  The message could hardly be clearer, and when Ulrike had left for work at about half past eight, he telephoned the Maardam CID.

  After the obligatory wrong connections, he finally got through to Münster.

  ‘That priest,’ he said.

  ‘What priest?’ wondered Münster.

  ‘The one that died. Who fell in front of a train.’

  ‘Oh, him,’ said Münster. ‘I know nothing about it. It was Moreno who took charge of that.’

  ‘Moreno?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you ask, Chief Inspector?’

  Hell and damnation, Van Veeteren thought. Four years have passed, and he still calls me that. No doubt it will say Chief Inspector on my gravestone.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Münster, who had drawn conclusions from the silence in his receiver. ‘I obviously have trouble in getting used to it.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Can you put me through to Moreno?’

  ‘I can always try,’ said Münster. ‘But I don’t think there was anything for us to worry about. No suspicious circumstances at all. I suppose you don’t want to tell me why you’re ringing?’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Put me through to Moreno now.’

  Detective Inspector Ewa Mo
reno was not in her office, but he eventually caught up with her via her mobile in a car between Linzhuisen and Weill. It was true that she had been dealing with the case of the priest who fell under a train – and what Münster said was also true, i.e. that there was no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary.

  Apart from the possibility that Gassel might have done it of his own free will, that is. The train driver had been interrogated, but had noticed nothing unusual apart from a person appearing out of nowhere and suddenly falling down in front of the engine. Obviously, it had been a traumatic experience for him – every train driver’s nightmare – but Moreno had not managed to squeeze anything else out of him, despite talking to him for two hours, she said. Or trying to talk to him.

  Van Veeteren pondered for a moment. Then he asked if she might possibly have time to indulge in a glass of beer with him that evening at Adenaar’s: and she had.

  What’s he after? she wondered.

  He didn’t want to go into that over the phone, but promised to do so while they were enjoying their beers.

  She turned up a quarter of an hour late, and what struck him immediately was how beautiful she was. The most attractive inspector in the whole world, he thought. She seemed to get prettier and prettier as the years went by: he wondered what kept her in the force, and how old she actually was. No more than thirty-five in any case. A year had passed since he saw her last, in fact – in connection with the deplorable case involving Intendent deBries – and the situation then had been so awful that even an attractive woman had been unable to distract attention from the horror of it all.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit late, Chief Inspector. I hope you haven’t been waiting for too long.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ he said. ‘Drop that Chief Inspector crap or I’ll have an epileptic fit.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It takes time to get used to it.’

  ‘Four years,’ Van Veeteren pointed out. ‘Is it all that difficult to get used to it over four years?’

  ‘We police are a bit slow to catch on,’ said Moreno. ‘As is well known.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Van Veeteren, beckoning to the waiter. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘So, Gassel,’ said Moreno after they had ordered. ‘What’s it all about? I have to admit I was a bit curious.’

  Van Veeteren scratched his head impassively and took out his cigarette machine.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he admitted. ‘I started to smell a rat, but no doubt it has to do with my age and impending Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Shall we take a bet on it?’ Moreno asked.

  Van Veeteren fed tobacco into the machine and said nothing for a while.

  ‘He came to see me,’ he said eventually. ‘That’s the rat.’

  ‘Came to see you?’ said Moreno. ‘Gassel came to see you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never got round to talking to him, unfortunately. I had an appointment at the dentist’s, and the following day I was flying to Rome with Ulrike. You’ve never met her, but she’s my better half . . . Much better, in fact. Anyway, that was three weeks ago – just over, to be precise: we agreed to meet when I got back, but now he’s dead. It could be pure coincidence, of course, but you sometimes wonder.’

  Moreno said nothing, but a furrow appeared in her brow.

  ‘I did get a hint of what he wanted, though,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘He wanted to get something off his chest.’

  ‘Get something off his chest?’

  ‘Yes. Somehow or other. He’d evidently got to hear of something that came within his duty of confidentiality and so he couldn’t tell me what – a confessor who wanted to confess, as you might say.’

  ‘Confession?’ said Moreno. ‘But he wasn’t a Catholic priest.’

  Van Veeteren lit his cigarette.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But as far as I can make out most other denominations use a sort of modified variation of confession. I suppose they’ve begun to understand that our conscience can sometimes become too heavy to bear.’

  Moreno smiled.

  ‘Didn’t he say anything else?’

  Van Veeteren shook his head gloomily.

  ‘Not as far as I remember. But he did make a decidedly nervous impression, and that’s what worries me. If it hadn’t been for that damned olive stone, I’d have sat down and listened to what he had to say, of course.’

  ‘Olive stone?’ said Moreno. ‘Now then, Chief . . . Now you’re talking in riddles.’

  ‘I broke a filling on an olive stone,’ explained Van Veeteren, pulling a face. ‘The same day as we were due to fly to Rome . . . or the day before, to be precise. That was why I had to go to the dentist’s. My fangs are in pretty good shape apart from that.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that for a second,’ said Moreno, deepening the furrow in her brow somewhat.

  The waiter came with the beers. They drank a toast, then sat in silence for a while.

  ‘Do you think there’s something illegal lurking in the background? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Van Veeteren inhaled deeply, then peered through the smoke as he breathed out.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible to say, but he’d picked me out in order to take me into his confidence because of what I was – a former chief inspector. Former, kindly take note of that. It was no coincidence – if I remember rightly, he let slip that he’d promised not to go to the police, that was the point. So what the hell could it be all about, if there wasn’t something illegal going on?’

  Moreno shrugged.

  ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘What do you think? Your intuition is not exactly an unknown concept, after all.’

  ‘Bah,’ muttered Van Veeteren, taking a swig of beer. ‘I don’t think as much as a chicken’s fart. Perhaps it’s the latest fad in the criminal underworld to go to confession, how should I know? But what about you, Inspector? Have you no suggestion to make? I assume there must have been some sort of investigation?’

  Moreno sighed and looked slightly worried.

  ‘Not much of one,’ she said. ‘We haven’t written it off yet – it’s only a week after it happened, of course; but we haven’t found anything to suggest that . . . well, to suggest that there are evil spirits behind it, as it were.’

  ‘Who have you spoken to?’

  ‘His father,’ said Moreno. ‘He’s a retired former self-employed businessman up in Saaren. He took it very hard. It was his only son, his wife died a year ago. A colleague out at Leimaar as well, and quite a few people in the station, of course. Gassel lived alone. Not many friends. It’s possible he was depressed, but based on what we know there’s no reason to make a song and dance about it. We simply don’t have any evidence to suggest anything improper.’

  ‘And nothing odd?’

  Moreno paused to think that over.

  ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ she said. ‘I’m not as sensitive as a certain former chief inspector used to be, but I haven’t noticed anything odd. Nothing at all. It would no doubt have been different if there had been any witnesses, somebody who’d seen or noticed something, but nobody has come forward. It was wet and windy that evening, and pretty dark on the platform where it happened. And there was nobody waiting to get onto the train – it was the terminus.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘And the engine driver didn’t notice anything?’

  ‘No. He happened to be looking down at the controls at the moment when it happened. That’s what he says, at least. All he noticed was a jolt.’

  ‘A jolt?’

  ‘Yes, that’s how he put it.’

  ‘And it hasn’t been established what Gassel was doing there? Whether he was waiting to meet somebody in, or something like that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know what he’d been doing earlier in the evening? Before he fell onto the tracks, that is?’

  Moreno shook her head.

&
nbsp; ‘No. It seems he was running a confirmation class until six o’clock. Out at Leimaar. Then he presumably went home. He lived in Maagerweg in the town centre. He should have been home by about half past six, but that’s only a guess. He fell under the train at 22.46, but what he’d been doing before that we have no idea.’

  ‘Had he bought a ticket?’

  ‘No. Not at the station, in any case. And he didn’t have one on him.’

  ‘So you don’t know why he was at the station at all? Unless of course he’d gone there to jump under a train . . .’

  ‘No. As I said.’

  Van Veeteren looked out of the window and sighed.

  ‘And you haven’t made much of an effort to find out, either?’

  ‘No,’ said Moreno. ‘Presumably he was at home all evening, but who knows? We have other things to do to keep us busy, you know.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Anyway, I suspect this is about as far as we’re going to get. Thank you for coming to listen to my high-flown rhetoric. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question before we pack up?’

  ‘Please do,’ said Moreno.

  ‘You are probably the most beautiful copper I’ve ever seen. I’m old enough to dare to say that. Haven’t you got married yet?’

  He watched her blush, and noted that she waited until it had passed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘No, not yet. I keep myself young by not doing so.’

  ‘How old are you, in fact?’

  ‘Old enough to have the sense to say thank you for a compliment,’ said Inspector Moreno.

  The vicar of Leimaar parish was Franz Brunner, and he received Van Veeteren at his vicarage. It was the oldest building in the area, he claimed – a low, handsome, wooden building from the early nineteenth century with wings covered in ivy, Virginia creeper and rambler roses gleaming in the sudden autumn sunshine.

  Van Veeteren enquired tactfully if the church itself wasn’t a little older, but Brunner explained that it had burnt to the ground at the end of the nineteenth century, and the new one wasn’t consecrated until 1908.