Munster's Case

by Håkan Nesser

“Quite unambiguous,” said Moreno after reading Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s final message to the world.

  “Yes, very clear,” said Münster. “She’s done her husband in, and now it was her turn. She was a woman of action, nobody can take that from her.”

  He stood up and looked out at the rain.

  “But it’s a bugger that she’s committed suicide in her cell,” he muttered. “They’ll have to revise their procedures. Hiller looked like a plum about to explode when he heard about it.”

  “I can imagine,” said Moreno. “But she did it well. Did you see the rope she made? Plaited four strands thick, it must have taken her several hours. A man would never have been able to do it.”

  Münster said nothing. A few seconds of silence passed.

  “Why did she do it?” asked Moreno. “I mean, I can understand that she didn’t particularly fancy spending the last years of her life in prison, but … was that all?”

  “What else could it be?” said Münster. “I guess that’s a good enough reason. If there’s anything to wonder about, it’s why she waited until now. It’s not exactly straightforward to commit suicide in a prison cell. Even if you are skilled, and the routines are bad. Or what do you think? Why now?”

  Moreno shrugged.

  “I don’t know. But there doesn’t seem to be much point in speculating now. We’ve got the key, after all.”

  Münster sighed and turned around.

  “What a pointless life,” he said.

  “Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s?”

  “Yes. Can you see any point in it? She murdered her husband, then killed herself. One of her children is in a psychiatric hospital, and the other two are not exactly the life of any party. No grandchildren. Well, you tell me if there’s some point that I’ve missed.”

  Moreno glanced at the letter again. Folded it up and put it back in the envelope.

  “No,” she said. “But that’s the way it is. It’s not likely to be a story with a happy ending if we’re involved in it.”

  “I suppose so,” said Münster. “But there ought to be limits nevertheless.… The occasional diamond among all the shit. What are you doing for Christmas?”

  Moreno pulled a face.

  “The main thing is that I don’t have to see Claus,” she said. “He’s due back tomorrow. At first I intended working over the holidays, but then I bumped into an old friend who had just been dumped. We’re taking six bottles of wine with us to her house by the sea.”

  Münster smiled. Didn’t dare ask about details of the Claus situation. Or what state she was in now. There were certain things that had nothing to do with him, and the less he asked, the better. It was safer that way.

  “Good for you,” he said. “Make sure you don’t swim out too far.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  “I’m working tomorrow,” said Münster as he shuffled the cards for Marieke. “Then I’m off for six days.”

  “About time,” said Synn. “I don’t want this autumn back again. We need to find a strategy to overcome this, we really do.”

  “A strategy?” said Münster.

  “Star-tea-gee,” said Marieke. “Jack of clubs.”

  “I’m serious,” said Synn. “It’s better to throttle the depression before it makes a mess of everything. We have to make time to live. Remember that my mother went to the wall at the age of forty-five. She lived to be seventy, but she didn’t smile once during the last twenty-five years.”

  “I know,” said Münster. “But you’re only thirty-eight. And you look like twenty-two.”

  “Seven of hearts,” said Marieke. “Your turn! How old are you, Daddy?”

  “A hundred and three,” said Münster. “But I feel older. All right, I agree with you. We need to do something.”

  For a second he tried to compare his life with that of the Leverkuhn family: tried to see where they stood in relation to one another—but the thought was so absurd that it collapsed immediately.

  “We’ll start the day after tomorrow,” he said. “Was there any mail today?”

  “Only bills and this,” said Synn, handing him a white envelope. He opened it and took out a sheet of paper folded twice.

  It was a brief message. Only three words. Dated two days ago.

  It’s not her.

  V.V.

  “Queen of spades,” said Marieke. “Your turn!”

  “Oh hell …,” said Intendent Münster.

  29

  Judgment in the Marie-Louise Leverkuhn case was announced the morning of Monday, December 22, in the Maardam courthouse.

  Unanimously, the jury had found Fru Leverkuhn guilty of the first-degree murder of her husband, Waldemar Severin Leverkuhn, in accordance with paragraphs forty-three and forty-four of the penal code. She was sentenced to six years in prison, the shortest time allowed by the law: Judge Hart announced in all seriousness that this reflected the fact that the guilty person was already dead and hence was not expected to serve the sentence.

  He then explained that an appeal against the verdict could be lodged in accordance with usual procedures within ninety days, slammed his enormous gavel down on the desk, and declared the case closed.

  Pathologist Meusse dried his hands on his coat and looked up.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  Rooth cleared his throat.

  “It’s about a skull.…”

  “That skull,” added Jung.

  Meusse glared at them over the edge of his misted-up glasses and beckoned them to follow him. He led the way through a series of chilly rooms before finally coming to a stop in front of a large refrigerator.

  “It’s in here,” he said, opening the door. “Unless I’m mistaken.”

  He took out a white plastic sack and lifted up a decapitated woman’s head by her hair. It was swollen and discolored, with blotches and pustules of every hue from ocher to deep lilac. The eyes were closed, but a few centimeters of dark brown tongue were sticking out of the mouth. The nose looked like a lump of excrement. Jung could feel his stomach turning over and hoped he wouldn’t be forced to leave the room.

  “Holy shit!” said Rooth.

  “Yes, it’s not going to win a beauty contest,” said Meusse. “She could have been lying there for a couple of months, I think. The plastic bag was high quality, otherwise more might have been nibbled away.”

  Rooth swallowed and averted his gaze. For want of anything else he found himself looking at Jung, who was standing about a foot away. Jung felt another spasm in his stomach and closed his eyes.

  “Do you recognize her?” asked Rooth, his voice shaking.

  Jung opened his eyes and nodded vaguely.

  “I think so,” he said. “Can you say anything about the cause of death?”

  Meusse put the head back into the bag.

  “Not yet,” he said. “She took a few hefty blows with something heavy on the crown of her head, but God only knows if that’s what killed her. But she must have blacked out in any case, it’s one hell of a contusion. You reckon you know who she is?”

  “We think so,” said Rooth. “Two months, is that what you said?”

  “Plus or minus a few weeks,” said Meusse. “You’ll get more accurate data the day after tomorrow.”

  “That will be Christmas Eve,” said Rooth.

  “You don’t say?” said Meusse.

  “How was she decapitated?” asked Jung.

  Meusse stroked over his own bald head a few times as if to check that it was still in place.

  “A knife,” he said. “A butcher’s cleaver, I think. Not the instruments I would have chosen myself for that kind of operation, but it clearly worked okay.”

  “Clearly,” said Rooth.

  “How old?” asked Jung.

  Meusse snorted.

  “If you know who it is, you ought to know how old she is,” he muttered, and started walking back to his office.

  “Just double-checking,” Rooth explained. “Our lady was close to seventy. Does that fit?”


  “Not too bad,” said Meusse. “This head seems to be between sixty-five and seventy-five, according to my preliminary calculations. But I didn’t receive her until yesterday afternoon, so I don’t want to be more precise than that yet.”

  Jung nodded. He had never heard Meusse being prepared to give an exact estimation, but on the other hand, he had never heard of Meusse ever guessing wrong. If Meusse said that the head they had just been gaping at belonged to a woman of about seventy who had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument hitting the crown of her head about two months ago, there were doubtless good reasons for believing that this was in fact the case.

  And that the woman in question was Else Van Eck, and no one else.

  “Hmm,” said Rooth when they emerged from the Forensic Medicine Department and turned up their collars to keep out the driving drizzle. “That was a turn-up for the bloody books. Changes things quite a bit, I suspect.”

  “Maybe we ought to give Münster a ring,” said Jung.

  “No doubt we should,” said Rooth. “But I’m thinking we ought to get a bite to eat first; this is going to cause masses of work and trouble, I can feel it coming.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Jung. “It’s in the air.”

  IV

  30

  He woke up and didn’t know who he was.

  It took a second, or half of one, but it had been there. The moment of complete blankness in which no past existed. No memories. No defeats.

  No falseness, no inadequacies.

  Not even a name.

  Half a second. Merely a drop in a large ocean of humanity. Then it came back.

  “Hmmm …,” mumbled the woman by his side. Turned over and buried her head more deeply in the pillow. Pressed herself closer to him.

  Ah well, he thought. It could be worse. He looked at the clock. Half past seven. He remembered the date as well. The first of January! Good Lord, they hadn’t gone to bed until after two; and as they were in bed, then …

  He smiled.

  Noticed that he was smiling. There was an unusual twitching in his cheek muscles, but by Jove, it was a smile. Half past seven after two or three hours’ sleep! On the first day of the year.

  He adjusted the pillows and observed her. Ulrike Fremdli. With chestnut-brown hair and one breast peeping out through a gap in the covers. A large and mature woman’s breast with a nipple that had served two children, and on a New Year’s morning like this it certainly seemed to be delivering a message of peace and goodwill. Of friendship and brotherhood and love between all people on earth, among all these drops in this ocean …

  Good Lord, Van Veeteren thought. I’m losing the plot. Life is a symphony.

  He stayed in bed and scarcely dared to breathe. As if the slightest movement would be enough to break this fragile moment.

  I want to die at a moment like this, he thought.

  Then a dream took possession of him again.

  Remarkable. It was as if it had been sitting around the corner, waiting as the morning spun its treacherous web of illusory happiness: waiting to stab him as soon as he had lowered his guard. Wasn’t that just typical? Absolutely typical.

  It was a peculiar dream.

  A dark and gloomy old castle. With arches and staircases and large, dimly lit halls. Empty and cold, with restless flickering shadows flitting along rough stone walls. Night, evidently; and threatening voices in the distance, and adjacent rooms … and the piercing sound of iron against iron, as if knives were being sharpened; and he’s scurrying along through all this, from room to room, hunting for something, unclear what.

  He comes to a cell: very small, next to one wall a diminutive altar with a Madonna relief, carved out of the dark stone of the wall, next to another wall a man asleep on a wooden bed. A thick horsehair blanket is pulled up over his shoulders and head, but even so he knows that it’s Erich.

  His son Erich.

  His wayward and accident-prone Erich. He hesitates, and as he stands there in the narrow doorway, not knowing what to do or what is expected of him, he hears the piercing sound of the knives getting louder, then suddenly, suddenly, he sees one of those daggers hovering in the room. Hanging in midair above the man sleeping on the bench. A big, heavy dagger, lit up by jagged beams, glistening, rotating slowly until the tip of its razor-sharp blade is pointing straight down at the man. At Erich, his son.

  He hesitates again. Then moves carefully forward and takes away the blanket from the sleeping man’s head. And it’s not Erich lying there. It’s Münster.

  Intendent Münster lying asleep on his side, at peace with his hands under his head, totally unaware, and Van Veeteren doesn’t understand what is happening. He puts the blanket back where it was, just as carefully, hears voices and heavy footsteps approaching, and before he has time to leave the room and reach safety, he wakes up.

  “It was like Macbeth. The funny thing is that I was so sure it was Erich lying there, but it turned out to be Münster.”

  Ulrike Fremdli yawned and rested her head on her hands. Eyed him over the kitchen table with a look that was almost cross-eyed with exhaustion. Charmingly cross-eyed, he thought.

  “You’re a remarkable person,” she said.

  “Hogwash,” said Van Veeteren.

  “Not at all,” said Ulrike, stroking her hair away from her face. “Curiouser and curiouser. The first time you turn up in my life it’s because you are trying to find out who murdered my husband. Then you wait for more than a year before getting in touch again, and now you sit here on the morning of New Year’s Day and want me to interpret your dreams. Thank you for last night, by the way. It wasn’t too bad.”

  “Thank you,” said Van Veeteren, and realized that he was smiling again. It was beginning to be a habit. “Anyway, women are better at dreams,” he said. “Some women, at any rate.”

  “I think so,” said Ulrike. “I agree with you in general, but you have a gift that makes you just as intuitive as I am. I’d always imagined that an old detective inspector would be much more resolute, but perhaps that’s just a prejudice?”

  “Hmm, yes,” said Van Veeteren. “We know so little.”

  “Really?”

  He cut a slice of cheese and chewed it thoughtfully. Ulrike stuck out her naked foot under the table and stroked his calf with it.

  “Hmm,” said Van Veeteren again. “Only a tiny bit of all there is to know. And if we don’t have a keen ear, it’s a damned minuscule bit.”

  “Go on,” said Ulrike.

  “Well,” said Van Veeteren. “This is one of my private hobbies, of course, but since you seem to be too tired to contradict me, maybe I can expand a bit on it.…”

  She stretched out the other foot as well.

  “Quite a humble little theory in fact,” he said. “It ought to suit a clever woman like you. A woman with humble feet … no, carry on, please do. Anyway, let’s assume that there is an infinite number of connections and correspondences and patterns in the world, and that the cleverest of us might be able—to dare!—to comprehend … let’s say a hundredth part of them. The dumbest of us might comprehend a thousandth, or a ten-thousandth. Let’s not go into how much I can grasp. Most of it comes to us in ways different from what the so-called Western way of thinking is prepared to accept. The deductive terror. Despite the fact that this in no way contradicts it. Or threatens it. Quite the reverse, actually, for it must surely be easier to comprehend things than to comprehend how we comprehend them. Our knowledge of the world must always be greater than our knowledge of knowledge.… Well, er, something like that.”

  Ulrike thought for a moment.

  “It sounds plausible,” she said. “But I’m not properly awake.”

  “There are so many patterns,” Van Veeteren continued. “We get so much information that we generally just let it flash over our heads. A thousand pounds of stimuli every second. We don’t have time to work on them. This is all obvious, but all I really understand is obvious, I have to admit.”
>
  “Dreams?” said Ulrike.

  “For example. But good God! A dagger hovering over Intendent Münster! You’re not going to tell me that that’s a coincidence? He’s in danger, even a child can understand that.”

  “You thought it was Erich,” Ulrike pointed out.

  Van Veeteren sighed.

  “Erich has been in the danger zone for as long as I can remember,” he said. “That wouldn’t be anything new.”

  “How old is he?”

  Van Veeteren had to think that over.

  “Twenty-six,” he said. “It’s about time I should stop worrying about him.”

  Ulrike shook her head.

  “Why should you do that?” she asked. “Once your child, always your child. Even if they’re a hundred years old.”

  Van Veeteren observed her for a while in silence. Felt the warm soles of her feet against his legs. Good God, he thought. This woman …

  It was only the fourth or fifth time they had spent a whole night together, and now, just as on all the previous occasions, he was forced to ask himself why it didn’t happen more often. As far as he could tell he didn’t seem to be causing her all that much suffering, so why be so damned cautious? Be as unabashed as a hermit. Not as doubtful as a donkey. As far as he was concerned … well, as far as he was concerned he wasn’t suffering in the least.

  He looked out the window at a New Year’s Day that seemed very uncertain. It had been raining during the night, and the sky and the earth seemed to be conjoined by a blue-gray light that certainly didn’t intend to keep darkness at bay for many hours. It struck him that there were grounds for thinking the sun had been extinguished at some point in November—he couldn’t recall seeing it since then.

  “Lovely weather,” he said. “Shall we go back to bed for a while?”

  “Good idea,” said Ulrike Fremdli.

  When they next woke up it was two o’clock.

  “When are your children due?” he asked in horror.

  “This evening,” she said. “They’re not dangerous.”

  “My solicitude concerns them and nothing else,” said Van Veeteren, sitting up. “I don’t want to give them a shock, first thing in the new year.”