Munster's Case

by Håkan Nesser

  “What about the wife?” said Van Veeteren. “What do you make of her?”

  Münster thought for a moment.

  “Introverted,” he said eventually. “She seems to have a lot buttoned up inside her that she’s reluctant to let come out. Although I don’t really know—there’s no such thing as normal reactions when you come home and find your husband murdered like that. Why do you ask?”

  Van Veeteren ignored that question as well. Sat squeezing his newly rolled cigarette and seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Anyway,” said Münster. “I just wanted to talk it through. Thank you for listening.”

  Van Veeteren lit the cigarette and blew smoke over a begonia that was probably just as dead as the chief of police’s acacias.

  “Tuesday afternoon,” he said. “Give me a few days to think things over, and then maybe we can have a game of badminton. I need to get some exercise. But don’t expect too much—regarding your case, that is,” he added, tapping his brow with his knuckles. “I’m a bit more focused on beauty and pleasure nowadays.”

  “Tuesday, then,” said Münster, writing it down in his notebook. “Yes, I’d heard rumors about that—a new woman, is that right?”

  Van Veeteren put the cigarette machine into his jacket pocket and looked inscrutable.

  The presents added up to nearly 500 guilders, topped by a red dress for Synn costing 295. What the hell, Münster thought. You only live once.

  What had she said the other day?

  What if we die soon?

  He shuddered and got into his car. However you looked at it, life was no more than the total of all these days, and at some point, of course, you start being more interested in the days that have passed rather than the ones yet to come.

  But there are moments in life—let’s hope so in any case—when you have an opportunity to devote yourself to the here and now.

  Such as a Saturday and Sunday in November like this.

  Damn, Intendent Münster thought. I wish to God I had one of those cop’s brains that you can switch on and off in accordance with working hours.

  If there is such a thing, of course. He remembered an old conversation with the chief inspector—presumably at Adenaar’s as usual—about the concept of intuition.

  The brain functions best when you leave it in peace, Van Veeteren had argued. Keep tucked away the questions and information you have and think about something else. If there’s an answer, it will come tumbling out sooner or later.

  Like hell it will! Münster thought pessimistically. I suppose there are brains and then there are brains .…

  Whatever, after the conversation with the chief inspector and the shopping at the height of the Saturday rush hour, there was no doubt that he felt switched off—so he could let his brain work away undisturbed in the background and see if anything came tumbling out.

  He looked at his watch. Ten past one. It was a Saturday in November, it was raining, and he had nothing to do except devote himself to his family.

  21

  During the night between Friday and Saturday Inspector Moreno slept for more than twelve hours, and when she woke up at about half past ten on the Saturday morning, it took some time before she realized where she was.

  And that she was alone.

  That the five years with Claus Badher were at an end, and that from now on she had only herself to worry about. It felt strange. Not least the fact that a month had passed since she left him, but it was only now that she realized that her fate was in her own hands.

  As if to check whether those hands were strong enough to carry it, she took them out from under the warm bedcovers and examined them for a while. Didn’t think that they looked up to much—but that’s the way it is with women’s hands. Underdeveloped and a bit childlike. There was an enormous difference between them and the large, sinewy equipment with which men were blessed. Usable and nice to look at. Now that she came to think about it, she couldn’t recall ever having seen an attractive woman’s hand. They were like chickens’ wings, it struck her—dysfunctional and pathetic. Perhaps there was food for thought in this striking difference—the extent to which it typified something basic when it came to the difference between men and women?

  An expression of essential differences? Their hands?

  And never the twain shall meet, she thought: but then she saw in her mind’s eye a black man’s hand on a white woman’s breast, and it occurred to her that the twain can in fact meet.

  By the time she entered the shower she had realized that the hand and the breast in the image she had conjured up were not in any way Claus’s and hers, but Tobose Menakdise’s and Filippa de Booning’s, and she was suddenly back in the middle of the investigation.

  You talk about what fills the mind, she seemed to remember somebody saying. But so what? The more thoughts she devoted to the Leverkuhn case and the fewer to Claus, the better.

  And the healthier it would be for her mistreated spiritual life.

  There was always the hope that there might be other alternatives with which to rack her brain. In that spirit she set out after breakfast on a long walk along Willemsgraacht, toward the Lauern lakes and Lohr. Strolled through the light rain and thought about all sorts of things, but mostly about her parents—and her brother in Rome, whom she hadn’t seen for more than two years. Her parents in Groenstadt didn’t live far away, but that contact wasn’t everything it might have been either. It was easy to form opinions about the Leverkuhns’ family relationships, but to be honest, her own were not much better.

  And then there was her sister, Maud. She had no idea where Maud was—in Hamburg maybe—or what state she was in.

  Perhaps the anthropologists were right, she thought, that when the northern European nuclear family had exhausted its role as an economic and social factor, it had also lost its emotional significance.

  Emotions were no more than superstructure and empty show. Men and women met, had children, then wandered off in different directions. Heading for wherever it was they were going before they happened to meet, for their various goals. Yes, perhaps that was how you ought to look at it. In any case, there were plenty of examples of this in the animal world, and a human being is basically an animal, after all.

  This last point made her realize that she was also a female, and that this week she was in the middle of her monthly cycle and was going to find it difficult to do without a man. In the long run, at least. What a pity, she thought, what a pity that a human being should be so badly constructed that there was such a disconnect between brain, heart, and sex sometimes. Usually.

  Always?

  The café at Czerpinski’s Mill was open, and she decided to indulge herself in a cup of tea before returning home. But she would have to be quick about it: it was already a quarter to three, and in no circumstance did she want to be strolling around in the dark.

  She had barely entered the premises before noticing that sitting at one of the tables in the circular room were Benjamin Wauters and Jan Palinski—they didn’t recognize her, or at least showed no sign of having done so, but she realized that it was a sign.

  A sign that there was no point in trying to keep her work at a distance anymore.

  She hung on for a bit longer. On Saturday evening she called both her brother and her parents, watched a French film from the sixties on television, and hand-washed two sweaters. But when Sunday morning announced itself with a high, clear blue sky, she knew that it was all in vain. It was simply too urgent. The case. Her work. A few hours of private investigation without any great expectations. It was in the nature of things, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

  There is something deep inside me, she thought, that makes me do this. A drive, an urge that I never acknowledge, that actually steers my life. Or at least my professional life. I like poking my nose into things! I enjoy putting other people under a magnifying glass. Their motivation and their actions.

  Besides, I’m in the middle of the month. I’d better l
ook after the sublimation myself.

  She smiled at that last thought as she stood waiting for the bus to Kolderweg. Working instead of making love? How totally absurd! If Claus could follow her thoughts for five minutes he would probably never dare to meet her again.

  But perhaps that’s the situation in all relationships?

  With all women and their men with their beautiful hands?

  The bus was approaching.

  The door was opened by a woman she had never seen before, and for a moment Moreno suspected the possibility of a breakthrough. But then the woman introduced herself as Helena Winther, the younger sister of Arnold Van Eck, and that hope was lost.

  “I arrived yesterday,” she explained. “I thought I needed to—he’s not very strong.”

  She was a slim woman in her mid-fifties, with the same anemic appearance as her brother, but with a handshake that suggested a certain strength of character.

  “You don’t live here in Maardam, then?”

  “No, in Aarlach. My husband has a business there.”

  She led the way into the living room, where Van Eck was sitting hunched in front of the television. He looked as if he had stopped crying only a short while ago.

  “Good morning,” said Moreno. “How are you feeling?”

  “Awful,” said Van Eck with a cough. “There’s such a void.”

  Moreno nodded.

  “I can imagine,” she said. “I thought I’d just call in and see if anything had occurred to you. These things usually come out of the blue, as I said before.”

  “It’s a mystery!” Van Eck exclaimed. “A complete mystery!”

  I wonder if he thinks the same way as he talks, Moreno thought. Whatever, he must surely be a special case even in that male sector she had been thinking about?

  “Do you remember if your wife acted in an unusual way during the days before she disappeared?” she asked. “Said or did something she didn’t usually say or do?”

  Van Eck sighed from the very depths of his martyred soul.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking and thinking, but everything is a complete mystery. It’s like a nightmare even though I’m awake.”

  “And you don’t remember noticing anything unusual when you came back home after your course last Wednesday? That first impression you had the moment you crossed the threshold, if you follow me.”

  Van Eck shook his head.

  “Do you think your wife had any male friends you didn’t know about?”

  “Eh?”

  For a second Van Eck looked cross-eyed behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, and Moreno realized that the question—like any possible answer to it—was way beyond his imagination.

  She also realized that she wasn’t going to get anything more out of him, but before moving on to the people who lived upstairs she had a few words with his sister in the kitchen.

  “Do you have much contact with your brother and your sister-in-law?” she asked.

  Helena Winther shrugged.

  “Not a lot,” she said. “There’s the age difference, of course, but we do meet now and then. My husband and Arnold are very different, though.”

  “And Else?”

  Winther looked out the window and hesitated before answering.

  “She’s a bit unusual,” she said. “But you’ll have gathered that. They are not the most normal couple in the world, but in a way they make a real pair. You’ve seen what he’s like without her.”

  “Is he taking any sedatives?”

  She shook her head.

  “He never takes medicine. He’s never even taken an aspirin for as long as he’s lived.”

  “Why not?”

  Winther said nothing, just looked at Moreno with her eyebrows slightly raised, and for a few seconds it was as if the whole masculine mystique was weighed up and fathomed out between those four female eyes.

  And found to be unfathomable. Moreno noticed that she was smiling inwardly.

  “You have no idea about what might have happened?”

  “None at all. As he says, it’s a complete mystery. She’s not the type who disappears. On the contrary, if you know what I mean.”

  With a slight nod Moreno indicated that she did. Then she shook hands with both her and her brother, and promised to do her utmost to throw light on these sad circumstances.

  Ruben Engel wasn’t exactly smelling of violets today either, but he seemed to be sober and there was a half-finished crossword lying on the kitchen table.

  “For the little gray cells,” he explained, standing up and pointing a dirty index finger at his forehead. “Welcome—and that’s a greeting I don’t extend to all police officers.”

  Moreno took the compliment with a practiced smile.

  “There are just a few things I’ve been thinking about,” she said. “If you have time, that is.”

  “Of course.”

  Engel hitched up his trousers, which had a tendency to fall, and indicated the vacant chair. She sat down and waited for a couple of seconds.

  “What is the link between Leverkuhn and Fru Van Eck?”

  “Eh?” said Engel, sitting down.

  Moreno leaned forward over the table and braced herself.

  “Listen,” she said. “What I mean is that there must be some sort of crucial link between these two events in the same building, some vital little factor that explains why it’s these two people who have been … been moved out of the way. It could be anything at all, but it’s almost impossible for an outsider to catch on. You have been living close to both of them for twenty years, Herr Engel, so you ought to be just the person to come up with something. Can you recall anything at all where both Waldemar Leverkuhn and Else Van Eck had their fingers in the same pie, so to speak?”

  “Are you suggesting they were having an affair?”

  Moreno choked back a sigh.

  “Not at all. It doesn’t need to be anything as big as that, but it’s hard to be more precise when you don’t really know what you are looking for.”

  “Yes,” said Engel, “it is.”

  He clamped his jaws together with a loud click, and she gathered that just now he was thinking of her in terms of a cop rather than a woman.

  “Are you worried at all that something might happen to you, Herr Engel?”

  Memories of his masculinity naturally got in the way of his giving her an honest answer to that question. He cleared his throat, straightened his back until it creaked, but she could see nevertheless that fear was coursing through his whole body.

  Lay there ominously like dark water under one-night-old ice.

  “I’m not especially frightened, young lady,” he claimed, trying to keep his gaze steady. “One learns to get by in the world we live in.”

  “Are there any neighbors you feel slightly less confident about?” she insisted. “When you bump into them on the stairs, for instance?”

  “The neighbors? No, no, of course not!”

  He burst out coughing, and as the attack slowly ebbed away Moreno sat there motionless, weighing up his final comment.

  Was it really as clear a dismissal of any such thought as he tried to make it sound? Or?

  Two hours later, as she slid down into a bubble bath smelling of eucalyptus, she still had not made up her mind about that.

  Inspector Ewa Moreno also slept soundly on Sunday night without waking up at all, and as she sat in the trolley in the cold light of dawn the next morning, on her way to the police station, she realized that she had finally caught up with herself. The lack of sleep that had been building up had now been satisfied, and for the first time in weeks she felt eager to start work.

  Ready to get to grips with whatever lay in store for her.

  But she could hardly have been prepared for what Intendent Münster had to tell her when she entered his office.

  “Anything new?” she asked.

  “You can say that again,” said Münster, looking up from the pile
of papers he was leafing through. “She confessed.”

  “What?” said Moreno.

  “Fru Leverkuhn. She rang at a quarter past seven this morning and confessed that she had murdered her husband.”

  Moreno sat down on a chair.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” she said. “So it was her after all?”

  “That’s what she claims,” said Münster.

  III

  22

  The police spent three days with her, and then she was left more or less alone. From the second week onward her visitors were restricted to a handful of people.

  Her lawyer, Bachmann, came in almost every day—in the beginning, at least. She had met him in connection with the first interrogation at the police station, and he hadn’t made a particularly good impression on her. A well-dressed, overweight man of about fifty with thick, wavy hair that he probably dyed. A large signet ring and strong, white teeth. He suggested from the very start that they should follow the manslaughter line, and she went along with it without really thinking about it.

  She didn’t like the man, but reckoned that the more she let him have his own way, the less time she would need to spend discussing matters with him. In the middle of the month, he stayed away several times for a few days on end; but in December, as the date of the trial approached, there was a lot to run through again. She didn’t really understand why, but never asked.

  Get it over with quickly, she thought: and that was the only request she put to him. Don’t let it become one of those long-drawn-out affairs with special pleading and the cross-examination of witnesses and all the rest that she had seen on television.

  Bachmann put his hand on his heart, assuring her that he would do his best. Although there were several things that were unclear, and one simply can’t get away with anything in court.

  Every time he pointed this out he gave her a quick smile, but she never responded with one of her own.

  The chaplain was named Kolding, and was about her age. A low-key preacher who always brought with him a flask of tea and a tin of cookies, and generally sat on the chair in her cell for half an hour or so, without saying very much. On his first visit he explained that he didn’t want to harass her, but it was his intention to call in every two or three days. In case there was something she would like to take up with him.