by Håkan Nesser
“I’ve no idea.”
“Not even roughly?”
“No. It could have been any time between nine and two. I never looked at the clock.”
“I understand. Why should you?”
Ruger started gathering together his papers.
“Might I suggest that you refrain from going into too much detail of the, er, lovemaking, if the matter is raised in court. I think it could be misinterpreted.”
“No doubt.”
“Incidentally, there was no trace of sperm. . Er, I expect you are aware that rather detailed examinations are made. .”
“Yes, the chief inspector explained that. No, I never came. I suppose that’s one of the effects of the wine. Or advantages perhaps, depending on how you look at it. Isn’t that so, Mr. Ruger?”
“Hmm. I take it you know that the time has been
established?”
“What time?”
“The time of death. Not precisely, of course, that’s virtually never possible. But sometime between four and half past five.”
“I got up at twenty past eight.”
“We know that.”
He stood up. Adjusted his tie and buttoned up his jacket.
“I think that will be enough for today. Thank you very much. I’ll be back tomorrow with some more questions. I hope you will be cooperative.”
“Haven’t I been cooperative today?”
“Yes, very.”
“Can I keep the cigarettes?”
“Please do. May I ask one final question, which might be a little bit, er, uncomfortable?”
“Of course.”
“I think it’s important. I don’t want you to be casual about your answer.”
“No?”
“If you don’t want to say anything, I shall understand completely. But I think it’s important that you are honest with yourself. Anyway, are you quite sure that you really do want to remember what happened, or would you prefer not to know?”
Mitter did not answer. Ruger avoided looking at him.
“I’m shoulder to shoulder with you. I hope you realize that.”
Mitter nodded. Ruger rang the bell, and a few seconds later the warder appeared and let him out. Ruger hesitated in the doorway. Seemed to be unsure of himself.
“My son asked me to pass on greetings. Edwin. Edwin Ruger. You taught him history ten years ago, I don’t know if you remember him. In any case, he liked you. You were an interesting teacher.”
“Interesting?”
“Yes, that’s the word he used.”
Mitter nodded again.
“I remember him. Please pass on greetings, and thank him.”
They shook hands, and then he was alone.
3
An insect crawled up his bare right arm. A persistent little bug only a few millimeters long; he watched it, wondering where it was headed.
For the light, perhaps. He had left the bedside lamp on, even though it was the middle of the night. He found it difficult to cope with darkness, for whatever reason. This was not like him. Darkness had never been a threat as far as he was concerned, not even when he was a child. He could recall several occasions when he had attracted more admiration for daring and courage than he deserved, simply because he was not afraid of the dark. Mankel and Li had been especially impressed.
Mankel was dead now. He had no idea what had become of Li. . It was odd that he should think of them now: he hadn’t given them a thought for years and years. There were so many other things he ought to think of instead-but who can control the capricious mechanisms of memory?
He checked the clock. Half past three. Had he been dreaming?
He’d slept restlessly, in any case. Perhaps something had come to him in his slumbers? In recent days he had become more and more convinced that everything would come back to him in his dreams. Nothing at all happened while he was 1 9
awake; after more than a week, that night was just as much of a blank as it had been the morning after. The developer used in the darkroom was faulty; no images, not even a hint of an outline materialized on the paper. It was as if he hadn’t even been there, as if nothing at all had happened after their wild lovemaking. The last images were clear enough: Eva’s thighs opening and closing around his penis, her back arched extrava-gantly at the moment of ecstasy, her breasts bouncing and her nails digging into his skin. . There was more to it than he had described to Ruger, but it was of no significance. After the embrace in the kitchen there was nothing. It was as blank as a mirror.
Like newly formed ice over dark water.
Had he simply fallen asleep? Passed out? He had been naked in bed when he woke up the next morning, dammit.
What in hell’s name had happened?
Eva? He had heard her voice several times in his dreams, he was sure of that, but never any words. Never any message, just her voice. Deep, puckish, somehow alluring. He’d always been fascinated by her voice.
The apartment had looked relatively tidy. Apart from the leftovers in the kitchen and the clothes on the floor, there had been no sign of untoward goings-on. A couple of full ashtrays, some half-empty glasses, the bottle in the hall. He’d cleared away what few things there were before the police arrived.
The same questions. Again and again. Over and over again.
Reflecting themselves in the mirror. Bouncing like a fistful of gravel over the ice. But nothing came back to him. Nothing at all.
And even if anything had come back to him in his sleep, how the devil could he be expected to hang on to it? And not to lose track of it, as he always did?
His sleep was more irregular than ever. Never longer than m i n d ’ s e y e
an hour, often only fifteen or twenty minutes. He’d smoked the last of the cigarettes from Ruger at about two o’clock.
He’d have paid a fortune for a puff now: there was a tingling in his body that he couldn’t get rid of, a sort of itch deep down under his skin that was inaccessible.
And weariness.
Weariness that came and went, and that might well have been a blessing in disguise, as it fended off other things that might have been even worse.
What was it that Ruger had wondered about?
Did he really want to know? Did he. .?
He felt a slight prick on his shoulder. The insect had bitten him. He hesitated for a moment before taking it between his finger and thumb and squashing it.
When he swallowed it, it felt like no more than an unchewed crumb of bread.
He turned over to face the wall. Lay there with his face pressed against the concrete, listening for sounds. All he could hear was the monotonous breathing of the ventilation system.
The whole of my world is going to collapse even more cat-astrophically, he thought. It’s only a matter of time.
When the breakfast cart arrived shortly after seven, he was still lying there in the same position. But he hadn’t slept a wink.
4
Ruger’s cold was no better.
“I ought to have a cognac and go to bed, but I must have a few words with you first. Have you slept well?”
Mitter shook his head.
“Have you slept at all?”
“Not a lot.”
“No, you look as if you haven’t. Have you had any tablets?
Some kind of tranquilizer?”
“No.”
“I’ll fix that for you. We mustn’t let them grind you down. I take it you don’t believe that this long wait before the trial is a coincidence?”
He paused and blew his nose.
“Ah yes, the cigarettes.”
He tossed an unopened packet onto the table. Mitter tore off the cellophane and noticed that he wasn’t in full control of his hands. The first puffs made everything go black before his eyes.
“Van Veeteren will come to interrogate you again this afternoon. I’d like to be present, but I’m afraid that won’t be possible. But my advice is to say as little as possible. I take it you know you have a right to be silent from start to f
inish?”
“I thought you had advised me not to do that?”
“At the trial, yes. But not when the police question you.
Just keep quiet, let them ask as many questions as they like. Or at least, just tell them that you don’t remember. Okay?”
Mitter nodded. He was starting to feel a degree of trust in Ruger, whether he liked it or not. He wondered if it was due to his lack of sleep, or the lawyer’s increasingly bad cold.
“The stupidest thing you could possibly do is to jump to conclusions, guess things, speculate, and then be forced to retract. Every single word you utter during the interrogations will be used against you at the trial. If, for example, you suggest the chief inspector ought to kiss his own ass, you can bet your life he’ll tell the jury-as an example of the kind of character you are. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
Mitter shook his head.
“Okay. I’d like to talk to you about the morning.”
“The morning?”
“Yes, when you found her. There are several points that need clarification.”
“Such as?”
“Your. . conduct after you’d phoned the police.”
“Oh?”
“You cleaned up the flat while your wife was lying dead in the bath, is that right?”
“I just tidied up a few things, that’s all.”
“Don’t you think that’s rather odd?”
“No.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“I put some glasses away, emptied an ashtray, picked up some clothes. .”
“Why?”
“I. . I don’t really know. I suppose I must have been a bit shocked. I didn’t want to go back to the bathroom, that’s for sure.”
“How long was it before the police arrived?”
“A quarter of an hour. Maybe twenty minutes.”
“Yes, that’s about right. Your phone call was recorded at 8:27, and according to the report they arrived at 8:46. Nineteen minutes. What did you do with the clothes?”
“I put them in the washing machine.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. There weren’t that many.”
“Where’s the washing machine?”
“In the kitchen.”
“And you put everything into it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you switch it on as well?”
“Yes.”
“Do you usually take care of the laundry yourself?”
“I lived alone for ten years.”
“Okay, but what about the different categories? Was the same program really appropriate for all of them? Surely there must have been different colors and materials and so on?”
“No, everything was dark colors.”
“So you used the colors program?”
“Yes.”
“What temperature?”
“A hundred degrees. Some should probably have had one-forty, but it doesn’t usually make much difference.”
There was a pause. Ruger blew his nose. Mitter lit another cigarette. His third so far. Ruger leaned back and looked up at the ceiling.
“Can’t you see that all this is damned peculiar?”
“All what?”
“You doing the washing just after finding your wife dead in the bathroom.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. .”
“Or did you set the washing machine going before you called the police?”
“No, I rang right away.”
“Immediately?”
“Yes. Well, I took a couple of tablets first. I had a blistering headache.”
“What else did you do while you were waiting for the police? Besides emptying the ashtray, rinsing some glasses, washing some clothes. .?”
“I threw some leftover food into the bin. Tidied up a bit in the kitchen. .”
“You didn’t water the flowers?”
“No.”
“You didn’t clean the windows?”
Mitter closed his eyes. That trust in Ruger was on hold now, he could feel that clearly. Perhaps it had only been due to the cigarettes. The one he was smoking now tasted anything but pleasant. He stubbed it out in annoyance.
“Have you ever found your wife dead in the bath, Mr.
Ruger? Even if not, perhaps you could inform me how one ought to behave while waiting for the police; it could be interesting to know. . ”
Ruger had fished out his handkerchief again, but paused.
“Can’t you understand, for Christ’s sake?”
“Understand what?”
“That your behavior was highly suspicious, dammit. Surely you can understand how it will be interpreted. For God’s sake!
Washing up glasses, washing clothes! Talk about removing evidence. .!”
“You are assuming that I killed her, I gather.”
Ruger blew his nose.
“No, I’m assuming nothing. And thank God your behavior was so idiotic that it will probably earn you more pluses than minuses.”
“What do you mean?”
“You drown your wife in the bathtub. Manage to lock the door from the outside. You get undressed and go to bed and forget all about it. The next morning you wake up, break into the bathroom and find her. . You swallow a couple of pills to ease your headache, phone the police, and start washing clothes. .”
Mitter stood up and walked to his bed. He was suddenly overcome by exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than for Ruger to go away and leave him in peace.
“I didn’t kill her. . ”
He stretched out on the bed.
“No; or at least, you don’t think you did. You know, I think it’s not impossible that the authorities might want to have you examined in order to assess your mental state. What would you have to say about that?”
“Are you saying they can’t force me to do it?”
“Not unless there is sufficient reason.”
“And isn’t there?”
Ruger had stood up and was putting on his overcoat.
“Hard to say. . Hard to say. What do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
He closed his eyes and curled up facing the wall. He could hear Ruger saying something in the far distance, but his exhaustion was now a deep, swirling abyss and he allowed himself to sink down into it, offering no resistance.
5
Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren did not have a cold.
On the other hand, he did have a tendency to be depressed when the weather was poor, and as it had now been raining more or less nonstop for ten days, melancholy had made the most of the opportunity to sink deep roots into his mind.
He closed the door and started the car. Switched on the cassette player. A Vivaldi mandolin concerto. As usual there was a gremlin in one of the speakers. The sound came and went.
It wasn’t just the rain. There were other things as well.
His wife, for instance. For the fourth or fifth time-he had lost count-she seemed to be on her way back to him. Eight months ago they had separated once and for all, but now she had started phoning again.
The point of return had not yet been reached, but it was clear which way the wind was blowing. He was pretty sure he could count on sharing household and bed by the run-up to Christmas, or thereabouts.
Again.
The only thing that could prevent it was for him to say no, but needless to say, there was nothing to suggest such a development on this occasion either.
He turned in to Kloisterlaan and fished up a toothpick from his breast pocket. The rain was pounding down and the wind-shield misting over again. As usual. He wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket, but for a few moments he could see nothing at all.
Death, here I come, he thought. But nothing happened.
He jabbed at the air-conditioning buttons and adjusted the controls. The flow of hot air over his feet became more intense.
I ought to get a better car, he thought.
Not for the first time.
Bismarck was al
so ill.
Ever since his daughter Jess’s twelfth birthday he had been saddled with the slow-witted Newfoundland bitch, but now all she did was to lie in front of the refrigerator, sicking up foul-smelling yellowish-green lumps, and he was forced to drive home several times a day in order to clean them up.
The dog, that is. Not his daughter.
He hoped that Jess was in much better shape. She was twenty-four now, or possibly twenty-three; lived a long way away in Borges with new dogs, a husband who repaired teeth, and a pair of twins who were busy learning to walk and to swear in a foreign language. He had last seen them at the beginning of the summer holidays, and felt no obligation to force himself upon them again before the New Year.
He also had a son. Erich.
Erich lived much closer. In the state prison in Linden, to be precise, where he was serving a two-year sentence for drug-smuggling. He was being well looked after, in other words. If m i n d ’ s e y e
Van Veeteren felt like it, he could visit him every day-it was just a matter of getting into the car and driving the fifteen miles or so alongside the canals, showing the warder his ID
card, and marching in. Erich was inside there; he had no possibility of avoiding his father, and as long as Van Veeteren took along some cigarettes and newspapers, he generally seemed to be not entirely unwelcome.
But he sometimes wondered what the point was of sitting and staring at his long-haired crook of a son.
He wound down the window to let in a little fresh air. A shower of raindrops fell onto his thigh.
What else?
His right foot, of course.
He’d sprained it during the previous day’s badminton match with Munster: 6-15, 3-15, abandoned due to injury with the score 0–6 in the third set. . The figures told their own story, of course. This morning he’d had difficulty in getting a shoe onto that foot, and every step was agony. Oh, what joy to be alive.
He wiggled his toes tentatively, and wondered if he ought really to have gone to the X-ray department; but it was not a genuine thought, as he was well aware. He only needed to recall his father, that stoic who refused to go to the hospital with double pneumonia, on the grounds that it was unmanly.
He died two days later in his own bed, proud of the fact that he had not cost the health service a single penny and never allowed a drop of medicine to cross his lips.
