The Stranglers Honeymoon

by Håkan Nesser

  Münster sat down on the balustrade, and thought that one over.

  ‘It’s hard to figure out the logic behind his behaviour,’ he said. ‘In many respects he’s as mad as a hatter, but in other ways he seems to be acting more or less normally.’

  That’s not an especially unusual phenomenon,’ said Van Veeteren, lighting a cigarette. ‘We all have a few screws loose, including you and me; but it’s a bit more complicated in the case of deFraan. He’s presumably hyper-intelligent, and if there’s anything we like to use our intelligence for it’s trying to explain away those loose screws. To find motives for our peculiar behaviour and our murky instincts . . . If we didn’t do that we would never be able to put up with ourselves.’

  Münster nodded.

  ‘Yes, I’ve never understood how certain people have the strength to carry on living. Rapists and wife-beaters and child murderers . . . How the hell can they look themselves in the eye the following morning?’

  ‘Defence mechanisms,’ said the Chief Inspector in a weary voice. ‘That applies to you and me as well. We create safety nets over the abyss, and in deFraan’s case he has presumably been forced to devote the whole of his abilities to making things work . . . We’ll have to see if we ever get to the bottom of it all.’

  ‘We’ll also have to see if we ever catch him,’ said Münster. ‘I hope Chief Inspector Yakos can handle this.’

  Van Veeteren shrugged and they started walking back to the harbour.

  ‘I’m sure he can,’ he said. ‘Just as well as we could, in any case.’

  Chief Inspector Yakos looked tired when he came to sit at their table shortly after nine o’clock that night. He beckoned to the waiter, ordered Greek coffee, beer, ouzo and peanuts. Stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but we haven’t managed to catch him.’

  ‘Things sometimes take time,’ said Van Veeteren.

  ‘He hasn’t been at the hotel since this morning. I’ve had a constable posted outside Odysseus all afternoon, and he’d have been bound to see him.’

  ‘What about that scooter?’ wondered Münster.

  Yakos shook his head grimly.

  ‘He hasn’t been back to the rental people with it. He was supposed to return it by nine o’clock, according to the contract – that’s when they close. I’m afraid there’s not much else we can do today. But my man at Odysseus will remain on watch – and if he turns up, we’ll pounce on him immediately, of course.’

  He placed his blood-red mobile on the table, as if to stress that the network was on red alert.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I assume you’ve instructed your constable not to try to tackle him on his own? We’re dealing with a murderer, and he can be extremely dangerous.’

  Yakos emptied his glass of ouzo.

  ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘Constable Maraiades is the most cowardly donkey on the whole island.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Van Veeteren again. ‘And that scooter – are you following that up?’

  Yakos observed his guests with a wry smile before answering.

  ‘My dear friends,’ he said slowly but firmly. ‘I have been a chief inspector in Argostoli for twenty years. I was born here – two days after the earthquake and a week too early, it was the tremors that sparked off my dear mother’s labour pains . . . Anyway, I can guarantee that every police officer, every bar owner and every taxi driver on this island knows that I’m looking for a purple scooter, a Honda with the registration number BLK 129. Don’t underestimate me.’

  ‘I apologize,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Let’s drink a bottle of good Boutari wine and eat a lump or two of cheese while we’re waiting.’

  Yakos flung out his arms.

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  52

  ‘The problem,’ her grandfather had said on his deathbed, ‘is that there isn’t a God.’

  She often used to recall those words, and during the last few weeks they had kept on returning with a sort of somnambulistic persistency. There isn’t a God. Her grandfather on her mother’s side had died of cancer, had spent the last few months of his life in hospital, and two days before he died she had sat alone with him, by his bed. They had been taking it in turns: her, her mother and her aunt – they all knew that he didn’t have long left.

  She had sat there in a blue armchair in the special part of the hospital reserved for the dying. Terminal patients. A grandfather on his last legs, drugged up to the eyeballs with morphine, and a sixteen-year-old granddaughter. The cancer was in his pancreas. A part of it, at least. She had gathered that if you had to have cancer, you wouldn’t choose to have it in your pancreas.

  It was his last night but one, as it turned out, and as morning approached, shortly before half past five, he had woken up and reached for her hand. She must have fallen asleep in the chair, and woke up when he touched her. She tried to sit up.

  He eyed her for a moment or two, with a serene expression on his face, and she almost had the impression that it was that notorious moment of clarity just before death – but it wasn’t the case, in fact. He had over a day left.

  Then he had spoken those words, in a loud and clear voice.

  The problem is that there isn’t a God.

  Then he let go of her hand, closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  He had been deeply religious all his life. At his funeral the church had been so full that she had to stand right at the back.

  She was sixteen years old, and had never told anybody about what he had said.

  No, she thought as she sat there in the taxi, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. There isn’t a God: that’s why we have to make sure justice is done ourselves.

  The journey lasted barely a quarter of an hour. He had stopped at a hairpin bend at the top of a ravine. There was still some distance left to the pass over to the north side of the island, if she understood it rightly. When she looked back she could still see a bit of the old, narrow stone bridge over the sound leading into Argostoli’s harbour. She asked the driver to continue past the next rocky outcrop, and then stop.

  She thanked him and got out of the car. The taxi continued up the side of the steep hill – she assumed it was too difficult to turn round on the narrow strip of asphalt, and perhaps there were other roads leading down to the capital. When the car had left her field of vision, she went back round the bend and saw him again. He was standing next to the purple scooter with his back towards her, staring down into the ravine. The sides were steep, rocky and devoid of vegetation, but down at the bottom, some thirty metres deep, there was a mass of dry, straggly bushes and rubbish which unscrupulous motorists had thrown down. Paper and plastic carrier bags and empty cans. And something that looked like a refrigerator.

  He was standing there motionless, with a small greyish-green rucksack at his feet and a revolver in his right hand.

  She ran her fingers over the mangled, ravaged skin on her face, then put her hand into her shoulder bag. She took hold of the wrapped-up iron rod. As far as she could tell he hadn’t noticed her presence. Good, she thought. The distance to him was no more than twenty metres: she gave no thought to why he was standing there, why he had a revolver in his hand or what he was intending to do. It was sufficient that she had her own plan clear and at the ready.

  More than sufficient.

  There isn’t a God, she thought as she approached him cautiously.

  He didn’t notice her – or took no notice of her – until she was almost next to him. He seemed to be concentrating hard: but when he finally heard her footsteps and sensed her presence, he gave a start and turned to look at her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said in English, tightening her hold on the iron rod in her bag. ‘Do you happen to know what time it is?’

  ‘The time?’

  It was a bizarre question to ask up here in this barren mountainous landscape, and he looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He raised his
hand, the one not holding the revolver, and checked his wristwatch.

  ‘Twelve,’ he said. ‘It’s one minute to twelve.’

  She thanked him and adjusted the scarf over her face. He doesn’t recognize me, she thought. He has no idea who I am.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said, and took a step closer, as if she was about to pass him. He looked out over the ravine again. Didn’t respond. The arm with the revolver was hanging down motionless by his side. She saw a bird of prey soaring up over the mountain ridge: it circled around then hovered high up in the air, almost directly above them. She took the rod out of her bag.

  God . . . she thought as she raised it in the air.

  He turned his head and stared at her for a fraction of a second with his mouth half open. Raised his gun so that it was pointing at his own head, his right temple.

  . . . doesn’t exist, she thought, and swung the rod.

  53

  Chief Inspector Yakos didn’t look much more cheerful.

  ‘He’d been asleep in bed with his mistress, that confounded taxi driver,’ he said. ‘That’s why we haven’t heard from him until this morning.’

  He leaned forward, supporting himself with his hands on his knees, and breathed heavily. Münster looked around. The view was stunningly beautiful, and it was hard to shake off the feeling of unreality that hovered in the clear morning light . . . The feeling that he was in bed, dreaming, or perhaps taking part in some surrealistic film. To make things worse he had slept badly, unlike the taxi driver, all alone in his austere hotel room. It had been three o’clock before he finally dozed off.

  Now it was half past ten. They were a few kilometres outside the town. The sun had risen a hand’s breadth over the top of the mountain ridge, casting light onto the lower, barren slopes, and the olive groves down by the coast, and the scattered whitewashed dwellings on the other side of the sound. The bluish silhouettes of little islands faded away in the west towards the horizon, which was as sharp as a drypoint engraving, despite the fact that the sea and the sky were very nearly the same blue colour. Closer to them, a few hundred metres further along the road, were the equally sharply outlined ruins of a building – some sort of mill, Münster guessed – flanked by two olive trees.

  And even closer, parked alongside the low, half-eroded stone wall that separated the road from the precipice was a purple scooter, a Honda. Registration number BLK 129.

  Münster adjusted his police gun and turned to look over the edge. Straight ahead of them was a ravine – two steep sides forming a deep and rocky V deep down into the hillside with its point a long way below them, some thirty or forty metres at a guess, covered by a mass of prickly bushes and piles of rubbish. Completely inaccessible to everyone and everything.

  Nevertheless the steep sides were crawling with people. Young men dressed in black with ropes and pickaxes and lots of other equipment. A helicopter was hovering over them, shattering the silence of the magnificent landscape. Münster turned his head a little more and observed Van Veeteren, standing two metres away from him with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He also looked as if he had slept badly.

  Or perhaps it was just the disappointment and frustration that was engraved in his grim facial expression. Disappointment at not having been able to capture Maarten deFraan alive.

  Ever since they had heard from Yakos about the discovery shortly before eight o’clock, the Chief Inspector had been irritable and tetchy. Münster guessed – hoped, perhaps? – that it was the arrogant reference to Pascal that gave him a bad taste in his mouth. Among other things.

  For Maarten deFraan was dead. Very dead. The idea of sitting face to face with him and poking around in his murky psychology would never become reality. Neither for Van Veeteren nor for anybody else.

  Chief Inspector Yakos wiped the sweat off his glistening head with a towel. He had just clambered back up to the road from the finding-place, and the patches of sweat under his arms were as large as elephant’s ears.

  ‘Would you like to go down and take a look?’ he asked, looking at Van Veeteren and Münster in turn.

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But I’d be grateful if you could give us a detailed description. I assume photographs will be taken?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ said Yakos. ‘No, forget about all the climbing. It looks horrific down there. Absolutely horrific.’

  He paused, as if he were tasting the word to make sure it was the right one.

  ‘Two bodies. Or rather, to be precise, one body and a skeleton. Dr Koukonaris says the skeleton could be anything from three to thirty years old: but of course we’ll get a more accurate assessment when all the analyses have been made. In any case, everything seems to indicate that it’s a woman.’

  ‘It’s his wife,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Her name is Christa deFraan and she’s been lying there in that ravine since August 1995.’

  Chief Inspector Yakos stared briefly at him with circumflex-shaped eyebrows, while blowing out a thin stream of air from between his lips.

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Well, if you say so. Anyway, the other body is of more recent vintage. A man who has been lying there for a day at most. There is no reason to doubt that it is Professor deFraan, who you have been hunting. But he has been badly mauled, so we can’t be certain of that yet . . .’

  ‘Mauled?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘How has he been mauled?’

  Yakos inhaled deeply on his cigarette and gazed out over the sea.

  ‘Do you want details?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Don’t blame me . . . But of course you’ll have to take a look at him when we’ve recovered him from the ravine. Horrific, as I said.’

  ‘We’ve gathered that,’ said Van Veeteren with a trace of irritation in his voice. ‘Please tell us about it now.’

  Yakos nodded.

  ‘In the first place, he’s been shot through the head. Entrance hole through one temple, exit hole through the other one. We haven’t found a gun, but it is a pretty large-calibre weapon – nine millimetres, perhaps. We’re still looking for it, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Van Veeteren.

  ‘But that’s not the worst injury,’ said Yakos.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Presumably he had injuries from the fall,’ said Münster.

  Yakos nodded grimly.

  ‘Yes, he doesn’t have many unbroken bones, according to the doctor, so it’s obvious he’s fallen from up here. Or been pushed . . . But those are not the injuries I’m referring to.’

  He inhaled once again, and seemed to hesitate.

  ‘Go on,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘The intendent and I have fifty years in the branch between us so you don’t need to censor your description.’

  ‘All right, if you insist. His body is almost naked and full of injuries in addition to those caused by the fall. There are stab wounds and slashes by a knife all over the place, and what seems to be corrosion, especially in his face – or what is left of his face. He is unrecognizable. His eyes have been dug out, and his . . . his penis and testicles have been cut off. His hands and feet are tied together with a nylon cord – his hands behind his back. Several of his nails have been pulled out. And in addition he has burns on large parts of his body, especially his chest and stomach – it looks as if somebody has poured petrol over him and set fire to it. Everything suggests that he has been tortured . . . down there . . .’

  He pointed to a narrow ledge a few metres down the precipice. Münster noted a few black patches on stones, and sooty remains of some sort of cloth or clothing.

  ‘If that happened before or after the bullet went through his brain, well, we don’t know that yet. I have . . . I must say that I’ve never seen anything worse than this.’

  He fell silent. Münster swallowed and looked up at the helicopter, which was flying away over the mountain ridge with something dangling on a rope underneath its grey-green bodywork. Van Veeteren stood there motionless, gazing down into the ravine
with his hands behind his back. Somebody down below shouted something in Greek and was answered by Chief Inspector Yakos.

  No, thought Münster. Why climb down there and look at that unless you were forced to? We’ll be faced with it soon enough anyway.

  One of the police officers climbed up onto the road carrying a plastic bag containing some dark object Münster was unable to identify. Yakos accepted it and handed it over to Van Veeteren, who looked at it for two seconds before returning it to the young police officer. Yakos gave him a brief instruction in Greek and he clambered into one of the police cars lined up along the side of the road.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ said Van Veeteren.

  Yakos nodded.

  ‘His penis. I told you it was horrific. What sort of a lunatic could have done that? Did you expect to find something like this? What on earth has been going on?’

  It was doubtless no more than half a minute before Van Veeteren replied, but it seemed to Münster like an eternity. The shades of blue in the perfect morning that surrounded them on all sides became slightly lighter. A lone cicada started chirruping listlessly, a bird of prey flew in from the coast and more or less took over the space previously occupied by the helicopter. Chief Inspector Yakos threw his half-smoked cigarette down onto the edge of the road and stamped on it.

  Münster began rehearsing the whole of this confounded case in his head, very rapidly. Almost against his will. Speedily and rhapsodically the images flashed past in his mind’s eye: the cramped flat in Moerckstraat, the dead priest and his bisexual friend, Monica Kammerle’s mutilated body in the dunes at Behrensee, the conversation with Anna Kristeva and all the others involved in this agonizingly drawn-out tragedy . . . The lapel badge in the shoe up in Wallburg, the Succulents and the veiled woman. Ester Peerenkaas. Nemesis. Had she got there in time, or what was one to think?

  And the murderer himself. Professor Maarten deFraan. Who had evidently killed his wife almost six years ago at the very spot where they were standing now, and then continued along the same lines . . . Another four people had lost their lives, just in order to . . . in order to what? Münster thought. What was it that had lain hidden at the back of his insane mind? Was there an explanation at all? Was there any point in looking for one? For the derangement, as Van Veeteren used to call it.