Munster's Case

by Håkan Nesser

  So there was no need to hesitate.

  Not much was said during the drive to the Sunday-sleepy suburb. Marie-Louise Leverkuhn sat hunched, her handbag on her knees, staring out through the side windows at the pouring rain, and seeming to be in a state of shock. Her shoulders were raised—as if to shield her from a hard and far too intrusive outside world—and all Emmeline’s questions were answered with at best a slight movement of the head or a monosyllabic yes or no.

  “Have you slept at all?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to phone your children?”

  No answer.

  Oh dear, Emmeline thought. She’s not well at all.

  Hardly surprising. Murdered? Waldemar Leverkuhn murdered? Emmeline shuddered. Who on earth could have imagined such a thing? An old fart like that.

  For a few minutes she said nothing, concentrating on her driving and trying to imagine what it must feel like to come home and find your husband butchered like that. Dead. Murdered and bathing in his own blood, as they had said on the radio. A carving knife!

  After a while she gave up the attempt to imagine it. It was simply too much to ask.

  Much too much. Emmeline peered cautiously from the side at her motionless friend. Poor Marie-Louise, she thought, I promise to take care of you! You’re bound to be in shock and confused, the main thing is to get a few tablets down you and then tuck you up in bed. I hope I have the strength.

  When the police rang that morning, her first and immediate reaction had been to rush and do what she could for her friend; but it was only now, as she sat here with the silent widow beside her in the car, that she began to realize what was involved.

  Anyway, it’s no doubt best not to let silence reign, she thought. I’d better say something.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision to make: if there was anything Emmeline von Post had difficulty in coping with, it was silence.

  “You can sleep in Mark’s room,” she said. “Then you won’t be disturbed by all the traffic noise. Will that be okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got a bit of that lamb cutlet left in the freezer. We can eat that, don’t you think? You thought it was very good. Then we won’t need to go shopping.”

  “Yes.”

  “For God’s sake! Here am I chattering on about food—you must be absolutely washed out.”

  No answer.

  “Waldemar was such a lovely man.”

  One thing at a time, Emmeline thought, putting her hand on her friend’s arm. We’ll sort it out eventually.

  “What miserable weather,” she said. “It was lovely yesterday.”

  Marie-Louise Leverkuhn went to bed in what used to be the boy’s room in Geldenerstraat 24 at half past two on Sunday afternoon and didn’t get up until about eight on Monday morning. Emmeline came in to check on her several times during the afternoon and evening, and before going to bed herself she left a tray with juice and some sandwiches on the bedside table. For the sake of nourishment and to get some vitamins into her. And out of consideration for her welfare. Although what her old friend needed above all else, as anybody could see, was of course some peace and quiet.

  And that is exactly what she got. Even if it was on the silent side.

  For her part Emmeline had quite a frustrating afternoon and evening. The lamb cutlet went into and out of the oven several times—until she finally put it in the refrigerator and decided it would serve as Monday’s evening meal. She drank at least five cups of tea and watered the flowers twice. It felt especially odd to have her old friend lying in Mark’s room—Mark who had eventually flown the nest eight years ago, but still came back to visit and sleep in his old unchanged boy’s room at regular intervals, especially when his all-too-young wife had done something silly again. Of course, it had been high time he found somebody: thirty-five was no age at which to be still living at home with Mommy. There’s a time for everything, after all.

  But now it was Marie-Louise Leverkuhn lying in his bed, because her husband had been murdered. As Emmeline tiptoed carefully about the house so as not to disturb or wake her guest, it occurred to her how fortunate it was that Edward—her own Edward—had had the good taste to die of cancer, instead of being stabbed to death with a carving knife.

  Murdered! It was terrible. Her lower arm broke out in goose bumps whenever she thought of that word—and by Jove, there were not many minutes when she managed to think of anything else.

  Eventually, when it was already dark outside and in corners of the house, she also began to think about who could have done the deed, which didn’t make things any better. There was a murderer on the loose!

  Then she started thinking about Marie-Louise, their meeting last Saturday evening, playing whist and drinking port (perhaps at the very moment Waldemar was being murdered!), and how remarkably reserved she had been during the car ride and the half hour before she went to bed, and then … well, then she suddenly felt very weary. And a little dizzy.

  There was something very strange about it all.

  Obviously you couldn’t expect a person to behave normally in circumstances like these, but even so? There was something else, Emmeline thought. Some other thing gnawing away deep down inside her friend, forcing her to keep silent. God only knows what.

  Then she shook her head and told herself it was just the silence inside the house and the darkness growing out of the corners and her thoughts about that blood-soaked body in the bed that sent her imagination spinning.… But nevertheless, there was no denying that she didn’t know very much about Marie-Louise and her life after all these years. Not much at all.

  And about her husband? Absolutely nothing.

  But then, perhaps she didn’t know any more than that about anybody else? A human being is a riddle, Edward—her Edward—occasionally used to say. An unsolvable riddle (for he was not afraid to throw in an expletive occasionally)!

  Having got thus far in her speculations, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a substantial whiskey. Drank it while standing up, established that she still had goose bumps on her lower arm, and poured herself another one.

  It was quite simply one of those evenings.

  The children rang on Monday morning.

  Ruth and Mauritz, one after the other, with less than fifteen minutes between the calls. Marie-Louise shut herself into the bedroom while she was speaking to them, and Emmeline couldn’t hear a word—although she would have liked to.

  But not a lot seemed to have been said. Both calls took less than five minutes—as if Marie-Louise had been worried about the telephone bill, even though she was not the one who had phoned.

  “You must talk about it,” Emmeline urged her friend when she came back to the breakfast table after speaking to her son. “It’s not good to bottle it all up.”

  Marie-Louise looked at her with tired, vacant eyes.

  “What on earth is there for me to say?” she said.

  Three seconds passed before she suddenly burst into tears.

  At last, Emmeline thought as she put an arm tenderly round Marie-Louise’s hunched shoulders. At last.

  8

  “Any comments?” said Münster, spreading the photographs out over the table so that all present could study them to their heart’s content.

  The variations were insignificant: Waldemar Leverkuhn’s mutilated body from a dozen different angles and distances. Blood. Crumpled bedclothes. Wounds in close-up. Pale skin covered in moles. An absurdly colorful tie sticking out from under the pillow. Blood. And more blood.

  Moreno shook her head. Intendent Heinemann took off his glasses and began rubbing them clean with the aid of his own much more discreet tie. Rooth stopped chewing away at a chocolate cookie and turned his back demonstratively on the table. Only young Krause continued perusing the macabre details, dutifully and with furrowed brow.

  “Take them away!” said Rooth. “My digestive system demands an
ounce of respect. And in any case, I was there and saw it all live.”

  Live? Münster thought. Does he call this live? It’s a long time since I’ve seen anything so stone-cold dead. He sighed, then gathered up the photographs, leaving two of them lying there as a reminder of the subject of their discussions.

  “Let’s take the forensics to start with,” he said. “Where’s Jung, by the way?”

  “He was going to speak to that Bonger character,” said Moreno. “He’ll turn up shortly, no doubt.”

  “The forensics,” said Münster again. “No further news, I’m afraid, just confirmation of what we know already. Waldemar Leverkuhn was killed by twenty-eight deep knife wounds to his stomach, chest, and neck. Mainly to his stomach. Pretty accurate, it seems. But if you stab somebody that many times, accuracy is neither here nor there. Well, what does that suggest?”

  “A hot-headed type,” said Krause with restrained enthusiasm. “Must be out of his mind—or was when he did it, at least.”

  “As high as a kite,” said Rooth, swallowing the last of the chocolate cookie. “A junkie coming off a bad trip. There’s no limit to what they can do, dammit. What does Meusse have to say about the stab wounds?”

  Münster agreed. “Yes, you could well be right. The wounds vary a lot. Some of them are deep—five or six inches—others superficial. Some caused not much more than scratches. The killer was right-handed, by the way—no doubt about that.”

  “Great,” said Moreno. “A right-handed drug addict. We’ve got only about three thousand of those in town. Can’t we hit upon some more interesting theory? If there’s anything I hate about this glamorous job of ours, it’s having to spend time grubbing around the drug addicts.”

  Münster folded his hands and rested his chin on his knuckles.

  “We can’t always set the agenda,” he said. “Unfortunately. But if we put off speculations until we’ve finished going through the facts, we can see where we’ve got to.… Knowledge is the mother of speculation, as Reinhart says. We don’t know a lot, but we do know a bit.”

  “Let’s hear it, then,” said Rooth. “But screw poetry for the time being.”

  “The weapon …,” said Münster, refusing to react, “the weapon seems to have been a pretty substantial knife. The blade was at least eight inches long. Sharp—presumably a carving knife pretty similar to the one Fru Leverkuhn described, and which, according to the same source, disappeared from its place in the kitchen at some point on the evening of the murder.…”

  “And which now,” said Rooth, “is almost certainly lying at the bottom of one of the canals. I may be wrong, but a quick calculation suggests that we have about three miles to choose from.”

  “Hmm,” said Heinemann. “Interesting. Purely from the point of view of probability, that is. Three thousand drug addicts times five thousand meters of canal.… That means that if we’re going to find both the killer and the murder weapon, the chances are … one in about nine million.”

  He leaned back in his chair and smoothed down his tie over his stomach.

  “How nice to see that we’re all so optimistic,” said Moreno as Jung appeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “But I was on official—”

  “Excellent,” said Rooth. “Sit down!”

  Münster cleared his throat. If only I could give all these comedy shows a miss, he thought. I’m not sufficiently arrogant yet, but no doubt that’ll come.

  “Regarding the time,” he said, “we can assume that Leverkuhn was murdered at some time between a quarter past one and a quarter past two. When I pressed Meusse a bit, he leaned toward the later half hour, in other words between a quarter to and a quarter past two.”

  “Hmm,” said Heinemann. “What time did his wife get home?”

  “Three or four minutes past,” said Moreno.

  “That narrows things down, then,” said Krause. “Assuming Meusse is right, that is.”

  “Meusse hasn’t gotten anything wrong for the past fifteen years,” said Rooth. “So, between a quarter to two and two. She must have been pretty damned close to bumping into him. Have we checked if she noticed anybody?”

  “Yes,” said Krause. “Negative.”

  “She could have been the one who did it, of course,” Heinemann pointed out. “Perhaps we shouldn’t exclude that possibility. Sixty percent of all men are murdered by their wives.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” wondered Rooth. “Thank God I’m not married.”

  “What I mean is …,” said Heinemann.

  “We know what you mean,” said Münster with a sigh. “We can discuss Fru Leverkuhn’s credibility later, but we’ll take the report from the lab first.”

  He fished the relevant papers out of the folder.

  “There was a hell of a lot of blood,” he continued, “both in the bed and on the floor. But they haven’t found any leads. No fingerprints apart from the victim’s and a couple of old ones of the wife’s—and the only mark on the floor was also from her: a footprint she made when she went in and found him. They had separate bedrooms, as I said earlier.”

  “What about the rest of the flat?” Moreno asked.

  “Only her fingerprints there as well.”

  “Sorry,” Heinemann interrupted. “But did she really go right up to the bed? Surely that wasn’t necessary. She must have seen that he was dead before she entered the room. We’d better look into whether she really needed to rummage around at the scene of the crime like that—”

  Krause interrupted him.

  “It was dark when she went in, she claims. Then she realized something was wrong and went back to switch on the light.”

  “Aha,” said Heinemann.

  “That fits in with the footprints in the blood,” explained Münster. “You might think it seems odd that the murderer could leave the scene without leaving any trace, but Meusse says that would not be anything remarkable. There was an awful lot of blood, but it wasn’t spurting out: most of it apparently ran out when the attack was over and done with. Evidently it depends on which sort of artery you happen to hit first.”

  “An old man’s blood,” said Rooth. “Viscous.”

  “That’s right,” said Münster. “It’s not even certain that the murderer would get any blood on his hands. Not very much, in any case.”

  “Great,” said Jung. “So we haven’t got a single goddamn clue from the forensic boys.… Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Hmm,” said Münster. “I’m afraid that’s the way it looks, yes.”

  “Good,” said Rooth. “In that case we’d better all have a cup of coffee. Otherwise we’ll get depressed.”

  He looked benevolently round the table.

  We could do with a chief inspector here, thought Münster as he rose to his feet.

  But that’s the way it was … Münster leaned back in his chair and raised his arms toward the ceiling while Rooth and Fröken Katz passed around the mugs.

  Exactly the way it was. For just over a year now their notorious chief inspector had been on leave, devoting himself to antiquarian books rather than to police work—and there were indications that he had no intention of returning to police duties at all.

  A lot of indications, in fact. It was Chief of Police Hiller who had insisted on what he called leave of absence. Van Veeteren himself—as Münster understood it at least—had been prepared to resign once and for all. To burn all bridges.

  Münster couldn’t help envying him just a little. The last time he had popped into Krantze’s—a cloudy afternoon in the middle of September—he had found Van Veeteren lounging in a worn leather armchair, at the rear of the shop under overloaded bookshelves, with an old folio volume on his knee and a glass of red wine on the armrest. The peaceful expression on his face had made him look not unlike a Tibetan lama.

  So there was good reason to assume that Van Veeteren had drawn a line under his police career.

  And Reinhart! Münster thought. Detective Intendent Re
inhart had spent the last three weeks at home babbling away to his eight-month-old daughter. Rumor had it that he intended to continue doing so until Christmas. An intention that—it was said—made Chief of Police Hiller froth at the mouth and turn cross-eyed in frustration. Temporarily, at least.

  There had been no question of appointing replacements, not for either of these two heavyweights. If there was an opportunity to cut down on expenses, that is of course what was done. No matter what the cost.

  The times they are a-changin’, Münster thought, taking a Danish pastry.

  “The wife’s a bit odd though, don’t you think?” suggested Krause. “Or at least, her behavior is.”

  “I agree,” said Münster. “We must talk to her again … today or tomorrow. But, of course, it’s hardly surprising if she seems a bit confused.”

  “In what way has she seemed confused?” asked Heinemann.

  “Well,” said Munster, “the times she gave are obviously correct. She did travel on the train she said she was on, and there really was a power failure last Saturday night. They didn’t get to Central Station until a quarter to two, an hour late, so she should have been at home roughly when she claims. One of the neighbors thinks he heard her as well. So, she finds her husband dead a few minutes past two, but she doesn’t ring the police until two forty-three. During that time she was out—she says she was going to report the incident at Entwick Plejn police station. But she goes back home when she discovers it’s closed.… I suppose one could have various views about that. Does anybody wish to comment?”

  A few seconds passed.

  “Confused,” said Rooth eventually. “Excessively confused.”

  “I suppose so,” said Moreno. “But wouldn’t it be more abnormal to behave normally in a situation like this? Mind you, she’d have had plenty of time to get rid of the knife—half an hour, at least.”

  “Did anybody see her while she was taking that walk?” Heinemann wondered.

  Münster shook his head.

  “Nobody has reported having done so yet, in any case. How’s the door-to-door going?”

  Krause stretched.