The G File

by Håkan Nesser

  Let’s face it, Van Veeteren thought: Ulrike was no doubt right. This is not going to lead anywhere.

  But it’s good fun to meet an old axe murderer again. No doubt about that.

  Beate Moerk set about what she needed to do the moment Van Veeteren left Kaalbringen police station. According to the telephone directory there were twenty-eight different hotels and bed-and-breakfast establishments where one could spend a night or indeed several in the little coastal town of Kaalbringen, but she knew that only about half of them were open all the year round. Exactly which ones were open in the usually rainy and not exactly hospitable month of April was not clear, but she decided to leave nothing to chance and started telephoning them all, one after another in alphabetical order.

  After five calls she changed tactics, and decided to use faxes instead of the telephone. Half an hour later she had sent out information to all the establishments unlikely still to be in hibernation – but she did not include a photograph of Verlangen: he looked even worse in a photocopy than he did in reality – like a botched Rorschach test or something of that sort – and in view of the fact that Van Veeteren could see no reason why he would have used a false name, she hoped it didn’t matter.

  Did they have the name Maarten Verlangen in their register? At some time in April this year – or at any other time, come to that. Please reply to Inspector Moerk at the police station. Preferably before five p.m. Negative or positive. It was a routine matter, but urgent.

  By the time she left her office at a few minutes past three she had received eleven responses to the nineteen faxes she had sent out.

  All of them negative.

  Van Veeteren had one victory and one draw in the bag from the games played the previous evening, but by the end of the Saturday afternoon session Bausen had caught up at 2–2. They decided to postpone a deciding game until later in the evening, and combined (but with Bausen very much in charge) to prepare a stew containing rosada fish, hake, mussels, olives, garlic, peeled tomatoes and parsley, which they ate together with saffron rice and thin slices of crispy bacon.

  Van Veeteren was inclined to agree with Bausen that it was top hole, as good as it damned well gets. Especially when, as in this case, it was washed down by a bottle of white Mersault, one of the very last of the 1973 vintage in Bausen’s cellar.

  Black coffee, a calvados and a Monte Canario cigar to round things off – and, Bausen claimed, heavenly bliss would be attained via a few simple but testing yoga exercises recommended by Iyenghir, devised specially for people with stiff loins and excessively short rear thigh muscles. Men over the age of fifteen, in other words.

  But not immediately after the food, God forbid. On this occasion it was merely theoretical.

  The theory had barely been considered when Inspector Moerk rang to report on progress. Bausen handed the telephone over to Van Veeteren, who was half-lying on the sofa as he heard that seventeen of the nineteen hotels and B&B establishments had responded, and could confirm that they had not had as a customer anybody by the name of Maarten Verlangen – nor anybody corresponding to the description of him – during the past year. Neither in April nor in any other month.

  So two establishments had not responded – probably because they had not yet opened for the season, but Moerk promised to look into that the following day. When she was also looking forward to having dinner with the two former chief inspectors at round about six p.m.

  ‘Where?’ she wondered.

  Van Veeteren consulted his host briefly, and they agreed on Fisherman’s Friend. The best ought to be good enough – and it promised to be that sort of occasion.

  Inspector Moerk assured them that she was very pleased about the choice of venue, and wished the two gentlemen a very pleasant evening. What were they doing, in fact? Wine and cigarettes and chess, presumably?

  What? Yoga exercises?

  She wished them sweet dreams and hoped they would soon be feeling better, then hung up. Van Veeteren noticed that he was smiling.

  The fifth game was soon abandoned as a draw, and as the time was merely half past eleven – and there was still half a bottle of 1991 Conde de Valdemar on the table – they agreed to make one final attempt at a decider.

  And so it was turned two o’clock when Bausen blew out the last candle with a tired sigh. Another draw. Final result: 3–3.

  ‘That’s life,’ said Van Veeteren when he had settled down in the guest bed and Bausen stood in the doorway to wish him goodnight. ‘We’re unbeatable, that’s the bottom line.’

  ‘I agree entirely,’ said Bausen. ‘And if that bastard G really is here in Kaalbringen, we’ll nail him as well.’

  ‘Let’s hope and pray that’s the case,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘If Inspector Moerk has found Verlangen by tomorrow, I’ll bet there’s another chapter still to be written in this damned story, despite everything.’

  But that was not the case.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said when they had sat down at a table in the conservatory at Fisherman’s Friend, ‘but it seems this Verlangen character hasn’t been here in Kaalbringen after all. Or at least, he hasn’t spent a night in any of our hotels or B&B establishments.’

  ‘How carefully have you checked?’ asked Bausen.

  ‘As carefully as you could ask for,’ said Moerk. ‘But it’s not a hundred per cent certain, of course. There’s a youth hostel, and quite a few private guest rooms as well – but only in the summer months. If he really has spent a few days here, it’s possible that he stayed with a friend, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Van Veeteren agreed, ‘but unlikely. For one thing he doesn’t have any friends, according to his daughter . . . Not outside Maardam, at least. And for another, a good friend would surely have reported the fact if he’d gone missing. But it’s obvious that we’re clutching at straws here in any case. He might simply have been passing through, for instance.’

  ‘The phone call to his grandson came from the railway station, is that right?’ asked Moerk.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘A call box. That could mean that he was on his way to somewhere else, of course – or back to Maardam: but I don’t think there’s much point in speculating about that.’

  ‘But all this doesn’t exclude the possibility that he did spend a few days here,’ said Bausen optimistically. ‘And that’s the main point, isn’t it?’

  Van Veeteren nodded. The main point? he wondered as he gazed out over the sea, which was grey and ambivalent in the gathering dusk a hundred metres or so below them. What does he mean by the main point?

  The waiter came with menus, and there was a pause in the conversation. Van Veeteren leafed through the stiff pages, and was reminded that this wasn’t just any old restaurant. It was perched up on a limestone cliff a kilometre or so east of Kaalbringen where the coast became much more hilly – and especially out here in the conservatory one seemed to be floating on air. Seagulls were soaring around in the gentle breeze, and he recalled – or thought he recalled in any case – that he had been sitting at this very same table with Bausen nine years ago. They had eaten turbot, if he remembered rightly, and drunk a bottle of Sauternes . . .

  That was before the antiquarian bookshop. Before Ulrike. Before Erich’s death.

  It wasn’t even a decade ago, he thought. But nevertheless my life has changed fundamentally. I’d never have believed it at that time.

  Bausen cleared his throat, and Van Veeteren came back down to earth.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Verlangen has presumably been here, at least for an hour or two – but I don’t think we’re going to get any further than that at the moment. I’m inclined to regard this meal as pleasure rather than business.’

  ‘Objection!’ said Bausen. ‘Why restrict yourself to either– or when you can have both–and? I assume there’s a Wanted notice out on this Verlangen character, and that you and your colleagues at the police station are keeping your eyes skinned.’

  There seemed to be a de
gree of irony in this assumption, and Beate Moerk smiled in order to show that she had realized that.

  ‘We’re all eyes, yes,’ she said. ‘If we discover the slightest trace of Verlangen – or of Jaan G. Hennan come to that – I promise that you will hear about it without delay. Maardam CID, I assume?’

  ‘Well,’ said Van Veeteren, digging out a business card. ‘I think it would be better if you contacted Krantze’s Antiquarian Bookshop in the first place. Discretion is the better part of valour, as they say.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ said Moerk, accepting the card. ‘But to tell you the truth, I’m feeling a bit peckish. I thought our agreement included a bite to eat?’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ said Bausen. ‘There’s a time for everything, and now it’s time to eat.’

  During the drive back home he listened to Pergolesi and thought about his memoirs.

  Or rather, why he had interrupted them.

  The bottom line was that it was not – as he often maintained and used as an excuse – the murder investigation involving G that had thrown a spanner into the works. Of course not. It just so happened that the two things occurred at the same time, and he needed an excuse.

  In fact, the need to document his life as a police officer seemed to have deserted him. The need to put things into perspective and put into words his thirty years in the police force . . . The feeling that something had to be justified.

  It was like photographs from a disappointing holiday, he had thought: a sort of retroactive authenticity – the actual time had been wasted, and the documentation replaced the experience.

  For better or worse, of course. ‘It’s always possible to make glittering poetry out of the most appalling failures – and thank goodness for that!’ was something Mahler had once confided in him, and no doubt there was some sort of parallel to that thought in his memoirs project . . . But the urge had left him, the vague desire to record his deeds in print – and of course Ulrike played a vital role in this. As in so much else.

  The words from Corinthians came to him once again, and he wondered what his life would have been like if Ulrike had not sailed into it. If and if not . . . There was no point in speculating on that as well, of course, and he soon grew tired of trying to find alternative ways through the swamp that was life. His own path had turned out the way it did, and if he thought about it at all nowadays, it was with gratitude. Despite everything.

  The year of grace?

  He abandoned fiction and tried to think about so-called realities instead – about Maarten Verlangen and about Jaan G. Hennan.

  What did he know?

  Nothing at all, to be honest.

  But what did he think, then?

  Or, What did he have good reason to think? Preferably with the aid of a reasonably sharp razor blade, presumably.

  He thought for a while and replaced Pergolesi with Bruckner.

  Something had happened.

  Indubitably, as they say.

  Verlangen had been on to something. But had come too close to the fire and burnt himself.

  Not just burnt himself. Been burnt up.

  Been killed.

  By G?

  That was what he had been telling himself ever since Verlangen’s daughter had come to the bookshop and told her tale. But did he really have good reason to believe that?

  Did he have any reason at all?

  Were the remains of Maarten Verlangen really buried somewhere in the Kaalbringen area (or dumped in the sea) – while the renowned former Chief Inspector Van Veeteren was sitting back in his warm car, fleeing the scene? Was that the reality? For an all-seeing and all-knowing and mildly ironic God?

  Good reason? Bullshit.

  I shall never sort this out, he suddenly thought. I shall never know how the murder of Barbara Clarissa Hennan was carried out. Nor what happened to Maarten Verlangen fifteen years later.

  Nor will anybody else.

  It’s so damned irritating, but that’s the way it is.

  Former Chief Inspector Van Veeteren was deceiving himself on this point to some extent; but a whole summer would pass before he realized this – and by then he had long since forgotten that he had given up all hope.

  AUGUST–SEPTEMBER

  32

  The body was found on Saturday, 24 August, by a mushroom picker called Jadwiga Tiller.

  It was a beautiful summer’s day. Fru Tiller was seventy-five years old and had been out all day in the mixed coniferous and deciduous woodland between the villages of Hildeshejm and Wilgersee several kilometres to the east of Kaalbringen with her husband Adrian. They had parked next to the log piles at the side of one of the many dirt roads running through the forest and down to the sea, and after a few hours had filled almost two carrier bags with top-class cep mushrooms. She used to tell her friends Vera Felder and Grete Lauderwegs how she had a good nose for mushrooms – ‘I can smell them a mile off !’ she used to say: ‘Even when I’m blind I’ll still be able to sniff ’em out!’ – and thanks to that ability she found herself exploring a little copse of young beech trees, searching around among dead leaves and old husks without finding anything edible, and then stumbled upon a human being.

  Or rather, a dead body. In an advanced stage of decomposition – there didn’t seem to be much more left than a few rags of clothing and a skeleton, and for a confused moment Jadwiga Tiller wondered if that was the smell that had seduced her. She suddenly felt very dizzy, and had to sit down on a felled tree trunk in order to recover her composure.

  That took a few seconds. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: ‘Kolihoo! Kolihoo!’

  That was the call she and her husband had been using in the woods while mushrooming for thirty years or more, and sure enough she heard Adrian’s ‘Kolihoo!’ response from not very far away.

  ‘Kolihoo! Kolihoo!’ she shouted again. ‘Come here! Now! I’ve found a dead body!’

  There was a crashing and crackling in among the bushes, then Adrian Tiller appeared. He continued walking in the direction pointed out by his wife’s shaking index finger and saw what she had seen. Despite the fact that he was an ex-soldier and had seen most of what there was to see, he also felt rather dizzy and needed to sit down. He flopped down beside his wife, took off his checked cap and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve.

  ‘We must ring the police,’ he said. ‘It’s fifteen thirty-five.’

  ‘I understand that we must ring the police,’ she said, ‘but why on earth are you telling me what time it is?’

  ‘Because the police always want to know what time it is when they are investigating a crime,’ said Adrian Tiller.

  Inspector Beate Moerk did not place as much importance on the time of the discovery as herr Tiller had done when she sat in her office at the police station in Kaalbringen that evening, trying to sum up what had emerged about the dead man after the first few hectic hours. The body was rather too old for that to matter.

  But in any case, it was a man. Evidently somewhere between sixty and seventy. A hundred and eighty centimetres tall, and at the time of his death wearing jeans, worn-out deck shoes, a simple cotton shirt and a blue denim jacket. All the items of clothing were in quite a bad way, of course. According to a very early estimate by the pathologist, the man had been dead for between four and six months, and the cause of death was almost certainly a shot in the head. The bullet had entered through his left temple, and exited through the right one. The gun had been quite a large calibre, possibly a Berenger or a Pinchmann, and the shot had been from close quarters, only half a metre away. No bullet or empty cartridge case had been found.

  Nor were there any identification papers or personal belongings, apart from a packet of chewing gum, Dentro Fruit, with two uneaten tablets remaining, in his right-hand pocket. It was impossible to take fingerprints in view of the advanced state of decay, but the Centre for Forensic Medicine in Maardam would be able to establish his dental profile – the body was on its way there for all the usual tests and ana
lyses.

  Nothing of interest had been found at or in the vicinity of the place where the corpse had been discovered, nor was there any trace of a fight or struggle. There was a reasonably accessible and usable track only about thirty metres away from the depression in the ground where the copse was located, so it could be that the body had been transported into the woods by car, either dead or still alive.

  There was nothing to suggest with certainty that suicide was an impossibility, but no weapon had been found, and the body had been so well covered by leaves and twigs that it seemed likely that somebody had tried to conceal it from the eyes of the world.

  Murder, in other words. Inspector Moerk knew that they were landed with a murder investigation. She had said as much in blunt but restrained terms to Chief of Police deKlerk, who was unfortunately attending a family gathering in Aarlach that Saturday, but now – at a few minutes past nine in the evening – ought to be in his car on the way back home from there (travelling in the opposite direction to the hearse with the dead body in it, but bound to pass it at some unknown point, Moerk realized with a suppressed smile), and would turn up at the police station before half past ten.

  That is what he had promised, at least: it wasn’t any old day that they were faced with a murder investigation in Kaalbringen, and if you were chief of police, you had appropriate obligations.

  Moerk drank the last drop of tea and put her notes away in a yellow folder. Leaned back on her desk chair and gazed out through the open window into the mild autumnal darkness.

  Murder? she thought. And then it dawned on her who the dead man must be.

  She ought to have realized sooner, of course: but it had been a stressful afternoon and evening. She had been telephoned from the police station by Constable Bang shortly after four, and it had been full steam ahead ever since. For the moment, at least, the case was the responsibility of the Kaalbringen police – although the scene-of-crime and pathology officers had been sent from Oostwerdingen.

  It had been all go without much pause for thought: interviews with the elderly mushroom-pickers who had found the body; detailed discussions with the pathologist Meegerwijk and with Intendent Struenlee, who was in charge of the scene-of-crime team; off-putting comments to a few journalists who had somehow (Bang?) got wind of the circumstances . . . Telephone calls here, faxes there: and it was only now – at nine o’clock in the evening – that she had the chance to sit down and think things over for a while.