The Truth and Other Lies: A Novel

by Sascha Arango

  “Henry, these are the people from the homicide squad. Excuse me, I’ve forgotten your names.”

  Henry recognized the opossum standing next to Jenssen. She had plucked her eyebrows since he’d last seen her; the unibrow had been erased. He didn’t know the dark-haired man with the fine-hewn face. The officer introduced himself. “Awner Blum,” he said drily. “I’m leading the investigations.” Henry couldn’t gauge whether that was good or bad news. He shook hands with everyone and again felt the power of Jenssen’s grip.

  “Are there any—how should I put it—breakthroughs yet?” Henry asked, looking around at the assembled company.

  “We’re still in the process of evaluating,” replied Jenssen matter-of-factly. “The perpetrator or perpetrators set fire to the car to destroy any evidence. We’re most interested in whether this was an accident or a premeditated crime.”

  “Who could possibly have planned it?” Henry adopted a puzzled expression. “Betty got lost. Not even she knew where she’d ended up. No one knew.”

  “That’s just the question, Mr. Hayden,” said Blum, butting in. Jenssen was silent.

  “You mean whether anyone was in the car with her?”

  “For instance. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Whoever could it have been?”

  The door opened quietly. Honor Eisendraht entered the room behind Henry. He noticed that the opossum was sniffing around again.

  “If you’ve no objections, Mr. Hayden, we’d like to continue the questioning with you.” Jenssen looked at Moreany. “Do you have another free room for us?”

  Before Moreany could reply, Henry raised his hand. “I’d like to say something that concerns all of us here. A little time ago I lost my wife.” Henry paused to collect himself. “As you may already know, the manuscript of the novel I’ve been working on for a long time disappeared along with Betty.”

  Henry glanced at Moreany, who nodded. “I just told the police that.”

  “A few days ago,” Henry continued, “I met Betty in the Four Seasons. She was distraught and scared, not herself. She was afraid.”

  Jenssen whipped out a device. “Would you mind if I recorded this?”

  “Not at all. Well then, we sat in the Oyster Bar and discussed the novel. I talked about the difficulties I was having getting anything written after Martha’s death. She hardly listened. I asked her what was wrong with her and then it burst out of her. She told me she was pregnant.”

  Honor leaned against the office wall. She felt a little dizzy.

  “Did she name anyone?” asked Jenssen, who clearly felt awkward conducting this conversation in front of the other witnesses.

  “No. She spoke of the disastrous mistake she’d made. It was already too late for an abortion.”

  “Do you think she was raped?” asked the opossum.

  “I wouldn’t want to rule it out. At any rate she spoke of a man she was afraid of. She said he was dangerous and unpredictable. She’d ended the relationship with him and now she was afraid he might try to get his own back. It seems he was always ringing her up and threatening to send the ultrasound images of the baby to Moreany’s office. She said he’d stolen the car.”

  “Along with the keys?” asked Jenssen in disbelief.

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  Shaking his head, Jenssen started to take notes.

  “I advised Betty to go to the police and offered to have her stay for a few days, but she refused. Then she felt sick and had to go to the restroom, but she didn’t come back and I drove home to work on the novel. That was the last I saw of her. Now I blame myself for not going straight to the police. She was in trouble, in danger. I shouldn’t have left her alone.”

  “I can confirm that,” Honor said in a quiet voice. She was slumped into a heap against the wall. “I also happened to be in the Four Seasons lobby that day. It was the Tuesday before last. I saw Betty go to the restroom. She vomited and she was crying. Crying a lot. Mr. Hayden came out of the Oyster Bar and left the hotel. He didn’t see me.”

  Moreany got up out of his chair with difficulty and let Honor have it. He seated himself behind his desk, his face screwed up in pain.

  “We interrupted you, Henry.”

  “I only want to say one more thing,” Henry declared. “If Betty is dead and it was, as Mr. Jenssen puts it, not an accident, but murder, then you must look for the father of her child.”

  Moreany’s office was as silent as a concert hall. Only a solitary cougher could be heard.

  19

  Chief Investigator Awner Blum was in charge of three separate homicide squads. He was reputed to be a genius of case analysis, which in film and on television is generally known as “profiling.” His officers had indeed a number of times drawn up such accurate criminal profiles that convicted murderers had congratulated him from prison. Blum didn’t know the first thing about psychology, but he had a superhuman instinct for managing people. He might have been born to run a murder squad. He had headhunted the most skilled detectives to join his squads and had attained a solved crimes rate of one hundred percent. He’d done that for three years in a row. Blum was a womanizer and liked the sound of his own voice. His lectures on criminal profiles, larded with quotations, could drag on forever. Jenssen was of the opinion that just listening to him ought to count as overtime. In the most successful investigations the movement patterns of victim and perpetrator were compared. The method worked well. You drew up the most comprehensive biographies possible of the victim and then looked for areas of overlap with the profiles of potential offenders.

  The data crunchers established that Betty Hansen had indeed made regular phone calls to an unknown person over the course of the last six months. His or her identity, however, remained a mystery. The SIM card from the prepaid phone had been registered under a made-up name and a false address. Betty’s phone also remained missing, as did her notebook computer, where her emails were stored. Neither her leather-bound diary nor her private or business correspondence yielded a name.

  Jenssen went to see the gynecologist who had carried out the scan. Betty Hansen hadn’t mentioned the father’s name to this woman either. Without a sample of tissue from the amniotic sac, it wasn’t possible to determine the father’s DNA. Members of Betty’s family were questioned, along with her friends, her neighbors, and her work colleagues, but no one knew anything. Just three sets of prints were found in her apartment: Betty’s, Jenssen’s, and those of a neighbor. The only evidence of any use was the scattered movement profile of the caller. A great deal of effort went into following up this evidence.

  It is widely believed that telephone companies store data as to who telephones whom, where, and for how long for no more than six months. Far too short a period for thorough police work, in Awner Blum’s opinion. Universal data mining for the purposes of criminal prosecution would be far more effective if there were no time limit, inasmuch as every caller is a potential offender who ought to be subject to preventative scrutiny. Only the National Security Agency knows everything forever, and the Americans are famous for being extremely tightfisted when it comes to handing over their valuable knowledge.

  Jenssen didn’t find the telephone data particularly helpful. He stuck a large transparency of the mystery caller’s movement profile on the map on his office wall and ordered a jumbo tuna pizza with extra capers. Place, time, and length of call were marked on the transparency in the form of clouds of scattered dots. Joining the dots up yielded an abstract pattern that was aesthetically demanding but an investigative nightmare. Each call came from a different place. Some were made in town, not far in fact from Betty Hansen’s apartment. Most of them, however, were made in sparsely populated areas, from remote forests and nature reserves, for instance, within a radius of two hundred miles. That meant that it was extremely difficult to locate the telephone with any accuracy. What is more, the caller only ever switched the phone on immediately before making the call and then switched it off again imm
ediately after hanging up. There was no movement along roads, no lines—only dots.

  A special task force was already hard at work looking for a nature lover, a forester, or a hunter. Hundred-strong police contingents combed the areas where the caller had switched on his phone. Thermal imaging cameras and satellite optics were also deployed in case there was a secret hideout to be found. Specialized dog teams hunted for underground burrows. They found only poachers’ hideaways and an abandoned Boy Scout camp. A lot of innocent hikers were detained by the police and had their phones examined—but the search yielded nothing.

  As the search for the unknown person wasn’t getting them anywhere, Blum’s teams reopened murder cases in which the trail had gone cold, and applied the same techniques. More experts with new hypotheses arrived on the scene. The homicide squads were expanded further, and the search area widened again. Jenssen, who had started throwing darts at the map in his office, didn’t believe in the nature-lover theories. He saw a much more flexible strategy in the guerrilla-like appearance and disappearance of the unknown caller. For Jenssen it was clear that the mystery man could be none other than Henry Hayden.

  At the daily briefings in the meeting room, Awner Blum circulated a photocopy of a new profile. “We’re looking for a man,” he began, “who’s been living a double life for a long time. He’s sporty, about thirty to forty-five years old, might well be married, have children, and leads an unremarkable middle-class existence. He lives in a radius of two hundred miles from here. Perhaps he’s a hunter or a forester—he might even be a policeman or a regular soldier by profession, because he’s a master of disguise and knows a lot about location technology. He’s looking for the kick that his day-to-day life can’t provide. Maybe he robs banks in his spare time, or kills people. It’s possible that he’s on the run from something.”

  “From what?” asked Jenssen in the back row.

  “Something in his past,” Blum replied. “A traumatic experience that’s still haunting him, or else a crime. He leaves nothing to chance. At some point he gets to know his victim. He must have told her some fanciful story about himself, a story so plausible that she didn’t talk about him to anyone, not even to her closest friends and relations. We have to assume that she was unaware of his true identity. Then one day or night she gets pregnant by him. He didn’t want that; the thing starts to get too risky for him. He was in the car with her when she was on her way to meet Mr. Hayden. That’s when the murderer killed her and disposed of her body.”

  “How?” asked Jenssen from the back.

  “By boat or by ship. The murder took place right by the water.”

  Jenssen rose from his seat.

  “Excuse me for saying this, but no woman is that stupid. The victim was an editor. Editors read books for a living. They analyze them. They look for logical errors and inconsistencies in them. They’re experts in fanciful stories. Nothing escapes them. I think you can fool anyone, but not indefinitely. If our man wanted to disguise himself—and there’s no doubt that’s what he wanted—then why did he phone her at all?”

  Jenssen’s reflections aroused a feeling of unease in the room, but he carried on regardless. “I think this fellow just likes going for walks. Why should he of all people send ultrasound images of the baby to the publisher when no one’s supposed to find out?”

  Awner Blum looked around at the assembled company. “Is it possible that the murder victim sent the pictures herself in order to get rid of him?”

  “Certainly not if she was afraid of him.”

  “OK, Jenssen.” Blum was getting angry. As a certified investigative genius, he had no use for time-wasting skeptics. “So why don’t you tell us who you think the unknown person is?”

  Jenssen mumbled something.

  “Sorry? Speak up, please. We can’t hear you.”

  “I said, maybe we already know him.”

  “Maybe?”

  Awner Blum looked at the clock on the wall. Jenssen was getting on his nerves with his “maybe.” He was still young and relatively inexperienced to be on a homicide squad, and on top of that he was slow on his feet and not a good team player. Blum had been considering a transfer for Jenssen for quite some time. A friendly “recruitment” by another department would be an excellent method.

  “We all know your theory, Jenssen, and we wonder why you persist in defending it. At the time in question, Mr. Hayden was sitting on a crowded restaurant terrace. He has no motive other than being famous. He has tried to the best of his ability to assist in solving the crime—what is more, he was talking to the victim on his phone when she died. What in your opinion would be a possible motive?”

  “Sex,” replied Jenssen after clearing his throat noisily. “The murder victim Betty Hansen was his lover. He’s the child’s father. Either he or she or both of them together killed his wife Martha. And something went wrong.”

  ———

  In the air-conditioned silence of his private room, Gisbert Fasch realized that he was a man who had problems. Not just since the accident, but also long before. His mother, Amalie, who paid him sporadic visits, confirmed this. He’d always been something of an only child, she explained to her son, even though he’d had two older sisters. That was why he’d spent half his childhood in children’s homes. After this clarifying conversation, Fasch broke off relations with his mother.

  The tiresome whistling sound, Fasch was told by a neurologist by the name of Rosenheimer, was not coming through the wall. It was tinnitus, a disorder of auditory perception caused by his cerebral bleeding. This bleeding incidentally also damaged his visual cortex, which, wonder of wonders, is situated right at the back of the brain—according to Rosenheimer that was why he was seeing double. Both afflictions were permanent, along with stiffness in his legs, a fifty percent lung capacity, and an eighty percent chance of having one or more epileptic seizures in the next sixteen months. Rosenheimer was not a sympathetic person. Gisbert would have liked to talk to a psychiatrist, but psychiatrists are famous for not visiting hospital patients. Three weeks after the accident he still wasn’t capable of getting up by himself. His legs were no longer hanging in slings, but encased in plastic sleeves. Only a trickle of clear fluid flowed from the drain in his chest.

  Gisbert Fasch had never been happier. The knowledge that he was able to enjoy his new-given life with all the possibilities of starting over filled him with joy and gratitude, and made his pains and the ringing in his ears more bearable. He often thought about the man he had to thank for it. Next to his head on the bedside table was a box set of The Sopranos that Henry had brought him and a letter from the public prosecutor’s office. From the letter he gathered there were proceedings against him on a charge of arson by culpable negligence. The entire contents of his apartment had been incinerated. Electric curling irons that had caught fire inside a Miss Wong–brand silicon doll were said to be the cause. It looked very much as if Fasch was going to be homeless on his release from the hospital and then thrown into jail soon afterward. If Fasch had read the underlined paragraph “Cause of Fire” once, he’d read it a hundred times—he could have sworn he’d switched off the curling irons in her groin before leaving the house.

  There was a knock. The evening-duty sister looked in. Her slim face, her black hair with its pageboy cut, and the thick eyeliner over her expressive eyes all reminded Fasch of his ex, Miss Wong, and, night after night, stimulated his curling-iron fantasies.

  “There’s a visitor for you,” the sister said.

  Jenssen came into the room with an unusually large briefcase. Gisbert’s heart missed a beat, but then he realized that this case was black, not brown like his. The policeman in the corduroy jacket introduced himself in a friendly way, showed Fasch his badge, and placed the briefcase on the table behind him against the wall. This poor fellow has not got any health insurance, and yet he can afford a private room, Jenssen thought. With his powerful hand he pushed aside the white curtain to cast a glance out over the magnificent park. Then
he looked around appreciatively.

  “Nice room you’ve got here.”

  This empty phrase might have been a polite prelude to particularly bad news, or was it the start of an entirely new topic? At any rate it was unusually personal for a policeman he didn’t know from Adam.

  “May I see your ID again?” Fasch asked.

  Jenssen obliged.

  “Mr. Fasch, you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. This isn’t a formal interview, and I’m not here because of the fire in your apartment either. I’d like to ask you some questions about your road accident.”

  Fasch squinted past the man’s broad shoulders at the black case on the table. “You don’t have my notes in there, by any chance?”

  Jenssen smiled slyly. “My colleagues from accident investigations found these documents in the wreck of your car.” Jenssen opened the briefcase and handed Fasch an envelope a quarter of an inch thick. Fasch tore it open. To his disappointment it contained only a Moreany Publishing House catalogue, the photocopy of a 1979 register of names from Saint Renata, and a few photo clippings of Henry. One of them was the magazine picture of Henry and his wife on the sofa. Fasch had circled Henry’s likeness with a felt-tip pen, which in retrospect seemed ridiculous.

  “How do you know Mr. Hayden?”

  There was no point in denying it. “He pulled me out of the car and brought me to the hospital. But you probably already know that.”

  Jenssen nodded. “How can you remember? You were unconscious, weren’t you?”

  “It’s an inference. The man who brought me to hospital is the same man who pulled me out of the car.”

  “Absolutely correct. How did he come to be present at the accident?”

  “I can assure you,” replied Fasch, who was prepared for this question, “that Mr. Hayden is in no way to blame for the accident.”