The Inspector and Silence

by Håkan Nesser

  She pointed at the rubber thing he was holding in his hand.

  ‘This?’ he said, with a smile. ‘Would you like me to show you how to use it?’

  She checked her watch.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t have time,’ she said. ‘I’m just looking for my hairslide. I lost it up here yesterday.’

  ‘Your hair?’ he said, and gulped.

  ‘Yes, it was somewhere near here.’

  She made a sweeping gesture.

  ‘Let me help you to find it.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Thank you! How nice of you. This way!’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Reinhart.

  The girl slithered down from the rock.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  They got out of the boat and pulled it up a few metres onto the narrow beach.

  ‘We’re looking for somebody,’ explained the chief inspector. ‘Haven’t you been told not to go off on your own today?’

  ‘No . . . Well, yes, but I’m waiting for a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’ said Reinhart.

  ‘Yes, she was just going to fetch something.’

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘A hairslide.’

  ‘And where had she left it?’ asked Van Veeteren impatiently.

  ‘She’d lost it up there in the woods yesterday.’

  She gestured up the slope.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Reinhart.

  ‘Ruth Najda. And who are you?’

  ‘We’re police officers,’ said Reinhart. ‘So you’re saying that your friend has gone up into the woods to look for her hairband, is that right?’

  ‘Hairslide,’ said Ruth Najda. ‘Not hairband.’

  ‘Okay. When did she set off?’

  The girl checked her watch then shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘A quarter of an hour ago, more or less. She said she’d be back in five minutes, but that was thirteen and a half minutes ago.’

  ‘Hell and damnation!’ said Reinhart. ‘Show us exactly which way she took!’

  ‘Why are you so—’ Ruth Najda began, but the chief inspector interrupted her.

  ‘Get on with it!’ he bellowed. ‘We’re in a hurry and this isn’t a game!’

  ‘Okay,’ said the girl, and set off through the alders.

  ‘How’s it going?’ yelled Suijderbeck into the microphone. ‘Can’t you switch off that damned engine so that we can hear what you say?’

  ‘It’s not easy to fly a helicopter without an engine,’ explained the voice. ‘But we caught a glimpse of somebody down below a couple of minutes ago. It might have been him. And the guys down there are hot on his heels.’

  ‘Well done!’ roared Suijderbeck. ‘Make sure he doesn’t get away, because if he does I’ll be up there with you before you know what’s hit you, and kick you all out one after another. Is that clear?’

  There was a crackling noise over and over again. Then:

  ‘Your name’s Suijderbeck, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘I thought I recognized your style, that’s all.’

  ‘Over and out,’ said Suijderbeck.

  It was Reinhart who saw them first.

  He glimpsed the girl’s long, fair hair flashing past some tree trunks, then Wim Fingher’s back appeared briefly. Then they came into full view as they emerged from between two large, moss-covered boulders – first the girl and then, ever so close behind, the murderer, clutching a black baton in his hand.

  Van Veeteren stopped dead. Reinhart stumbled, recovered his balance and reached for his gun – but it wasn’t necessary: at that very moment there was a commotion in the thicket and two uniformed police officers came racing out. One threw himself at Wim Fingher in a flying tackle that wouldn’t have been out of place in any American B-movie you could think of, the chief inspector thought. It sent him crashing to the ground, and the other officer stood with his legs wide apart, his pistol aimed at the murderer’s head from a metre away.

  ‘If you move just one centimetre, you fucking monster, I’ll blow your brains out,’ he explained patiently.

  All in all a very professional operation, and the chief inspector suddenly felt utterly exhausted.

  Bottomless exhaustion, and he realized that he hadn’t slept a wink for over twenty-four hours.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ asked Helene Klausner.

  ‘It was necessary’ Reinhart explained. ‘He’s sick.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reinhart. ‘Did he touch you?’

  ‘Touch me? No, he was just helping me to find my hair-slide. This.’

  She waved something sky-blue. The chief inspector nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘But shouldn’t you be having breakfast now? Off you go!’

  ‘All right. Bye-bye!’

  They watched the girls slowly ambling towards the red building a little further along the shore.

  ‘Can I borrow your diving mask now?’ they heard the dark-haired girl ask. ‘I was waiting all the time, and you promised . . .’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said the blonde cheerfully, setting up her hair with a well-practised movement. ‘Let’s have breakfast first, though.’

  The chief inspector cleared his throat and went to sit down in the boat.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to cast off.’

  Kluuge tried to glare into the telephone receiver.

  It was three in the afternoon, he was in bed and Deborah was massaging his shoulders and chest. She was sitting astride him, and he could feel the baby pressing up against his own stomach. It was a divinely inspired moment, in both a spiritual and physical sense, no doubt about that. And then Chief of Police Malijsen interrupted it with a telephone call!

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you let me know?’ he screeched. ‘You ought to have known that you couldn’t handle a situation like this on your own. It was just an amazing stroke of luck that it didn’t end in chaos! I shall make sure personally that you get . . .’

  Kluuge placed the receiver under the pillow and thought for three seconds. Then he took it out again.

  ‘Shut your trap, you stupid bugger!’ he said, and hung up.

  ‘Well done,’ said Deborah.

  40

  As far as he could recall, those present were the same as last time, and it was a while before he was alone with the editor.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Przebuda. ‘I expect you’ve seen it before?’

  Van Veeteren nodded.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I can’t say that Mazursky is one of my favourites, but The Tempest is one of his best.’

  ‘I agree entirely,’ said Przebuda. ‘Three cheers for The Tempest. There’s something special about Crete as well.’

  ‘There certainly is,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

  Przebuda shook his head demonstratively. Then he smiled.

  ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘But I have a decent meal up my sleeve, and a few good wines. A Margaux ’71 and a Mersault.’

  ‘Why are we hanging around here, then?’ wondered the chief inspector.

  ‘Case closed, I take it?’ assumed Przebuda after the mushroom pasty, veal medallions in a lemon sauce, watercress salad and one and a half bottles of wine.

  ‘Yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Case closed. A very nasty business. There are no extenuating circumstances when children are attacked. And heaven remains silent.’

  ‘And heaven remains silent,’ echoed Przebuda. ‘Yes, it tends to do that. How did you work it out? That he was the one, I mean?’

  The chief inspector leaned back and paused for a few moments before answering.

  ‘It was in the telephone directory,’ he said eventually.

  ‘The telephone directory?’

  ‘Yes. Do you remember Ewa Siguera?’

  The editor hesitated.

  ‘Er, that woman in the photograph?’

  ‘Yes. Her name
wasn’t Siguera. It was Figuera. You’d heard wrongly. Or written it down wrongly.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Przebuda and froze, his glass halfway to his mouth. ‘You surely don’t mean that if . . .’

  The chief inspector shook his head.

  ‘No. Don’t worry. The dead were already dead. It’s just that things might have gone a bit faster.’

  Mind you, on second thoughts he realized that this wasn’t actually the case. The reverse was more likely in fact. If he’d had the right name from the start, he might well never have caught on to the realities. Not in time, anyway – in time to prevent that girl with the blonde hair and the hairslide from . . . No, he preferred not to imagine what might have happened.

  Przebuda was sitting there in silence, and seemed to be meditating.

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘What the devil had Ewa Siguera – sorry, Figuera – to do with Wim Fingher?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Nothing at all. This really is an excellent wine. It’s so rare to find this very dry aftertaste penetrating even under the tongue . . .’

  ‘I have another bottle,’ said Przebuda. ‘Cheers!’

  They drank.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Nothing at all, as I said,’ the chief inspector resumed. ‘But when I was preparing to call Figuera, I came across the name Fingher on the same page. The same column, in fact, just a couple of lines further down. It’s not exactly a common name . . .’

  Przebuda tried to nod and shake his head at the same time.

  ‘Anyway, then I remembered the two comments I’d heard when I called on them the second time, on the Thursday. It must have been Mathias Fingher – the father, that is – who said both of them. He said that they only had one son, and he mentioned that his wife was going to visit a grandchild. Or it could have been her who said that.’

  Przebuda said nothing, but toyed with his glass.

  ‘Nevertheless . . . ?’ he said eventually. ‘It can’t have been a very convincing indication, surely? Why should he be a murderer, just because he’d been married and had a daughter?’

  The chief inspector shrugged.

  ‘I seem to recall that the last time we met, my editor friend spoke warmly about something called intuition. His wife had retained his name – she didn’t know why, but it acquired a significance in the end.’

  ‘Well I’ll be damned!’ said Przebuda after another pause. ‘It gives the impression of having been stage-managed. Who was this Ewa Figuera, then?’

  Van Veeteren lit a cigarette.

  ‘She was a friend of one of the three women out at the camp,’ he said. ‘She has nothing at all to do with the Pure Life. She just happened to be visiting them for one day only last summer, and . . .’

  ‘And that was when I was there and took the picture,’ said Przebuda. ‘It’s absolutely amazing, because if . . .’

  He fell silent and stared up at the ceiling, as if searching for an answer among the dark recesses.

  ‘. . . If I hadn’t shown you that picture, and all the rest of it. What an amazing coincidence!’

  ‘There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ said the chief inspector. ‘This was merely one of the threads leading us to the goal. There are hundreds of other possible threads. If life is a tree, it shouldn’t make all that much of a difference if you happen to land up on one particular branch or any other – if you’re looking for the root, that is. Or whatever else it is you’re looking for.’

  Przebuda thought that over for a while.

  ‘I’ll go and fetch that other bottle,’ he said in due course.

  ‘What about the women?’ asked Przebuda a little later. ‘Those tight-lipped priestesses – why the hell did they refuse to say anything?’

  ‘They thought that was the party line,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Presumably Yellinek gagged them in connection with the disappearance of the other girl, before he was murdered himself and vanished into thin air. And then I suppose it was just a question of following the prophet’s word. As usual, you might say. Both Mohammed and Christ have been dead for quite a long time, if I’m not much mistaken.’

  Przebuda smiled.

  ‘How are they now? The women, I mean.’

  Van Veeteren hesitated for a moment.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘Two of them left Wolgershuus together this afternoon. The third one, Madeleine Zander, has apparently asked to stay on.’

  ‘Stay on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah well, perhaps that indicates that she suspects she’s not right in the head,’ muttered Przebuda as he squeezed the last drops out of the final bottle of Burgundy.

  ‘What about Wim?’ he asked. ‘Wim Fingher?’

  The chief inspector shrugged again.

  ‘A case for the medics, I should think. It’s odd that he can be more or less normal nearly all the time . . . As far as we know he’s only attacked his own daughter, and then these two. I can’t say if he’ll end up in jail or in a loony bin. I’m not even sure what I think myself.’

  ‘But it will be jail for Mirjan Fingher, I suppose?’

  ‘Without a doubt. What she did was both rational and logical.’

  ‘And defensible as well, perhaps,’ said Przebuda. ‘Obviously, you can’t just wander around killing any priest you come across . . . But from a mother’s point of view . . .’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘One might also ask who was worst affected by this nasty business. The poor girls and their families, of course, but I don’t think we should forget Mathias Fingher in this connection. Maybe you could call in on him if you happen to be in his neighbourhood.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Andrej Przebuda, raising his glass. ‘Poor devil! Anyway, let’s finish this off.’

  It was turned half past one when he crossed Kleinmarckt for the last time, on his way back to Grimm’s. The bar next door to the town hall was still open, but there was not much sign of night life there. The reporters had evidently been summoned back home as soon as the case was solved; as soon as the final whistle blew. As usual. The priority now was to construct a psychological portrait of the murderer instead – childhood, injustices suffered at school, let-downs, and all the rest of it.

  The dead are dead, Van Veeteren thought. But the killers are still alive and are newsworthy. Every dog has its day.

  Reinhart, Jung and the rest of them had also left Sorbinowo that afternoon: he was the only one to stay on for an extra day.

  As if that was what decency required of him, he thought. As if all those involved needed to have a line drawn underneath what had happened. Guilty or innocent. Victim or perpetrator.

  All these social castaways, he thought.

  And all this evil. All this accursed, uncontrollable murkiness that had flooded the stage on which he’d been performing for the last thirty-five years now. Always lurking in the background and ready to strike the moment you turned your back or dropped your guard. This brooding enemy that cast a shadow over all happiness, and made all rest seem indecent.

  Was it more than just an illness, this murkiness? It didn’t matter, you only needed to look at the result, at the people affected – maybe this was the context in which the problem ought to be described. His own problem, and that weighing down on everybody else.

  As the difference between the motives of actions, and their consequences. Was this the vital factor that created evil?

  Not really. He could see that this was merely one angle of incidence. One of several hundred more possibilities. As he walked down the steps towards the lake, he began to wonder if the Pure Life would ever resurrect itself. But he soon realized that this was not the heart of the matter either.

  Would all those people, all those misled members, be able to resurrect themselves – that was the question. Resurrect themselves as – as people.

  Then another concept occurred to him.

  God’s finger.

  God’s Fingher?

  No, ti
me to put a stop to all this. Time to stop theorizing simply in order not to have to think about the bodies of those dead girls. I shall never be able to forget them.

  And as he entered Grimm’s Hotel, it occurred to him that this was the very evening, the very night, when he ought to have been going to bed at Christos. A hundred metres from the Venetian harbour at Rethymnon.

  By hook or by crook.

  Too bad, he thought. I’ll call her when she gets back home instead. Time and space are concepts for cretins.

  Yes indeed, for cretins.

  SEVEN

  10 AUGUST

  41

  When he woke up. the dream was lingering on inside his head.

  The image with the pale girls in the background, at the very edge of the water. Slim figures in groups of three or four – and a strange, shimmering light over the lake and over the outline of the forest to the east. Morning. Yes, definitely morning.

  The two dead bodies in the foreground.

  Naked and strangely twisted. Covered in wounds and swellings, and big black holes instead of eyes – but even so they seem to be staring at him, accusingly.

  Girls’ bodies. Dead and violated girls’ bodies.

  Then the fire. Tongues of flame spurting out of the water, and soon the whole image is consumed by flames. A sea of fire. He can feel the heat in his face. Then he turns his back on it all and hurries away.

  The same short dream. No more than one sequence, or a tableau. The third night now.

  And when the image of Wim Fingher crops up, he is already awake. Inexorably awake. The murderer. Throughout the whole of the investigation he has been a mere stone’s throw away from the crime scene, and on two occasions Van Veeteren has been face to face with him without reacting.

  Unforgivable.

  The ultimate signal.

  He got out of bed. Opened the balcony door: pale sky, a warm, barely noticeable breeze.

  A few half-hearted back exercises in front of the mirror.