by Håkan Nesser
‘What about the alcohol?’ wondered Münster. ‘Why does she sit and drink herself silly if everything in her garden is lovely?’
Sachs took off his glasses and rubbed his thumb and index finger over the bridge of his nose.
‘He’s a bit vague on that question,’ he said. ‘I thought so, at least. Presumably she had drunk several gin and tonics plus quite a lot of sherry; but Hennan maintains that she didn’t normally drink anything like as much as that. He admits that she did sink a few glasses now and then– even when she was on her own – but not that kind of quantity.’
‘1.74 per mil is a pretty high percentage,’ said Münster.
‘It certainly is,’ said Sachs. ‘And Hennan let slip that she tended to lose control when she’d had too much to drink – which suggests that it must have happened before. He said she had more body than head when she was drunk. That seemed to mean that she was capable of standing up straight and walking, but not so good at thinking straight.’
‘Hmm,’ said Münster. ‘That would fit in with her being able to climb up to the top of the tower and dive down, without checking to see if there was enough water in the pool.’
‘Yes indeed,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘It fits in exactly. But I don’t think we should forget the source of all this information.’
Münster nodded, and Sachs turned over a few more pages in his notebook.
‘As far as Hennan himself is concerned,’ he continued, ‘he was in that restaurant. The Columbine. It’s just behind the town hall. From about half past seven until half past midnight, he maintains. We haven’t got round to speaking to the staff there yet, but that is being organized. I’m expecting a report from Inspector Behring later this afternoon. He may well have an alibi. It would take at least half an hour to drive from there to Kammerweg and back – maybe forty minutes. Anyway we’ll see what they have to say. Barbara Hennan died at some time between half past nine and half past ten, if I understand it rightly.’
He looked inquiringly at Van Veeteren.
‘That’s correct,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I phoned Meusse, and he guesses around ten o’clock. He’s rarely more than half an hour out. What was your overall impression of Hennan? Is he concealing something?’
Sachs closed his notebook and placed his hands in his armpits. Leaned back in his chair and thought for a while.
‘God only knows,’ he said eventually. ‘He was drunk when I spoke to him, but nevertheless . . . well, incredibly calm and collected, somehow. If he was in shock or something of the sort – and let’s face it, he ought to have been – he didn’t show it at all. But . . . Well, I have to say that I’m not at all sure about my impression of him. I’m grateful for the fact that you are here and will draw your own conclusions as well. As I said, I’m inclined to think that it was an accident, of course – but you never know.’
‘And there were no indications in the house suggesting that she’d had a visitor? Somebody else, that is.’
‘Nothing that we found, at least. There was just one used glass, and it had her prints on it. But of course we haven’t been through the house with a fine-tooth comb. There wasn’t . . . There didn’t seem to be any need.’
Van Veeteren nodded, and took hold of the arms of his chair.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what Inspector Münster and I come up with. If there is anything of immediate importance maybe we can call in here on our way home. Otherwise we’ll be in touch by phone.’
‘You’re always most welcome,’ said Chief Inspector Sachs, thrusting out his arms. ‘Good hunting, as they say.’
8
A few seconds before coming face to face with Jaan G. Hennan, an old Borkmann rule came into Van Veeteren’s head.
It was not the first time. Chief Inspector Borkmann had been his mentor during the early years up in Frigge, but at that time he had not realized how many of the old bloodhound’s understated comments would accompany him throughout his career.
But they did. Irrespective of the type of investigation, there was more or less always a relevant piece of advice from Borkmann to fish up from the well of memory. It was just a case of devoting sufficient time to thinking about it. Sometimes – as on this occasion – he didn’t even need to go fishing: he could hear his mentor’s calm voice as clear as day inside the back of his head, echoing down through two decades of messy and clamorous police work.
This time – just as he and Inspector Münster were slowly approaching the somewhat portly figure up on the terrace of Villa Zefyr – it concerned the ability to keep quiet.
‘Learn how to stay silent!’ Borkmann had urged. There was nothing as uncomfortable for anybody with anything on their conscience as silence.
And Borkmann had elaborated: ‘If you can just keep your trap shut, a mere look or the raising of an eyebrow can induce any killer or bank robber to lose his composure and let the cat out of the bag. From sheer nervousness. Make silence your ally, and you will come off best in every single interrogation!’
Just before they were within hearing distance, Van Veeteren poked Münster with his elbow.
‘Don’t say too much,’ he said. ‘Let me run this conversation.’
‘Okay,’ said Münster. ‘Message understood.’
Hennan was wearing wide white trousers and some kind of blue sailing jumper. Or possibly a golf jumper, Münster found it difficult to decide which. He looked grim and easily irritated. Close-cropped, dark hair. A suggestion of grey at the temples. A powerful-looking face. When he shook hands, his grip was firm – as if it involved some kind of marking of territory.
‘VV,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
‘G,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Yes, it’s been a few years.’
‘Münster,’ said Münster. ‘Detective Inspector.’
They sat down at a table made of high-grade hardwood. Probably teak. Standing in the middle of it was an ice bucket with several bottles of beer pressed down inside it.
‘A glass of beer?’ Hennan suggested. ‘It’s on the warm side today.’
‘It’ll probably rain,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But yes please.’
Hennan poured out three glasses. They each took a swig, then sat in silence for ten seconds.
‘Well?’ said Hennan.
Van Veeteren produced a packet of West, took one out and lit it with a theatrical flourish. Münster folded his arms and waited. It struck him that it was much easier to conduct an effective interrogation if you were a smoker.
‘A sad story,’ said Van Veeteren, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
‘You can say that again,’ said Hennan.
Five more seconds passed.
‘I wonder how the hell it happened,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘What do you mean by that?’
Van Veeteren shrugged, and contemplated Hennan for a while. Hennan didn’t move a muscle.
‘Don’t you?’
‘Don’t I what?’
‘Wonder how it happened.’
Hennan drank a sip of beer, and took a slim black cigar out of a wooden case lying on the table. Also teak, Münster decided. Or possibly walnut – the grains were not quite the same.
Hennan lit it, and removed a flake of tobacco that had stuck fast to the tip of his tongue.
‘I don’t understand why you have come here,’ he said. ‘My wife has died as a result of a terrible accident. I’ve spent half the night talking to stupid police officers, and now it seems the same nonsense is going to continue.’
Van Veeteren took a puff of his cigarette, and nodded very slowly and very thoughtfully.
‘How long were you in jail?’ he asked.
Jaan G. Hennan’s facial expression stiffened significantly, Münster noted. As if somebody had pulled his ears backwards and stretched the skin on his face and somehow or other made it thinner. A sort of facelift, but sideways. The image of a wolf flashed through Münster’s consciousness.
Van Veeteren yawned and blew his nose. He took a little yellow notebook o
ut of his inside pocket and wrote something down. Hennan observed his actions with increasing annoyance.
‘What the hell do you want?’ he exclaimed in the end. ‘If you have something to say, for Christ’s sake come out with it! But if you simply intend to sit here and play at hard-nosed idiotic coppers, I shall leave you to it. I have quite a lot of things to see to.’
‘Really?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘What, for example?’
‘Eh?’
‘What do you have to see to?’
‘That . . .’ Hennan hesitated for a second . . . ‘That has nothing to do with you.’
He pulled up the sleeves of his sailing-golf jumper and revealed two powerful, tanned lower arms. Van Veeteren leaned a bit further forward over the table.
‘Why are you so nervous?’ he asked in a friendly tone of voice. ‘Is there something you forgot to mention to the police last night?’
Hennan turned his head and spat out another flake of tobacco onto the grass. Crossed his legs and began drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. A few more seconds passed.
‘Your lickspittle here,’ he said, pointing at Münster. ‘Is he dumb, or what?’
‘I have a sore throat,’ said Münster. ‘Carry on, you two. I’ll say something if there’s anything that needs saying.’
Van Veeteren nodded sympathetically in Münster’s direction before once again concentrating on Hennan.
‘G,’ he said. ‘I’ve never liked that letter.’
Hennan did not react.
‘Do you really think your wife died in the way you tried to convince the police it happened last night?’
Hennan didn’t move a muscle of his face. But he kept on drumming his fingers. Van Veeteren waited. Münster waited.
‘Would you kindly explain what the hell you mean by that?’
The Chief Inspector raised a smile.
‘What do I mean? I wonder if she was blind, of course. What was her IQ?’
‘What the devil . . . ?’ Hennan began to protest.
‘Don’t you also think there was somebody who pushed her?’
‘Why should I think that?’
‘No sensible person dives into an empty swimming pool.’
‘Barbara did it by mistake.’
‘That’s what you are trying to make us believe, yes.’
Hennan seemed to be arguing with himself for a few seconds. Then he stood up and pushed his chair backwards so that it toppled over onto the lawn.
‘I’ve had enough of this now,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to sit here and be castigated any longer. Not another word without a solicitor present.’
Van Veeteren stubbed out his cigarette. Then he took a drink of beer. Then he stared at his former schoolmate with astonishment written all over his face.
‘A solicitor? Why on earth should you need a solicitor? Surely you aren’t hiding something from us?’
‘I have no intention . . .’
Van Veeteren stuck a warning index finger up into the air, and turned to look at Münster.
‘Do you think herr Hennan is hiding something, Inspector?’
Münster thought for a moment.
‘I can’t think what that could possibly be,’ he said.
‘Get out of here!’ said Hennan. ‘Leave me in peace. This was the damnedest—’
‘I’ll just finish off my beer,’ said Van Veeteren, raising his glass. ‘It wasn’t up to much, but it’s drinkable. Cheers, and I look forward to our next meeting.’
‘Not too bad,’ said Van Veeteren when they were back in the car. ‘Round one to us, all the judges agree.’
‘So do I,’ said Münster. ‘But I don’t really understand what you’re getting at.’
‘Really?’ said Van Veeteren in surprise. ‘And what do you mean by that, Inspector?’
Münster started the engine.
‘Are you suggesting that it’s Hennan who’s behind all this? Or what? Have we forgotten that he seems to have an alibi?’
‘Bah!’ exclaimed Van Veeteren. ‘Alibi? We haven’t had confirmation of anything yet. He could easily have slipped out of that restaurant for thirty or forty minutes . . . Let’s wait until we have the staff’s version before we start talking about an alibi.’
‘All right,’ said Münster. ‘I’ll wait for that.’
‘Or he could have had an accomplice,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘He could have hired a gorilla who went to the house and pushed her into the pool.’
Münster sighed.
‘Are you really being serious?’
Once again he received a surprised look from his superior.
‘Münster, I know that Barbara Hennan’s death looks like some sort of accident, and there’s a damned good reason why it should look like that as well.’
‘Really?’ said Münster. ‘And what’s that?’
‘That G wants it to look like an accident.’
Münster said nothing.
‘Surely you don’t think that I’m mistaken?’ said Van Veeteren, winding down the passenger window a couple of centimetres. ‘It seems to be raining now – what did I tell you?’
‘It would never occur to me to question your judgement, Chief Inspector,’ said Münster diplomatically. ‘We don’t have any facts to go on as yet, so it’s okay to speculate as much as you like.’
‘Speculate?’
‘Yes.’
Van Veeteren said nothing.
‘But he seems a hard nut to crack, that Hennan,’ said Münster. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘Even hard nuts can be cracked open,’ said the Chief Inspector, staring hard at a broken toothpick. ‘Just wait.’
‘It will be interesting,’ said Münster. ‘And those old insights into his psychology that we spoke about . . . What was it you said? The most unpleasant bastard . . . ?’
But Van Veeteren merely gestured dismissively with his hand.
‘Next week,’ he said. ‘Let’s enjoy a restful weekend first. How are Synn and little Bart?’
He drives me up the wall at times, thought Münster.
Maarten Verlangen had an alcohol-free day on Saturday. He changed the bed sheets, washed three machine-loads of laundry, and took all his rubbish out to the communal bins. In the afternoon he went jogging for one-and-a-quarter kilometres in Megsje Bois, then telephoned a woman he knew.
Her name was Carla Besbarwny, and exactly as he had hoped and expected she said he was welcome to visit her if he felt like it. She would need to walk the dogs first, but any time after eight would be fine. He thanked her and hung up. Breathed a sigh of relief. It’s good that Carla exists at least, he thought.
He had known her for rather more than three years: they had met about half a dozen times, and on each occasion had spent more or less all the time in her generous waterbed. He knew that she probably had quite a few other men who came to visit her in similar circumstances, but so what? You couldn’t own women like Carla. She lived at the far end of Alexanderlaan in a large four-roomed flat, together with three dogs, a few cats and an unknown number of small birds, guinea-pigs and Japanese dwarf-mice. Goodness only knew how she made a living, and from a purely clinical point of view she was probably mad.
But that didn’t much matter either. He wasn’t going to visit her that evening for spiritual fellowship. Nor would that be why she received him.
He rang her doorbell at a quarter past eight on Saturday evening, and exactly sixteen hours later left her in an ambivalent state of lax harmony and bad conscience. Exactly the same as usual.
‘Why don’t you get married, Carla?’ he had asked her at one point during the night. ‘A woman like you?’
‘Are you proposing to me?’ she had wondered.
‘No,’ he had answered. ‘I . . . I’m not mature enough to get married yet.’
‘There’s your answer.’
He returned to the loneliness and clean sheets of Heerbanerstraat. Thought about phoning his daughter, but put it off. He didn’t want to contact her too often. He didn’t
want her to feel that she had a duty to meet him or talk to him. Quality is better than quantity, he used to tell himself. A bitter and somewhat heroic thought, in fact, for surely a certain level of quantity was necessary if any kind of level of quality was to be achieved?
Except in connection with Carla Besbarwny, perhaps?
He shelved all such thoughts and instead tried once again to telephone Villa Zefyr. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get some instructions about how he should go about his work in future, he thought, and in any case, he still hadn’t delivered his Friday report.
If it was G who answered he could always hang up.
It was G.
As far as Verlangen could judge, in any case. He sounded gloomy. For a couple of seconds Verlangen toyed with the idea of disguising his voice and saying that it was a wrong number, but he decided that to do so would be too risky.
He swallowed, and hung up.
Strictly speaking I don’t actually start work again until tomorrow, he decided. The Sabbath day should be respected – and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as the Good Book says.
He fetched a beer from the refrigerator and switched on the television.
When Van Veeteren put on Pergolesi’s Stabat mater late on Sunday evening, he had been longing for that moment all weekend.
There had been so many domestic obligations to cope with. Dinner with Renate’s brother and sister-in-law on Saturday evening – and breakfast and lunch with the same dodgy pair on Sunday, since they lived up in Chadow and had spent the night with the Van Veeterens. A serious discussion with Renate about Erich’s situation at school (and in life generally) on Sunday afternoon (but without the main character himself, as he was out with some of his mates), and then – for two hours in the evening – a damned dishwasher he had been promising to try to repair for a month now. It was much more broken when he had finished with it than it had been to start with.