The Stranglers Honeymoon

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Really?’ said Moreno. ‘How come?’

  Edwina shrugged. Betty blew out a cloud of smoke and pulled a face.

  ‘She’s odd,’ she said. ‘Sort of superior. Always wants to do things that nobody else does. Nobody misses her, in fact.’

  ‘Does she have any friends in your class? Anybody who knows her a bit better than you seem to do?’

  The girls shook their black heads.

  ‘No, Monica doesn’t have any friends. She sort of doesn’t want to have any. It was like that in those other classes, and it’s the same now. Or was, if she really has transferred . . .’

  ‘I see,’ said Moreno. ‘Have you seen her at all since she changed schools?’

  ‘No,’ said Edwina. ‘I haven’t seen a trace of her.’

  ‘No,’ said Betty, ‘me neither.’

  ‘But surely she must have had some friends in your old class?’ said Moreno. ‘Surely everybody has a friend or two? I need to talk to somebody who knows a bit about her.’

  The girls sat there in silence, thinking. Exchanging doubtful glances and stubbing out their cigarettes.

  ‘I can’t think of anybody,’ said Betty. ‘Can you?’

  Edwina shook her head.

  ‘No, she was very much a loner. Some people are like that, and Monica was one of them. She did mix a bit with Federica Mannen, but Federica moved away when we were in class nine.’

  Moreno made a note of the name and asked where the girl had moved to, but neither Edwina nor Betty could remember.

  ‘Why did Monica change schools?’ she asked instead.

  ‘Huh,’ said Betty. ‘I suppose she didn’t like it here. Why don’t you ask her?’

  Moreno didn’t respond.

  ‘Have you met her mother at all?’

  Judging by their feeble reaction, the news of Martina Kammerle’s death hadn’t yet reached them. They shook their heads again, and Edwina said they had never seen any sign of either of Monica Kammerle’s parents. But they had heard that her mother was a bit of a weirdo. A lot of a weirdo, in fact. She hadn’t even turned up to some parents’ meetings before a school trip when they were in class nine – but Betty thought that maybe wasn’t so odd as Monica didn’t take part in the trip anyway.

  ‘Where did you go to?’ wondered Moreno.

  The girls explained that they had gone to London, and that it was fab. All the class had been there apart from Monica and a fat slob called Dimitri.

  ‘A really, really fat slob,’ agreed Betty, lighting another cigarette.

  Moreno had a sudden urge to snatch the cigarette out of her excessively made-up mouth, squash it in the ashtray – the cigarette, that is, not her mouth – and tell her and her friend to go to hell. Or at least to go out jogging.

  Or to eat an apple. No, she thought, if I really passed through a phase like this I must have suppressed all memory of it.

  And rightly so. Some things need burying.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Edwina. ‘Has something happened to her?’

  ‘I can’t go into that,’ said Moreno again. ‘But if you come across anybody who’s seen Monica recently, please give me a ring. Ask among your classmates if you have time.’

  She took out a couple of business cards and gave them one each. The girls took them, and suddenly their heavily made-up faces took on a more serious, unforced expression.

  As if a child were peeping out from behind all the makeup, Moreno thought. She guessed that it was the italicized words on the cards that had brought about the change: Detective Inspector Moreno.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Betty. ‘We’ll . . . we’ll ask around. Is it . . . I mean, is it serious? What’s—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you any details,’ said Moreno for the third time. ‘Thank you very much for speaking to me. I might be in touch again before long.’

  ‘Great,’ said Edwina Boekman.

  Inspector Moreno stood up and left the Café Lamprecht. Neither of the girls showed any sign of going back to school, and when she came out into the street Moreno caught a glimpse of their black heads through the dirty window, deep in conversation. Enveloped in fresh clouds of smoke from newly lit cigarettes.

  They’ll have cellulite and drooping breasts before they are twenty, she thought, sighing deeply. Serves them right.

  ‘I know what’s the worst aspect of this bloody job of ours,’ said Rooth.

  ‘Really?’ said Jung. ‘Let’s hear it, then.’

  ‘The constant confrontation with life and death,’ said Rooth. ‘It’s so hard to handle that you’re just not able to cope. You either have to be so damned serious and profound and gloomy all the time – and my petty brain’s not really up to that . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Jung. ‘Or?’

  ‘Don’t interrupt,’ said Rooth. ‘Or you have to back off and keep it all at arm’s length. Be cynical, or however you’d like to put it . . . And my big bleeding heart can’t manage that in the long run. Do you understand what I mean?’

  Jung thought for a moment.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right, for once. You’re constantly veering from one extreme to the other. Facing up to Death, or waving two fingers at him. That’s what it’s all about.’

  Rooth scratched his head.

  ‘Very well put, dammit!’ he said. ‘Facing up or two fingers! That’s what I shall call my schizophrenic memoirs. No wonder we grow prematurely old. If only we could look after rabbits instead, or something of that sort.’

  ‘That will come in the next life,’ Jung assured him. ‘Anyway, shall we go in and get going?’

  ‘Let’s do that,’ said Rooth. He put the key into the lock and turned it. ‘The murderer’s name is what we’re after!’

  They entered Martina Kammerle’s flat. There was a sort of grey light inside, but nevertheless Jung began by walking from room to room and switching on every light he could find.

  Rooth put a packet of sandwiches and two bottles of mineral water on the kitchen table, and looked around.

  ‘An interesting job, this,’ he said. ‘Believe it or not.’

  It was Rooth himself who had proposed it, so Jung refrained from comment. Besides, he was inclined to agree: if the person who had put his hands round Martina Kammerle’s neck just over a month ago and squeezed tightly – if that person was known to his victim, no matter how slightly, was Rooth’s point – then the probability was that she had written down his name somewhere.

  If not in blood on the wall under the bed where her body was discovered, then in some other place. In an address book, perhaps. A note pad. On a scrap of paper . . . Anywhere at all. There were indications that the killer had cleaned up the flat and removed any traces of his presence: but he had been most concerned about fingerprints, and surely he couldn’t have checked absolutely everything?

  There was nothing to suggest that Martina Kammerle or her missing daughter had had a wide circle of friends – on the contrary. If for instance they were to find fifty names – Rooth had maintained – there was a good chance that one of them would be the person they were looking for. The murderer.

  To be honest, this was a routine measure that was carried out in eleven out of ten investigations: but with a bit of luck the chances of finding a vital clue were greater in this case than usual. The investigation team had been in agreement on that point.

  So, it was time for Inspectors Rooth and Jung to get going. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and they had promised Reinhart to report by five in the afternoon.

  Or to be pedantic, that was when Reinhart had said he expected them to report.

  ‘I’ll take the mother’s room, and you take the daughter’s,’ said Rooth. ‘To start with, at least. We’ll meet in the kitchen two hours from now over a sandwich.’

  ‘Two hours?’ wondered Jung. ‘Can you really last as long as that without food?’

  ‘Character,’ said Rooth. ‘It’s all a question of character and strength of mind. I’ll
explain it to you in more detail some other time.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Jung, opening the door to Monica Kammerle’s teenage room.

  17

  A picture of the murdered Martina Kammerle appeared in the three most important Maardam newspapers on Tuesday – the Telegraaf, the Allgemejne and the Neuwe Blatt – and by four o’clock, in response to the police’s appeal for tips and assistance, three people had telephoned the switchboard and been passed on to Chief Inspector Reinhart in person.

  The first was a social worker by the name of Elena Piirinen. She reported that on and off – mostly off – she had been in contact with Martina Kammerle until about a year ago, when she changed jobs and was given more administrative work. The assistance she had given Martina Kammerle had mainly been in connection with financial matters: Piirinen had helped her to apply for various grants, and also – once or twice – arranged for her to receive regular social care. But she was adamant that she had not had much of an insight into her client’s private life. However, it was horrendous that she had been murdered.

  Reinhart agreed, and wondered if she had any more concrete tips to give him.

  No, she hadn’t, she assured him. She had decided to get in touch because she thought it her duty as a responsible citizen to do so, nothing else. Reinhart thanked her for her laudable public spirit, and said he might be in touch again if developments in the investigation suggested that it might be helpful to do so.

  Number two was a certain fru Dorffkluster, who had lived next door to the Kammerles in Palitzerlaan in Deijkstraa for five years, but unfortunately had even less information to impart than Elena Piirinen. Fru Dorffkluster was eighty-seven years old, and recalled clearly that there were two small, badly brought-up boys in the neighbouring family, and that Martina Kammerle herself had been a very successful television presenter who liked to play golf and ride thoroughbred Arabian horses in her spare time. She presented one of those question-and-answer programmes that everybody watched, and that changed its name more often than a cat scratched itself . . . Or a pig. Some sort of quiz . . .

  Reinhart also thanked this public-spirited citizen, and thought briefly about his own mother who had passed away at this lady’s age, eighty-seven. That was six years ago, and he recalled that whenever he visited her in hospital during her final months she always thought he was her father rather than her son. Which certainly made their conversations somewhat bizarre – but not without interest even so.

  Perhaps that is what ought to happen in one’s twilight years, he thought. A right to populate one’s environment with the people one wanted to be surrounded by, and talk to. So that everything can be cleared up before it is time to pass over to the other side. After all, it was often one’s environment that caused the most distress when one’s memory started dancing around, Reinhart thought as he lit his pipe. Yes indeed. Of course Mum was as mad as a hatter, but she was in no pain.

  The third person who phoned in that day with information about Martina Kammerle was also a woman. Her name was Irene Vargas, she was in her forties, if he was able to judge her voice correctly, and he realized immediately that she had information to impart that justified a face-to-face interview rather than a one-dimensional telephone conversation. As he had seventeen irons in the fire at the time, he contacted Münster and arranged a meeting between him and fröken Vargas in the intendent’s office an hour later. Irene Vargas lived in Gerckstraat, a ten-minute walk from the police station, but needed to sort out a few errands first.

  Nothing could be simpler.

  ‘Please sit down,’ said Münster, gesturing towards the visitor’s chair.

  Irene Vargas thanked him, and sat down. Looked around the room a little anxiously, as if wanting to make sure she wasn’t locked in. Münster had the overall impression that she radiated an aura of anxiety. She was a thin woman of about his own age, with pale skin, pale hair and pale clothes. He guessed that she was afflicted by some chronic illness – fibromyalgia or a mild form of rheumatism, perhaps – but it could just be because he had read an article about hidden suffering in one of Synn’s magazines the other evening.

  In any case, she had not come to talk to him as a patient.

  ‘You phoned us,’ he began. ‘Chief Inspector Reinhart, who you spoke to, is unfortunately busy and out of his office, but no doubt we can get by without him. My name’s Münster.’

  Vargas met his gaze, and nodded somewhat hesitantly.

  ‘Would you like something to drink? I can arrange for tea or coffee, or—’

  ‘No thank you, that’s not necessary.’

  Münster cleared his throat.

  ‘Well, if I understand it rightly, you have some information about Martina Kammerle, who was found dead in her home the other day.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vargas. ‘I knew her slightly.’

  ‘We’d be grateful for anything you can tell us,’ said Münster. ‘We’ve found it hard to find anybody who knew her.’

  ‘Martina was quite a solitary person.’

  ‘We have gathered that.’

  ‘She didn’t know many people. She didn’t really know me either, come to that. We met at the hospital three or four years ago. We attended the same little therapy group, but we haven’t seen much of each other since then . . . We’re not exactly friends, as they say.’

  ‘But you did meet occasionally?’

  ‘Never by arrangement. But we sometimes bumped into each other in town. I’ve never been to her flat, but she did come to my place for tea, three years ago.’

  ‘Did you talk on the phone?’

  ‘Very rarely nowadays. More frequently when we first got to know each other – we used to chat a few times a month then.’

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘In August. That’s why I phoned you. The rest might not be very important – nor this either, perhaps, but . . .’

  ‘In what circumstances did you meet Martina Kammerle in August?’

  Vargas swallowed, and stroked a few strands of her sparse hair behind her ears.

  ‘It was in town. We just bumped into each other, and I mean that literally. It was one evening in the middle of August, the fifteenth or sixteenth I’d guess. I was on the way to the Rialto cinema with a woman friend of mine, and we were a bit late. We hurried round a corner in Rejmer Plejn, and I literally bumped into Martina, who was coming from the other direction.’

  Münster nodded encouragingly.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Vargas shrugged.

  ‘Well, there’s not much more to say, but the policeman I spoke to on the phone evidently thought it was important . . .’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Münster. ‘Then what happened? Did you stop and talk for a while?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Vargas with a somewhat guilty smile, as if she now felt she ought to have done. ‘There were only a few minutes to go before the film started, and . . . Well, to be honest, I didn’t really want to talk to her. Martina seemed to be a bit high, I could see that, and she could go on a bit . . .’

  ‘High?’ said Münster.

  ‘I mean manic, of course. Nothing to do with drugs or anything like that . . . I assume you know she was a manic depressive?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Münster. ‘We are aware of that. So you were with a friend. What about Martina? Was she alone, or was she also with a friend?’

  ‘She was with a man,’ said Vargas.

  The way she pronounced the word ‘man’ made Münster suspect that this was a fact she had struggled for some time to come to terms with. Probably without success.

  ‘A man?’ he said. ‘Did you recognize him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you spoke briefly to them?’

  ‘Not to him. We just spoke about bumping into each other, Martina and I. Laughed a bit and agreed that it was funny. And after ten or fifteen seconds, we continued on our way to the cinema, my friend and I. I’m sorry if you had the impression I had something more imp
ortant to tell you. I tried to explain that to the chief inspector, but he—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Münster encouragingly. ‘You can never tell what is significant and what isn’t as early as this in an investigation. But let’s concentrate on this man . . . Did you have the impression that . . . that they were a couple, as it were? Monica Kammerle and him?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Vargas after a second’s hesitation. ‘But that’s only the impression I got. He might just have been somebody she knew.’

  ‘And she didn’t introduce him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You don’t happen to know if she was having an affair at this time?’

  Vargas shrugged again.

  ‘I have no idea. I hadn’t spoken to her for nearly six months.’

  ‘Do you know anything about other men in her life? After that tragic accident involving her husband, that is.’

  ‘No. Although she did mention once that she’d been with somebody, but we never discussed it. I don’t think she had any steady relationships.’

  ‘But occasional ones?’

  ‘Now and then, yes, that’s possible. I do know she picked up a bloke for a one-night stand once. We were at a restaurant together, and she pulled him. It was rather painful, in fact.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Maybe three years ago . . . Yes, it was while we were still attending that group.’

  ‘I see,’ said Münster. ‘Let’s go back to that collision in August – you weren’t introduced to the man?’

  ‘No,’ said Vargas. ‘As I said, my friend and I rushed off to the cinema.’

  ‘And you’d never seen him before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘I don’t really remember,’ she said. ‘Quite tall, quite powerfully built, I seem to recall. But pretty ordinary at the same time. There was nothing especially remarkable about him, in any case. No, I can’t really describe him.’

  ‘Try,’ Münster urged her.

  ‘Darkish – well, fairly dark. Between forty and fifty, maybe . . .’

  ‘Beard? Glasses?’