The Stranglers Honeymoon

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Yes, thank you very much,’ said Jung. ‘I had no idea there were so many people indulging in . . . in this kind of activity.’

  ‘Huh,’ muttered the woman. ‘There’s no end of lonely people around.’

  That certainly seems to be the case, thought Jung as he settled down in his car again. Paradoxically enough, that seemed to be the lowest common denominator among people. Loneliness.

  Why on earth did I come here at all? he asked himself. Anna Kristeva had said they had thrown away the response from Amos Brugger – as they had done with all the other letters hoping to exploit the favours on offer from her and Ester Peerenkaas. He would never have even dreamt that the newspaper would retain a copy.

  Besides, he had been acting on his own initiative. Reinhart hadn’t told him to follow it up – although he might well have given it his blessing.

  That morning’s meeting had convinced him that now was the time to act on one’s own initiative. And to chase after straws.

  After a while Jung realized he was sitting in his car with his hands on the steering wheel, staring out through the windscreen at the rain. Sitting there and thinking about that Kerran-Brugger character.

  He probably doesn’t have a wide circle of friends either, he thought, thinking back to his conversation in the newspaper office. Perhaps he’s the most lonely bastard of them all. Yes, that’s highly likely to be the case.

  It was hardly an earth-shattering thought. Murderers were seldom good mixers.

  He realized he was feeling cold. Dawn had passed over into dusk. He checked his watch, started the car, and drove off to collect Maureen from work.

  35

  Münster switched off the engine, but left the music on. Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, live from the Village Vanguard in the early 1950s.

  He had been given the CD by Reinhart. You’ll think better if you have a sax in your ear, he had said.

  Perhaps Reinhart was right. The atmosphere inside the car wasn’t that of the usual barren desert, and there was a melancholy sharpness in the tone that could well help to banish the sludge polluting his brain.

  He was parked in Moerckstraat. It was half past four in the afternoon, rain was drizzling down and a dirty, dusky gloom enveloped the housing estate in a sort of compassionate shroud. You didn’t need to see it.

  But maybe it wasn’t really that bad, Münster thought. No worse than a lot of other places, in any case. The whole town looked pretty awful at this time of year. The bluish-greyness and the frosty mists. The rain and the persistent winds blowing in from the sea . . . No, there was very little chance of Maardam ever being allocated the Winter Olympic Games, that was for sure.

  He contemplated the buildings with their frequent patches of damp. Most windows were still dark. Presumably people haven’t come home from work yet, Münster thought. Or haven’t noticed that it’s getting dark.

  Or haven’t had the strength to shake off their lethargy and switch the lights on, perhaps. There must be a high proportion of unemployed and people on the sick list in a housing estate like this one. The three windows of the flat where Martina and Monica Kammerle had lived were all dark. Münster knew that the furniture and household goods were in store, but that no new tenants had moved in. He wondered why. Did people still believe that it was dangerous to live in a building where somebody had recently been murdered? Maybe. People were more superstitious than one might think.

  But he suspected that it was difficult to let flats here irrespective of that. Stopeka, as the district was called, was one of the least attractive areas of Maardam as a whole, and the developers had probably over-reached themselves. Strict curbs had been placed on immigration in recent years, so it was not easy to find natural tenants for a 1970s ghetto, and not surprising that there were empty flats here and there.

  He sighed. Do something! Reinhart had instructed him. Anything at all. Try to make some sense of this damned case – I’m making as much progress as an ice skater in a paddy field.

  Yes, they really were stuck. Münster had no objections to Reinhart’s analysis. New cases came and went at the police station, but with regard to the murders of the priest and the two women in Moerckstraat, over four months had now passed with barely a glimpse of a clue of any kind. Apart from that business of the names. Benjamin Kerran and Amos Brugger. Names the murderer himself had let slip, possibly in order to tease the authorities – it was easy to imagine him grinning sardonically somewhere in the background. A long way away, at the far end of a dark cul-de-sac.

  The link with the disappearance of Ester Peerenkaas was far from one hundred per cent established, of course, but Münster believed it. As did all the others, as far as he could judge. It made sense. There was a pattern. Even if the similarities were shadowy rather than clear-cut as yet, it was easy to imagine the same culprit behind the Peerenkaas murder as behind the two other murders – and also in the Kortsmaa case in Wallburg last summer.

  But it was only a suspicion, no more than that. Not the slightest trace of anything more concrete. After all this time, and all these efforts . . . No, it was not difficult to understand Reinhart’s feelings of impotence. Not at all. They wanted to believe in something, and so they believed in a link. Perhaps there was no more substance to it than that? Münster sighed, and glared at the black windows.

  Behind them, Kerran-Brugger had murdered Martina Kammerle. Possibly her daughter as well, although that murder was more likely to have taken place somewhere else. It seemed highly implausible that he would have removed the body of one of his victims but left the other one where it was. He hadn’t been in a hurry. He’d had all the time in the world, it seemed, especially when you thought of how long he must have spent wiping away all the fingerprints.

  He must have visited that flat several times even before the murders. How often?

  Nobody knew. Probably not all that often, Münster thought. None of the neighbours had noticed him. Fru Paraskevi thought she had heard a voice, that was all.

  So quite sporadically, in all probability, and for quite a short period of time. About a month at most? A few weeks?

  The most likely background was an affair with Martina Kammerle. Possibly even the only explanation. But why had he felt compelled to kill her?

  Compelled? Münster thought. Crap. Lunatics feel compelled to do anything that clicks inside their sick minds.

  What about the daughter? How did she fit into the picture? Had she witnessed the murder of her mother, or was simply knowing who he was a sufficient reason? Was it just too dangerous for him to have a living witness still around? Had she played some additional role? If so, what? . . .

  Stop it now! Münster told his own thoughts. That’s quite enough! I’m making it sound as if he had legitimate reasons for killing Martina Kammerle, but not Monica. My engine’s running in neutral, they are the same questions as we were asking in November, the same damned ice skating in a paddy field that is keeping Reinhart busy, the same bloody . . .

  He turned up the volume of the music in order to increase the stimulus. Dexter Gordon’s sax was screaming and wailing now. Harsh, alienating screams in a tone that wouldn’t have been out of place in a jet engine.

  What about the names, though? he thought. Kerran and Brugger. Why did the murderer think it was necessary to flaunt these sinister literary characters? What was the point?

  He leaned the seat back as far as it would go. Closed his eyes and spent a few minutes trying to convince himself that there might be a new way of approaching the problem – something they hadn’t thought about. A clue they had missed, a possibility they hadn’t tested.

  But he found nothing. Because there wasn’t anything, he concluded. We have done all that we could. The fact that we haven’t got anywhere is because it’s all so irrational. The reasons and motives originate in the same perversions that tell him he must kill. That is the root of all his evil – his accursed strangler-brain: we shan’t be able to understand why he does what he does until we find him. An
d perhaps not even then.

  But he’s a well-read person, that’s beyond all doubt. An academic, perhaps. Those who have studied at university are always the worst, Reinhart had declared the other day. The more they use their brains, the more likely it is that they’ll go off the rails.

  Münster found it hard to go along with such a depressing claim . . . It implied consequences that were too absurd to contemplate, and the officer in charge of the investigation had been very tired these last few days.

  He started thinking about loneliness instead.

  The loneliness that everybody experienced, but that of Martina and Monica Kammerle in particular. They must have felt very isolated, incredibly so. They had lived there behind those dark windows, and their world didn’t seem to have extended all that far beyond the cramped three-roomed flat. They had had each other, presumably – a sick mother and her isolated daughter. No social contacts – apart from a man who killed them both when he thought the time was ripe . . . What a depressing state of affairs: but that is evidently how things were. Exactly like that. Some people’s lot is allocated in so miserly a fashion, Münster thought. They never have a chance to influence the course of their lives.

  Not the slightest chance. Monica Kammerle lived to the age of sixteen. Sixteen! His own son Bart would reach that age two years from now.

  That thought crawled around in his brain like a freezing cold worm, and he shuddered uncontrollably. What kind of a monster would wipe out a sixteen-year-old girl? Take away her life? Kill her, saw off her legs and bury her among the dunes at the edge of the sea?

  Saw off her legs!

  He felt fury welling up inside him – a fury that was like an old acquaintance he could never get rid of. A hopeless and desperate relation that constantly reared its ugly head and held him captive by means of its inescapable blood relationship. Anger and impotence.

  Was there really any logic behind actions like this? Patterns that could be discovered?

  Oh yes. He knew that was entirely possible. If only one could overcome one’s disgust, suppress one’s personal feelings of impotence and fling wide the gates – then, perhaps, it might be possible to detect indications.

  But what? he thought. What am I looking for? The portrait of a murderer? Would it be possible to establish that at this stage? Of course not! We don’t know a thing, for Christ’s sake.

  He switched off the music. It was a piano solo now. Did there always have to be a piano solo in a performance of jazz music? he wondered. That wasn’t something it was appropriate to think about just now, it was somehow too lightweight. Like a thin, blue cloud of smoke. He made a mental note to ask Reinhart about that. If there were CDs with exclusively woodwind. Or woodwind, bass and percussion, perhaps?

  Intendent Münster shook his head. Took one final look at the unlit and meaningless windows, and started the engine.

  He drove slowly through the narrow streets of Stopeka. It was high time: his badminton match with the Chief Inspector was due to begin at half past five.

  Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno had eaten a lot of excellent dinners in Mikael Bau’s kitchen, but his bouillabaisse took the biscuit.

  ‘It comes down to the stock,’ he said when they had finished eating. ‘All fish soups taste of salt, of course: but there is a qualitative aspect to the salt you put in the stock, and not merely a quantitative aspect as most people seem to think.’

  ‘Really?’ said Moreno.

  ‘Poor quality stock kills lots of other tastes, whereas a good quality stock can highlight them instead . . . The same applies to that little drop of lemon juice . . . Or the dash of angostura . . . Or that half-drop of tabasco.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Moreno lay back in her chair, feeling well satisfied. ‘And how exactly did you make the stock in this evening’s meal? To tell you the truth, it’s one of the best I’ve ever eaten.’

  Mikael Bau didn’t reply. He merely sat there, looking at her with his warm blue eyes. Then he cleared his throat and looked up at the ceiling instead.

  ‘The basis is lobster shell, of course. But if you marry me, I’ll give you the whole recipe.’

  ‘All right,’ said Moreno.

  When she came back up to her own flat she didn’t switch on the light. Instead she dragged the armchair forward so that it was facing the window. She flopped down into it and gazed out at the violet-blue sky.

  Am I out of my mind? she wondered. He actually proposed, and I actually said yes.

  The motive was a recipe for the right kind of stock in a fish soup. Lobster shell?

  Mikael Bau had proposed to her several times before. Not always directly. But she had never said yes.

  She had now, though. She was going to marry him. That was what was expected of you if you said yes in a situation like that.

  Oh my God, she thought. I didn’t even think about it.

  She could feel the butterflies in her stomach, and she was close to tears. Or to bursting out laughing. Or something in between. But she could feel tears on her cheeks – on the right one, at least.

  When we have children, she thought, they are bound to ask how it came about that we decided to get married. And I shall have to tell them that the trump card their dad played was a fish soup.

  She smiled up at the dark sky, and suddenly recalled one of the quotations Van Veeteren used to come out with.

  Life is not a walk over an open field.

  How very true.

  Before going to bed she listened to her answering machine. There was only one message, and it was from Inspector Baasteuwel in Wallburg.

  Could she please ring him before midnight. Yes, it was important.

  She looked at the clock. Five to twelve. She dialled his number.

  He answered after a mere second.

  ‘Ewa Moreno,’ she said. ‘You wanted to tell me something. I’m sorry it’s so late, but you said it would be okay until midnight.’

  ‘No problem’ said Baasteuwel. ‘Or rather, there is a problem, that’s why I rang.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Moreno.

  ‘The old man’s had a heart attack, we’ll have to postpone it.’

  ‘I beg your pardon? Who’s had a heart attack?’

  ‘My dad. His third, they don’t think he’ll survive it, so I have to sit up with him.’

  ‘Your dad?’

  ‘Yes. He’s eighty-nine, I don’t think he’s aiming to get to ninety. But I’ll have to sit up tonight with him, and maybe for a few more days and nights. So I’m afraid we shall have to put off that discussion about the strangler.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Moreno. ‘Obviously you must be with him. The case is only marking time anyway. Do you have any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘I’m afraid not. And my mum died ten years ago, so . . . Well, you know how it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Moreno, thinking at the same time that in fact she didn’t, of course. Sitting at a parent’s deathbed must surely be one of those experiences you couldn’t possibly understand properly unless you had actually done it yourself. She tried to think of something appropriate to say, but words seemed to be as distant as death itself.

  ‘I’ll phone you in due course,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘Take care.’

  ‘And you,’ said Moreno. ‘Is there . . . Is there anything I can do for you?’

  Baasteuwel laughed drily and briefly.

  ‘No, dammit,’ he said. ‘It feels very strange, I must admit. I can’t really get my mind round it, but I’ve never believed that business of eternal life. Not even for my old man. Sleep well, my lovely.’

  ‘Thank you. The same to you.’

  ‘No chance of that.’

  ‘Oh no, of course not,’ said Moreno.

  As soon as she had replaced the receiver she started thinking about her own parents’ state of health.

  And about her brother.

  And Maud.

  Her spirits fell like a stone, and suddenly she recalled another one of those mottoes she�
��d had on her wall as a teenager:

  If you don’t dare to trust in your love,

  you must trust your loneliness.

  Or had it said your freedom, in fact? Or your strength? She couldn’t remember.

  Then it occurred to her that she wouldn’t now need to get up at six the next morning in order to drive to Wallburg, and she picked up the receiver again.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Please come up to me. If we’re going to go along that path anyway, I mean . . .’

  ‘Ten seconds,’ said Mikael Bau. ‘You can start counting now.’

  36

  He rubbed his aching throat as he read through the Wanted notice in the morning paper.

  Studied the photograph on the front page, and decided that it did her more than justice. The photograph must have been taken quite a long time ago, maybe even ten years ago, he thought. The same eyes, the same self-assured smile but more vital. More naive, healthier. He wondered what had happened to her since the photograph was taken – and what it would have been like to meet her then, instead of that December evening when she was on the verge of middle age.

  Ten years?

  That was an aeon. Such an enormous expanse of time that his mind couldn’t cope with it. Nor could he convince himself that he had been the same person in 1991 as he was now.

  There was no continuity. No calm river representing his own existence that could be followed from the clear, sparkling spring of his childhood and over the flat landscape of his life towards the estuary where it flowed into the sea in the autumn of his days. As he had been thinking only the other evening as he sat reading Auden . . . W. H. Auden, one of his favourites – but then, he had several. It was only in poetry that he could rediscover himself and the spirit of his earlier life. Nowadays.

  A shift had taken place, and pointlessness – his own and that of everybody else – had extended its sterile desert to include all the dried-out furrows and streams – his own and those of everybody else: he had tried to write poems about precisely that, but given up. Emptiness didn’t need any words. Any fuss.