by Håkan Nesser
‘Well,’ said Reinhart, ‘I suppose all that’s left for me is the young ladies of a more tender age.’
‘Good hunting,’ said Jung, standing up.
‘Many thanks,’ said Reinhart. ‘See you later this afternoon.’
Belle Moulder looked sullen and scared. And as insignificant as they come, Reinhart thought, especially as he’d spent over two hours on the phone and in the car in order to get to her.
After the dramatic break-up of the camp at Waldingen, the girl had evidently spent a couple of days at home in Stamberg before being despatched to an aunt in Aarbegen with similar religious convictions. She was expected to spend the rest of the summer holiday there saying her prayers, bathing in the river and undertaking long, invigorating bicycle rides supervised by two corpulent cousins – in order to lick her wounds and recover from the traumatic days in the Sorbinowo forests, one assumed.
But that was no criticism of the Pure Life. God forbid.
Edwina Moulder welcomed him in shorts and on a yellow garden hammock, and it soon became obvious that she had no intention of leaving her niece alone with the police officer.
Not for a second, Reinhart decided on the basis of the determined expression on her face. He spent a couple of moments considering the circumstances and his subsequent strategy, then he fell into line and sat down on the garden chair designated for him, under the parasol.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ he began, ‘but we have to find the madman who’s committed these murders.’
‘We understand that,’ said Edwina Moulder.
‘Good,’ said Reinhart, glancing at the girl. ‘I had intended to take Belle with me to the police station – but naturally it would be better if we could sort things out here instead.’
‘Belle really has told you everything she knows, and besides—’
Reinhart raised a warning finger.
‘Steady on now. Your niece was one of those who obstructed the police more than anybody else at the beginning of our investigation, so everything depends on whether or not she is prepared to cooperate.’
‘What . . . ?’
‘As long as you don’t interrupt, you are welcome to sit in on our conversation,’ Reinhart explained. ‘But I must insist that you don’t say anything. Is that clear?’
‘What? You come here and—’
‘Is that clear?’ Reinhart said again.
‘Hmm,’ said Edwina Moulder.
Reinhart took a sip of the watery coffee. Adjusted his chair so that he didn’t need to look at the very suntanned aunt, and could concentrate on the girl instead.
‘Belle Moulder?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve spoken to the police several times already about these most unpleasant goings-on . . .’
The girl nodded at him, without looking him in the eye.
‘And to start with, you behaved very badly – is that right?’
Belle Moulder examined her thumbnails.
‘But let’s not worry about that now. I take it for granted that you are telling the truth, and helping me as much as you can. If I notice that you are making things up or refusing to answer, I’ll have to drive you into town and interrogate you at the police station. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Excellent. What I’m most interested in is what happened that Sunday evening when Clarissa Heerenmacht went missing. I take it you remember that pretty clearly?’
‘Fairly.’
The girl shrugged, and tried to look nonchalant. Reinhart couldn’t help thinking about Winnifred and the child they were expecting.
Surely it wasn’t going to be one like this?
He cleared his throat and tried to banish the thought.
‘Why did you leave Clarissa alone down there at the bathing rock?’
‘She wanted to be on her own.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Had you quarrelled?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was Clarissa upset when you left her alone?’
‘No.’
‘Happy?’
‘She was the same as always.’
‘What was she like when she was the same as always?’
‘Er, like she always was.’
Reinhart took another sip of coffee. It hadn’t become any better.
‘And then you spoke to Yellinek.’
‘What?’
‘You had a conversation with Yellinek later that evening. When was that?’
‘Er, it . . . it was after evening prayers.’
‘What time would that be?’
‘Half past nine . . . A quarter to ten, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been asked about that before. We don’t . . . didn’t . . . keep all that close a check on time at Waldingen. We didn’t need to, we were always called up when necessary . . . But it was round about then.’
‘Between half past nine and a quarter to ten?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Clarissa.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’d gone missing, of course.’
‘You knew that she’d gone missing?’
‘Of course. She wasn’t there for dinner. Not there for PT, nor for prayers.’
‘What did Yellinek want to know?’
Belle Moulder hesitated for a second.
‘If I knew anything. I mean, nobody had seen her since we were down by the rock – I suppose I was the last person to see her.’
‘Can you remember exactly what Yellinek said?’
‘He asked if I knew where she was.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘That I didn’t know, of course.’
‘And then? You were talking for ten minutes after all, weren’t you?’
‘No, not as long as that. He sat thinking as well.’
‘But he must have asked you other questions?’
‘Yes, what I’d been doing that afternoon and so on, but nothing special.’
‘Nothing special?’
‘Belle has told you all that already,’ interrupted Edwina Moulder.
‘How do you know?’ asked Reinhart.
‘Eh?’
‘I asked you how you could know that,’ said Reinhart, angrily. ‘Have you read the minutes of the police interview? If you can’t hold your tongue I must ask you to go away and cut your hedge, or whatever. Is that clear?’
Edwina Moulder opened her mouth, then closed it again. Then she looked down and seemed to have decided it was best not to say anything.
‘Anyway,’ said Reinhart. ‘What else?’
‘What do you mean, what else?’
The same snooty nonchalance, he noted. Despite the fact that she still looked scared. Perhaps that’s the way kids were at that age?
‘What else did Yellinek have to say? Don’t play the innocent, young lady.’
‘Eh?’ said Belle Moulder. ‘He didn’t say much at all.’
‘He asked you not to say anything, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, of course. Although it was mainly the sisters who said that later.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, and then we said a prayer.’
‘You and Yellinek?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of a prayer?’
‘Eh?’
‘What sort of a prayer? What did it say?’
‘It . . . No, I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Repeat the prayer for me now!’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, like, he was the one who did the praying. I just repeated it silently.’
He did the praying, I just repeated it silently, thought Reinhart, and sighed.
‘So you don’t remember the words?’
‘No . . . No, I don’t.’
‘And this took ten minutes?’
‘He sat thinking as wel
l, as I said.’
Reinhart lit his pipe and waited for a while.
‘Okay,’ he said, and glanced at Edwina Moulder. ‘Did he touch you?’
‘What?’ said Edwina Moulder.
Reinhart blew a cloud of smoke in her face.
‘The final warning,’ he said before turning his attention back to the girl. ‘Well, did he touch you?’
‘He just gave me a hug.’
‘Just gave you a hug?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
She seemed a bit confused.
‘From behind?’
‘Yes.’
Reinhart bit hard on the stem of his pipe.
‘While you were praying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Only then?’
‘Yes.’
Edwina Moulder’s suntan seemed to have ebbed out into the yellow garden hammock, and her jaws were twitching and squeaking softly.
‘And then?’
‘Then? Er, then he left.’
‘Going where?’
Another shrug.
‘I don’t know. Headed for the lake, I think.’
‘The bathing rock?’
‘Could be.’
‘But you don’t know? He didn’t say what he was going to do?’
‘No, but . . .’
‘Well?’
‘I think he was going to go to the rock. He might have said that, but . . . No, I don’t remember.’
Reinhart paused, but nobody said anything, neither the girl nor her aunt.
‘So,’ he tried again, ‘you think Oscar Yellinek went down to the bathing rock some time round about ten o’clock or shortly before that, on Sunday evening?’
‘Yes. Maybe, in any case.’
‘Did you see him again after that?’
She paused to think.
‘No . . . No, I didn’t.’
‘Do you know if anybody else saw him after that?’
‘I don’t know. But I don’t think any of the girls did.’
He waited for a few moments, but she just sat there looking at her knees, especially the right one, on which he could detect the dirty remains of a plaster. He put his pipe away.
‘So, you were the last one to see Clarissa Heerenmacht alive, and possibly also the last one to see Oscar Yellinek before he went missing. Have you told the police that business about him maybe going down to the bathing rock?’
She thought it over.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Why?’
‘Nobody’s asked me that.’
‘Nobody’s asked you that?’
‘No.’
Typical, Reinhart thought.
Then he left the aunt and her niece to their fates, and returned to his car.
30
Uri Zander was dressed like somebody from the 1960s, and hanging over the corduroy sofa in the living room was a signed poster featuring a pop group called Arthur and the Motherfuckers. It was by no means impossible that Mr Zander was in fact identical with one of the four grim-faced youths in bomber jackets and sunglasses, but Van Veeteren didn’t bother to pursue the matter.
In any case, time had left its mark on Uri Zander. His hair was now long and straggling at the sides and at the back of his neck – the top of his head was empty – and a crescent-shaped pot belly coupled with a distinctly humped back made him reminiscent of a carelessly drawn question mark.
He didn’t seem particularly happy either.
‘Would you like anything to eat or drink?’ he asked as the chief inspector lowered himself warily into a red contraption made of soft plastic.
Van Veeteren shook his head.
‘Just as well, I’ve got nothing in.’
He took off his round-rimmed spectacles and started polishing them on his shirt, a tight-fitting flowery garment. The chief inspector thought he recalled the pattern from one of those summers at the beginning of time – probably sixty-seven or sixty-eight – when he had been so new to the game that he occasionally found himself rented out as a uniformed representative of the forces of law and order. Whenever the regular police were short-staffed, that is – which they were all the time.
All those pot-perfumed music festivals and free-love manifestations that, in retrospect at least, seemed to have been so thick on the ground. There were pleasanter memories than those, even in his life.
‘Well, as I explained,’ he began, ‘it’s not you we’re interested in, but your ex-wife. Madeleine Zander.’
‘Ugh!’ said Mr Zander.
‘I assume you’re familiar with the situation,’ the chief inspector went on. ‘We are busy with the murders of the young girls at Sorbinowo, and that sect she’s mixed up with is involved somehow or other. There were three women present at the camp, and Madeleine is one of them . . . As you may have heard, they all refused to cooperate with the police from the very beginning. I don’t know what you think of all this . . .’
‘Bloody idiots,’ said Uri Zander.
Ah, Van Veeteren thought. Good. He hadn’t really been worried, but there was always a risk that Uri Zander might line up on his ex-wife’s side. It was more than clear that this was not the case.
‘That accursed church,’ his host exploded. ‘And that priest . . . In my view the whole lot of ’em should be locked up; they’re a disgrace to the town. A disgrace to humanity dammit.’
‘So you know them all well?’ the chief inspector asked.
‘How can you avoid knowing about them these days?’ wondered Uri Zander, putting his glasses back on. He was evidently dissatisfied with the result as he took them off again right away and started polishing anew.
‘How long were you married to Madeleine?’
‘Eight years,’ said Zander. ‘From seventy-four to eighty-two. She was only twenty when we met. Got a bun in the oven the very first time we had a shag. We were on a tour, I thought she was your usual groupie of course, but in fact she was almost a virgin and then, well, things just went on from there.’
‘So you got married before the child was born?’
‘Of course. Oh, I liked her a lot in those days. And it was time to stop playing around. I was getting involved in too much of this and that, if you follow me?’
Van Veeteren nodded, as always in such circumstances.
‘Anyway, we settled down, I suppose you could say. I got myself a proper job and Madeleine looked after Janis, our daughter. Maybe things could have turned out okay – in any case, we were together for eight years: most marriages come to grief a lot sooner than that, don’t they?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Van Veeteren, who had stuck it out for more than three times as long as that. ‘No more children?’
Zander shook his head.
‘Nope. But when you think about it, it’s obvious it was doomed from the start.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Huh, I don’t really know. She was young and inexperienced. I’m seven years older, and then, well, it seemed as if she felt obliged to give everything a try, once she’d got over the first flush of being a mother. And she got over that pretty damned quick, by Christ she did.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Van Veeteren.
Zander finally replaced his spectacles and started groping around for cigarettes instead. He eventually found a pack under a pile of newspapers and magazines on the table. After a discreet check on how many were left, he offered one to the chief inspector and then lit up for both of them.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘she wasn’t exactly happy sitting around at home with the kid. With Janis, that is. She wasn’t happy about anything, if truth be told. She had loads of ideas about every bloody thing, but nothing was good enough to keep her happy in the long run.’
‘What kind of ideas?’ Van Veeteren wondered.
‘Everything you can think of,’ snorted Zander, forcing a cloud of smoke out through his hairy nostrils. ‘Every damned thing you can think of! She became a feminist, a Buddhist, a spiritualist – and in the end
she became a lesbian as well.’
‘Really?’ said the chief inspector.
‘Yes, really – although that soon passed. Everything passed. Some things lasted just for a few months, others for a bit longer, and every time she started out on something new it was as if nothing of the old stuff counted any longer. As if . . . As if she needed to start out on a new life twice a year, more or less. Not exactly a secure background for a little kid, don’t you think? It was all that jumping around from one thing to another that finished me off in the end.’
‘I understand,’ said Van Veeteren, and he really did. ‘But she seems to have stuck with the Pure Life – is that true?’
Uri Zander inhaled and nodded.
‘Yes, it seems so. You might ask yourself why. I think she was there at the very beginning, that must be over ten years ago now. It would have been better if she’d stuck to another of her fads, but I couldn’t give a toss about that now. Janis has flown the nest, and she has no intention of finding herself a new mum.’
‘Who looked after her?’ the chief inspector asked. ‘After you’d separated, that is.’
‘Me, of course,’ said Uri Zander, with perhaps a trace of humble pride in his voice. ‘For fuck’s sake, she couldn’t be left with that scatterbrained nincompoop! They used to get together over the weekend the first few years, but then Madeleine cleared off to the USA for six months – some fancy emancipated sect or other; I think they were at the heart of a scandal later on, but that was after she’d moved on – and since then they haven’t been in touch at all. Janis wasn’t interested, nor was the scatterbrained nincompoop, as I understand it.’
Van Veeteren devoted a few moments’ thought to this family idyll.
‘Do you know a lot about the Pure Life?’ he asked eventually. ‘What they get up to, that sort of thing?’
Zander puffed away at his cigarette and gazed out of the window, looking miserable.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Only what I’ve read in the newspapers. And what people have been saying after these murders, of course. Obviously, I think they’re a collection of right bastards, and it’s a bloody scandal that they can hoodwink so many poor swine who are so stupid that they can’t distinguish between a hole in the ground and their own arsehole. Youngsters and old dodderers and all the rest of ’em, just so that they can get screwed by the priest and shag one another.’
