by Håkan Nesser
Rooth nodded and chewed away.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Something occurred to me as we were sitting upstairs, discussing the case.’
‘Go on,’ said Jung.
‘Blackmail,’ said Rooth.
‘Blackmail?’ said Jung.
‘Exactly. It would fit. Listen. Erich Van Veeteren is the blackmailer. He has some kind of hold on somebody, and has named a price for his silence. He drives out to Dikken in order to collect his cash. But his victim doesn’t want to pay up, and kills him instead. It’s as plain as a pikestaff, correct me if I’m wrong.’
Jung thought it over.
‘It’s not impossible,’ he said. ‘It’s a credible theory. Why didn’t you say anything about it during the run-through?’
Rooth looked a bit embarrassed.
‘I only thought of it towards the end,’ he said. ‘You lot didn’t seem all that amenable. I didn’t want to drag things out.’
‘You mean you were hungry?’ said Jung.
‘You said that, not me,’ said Rooth.
16
‘If you regard it as a sort of cancer,’ said Reinhart, ‘it becomes quite clear.’
‘White man, he speak with forked tongue,’ said Winnifred, who was a quarter aboriginal.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Explain.’
They were lying in the bath. The fact that Winnifred Lynch, born in Australia but grown up and awarded a doctorate in England, had moved in with Reinhart and given birth to his child was largely due to that bath. At least, that’s what she usually claimed when he asked her if she really loved him.
It was big and deep. And built-in. Adorned with an irregular mosaic pattern of small green and blue ceramic tiles on the outside, and fitted with an impressive array of copper taps in the middle. Big enough for two adults to half-lie in. One at each end. Like now. With their legs and bodies nicely intertwined. It had cost Reinhart two months’ wages to refurbish his bathroom twelve years ago.
But it had been worth it, obviously.
‘Cancer,’ he said again. ‘A cancerous growth forms metastases — if it doesn’t do so it often escapes detection. It’s the same with a lot of criminal cases, that’s what I mean. This business involving The Chief Inspector ’s son, for example. Are you with me?’
‘I’m with you,’ said Winnifred.
‘Good. We’ve established everything that can reasonably be established regarding what happened. But even so we’ve got nowhere, and that doesn’t bode well for our chances of solving the case… Unless it produces a few buds.’
‘Produces a few buds?’
‘Metastases,’ said Reinhart. ‘Something else has got to happen. That’s what I’m trying to explain. If you just commit an isolated crime — kill somebody, rob a bank or whatever — and leave it at that, well, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Especially if you are a pretty law-abiding citizen otherwise. But generally speaking it doesn’t stop at the initial growth stage. The crime gives birth to metastases, we discover them and trace them to where they came from, and so we solve the bloody case. Are you with me?’
Winnifred sighed.
‘Brilliant metaphorics,’ she said, and started wiggling her toes in his armpits. ‘Criminality as a cancer in the body of society. Clever stuff, I give you that. I haven’t heard anything quite as telling for several hours.’
‘Hmm,’ said Reinhart. ‘It was mostly that business of the metastases that I was after.’
‘All right,’ said Winnifred. ‘It has to produce a few buds, otherwise you won’t find Erich’s murderer — is that the point you’re making?’
‘More or less,’ said Reinhart. ‘We’re marking time at the moment. Or treading water if you want a more appropriate-’
He broke off because Winnifred had bitten him in the calf.
‘Ouch,’ said Reinhart.
‘Is there anything to suggest the production of a bud?’
Reinhart thought that one over.
‘How the hell should I know? Cancer is a mystery, isn’t it?’
‘Of course,’ said Winnifred. ‘But if you massage my feet and give me a few facts about the case, I’ll see what I can suggest.’
‘Fair deal,’ said Reinhart. ‘Remove them from my armpits.’
Ulrike Fremdli was displaying a new trait that he hadn’t seen before. A sort of caution. He had been thinking about it for several days, and when she collected him from the antiquarian bookshop at closing time on Thursday evening, he said as much.
‘Caution?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You look at me as if I were a patient,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Stop it. My son has been murdered: if I go out of my mind as a result, I’ll get more than enough of that bloody therapist’s look in the loony bin.’
‘What the hell…?’ she said. Then they walked in silence, arm in arm, past Yorrick’s Cafe before she stopped dead.
‘All right, you may be right. No more being unnecessarily considerate — but in that case you really must open your mouth now and again as well.’
‘Hmm,’ said Van Veeteren.
Ulrike looked at him with a vertical furrow between her eyebrows.
‘I’m with you in that grief doesn’t need to be expressed in words,’ she said, ‘but I refuse to believe that not doing so is the best way of honouring the dead. We ought to celebrate them instead of mourning them… Like they do in Mexico, or wherever it is. The Day of the Dead and all that. Silent grief is only of benefit to somebody who wants to wallow in it.’
Van Veeteren thought that over for a while.
‘You may be right,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, if life has to go on it’s presumably necessary to open your cake-hole now and again.’
She suddenly burst out laughing. Threw her arms round him and hugged him so tightly that he wondered if he could be completely confident of winning if he took her on in an arm-wrestling match. If it was going to come to that.
‘I give in,’ he said. ‘Do you think…’
‘Do I think what?’ she said, letting go of him.
‘Do you think we can find a sort of compromise position… somewhere between patient and sparring partner? I think that would be of benefit for our relationship.’
She smiled. Linked arms with him again and started walking.
‘What you are trying to describe is the ideal man,’ she said. ‘But he doesn’t exist. I’ll have to put up with you as you are. Sometimes patient, sometimes sparring partner — but it doesn’t matter. I’ve never expected anything else. Come on, then, let’s go up to Marlene’s and see if she’s found any photographs.’
They had finally got round to visiting her together for the first time, and it didn’t last long. Marlene Frey had been having problems with her stove: the temperature in the flat hovered between ten and twelve degrees, and she was just about to go to a friend’s place for the night.
However, she had dug out a dozen photographs of Erich — some of them featured both Erich and herself, in fact. Obviously she would like to keep some of them — perhaps they could meet on another occasion and come to some agreement. When it wasn’t so damned cold. One could always have copies made if one still had the negatives — and she did have them. Most of them, at any rate.
‘How’s it going with…?’ he wondered, glancing for a fraction of a second at her stomach.
‘All’s well,’ she assured them. ‘He’s still hanging in there.’
It was obvious that she was stressed, and he didn’t think she was quite herself, compared with when they’d met at Adenaar’s. She merely shook hands with Ulrike and gave her a quick smile, and the brief visit left a somewhat insipid taste in the mouth.
‘You mustn’t read too much into it,’ said Ulrike when they had found a table at Kraus’s half an hour later. ‘It’s easy to do that when you’re not on top form yourself.’
‘Top form?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I haven’t been on top form since I started school.’
Not that he had all that much against jazz as such. Reinhart used to maintain that when you listened to — and above all if you could play, of course — modern, improvised jazz, you increased your IQ to record levels. As an exponential function of time, concentration and alcohol intake… or something like that: he didn’t always listen too carefully to what Reinhart said. But not tonight, thank you, he thought. It’s too soon. He had barely felt up to coping with his own music. He couldn’t even stomach William Byrd and Monteverdi, so the barbed-wire tones of saxophones didn’t seem particularly appropriate for the occasion.
He sipped away at his dark beer while waiting, and thought things over. Asked himself just what was happening to his thoughts and his mind nowadays. All the mood swings. It was not pleasant. Grappling with all the different states he found himself in. His usual attitude born of experience: his chastened — not exactly optimistic but nevertheless bearable — belief that there was something logical behind all the darkness. Certain patterns. Positive resignation, to borrow a term from old Borkmann. But on the other hand this new feeling: the totally black resignation. To be sure, he’d occasionally had a sniff of it — especially in connection with his professional life — but it had never been able to retain its grip on him as it was doing now.
Not like this. For hours on end. Sometimes half a day. Incapable of action. Incapable of thought.
Incapable of living?
I must put a stop to it, he thought. I must get a grip. It’s Erich who’s dead, and me who’s still alive. All lives come to an end, some too soon, others too late. Nothing can change that eternal truth. And I don’t want to lose Ulrike.
Reinhart turned up at half past nine, half an hour late.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Joanna has earache. Terribly painful, it seems. Did they have that in your day as well?’
Van Veeteren nodded. Reinhart noticed his half-empty glass, and signalled for two new ones.
‘How’s it going?’ Van Veeteren asked when the goods had been delivered, and each had taken a swig. Reinhart lit his pipe, and scratched his short, greying hair.
‘So-so.’
‘So-so?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘What the devil does that mean? Have you been stricken by aphasia?’
‘We haven’t made all that much progress,’ said Reinhart. ‘What do you expect? Do you want me to spell out every bloody detail?’
Van Veeteren tapped a cigarette against the table top, then lit it.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Every bloody detail. Please.’
It took quite a while, and when Reinhart had finished the music had started on the stage. Only a pianist and a dark-skinned lady singing in quite a low voice, so it wasn’t difficult to make oneself heard. Van Veeteren established that his earlier prejudices had been wide of the mark: the woman had a pleasantly low voice that reminded him of simmering velvet (in so far as velvet could possibly simmer, and produce sounds…), and while Reinhart was speaking the singing produced an attractive distancing effect. It seemed to swathe Erich’s death and all the associated circumstances in a sort of soft, almost sensuous shroud. It occurred to him that Erich would have liked that.
Grief and suffering, he thought. We can’t avoid that. All we can do is welcome it with open arms and treat it in the right way. Swathe it in art or rituals or whatever else we have at our disposal. But for goodness’ sake don’t just leave it lying in a corner like a ball of dust.
‘Anyway, that’s more or less it,’ said Reinhart. ‘We’ve got the killer surrounded — that character in the bar. It’s got to be him, everything suggests it’s him; but we don’t have any plausible hypotheses regarding what Erich was doing out there. Or was intending to do. You could speculate about various possibilities, of course: but I’d be misleading you if I claimed there was anything more to it than that.’
‘I understand,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘You’re still pretty keen on our nailing him, I take it.’
Van Veeteren glanced at the singer before answering. She was saying thank you for the sporadic applause, and announcing that there would be a brief interval.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Keener for every day that passes. I didn’t understand it properly at first, but it seems to be more or less rooted in one’s genes… You have to find your son’s murderer.’
‘Rooted in our culture, in any case,’ said Reinhart. ‘And in our mythology.’
‘Bollocks to whether it’s mythology or not,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I want you to catch him. Are you going to do that?’
‘I’ve already promised you I’ll do that,’ said Reinhart.
Van Veeteren thought for a moment.
‘Are you annoyed because I’m interfering?’ he asked. ‘For Christ’s sake say so if you are.’
Reinhart raised his glass.
‘I’d think it was damned odd if you didn’t. Cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ said Van Veeteren, and drained his glass. ‘Anyway, go home now and look after your daughter. I think I’ll sit here a bit longer and listen to that singer.’
‘Good for you,’ said Reinhart, getting to his feet.
17
After work on Friday he went to visit his father. It was over two months since he’d last been, and it was a way of passing the time. The Oesterle Care Home was in Bredenbuijk, just outside Loewingen: he took the route via Borsens in order to avoid the worst of the traffic, and arrived just after the evening meal had finished.
As usual, his father was sitting in his bed, gazing at his hands. It often took some time to get him to look up, but on this occasion he did so more or less immediately. He had barely managed to move the chair to the side of the bed and sit down before his father slowly raised his head and looked at him with those bloodshot, watery eyes of his. Just for a second there was a sign of recognition, but perhaps that was wishful thinking.
Why should he recognize him today when he hadn’t done so for the last six years?
After half a minute his father’s chin sank gradually down towards his chest, and he returned to studying his hands, which were lying on top of the blue blanket and slowly rotating around each other.
He sat there for ten minutes. He couldn’t stand it any longer than that. He couldn’t see a nurse or care assistant he recognized, and didn’t bother to ask about his father’s condition.
How is he? Is he all right?
Such questions were pointless. Had been pointless for several years; it felt better not to ask them. He had often wondered what the point was of keeping him alive, but nobody at the care home had so much as whispered the word euthanasia, and he didn’t want to be the first to do so. Besides, his sister in America would be against it, he knew that without needing to ask.
So his father just sat there. Never spoke to anybody, never read a book or a newspaper. Never watched television or listened to the radio. Didn’t even get up nowadays to go to the toilet. The only sign he gave of being in some sort of a conscious state was that he opened his mouth when a spoonful of food was approaching.
My father, he thought. One of these days I shall be like you are now. Nice to see you.
And he made up his mind that he would make the most of life while he still could.
That Friday night became very difficult. Bearing in mind that Vera would be coming the next day, he gave the whisky a miss. He didn’t want it to become a habit. And he didn’t want to overdo the Sobran tablets either. He took a weak sleeping tablet instead, but it only made him feel sluggish and slightly sick.
His decision to wait for Monday’s letter before deciding what to do next was of course the right one — the only conceivable one: but i
n no way did it mean that he could stop thinking about it.
Those persistent gloomy thoughts and images of what would happen to him. Speculations about what kind of scenario ‘a friend’ would propose for handing over the money this time. And about what he would be forced to do. Again.
Whether there was going to be any possibility of doing it.
Killing him.
Killing one last time and drawing a line once and for all under his former life. Without needing to sum it all up or look back at all. Simply waking up to a new, blank day.
He wished he were already at that point.
Wished it were all over. So he could make the most of his life while he still could?
The last time he looked at the clock it was ten minutes to six.
It was raining when he woke up a few hours later. Persistent rain, and a strong wind hurling it at the windows. He stayed in bed for a while, listening to it. Then he got up and had a shower.
He spent the morning and the early afternoon preparing the evening meal. Did some vacuuming and tidying up, and opened some bottles of wine to breathe. Sorted out the laundry as well. Shortly after two he had a call from Smaage, reminding him that the next meeting of the Fraternity was due to take place the coming Friday; they chatted for a while, and afterwards he was surprised at how easy he had found it. How uninhibited he’d been. After all, it had been immediately after the previous meeting that it had all begun. After that damned meeting of the ‘brothers’ his old, secure life had been brought to a halt, and everything had shot off in different directions. He promised Smaage that he would be there, provided nothing unforeseen cropped up — and it was when he said ‘unforeseen’ that he suddenly felt a flash of dizziness. Smaage wished him a pleasant weekend, and hung up.
Then there was one more hour during which he had nothing to do but sit around, waiting for her. Between four and five, as darkness was falling and the wind seemed to ease off a little. But the rainbows kept coming and going. He spent quite a long time by the bedroom window, looking up at the low, restless sky over the strip of trees planted along the back of the row of terraced houses.
