Woman with Birthmark

by Håkan Nesser

  “Yes, yes,” said Van Veeteren. “Cherchez la femme, if you really must.”

  When he got home and had gone to bed, he realized that his tiredness had not yet overcome the tension in his brain once and for all. The image of Rickard Maasleitner's bullet-ridden body kept cropping up in his mind's eye at regular intervals, and after ten minutes of vainly trying to fall asleep, he got up and went to the kitchen instead. Fetched a beer from the refrigerator and sat down in the armchair with a blanket around his knees and Dvořák in the speakers. He allowed the darkness to envelop him, but instead of the unease and disgust he ought to have felt, in view of the two unsolved murders they were struggling with, another sensation altogether took possession of him.

  It was a feeling of movement. Of hunting, in fact. The feeling that the drive had begun now, and that the prey was somewhere out there in the hustle and bustle of town, and it was only a matter of time before he would be able to get his teeth into it. Bring down the murderer.

  Oh, shit! he thought as he took a swig of his beer. I'm beginning to lose the plot. If I weren't a police officer, I'd probably have become a murderer instead.

  It was only a random thought, of course, but nevertheless, somewhere in some obscure corner of his brain, he realized that there was more meaning in it than would be sensible to acknowledge. It had something to do with the concept of the hunt….

  In the beginning, at least.

  Only in the beginning, if truth be told. Somewhere along the line came the peripeteia, the volte-face, and when he eventually—usually much, much later—stood there with his prey, with the perpetrator, what generally possessed him were exclusively feelings of loathing and disgust. The excitement—the stimulation—was only theoretical.

  And in the beginning.

  For when you had dug down sufficiently deep into dire reality, his stream of thought told him, when you had dug down as deep as the soil layer of the crime itself, all there was to see was the black and hopeless dregs. The causes. The maggot-ridden roots of warped society.

  The back side.

  Not that he believed the society in which he lived had higher or lower moral principles than any other. It was simply the way things were—two to three thousand years of culture, and law-making bodies were unable to do anything about it. The veneer of civilization, or whatever you preferred to call it, could begin to crack at any moment, crumble away and expose the darkness underneath. Some people might have imagined that Europe would be a protected haven after 1945, but Van Veeteren had never been one of them. And then things had turned out as they did. Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and all the rest of it.

  And of course it was in the same underlying darkness that his own hunting instincts originated. In any case, he had always found it difficult to associate his police activities with any kind of noble deeds. Nemesis, rather. The inexorable goddess of revenge with blood on her teeth…. Yes, that was more like it, there was no denying it.

  And at some point, the game always turned deadly serious.

  In this particular case it had taken two murders for him to begin to feel involved. Were his senses becoming duller? he wondered. What would he be like a few years from now? What would be needed by then to start the notorious Chief Inspector Van Veeteren firing on all cylinders?

  Butchered women? Children?

  Mass graves?

  When would cynicism and world-weariness have overcome his determination to fight once and for all? For how much longer would the moral imperative have the strength to continue screeching in the darkness of his soul?

  Good questions. He felt his self-disgust rising and cut off the train of thought. No doubt it had been the contrary nature of January that had made him a little sluggish at the start. Now it was February. February the second, to be precise. What was this Maasleitner business all about?

  He started thinking about what had happened that afternoon.

  The alarm had sounded just as he was preparing to pack up for the day. Half past four. He and Münster had been at the apartment in Weijskerstraat a quarter of an hour later, more or less at the same time as the forensic guys and the medical team. Rickard Maasleitner was lying in exactly the same posture as Ryszard Malik had been some … how long ago was it now? Two weeks, more or less? Yes, that was correct.

  He had been convinced from the very first glance that it was the same killer. And that the method had been the same.

  A ring on the doorbell, and then shots the moment the door opened.

  A sound method, Rooth had said.

  Most certainly. Once it was done, all that remained was to close the door and walk away. What sort of time was involved? Ten seconds? That would probably be long enough. You could fire four shots from a Berenger in half that time, if need be.

  He emptied his glass.

  And then?

  Well, then everything got under way, of course. Police tape around the crime scene, a thorough search, taking care of the poor daughter who had found him. And so on.

  Questions.

  Questions and answers. No end to it already. And yet it was just the beginning. As already stated.

  But if one were to look a little more closely at the whole business, one thing stood out, of course. Only one so far, that is. There was an enormous difference between the risk involved in the two murders.

  In the case of Malik, the chances of being seen were as minimal as it is possible to be; but yesterday, all it needed was for somebody to happen to go out with a garbage bag, or to glance out through a half-open door.

  It had been nighttime, of course; but even so.

  Ergo: either there were witnesses or there weren't.

  Perhaps, and this was much to be desired, somebody (or several people) had seen the killer on one of the two occasions when he must have visited the apartment block—while he was fiddling with the lock (because it must surely be the murderer who was responsible for that?), or when the shooting took place. Either on the way there or while leaving.

  Or while he was standing waiting?

  A case of either-or, then. If Reinhart and deBries did their job properly, we should know tomorrow. And even if the neighbors, or Reinhart and deBries, had missed something, there was still a good chance of striking lucky. A press release had been issued at ten o'clock, and it would be in all the main newspapers and in the radio and television news bulletins later this morning. Everybody who thought they might have some relevant information, or had merely been in the Weijskerstraat area around midnight on Wednesday evening, was urged to get in touch with the police immediately.

  So there were grounds for hope.

  Having come thus far in his deliberations, Van Veeteren gave in to temptation and lit a cigarette. It was time to address the big question, and that would no doubt need a bit of extra effort.

  Why?

  Why in hell's name should anybody march up to somebody's door, ring the bell, and shoot whoever opened it?

  What was the motive?

  What was the link between Ryszard Malik and Rickard Maasleitner?

  And furthermore: What would have happened if somebody else had opened the door? Could the murderer be one hundred percent certain who it would be? Was it all the result of meticulous planning, or was coincidence involved?

  There's no such thing as coincidence, Reinhart had once said, and that was no doubt basically true. Nevertheless, there was a hell of a difference between some causes and others. Between some motives and others.

  Why had Malik and Maasleitner been singled out by the murderer?

  Dvořák fell silent, and Van Veeteren could feel the weariness behind his eyes now. He stubbed out his cigarette and heaved himself up out of the armchair. Switched off the CD player and went to bed. The blood-red digital numbers on the clock radio showed 2:21, and he realized that he had less than five hours' sleep to look forward to.

  Ah well, he'd been through worse situations in the past, and no doubt would be faced with worse in the future as well.

  When Detective In
spector Reinhart snuggled down under the covers on his big iron-frame bed, the night had ticked its way through twenty more red minutes; but even so, he considered phoning Miss Lynch and asking her if she felt like popping over. In order to exchange a few words, if nothing else; and to remind her that he loved her.

  However, something—he was confident it had to do with his good character and upbringing—restrained him from submitting to his desires, and instead he lay for a while thinking about their efforts during the course of the evening, and the way in which people seemed to notice nothing of what was happening round about them.

  Or their stupidity, as some would doubtless have expressed it.

  In any case, a lack of awareness. In the old, well-maintained 1930s apartment block where Rickard Maasleitner lived, there were no fewer than seventy-three inhabitants. In apartments off the relevant staircase—26B—there were seventeen tenants at home at the time of the murder, in addition to the victim himself. At least eight of those had been awake when the murderer fired the fatal shots (assuming that the incident took place before two in the morning). Five of those had been on the same floor. One had come home at ten minutes to twelve.

  Nobody had noticed anything at all.

  As for the front-door lock, which the murderer had sabotaged by jamming a piece of metal between the bolt and the drum, at least three persons had noticed that there was something amiss, but none of them had done anything about it, or drawn any conclusions.

  Stupid idiots! Reinhart thought.

  There again, of course, he knew that this was not an entirely fair judgment. He himself hadn't the slightest idea of what his neighbors got up to of an evening—he hardly knew what they were called, never mind anything else—but after seven hours of interrogation, and with so many possible witnesses among them, one would surely have been justified in expecting a rather more positive outcome.

  Or any outcome at all, to be honest.

  But there had not been any.

  What was pretty clear, however, was the time sequence. The front door of Weijskerstraat 26 was locked automatically at 2200 hours every evening. In order to tamper with the lock in the way the murderer had done, he (or she, as Winnifred Lynch maintained) must have waited until after that time, presumably somewhere inside the building. And then, when the automatic locking took place, he or she must have calmly opened the door from the inside and inserted the piece of metal. The alternative was that the murderer stood hidden somewhere in the shrubbery outside the front door, and slipped in when one of the residents went in or came out. A pretty risky operation, and hence not very likely, as deBries and Reinhart had agreed.

  What the murderer did after that was impossible to say, of course; but when Maasleitner came home at about midnight after his night out with Faringer, he (or she) had presumably wasted no time hanging around. Everything suggested that Maasleitner hadn't been at home for more than a few minutes before the doorbell rang.

  And then four bullets. Two in the chest, and two below the belt. Exactly the same as on the previous occasion. Close the door and melt away. And no witnesses.

  Good God, thought Reinhart with a shudder. It was so simple, enough to make you afraid of the dark.

  Nevertheless he stretched out his arm and switched off the light. And as he did so he remembered that there were a couple of straws to grasp. Two of the apartment owners had been at home during the night in question, but had not been available for an interview. What is more, one of them—a certain Mr. Malgre—lived next door to Maasleitner; for want of anything better, Reinhart made up his mind to attach his best hopes for the next day's interviews to the one with him. This was scheduled for midday, when Malgre would be back from a conference in Aarlach. DeBries was due to interrogate him.

  Now, if Malgre was the type used to attending conferences, Reinhart thought, he was bound to be a person with a high level of awareness. Not your usual thickie.

  As he registered that thought, the usual flag of protest was raised in the back of his mind, condemning such prejudiced thoughts. But his exhaustion had the upper hand. Reinhart sighed, turned onto his side, and fell asleep.

  By that time the minutes had ticked their way forward to 3:12. All evening and night he hadn't devoted a single second to thinking about the motive.

  That would have to wait until tomorrow.

  He'd been working today. Tomorrow he would start using his brains.

  14

  Baushejm was only a few stone's throws away from the suburb where Münster lived, and he drove straight there on Friday morning. If for no other reason than to save time. Wanda Piirinen (formerly Maasleitner) had to get to work—she was a secretary at one of the town's most reputable attorneys' offices—and despite the murder of her ex-husband, she had no intention of taking any more leave than necessary. Half a day, to be precise.

  The children—three of them, aged seventeen (the girl who had found her father murdered the previous day), thirteen, and ten—had been allowed an extended weekend, and when Münster was shown into the well-kept villa, they had just been collected by an aunt, and would be spending at least two days with her and their cousins out at Dikken.

  “We divorced eight years ago,” explained Wanda Piirinen. “It was not a good marriage, and relations have not improved since then. I don't have any feelings, although I know I ought to have.”

  “You have three children together,” said Münster, devoting a rapid thought to his own two.

  She nodded and gestured toward the coffeepot on the table. Münster poured himself a cup.

  “That's the only reason why we still remain in contact. Or used to, perhaps I should say.”

  Münster took a sip of coffee and observed her covertly over the edge of his cup. An elegant lady that was for sure. Round about forty-five, he thought; fit-looking and suntanned despite the time of year, but also displaying signs of ruthlessness which she had difficulty concealing.

  Perhaps she doesn't want to, Münster thought. Perhaps she wants her independence and strength to be noticed immediately. To deter men from getting any inappropriate ideas or taking liberties. Her thick, ash-blond hair was skillfully done in a French braid, and her makeup seemed to be fastidious and understated. He guessed that she spent rather a long time at the dressing table every morning. Her nails were long and well manicured, and it was a little difficult to believe that she had been solely responsible for bringing up three children. On the other hand, of course, this is what people working in an attorney's office should look like—efficiency and well-directed energy radiated from her like an aura, and he realized that he would have to deal with what Rein-hart generally called a modern woman.

  Or possibly postmodern?

  “Well?” she said, and he became aware that he had lost himself in thought.

  “Describe him!” he said.

  “Rickard?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She gave him a searching look.

  “I don't think I want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I would only have negative things to say. It doesn't seem appropriate for me to disclose my feelings about my former husband when he has just been murdered. Please excuse me.”

  Münster nodded.

  “I understand. How was contact with the children? Between him and the children, I mean.”

  “Bad,” she said, after a moment's hesitation. “At first they used to go and stay with him occasionally. Every other weekend, and sometimes during the week. We live in the same town, after all. It ought to have been a practical possibility to arrange something along those lines, but after a year I realized that it would be better for them to live with me all the time. They needed a home, not two homes.”

  “Did he protest?” Münster asked.

  “Not really. Just a little bit, for appearances' sake. He no doubt thought it was a bit of a nuisance, having them in his house. That is … was … his attitude toward quite a lot of people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  �
�I'm sure you understand. If you talk to some of his colleagues, you will soon get a clear idea about that. And his friends, always assuming that he has any left …”

  “We'll do that, of course,” said Münster.

  He looked around the modern kitchen. There was very little to show that four people had recently had breakfast there, but no doubt there are painless routines for cleaning up, he assumed.

  Why am I feeling so aggressive? he wondered, slightly surprised. What's the matter with me?

  He had managed to find time to make love to Synn, take a shower, and have breakfast before leaving home, so he ought not to be so irritated. Surely she wasn't all that dangerous?

  “What do you think about it?” he asked.

  “About the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned back and gazed out the window.

  “I don't know,” she said, and for the first time there was a trace of doubt in her voice. “A lot of people don't like Rickard, that is no secret; but that anybody would want to murder him … no, I'd never have thought that.”

  “Why didn't people like him?”

  She thought for a moment, searching for the right words.

  “He could see no further than himself,” she said. “Contemptuous of everybody and everything that didn't suit his taste. Or didn't fit in with his way of thinking.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “His way of thinking.”

  She hesitated slightly again.

  “I think it can be traced back to his upbringing,” she said. “He was an only child from the age of ten onward. He had an elder brother who drowned at the age of fourteen. After that, his parents devoted all their care and attention to Rickard, but they were totally blind to the fact that he might have any faults or shortcomings. Yes, that was the basis of it all, of course.”

  “Why did you marry him?” Münster asked, wondering if he might be being impertinent.

  But she smiled for the first time.

  “Feminine weakness,” she said. “He was handsome and I was young.”

  She took a sip of coffee and sat for a few moments with the cup in her hand.