by Håkan Nesser
Once this case is over, he thought, I won’t want to be reminded of it. Not ever.
Then he sat down at the desk and made two phone calls.
He asked two questions, and received more or less the replies he’d been looking for.
“I’ll be there at around noon,” he said. “No, I can’t tell you what it’s about. It would be such a goddamn disaster if I’m wrong.”
Then he took a shower and went to bed. It was only eleven o’clock, but the earlier he could set off the next day, the better.
I’ll know tomorrow, he thought.
We’ll have him behind bars the day after tomorrow, and I can go home on Saturday.
But before he could go to sleep, thoughts about Beate Moerk came flooding into his mind, and it was well into the early hours before he finally dozed off.
45
“Evil,” he began, and his voice was deeper now, barely audible in the densely packed air, “is the concept we cannot avoid, the only certainty. A young person might find that hard to grasp, but for those of us who have understood, it becomes steadily clearer. What we can be sure of, what we can rely on absolutely, is evil. It never lets us down. Good . . . goodness is only a stage set, a backdrop against which the satanic performs. Nothing else . . . nothing.”
He coughed. He lit another cigarette, a glowing point trembling in the darkness.
“When you eventually acquire that insight, it brings with it a certain degree of comfort despite everything. The difficult thing is simply to rid oneself of all the old hopes, all the illusions and castles in the air that one builds at the beginning. In our case her name was Brigitte, and when she was ten she promised never to hurt me. That was the time she came running over the sands; it was a very windy day at the end of May. Out at Gimsvejr. She flung herself into my arms and hugged me so tightly that I remember having a pain in the back of my neck afterward. We’ll love each other all our lives and never do anything silly to each other—those were her very words. Anything silly . . . never do anything silly to each other . . . ten years old, blond braids. She was the only child we had, and some people said they had never seen such a happy child. Nobody laughed like she did—she sometimes even woke herself up, laughing in her sleep—who can blame us for having hopes?”
He coughed again.
“She took her final exams in 1981, then went to England and worked there for a year. Was accepted by the university in Aarlach the following year. Met a boy called Maurice—Maurice Rühme—yes, we’re there already. I think she knew him slightly from before; he came from Kaalbringen. He was reading medicine. Came from an upper-class family, very attractive, and he taught her how to use cocaine . . . he was the first, but I kept him until last.”
The cigarette glowed again.
“They moved in together. Lived together for about a year until he threw her out. By then he had taught her other things . . . LSD, pure morphine, which he never used himself, and how a young woman can earn money most easily and most effectively. Perhaps she provided for him, perhaps he was her pimp . . . I don’t know, we never talked about that. Perhaps it hadn’t gone quite as far as that, not then.
“She stayed in Aarlach on her own for another eighteen months. She had no place of her own, but moved around from man to man. And she was going in and out of hospitals and treatment centers. Detoxified, ran away, moved on . . .”
He swallowed, and she could hear him holding his breathing in check.
“She lived at home for a short period as well, but then went back. Kept clean for a while, but before long it was the same old story. Eventually she was ensnared by some kind of sect, kept away from drugs but was brought down by other things instead. It was as if she didn’t have the strength, or as if she shied away from any normal sort of life . . . or perhaps it was no longer enough for her, the everyday, I don’t know. Nevertheless, after two years she agreed to leave Aarlach and live with us again, but now all that happiness had vanished . . . Brigitte . . . Bitte. She was twenty-four. She was only twenty-four, but in fact she was much older than me and my wife. She knew, I think she knew even then that she had burned up her life . . . she could still do her hair in blond braids, but she had burned up her life. She realized that, but we didn’t. I don’t know, in fact . . . perhaps there was a faint glimmer of hope left, a possibility of sorting everything out. That’s what we told ourselves, at least, what we had to tell ourselves . . . the desperate illusion of vain hope. We believe what we have to believe. Until we’ve taught ourselves to see reality, that is what we do. That’s what this damn life looks like. We cling on to whatever is at hand. Anything at all . . .”
He fell silent. She opened her eyes and saw the cigarette glow illuminate his face, and pulled the blankets more tightly around her. She felt and sensed the extreme hopelessness that came flowing out of him uninterruptedly. Coming in waves, and for a moment it seemed to compress the darkness, making it solid and impermeable even for words and thoughts.
I understand, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. They stayed deep inside her. Frozen and meaningless.
“I went to see Maurice Rühme that same fall,” he said, breaking the silence. “One day during the few months she was at home with us again I went to see him. Visited him in that same well-kept apartment she had shared with him, and where he now lived with another woman . . . a young and beautiful woman who still retained all her happiness and never discovered the reason for my visit. He kept her out of the way, and when I wanted to talk to him about Brigitte, we went out and sat in a bar. Sat on a peculiar plush velvet sofa and he waved his arms around and wondered what the devil I wanted; he paid for the wine and asked me if I wanted money . . . I think that’s when he sowed the seeds of his own destruction, but it wasn’t until he came back here, and the others as well, that I realized the time was ripe. When I killed him, the pleasure was all the greater. Somehow deeper and more intense than with Eggers and Simmel, and that doesn’t surprise me. He was the one who had started it all off, it was the image of a living Maurice Rühme who caused the greatest torture during all those sleepless nights before I made up my mind . . . a living, smiling Maurice Rühme sitting on that sofa, flailing his arms about and regretting that Brigitte wasn’t made of sterner stuff. That she would fall so badly and hurt herself so much . . . he had never imagined that, the little rich boy with the strong safety net.”
He fell silent once again and shifted his position on the chair.
“I have to leave you now,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the others another time. If nothing unexpected happens . . .”
He remained sitting there for another minute, then she heard him stand up and open the door. Heard the squeaking hinges as he closed it again, locked and bolted it, and it was only after his footsteps had long since faded away that her tongue loosened again.
“And what about me?” she whispered, and for a moment she thought her words remained hanging like symbols in the darkness.
Small, rapidly fading sparks in a black, black night.
Then she wrapped the blankets around her and tried to close the eyes of her soul.
46
When he drove out of the parking lot behind The See Warf, it was no later than half past seven, and the sun had barely risen over the high coast to the east. A clear day seemed to be in store, and he was rather looking forward to sitting behind the wheel for a few hours.
Sitting there and traveling through an autumnal landscape with glowing colors and the sharp contours of a drypoint engraving. Perhaps he could pretend that he was an ordinary person on some mundane errand—on the way to Bochhuisen to give a lecture on modern management techniques. Checking the sulfur dioxide emissions from some obscure chemical factory. Meeting a relative at the airport.
Or whatever ordinary folk did.
Sometime in March he had hemmed and hawed and wondered if he ought to change his car, or be satisfied with buying a better auto stereo system. He’d gradually come around to the latter option, and as he n
ow crawled along Kaalbringen’s narrow alleys he was grateful that he had made such a sensible decision. He would never have been able to afford the extra few thousand he’d invested in some very exclusive loudspeakers if he’d had to buy a new car as well.
As things were now, the value of his stereo system was far more than anybody could be expected to give for the rest of his old Opel, and he preferred it that way.
The car was a means of transport. The music was a luxury. No doubt about which ought to be given priority.
He selected something Nordic for this morning. Cold, clear and serene. Sibelius and Grieg. He inserted the CD, and as the first notes of Tuonela enveloped him, he could feel how the hairs on his arms bristled.
It was dazzlingly beautiful. Like being in Lämminkäinens cave and the whole mountain echoing with this inspiring music. For the first time in weeks—indeed, ever since he had come to Kaalbringen—he managed to exclude the Axman from his thoughts. Forget him. Just sat there, lost in the music . . . inside a dome of crystal-clear sound, as the mists lifted and disappeared over the extensive, rolling countryside.
After a stop at a mundane and gloomy roadside café on a level with Urdingen, however, there was a sea change. He realized that instead of traveling farther away, it was now a question of coming closer. His starting point was dropping farther and farther behind, his destination looming . . . rising, falling . . . as ever. He had passed the crown of the hill. He would soon be there. The time was out of joint, and everything would click into place.
Or fall apart. This damn case!
And although he tried once again to distance himself from it, to banish it from his mind, it kept popping up in his consciousness, not in the form of thoughts, speculations or conclusions, but as images.
All the way through the “Hall of the Mountain King” and “Anitra’s Dance” flowed a constant stream of sharp, unretouched photographs. They throbbed their way forward with a regular and persistent but quite slow rhythm. Like one of those old film strips from a history lesson at school, it struck him. There was plenty of time to evaluate each individual image, although the content was rather different, of course.
Ernst Simmel’s head at an unnatural angle on the pathologist’s marble table, and the latter’s ballpoint pen poking around inside the open gullet.
The lawyer Klingfort’s trembling double chin when he gaped in surprise.
The hall carpet soaked in blood in Maurice Rühme’s apartment. And the butcher’s ax, the origin of which they had never managed to establish.
Louise Meyer, Eggers’s heavily made-up whore, whom he had spent a whole afternoon trying to interview, but she was so high that it was totally impossible to get through to her.
The ice-cold eyes of Jean-Claude Rühme, and Inspector Moerk’s beautiful hair when she entered the room with the Melnik report in her hand . . .
Dr. Mandrijn and his wife carting that deformed creature around the grounds at the Seldon Hospice.
And Laurids Reisin. An imagined and persistent image of the man who didn’t dare to set foot outside his home.
And the Axman.
The image of the Axman himself. Still blurred in outline and unidentifiable, but if Van Veeteren really was on the right track now, it was only a matter of an hour or so before the image emerged with all the clarity that could be wished for.
A few little checks. Confirmation of a nasty suspicion, and it would all be over.
Perhaps.
He was sitting behind his desk, twiddling his mustache. Slim, in a black suit and with thin hair combed back, he was more reminiscent of a funeral director than anything else. That was precisely how Van Veeteren remembered him; in fifteen years he seemed to have aged by one, or at most two months. There was no sign of his having been operated on only a week ago.
With a slight, somewhat acid smile he welcomed his visitor and indicated the visitor’s chair, which was directly in front of the immaculately tidy desk.
“What the devil’s all this about, then?”
Van Veeteren recalled that the man was reputed to be incapable of opening his mouth without swearing. He turned the palms of his hands in the direction of the ceiling and tried to look apologetic.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Just let me have a look at the material I came here to see . . . it’s a rather delicate matter.”
“Like hell it is!” He opened a desk drawer and took out a brown folder.
“Here you are. You’re welcome to the damn thing!”
Van Veeteren took the folder and wondered for a moment if he ought to read it there and then, on the visitor’s chair, but when he looked at the man in black he knew that the matter was over and done with. Finished! He remembered also that his host had never been one to indulge in superfluous details—conversation and that sort of thing. He stood up, shook hands and left the office.
The whole visit had taken less than two minutes.
People who claim I’m bad tempered ought to meet this happy guy, thought Van Veeteren as he hurried down the stairs.
He crossed the street and opened his car, then took the briefcase from the backseat and put the folder inside it. He looked around. Some fifty yards away, on the corner of the street, was what appeared to be a café sign.
Just the thing, he thought, and set off for it.
He waited until the waitress had left before opening the folder on the table in front of him. He leafed through a few pages and nodded. Leafed some pages backward and nodded again.
Lit a cigarette and started reading from page one.
He didn’t need to keep going for long. Confirmation came as early as page five; maybe it wasn’t quite what he’d expected, but dammit, it was confirmation even so. He put the papers back in the folder and closed it.
Well, I’ll be damned, he thought.
But the motive was far from being clear, of course. What the hell did the other two have to do with all this? How the hell . . . ?
Ah, well, it would become clear eventually, no doubt.
He checked his watch. Just turned one.
Thursday, September 30. Chief of Police Bausen’s last day but one in office. And all of a sudden, the case was on its way to being solved.
Just as he’d suspected from the start, it was hardly the result of laborious routine investigations. Just as he’d thought, the solution had come to him more or less out of the blue. It felt a little odd, he had to concede; unfair almost, although there again, it was hardly the first time this kind of thing had happened. He’d seen it all before, and had realized long ago that if there was any profession in which virtue never got its due reward, it was that of police officer.
Justice has a certain preference for cops who lounge around and think, instead of working their butts off, as Reinhart had once put it.
But what struck him above all else was how reluctantly he would want to look back on this case in the future. His own contribution was certainly nothing to be proud of. Quite the opposite. Something to draw a line under and then forget immediately, for Christ’s sake.
Not quite as usual, in other words.
47
Something gnawing away from inside? Or a creeping numbness? A movement going nowhere?
Something like that. That’s roughly what it felt like. Insofar as she could feel anything at all.
The time that still existed was for the fading rhythms and needs in her own body. In this deadening darkness day and night no longer existed; time was split into fragments: She slept and woke up, stayed awake and fell asleep. It wasn’t possible to judge how long anything took; it might be day outside, or it might be night . . . perhaps she had slept for eight hours, or was it only twenty minutes? Hunger and thirst cropped up merely as faint signals from something that didn’t concern her, but she ate nevertheless from the bowl of bread and fruit that he replenished now and again. Drank from the bottle of water.
With her hands chained together, her feet too, her mobility was greatly restricted, and not just by the room; she lay
curled up under the blankets, almost in the fetal position. The only times she stood up were when she needed to use the bucket . . . crouching down and groping her way forward. The smell from the bucket had troubled her at first, but soon she no longer noticed it. The overwhelming smell of soil was the only thing she was constantly aware of, the thing that struck her the moment she woke up, that stayed in her consciousness all the time . . . soil.
Interrupted only by the pleasant smell of tobacco when he sat in the chair and told her his story.
The enormous fear she had felt at first had also ebbed away. It had vanished and been replaced by something else: a heavy feeling of lethargy and tedium; not hopelessness, perhaps, but an increasingly strong impression that she was some kind of vegetable, a being that was gradually fading away and becoming an apathetic, numb body . . . a body that was increasingly indifferent to all inner pressures, thoughts and memories. The all-enveloping darkness was eating its way into her, it seemed, slowly and relentlessly penetrating her skin . . . and yet she realized that this might be her only chance of surviving, her only chance of not going mad. Simply lying there under the blankets, maintaining her bodily warmth as much as possible. Letting the dreams and fantasies come and go as they wished, without paying too much attention to them . . . both when awake and when asleep.
And not hoping for anything. Not trying to imagine or think about what might be the final outcome. Just lying there. Just waiting for him to come back and continue his story.
About Heinz Eggers and Ernst Simmel.
“No,” he said, and she could hear him tearing the cellophane off his new pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know if it was already over when she came back from Aarlach. Or if there was still a chance. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference now, afterward, there’s no point in speculating . . . things turned out the way they did, and that’s that.”
