by Håkan Nesser
G:
That was our business. Are you as bored by all this as I am?
R:
You can bet we are. Prize idiots don’t have all that much in the way of entertainment value.
VV:
Claus Dorp – can you tell us a bit about him?
G:
Claus Dorp? Why should I tell you anything about Claus Dorp?
VV:
Because he’s an old friend of yours, isn’t he?
G:
I wouldn’t say that.
VV:
I don’t suppose he would either. But you were both found guilty in that drugs business twelve years ago. Isn’t that the case?
G:
So what?
VV:
Have you been in contact with him since you came back?
G:
No.
R:
What about Christian Müller? Ernst Melnik? Andreas van der Heugen?
G:
Bravo! Clever coppers! No, I haven’t seen any of them for twelve years.
VV:
When you got home and found your wife at the bottom of the empty pool, can you tell us exactly what you did then?
G:
I’ve already answered that question several times. If you really want to hear it all again, maybe you could dig out your tapes and listen to them.
R:
You’ll have to say it all again at the trial in any case.
G:
All the more reason why I shouldn’t do it now. But there won’t be a trial – you know that as well as I do.
R:
Shall we have a bet on that?
G:
What?
R:
One point two million, perhaps? That’s a nice round sum.
G:
You like to joke, don’t you, Constable.
R:
Of course. But I don’t want to have a bet with you. I don’t get involved with any old riff-raff.
G:
I’m glad to hear it. Can I tell you something? Man to man, as it were.
VV:
Please do.
G:
You are pretty ropey actors – I don’t know which of you is worse. You know full well that the case you are trying to build up against me would be laughable in a courtroom. You know that and I know that. A flimsy house of cards. It would only need a third-rate defence lawyer to sneeze, and the whole thing would collapse. Why don’t you admit that it’s the case? So that we don’t have to carry on with these ridiculous pirouettes?
R:
What’s it like to rape your little sister? Do you feel good afterwards?
There was a long silence. Only the sound of Jaan G. Hennan lighting a cigarette, and Reinhart tapping a pen absentmindedly on the table. Van Veeteren switched off.
I don’t want to hear any more, he thought. Reinhart can listen to it and see if he picks up anything.
Picks up what? he asked himself immediately. What is there to listen for, in fact?
An unintentional slip of the tongue?
Something G happened to let slip without meaning to? A ray of light that could at least indicate where it might be fruitful to dig a bit deeper?
He didn’t think so. To be honest he didn’t think so, he realized that, and to be honest he agreed with G on one point. These interrogations – or conversations – were pointless.
Because the circumstances were clear.
They knew that G was behind the death of his wife.
And G knew that they knew.
It wouldn’t even harm him significantly if he happened to slip up and admit that he had done it, Van Veeteren thought. The only thing that would harm him would be if he let slip how.
Or who, perhaps. That G came out with the name of the accomplice that – when all was said and done – he must have had.
Hoping for something of that sort seemed almost idiotic.
He switched the light on and took the tape out of the machine. Spent a couple of minutes searching through his collection of records, and eventually decided on Bartók’s second piano concerto. He knew that sooner or later he would have to think through that Christa business as well, and it was time now: he could think of no better accompaniment that Bartók.
It wasn’t only Adam Bronstein, it was Christa Koogel as well. That’s the way it was.
Christa Koogel, who had opened up inside him a room of whose existence he had never known. The room of love. A place and a situation in which it was possible to love a woman, and be loved in return. Far away from . . . what had he called it? . . . the primeval swamp of existence.
He was twenty-one, she was nineteen. For four months – a summer and a little longer – he had lived there . . . A magic circle of enhanced vital sensuousness. He could find no alternative way of expressing it, high-flown though the words might seem. An existence, it had seemed to him, in which every object, every action, every look and every touch and mundane chore had been filled with a profoundly meaningful and magically real significance.
Over and over again. Just knowing that she was there in the vicinity, in the same town and the same life, that it was sometimes possible to stretch out his hand and touch her arm or hair or back, and receive a look from her in acknowledgement, gave him – had given him – an incomprehensible feeling of ease and invulnerability. And substance.
Twenty-one and nineteen.
Kissing her and feeling her willingness and her naked skin, gently stroking with the back of his hand along her outstretched arm, then continuing over her breasts and her gently rounded stomach . . . he could still – after almost thirty years, it was incredible! – still recall the bodily sensation of that movement and touching. His left hand, her right arm.
The red room of love. Ease and substance. Just over a summer. And then came her hesitation, and he discovered something else. The black hole of absence. Square one.
They never broke off their relationship formally. They didn’t need to.
They simply agreed to meet less often. She needed to think over her emotions. A week later he saw her in a cafe. He saw her, she didn’t see him. Her eyes were preoccupied by something else. She was sitting at a table together with a young man, a different young man. They were drinking wine, and their heads were very close together. They were talking and laughing. He was holding his hand over hers. They were both smoking – she had never smoked when she had been together with Van Veeteren in the red room of love. They had hardly ever drunk wine either. The new man was G.
They never broke off their relationship formally. They didn’t need to.
And she taught him a third thing.
The feminine defect. That horrific and incomprehensible trait. The fact that a beautiful and gifted and much loved young woman can fall for an utter shit who is not fit to kiss the ground she walks and stands on.
And the door to the room of love was closed. Several years later he met her by pure chance, and rashly plucked up the courage to ask her why she had bothered to open it. The door to love. Or was the bottom line that she could open it to anybody who happened to come along? Was it as simple as that?
They spoke for quite a long time. She cried and said that she regretted what she had done. That G had treated her very badly. He had made her pregnant, then abandoned her. After the abortion she didn’t believe in the room of love either. She said – and he believed her – that she wished that they had stayed together and that she had never met G.
But by then it was too late. Renate was in her seventh month, and circumstances were no longer what they had been.
So there it was. That was roughly how it could be put into words. It wasn’t even all that remarkable. Quite a run-of-the-mill melodrama, no doubt. An experience that pretty well everybody had been through – and perhaps that was the aspect which was saddest of all.
He checked the time: a quarter past twelve. Erich hadn’t rung, nor had Renate. Bartók had finished, but he couldn’t be bothered to prise himself out of
his armchair and put on something else. He emptied his glass of beer instead, and hoped to rinse Christa Koogel out of his memory.
Or to shift her into the place where she belonged: alternative paths through life that had never been embarked upon. Closed rooms.
But that left G.
That left Jaan G. Hennan.
As a sort of macabre incarnation of all possible devilry and the errors that had scarred one’s earlier life. Downright evil: a person with no redeeming factors.
I hate him, he suddenly thought. If there is any bastard on this earth that I hate, it’s G. I could throw him into a fire without a second thought, as one would do with a cockroach. I really could.
He sat there in the darkness for another half hour. Then he made up his mind and went to bed.
20
Chief of Police Hiller felt nervous.
That was clear from a series of minor indications that Münster had no difficulty in interpreting. He licked his lips with the tip of his tongue after every tenth word. He clicked his Ballograph pen non-stop. He was sweating despite the fact that the temperature inside his office was nothing out of the ordinary, and he kept shuffling around on his chair as if he had a thistle between his buttocks.
He’s a buffoon, Münster thought.
It wasn’t the first time he had thought that. Or something along the same lines. Hiller had spread out in front of him on his large desk an array of daily newspapers. After the article on ‘The Pool Murder’ in Saturday’s Neuwe Blatt, a whole host of features had appeared. The Allgemejne, den Poost and the Telegraaf had carried large spreads on Sunday, and today – on Monday morning – Grouwer had once again taken the stage and demanded that the police at last, and for once, should satisfy the demands – the minimal demands! – that the general public and the taxpayers – not to mention the insured! – had a right to expect of them. There was a limit to what the people’s sense of justice could take. People like Jaan G. Hennan should simply not be allowed to go free!
‘A good point!’ said Hiller, mopping his brow with a paper towel. ‘He has a point, that damned journalist! We must sort this out. The situation is blatantly obvious: he has eliminated his wife in order to collect the insurance money!’
‘He was sitting in a restaurant when she died,’ pointed out Van Veeteren quietly.
‘He has an alibi,’ added Reinhart.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said the chief of police, sweeping his arm over the newspapers. ‘Just look at all this! We shall be portrayed as flat-footed incompetents if we don’t solve this. For Christ’s sake, the man has done exactly the same thing once before!’
‘Very true,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘He succeeded on that occasion as well. We won’t be the only ones having to bear the shame.’
‘Shame!’ snorted Hiller. ‘There will be no question of any shame as far as we are concerned! Hennan will be arrested and found guilty of this, so we need to produce evidence that will stand up in court. I’ve spoken to the prosecutor this morning.’
‘I spoke to him on Saturday,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘He is in complete agreement with our approach.’
‘No matter what, we need to bring him to court,’ said Hiller, tapping with his Ballograph on one of the few empty spaces on his desk. ‘No matter what. I managed to persuade the prosecutor of how necessary this was . . . even if the level of proof is not what it might be.’
‘He was convinced of that on Saturday,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I don’t think we need to sit here all morning going on about this – the situation is quite clear, after all. It must—’
‘Hennan must have had an accomplice!’ the chief of police interrupted. ‘I have read up on the case and come to the conclusion that this is the only possibility.’
‘Really?’ said Reinhart.
‘Some sort of hit man, yes. The prosecutor agreed. Your job is to find this contract killer, or to put pressure on Hennan so that he comes clean. We shall devote as much as possible in the way of resources to this, no stone must be left unturned. All Hennan’s contacts must be hunted down and interrogated! He has a record, after all.’
‘We know,’ said Reinhart. ‘We are not idiots. But given the way things stand at the moment . . . Well, is the prosecutor prepared to go ahead with the little we have?’
The chief of police nodded seriously and wet his lips.
‘Yes. We need to have him arrested this afternoon. At an appropriate time before the press conference. The Chief Inspector and I will take that, the same policy as usual. Frankness and restraint. We don’t want to have the media against us in this case. We’re all on the same side – I assume I don’t need to go on about that?’
‘Hardly,’ said Van Veeteren with a sigh, checking his wrist watch. ‘Was there anything else? Press conference at three o’clock, is that right?’
‘Fifteen hundred hours,’ said Hiller. ‘Well, if you don’t have any questions, that was that, then.’
‘So there,’ said Reinhart, lighting his pipe. ‘That was that, then, to quote a well-known sage.’
He was sitting on one of the two visitor chairs in Van Veeteren’s office. Münster was on the other one, and the Chief Inspector himself was standing with his back to his colleagues, gazing out over the town through the open window. The sky was unsettled: an area of low pressure had drifted in from the south-west in the early hours of the morning, and put the damper on summer – but perhaps it was a better reflection of the mood in the office, in fact.
‘Well,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘unfortunately we have to admit that he summed up the situation quite well for once. We’ve come as far as we’re going to get for the time being, and if we don’t get any further it will be up to the prosecutor to show that the evidence we have is sufficient – but God only knows how he’ll do that.’
‘What has le Houde discovered?’ asked Münster.
The Chief Inspector shrugged without turning round.
‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Or nothing at all, to be exact. Nothing from the diving tower apart from some fingerprints of herr and fru Hennan. Especially from her, which doesn’t exactly strengthen our case. Ditto inside the house . . . The occasional fingerprint from persons unknown – but that’s normal. They had a cleaner, for instance. Heinemann has spoken to her: she came just once every other week, and there was never anybody at home . . . Three times in all – they hired her at the beginning of May.’
‘No sign of anybody else being there that evening?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Pity,’ said Reinhart, blowing out a cloud of smoke. ‘But I suppose that was only to be expected.’
‘It can sometimes be wise to dampen down our expectations,’ said the Chief Inspector.
‘Has anybody spoken to Denver yet?’ wondered Münster.
Reinhart sighed.
‘Yes. I got hold of Lieutenant Horniman last night. He had just returned from his mother’s funeral, and wasn’t exactly in high spirits. As far as Hennan and Philomena McNaught are concerned, he had a theory I’m inclined to believe without more ado. He thinks Hennan killed her during that holiday out in the wilds – strangled her or shot her or cut her head off with an axe, you name it – then buried her one metre deep – or a yard, to quote the source – and reported that she had disappeared. That damned National Park is about as big as Ireland and it would involve a hell of an effort to find her.’
Van Veeteren stopped contemplating the weather and sat down at his desk.
‘That’s something we’ve always known,’ he said.
‘What is?’ asked Münster.
‘If murderers in general had the sense to dispose of the bodies of their victims properly, we wouldn’t catch very many of them. We must be thankful that people haven’t been bright enough to adopt that simple rule. Had he anything helpful to tell us – Horniman, that is?’
‘Zilch,’ said Reinhart. ‘But he’s just as sure as we are that Jaan G. Hennan is a blackguard of the first order.’
‘Blackguard?�
�� muttered the Chief Inspector and glared at Reinhart. ‘Do you no longer distinguish between a blackguard and a murderer?’
‘It’s very easy to be both,’ said Reinhart. ‘How’s it gone for Rooth and Jung in their search for an accomplice? That’s surely where we are going to make a breakthrough.’
‘No luck there either so far,’ said Van Veeteren, gazing out of the window at the overcast sky again. ‘Unfortunately. They have a list of about twenty names, and when they’ve gone through them all I’ll also have a chat with the ones who seem potentially interesting. I’ve asked Rooth to produce five names in any case – even if there isn’t a single prat who is really interesting.’
‘Find the one who knows something,’ said Münster. ‘It’s not the first time we’ve been looking for a key of that kind.’
‘No,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘The problem in this particular case is that the one with the knowledge happens also to be the murderer. Which could possibly mean that he might prefer to keep silent.’
‘That’s hardly the first time either,’ said Münster.
Reinhart nodded and looked impotent.
‘It’s so damned simple that it could drive you mad,’ he growled. ‘That bastard hires a gorilla who does the job for him, receives a substantial sum of money, and we don’t arrest him. Neither of them. Could there be some charge other than murder, by the way? If he wasn’t the one who literally did the deed?’
‘Of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Incitement, for instance; but there are several options to choose from. They could result in eighty years at least. But you are forgetting a few small details.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ said Reinhart.
‘In the first place,’ said the Chief Inspector, ‘we have to be able to demonstrate that Barbara Hennan didn’t die as a result of an accident, as G maintains. In the second place we have to prove that Hennan really did hire a contract killer. And to be honest, we haven’t really got very far on either of those obligations – don’t you agree?’
