by Håkan Nesser
‘Yes,’ said Jung. ‘A trainee nurse. But I haven’t been able to get hold of her. She’s off work today and tomorrow.’
‘Shit,’ said Reinhart. ‘Anyway, we’ll dig her out, of course. We might as well get to the bottom of this. I have to say that it sounds quite likely, when you think about it. A nurse and a doctor — we’ve heard about that before.’
‘They say there are quite a few white coats at the Gemejnte,’ said deBries.
Reinhart sucked at his pipe and looked ready to kill.
‘This is what we’ll do,’ he said after a few seconds’ thought. ‘I’ll phone the head doctor, or the hospital’s CEO, or whatever the hell he’s called. He can supply us with the full list of employees — let’s hope he’s got photographs as well. It would be a bit of a bugger if we didn’t get a bit of joy out of this… I don’t suppose Inspector Rooth has a little theory about a possible link to Erich Van Veeteren as well?’
Rooth shook his head.
‘I seem to recall that I did have,’ he said. ‘But I can’t remember what it was.’
DeBries sighed loudly. Reinhart pressed the stop button, and the run-through was finished.
He had chosen Vox again — bearing in mind Van Veeteren’s positive memory from the previous time — but this evening there was no velvet-voiced chanteuse to look forward to. No music at all, in fact, as it was a Tuesday. Monday and Tuesday were low season, and apart from Reinhart and Van Veeteren there was only a handful of listless customers sitting at the shiny metal tables. The Chief Inspector was already installed when the chief inspector arrived. For the first time — the first time ever, as far as he could remember — Reinhart thought he was looking old.
Or perhaps not old, rather resigned in that way a lot of elderly people gave the impression of being. As if some strategic muscles in the spine and the back of the head had finally had enough and contracted for the last time. Or snapped. He assumed Van Veeteren must be sixty by now, but he wasn’t sure. There were a lot of mysterious circumstances surrounding The Chief Inspector, and one of them was the question of his real age.
‘Good evening,’ said Reinhart, sitting down. ‘You look tired.’
‘Thank you,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘No, I don’t sleep at night any more.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Reinhart. ‘When the Good Lord robs us of our sleep, he doesn’t exactly do us any favours.’
Van Veeteren opened the lid of his cigarette-rolling machine.
‘He stopped doing us favours hundreds of years ago. The devil only knows if he ever did us any.’
‘Could well be,’ said Reinhart. ‘I’ve just been reading about God’s silence after Bach. Two Dunckel, please.’
The latter request was addressed to a waiter who had just emerged from the shadows. Van Veeteren lit a cigarette. Reinhart started filling his pipe.
Hard going, he thought. It’s going to be hard going this evening.
He took the tape out of his jacket pocket.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have a Gospel for you either,’ he said. ‘But if you want an indication of where we are, you can always listen to this. It’s a recording of today’s discussions. Not exactly a climactic experience, of course, but you know what it’s usually like. The voice you won’t recognize is a detective-sergeant called Bollmert.’
‘Better than nothing,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Ah well, I’m not finding it easy to keep my nose out of things.’
‘Perfectly understandable,’ said Reinhart. ‘As I’ve said before.’
He took out the photograph of Vera Miller.
‘Do you recognize this woman?’
Van Veeteren looked at the picture for a couple of seconds.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do, in fact.’
‘What?’ said Reinhart. ‘What the devil do you mean by that?’
‘If I’m not much mistaken,’ said Van Veeteren, handing the photograph back to Reinhart. ‘A nurse at the Gemejnte. Looked after me when I had my colon operation a few years ago. A very pleasant woman — how have you come across her?’
‘That’s Vera Miller. The woman who was found murdered out at Korrim last Sunday morning.’
‘The woman who’s linked with Erich somehow or other?’
Reinhart nodded.
‘It’s only a hypothesis. Extremely shaky so far — but perhaps you can confirm it?’
The waiter came with the beers. They each took a swig. Van Veeteren looked at the photograph again, then slowly shook his head and looked sombre.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s sheer coincidence that I happen to remember her. Have I understood it rightly, and that it’s Meusse who has indicated this link?’
‘Meusse, yes. He thinks the blow to the back of the head suggests a connection. It indicates a degree of expertise, he says. In both cases… Well, you know Meusse.’
Van Veeteren was lost in silence. Reinhart lit his pipe and allowed him to ponder to his heart’s content. Suddenly felt extreme anger bubbling up inside himself. A fury directed at whoever had killed The Chief Inspector ’s son. Who had killed Vera Miller.
Was it the same person, or two different ones? Who cares? A fury directed at this murderer or these murderers, but also at all killers, whoever they might be… And so the coldest and darkest of all his memories began to stir. The murder of Seika. Of his own girlfriend. Seika, whom he should have married and built up a family with. Seika, whom he had loved like no other. Seika with the high cheekbones, the half-Asian eyes and the most beautiful laugh the world has ever heard. It was almost thirty years ago now: she had been lying in that accursed grave out at Linden for three decades. Nineteen-year-old Seika who ought to have been his wife.
If it hadn’t been for that evil killer, a knifeman on that occasion, a drugged-up madman who had stabbed her to death one evening in Wollerims Park without the slightest trace of a reason.
Or at least, nothing more than the twelve guilders she had in her purse.
And now The Chief Inspector ’s son. Bloody hell, Reinhart thought. He’s absolutely right, it was a long time ago that the Good Lord stopped doing us favours.
‘I went out to Dikken to have a look around,’ said Van Veeteren, interrupting his train of thought.
‘What?’ said Reinhart. ‘You?’
‘Me, yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I took the liberty — I hope you’ll forgive me.’
‘Of course,’ said Reinhart.
‘I spoke to a few people at that restaurant. It’s more like a sort of therapy really. I don’t expect to find anything that you lot won’t find, but it’s so damned hard just sitting around, doing nothing. Can you understand that?’
Reinhart paused for a few seconds before answering.
‘Do you remember why I joined the police?’ he asked. ‘My fiancee in Wollerims Park?’
Van Veeteren nodded.
‘Of course I do. Okay, you understand. But anyway, there’s one thing I wonder about.’
‘What?’ said Reinhart.
‘The plastic carrier bag,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘That plastic carrier bag that changed owners. Or was supposed to change owners.’
‘What bloody plastic bag are you on about?’ said Reinhart.
Van Veeteren said nothing for a moment.
‘So you don’t know about it?’
Oh, shit, Reinhart thought. Now he’s put us on the spot again.
‘There was somebody who said something about a plastic carrier bag,’ he said, trying to sound offhand about it. ‘That’s true.’
‘It seems that this Mr X, who is presumably the killer…’ said The Chief Inspector, noticeably slowly and in a tone of voice that sounded to Reinhart painfully like some pedagogue explaining the obvious to ignorant pupils, ‘… had a plastic carrier bag by his feet when he was sitting in the bar. And it appears that Erich was carrying that bag when he left the restaurant.’
He raised an eyebrow and waited for Reinhart’s reaction.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Reinhart. ‘To tell you the truth… Well, t
o tell you the truth I’m afraid it looks as if we’d missed this. The second half, that is. Several witnesses said Mr X had a plastic carrier bag with him, but we haven’t heard anything about Erich having taken it over. How did you find out about that?’
‘I happened to meet the right people,’ said Van Veeteren modestly, contemplating his newly rolled cigarette. ‘One of the waitresses seemed to recall having seen him carrying a plastic bag when he left the restaurant, and when she said that the barman remembered it as well.’
And you happened to ask the right questions as well, no doubt, Reinhart thought, and felt a flood of deep-rooted admiration surging through his consciousness, removing all trace of anger and embarrassment. Admiration for that psychological insight that The Chief Inspector had always been blessed with, and which… which could cut like a scalpel through a ton of warm butter faster than a hundred riot police in bullet-proof vests could work out the whiff of a suspicion.
Intuition, as it was called.
‘So what conclusion do you draw?’ he asked.
‘Erich was there to collect something.’
‘Obviously.’
‘He drove out to the Trattoria Commedia in order to collect the plastic carrier bag in an agreed location — perhaps in the gents.’
Reinhart nodded.
‘He didn’t know who Mr X was, and it was not the intention that he should know.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘If it had been possible for them to meet without concealing their identities, they could just as well meet anywhere at all. In the car park, for instance. Why mess about with that bloody masquerade if it wasn’t necessary?’
Reinhart thought that over.
‘Mr X was disguised,’ he said.
‘He was going to murder my son,’ Van Veeteren pointed out. ‘And he did so. Of course he was going to be disguised.’
‘Why hand over the carrier bag if he was going to kill him anyway?’ said Reinhart.
‘You can answer that yourself,’ said Van Veeteren.
Reinhart sucked twice at his pipe, which had gone out.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘He didn’t know who he was. Neither of them knew who the other was. He didn’t know who it was until he saw him with the carrier bag in his hand… He’d be out in the car park, waiting for him, of course.’
‘Presumably,’ said Van Veeteren, rolling another cigarette. ‘That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn as well. What else? What do you think it was all about? Who’s calling the shots, and who’s obeying?’
A good question, Reinhart thought. Who is calling the shots and who is obeying?
‘Erich calls the shots, and Mr X obeys,’ he says. ‘To start with, at least. Then Mr X reverses the roles. That’s why… Yes, that’s why he does it. That’s why he kills him.’
Van Veeteren leaned back on his chair and lit the cigarette. His son, Reinhart thought. For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about his murdered son.
‘And what do you think it was all about?’
The narcotic cloud hung in the way, and blurred Reinhart’s thinking for five seconds: then he hit on the answer.
‘Blackmail,’ he said. ‘It’s as clear as bloody day.’
‘He maintains that Erich had never indulged in anything like that,’ Reinhart explained to Winnifred an hour later. ‘I believe him. Besides, it seems incredible that he’d be so bloody stupid simply to drive out to that restaurant and sit there waiting for the money… Not if he knew what it was all about. Erich was a messenger boy. Somebody else — the real blackmailer — had sent him out there: when you come to think about it it’s pretty obvious. Everything falls into place.’
‘What about this Vera Miller woman, then?’ said Winnifred. ‘Was she behind it all, somehow or other?’
‘It’s very possible,’ said Reinhart. ‘The murderer thought it was Erich who was the blackmailer, and killed him quite unnecessarily. Maybe he got the right person when he killed Vera Miller.’
‘Did Erich know Vera Miller?’
Reinhart sighed.
‘Unfortunately not,’ he said. ‘That’s where it all comes to a stop for the moment. We haven’t found a single little thing to link them together. But there might be one. If we assume that he — the murderer, that is — is a doctor at the Gemejnte, it’s quite possible that Vera Miller had some kind of hold over him. An operation that he made a mess of, something of that sort perhaps. Could be any damned thing. It’s unforgivable for a doctor to make a mistake. He might have killed a patient through sheer carelessness, for instance. She saw an opportunity to earn a bit of cash, and took it. That it turned out as it did is another matter altogether, of course. Anyway, it’s a theory at least.’
Winnifred looked sceptical.
‘And why did she have to go to bed with him? That’s what she did, isn’t it?’
‘Hmm,’ said Reinhart. ‘Were you born yesterday, my lovely? That’s where a man reveals his true self. It’s in bed that a woman gets to know all a man’s merits and shortcomings.’
Winnifred laughed in delight and snuggled up close to him under the covers.
‘My prince,’ she said. ‘You are so right, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for a few days before you can demonstrate your merits to me.’
‘That’s life,’ said Reinhart, and switched off the light. ‘And I have hardly any shortcomings.’
A quarter of an hour later he got up.
‘What are you doing?’ wondered Winnifred.
‘Joanna,’ said Reinhart. ‘I thought I heard something.’
‘You didn’t at all,’ said Winnifred. ‘But go and fetch her so that we can lie here, all three of us. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?’
‘More or less,’ admitted Reinhart and tiptoed over to the nursery.
My wife knows what I’m thinking before I do, he told himself as he lifted up his sleeping daughter. How the hell does she do that?
25
On Wednesday, 9 December it was plus ten or eleven degrees, and the sky was high and bright.
The sun seemed to be surprised, almost embarrassed at having to display itself in all its somewhat faded nudity. Van Veeteren phoned Ulrike Fremdli at work, was informed that she would be finished by lunchtime, and suggested a car trip to the seaside. They hadn’t seen the sea for quite some time. She accepted straight away: he could hear from her voice that she was both surprised and pleased, and he reminded himself that he loved her. Then he reminded her as well.
The living must look after one another, he thought. The worst possible outcome is to die without having lived.
As he sat in the car outside the Remington dirt-brown office complex he wondered if Erich had lived. If he had managed to experience the fundamentals of life, whatever they might be. He had read somewhere that a man must do three things during his life: raise a son, write a book and plant a tree.
He wondered where that had come from. In any case, Erich had not achieved the first two of those requirements. Whether or not he had planted a tree he had no idea, of course: but it didn’t seem all that likely. Before he had time to think about how far he himself fulfilled those requirements, he was interrupted by Ulrike flopping down in the seat beside him.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said. ‘What a marvellous day!’
She kissed him on the cheek, and to his surprise he found that he had an erection. Life goes on, he thought, somewhat confused. Despite everything.
‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.
‘Emsbaden or Behrensee,’ she said without hesitation. She had evidently been thinking about it ever since he’d rung.
‘Emsbaden,’ he said. ‘I have a bit of a problem with Behrensee.’
‘Why?’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Something happened there a few years ago. I’d rather not be reminded of it.’
She waited for an explanation, but there wasn’t one. He started the car and drove off instead.
‘My secretive lover,’ she said.
And eventually also about Erich.
‘I remember something you said,’ Ulrike told him. ‘Then, when you’d found the woman who murdered Karel.’
Karel Innings was Ulrike’s former husband, but not the father of her children. They had been the product of her first marriage to an estate agent, who had been a good and reliable paterfamilias until his inherited alcoholism got the better of him.
‘We never found her,’ Van Veeteren pointed out.
‘But you found her motives,’ said Ulrike. ‘In any case, you maintained that from her point of view — in one sense at least — killing my husband had been justified. Do you remember that?’
‘Of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But it was only true in a way. From a very individual, limited point of view. It’s a distortion if you put it like you did.’
‘Isn’t that always the case?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it always the case that the murderer — or any other criminal, come to that — thinks that his crime is justified? Doesn’t he have to think that to himself anyway?’
‘That’s an old chestnut,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But you are right in principle, of course. A murderer always justifies his motives — acknowledges them also, naturally. Mind you, it’s a different matter if somebody else points them out. There are reasons for everything we do, but the dogma of original sin never seems to convince members of the jury nowadays. They are much more thick-skinned than that.’
‘But you believe in it?’
He paused for a moment and gazed out over the sea.
‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘I don’t defend evil deeds, but if you can’t understand the nature of crime… the motives of a criminal… well, you won’t get very far as a detective. There is a sort of twisted logic which is often easier to discover than the logic that governs our everyday actions. As we all know, chaos is the neighbour of God: but everything’s usually neat and tidy in hell…’