We had both drunk quite a bit, so I cannot remember exactly what happened after the dance. But when I woke up the next morning she was lying naked beside me – and she was a blonde. Fortunately I did not have any classes on Tuesday. I carefully pulled back the sheets and sat down on the sofa opposite the bed. That morning I gazed with the eyes of a beggar at that warm, young creature that had landed like an undeserved gift between my sheets, and, choked with emotion, I waited until, bathed in a golden pool of light like a shameless victim on an altar, she had slept off her intoxication.
Now and then she would groan, smile, stretch out her hand feebly, and feel around in the empty bed as if she was reaching out for me. I kissed her fingertips to relax her. I watched over her like an anxious dog inebriated by a sense of unending joy. I whispered loving, calming words to her, and she dozed off again, caressing her taut belly and the scorpion tattooed on the inside of her left thigh in her sleep. When she lay on her side her breasts lay against each other like two pale ripe little pears. The tender breasts of Montana Wildhack on the planet Tralfamadore in George Roy Hill’s film of Slaughterhouse-Five . Six weeks later we were married.
Luyckx gulps down two aspirins with his Alka-Seltzer. It is as if Sonny Spencer is stuck drumming between his temples. The duty orderly who is getting ready to finish his shift brings him a plastic mug of weak coffee and asks if Cox’s account is worth the trouble. “He worked on it for eight hours.”
“You have the feeling that he’s done his best,” says Luyckx with a yawn. “He’s trying to shake off something – but I still don’t know what. I’ve only read a couple of pages so far. It’s obvious that at first he was completely in love with his wife. But then who isn’t?” Sipping his coffee he carries on reading.
Shelley and I went away on a week’s honeymoon to Los Angeles. I had been dreaming for years of visiting the Mecca of film. It was between the W and the O of the gigantic Hollywood sign, on top of the hills, in the copper glow of a Technicolor sunset, that I made her a gift of Karen Morley’s earrings. We were staying at the Chateau Marmont, where I had taken Suite 5D on the fifth floor. It was the suite that Vivien Leigh usually demanded when she came to Hollywood and from where they took her away in a straitjacket in 1953 after she was replaced in William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk by an Elizabeth Taylor twenty years her junior. Seven years later she stayed there once again for a month with her cat Poo Jones, while she was playing opposite Jack Merivale at the Hollywood Playhouse.
I don’t know whether Miss Leigh’s drinking problem was catching, but the fact is that Shelley and I drank an awful lot during our stay in the hotel. Especially Shelley, who every now and then would burst into tears if the mini-bar was empty and she had to wait too long for room service to bring up another bottle. I did not attach much importance to this because she claimed she had never been so happy.
Back in Antwerp we moved into the flat where I still live. I went to the Berchem Palace pretty frequently if she was working nights. Not because the programme was worth the trouble (although I discovered a couple of little-known science-fiction gems like The Mole People with Cynthia Patrick, or Phase IV, where Lynne Frederick is abducted by giant ants) but usually to make sure that she came home after the last screening instead of hanging around in the Vollen Bak, the café around the corner.
In early 1982 Shelley became pregnant. She did not follow her gynaecologist’s advice to give up drink for a while, and lost the baby at five months. It was a girl that we would have called Romy, in humble tribute to Romy Schneider, who had committed suicide in her apartment on the rue Barbet-de-Jouy in Paris on 29th May. To add to her misery, she lost her job shortly after her miscarriage because the Berchem Palace closed down. Her vague attempts to find another position were farcical. She was usually too drunk to get to her interviews.
While I continued to lecture at the Institute, she spent the whole day shuffling around the apartment in her dressing gown like a ghost. She hardly went out any more and cut herself off completely from the outside world. She never watched a film, never listened to music. She drank because she was bored with me, she said, and because I preferred dead film stars to her. Those were our Days of Wine and Roses. With the difference that I had developed an aversion to alcohol and refused to touch another glass of the stuff. I was busy with everything because she usually spent the day in bed with a bottle and was no longer able to take care of the housework. I suggested several times that she should go for detox. She agreed to give it a go and was admitted to Stuivenberg Hospital. But after three days I found her in the morning in the front garden, naked like Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy, sleeping on the damp grass under a rhododendron bush. I know that I let slip to my colleagues at that time that I would have preferred her to be dead than to watch her slide into dementia and that I would feel a release once she had definitively drunk herself into the grave. They will confirm this. Nevertheless, that does not mean that I murdered her ten years later. For to this day I love the Sioux beauty who lit up that student ball like a dark sun on 11th June 1979. When she began to degenerate physically, I could not look at her any longer. And just as there are no known photos of Garbo in her advanced years, I have remained with that first image before my eyes. The image of eternal beauty, of youth frozen in time.
Luyckx puts down the papers and rubs his eyes dejectedly. The more he reads, the harder it is to find the answers he is seeking. Either the man is absolutely crazy and is living in a dream that is closer to the fantasy world of cinema than reality, or this is a diabolical plan, long in the making, to eliminate his wife. Or again he is as naive and hopeless as he acts and has nothing to do with his wife’s death.
Luyckx gets up and is just about to call Lannoy to get him out of bed when his partner bursts in.
“Well, you’re here early today!”
“I’ve already been down to the Ford garage.”
“And?”
“His car really is there. With all the damage that he described. The man at the garage showed me traces of blue paint on the bodywork and agreed that it was the result of a collision. Given the colour, probably a Renault, he said. And what’s Cox written down?”
“No confession so far. But I’ve still got to go through the last bit. Here, you can read the beginning while I’m doing that.”
But before I go to sleep, I must still unburden myself of a couple of things.
I have no argument with people who drink a glass or two too much at a party from time to time. To each his pleasure. That used to happen to me too, and I could hold my own as well as the next man. But Shelley’s problem was different. She did not enjoy drinking and when she was drunk her personality changed into something else: Faye Dunaway in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. At times like that she could talk nonsense for hours, as if she had bats in the belfry with a head full of spiders, that sort of thing. Or she changed into a terribly sad, terribly scared creature, who thought that humanity had turned on her, a nagging, vulgar monster who listened to no one and what’s more was convinced that I was carrying on with all my female students. It is true that for some time we had had no sexual relations with each other. With time she had become anything but attractive. She lost weight, her hair began to fall out and her teeth became loose. I suggested that she take a lover and leave me in peace. And she did. I know that for a time she had a relationship with a professional soldier, one Captain Aimé Butterfly, who was stationed in Brasschaat, and who drank as much as she did and – or so she told me in order to torment me – possessed Joan Collins’s autograph. I let her do it. At least she was out of the house and didn’t need to stuff her bottles behind my books or under the sofa. Whether she was still seeing him recently I would not be able to say.
She spent almost every night away from home in the last few years. I do not know where she was hanging around. And I never asked her either. To tell the truth, we no longer spoke to each other. She had her own room where she slept through the day, while I was at college or spent my
time in the cinema or in my study, where I was occupied with my collection or my research into ‘The Evolution of Desire on the Silver Screen’. I could not see any other solution. I admit that I was happy with her for a few months, twenty years ago. A time I will never forget. And that is already something that counts in a man’s life.
I hope that you can now understand my reaction a little more clearly. It is not indifference. What happened to Shelley last Saturday is really awful. But it was written in the stars and perhaps it was for the best. Certainly for her. For her life was no longer a life, Superintendent, but a hopeless, endless crucifixion.
Luyckx hands the last three pages of Cox’s account to Lannoy.
“He’s innocent,” he sighs. “A little otherworldly, but innocent.”
“Still, he had every motive to get rid of her,” replies Lannoy. “I would have killed her years ago.”
“Exactly. Why would he have waited so long? He had the opportunity every day. He just needed to push her downstairs. As far as I’m concerned, he can go home.”
8
Aimé Butterfly
After dropping a totally exhausted Victor Cox back home, Luyckx and Lannoy drove to the barracks at Brasschaat to pay an unannounced visit to Aimé Butterfly. After all, if Cox’s statement was true, the captain was more or less the only person with whom Shelley had shared her life recently. He would probably be able to say more about her than her husband.
“Aimé,” says Luyckx, as they drive into the camp, “the perfect name for a lover.”
“Talking of which, Ma Mussel told me that Shelley would sometimes speak about a butterfly on her shoulder as if she was talking about a guardian angel.”
“Well, I’m curious to hear what our guardian angel has to say.”
Captain Butterfly was responsible for cultural services at Brasschaat camp. His office was in a booth next to the library, a tiny room with two IKEA bookcases crammed full of well-thumbed books about World War Two, dog-eared biographies of great strategists and generals, torn atlases, hobby guides on gardening, aquariums and miniature modelling, technical literature on tanks and artillery and a tome on Rubens and his age.
On the pale green walls, next to the framed autograph of Joan Collins and official portraits of King Albert and Queen Paola, hang posters for forthcoming cultural events: a one-off concert with Marcel Schoeters and his exotic ensemble, an appearance by the international conjuror Abdul Ajax, a poetry recital by Warrant Officer Arno Serneels accompanied by flamenco guitar and a pedagogical evening devoted to family planning in the armed forces.
In the middle of the room, like at the dentist’s, there is an oval three-legged coffee table made of orange Formica, the sort of 1950s antique that you can still find at second-hand shops like Spullenhulp. Three piles of magazines – about cars, pets and the royal family – are stacked on the table.
After a sloppy sergeant has informed the captain of their arrival, Luyckx and Lannoy are admitted to his office. Butterfly is sitting rigid in his starched uniform behind an empty desk. A little, desiccated functionary, a warrior without a war, a ruler without subjects, a hero without a story. His shoes shine like marble.
“You are lucky to find me here, gentlemen. Normally I only meet people by appointment.”
When he speaks, Butterfly loses control of his right shoulder, which develops a twitch.
“Sometimes we’re in luck, right?” replies Luyckx, barely able to suppress a smile as he tries to imagine Shelley and Aimé romping.
“Butterfly – is that your real name?”
“Yes.”
“Like Madam Butterfly, the opera?”
“Yes. I suppose that’s why they put me in the cultural service. Well, Chief Superintendent Luyckx… the name’s familiar. Didn’t you lead the investigation in the Donders case, that notary from Puurvelde?”
“That’s right, yes.”
“And the murder of that young nurse, Virginia Steiner, two years ago?”
“Yes, and that one.”
“Still unsolved, if I remember correctly?”
“You have a good memory.”
“You need to in the cultural service. But anyway, how can I help you, gentlemen?”
Butterfly pours himself a plastic cup of lukewarm Absolut vodka, filling it to the brim.
“Can I offer you anything?”
“It’s still a little early for me. Luc?”
“No thanks.”
The mahogany clock on the wall strikes nine.
“We won’t hold you up for too long. Does the name Shelley Cox mean anything to you?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Because she knows you.”
“Or rather, knew you.”
Captain Butterfly looks enquiringly at them through the dark rectangles of his glasses.
“We guess that Mrs Cox knew you, because she told us that you own Joan Collins’s autograph.” Luyckx directs his gaze pointedly to the little frame next to the Queen.
“Indeed. But many people know about that. Miss Collins signed my invitation at a reception of the provincial governor’s. On the ninth of December 1993, to be precise.”
“And ‘Dixie’, does that mean anything?” interrupts Lannoy.
Captain Butterfly empties his cup in one gulp.
“Dixie? Dixie… Yes… She’s a friend I see regularly.”
“Her husband told us that she’s your lover.”
“Is Dixie married?”
“Shelley Cox and Dixie were the same person.”
“Were?”
“We fished her corpse out of the Bonaparte Dock yesterday.”
Aimé begins to tremble violently. He pours himself another vodka and drains it in one go. Then he runs out to the corridor and locks himself in the toilet. Luyckx and Lannoy can hear him throwing up loudly. When, propped up by the sergeant, he reappears in his office, he immediately sits down behind his desk and wipes his mouth carefully with a paper tissue.
“Sorry about that. Dixie and I were indeed very… We… I really loved her. She was looking for someone who would understand and protect her. We met each other a couple of years ago at the sauna in Zoersel.”
“That nudist camp where you can play bowls naked?”
“Dixie felt joyfully at one with nature.”
“That’s why she drank nothing but water, right?”
“I never claimed that.”
“Captain, did the two of you have a relationship, yes or no?”
“Many officers go to the sauna. Dixie liked officers, their aura of power, the respect they command. I was not the only one, but I had more in common with Dixie than the others. We were both Scorpios. Like me she was very sensitive. Perhaps it sounds strange for a soldier, but yesterday I was moved to tears by a Japanese ice-skater on TV.”
“When was the last time you saw Shelley Cox?”
“Last Friday. This is all strictly in confidence, I hope.”
“Where?”
“In my caravan, right by the sauna. Our secret love nest, as she called it. She left at about eight to go back to Antwerp, where she had a meeting. I believe it was with someone from the film world.”
“There’s no business like show business.”
“And how did you spend the next evening?”
“On Saturday night I was in the officers’ mess, celebrating Colonel De Bruin’s birthday until the early hours of the morning. I can give you the names of twenty colleagues who can confirm that.”
“Did you ever go out with Mrs Cox in Docklands?”
“Absolutely not. I am the father of two children, gentlemen!”
Lousy bastard, thinks Luyckx.
9
Louise Vlerickx
Because Captain Butterfly had brought up the Donders case while he was being questioned, Luyckx was dreaming about the notary when the cries of jeering children in the narrow Pompstraat woke him at around four o’clock. Irritated because he had been on the point of solving the case in his dream, he shuffled into
the kitchen to make some coffee. Tough case, that murder in Puurvelde. He had been fumbling in the dark for three years and every trail had petered out.
On 16th December 1995, The Sponge was sitting in that very kitchen over two fried eggs listening to the morning news when the telephone rang. It was Lannoy. The body of a young woman had been discovered in Puurvelde in the village notary’s garage and the godforsaken village was just about in the goddamned province of Antwerp. He didn’t have any other details. Ten minutes later they were on their way. On either side of the motorway the grass had vanished under a fresh fall of snow and the horses looked like ponies.
Jos Donders’s chambers were located in his villa at 3A Dennenlaan. A building of whitewashed bricks with a gently undulating thatched roof from the beginning of the unstylish Eighties.
“What have you got for us?” asks Luyckx, shaking the hands of Gendarmerie Brigadier Peeters.
“A young woman. Suicide or murder.”
“I hope nobody has touched anything.”
“We know the rules, Inspector, even out here in the sticks.”
A heavy man in a grey flannel three-piece suit walks awkwardly up to them over the crunchy snow. He carefully avoids the shapeless lumps that here and there betray the presence of a snow-covered garden gnome. With his thin, closely trimmed grey hair, double chin, purple cheeks and small round glasses he looks older than he probably is.
“Luyckx and Lannoy, Antwerp Detective Branch,” says The Sponge curtly.
“Incredible fall of snow last night. The skies just opened,” the notary sighs as if he is receiving a client with one of his polite formulas and has nothing more important to report. “Did it snow like this in Antwerp too?”
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