by Håkan Nesser
What had he said to Münster? Something about a restful weekend?
He hadn’t even had time to glance at the chess problem in the Allgemejne.
But at half past eleven he flopped down at last in the armchair with Pergolesi ringing in his ears. Dark in the room. Renate in bed, Erich in bed. The disc was fifty-eight minutes long – he had checked that before switching it on. It also contained the Orpheus cantatas.
Good, he thought. At last an hour of high-quality life.
And at last an opportunity to think about his relationship with G.
What could be a better-quality accompaniment to that than the Dolorosa duet, sung by Julia Gouda and Anna Faulkner? He took three deep breaths and floated back thirty-five years in time. That was where it was – his strongest memory of G.
Blacker than black.
Autumn term at Manneringskolan on the banks of Poostlenergraacht, to be more exact. Age: early puberty. Main characters: G, VV and a little Jewish boy by the name of Adam Bronstein.
G: the big, strong and feared young man. Adam Bronstein: the gifted, spectacles-wearing, quick-thinking, anaemic one. VV: the hesitant one who didn’t dare to pick a fight with G, didn’t dare intervene and put a stop to the bullying of those weaker than himself. It is not only Adam Bronstein who suffers, but he is the main victim.
The terrible deed takes place after a PE class. When the teacher (the immensely unpopular herr Schwaager) has left – and when most of the boys have finished the necessary washing and clothes-changing and left the gym that smells strongly of sweat (located in an old wooden building between the school itself and the canal) – G forces Adam Bronstein to lie down on the large grey mat that is used for practising somersaults and similar useful exercises. The skinny little boy does as he is told and G rolls him up inside the mat. It becomes a large, compact cylinder, just over a metre high and just over a metre in diameter. A leather strap fastened around it prevents it from unrolling. Thanks to his own considerable strength and the assistance of one of the boys still left (his name is Claus Fendermann and he is destined to become an outstanding pianist), G stands the cylinder upright – with Adam Bronstein’s head at the bottom. His arms are pressed closely against his sides, his feet in a pair of pitiful blue-grey socks with worn-out elastic tops sticking a few centimetres out of the top. The boy is stuck there in a sort of dark, iron-hard vice: his head is slowly filled with blood, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to breathe – and the boys leave him there in that state. G, Claus Fendermann, VV and several others. They gather together their things and hurry off to their conventional classroom. G is the last to leave, and closes the door behind him.
There is no class in the gymnasium the following period, so Adam Bronstein stays inside the cylinder for almost an hour. It is a cleaner who finds him. He is still alive, but only just. He spends two months in hospital. Never comes back to school.
The news breaks in January that he has hanged himself.
It is not usual for thirteen-year-olds to hang themselves. Not at that time, at least.
He might just as well have died straight off in the bloody mat, says G. The little Jewish swine.
Stabat mater.
The Quis est homo movement began, and Van Veeteren realized that he was sweating profusely in his armchair. Cold sweat. Adam Bronstein was only one of the memories associated with G. There were more. But perhaps that one was sufficient to be going on with?
He tried to concentrate on Friday’s confrontation instead.
What had it signified? In fact?
Why had he chosen that absurdly hard-boiled line during the conversation at Villa Zefyr? Silence and polished steel. Why? There was no doubt that he had overdone Borkmann’s rule of silence.
And why had he been so convinced of Hennan’s guilt when he spoke to Münster about it afterwards in the car? The inspector had sounded sceptical, and rightly so.
Did he really think that G had got rid of his wife? Killed her? Hand on heart.
Wasn’t it rather a sudden urge – and a sudden opportunity out of the blue – to give G what he deserved? To put things to rights and punish him thirty-five years later? Once and for all.
Was it really as simple as that?
In any case, it was difficult to ignore these private motives for revenge – but maybe it was good that he had allowed himself to wallow in them? From the very start. Motives that you didn’t recognize were more difficult to cope with than those you dragged up to the surface, he was aware of that. It was something even Borkmann had pointed out on one occasion or another – although in that case it had to do with the motivation of a criminal rather than that of a police officer investigating a case.
But if he could now – in theory at least – ignore the deep-seated disgust he felt for Jaan G. Hennan, push it to one side for a moment, what were the facts of the circumstances surrounding Hennan’s wife’s death?
Was there any real reason to suspect a crime?
And if there was, was there any objective justification for directing those suspicions at G?
Van Veeteren closed his eyes and tried to relax. The questions were pointless. They were being asked too early. Of the traditional puzzle-pieces Motive-Method-Opportunity, only the second was anywhere close to being identified. If in fact it was the case that Barbara Hennan had been murdered, there was not much doubt about the method. The way in which it had been carried out. A push in the back – or as much violence as could be considered necessary to make her lose her balance and fall down from the diving tower.
Another matter, of course, was getting her up there in the first place. That would probably not have been due to brute strength. Cunning, more likely . . . Presumably some kind of very subtle cunning.
Or perhaps she had been knocked unconscious by a blow to the head? It would have been difficult to carry her up the steps to the top of the diving tower afterwards, but no doubt not impossible. He made a mental note to ask Meusse if one might be able to distinguish between a wound that had been inflicted slightly earlier than – and in a different way to – those that were the result of her crashing down into the bottom of the empty swimming pool.
That was more or less all that could be said about the method, Van Veeteren thought. He wondered if he ought to go and fetch a beer from the kitchen, but decided against it.
What about Opportunity? Well, it wasn’t especially difficult to speculate about that.
Anybody at all who might have been in the vicinity of Villa Zefyr at about ten o’clock on Thursday evening would have had an opportunity – hypothetically at least – to carry out the murder in the way spelled out above. The problem was that the most interesting figure in this context – Jaan G. Hennan – appeared to have an alibi for this time.
Appeared. Obviously, it remained to be seen how solid this alibi really was. Sachs and his team ought surely to have had enough time to sort out this matter by now.
That left Motive. Who had had any reason to kill Barbara Hennan? And more specifically: what motives might G have had?
Van Veeteren decided that if there was one question he ought to examine rather more closely in the next few days, it was this one.
If there is even a fraction of a possibility that he is behind this, the Chief Inspector thought, gritting his teeth . . . If G has anything at all to do with the death of his wife, I shall put him behind bars for it. For Adam Bronstein’s sake and all the other poor devils he has tortured in one way or another during his life.
It was quite simply his duty. An absolutely imperative duty.
What am I doing? he thought in horror. I’m sitting here, hoping that an accident can be transformed into a murder. Purely in order to satisfy my own private instincts for vengeance. Talk about objective police work! Talk about motives!
He listened to the end of the Pergolesi CD, both Stabat mater and the Orpheus cantatas. It was a quarter to one when he crawled down into the double bed next to his wife. Quietly and carefully so as not to wake her up.
<
br /> I don’t love her any more, he suddenly thought. I haven’t done so for ages now. Why do we continue to maintain this conventional spectacle?
For whose sake?
It was an idiotic question to ask himself just before falling asleep, and an hour later he was still awake.
9
When Maarten Verlangen opened up his office in the morning of Tuesday, 9 June, it was the first time he had set foot in there since Wednesday the previous week.
As a result, if nothing else, he had the last five editions of Neuwe Blatt to read. In accordance with an unwritten gentleman’s agreement, a neighbour – the widow fru Meredith – always posted her copy through his letter box after she had read it and cut out the evening’s television programmes. The gesture was a thank-you for what Verlangen had done eighteen months earlier to track down some pervert who had spent some time posting his own excrement through her letter box – a young and at times promising banking lawyer, it transpired, who had undergone a personality change after cycling headfirst into a tramcar on Keymer Plejn. After nailing him, Verlangen had felt a certain degree of sympathy with the poor, confused young man, and had visited him regularly during the six months he had spent in the Majorna mental hospital.
Despite everything, it seemed there were some people worse off than he was . . .
He arranged the newspapers chronologically in a pile on his desk, lit a cigarette and listened to his telephone answering machine. Nothing from Barbara Hennan. Only three messages, in fact: one from the insurance company, one from somebody called Wallander who would ring him back, and a wrong number.
He dialled the number of Villa Zefyr.
No answer.
He read the Wednesday edition of Neuwe Blatt and tried again.
No answer.
Lit another cigarette and worked his way through the Thursday and Friday editions of the newspaper.
Third time lucky, he thought.
The hell it was. The ringing sounded as desolate as his own thoughts. He replaced the receiver, and wondered what to do next. Was there any point in continuing to keep an eye on Hennan?
Was he under any obligation to do so?
Hardly. He had been working on the case for three days (or at least been on hand in Linden for three days), his daily rate had been three hundred guilders and he had been given a thousand by fru Hennan. Bearing in mind his hotel bill and other odds and ends, one could say that the pay more or less covered his input.
Perhaps it would be as well to leave it at that. Forget about the elegant American woman and her shady husband, and devote his attentions to something else.
But on the other hand: another thousand for a few days of less than strenuous effort was not to be sniffed at. Especially as he had no other commitments at the moment. Apart from a so-called ‘pay by results’ job he had been toying with for several months: a gang of graffiti-producing vandals had been making a nuisance of themselves in Linden, and local shop-owners had clubbed together to offer a reward of 5,000 guilders to anybody who could apprehend them. But although Verlangen had one or two possible names and a few possible faces in mind, there was a long way to go before he could collect the reward.
He sighed. Opened the day’s first beer and decided on one final compromise in the Hennan question: first he would glance through the Saturday and Sunday editions of Neuwe Blatt, and then make another call to Villa Zefyr.
The article was on page five of the Saturday edition.
Woman found dead was the headline, and he read the short text with roughly the same feelings he used to have at the Gerckwinckel pub when he realized that the sweaty, red and swollen face in the mirror over the toilet was his own.
Was it possible? he wondered.
Who else could it be, for Christ’s sake?
A woman aged about 35, it said.
Of American origin.
Found dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool.
On the outskirts of Linden. Unclear circumstances, but as far as one could tell she had thought the pool was full and dived in from a considerable height.
No witnesses of the accident. No suspicions of foul play.
Verlangen read the article – no more than sixteen lines in a single column – three times while drinking the beer and smoking another cigarette.
American woman?
How many American women could there be in Linden? Not many, he thought.
And he remembered that diving tower. What an incredibly pointless way to die.
Hell’s bells, he thought. What the devil is the significance of this?
Thursday night? Dammit all, that was the night he had sat and . . .
For a few seconds Maarten Verlangen could feel his mind changing into that famous tablet of soap in the bathroom that it was impossible to grasp hold of, and that not even a louse could cling to. After another deep draught of beer, however, he managed to restore a modicum of order into his thoughts, and two possible courses of action crystallized out.
Or at least, two first moves in two possible courses of action.
Either he could phone the police – that would of course be the most sensible thing to do.
Or he could drive out to Linden one more time and see what he could find out there.
After five seconds of simulated thinking, he chose the second alternative. He could ring the police at a later stage, and it would be stupid to get involved before he had established that it really was the right woman. That it was in fact Barbara Clarissa Hennan who had been found lying dead in the swimming pool.
No sooner said than done. He left his office and half-ran to his car.
‘Really?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Is it that bad?’
He listened intently to what was emerging from the telephone receiver with the expression on his face becoming ever more gloomy. Like a trough of low pressure, thought Inspector Münster, who was sitting opposite his superior and running the tip of his tongue over a back tooth from which he had lost part of a filling the previous evening. An English toffee – it wasn’t the first time.
‘I see,’ muttered Van Veeteren. ‘Ah well, I suppose it was only to be expected . . . Good God no, we’re not going to drop the matter as quickly as that. I’ll be in touch again shortly.’
He listened for a short while longer, then said goodbye and hung up. Leaned back on his chair and glared at Münster.
‘Sachs,’ he said. ‘They’ve spoken to people at that restaurant now.’
‘And?’ said Münster.
‘Unfortunately it seems he was in fact hanging around there all the time, our friend G.’
‘Oh dear. But maybe he—’
‘The whole evening.’
‘Are they certain of that?’
The temperature in the area of low pressure fell by several more degrees.
‘Apparently. Damn and blast!’
Münster shrugged.
‘So that’s that, then. I suppose we can—’
‘But who knows? He arrived at about half past seven – he’d rung in advance and booked a table. As if he were determined to set himself up with an alibi, the swine.’
Van Veeteren stared hard at Münster.
‘And then what?’ wondered Münster, as was presumably the intention.
‘Then? Well, he had dinner, drank a fair bit with it, then moved over to the bar, they reckon. He evidently took a taxi at about a quarter to one: they’re trying to track down the driver. Damn and blast, as I said.’
Münster nodded.
‘So he’s clean, it seems? It’s not possible that he slipped out for an hour or so, I take it?’
‘How should I know? Nobody was keeping an eye on him all the time, but given how long it would take to get to Kammerweg and back . . . Well, I suppose it’s not totally out of the question. It would have had to be after he’d paid his bill in that case, and he presumably did that at about half past nine . . . Hmm . . .’
‘Was there anybody with him?’
‘Not while he was at
his table. Apparently he spoke to somebody or other later in the bar . . . Maybe even several, but our colleagues in Linden haven’t bothered to look any closer into that. No, we shall have to try to find some other way of solving this, Münster.’
‘What, for example?’
The Chief Inspector snapped a toothpick and looked out through the window.
‘Theoretically . . . Theoretically he could have nipped out at around half past nine, driven like a madman to Kammerweg, pushed his wife into the empty swimming pool and been back in the bar at Columbine’s thirty or forty minutes later. But as I said, if you can think of a better solution, that’s fine by me.’
Münster said nothing for a while.
‘That business ten years ago . . .’
‘Twelve,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Nineteen seventy-five.’
‘Twelve years ago. Were you involved in it in any way?’
Van Veeteren shook his head.
‘Not at all. The drugs squad dealt with all aspects of it, I only heard about it. It’s a pity they didn’t manage to get him locked away for longer – I suspect he should have got much more than two-and-a-half years . . . If they don’t appeal, that’s usually an indication that they were lucky.’
Münster squirmed in his chair.
‘Forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but how come you are so sure he is guilty this time as well? Despite everything, it does seem—’
‘I’ve never said I’m sure,’ interrupted Van Veeteren, annoyed. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to exclude that possibility at this early stage.’
‘There is a variant,’ said Münster after a short pause.
‘A variant?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘What do you mean by that, Inspector?’
Münster cleared his throat and hesitated for a moment.
‘Well, how about this?’ he said. ‘It’s purely hypothetical, of course. Hennan leaves the restaurant, let’s say at a quarter to ten. He goes out and meets his wife somewhere in central Linden. He hits her and kills her and puts her body in the boot of his car. It takes about ten minutes. Then he goes back into the restaurant. When he gets home – at about one o’clock – he takes her out of the boot and throws her into the swimming pool. Then he phones the police.’
