by Håkan Nesser
‘Somebody on the line? That’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m absolutely certain that I heard a sneeze. You have another woman with you in the car, don’t you?’
‘I swear I don’t,’ said Traut.
‘Huh, tell that to the marines,’ said his wife. ‘But it’s what you don’t tell the marines that I’m interested in. What’s her name? Is it somebody I know, or have you just picked her up?’
Traut tried to hit on a counter-move, but his mind was pretty sluggish today and nothing plausible occurred to him.
‘It’s not that vulgar little hussy fröken Klingerweijk, is it?’ yelled his wife as loudly as she could, to make sure she could be heard clearly in the car. Traut glanced at his passenger, and could see she had heard what was said.
Bugger it, he thought. Death to the inventor of the mobile phone.
‘I can assure you,’ he assured her. ‘I’m as much alone in the car as . . . as a herring in a church.’
‘A herring in a church? What are you raving on about? There aren’t any herrings in a church. Are you not even sober?’
‘Of course I’m sober. You know I’m always very careful about what I drink when I’m travelling on business. And if there were a herring in a church, it would be feeling pretty lonely, wouldn’t it? Can I get to the point now, or are you going to go on and on, accusing me of God knows what?’
That was quite a clever ploy, and the receiver was silent for a few seconds. But it was not a good silence, he could hear quite clearly that she didn’t believe him. And in the corner of his eye he could see that Betty Klingerweijk was glaring at him, and seemed to be preparing to sneeze again. Out of sheer cussedness.
‘What point?’ asked his wife.
‘Your barmy sister, of course. What’s her new address – you said they’d just moved. I’ll be in Maardam in five minutes.’
That was enough to shift the focus of the conversation – for the time being, at least. His sister-in-law was in fact the reason he had made the call, and doing so was bound to portray him in a more favourable light. His wife had gone on and on about how he really must call in and check on how she was, seeing as he was passing though Maardam in any case. Her sister hadn’t answered the phone for over a month, and something must have happened to her. That was as clear as day, and blood is thicker than daylight.
They had discussed the matter at considerable length on the Thursday morning before he had set off, but he hadn’t actually promised to call on her sister. Not as far as he could recall, at least. So the fact that he was ringing her now and offering to do so must surely be seen as a reasonable and humane thing to do. He was prepared to put himself out and call on her lunatic sister in her flat in order to make sure she was okay – wasn’t that proof of how highly he valued his wife and their married life together?
He didn’t say any of this outright, but he felt he could interpret his wife’s soft humming – presumably while she was looking through the address book – along those lines. At least she was no longer harping on about that damned sneeze.
‘Moerckstraat,’ she said in the end. ‘Moerckstraat 16. God only knows where that is, but no doubt you can ask somebody. And make sure you take whatever steps are necessary if she doesn’t answer the door.’
Necessary steps? thought Traut. What the hell might they be?
It took over half an hour to find Moerckstraat, which was in an unusually grim 1970s district on the northern side of the Maar, and Betty Klingerweijk was already moaning about the delay.
‘You promised we’d be home before ten,’ she said. ‘We’ll never make that now.’
‘Promised and promised,’ said Egon Traut. ‘But it’s great if we can be together a bit longer.’
‘Huh,’ said Klingerweijk, and he was not at all sure how he should interpret that.
He switched off the engine and stepped out into the rain. Turned up the collar of his jacket and ran ten metres up a little asphalt ramp. That was about as far as Traut was able to run – especially if it was uphill – and he stopped to get his breath back under a roof overhang that ran all the way along the row of houses. He found the name Kammerle on a glass-covered nameplate, barely legible under all the graffiti, and worked out that the flat must be on the first floor.
He couldn’t find a lift, so he walked up the stairs.
The Kammerle hovel – it really was a hovel – overlooked the courtyard. Traut found it difficult to imagine how people could live like this. It was somehow inhuman. He could see right into the flat through a narrow window, presumably a kitchen ditto – or rather, would have been able to if there had been a light on. But there wasn’t. All he could see in fact was his own reflection, which more or less filled the whole window, at least in width.
He rang the bell. There was no humming nor ringing sound, so he assumed the bell was broken. He belted hard on the door several times with his fist, and waited. No response. He tried knocking on the window several times as well, but there was no sign of life inside.
Bugger, he thought. There’s nobody in, that’s obvious. What shall I do now?
Necessary steps, Barbara had gone on about.
He looked around and thought. Most of the tenants seemed to be at home on this miserable November evening. There was a light in almost every window. Perhaps he could ask a neighbour? Or try to contact some kind of caretaker – there must surely be a caretaker in a place like this?
And Betty was sitting in the car, growing more annoyed for every minute that passed.
And Barbara had heard her sneezing in his mobile. Damn and blast, he thought. I’d rather be sitting with a beer somewhere in the sun, a long way away from here.
He looked up at the blue-grey sky and decided that just now, this very moment, these very hours of his life were something he could happily have done without.
And he was a little surprised to realize that this was by no means a new thought.
When he lowered his gaze again, he saw that a door a few metres further along the corridor formed by the roof overhang had opened, and a woman’s head was poking out, looking at him. A short, dark-skinned immigrant woman. Kurdish or Iranian, perhaps: but he was not all that well up on foreign cultures and so she might well have been from some other country.
‘You looking for Kammerle?’ the woman asked, with barely a trace of a foreign accent. She must have been living here for several years, Traut thought.
‘Yes. They don’t seem to be in.’
‘There is something that is not good with them in there.’
‘Not good? What do you mean?’
She opened the door, wrapped the patterned shawl more tightly around her head and shoulders, and came out to him. She was small and dumpy, and moved awkwardly; but her eyes were large and expressive. It was not difficult to see that she was genuinely worried.
‘I worry for them,’ she said. ‘Something is not right, I haven’t seen the mum, not the girl, none of them for a whole month.’
‘Perhaps they are away on holiday? Or have moved?’
‘Not moved, that can’t be so. You notice when somebody moves, and I’m at home for all of every day. They had washing in the machines as well.’
‘Washing?’ wondered Traut, who had little idea about communal laundry facilities in blocks of flats.
‘Yes, a month ago. Fru Kammerle left two machines full with washed clothes without taking care of them. I have hung and dried, we have them in carrier bags in our flat, but something must have happened. Why would anybody leave fine clothes in that way?’
Traut had no answer to that, and began rummaging in his pockets for a cigarette.
‘Who are you, by the way?’
‘Ah, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot to introduce myself. Egon Traut.’ He held out his hand, and the woman shook it with a firm, warm grip. ‘I’m married to a sister of Martina Kammerle. We have also begun to wonder, as she hasn’t answered the telephone for . . . yes, as you say, for a whole month.’
She let go
of his hand and shook her head anxiously.
‘My name’s Violeta Paraskevi,’ she said. ‘I don’t know your relative at all, we just say hello, as you do in the country. But we never meet, nor do my girl and her girl. It’s sad and I’m so worried that something must happen to them.’
Traut thought for a moment.
‘Do you know if somebody has a key to their flat?’ he asked. ‘A caretaker, or somebody like that?’
Violeta Paraskevi nodded energetically.
‘Herr Klimkowski,’ she said. ‘He’s the landlord, I have his telephone number. I have told him an earlier time, but he just says we shouldn’t interfere and wait some more time. I say to him that he’s wrong, but he doesn’t want to listen to a fat little woman from another country with a hijab and lots of oddities. He is one of those who . . . you know, who don’t like us. Who thinks we should go home and be followed and killed instead of living here and having it good . . .’
‘I see,’ said Traut. ‘Anyway, if you give me the number, I’ll give him a ring.’
‘Good. Come in and ring from me.’
Traut tapped his jacket pocket, but realized that he’d left his mobile in the car with Betty. He followed the woman into her flat.
It was another half an hour before herr Klimkowski appeared in Moerckstraat. He was a small, sturdy man of about sixty with a limp in his right leg, and he made no secret of what he thought about being dragged out on a pointless exercise on a rainy Sunday evening in November.
Betty Klingersweijk wasn’t in a much better mood, despite the fact that Traut had been to the pizzeria on the corner and bought her a beer and pizza with chips.
Women, he thought, after sitting in the car for over a quarter of an hour, trying to entertain her with a little small talk. I simply don’t understand you. I’ll be damned if I do.
‘Well, here I bloody well am,’ said Klimkowski. ‘People think I’m a fucking priest, on call 24/7.’
‘I do apologize,’ said Traut. ‘I don’t think that at all, believe me. It’s just that we happen to be passing through Maardam and we’re a bit worried about my sister-in-law. Obviously I shall pay you for your trouble.’
‘Huh,’ said Klimkowski, rattling his bunch of keys. ‘Keep your money. Now, let’s see . . . 16D, Kammerle, is that right?’
Traut nodded and they climbed the stairs once again. Violeta Paraskevi met them on the landing and pointed to the door in question with an exaggerated gesture typical of somebody from the south.
‘I know, I know,’ muttered Klimkowski. ‘Get out of the way.’
He fitted the key in the lock and opened the door.
‘You’ll have to sign a form as well,’ he said, turning to Traut. ‘It has to be a relative or the police for me to be authorized to open the door. I don’t want to find myself in the shit if I can avoid it.’
‘Of course,’ said Traut. ‘So, let’s go in and see what there is to see.’
It took them less than half a minute to find the body, and it was above all the smell that guided them. Martina Kammerle’s rotting corpse was packed into two black rubbish bags under her own bed. One bag was pulled down from the top, the other pulled up from the bottom. When Klimkowski pulled out the corpse and exposed the upper part, Egon Traut realized that the last thing one ought to do before discovering a dead body is to drink beer and eat a pizza.
When he had finished throwing up, he also realized – with a vague trace of gratitude amidst all the gloom – that the sneeze picked up by his mobile phone was not going to have as much significance for the future of his marriage as he had been fearing it would for the last few hours.
Every cloud has a silver lining, he thought, with a slight trace of guilt.
13
It was Detective Inspectors Jung and Rooth who were delegated to supervise the first few hours at Moerckstraat 16, and neither of them would write anything about the experience in their diaries.
Or at least, wouldn’t have done even if they had kept a diary. It was just too depressing. Too grim, too macabre. They wandered about in the cramped little flat, kept their eyes skinned for anything of importance worth noting down, tried to keep out of the way of the scene-of-crime team – and to breathe with their mouths wide open in order to avoid the smell.
‘What a lot of bloody crap,’ said Rooth. ‘I find it hard to cope with this sort of thing.’
‘You get paid to cope with this sort of thing,’ said Jung.
It was a few minutes after half past nine before Chief Inspector Reinhart turned up, just in time to hear a preliminary assessment from the medical team and an even more preliminary assessment from the technical specialists.
Martina Kammerle – assuming it really was her in the rubbish bags under the bed (there was no obvious reason to suspect that it might be somebody else, but because of the advanced state of decomposition of the body and his own indisposition at the time, Egon Traut had been unable to make a definitive identification) – had apparently died quite a long time ago. At least three weeks, it seemed, but in order to make a more precise judgement it was necessary to analyse more data, such as textile tests, blood status, average daily temperatures in the flat, and so on.
It was not possible to establish the cause of death at this early stage, but because it seemed likely that the woman hadn’t died of natural causes in two plastic sacks under her bed, Jung at least concluded that, as it was stated officially, she had been killed by a person or several persons unknown.
And there was nothing to suggest that anybody had been in the flat for at least three or four weeks. Whether or not Martina Kammerle had managed to collect fragments of her murderer’s skin under her fingernails, or possibly even drawn his blood – and hence, with a large dose of luck, enabled a DNA analysis – remained to be seen, after the National Laboratories for Forensic Chemistry and Forensic Medicine had played their part. In any case, no obvious clues had been discovered; but needless to say the flat would be cordoned off for as long as it was considered necessary, so that high-ranking detective officers would have the right to wander around and search for clues – always assuming that it was concluded that there was anything worth searching for.
That was more or less the attitude behind the statement issued by Inspector le Houde, who was in charge of the scene-of-crime group – and who had been summoned from a cup match in the Richter Stadium ten minutes before half time, and two minutes before the home side equalized – a goal that, according to all sensible spectators, had been dream-like, and executed by a recently bought Dane: the ovation had been echoing inside le Houde’s head ever since he was about to enter the patrol car.
‘Ah well, we’ll have to wait and see,’ said Reinhart. ‘I’m sorry you missed the match. Personally I couldn’t care less about football, but we won five–two, I gather. Not a bad performance,’
‘Shut up,’ said le Houde.
Reinhart spent five minutes inspecting the room and the flat. Then he decided to return to the police station together with Egon Traut, but he instructed Jung and Rooth to stay at the scene and begin interviewing the neighbours.
‘It’s a quarter to ten,’ Rooth pointed out.
‘Keep going until twelve,’ said Reinhart. ‘Nobody’s going to bed after this palaver. I’ll send you some back-up as soon as I find anybody,’
‘All right,’ said Rooth. ‘We’ll start by a trip to the pizzeria – it’s just round the corner. No point in working on an empty stomach, you just don’t function properly.’
Reinhart glared at him, then left with Traut. Jung declared that in the circumstances, he wasn’t all that hungry, and instead went to the neighbouring flat to talk to the woman from Yugoslavia who he had already exchanged a few words with.
And who seemed to have some idea of who the victim really was.
But only a bit of an idea. If this Kammerle woman had been lying here dead for a month or more, the idea of good neighbours couldn’t very well have been all that effective.
Thought Inspec
tor Jung, as he dug out a pen and some paper.
‘What’s been going on?’ asked Münster, sitting down opposite Reinhart.
Reinhart pulled a face and placed his feet conveniently on a bookshelf.
‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ he said. ‘Murder. A woman who seems to be called Martina Kammerle. Lived in Moerckstraat. She was strangled, and has been lying dead under her bed for about a month.’
‘Under?’ said Münster.
‘Yes, under,’ said Reinhart. ‘The murderer had tucked her into a couple of rubbish sacks so that she didn’t have to feel too cold. Very thoughtful of him. It’s a right bugger. As usual.’
‘As usual,’ said Münster. ‘Was she raped as well?’
‘Possibly,’ said Reinhart. ‘But she was wearing a few clothes, so she might have escaped that. Knickers and a nightdress . . . Or the remains of those garments, to be more precise. If a body has been lying at room temperature for a month or so, certain chemical processes take place – I presume I don’t need to go on about that.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Intendent Münster with a sigh. ‘You don’t need to. Who is she?’
Reinhart sat up straight and started scraping out his pipe.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but we have a bloke here who might know. His name is Traut – he was the one who found her. He’s a relative, it seems. Runs a business of his own. To be honest he’s not exactly my type – but being honest doesn’t really help us . . .’
‘Have you interrogated him?’
‘Not yet. I thought there ought to be two of us – that’s why I rang you.’
Münster nodded.
‘Anything else before we get going?’
‘Not as far as I know at this stage,’ said Reinhart. ‘Shall we have a go at him? I think he’s been waiting for long enough now.’
‘It’s eleven o’clock now,’ said Münster. ‘High time we got started if we’re going to get any beauty sleep tonight.’
‘You’re right,’ said Reinhart, standing up. ‘There’s a time for everything. Just hang on a minute – I must have some tobacco handy: I reckon I can allow myself a bit of pleasure.’
