The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  Bergman has been in touch several times, in fact. He rang yesterday and said he had read Martin’s play. Strong stuff, he said. It has every prospect of becoming a classic. I hope that can be of some consolation to you, if . . . well, if that was the last thing he ever wrote.

  I replied and said I would try to see it in that light.

  Did I have anything against his contacting a few theatre people already?

  I said he was free to do whatever he found appropriate.

  I start cutting up the shallots, and think it will be good to leave Sweden. I really didn’t think I would ever make that decision, but after spending just one day in the house I was quite sure. I’m also clear about the fact that it’s not only due to Mark: it’s all the other things as well. Opening the door to a village pub you’ve never been to before, after a long walk. The gorse that is constantly in flower and permits you to make love all the year round. Dunster Beach. Simonsbath. The Barrett witches?

  When I weighed all this up against ten years in the Monkey-house, I had no doubts whatsoever, and contacted the estate agent a mere three days after my return.

  I long to be back on the moor, it’s as simple as that. It’s an almost physical perception, and I dream about it at night: the wind, the rain and the mists. I don’t understand how this has come about – but then, it’s not something you need to understand.

  I look at the clock. Mark should be ringing from Arlanda at any moment now, to say that he’s landed. I switch on the oven, and think it will be time to put the meat in as soon as I hear from him. I check that the bottle of white wine is in the fridge, and open the bottle of red.

  There is a ring at the door.

  What’s all this? I wonder.

  But then the penny drops. He has fooled me. He’s taken an earlier flight and wants to surprise me. I can feel a hot flush like a teenager, and as I pass the hall mirror I see that I’m smiling again.

  I look good and I smile. Perhaps you can only look like that when you’re in love. The thought embarrasses me – it’s not a thought that should occur to a woman of my age. I hurry to open the door.

  Who’s ringing the doorbell?

  I’m writing this postscript a bit later – not all that much later, but not immediately afterwards. Time is something I have plenty of. Strictly speaking, that’s all I have. My room is fifteen square metres, and from my window I have a view of the edge of a forest and the sky. I can see quite a lot of stars at night, and I often lie awake doing just that: looking at the stars. They say that the light we can see from them down here on earth is light they transmitted thousands of years ago, and it could well be that they have gone out now. That they are dead. I think that is interesting – it’s reminiscent of life. It has already taken place, everything important has already happened ages ago. Always assuming it really was all that important, but we have now acquired an awareness that enables us to imagine all kinds of things. I agree with that professor of literature who said the brain needs all its many convolutions in order to make us feel unhappy. That seems absolutely right – but the very fact that we can imagine things at all is significant. Things that have never existed, or that did exist but have now disappeared. It was. It will never be again. Remember – how about that for an evocative summary of life in just eight words?

  Moreover I am sure that we have been given our brains so that we can handle the passage of time. An awful lot of profound things have been written about the nature of time: most often the men who devoted themselves to studying the nature of time are desperate characters who are trying hard to somehow avoid being subjected to it. It can come and go as it likes. Seconds can expand and years can shrink, that’s the way they are, after all. I think that is how our minds ought to deal with the matter. There are brief, beautiful seconds and minutes that really are so much more significant than masses of wasted rubbish years, and then – perhaps this is what I am aiming for, this conclusion I want to reach as I sit here looking at the extinguished or possibly not extinguished stars – then there are those pregnant moments that are so incredibly significant that they can barely contain the burden they are carrying. For my own part, since I landed up here, I think first and foremost about those seconds – there can’t have been very many of them – when I go to open the door that evening in February. The brief moments in between my seeing my image in the mirror and discovering that I’m smiling and look rather beautiful, until the moment when I take hold of the handle and open the door. It can’t have been more than three seconds. Four at most – it’s not far from the mirror to the front door. But time has set itself free, it does whatever it likes, it creates its own freedom, or perhaps reclaims it: it has nothing to do with any intention or effort on my part, nor with what is happening inside my head: the thoughts that normally harass me – I can’t think of a better word than ‘normally’, but no doubt I shall do so if I revise these notes tomorrow – the thoughts that normally harass me wouldn’t fit into those brief moments.

  It begins of course with my excited expectations at the thought of seeing Mark Britton standing outside the door – I’m convinced he will be carrying a bunch of roses or perhaps a bottle of champagne, maybe even both. But then a cloud descends over that expectation: it stumbles off the straight and narrow path, gets completely lost and falls down into an abyss. The whole thing reminds me of a little girl who has got lost in the woods. I can see her quite clearly in my mind’s eye: innocence, flaxen hair and lots of other details – I don’t need to go into who she is.

  It won’t be Mark Britton standing out there, the left side of my brain tells me – the half that doesn’t devote itself to sagas and that sort of thing: my happiness and lust for life have been a total waste of time. They are as false and unreliable as eyes: it will be somebody else standing there.

  Is it somebody else? What does that question mean? Well, even an idiot can explain what it means – but is there more than one answer? Is there more than one person who could take on the role of ‘some-body else’ in this situation? How have I . . . How have I managed to scrape together all this fabulous belief in the future and this fruitless optimism in just a few weeks – an optimism that is now running off me like water off the back of the goose I clearly am.

  ‘Don’t open the door!’ yells a voice inside me. It is almost bellowing: it really is strong, so strong that for a fraction of a second I have the impression that there is actually somebody else shouting at me. Yet another somebody else who is evidently standing behind me, somewhere inside the house, and is trying to warn me – to prevent me, to save me, I don’t know what, but in a quick flash of inspiration I conjure up the presence of a redeeming angel. Yes, now afterwards I am certain that it must have been an angel. A bellowing angel – is there such a thing? Whatever, there is not much point in warning or bellowing, not at this late stage in my life, not in the fifty-ninth second of the sixtieth minute of the twelfth hour.

  But before I submit to this destructive avalanche taking place so suddenly and so unexpectedly inside me, I am raised up out of the darkness. I regain control of myself, terror loosens its grip, everything is repeated and retreats in the opposite direction, I am transported from the fear of death to a state of happiness and trust by the fastest lift in the world – or perhaps it’s that angel after all – and when I turn the door handle that I have finally succeeded in coming to, the whole of my being is possessed by a sense of almost childish curiosity: who is it standing outside the door?

  The fact is that until you have investigated, until you have lifted the lid, you can’t possibly know anything about what is inside. Until we reach that very last second, everything is still possible.

  Expectation, there is no sweeter sweetness in this life.

  Who’s ringing the doorbell?

  58

  There is a man in his sixties standing there. Slightly hunched, slightly overweight.

  ‘Yes? . . .’

  ‘Fru Holinek?’

  ‘Yes . . . Yes, of course. What’
s it all about?’

  He produces something from his inside pocket and holds it up. I don’t understand what it is.

  ‘Chief Inspector Simonsson. May I come in?’

  I see that there is a dark blue car parked outside the gate. The engine is running, and another man behind the wheel is talking into a mobile phone.

  ‘Yes, of course. This way . . . Forgive me, but I’m busy making dinner.’

  He steps into the hall and sniffs the air. ‘Yes, I can smell that.’

  He hangs up his jacket. ‘Is there somewhere where we can sit and talk? I have a few questions.’

  ‘Is it about . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, it’s about your husband, fru Holinek.’

  I show him into the living room and we each sit down in an armchair.

  ‘Would you like anything?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  He takes out a small notebook and leafs through it for a moment.

  ‘So your husband, Martin Holinek, disappeared from the ferry between Puttgarden and Rødby on the evening of the thirtieth of January, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes . . . Yes, that’s true. Why are you asking about that? I’ve already spoken several times to both the Danish and the Swedish police—’

  He holds up his hand and I break off.

  ‘The fact is that we might have found his body, fru Holinek.’

  ‘You might have . . . ?’

  For a brief moment my brain blows a fuse. I stare at him and try to remember what he said his name was.

  ‘It’s a possibility at least,’ he adds. ‘There are quite a lot of bewildering circumstances.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Simonsson. Chief Inspector Simonsson.’

  ‘Thank you. I don’t really understand . . . Bewildering circumstances?’

  He clears his throat and looks at his notebook.

  ‘I can’t think of a better way of putting it. But maybe you can put us on the right track. Your husband is supposed to have jumped overboard from the ferry more or less halfway between Puttgarden and Rødby about . . . well, just over two weeks ago. And now a body has been found that might possibly be his.’

  ‘What do you mean by “possibly”?’

  He nods a few times and looks around the room before saying anything more. As if he were looking for an answer in the bookcase or up near the ceiling.

  ‘In the first place we are wondering about the spot where he was found. It’s quite a long way from where he is supposed to have jumped overboard.’

  ‘I . . . I’ve been told that there are strong sea currents down there. That’s what the Danish police said, at least.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s true. But this body was found rather a long way to the east of Fehmarn . . . In Poland, in fact.’

  ‘Poland?’

  ‘Yes. That’s one of the circumstances. The other one is the time aspect. The human body they’ve found has evidently been dead for several months . . . It’s been very badly mauled, and to complicate matters further was discovered inside a bunker.’

  ‘A bunker?’

  ‘Yes. An old abandoned remnant from the last war . . .’

  ‘But then it can’t possibly be my husband. How . . . how on earth could he have ended up inside a bunker?’

  I don’t know where I got my neutral, almost slightly irritated tone of voice from.

  Chief Inspector Simonsson sits up a little straighter in the armchair and leans towards me. ‘That’s a question we are also asking ourselves, fru Holinek. This body has been with the Polish police for quite some time, but they haven’t managed to identify it because it is so badly mauled. As far as they can see the man must have died inside that bunker, but before he did so he might possibly have written something on the wall.’

  ‘Written something . . . Now you said “possibly” again.’

  ‘Yes. There are quite a lot of scribbles on those walls, it seems. Names and suchlike. But when the Polish police failed to get anywhere with identifying the body they sent out a list to police forces in other countries. That was about a month ago . . . Eleven names in all, and one of them might have been scratched in by this man before he died – that’s what they are suggesting in any case.’

  ‘Really? I don’t think I . . .’

  ‘Anyway, one of the names is Holinek. One of my younger colleagues happened to notice it and recognized it from that Rødby report. He’s the one sitting out there in the car, incidentally. Stensson – a promising young detective officer.’

  I swallow and try to think of something to say, but I can’t find any words. Instead I look at the police officer with a calm and tolerant television smile.

  ‘It’s a pretty long shot, of course,’ he says, closing his notebook. ‘But we need to turn over every stone – that’s the way we work . . .’

  ‘I still don’t understand. Of course it’s not him. How could it possibly be?’

  He raises his hand again. ‘I agree that it sounds out of the question. But we thought we ought to look into it even so. After all, there are not many people around called Holinek. So we thought we’d investigate so that we could exclude the possibility – can I assume that’s all right with you?’

  ‘Of course. Naturally there’s nothing I’d like more than Martin’s body being found, so that . . . well, so that we know for certain. Are you intending . . . ?’

  ‘Intending what?’

  ‘Are you intending to test DNA and that kind of thing?’

  He puts his notebook back in his jacket pocket and nods. ‘That would be one method, of course. But maybe there’s a shortcut in this case.’

  ‘A shortcut?’

  He stands up. Looks thoughtfully around the room again. ‘Apparently there’s not much left of that corpse in the bunker. Neither the body itself nor the clothes he was wearing. But there’s one little thing that has survived intact. I had it delivered to my desk a couple of hours ago.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A car key. He had a car key with him, and it seems the rats didn’t find it edible. Forgive me . . . That’s probably what he used to scratch things on the wall with. I take it that’s your Audi parked out there on the drive?’

  He has walked over to the window and I can see that he is giving some sort of signal to his colleague. Stensson.

  ‘Come here, let’s see what happens.’

  I walk to the window and stand beside him. I watch as Stensson – a tall, well-built young man of about thirty – has got out of the car he’s been sitting in while Chief Inspector Simonsson and I have been talking.

  It strikes me . . . Yes, it suddenly strikes me that I am standing exactly where I stood that winter evening so long ago. Just as cold or even colder than this one: I’m standing here beside Martin and watching as his sister comes walking up to the house with her secret lover. Our children are small and we have all our lives ahead of us: there are so many wonderful opportunities open to us, so many days, but we don’t think about that; we just stand here, in exactly the same place as Chief Inspector Simonsson and I are standing twenty-seven years later, Martin and I, trying to imagine who that man in the ordinary shoes and with his jumper pulled up over his head might be – and it occurs to me that life passes so quickly that one can remain standing there in the same spot and not notice that it’s already too late. You can sail without any wind for years, and believe all the time that you are on the way to somewhere.

  And then I come back down to earth and watch the young police officer open the front door of my car – as usual I haven’t locked it – and see how he settles down behind the steering wheel and waves to us – possibly slightly embarrassed, it seems to me – before leaning forward and inserting the key in the ignition.

  The ponies, I think. The pheasants. The Protection . . .

  The headlights come on, and it starts at the first attempt.

  ‘How about that?’ says Chief Inspector Simonsson. ‘It started. How do you explain that?’

/>   I don’t answer.

  ‘Ah well, I think I must ask you to come with us, fru Holinek, so that we can continue our conversation in another place.’

  I say nothing. Stand still and watch my car with its engine still running out there in the cold. Castor comes and sits down next to me. My mobile phone rings, I know who it is and don’t need to check.

  ‘I must just switch off the oven first,’ I say.

  NOTE

  This novel is an imaginative creation of the author. This applies to Swedish professors and slim government ministers, it applies to English and American authors and it applies to people living in and around the village of Winsford in the county of Somerset, England. However, the Exmoor environment has been meticulously described in accordance with reality.

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD IN WINSFORD

  Håkan Nesser is one of Sweden’s most popular crime writers, receiving numerous awards for his novels, including the European Crime Fiction Star Award (Ripper Award) 2010/11, the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Prize (three times) and Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award. His Van Veeteren series is published in over 25 countries and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. The Living and the Dead in Winsford has been awarded the Rosenkrantz Award for Best Thriller of the Year. Håkan Nesser lives in Gotland with his wife, and spends part of each year in the UK.

  Also by Håkan Nesser

  The Van Veeteren series

  THE MIND’S EYE

  BORKMANN’S POINT

  THE RETURN

  WOMAN WITH A BIRTHMARK

  THE INSPECTOR AND SILENCE

  THE UNLUCKY LOTTERY

  HOUR OF THE WOLF

  THE WEEPING GIRL

  THE STRANGLER’S HONEYMOON

  THE G FILE

  First published 2015 by Mantle

  This electronic edition published 2015 by Mantle

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR