The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Good, but not five stars. What was yours like?’

  We had both chosen fish: me cod, him sea perch.

  ‘Pretty good. Five stars plus or minus a half.’

  ‘I would have cooked it more slowly at a lower heat,’ he said, nodding at his plate. ‘But of course, then the customer needs to be patient and wait a little longer. Would you like to try it?’

  I don’t understand what he means. ‘Try what?’

  ‘My cooking. You could come round to my place for a meal one evening, and see what I’m capable of.’

  I’m taken completely by surprise, but at the same time must ask myself why. What is so remarkable about a single man inviting a single woman to dinner?

  ‘You’re doubtful?’ he has time to say before I can squeeze a response out of myself.

  ‘No! Of course not . . . I mean, obviously I’d love to go to your house for dinner. Forgive me, it’s just that I’m a bit socially retarded.’

  That makes him laugh. ‘We’re in the same boat, then. I . . .’

  He pauses and looks embarrassed for a moment.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I really wasn’t at all sure if I would dare to invite you. But anyway, it’s done now.’

  ‘Are you saying it was planned?’

  He smiles. ‘Of course. I’ve been thinking about it all the time since we first met. If you think I’m some sort of village Casanova, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. But I’m pretty good with fish, as I’ve already said.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Thank you for being so bold. But how is Jeremy going to take it? Will he accept that you are being visited by a stranger?’

  Mark gestures with his hands and looks apologetic. ‘He’s not going to hug you enthusiastically. You’ll probably think he’s being antagonistic, but he will leave us in peace. He has plenty of private business to be getting on with.’

  I think about the gesture Jeremy made when I saw him looking out of the window. I wonder if I ought to mention it, but decide that it can wait. ‘And dogs? Does he like animals? I won’t come without Castor, I hope you understand that.’

  He bursts out laughing. ‘The invitation is for both of you. As for Jeremy, I think he prefers animals to humans. I’ve thought about buying a dog, but haven’t got round to it.’

  And so we start talking about breeds of dog, about loneliness and the particular kind of darkness that embraces the moor at this time of year. He maintains that some nights, when there are no stars visible, heaven and earth can take on exactly the same shade of black – it’s simply not possible to distinguish between them, it’s as if one were living in a blind universe. Or as if heaven and earth had actually merged. Such nights can be dangerous for your state of mind, Mark says, even if you don’t go out on the moor to experience it. The phenomenon creeps into your house and under your skin. He remembers it from his childhood in Simonsbath – people just went out of their minds overnight.

  ‘And it’s at times like that you need to visit a good friend and have a bite to eat, is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Mark. ‘See a different face, just like I said. Shall we say next Friday? A week from now?’

  We agree on that. Why wait for a whole week, I wonder, but I don’t say anything. He explains that I can drive right up to the house even though that doesn’t seem possible from a distance, and when we leave The Royal Oak Castor and I accompany him a short way up Halse Lane so that he can show us where we must turn off.

  ‘A mere three hundred crooked yards,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Castor and I have already walked them, but in this direction, not towards the house.’

  Then we shake hands and part.

  *

  I wish I could regard that as the end of the day, but unfortunately that is not possible. When we come down to the war memorial, where we have parked the car as usual, there it is again: the silver-coloured hire car. I can’t see the silver colour, of course, because this little central spot in the village is only lit up by a single street lamp which is hanging over the memorial, swinging back and forth in the wind, and its dirty yellow beam is inadequate – but there is no doubt that it is the same car. The same newspapers are lying on the dashboard, one Polish and one Swedish, and this time he has parked so close that I have to get into my car via the passenger door.

  He? Why do I write he?

  29

  I must get to grips with this.

  Must bring my fear out into the daylight. It’s the unformulated apprehensions that are the worst, and once you have dared to put a face on the monster you are halfway to overcoming it. I recall that Gudrun Ewerts used to use images like that, and when I get up on Saturday morning after a chaotic night, I realize that it’s high time.

  What exactly is it that is scaring me? What am I imagining? My goal is simply to outlive my dog, after all. Isn’t it?

  But first the routines, otherwise chaos will take over. I must make a fire and have a shower. Wake Castor up. Make the bed. Note down my meteorological observations.

  Five degrees at nine o’clock. Moderate wind, misty, visibility fifty metres or so.

  We walk in the direction of Dulverton: those are the fairly dry paths we know best, and where we meet the ponies three mornings out of four. And as we are walking I think through everything in detail. Or at least try to formulate the apprehensions. Put a face on the monster. Return to Miȩdzyzdroje.

  *

  So:

  More than six weeks have passed. One-and-a-half months. If he did manage to get himself out, he must have done so that first day.

  Otherwise he’d have frozen to death.

  Been eaten up by the rats.

  Or?

  Okay, two days. Two days maximum. I decide on that.

  So, assume that Martin has been free since the twenty-fifth of October. Alive. What would he have been doing all that time? Would he have spent over forty days looking for me? I erased all traces of my movements after Berlin. Was there something I overlooked?

  Has he been looking for me without making his presence known? Is that a possibility? Surely it sounds impossible. Or is it in fact as impossible as that?

  Has he somehow found a trail leading to England?

  Rented a silver-coloured Renault and followed a new trail to Exmoor?

  Found our car? No doubt it’s possible that the registration number is on a data list at the tunnel terminal in Calais – but how could he have got hold of such a document?

  And Winsford?

  Rubbish. It simply doesn’t add up.

  But if he really did get out of the bunker – I think, hypothetically – he must have kept everything secret. Somehow or other. There’s no doubt about that: he must have chosen not to have revealed the truth. Everybody thinks we are in Morocco. Everybody I am in touch with, that is. Gunvald. Synn. Christa. Bergman. Soblewski. G, whoever he is.

  Other people as well – colleagues in the Monkeyhouse, colleagues in the Sandpit, Violetta di Parma and our neighbours with whom we never socialized . . . The fact is that every man jack who knows who we are also knows that we chose to leave Sweden because of certain improper goings-on at a hotel in Gothenburg. Together. Surely . . . Surely there would have been some sort of mention in the e-mails if Martin had suddenly turned up and put a stop to all the illusions and circumstances I so carefully cobbled together? In Stockholm or somewhere else. Surely?

  Surely?

  I pause briefly at this point because a little bird appears from nowhere and perches on the back of a pony. Only ten metres away from us. It sits there wagging its tail for a few seconds before flying away. I don’t know if it’s an especially remarkable event, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. The pony paid no attention to it in any case, just carried on grazing calmly.

  I shake my head and pick up the thread again. How . . . How could he possibly have traced me to the edge of an obscure little village in Somerset? We were supposed to be going to Morocco, after all.

/>   It’s a more or less rhetorical question. I haven’t used a bank card or a mobile phone since I left Berlin, I am using an assumed name, there are no connections between the fictitious writer Maria Anderson and the former television personality Maria Holinek. None at all.

  In the relative light of day during a familiar morning walk it is not difficult to reach this conclusion. The fact that I’m fighting against figments of my imagination. If Martin were alive, I would know about it. Everything else is out of the question. Everything else is fantasy.

  Unless . . .

  I pause again and think. Unless this is exactly the strategy he has decided to follow.

  This sort of revenge, to be more precise: to slowly, extremely methodically and cunningly let me know that he is on my heels . . . Revenge is a dish best served cold . . . Letting me know that he knows where I am, and then, nudge nudge, scaring me over the edge into a nervous breakdown before finally . . . Well, before doing what exactly?

  Would he be capable of acting like this?

  I have to ask myself that question in all seriousness. Would Martin Holinek, the man with whom I have shared house and home for the whole of my adult life, be capable of doing something like that? Would it be in line with his character?

  To my horror I realize that I can’t answer no to that question without reservations.

  Especially if I consider the fact that the person he is after is his lawful wedded wife who tried to take his life by shutting him into a bunker full of hungry rats – and I really do have to take that circumstance into account, no matter what.

  I start walking again. I feel sick. I can feel the first drops of what promises to be a heavy rain shower, and speed up in order to get back indoors as soon as possible.

  But would it be possible to do that? I ask myself. Even theoretically possible? All he had with him when I left him there was the clothes he stood up in. How could he possibly have managed it?

  An accomplice.

  That thought strikes me just as we are clambering over the wall that separates Darne Lodge from the moor, and I realize immediately that it is a legitimate conclusion. Ergo: if Martin somehow managed to extricate himself from that confounded bunker and is still alive, he must have acquired an accomplice more or less immediately. There is no other possibility.

  Somebody who assisted him with his plans, and helped him in every way necessary. Silence, money, support.

  But how? I wonder. How could he possibly have found somebody like that?

  Who?

  When we had come indoors I tried to look at the situation from the other direction, from my point of view. What indications do I have? What exactly is there to suggest that these might be the facts of the situation? That the professor of literature Martin Emmanuel Holinek is in fact alive, and has a plan.

  A silver-grey hire car with two daily newspapers in it?

  Dead birds outside my front door? But it’s several weeks now since the pheasant appeared there: would Martin really have been on Exmoor for as long as that?

  No, I think. It doesn’t add up. It’s too implausible for it to be true. He would already have killed me if he had been here.

  I don’t know how convinced I really am about the correctness of this conclusion, but I curse myself for my stupidity. Curse myself for not having had the sense to make a note of the registration number of that car on either of the two occasions I’ve seen it. Armed with the number, it shouldn’t be impossible for me to find out who hired the car from the Sixt rental company.

  If I have a third opportunity I certainly won’t waste it.

  When we’ve been back at home for a while another thing occurs to me. If Martin Holinek is alive, he has exactly the same opportunity as I have for going into an internet cafe and checking his e-mails. For example . . . For example, reading the messages he himself is alleged to have sent to various recipients.

  And surely he must ask himself who is looking after his e-mail correspondence so efficiently in his absence. Is there more than one candidate?

  Using computers with their own unique IP addresses – for I haven’t used our own computers, not in Minehead, and not in Winsford. If you have that number, that address, surely you must also be able to find out exactly where in the world that computer is located?

  Could that be how it happened? Is that what he has done?

  But I reject the idea. Martin has always been just as ignorant about and uninterested in computers as I am.

  Perhaps it was that accomplice, then?

  I reject him (her?) as well. Put two pieces of firewood on the fire and pour out a glass of port. Take two large swigs and feel my unease receding.

  I take out the playing cards – I feel too unfocused to be able to read. Not even about John Ridd and Lorna Doone, ‘a simple tale told simply’.

  I reject the hazy hypotheses of fear.

  Martin Holinek is dead. We met one day in June thirty-four years ago, at a garden party in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. We lived our lives together, and now he has gone. Naturally. Eaten up by rats and impossible to identify when some curious walker wandering along the beach on the Baltic coast of Poland feels moved to take a look inside a filthy old bunker.

  That’s the way it is. It’s just that I have chosen not to spell it out previously with such brutal clarity. I’ve done exactly the same as the author E, and let it hide itself away between the lines: please forgive me for that detail, Gudrun Ewerts, when you read this up in your heaven.

  I check that I have locked the door. Empty my glass of port and pour myself another, and set out the game of Spider Harp.

  30

  When Martin celebrated his fiftieth birthday, his present from me was a long weekend in New York. It was in September 2003: we arrived on a Thursday afternoon and left four days later. We stayed at a hotel in Lexington Avenue quite close to Grand Central Station, and I never set foot outside our room from start to finish.

  The cause was a major stomach upset which had begun to make itself felt as our flight was approaching Newark, and which forced our taxi driver to stop twice on the drive into Manhattan.

  I needed to be within easy reach of a lavatory, it was as simple as that. I suppose I thought it would pass after a few hours – or a day at most – but it didn’t. I couldn’t keep down a crumb of food until the Sunday evening, and as we boarded the plane the next morning for the flight home I was extremely grateful for the fact that I’d treated ourselves to business class in view of the journey’s significance. If I’d been in economy I’m quite sure I would have been sick again.

  Martin was loyal that first evening, just went down to the hotel bar for an hour and spent the rest of the time with me in room number 1828. The room was on the eighteenth floor, and so we had a splendid view. To the south and the east, downtown and over the East River towards Brooklyn on the other side. From the very beginning, that first evening, I made it clear to Martin that this was to be his trip and it wasn’t the intention that he should sit twiddling his thumbs in a hotel room on my account. Neither of us was especially familiar with the city (Synn hadn’t yet moved there, that happened about three years later and in any case didn’t increase the frequency of our visits), so he ought to get out and about.

  It wasn’t too difficult to persuade him of that. On Friday he went out after breakfast, came back at six o’clock, had a shower and a whisky, then went out again. If I remember rightly he eventually tumbled into bed at about half past two.

  On Saturday Martin woke up at about eleven and asked if I still had the stomach problem. I admitted that unfortunately that was still the case, he went back to sleep, got up an hour later and after another shower wondered if, given the circumstances, I didn’t fancy going out for lunch.

  I confirmed that unfortunately that was also the case, and he left me soon after two.

  He returned thirteen hours later in a new but somewhat soiled suit. I asked him where it had come from, and he explained that it had come from Fifth Avenue and was his fiftieth b
irthday present to himself. I wondered what had happened to his old clothes, the ones he had been wearing when he went out, and he said he had given them away to a down-and-out in Union Square.

  He fell asleep still wearing half his suit, without asking me about the state of my stomach infection.

  I woke up early on Sunday morning, went to the bathroom and was sick. I realized it was due to the banana I had eaten during the night, and wondered if it was going to be possible for me to board a plane the next day. I also felt rather annoyed about Martin, and wished we had had separate rooms. But at the same time I felt a bit guilty: here he was, for once, in the city of cities, and of course it was only right that he should go out and enjoy himself.

  But you can’t deal with annoyance using reasonable thoughts of that kind, and when he had left me alone again, a few hours into the afternoon, I was merely glad to be rid of him. I didn’t ask him to tell me what he had been up to the last couple of evenings, nor what he had in mind for the third and last one. And he didn’t seem all that interested in informing me either, so in that respect I suppose you could say that we were on a par. I was also so exhausted after all my visits to the toilet that I reckoned as far as I was concerned he was welcome to go and drown himself in the Hudson River.

  Or why not the East River – then I could watch it happening from my window.

  The phone rang at a quarter past one in the morning. It was from the police station in 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Somebody called Sergeant Krapotsky.

  He asked if he was talking to Mrs Holinek, and I confirmed that he was. What was it all about?

  Was I perhaps married to a certain Martin Holinek? Sergeant Krapotsky wanted to know.

  I confirmed that as well

  ‘Very good,’ said Krapotsky. ‘We have your husband locked up in a cell at the police station here. Could you perhaps be so kind as to come and collect him?’

  ‘What has he done?’ I asked.