Borkmann's Point: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery

by Håkan Nesser

  She closed her notebooks and saw from the clock that it was too late for that Italian film on the TV that she hadn’t really intended watching anyway. No, she was not one for the quantitative approach. Not for her the tedious search through haystack after haystack; Kropke could get on with that, with the help of Mooser and Bang. She had better things to do.

  She looked up again, just in time to see the moon glide into the rectangle formed by her window. Full and round... Juno!

  It was a sign, no doubt about it. There were other criteria to be applied to this case. Different assumptions. Intuition! Woman!

  None of this confounded left side of the brain! Yin, not yang!

  She sat smiling at the moon. I’m an idiot, she thought. A damn fool! Time to go to bed. Yes, no doubt about it. Lucky that nobody else knows how I’m using my brain. Or rather, abusing it!

  She stood up and went into the hall. She slid out of her dressing gown and examined herself in the mirror. Hmm, not too bad, she thought. Could easily be twenty-five, twenty-six, or thereabouts. A pity there isn’t a man waiting for me in my bed.

  But she certainly didn’t want him there tomorrow morning as well!

  And when she started to doze off a quarter of an hour later, all that drifted into her subconscious through the darkness were the imaginary images of the murderer. Insofar as there are any imaginary images...

  The Axman?

  Could they even be sure that it was a man?

  That question registered just as she abandoned her final foothold and submitted to the boundless embrace of slumber.

  There was no time to consider whether or not Wundermaas would have assigned her to one of the potentially fruitful haystacks.

  10

  “I sometimes get the feeling there is a guiding hand, despite everything,” said Bausen, handing Van Veeteren a glass.

  “God’s finger?”

  “Or the other one’s. Cheers! This is not strong; I didn’t want to kill off your taste buds. I thought we could sample a few decent things later.”

  They drank and the wicker chairs creaked in sympathy. Van Veeteren lit a cigarette. He’d succumbed to temptation and bought a pack at the newsstand outside his hotel. It was the first one since Erich had left him, so he felt entitled to it.

  “Anyway,” said Bausen, producing a shabby tobacco pouch vaguely reminiscent of something Van Veeteren had seen in Ernst Simmel’s throat. “We lead a fairly quiet life here. Lock up a few drunks, clear up the occasional case of assault and battery, confiscate a few bottles of the hard stuff from the boats coming in from the east, and suddenly we’re landed with this.

  Just when I’m about to call it a day. Don’t try to tell me that’s not a pointer!”

  “There are certain patterns,” said Van Veeteren.

  Bausen sucked fire into his pipe.

  “I’ve even given the racists a rap on the knuckles.”

  “Ah, yes. You have a refugee camp out at Taublitz, if I remember rightly,” said Van Veeteren.

  “We certainly do. These characters started stirring up trouble a few years ago, and in November last year there was a gang going around setting fire to things. They burned two huts down to the ground. I arrested eight of them.”

  “Excellent,” said Van Veeteren.

  “Four of them are busy rebuilding the cabins; can you imagine that? They’re working alongside the asylum seekers! They were allowed to choose between two years in jail or community service. Damned fine judge. Heinrich Heine his name was, the same as the poet. And now they’ve learned their lesson.”

  “Impressive,” said Van Veeteren.

  “I agree. Maybe it is possible to make human beings out of anybody at all, providing you go for it hook, line and sinker.

  Mind you, four of them preferred jail, of course.”

  “Are you intending to go on October first anyway, no matter what happens?” asked Van Veeteren. “They haven’t approached you about staying on, or anything?”

  Bausen snorted.

  “No idea. I’ve not heard any hints yet, in any case. I expect they hope you’ll sort this out in a couple of ticks so that they can send me packing in the usual manner when the day comes. I hope so as well, come to that.”

  Same here, thought Van Veeteren. He picked up his glass and looked around. Bausen had cleared the table and put a cloth on it, but apart from that, the patio looked the same as the previous time—books and newspapers and junk every-where. The serpentine rambling roses and the overgrown garden sucked up every noise and impression but their own; you could easily imagine having been transported to some Greene-esque or Conradian outpost. A mangrove swamp at the mouth of some river in the as yet unexplored continent. The heart of darkness, perhaps. A couple of topis, a jar of quinine tablets and a few mosquito nets would not have disturbed the image.

  But nevertheless, he was in the middle of Europe. A little toy jungle by a European sea. Van Veeteren took a sip of his drink, which smelled slightly of cinnamon, and felt a brief pang of satisfaction.

  “Your wife... ?” he said. Sooner or later he’d have to ask that question, after all.

  “Died two years ago. Cancer.”

  “Any children?”

  Bausen shook his head.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Divorced. Also two years ago, or thereabouts.”

  “Ah, well,” said Bausen. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  Bausen smiled.

  “A little trip into the underworld. I thought I’d show you my treasure trove.”

  They emptied their glasses, and Bausen led the way down into the cellar. Down the stairs, through the boiler room and a couple of storage rooms full of still more junk—bicycles, furniture, worn-out domestic appliances, rusty old garden tools, newspapers (some in bundles and some not), bottles, old shoes and boots...

  “I find it hard to let anything go,” said Bausen. “Mind your head! It’s a bit low down here.”

  Down a few more steps and along a narrow passage smelling of soil, and they came to a solid-looking door with double bolts and a padlock.

  “Here we are!” said Bausen. He unlocked the door and switched on a light. “Stand by to have your breath taken away!”

  He opened the door and allowed Van Veeteren to go in first.

  Wine. A cellar full of it.

  In the dim light he could just make out the dull reflections from the bottles stacked up in racks around the walls. In neat rows from floor to ceiling. Thousands of bottles, without doubt. He sucked the heavy air into his nostrils.

  “Aah!” he said. “You are rising in my estimation, Mr. Chief of Police. This denotes without doubt the pinnacle of civili-zation.”

  Bausen chuckled.

  “Exactly! What you see here is what will become my main occupation when I’ve retired. I’ve worked out that if I restrict myself to three bottles per week, they’ll last ten years. I doubt if I’ll want to continue any longer than that.”

  Van Veeteren nodded. Why haven’t I been doing something like this? he thought. I must start digging the moment I get home!

  It might be a bit problematic in view of the fact that he lived in an apartment block, of course, but maybe he could start by purchasing the goods instead. Perhaps he could rent an allotment or something of the sort? He made up his mind to take it up with Reinhart or Dorigues as soon as he was back home.

  “Please choose two for us to drink,” said Bausen. “A white and a red, I think.”

  “Meursault,” said Van Veeteren. “White Meursault, do you have any of that?”

  “A few dozen, I should think. What about the red?”

  “I’ll leave that to the boss of the investigation team,” said Van Veeteren.

  “Ha ha. All right, in that case I’ll propose a Saint Emilion ’71. If my friend the chief inspector doesn’t disapprove.”

  “I expect I’ll be able to force it down,” said Van Veeter
en.

  . . .

  “Not too bad an evening, on the whole,” he maintained two hours later. “It would be no bad thing if life were to be enhanced by rather more of this kind of thing—good food; intelligent conversation; sublime wines, to say the least; and this cheese.” He licked his fingers and took a bite of a slice of pear. “What do I owe you, by the way?”

  Bausen chuckled with pleasure.

  “Haven’t you figured it out? Put the Axman behind bars, for God’s sake, so that I can grow old with dignity!”

  “I knew there’d be a catch,” said Van Veeteren.

  Bausen poured out the last drops of the Bordeaux.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll have a whiskey to round it off later. Well?”

  “Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “It might be better if we take what you have to say first. You’ve been in it from the start, after all.”

  His host nodded and leaned back in his chair. He kicked off his shoes and put his feet up on a wooden crate of empty jars.

  Wiggling his toes for a while, he seemed to be lost in thought.

  “God only knows,” he said after a minute or two. “I have so many ideas and loose ends buzzing around in my head that I don’t know where to start. I’ve spent most of today wondering if there really is a connection, when you get right down to it.”

  “Explain!” said Van Veeteren.

  “Of course we’re dealing with the same murderer; I take that for granted—for simplicity’s sake if for no other reason. The same murderer, the same method, the same weapon. But the link between the victims—that’s what I’m a bit doubtful about. I’m a bit afraid of finding out something that we might jump at simply because we’ve found it. That they were on the same package holiday in Sicily in 1988, or were in the same hospital in October 1979, or some other damn thing.”

  “Two people always cross each other’s path somewhere or other,” said Van Veeteren.

  “Something like that, yes, and the fact that they do doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. It can, but it doesn’t have to, by any means.”

  “Don’t forget that we’re talking about three paths,” said Van Veeteren. “The murderer’s as well.”

  “Yes, fair enough; of course we have to look for the third link as well if we’re going to make a breakthrough. It’s just that I have the feeling it might be different in this case.”

  “You mean that Eggers and Simmel might have been picked out at random?”

  “Possibly,” said Bausen, staring out into the darkness. “Of course he has picked on Eggers and Simmel on purpose, but it’s not certain that they have much to do with him personally.

  There could be much looser connections, as it were.”

  “A list picked out at random from the phone book?” suggested Van Veeteren. “There are precedents, as you know. Harridge, if you remember him. He shut his eyes and stuck a pin into the Coventry edition of the telephone directory. Then went out and strangled them, one after another.”

  “I know,” said Bausen. “One every Saturday... finished off five before they got him. Do you know what scuppered him?”

  Van Veeteren shook his head.

  “One of the people he’d picked out, Emerson Clarke, if I remember rightly, was a former boxing champion. Harridge simply couldn’t cope with him.”

  “Tough luck,” said Van Veeteren. “But he ought to have taken the boxers off his list before he got started.”

  “Serves him right,” said Bausen.

  They both lit a cigarette and sat in silence for a while listening to the gentle rustling among the roses. A few hedgehogs had appeared and sniffed around before drinking from the saucer of milk outside the back door, and a few swallows were still sailing back and forth from underneath loose tiles. Perhaps not exactly the sounds and creatures of the jungle, but Van Veeteren still had a distinct feeling of the exotic.

  “Of course, we’ll be in a different position altogether if he beheads somebody else,” said Bausen.

  “No doubt about that,” said Van Veeteren.

  A cold wind suddenly swept through the garden.

  “Do you want to go indoors?” asked Bausen.

  “No.”

  “And you don’t have any suspicions?”

  Bausen shook his head and tasted his whiskey and water.

  “Too much water?”

  “No. Not even any... little glimmers of a suspicion?”

  Bausen sighed.

  “I’ve been in this job for more than twenty-five years. Half the population I know by name, and I know how they spend their lives—the rest I recognize by sight. There might be a thousand or two, newcomers and the like, whom I haven’t got a finger on, but apart from that... For Christ’s sake! I’ve thought about every one of them, I reckon, and come up with absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing!”

  “It’s not easy to imagine people as murderers,” said Van Veeteren. “Not until you meet them face-to-face, that is. Besides, he doesn’t have to be from here, does he?”

  Bausen thought for a moment.

  “You might be right there, of course, but I doubt it. I’d stake all I’ve got on his being one of our own. Anyway, it would be nice to be able to come up with something useful. For Christ’s sake, we’ve spent thousands of hours on this damned Eggers!”

  “There’s no justice in this job,” said Van Veeteren with a smile.

  “Not a trace,” said Bausen. “We might as well put our faith in the general public. They always come up with something.”

  “You may be right,” said Van Veeteren.

  Bausen started scraping out his pipe, looking as if he were turning something over in his mind.

  “Do you play chess?” he asked.

  Van Veeteren closed his eyes in delight. The icing on the cake, he thought.

  Better make the most of everything that comes along. It looked suspiciously as if things might get more difficult.

  11

  It wasn’t only the radio station and the local press that had taken Chief of Police Bausen’s orders ad notam. On Sunday, several national newspapers issued a serious exhortation to the conscientious burghers of Kaalbringen to go to the police without delay with any scrap of information that might possibly lead to the rapid capture of the Axman.

  When Inspector Kropke and Constable Mooser compiled the results of the general public’s first day of sleuthing, quite a lot of things were crystal clear. It is true that Kropke had not had time to prepare any overhead projector transparencies before he addressed his colleagues in the conference room that evening, but everything was neatly set out in his notebook with detachable pages and dark-blue leather covers:

  1) In the course of the day, forty-eight persons had reported to the police station and testified about various aspects of the evening of the murder. Of them, eleven had been interrogated previously. Six of the remaining thirty-seven were considered to be irrelevant because they were in the wrong part of town (three), or had been out at the wrong time (two) or had got the date wrong (one—old Mrs. Loewe, a widow, had been out to buy some cat food on the Monday morning, and had observed and noted down several mysterious characters with axes hidden under their overcoats).

  2) The remaining forty-two witnesses, of all ages, had been without exception in the area—Langvej, Hoistraat, Michel’s Steps, Fisherman’s Square, Harbor Esplanade, municipal woods—at some time between 2300 and 2400 hours. Everyone’s name, address and telephone number had been meticulously recorded, and they had also been forbidden by Kropke to leave the town and its environs for the coming week, in case any of them should be required to present themselves for supplementary questioning. (A measure that smacked very much of abuse of power, of course, but Van Veeteren suppressed his objections. He was not in charge of the investigation, after all.)

  3) All the witnesses had at some time or other and in various locations noticed one another, in accordance with an extremely complicated and potentially even more i
nvolved pattern that Kropke had failed to program into his PCB 4000, despite repeated attempts. (The fact that this had led to a degree of annoyance and frustration was something Constable Mooser could not have failed to appreciate during the late afternoon, the hierarchy and pecking order of the police force being what it is.)

  4) The earlier evidence provided by Miss deWeutz and Mrs. Aalger, who had been conducting a conversation in Dooms Alley and had noticed Ernst Simmel walking across the square, had now been confirmed by four new witnesses. Two couples, who had crossed the square at around about 2320, albeit in different directions, had also noticed a lone pedestrian who, now that they came to think about it, could be identified as the deceased property developer.

  5) Two teenagers on scooters (as likely as not in circumstances that placed them somewhat to the wrong side of the letter of the law) had ridden across the square toward the Esplanade about a minute later, and claimed to have passed a person who, to all appearances, seems to have been Simmel.

  6) A courting couple, of which the lady for certain reasons wished to remain anonymous and therefore preferred to confirm the man’s account by telephone rather than appearing in person at the police station, had been sitting, or more likely semi-recumbent, in a car down by the marina between approximately 2300 and 0100, and at 2330 or thereabouts had seen a man smoking at the edge of the quay, scarcely more than ten yards away from their car. Both were more or less convinced that it was Ernst Simmel.

  7) Up in Hoistraat, three new witnesses (to add to the other two) had seen the murdered man on the way from The Blue Ship. In addition, all three had observed one or possibly two unaccompanied male persons; in all probability this was a case of witnesses observing one another.

  8) One lone witness had seen an unaccompanied man come out of Hoistraat and walk down Michel’s Steps sometime between 2310 and 2315, in all probability Ernst Simmel. It is true that the distance between the witness and the person observed was some twenty yards; but since the man was under a streetlight at the time, the witness had been able to register a fairly clear picture of him. The most interesting aspect of this picture was probably that the man in question had been wearing a hat with a broad brim, which had kept his face shaded. This was one of the facts suggesting that this sighting was actually of the murderer; if that really was the case, it was the only direct sighting thus far. No male person wearing a hat had figured in any of the other reports submitted by the citizens of Kaalbringen frequenting their town by night.