Woman with Birthmark

by Håkan Nesser

  27

  She dithered for a day and a half.

  She had read about it for the first time on Thursday evening—in one of the newspapers on the bus on the way home—but it wasn't until much later the same night that her suspicions were aroused. In the middle of a dream that vanished immediately into the shadows of the subconscious, she woke up and could see it in her mind's eye.

  The occupied telephone booth in the hall. The back pressed up against the tinted gray glass. The tape recorder pressed against the receiver.

  It had happened only once, and that was at least three weeks ago now. But the image persisted. That Tuesday evening. She had intended to phone a fellow student to ask about something, but had seen immediately that it was occupied. It can't have lasted more than three or four seconds—she had simply opened her door, noted that the phone booth was occupied, and gone back into her room.

  Five minutes later, it was free and she'd been able to make her call.

  It was remarkable that this brief, totally meaningless sequence should have stayed with her. Now, when she had been woken up by it, she couldn't recall having thought about it before at all.

  And, of course, it was precisely that—these vague, unlikely circumstances—that made her hesitate.

  On Friday afternoon she had bumped into her on the stairs. There was nothing unusual about that, either—it was a banal, everyday occurrence—but when she woke up with a start early that Saturday morning, the two trivial images had somehow combined.

  Melted into each other and roused a horrible suspicion.

  She ought really to have consulted Natalie first, but Natalie had gone home to her parents for the weekend, and her room was empty However, after an early jog in the park (which was cut short because of the rain), a shower, and breakfast, she had made up her mind.

  Something prevented her from using the telephone in the hall (was it fear? she asked herself later), and instead she used a public phone booth by the post office to call the police.

  It was 9:34, and the call and her information were registered by Constable Willock, who promised to pass it on to the senior officers on the case and report back to her eventually.

  She returned to her room to study and wait.

  Her conscience was clearer, but she had a nagging feeling of unreality.

  Reinhart sighed. He had spent the last ten minutes trying to perform the trick of half lying down on a standard office chair, but the only notable result was that he now had a backache. At the base of his spine and between his shoulder blades. Van Veeteren was sitting opposite him, slumped over his desk, which was littered with paper, files, empty coffee mugs, and broken toothpicks.

  “Say something,” said Reinhart.

  Van Veeteren muttered and started reading a new sheet of paper.

  “Hot air, nothing else,” he said after another minute and crumpled it up. “There's no substance in this, either. Loewingen is a suburb for the middle classes, in case you didn't know. All the wives work, and all the kids attend nursery school. The nearest neighbor at home when the murder took place was six houses away, and she was asleep. This case is not exactly gliding smoothly along the rails.”

  “Asleep?” said Reinhart, with a trace of longing in his voice. “But it was one in the afternoon, for Christ's sake!”

  “Night nurse at the Gemejnte Hospital,” Van Veeteren explained.

  “So there are no witnesses, is that what you're saying?”

  “Exactly,” said the chief inspector, continuing to leaf through the papers. “Not even a cat.”

  “He certainly seems to have been worried,” Reinhart pointed out after a moment of silence. “Everybody has commented on that. He must have known that he was in trouble.”

  “Certainly,” said Van Veeteren. “We can assume we're looking at a small group.”

  Reinhart sighed again and abandoned the chair. Stood gazing out the window instead.

  “Bloody rain,” he said. “I ought to be reborn as a swamp. Haven't you found anything at all to work on?”

  There was a knock on the door and Münster came in. He nodded and sat down on the chair Reinhart had just vacated.

  “He was out last Friday night,” said Van Veeteren.

  “Innings?” asked Münster.

  “Yes. Maybe we should check up on what he was doing. He was probably having a beer with a few colleagues, but you never know.”

  “How can we check up on that?” asked Reinhart.

  Van Veeteren shrugged.

  “Hmm,” he said. “We'll put Moreno and Jung on it. They can ask a few questions at his workplace again. See if they can find somebody who was with him. And then, I wonder …”

  “What do you wonder?” asked Reinhart.

  “In town, I think she said…. He was at a restaurant in town, his wife thought. Did she mean Loewingen or Maardam?”

  “Loewingen's not a town, it's a dump,” said Reinhart.

  “Could be,” said Münster. “But there are a few restaurants there even so.”

  “Yes, yes,” muttered Van Veeteren. “That'll be Jung and Moreno's headache. Where are they, by the way?”

  “At home, I expect,” said Reinhart. “I've heard it said that it's Saturday today.”

  “Go back to your office and ring them and wake them up,” said Van Veeteren. “Tell them I want to know where he was and with whom by Monday afternoon at the latest. How the hell they do that is up to them.”

  “With pleasure,” said Reinhart, walking to the door. Just then Miss Katz appeared with two bundles of paper.

  “Tips from the detective known as the general public,” she explained. “A hundred and twenty since yesterday afternoon. Constable Krause has sorted them out.”

  “How?” asked Münster.

  “The usual categories,” snorted Van Veeteren. “Daft and slightly less daft. Can you run through them, Münster, and come back to me an hour from now?”

  “Of course,” sighed Münster, picking up the papers.

  Ah well, the chief inspector thought when he was alone again. The wheels are turning. What the hell was it I'd thought of doing myself?

  Ah yes, an hour down in the sauna, that was it.

  28

  “I'm going away for a bit,” said Biedersen.

  “Oh, are you?” said his wife. “Why?”

  “Business,” said Biedersen. “I'll probably be away for a few weeks, at least.”

  His wife looked up from the burners on the stove she was busy cleaning with the aid of a new product she'd found in the shop yesterday and which was said to be more effective than any other brand.

  “Oh, will you?” she said. “Where are you going?”

  “Various places. Hamburg among others. There are quite a few contacts I need to follow up.”

  “I understand,” said his wife, and started scrubbing again, thinking that she didn't at all. Understand, that is. But it didn't matter, of course. She had never interfered in her husband's affairs—running an import company (or was it two now?) was a complicated and not especially appealing business. Nothing for a woman like her. Ever since they married, they had been in agreement about one thing: they would each look after their own side of family life. He would look after the finances, and she would take care of the home and the children. All of whom had fled the nest now, and formed their own families on more or less similar lines.

  Which in turn gave her time to devote herself to other things. Such as stove-top burners.

  “How's it going?” she asked.

  “How's what going?”

  “Well, your business. You seem to have been a bit stressed these last few days.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That's good to know. But you'll keep in touch, won't you?”

  “Naturally.”

  But when he'd left, she found herself still wondering if there hadn't been something wrong nevertheless. Ever since—she worked it out—Tuesday e
vening, when he'd come home rather late and in a bit of a nervous state, he had been unusually irritated and touchy.

  And then they had found one of his old National Service mates murdered, and that had knocked the stuffing out of him, she could see that. Even if he hadn't wanted to admit as much, of course.

  So perhaps it was a good thing for him to get away from it all for a while. Good for all concerned, as they say. There were things she also didn't want to admit as well, such as not objecting to having their large house to herself for a change. She had nothing against that at all, she decided, and put a little extra elbow grease into her scrubbing.

  · · ·

  When the chief inspector came back from the sauna, Münster was already sitting in his office, waiting. It looked as if he'd been there for quite a while, in fact, as he'd had time to supply himself with a mug of coffee and the morning paper.

  “So,” said the chief inspector as he sat down at his desk. “Let's hear it, then.”

  Münster folded up his newspaper and produced three pale yellow cards.

  “I think it would be best if somebody else went through the material as well,” he said. “It's a bit difficult to keep awake when you have to read so much rubbish. One guy has evidently called three times and claimed that his mother is the murderer.”

  “Really?” said Van Veeteren. “And you're sure he isn't telling the truth?”

  “Pretty sure,” said Münster. “He's well into his seventies, and his mother died in 1955. And then there's somebody who claims to have been present at the time … in Innings's house, that is … and seen exactly what happened. The killer was a gigantic immigrant with a scimitar and a black patch over one eye.”

  “Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “Do you have anything a bit more credible to tell me?”

  “Yes, I certainly do,” said Münster. “Several things we ought to follow up. These three are probably the most interesting ones.”

  He handed over the cards, and the chief inspector read them while working a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “I'll take this one,” he said. “You can check the other two. Give the rest of the interesting ones to Reinhart, and he can arrange follow-ups.”

  Münster nodded, drank up his coffee, and left the room.

  Van Veeteren waited until the door was closed, then looked at the card again and dialed the number.

  “Katrine Kroeller?”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  There was a pause of half a minute or so, then he heard a girl's voice in the receiver. No more than nineteen or twenty at most, he thought.

  “Hello, Katrine Kroeller here.”

  “My name is Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. You've reported an observation in connection with an investigation we are busy with. Can I come and have a chat with you?”

  “Yes … yes, of course. When will you be coming?”

  “Now,” said Van Veeteren, looking at the clock. “Or at least in twenty minutes or so. Your address is Parkvej 31, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I'll see you shortly, Miss Kroeller.”

  “Yes … you're welcome. I hope …”

  “You hope what?”

  “I hope you're not just wasting your time.”

  “We shall see,” said Van Veeteren, and hung up.

  If only she knew how much of our time is wasted, he thought. Then he wriggled into his jacket and set off.

  She was waiting for him at the gate. As he thought, she was about twenty—she looked very Nordic, with a blond ponytail and a long neck. She was carrying an umbrella, and she escorted him carefully along the paved path to the front door at the gable end of the large two-story house, making sure he didn't need to step on the soaking-wet lawn.

  “It's not all that easy to find your way here,” she explained. “There are four of us renting rooms. Mrs. Klausner, our landlady lives on the ground floor.”

  Van Veeteren nodded. Both the house and the garden suggested well-heeled upper middle class; but, of course, there were always people hovering at the edge of their social class, he reminded himself. People who had to take in lodgers and resort to similar ways of making ends meet.

  “Let's hear it,” he said when he had sat down in her room, with its sloping ceiling and blue wallpaper. “If I understand the situation rightly, you saw a woman using a tape recorder in a phone booth.”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, outside here in the hall. It's there for the tenants to use. I saw her inside there, holding a tape recorder against the receiver…. One of those little cassette things.”

  “Who?”

  “Miss Adler, the woman who lives next to me.”

  “Adler?” said Van Veeteren.

  “Yes. Maria Adler. There are four of us, but I don't know her at all. She keeps to herself.”

  “When was this?”

  “Three weeks ago, or thereabouts.”

  “Just the once?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you remember it?”

  She hesitated.

  “I don't really know, to tell you the truth. I hadn't given it a second thought. But then it came back to me when I read about those murders in the newspaper.”

  Van Veeteren nodded and thought for a moment. She seemed to be a reliable witness, that was obvious. Calm and sensible, not inclined to exaggerate or be hysterical.

  And slowly, very slowly, the thought began to sprout in his case-hardened consciousness. That this could be it. If this pale girl knew what she was talking about—and there was no reason to think she didn't—it was not impossible that the murderer was right here. Ryszard Malik's and Rickard Maasleitner's and Karel Innings's murderer. In the very next room. He could feel his pulse beating in his temples.

  In this respectable villa in the respectable district of Deijk-straa. Surrounded by doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, and God only knows who else.

  A woman, then, just as Reinhart had predicted—yes indeed, there was a lot to support that thesis…. Perhaps most of all this feeling he had, which he always seemed to have when something was happening. A little signal saying that now, now things were suddenly getting serious, after all those days of hard work and despair.

  And it was winking at him this very moment.

  The signal. That red warning light.

  Naturally, there were plenty of other reasons for using a tape recorder in a telephone booth; he was the first to admit that. It was simply that he didn't want to believe them, had no desire to do so. He wanted this to be the breakthrough, that was the bottom line.

  “So she's in there?” he said, indicating with his head.

  She nodded.

  “Maria Adler?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know if she's there at the moment?”

  Katrine Kroeller shook her head. Her ponytail waved back and forth.

  “No. I haven't seen her today. But she's very quiet, so it's possible she's in.”

  Van Veeteren stood up and tried to work things out. If he were to follow the police rule book, the correct procedure in this situation would naturally be to phone for reinforcements. There ought to be several officers involved. The woman in that room could very well be the person who had shot dead, in cold blood, three of her fellow human beings during the last month. She had a gun, and presumably ammunition, and she didn't normally miss.

  He didn't even have his police weapon with him. As usual, it ought to be said.

  So of course he ought to phone. It wouldn't take long for a few more officers to get here.

  He looked around.

  “May I borrow this?” he said, picking up an oblong-shaped wooden statuette standing on a bookshelf. Presumably African. Easy to handle. Three-quarters of a kilo, or thereabouts.

  “Why?”

  He didn't answer. Stood up and went out into the hall. Katrine Kroeller followed him hesitantly.

  “The next door here?”

  She nodded.

 
“Go back to your room.”

  She reluctantly did as she was told.

  With his left hand he slowly depressed the door handle. His right hand was clutching the statuette. He noticed that he was still sweating a little after the sauna.

  The door opened. He burst in.

  It took him less than two seconds to register that the room was empty.

  More than empty.

  Abandoned. The tenant who had been living here had left and had no intention of returning.

  She had moved somewhere else.

  “Shit!” he exclaimed.

  Stood motionless for a few more seconds, looking at the barren room.

  No personal belongings. No clothes. No dishes drying in the kitchenette alcove. The bed made in such a way that you could see there were no sheets. Just a pillow, a blanket, and a quilt.

  “Shit!” he muttered again, and went back out into the hall.

  Miss Kroeller peeped out through her door.

  “She's done a runner,” said Van Veeteren. “Go and fetch … what's the name of your landlady?”

  “Mrs. Klausner.”

  “Yes, that's the one. Tell her I want to speak to her in your room immediately. When did you last see Miss Adler, by the way?”

  Katrine Kroeller thought for a moment.

  “Er, yesterday, I think. Yes, yesterday afternoon.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, on the staircase. We just happened to pass.”

  Van Veeteren pondered that.

  “Okay, fetch Mrs. Klausner. Is it possible for me to use this telephone?”

  She opened the door of the booth and keyed in her personal code.

  “It's all yours,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Van Veeteren, and dialed the number to the police station.

  Two minutes later, he was talking to Reinhart.

  “I think we've found her,” Van Veeteren said. “But she's done a runner.”

  “Oh, shit!” said Reinhart. “Where?”

  “Deijkstraa. Parkvej 31. Get yourself here with some of the forensic guys. Fingerprints, the lot. Münster as well. I'll be expecting you twenty seconds from now.”

  “We'll be there in ten,” said Reinhart, and hung up.

  29