by Håkan Nesser
He took out his cigarette machine. Put it on the table in front of him and began filling it with tobacco. Thoughts were buzzing around inside his head now, and he needed something to occupy his hands. Elizabeth Nolan sat there motionless, looking at him.
‘You lied to them, didn’t you?’
No reply.
‘You knew about his background, didn’t you?’
She smoked and gazed past him, out through the window. He lit his cigarette and tried quickly to think of what to say next. He realized suddenly that a crucial point was looming.
Crucial? he thought. Could it be . . . ?
‘I must ask you to leave me in peace now,’ she said again. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He ignored her interruption. The noise from the neighbour’s lawnmower suddenly ceased, and the silence became as noticeable as a stranglehold.
‘You know exactly what happened to Maarten Verlangen as well, don’t you?’
The questions were tumbling out more or less automatically now. He realized that her resistance was broken. He could see that by looking at her. She dropped her shoulders and looked him in the eye. Several seconds passed, then she shook her head slowly and sighed deeply.
‘All right, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. Blame yourself.’
She must have had the pistol tucked down between the cushions on the sofa, as he didn’t detect it until she was holding it in her hand, pointing it at him from only a metre away.
‘It was idiotic of you to come here,’ she said.
Something had moved inside Bausen, and at first he didn’t realize what it was. Then it dawned on him that it was Van Veeteren’s invitation to celebrate Christmas in Maardam.
Him and Mathilde. Together with Van Veeteren and Ulrike. Maybe others as well, he didn’t know. And he didn’t know why this should be so remarkable: but the somewhat sentimental feeling nagging away inside his skull was incontestable.
Or inside his chest, or wherever. My God, he thought: I’m nearly seventy-four, I should be too old for this sort of thing. But perhaps you get a bit more emotional as you get older.
In the afternoon he spent three-quarters of an hour doing yoga exercises, then he telephoned Mathilde and asked if she’d like to come round for a bite to eat that evening. They hadn’t seen each other for a week, and she accepted without further ado. He could hear that she sounded pleased.
He drove down to Fisktorget, bought a kilo of line-caught fish, some mussels and fresh vegetables. Then he drove out to Wassingen to fetch her. Folded up her wheelchair as usual and put it in the boot, and carried her out to the car.
It occurred to him that he hadn’t mentioned to Van Veeteren that she was wheelchair-bound, and wondered why not. Did the fact that he had kept it to himself signify something, and in that case, what?
Ah well, there were three-and-a-half months to go before Christmas. If the trip to Maardam actually did come off, there was plenty of time to sort that detail out on the telephone.
Together, they began preparing the fish. He had made various changes in the kitchen since they met, to make it easier for Mathilde to move around. They each drank a glass of Alsace wine while they were busy with the cooking, and while they were doing so it occurred to him that he was in love with her.
In the autumn of his life he was unable to find any other word for it: but so what? Love was as good a word as any other, surely?
He told her as much as well, just as they sat down at the table, and she said that she had come across worse blokes than he was. One or two, at least. He laughed, walked round the table and kissed her.
They had just opened bottle number two when Ulrike Fremdli rang. It was a quarter to nine.
‘Bausen?’
‘Yes.’
They had spoken two or three times before, but never more than a few words.
This time it was rather more. In view of the reason for the call.
According to what she said, Van Veeteren still hadn’t turned up in Maardam. In fact. Despite his promise to be home around five o’clock. And he wasn’t answering his mobile. Something must have happened.
‘He did mention that there was something wrong with it,’ said Bausen.
‘His mobile?’
‘Yes.’
‘What time did he leave Kaalbringen?’
Bausen thought for a moment.
‘About half past twelve. Yes, he ought to have been back home ages ago.’
‘I don’t understand why he hasn’t been in touch.’
Nor did Bausen. But he could hear from Ulrike Fremdli’s voice that she was more worried than she was trying to seem, and he tried to calm her down by suggesting that there might be something wrong with the car.
He assured her that he would let her know the moment he heard anything – but no doubt it wasn’t anything serious.
He said nothing about Christmas – after all, it was only 8 September.
What the hell has happened? he thought when he had replaced the receiver. Has he driven off the road, and is lying helpless in a ditch somewhere?
No, no, he thought as he turned his attention back to Mathilde. We mustn’t make things worse than they are.
47
‘Very idiotic,’ she said again, and once more he noticed how there was an infinitely small twitching of the muscles at the side of her mouth. Butterfly-light stimuli like the puff of a breeze on the surface of a lake.
There was not much more that he noticed. Just a feeling that her judgement was absolutely correct – he really did feel like an idiot – and a certain increasing impression that had to do with his perceptions. Reminiscent of tunnel vision. His surroundings – the furniture, the garish walls covered in paintings, the picture window looking out on the garden and the municipal forest – all seemed to shrink away and dissolve into a vague blur. The only thing that seemed to him to be real, the only thing that was anywhere close to being in focus was the fact that he was sitting in this wine-red armchair opposite this woman dressed in black, pointing her gun steadily at him.
A Pinchmann, if he was not much mistaken, 7.6 millimetres. There was nothing to suggest that Maarten Verlangen had not also become acquainted with it. Nothing at all.
‘I understand,’ he said.
Which was an obvious lie. She raised an eyebrow and he could see that she also doubted if he understood.
‘Let me make one thing quite clear,’ she said. ‘I know how to use this pistol, and I won’t hesitate to use it. If you like I can shoot you in the leg right now, so that you don’t need to have any doubt on that score.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I believe you.’
One corner of her mouth twitched a little more strongly, but no smile came into being.
‘Good. You have lived most of your life, after all, and seem to be a sensible man. Until now, that is.’
He made no reply. She appeared to think for a while, then took out a cigarette and lit it using only one hand.
I must talk to her, Van Veeteren thought. Must. Silence is not my ally on this occasion.
‘Verlangen?’ he said.
‘What about him?’
‘That private detective. What happened to him?’
She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue and hesitated for a moment.
‘He saw us,’ she said.
‘In Maardam?’
‘Yes. Pure coincidence, but I suppose it had to happen sooner or later.’
‘When was that?’
‘In March. Somewhere around the middle of the month. We had gone there to look at some pictures left by somebody who had just died.’
‘But surely you can’t have recognized him? It was—’
‘Of course not,’ she said, interrupting him and sounding slightly annoyed. ‘But he told us about it later. Do you happen to have a mobile phone in your jacket pocket?’
Van Veeteren took it out and put it on the table.
‘It’s not working.’
‘Just in case,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you and Verlangen seem to be birds of a feather. He couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘Several of us suffer from that weakness,’ admitted Van Veeteren. ‘Do you mind if I smoke as well?’
‘Not at all. Here, have one of mine so that you don’t need to use that nasty little machine.’
He did as he was bidden, and noticed as he lit the cigarette that his hands were less than steady. No wonder, he thought.
‘He came up here after you, I take it. Verlangen.’
She nodded.
‘Yes. The idiot. He was no doubt egged on by that old detective streak of his, and of course it wasn’t especially difficult to track us down once he had got wind of us. Not even for him. He turned up one evening in April, claiming he was some sort of market researcher . . . It only took a few minutes for us to realize who he really was.’
‘And you shot him?’
She inhaled and paused before answering.
‘My husband took care of that. It’s a pity he made a mess of hiding the body.’
Van Veeteren pricked up his ears on hearing that last sentence. The way she said it made it quite clear who had been the driving force in their marriage.
Absolutely clear.
It also made it clear, unfortunately, what kind of an opponent she was. He knew that she wouldn’t make any mistakes when it came to hiding his body.
Everything, he thought. I’ve misjudged everything. For fifteen years.
And now I’m going to get my punishment.
She stubbed out her cigarette and stood up.
‘Stand up now, please.’
He raised himself out of the armchair.
Take off all your clothes apart from your underpants.’
‘I haven’t carried a gun for five years.’
‘Do as I say.’
As he carried out her instructions, she stood two metres away, watching him. Without moving a muscle. He threw his garments over the back of the chair, one after another, but even when he ended up by standing there in nothing but his underpants and his misery she just stood there without so much as a smile.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘You can get dressed again.’
He performed the same procedure in reverse, somewhat long-windedly, then sat down in the armchair again. Without releasing him from her gaze or from the aim of her pistol, she took a small bottle from her handbag, which was lying beside her on the sofa. She also produced a carafe and a glass from a low table at the side of the sofa. She poured out a couple of centimetres – he assumed that it was whisky – and dropped in four or five tablets from the bottle. They started to dissolve immediately in the brown liquid. She stirred the brew with a propelling pencil that she also took from her handbag. It all seemed quite routine, he thought, as if she were performing some mechanical exercise that she had carried out thousands of times before.
My Last Supper, he thought.
‘Here you are, drink this,’ she said, sliding the glass over to his side of the table.
He stared at the barrel of the pistol. Actually recalled having seen the exit hole of a bullet in the back of the head of a man who had been shot with a Pinchmann. It was rather large, if he remembered rightly.
If I’d been thirty I would no doubt have made a lunge at her now, he thought.
And become no older . . .
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and emptied the glass. And noted that his guess as to the spirit involved was correct.
Rather a good whisky, in fact. As far as he could judge, the tablets tasted of nothing.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Possibly a bit on the smoky side.’
She shrugged. They remained sitting there for several minutes without speaking, and the last thing he registered was that the neighbour had started mowing the lawn again.
‘I have the feeling we’ve missed something,’ said Rooth.
‘You have drunk three beers and a large cognac,’ said Münster, signalling to the waiter that they would like the bill. ‘That’s why you are imagining things.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Rooth. ‘It’s been at the back of my mind since yesterday, there’s something I ought to have thought of . . . I’ve had that feeling before, and it’s hardly ever been wrong.’
‘Do you think you could express yourself a little more clearly?’ wondered Münster.
‘More clearly? As I said, I don’t really know exactly what it’s about . . . You sometimes get a little nudge like that which just falls down through your brain and ends up in your subconscious. Does it never happen to you?’
‘All the time,’ said Münster. ‘And it usually stays there as well.’
‘Exactly,’ said Rooth. ‘That’s the danger. But in this case I’m determined that it won’t do that. I know that I thought: “That was odd”, or something along those lines . . . But I haven’t had time to think it over properly.’
‘No time?’ said Münster. ‘Surely time’s the only thing we’ve had loads of in this confounded case.’
Rooth nodded, and tried to lick the inside of his cognac glass clean.
‘I know,’ he said, abandoning his cleansing attempts. ‘But it would be a plus if I could pin down this particular detail. There are lots of question marks hovering around, after all.’
Münster said nothing for a while. Looked somewhat listlessly around the soberly furnished hotel dining room, and realized that they were the last customers. It was almost half past eleven, and he began to feel it was time to take the lift up four floors, and go to bed.
The final night in a hotel bed. Great. Over the last few days he had really missed Synn and the children: being away from them for a whole week was simply too long.
Far too long, for Christ’s sake. Just a few hours at a time was all he could bear.
But there was something that couldn’t be denied in what Rooth was sitting there and going on about. They had missed something. Or been deprived of something? he thought. Perhaps that was a better way of putting it. G had been buried in some kind of hidden agenda for fifteen years – not so much his own, but the Chief Inspector’s, of course – and now when they had got wind of him again, then been confronted with his suicide, well, it felt as if . . . Hmm, as if what?
As if they had been cheated out of the goodies? Münster wondered. Yes, deprived of something.
Namely the satisfaction of arresting him and making him answerable to his crimes. Of ensuring that Jaan G. Hennan was given the punishment he deserved.
A both reasonable and justified reaction, surely? Feeling bad about it all.
But the fact was that they hadn’t solved that old murder mystery. Just what had happened when Barbara Hennan ended up at the bottom of the empty pool in Linden – that was a secret G had taken with him to his grave. It could be assumed that he had shot poor Maarten Verlangen; but no matter how you looked at it, the Linden murder was still unsolved. And would presumably remain unsolved. For ever.
All things considered, it was hardly a mystery, Münster tried to convince himself while Rooth sat there looking introverted with his eyes half closed. Hennan had hired an accomplice, they had never found him, and with his employer out of this world the actual killer could feel pretty sure that he would never be found.
No doubt it goes with the territory, Münster decided. Some criminals were never nailed, and some questions were never answered. It was annoying, but something you had to learn to live with.
‘I suppose it’s just this berk G who’s annoying me so damned much,’ said Rooth, chiming in with Münster’s thoughts. ‘Do you know what I’d like to do?’
‘No,’ said Münster.
‘As with Jesus.’
‘Eh? Jesus?’
‘Yes. Let him be resurrected for a few days. Interrogate him non-stop and then kill him again. Just to torture the bastard. That’s what he deserves.’
&
nbsp; An interesting Bible interpretation, Münster thought, and couldn’t help smiling.
‘A good idea,’ he said. ‘You accept your rock-bottom motives at least – that’s good.’
‘I’m a pretty rock-bottom type,’ sighed Rooth. ‘In fact. I know that my chivalrous behaviour can sometimes dazzle people, but to be honest, the fact is . . .’
The waiter arrived with the bill, and Rooth abandoned his confessions. They paid, and left the dining room. In the lift up to their rooms, however, the inspector probed his subconscious once again.
‘That thing that I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘It must be in connection with when we found him . . . When we went dashing into the Nolans’ house.’
‘Why?’ wondered Münster. ‘Why must it have been then?’
‘As you said, it’s the only time all week that we were in a bit of a hurry.’
Münster thought, but could think of no comment to make.
Instead he yawned, unlocked his door and wished Inspector Rooth sweet dreams.
48
He regained consciousness.
Didn’t wake up: the outside world merely shone a thin beam into his brain, no more.
Or perhaps it was not the outside world. Perhaps it was merely reflexes from his own body: fragile, undeveloped signals in the darkness and inertia. His head ached. His tongue was sticking to his gums. The tiredness in his arms and legs was devastating.
He was lying on some kind of hard sofa in a position that was extremely uncomfortable.
On his left side. His hands were tightly bound behind his back. His feet were also tied together. His ankles were rubbing against each other. The rough cover of the sofa smelled of dust, and he felt sick.
Dark. He opened his eyes one millimetre for a fraction of a second, and saw that it was just as black round about him as it was inside him.
He sank back into unconsciousness.
Some time later he woke up properly. His tiredness was still like a lead weight on top of him, but she was standing in a light doorway, talking to him.
Saying something to him, giving instructions.
She came up to him and placed something on a table next to his face.
