The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  But we kept on walking. It was an hour before we found ourselves back at the little lay-by. We hadn’t met a single person on the way this time either, and there was no vehicle apart from our dark blue Audi parked outside the boarded-up cafe. There may have been a hint of rain in the air, but when we clambered back into the car Castor and I felt comfortably uplifted and refreshed. Once I had checked that Martin’s mobile, passport and wallet really were in the outside pocket of his briefcase – and after I had spent some time studying the map – we were able to set off and concentrate exclusively on the future.

  We reached Berlin at six o’clock in the evening. On the way there I had telephoned and cancelled the hotel rooms Martin had already booked: I explained that we had fallen ill, and we were excused penalty charges. Instead, Castor and I booked into the Albrechtshof in Mitte for six nights. I felt that we needed time to make plans and take precautions without feeling under undue pressure, and that is in fact how we spent the next few days.

  That first evening, only an hour after we had checked into the hotel, something took place that, looking back, I have interpreted as a sign. We had gone out for a little walk, and suddenly found ourselves outside a police station. I must have suffered some kind of shock as I found myself standing there outside the entrance, unable to move. I just stood there with Castor by my side, feeling that the imposing buildings were leaning over us and threatening to collapse on top of us. The noises of the city were magnified in my ears to form a bewildering cacophony, but after a few seconds they died away and instead I heard a voice inside my head intoning: It’s not yet too late. He’s still alive. You can go in through that green door and put everything to rights.

  And without a second thought I walked up the three steps and opened the door, with Castor at my heels. We came into some sort of reception area, and were immediately confronted by a stern woman in a uniform who informed me that it was not allowed to take a dog with me into the police station. For some reason I couldn’t understand she was holding a stethoscope in her hand. Surely police officers don’t normally use stethoscopes?

  I hesitated for a second, then apologized and left together with Castor.

  We continued our walk, and a quarter of an hour later were back in our hotel room. I enjoyed a night’s dreamless sleep, and when I woke up early the next morning I felt like an overture.

  Or perhaps that’s just a peculiar thought I had. It’s presumably not possible to feel like an overture.

  The Albrechtshof was just over a kilometre from the Tiergarten, and we spent several hours roaming around this attractive park, making necessary decisions. The weather was mild and pleasant all the time – not much in the way of sunshine, but no rain. It was the first time I had been in Berlin for many years, and what I remembered now was my very first visit to that troubled city. It was in May 1973, six months before Gunsan died; and in charge of us was our much admired form master and Swedish teacher, known affectionately as the Beanpole. The whole class was there, with not a single pupil missing: twenty-eight fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds, plus the Beanpole and a couple of parents. It was three weeks before we left our secondary school and some of us proceeded to sixth-form college, and we scurried around like scalded cats, visiting various museums, cafes and monuments, stared in bewilderment and horror at the Wall and passed through Checkpoint Charlie, scribbled our names on walls at the Zoo railway station, shopped at KaDeWe and tried to speak German even among ourselves.

  And we visited Tiergarten, then as now. Fifteen years old then, fifty-five now. It seemed to me that the park was more or less unchanged. I decided that life was short, and said as much to Castor at regular intervals. Life is short, a dog’s life even shorter. We sat on a park bench and ate a curry wurst. What shall we do with the time we have left? I asked my dog. Eat more German sausages was his suggestion – I could see that just by looking at him, and it seemed to me that I was now seeing the world as it really was. For the first time. I burst out laughing: it soon passed, but that was a moment when the sun came out from behind a cloud and I started laughing, there on a bench in Tiergarten.

  The first decision I made was not to go back to Sweden. Going back to a familiar environment, making up some kind of story about Martin having disappeared, directing my sorrowful steps back to the Monkeyhouse . . . No, that felt like an utter impossibility, and I didn’t spend many minutes thinking about it.

  The second decision was just as straightforward: we would not continue to Morocco. I had never set foot in that country, there was nobody and nothing awaiting us there, and I had no illusions about the prospects of a solitary woman with a dog being able to establish a foothold there.

  So what was the alternative? The alternative was to find a suitable place in Europe in which to spend the winter. A suitable country. It was distinctly possible of course that I might have a nervous breakdown, I was the first to acknowledge that. Everything could very easily go to hell, but while waiting for that day and that moment to arrive I couldn’t simply sit on a park bench in Tiergarten and eat sausages. Sorry, Castor.

  And so there were a number of practical details to be attended to. It was vital that I didn’t leave behind any traces that could be followed up. I mustn’t allow use of my credit card and mobile telephone to betray routes and stopping places. In case somebody came looking for us – the police, or a husband who had somehow managed to find a way out of the bunker.

  During the days spent in Berlin I became increasingly unsure of how I judged the latter possibility. I had no clear idea of how long a person can survive without food and water, but I assumed his worst enemy would be the cold. I recalled having read that some people had survived for more than a fortnight without water, perhaps as long as a month, but they had been isolated in temperate conditions. What was the temperature in the bunker? Hardly more than seven or eight degrees, I estimated, and of course it would get much colder at night.

  I tried to refrain from thinking about what role the rats might play – but surely they must have had some way of getting in and out? Or did they use the apertures facing the sea? I was sure they were too small for a grown adult, but of course they were big enough for a rat.

  Anyway, what were the realistic chances of a man being able to get out?

  How likely was it that some walker would come past and hear somebody crying for help?

  And how likely was the other scenario – that the police would start looking for Castor and me? If somebody found a dead body in a bunker on the Polish Baltic coast, how would they go about discovering who it was?

  No identification documents. No mobile. Did Martin have anything in his pockets that could indicate Sweden? I didn’t know. But in any case the fifty-year-old literary colossus Martin Holinek from Sweden had not been reported missing, and his fingerprints and DNA were not in any register. Unless of course the police had taken his prints that day when he was being interrogated on suspicion of rape. I didn’t know. How could I? Would some kind of suspicion crop up in the head of Professor Soblewski if he read in his local newspaper about a macabre discovery on a remote beach? There was surely no reason to fear that it would. Or was there?

  Good questions, perhaps. But as early as my third day in Berlin I decided to regard them as irrelevant. The answers had nothing to do with my strategies for the future, and I needed to plan and act as if everything was under control. Whatever happened outside my horizons did not affect our circumstances – Castor’s and my circumstances, that is. Make the best of the situation, that was all that mattered, and keep plugging away.

  I realized quite quickly that I had a cool, logical brain, and concluded that it was largely because I wasn’t in a hurry. Despite everything, I wasn’t being hounded, wasn’t under stress. There was time to analyse and ponder upon every step and every measure, and if I were to decide that I needed more time there was nothing to prevent me from extending our stay at the hotel for a few days. In any case, Berlin would be the last place where I left any trace of my presence, I m
ade my mind up about that. The last place where I used any of our credit cards, and the place where I finally switched off our mobile phones. All the newfangled inventions that were so easy to track down.

  The fact that I would have to keep on using our car was possibly a complication, but stealing another car or trying to change the registration plates seemed to be quite simply out of the question. If I had murdered a president or a prime minister I would probably have considered such actions, but I wasn’t guilty of such crimes after all.

  For the foreseeable future nobody with conventional resources was going to be able to find us: that was the basic fact that I had to grasp and adhere to.

  And I did so.

  *

  When we left the Albrechtshof early in the morning of the twenty-eighth of October, I had succeeded in withdrawing from various banks and ATMs a total of 45,000 euros, which together with the 10,000 US dollars and the 12,000 euros we already had in our travelling funds ought to be sufficient ready money to keep our heads above water for at least six months. And if we lived frugally, for considerably longer.

  And during the misty morning hours on the motorway between Berlin and Magdeburg, I decided on England. I had toyed with the idea of both Spain and Provence – and Italy and Greece as well, to be honest – but in the end what really mattered was not the climate. I wanted Castor and myself to withdraw to a country where I could speak the language reasonably well, could read a daily newspaper without any problems and follow the news broadcasts on the radio and television. I’m not absolutely clear why those factors felt so essential – but God knows, that was not the only thing I was not absolutely clear about.

  The following night we stayed in a small hotel in Münster, literally in the shadow of the big cathedral. When we checked in I explained that both my credit cards and passport had been stolen, and asked to pay in advance in cash. No problem. It is a distinct advantage to be a respectable-looking fifty-five-year-old woman: people tend to believe you, whatever you say.

  Nor were there any problems when it came to getting Castor across the English Channel – but there would have been if I hadn’t bluffed my way through customs. I only became aware of the British regulations regarding the movement of animals when I got to the tunnel terminal in Calais, and after thinking things over carefully I decided to take a chance. I adjusted all my luggage to make room for Castor, and covered him over with a blanket: I prayed to God that nobody would discover him, and my prayers were answered. I had to present my own passport, of course, but as far as I could see it wasn’t scanned – and so I’m not sure whether my arrival in the UK was registered at all.

  Be that as it may, I have no intention of looking further into the matter. Moreover, if I had spent more time thinking matters through, I might well not have chosen Great Britain as my destination anyway. The border between France and the island kingdom is basically the only manned crossing between two countries in Western Europe. But the fact is that I didn’t spend more time thinking about it, and so fate took its course. As I sat resting in the car as the train rattled its way through the tunnel, I concluded that one has to take a few risks and challenge fate and the powers that be now and then, one really does.

  We drove off the tunnel train and found ourselves in dirty grey, rather shabby imperial territory. Driving from Folkestone into central London was a veritable challenge. All the way I had the feeling that I would have a collision at any moment, and that Castor and I would spend the evening in police custody. And hence that everything would have been lost. I tried to continue challenging fate and the powers that be, but it was far from easy. During the two-and-a-half hours it took us to get to Marble Arch I was preoccupied with controlling a racing heart and barely suppressed panic, and when I eventually managed to park in a little side-street leading to Queensway in Bayswater I had such feelings of relief that I clasped my hands in prayer and gave thanks to God.

  It was half past six, and raining. Unfortunately the entrances to Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were closed as it was dark, and so we had an evening walk to Notting Hill instead. The rain was thin, to say the least, a kind of drizzle you only experience in London – drops of water drifting around in the air without actually falling. I have never experienced anything like it anywhere else, at any rate. We started asking about accommodation, and eventually found a small hotel in Leinster Square that agreed to take both me and my dog for the next three or four nights. It was a cramped little room looking out onto a firewall; but both Castor and I were grateful for having a roof over our heads. We returned to the car at precisely the right moment to avoid a parking ticket, and the warden actually smiled and waved at us as we drove away. I regarded this as a friendly sign from heaven above, and after having unloaded some of our luggage and a packet of dog food at our hotel, then driven around for a while, I found a multistorey car park not far from Paddington where you could drive in and leave the car without needing to pay in advance. I thought I would let it stand there until it was time to leave London, and that I would be able to explain to the attendant that I had lost my credit card and hence would be paying cash. Respectable-looking middle-aged ladies don’t tell lies in this country either.

  And that is exactly what happened in the end. It’s not all that easy to remain incognito nowadays, but I had the feeling that I was learning how to do it as a matter of course.

  14

  Twelve degrees. Lifting mist and a south-westerly wind. The sixth of November.

  A fire, a short walk towards Dulverton, breakfast, thirty pages of Bleak House. Mornings are easy. We’ve only slept in the house for four nights, but it seems as if it could have been forty. The way you live one day is the way you can live all the rest of your days – that is a recurrent thought, but I’m not sure how true it is.

  A group of wild ponies came to greet us. Shaggy but friendly, they seemed to us. Muddy and wet, one might add – I’m thinking of buying a pair of Wellingtons to wear instead of my walking boots.

  At about noon the sun began shining in earnest, and we went for a car ride to nowhere in particular. We drove northwards and eventually stopped in a little lay-by between Exford and Porlock. Up here the moor is just as barren and extensive as Mark Britton described it. You can see for goodness knows how many kilometres in all directions, and there isn’t a single building in sight. No sign of any human activity at all, barely even a tree: just heather, gorse and bracken. Rough grass, moss and mud. The heavens seem very close indeed in such landscapes. We followed a sort of path in a north-easterly direction – I assume it’s the wild ponies that have made it – but it seemed to peter out in places and then double back on itself. It was often too wet to walk on, and we were compelled to literally force our way through the rough heather: but Castor regarded it all as a stimulating challenge, and I noticed that his attitude was rubbing off on his missus. I felt possessed by a strange feeling of freedom, of something wild and primitive. The way you live one day . . . We skirted around the most waterlogged swamps, always looking back over our shoulders to make sure we didn’t lose our bearings – always respectful guests in this barren, unspoiled countryside. You don’t need to steel yourself to act like that, the feeling simply takes possession of you, the most natural thing in the world. You feel incredibly small.

  Then suddenly the sky was cloudless and bright blue. It occurred to me that simply knowing that such days are a possibility, that they are stored away in time and in our calendars, makes it possible to endure our environment in ways that I have frequently found too easy to forget. After a while we came across a large group of ponies some distance away, twenty-five or thirty of them, all grazing on a sunny slope: and I immediately imagined them standing there for ever, in exactly the same place, totally indifferent to world wars, the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and the invention of the wheel. On that sun-drenched slope in the England that was after all the cradle of the modern era.

  Five or six hours from now they would be enveloped in mist and darkness,
but nothing could worry them less.

  As we slowly trudged back towards the car I wondered if reflections such as these were something I would have tried to put into print, if I had in fact been the writer I pretended to be. Or perhaps I should put them into print in any case? But I decided that such thoughts were irrelevant. Why add a few more straws to the rubbish heap of nature observations that . . . that white men have squeezed out of their existential poverty ever since the dawn of civilization? Words, words, words, I thought, and I felt undeniably pleased and relieved over the fact that my writing is no more than a mask.

  On the way home we paused in Exford to do some shopping and buy a newspaper. I had barely glanced at a newspaper since sitting with Svenska Dagbladet on the ferry between Ystad and Poland, and when we got back to Darne Lodge, after making a new fire, I lay down on the sofa with Castor curled up under my legs and read through the Independent from the first page to the last. It was more of a gesture in the direction of reality and civilization as such, I think, and I found nothing that concerned me in any way, or induced me to take any interest in the outside world. I eventually fell asleep, of course, and when I woke up it was dark in the room and the fire was reduced to a barely glowing heap of embers.

  I lit two candles on the table, lay on the sofa again and meditated. Listened to the whispering sounds of the rhododendron branches rubbing against the windowsill, and to the wind. It was beginning to blow quite strongly. There are no curtains in the living room. If a person or an animal were standing two metres outside the house and peering in, I wouldn’t detect it. I got up and added torch to my shopping list. According to Mr Tawkings’s inventory tucked away in its folder, there are supposed to be two torches in the house: but I haven’t discovered either of them.

  Having got thus far on this unremarkable November day, I decided to take my first look at Martin’s material from Samos and Morocco.