The Inspector and Silence

by Håkan Nesser

  She was sitting waiting for him in the cafe they’d agreed on, and he wondered again why she had preferred to meet him here rather than in her own home.

  To protect her privacy? he thought as he sat down opposite her. To keep something sacrosanct despite everything? That would be perfectly understandable.

  He introduced himself, and she reached out a hand over the table to greet him, somewhat nervously.

  ‘So, here we are,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get away earlier. A lot has happened today.’

  He nodded and dug out a toothpick. The thought suddenly struck him: I’m right. I can see it in her appearance and behaviour. How the devil could I have known that?

  ‘You understand what I want to talk to you about, I take it?’

  He was taking a big risk, but he’d decided on that opening gambit. There weren’t really any other possibilities. No alternative moves.

  She hesitated for a moment.

  ‘I think so.’

  He could see that there was no point in rushing her. It was more important to give her plenty of time, and let things come out in whatever order seemed most natural to her. Or rather, least unpleasant.

  ‘We’d been together for eight years before I caught on,’ she began. ‘Eight years, and married for five.’

  ‘It can be something that suddenly strikes,’ he said. ‘It might not have been there all the time.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ve tried to convince myself of that as well, but I don’t know if it would be much consolation. It’s so . . . well, so damned incomprehensible. It’s simply not possible to understand it, that’s the only conclusion I can reach. I just can’t get over it, I have to forget it and bury it. I thought that was my only chance – but now I realize that was also wrong, of course.’

  She paused and rummaged in her bag. A waiter appeared, and without even asking Van Veeteren ordered coffee and cognac for them both.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he said when she had lit a cigarette.

  She scraped with her fingernail at a speck of candle wax on the tablecloth, and blinked several times. The chief inspector was holding his breath; it was his very presence that was digging up these old horrors, but he hoped to reduce the awfulness to a minimum.

  ‘It went too far,’ she said. ‘What I can never forgive myself for is that I allowed it to go on for so long, instead of reacting to the signs immediately. Over six months . . . I just couldn’t believe it was true. It’s the kind of thing you read about, and . . . Well, you know what I mean.’

  Van Veeteren nodded.

  ‘It was in the bath that I caught him at it. Judith was only five, but old enough to understand what was going on. And to be ashamed. What was hardest to understand was that he could be so unconcerned about it.’

  ‘Did he admit it?’

  She inhaled and took a sip of cognac before replying.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Or maybe yes and no. He pretended that he didn’t know what I was talking about, but on the other hand he agreed to an immediate divorce. He moved out – I made him move out the very same day.’

  ‘And you no longer meet?’

  ‘No. When I’d got over the shock I hired a lawyer, of course. Prepared myself for a fight, but there was no fight. He gave up everything and left us without saying a word. That’s what I regard as proof that he admitted what he’d done.’

  Another pause. Van Veeteren snapped the toothpick and took a cigarette instead.

  ‘How far had it gone?’ he asked.

  ‘A long way,’ was all she said.

  ‘Did you have her examined?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes, I wanted to know. Oh yes, he’d gone all the way. There was no doubt about it.’

  The chief inspector felt a surge of disgust rising within him, and he emptied his glass of cognac as an antidote.

  ‘When exactly was this?’ he asked.

  ‘Four years ago,’ she said. ‘Four years and two months.’

  ‘You didn’t report him?’

  ‘No,’ she said, sighing deeply. ‘I didn’t.’

  Van Veeteren observed her hands clamped round her glass. He could have reproached her now. Turned up the heat and asked how the hell she could have failed to follow up something as horrendous as that – but of course, there was no need.

  No need to torture her any longer. The whole conversation had taken less than ten minutes, and it had turned out exactly as he’d expected.

  Or dreaded, rather.

  Knew it would?

  ‘I’ll try to make sure that you are not involved in what happens next,’ he said. ‘But it’s not easy to see how it will—’

  She interrupted him.

  ‘I’ll say my piece,’ she assured him. ‘You don’t need to worry. I don’t want to make the same mistake twice.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I’ll be in touch when the time comes.’

  They shook hands again, and he took his leave. When he emerged into the street, he was shivering. It was a chill that had nothing to do with the warm, pleasant summer evening. Nothing at all.

  He found a public telephone and called Sorbinowo again, but all he got was a recording of Miss Miller’s voice informing him that the police station was now closed for the day, and providing two numbers to call if he had relevant information to provide regarding the Waldingen affair.

  Oh yes, Van Veeteren thought. I have relevant information all right.

  But he didn’t make any further calls. There were still several question marks – with regard to Yellinek’s death, for instance – and what he would most like to do was to serve up the solution to his colleagues on a plate. All done and dusted.

  That had a whiff of vanity, of course; but if this really was to be his last case, perhaps he could be forgiven that.

  And needless to say there was nothing – nothing at all – better able to eliminate any further question marks than a car journey. A long, calm drive through the night.

  He pondered for a while. Then made up his mind: together with Penderecki.

  Yet again Penderecki.

  36

  ‘It’s five to twelve,’ said Reinhart. ‘We might as well go straight to the hotel. I wouldn’t have thought they’d still be sitting around deliberating.’

  ‘We can always phone and check,’ said Jung. ‘Mind you, I don’t know what we can say about these ladies.’

  ‘Good God, no,’ groaned Reinhart. ‘Although Lauremaa had a point when she talked about them having their differences.’

  ‘She certainly did,’ said Jung, suppressing a yawn. ‘But surely there was something distinctly unchristian about them, don’t you reckon?’

  The visit to Wolgershuus was over and done with, and perhaps the word ‘unchristian’ was not the most appropriate in the context. But when Jung tried to sum up his impressions, he couldn’t think of anything better off the top of his head. All he knew was that he’d never experienced anything like it. Never ever.

  So unchristian. Even so, they had followed the agreed tactic to the letter. Discretion. Professional approach; no more fuss than necessity and the law required. Without too much effort they had found a neutral room, away from the main corridors, and summoned the women in order to pass on the news without further ado.

  The news of Oscar Yellinek’s death.

  One at a time. First Madeleine Zander.

  Reaction: none at all. She listened to them for half a minute, then turned on her heel and left the room. Jung thought he had noticed a few twitches at one side of her mouth, but that was all. There was no denying the fact that both he and Reinhart had felt somewhat uncomfortable after that first round – and when Mathilde Ubrecht was ushered in and presented with the same unvarnished facts as her friend, Jung at least was worried that they were going to be faced with the same silent reaction all three times. The same rigid autism.

  But that was not what happened. Instead, in the case of Miss Ubrecht, it was a dam bursting. Before they had th
e chance to take in what was happening, she had already lashed out with several blows and kicks (Jung’s head, Reinhart’s shin, Jung’s back), hurled a chair and a vase across the room and run screaming straight into a wall. The latter – they assumed, at least – was a desperate attempt to knock herself senseless. They eventually forced her down to the floor, and by the time the significantly more hardened medical orderlies arrived, her bellowing had begun to sound more like a sort of epileptic gurgling. The older of the two orderlies produced a syringe and without any hesitation stuck it into her stomach, whereupon she lost consciousness after about ten seconds.

  To be on the safe side, the orderlies stayed in an adjoining room when it was time for the third confrontation – with Ulriche Fischer, to whom Jung had already spoken. But when Reinhart delivered the news to her face, this time very cautiously and on his guard, she reacted at first as silently as Madeleine Zander. But then she slumped down over the table, her arms clasped round her head, and burst out crying.

  ‘I expected this!’ she whimpered, rubbing her fists back and forth over her face and the top of her head. ‘There was no other explanation! He would never have abandoned us like that! He just couldn’t!’

  Not much more was said, and Inspector Jung at least was so shattered by now that he felt nothing more than extreme and genuine gratitude to the doctor who had been summoned in connection with Miss Ubrecht’s outburst, who hurried into the room and wondered what the hell was going on.

  ‘Routine investigation,’ Reinhart explained. ‘But we’ve finished now.’

  Jung felt ready to drop when he clambered out of the car in the car park outside Grimm’s Hotel. So much so that he firmly declined Reinhart’s offer of a nightcap, and instead went straight to his room and collapsed onto the bed without having taken off anything but his jacket and shoes.

  A hell of a Wednesday as somebody had said.

  There was something about Penderecki.

  Something about this pain-filled Polish requiem that was quite unlike anything else he knew, and which almost without exception made him feel liberated. Cleansed, and as tall as a cathedral.

  Touched by the divine, as Mahler would have said. His good friend the poet, that is. Not the composer.

  And of course it was also to do with suspense. Suspense loosening its grip, and suspense building up; a sort of acupuncture of the soul, and an escape route away from the torments of the flesh. Probably also Mahler’s words, he assumed . . . Something that applied to all music, in fact; but nowhere else was it so clear and so painfully beautiful as in Penderecki.

  And it was in this space, under this dome of cruel clarity that he drove the two hundred kilometres from Stamberg back to Sorbinowo.

  And in that space that he solved the remaining questions in the Waldingen case.

  This case that had been going on for two weeks now. No matter how he calculated this never-ending period, filled with evil, it was no more than fourteen days since he had stood in the car park and gazed out over the idyllic summer vista and the dark, glittering water.

  Two weeks.

  Two raped and murdered young girls. A priest beaten to death.

  A burned-down church and a sect in meltdown.

  That was the gist of it.

  The yield of his final case. A pretty good conclusion, he thought. No doubt about that.

  And the solution, what could you say about that? It had come to him via a mundane telephone directory. Thanks to an extremely trivial misspelling. The familiar old thought about lines and patterns and tuning in to existential processes felt so straightforward that he didn’t even bother to keep it in mind.

  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, he thought. At least one difference between real life and a game of chess.

  No, better to try to anticipate what would happen in a few hours’ time, and to concentrate on what remained to be done. The conclusion. Confronting the guilty people with what they were accused of. Making them give in and confess. Make them face up to the overwhelming proof, and watch them break down.

  The last verse. The checkmate manoeuvre.

  In the lowest possible number of moves.

  Needless to say he was tempted to leave this to the others, but it was his duty, he knew that. That as well.

  Patterns as patterns.

  He allowed himself only a five-minute stop on the way back to Sorbinowo, and when he finally walked through the door into Grimm’s Hotel after an absence of four days, it was no more than half past midnight. He asked to check the hotel ledger, and five minutes later he knocked on the door of Reinhart’s room with two beers in each hand.

  Two light and two dark.

  For the first time since that afternoon in the boat he felt the stimulus. That tingling feeling in his groin and thighs, and he knew that the time had come once more. Time to come to terms with it.

  After watching a rather insipid action thriller on the television, he went to bed around midnight, tried to masturbate himself to sleep, but wasn’t up to it. Lay awake for a few hours, waiting while the urge grew stronger and stronger and eventually dominated more or less every nook and cranny of his being. The compulsion. That evil instinct.

  In the end he got out of bed. It was only just starting to get light, and he hesitated for a moment. Stared out of the window at the narrow bands of red over the forest to the east. Thought about the girls. About their outspread legs and fluffy cunts. Their naked helplessness. Then he dressed, checked to make sure he had the condoms in his breast pocket – the little extra pleasure he derived from rolling them into place was not to be scoffed at. He smiled at his indistinct reflection in the mirror, tiptoed down the stairs and out through the kitchen door.

  Fetched his bicycle from the shed. Checked the tyre pressure and secured the rubber baton to the luggage carrier. Set off.

  It took him twenty minutes to get to the main road. The regular pedalling sparked off an impulse that aroused images in his mind’s eye of what was in store, overpowering and with no room for mercy.

  No room for mercy. The black rubber baton that forced its way in and opened up the way. Their smoothly resilient skin. So smooth and so magnificently resilient. The hole, that hole. The pleasure that passeth all understanding. The wild terror in their eyes before he extinguished the sparkle. Extinguished it for ever.

  Powerful images. Irresistible images. He checked his watch. Only half past three. He would have to lie down in the forest and wait for a few hours, but that didn’t seem much of a problem. The main point was that the time had come once more. That before long – before the day that was just breaking had come to a close – he would meet another one . . . Fair hair: he hoped that she would have long, fair hair this time. Yes indeed, if circumstances dictated that he would have a choice, that’s the one he would select.

  He pedalled away, and listened to the rhythm that welled up inside him.

  37

  There were three cars.

  Van Veeteren, Reinhart and Kluuge were in the first one. Then came Tolltse and Lauremaa, with Jung and Servinus bringing up the rear. At his own request Suijderbeck stayed behind in the police station; obviously it was not a bad idea to have some back-up there. In case something went wrong – it had happened before.

  They set off at exactly a quarter to four, when the first signs of dawn were no more than a faint hint over the string of lakes and the sleeping forests. Waking everybody up, assembling and bringing them all up to date had taken a fair amount of time; the chief inspector had reported, elaborated and explained at a leisurely pace, but once the truth had sunk in everybody agreed that there was no real reason to wait until a new day had dawned.

  Better to strike while the iron is hot – both Reinhart and Van Veeteren were well aware what a few extra hours presented unnecessarily to a murderer might lead to. In the worst-case scenario.

  And there were indications that this was a worst-case scenario.

  They arrived at twenty minutes past four. A grey mist was slowly lifting over
the lake, and the forest was filled with the sound of birds. They parked in a row on the narrow dirt road, and approached the house in close formation; the chief inspector belted twice on the door, but there was no sign of life.

  He tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked, and as quietly as possible the whole group crept in and assembled in the pitch-black living room. Jung found a switch and turned on the light. The chief inspector nodded to Kluuge, and they set off together up the stairs.

  They paused halfway up. A door opened on the upper floor and Mrs Fingher came towards them.

  She was wearing slippers and a worn blue dressing gown, but displayed no obvious signs of having been woken up.

  Van Veeteren nodded again at Kluuge.

  ‘Mrs Fingher,’ said Kluuge. ‘I’d like to arrest you on suspicion of having murdered Oscar Yellinek, and for . . .’

  He lost the thread. Would like to? Reinhart thought.

  ‘. . . And for complicity in the murders of Clarissa Heerenmacht and Katarina Schwarz. You have the right to remain silent, but anything you say may be used in evidence against you.’

  Mrs Fingher stood still and hung on to the banister. A shudder passed over her roughly chiselled face, then she sank down onto the stair and buried her face in her hands. Five seconds passed.

  ‘It’s all over now,’ said Van Veeteren, holding out his hand.

  She grasped it and he led her down to the living room. Sat her down on one of the upright armchairs and waited for a few more seconds. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose.

  ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s all over now.’

  ‘Where’s your son?’ Reinhart asked.

  She gestured with her head towards the upper floor. Reinhart and Jung set off up the stairs and vanished into the darkness.

  ‘Why did you kill Oscar Yellinek?’ the chief inspector asked.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I had to,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ said the chief inspector.

  ‘He turned up.’

  ‘Turned up?’