Hour of the Wolf

by Håkan Nesser

  Would have done.

  He stood down there in the ditch with the boy’s body in his arms for quite some time, while thoughts whirled around in his head. It was only a metre or so up to the road, but it was steep and the rain had made it slippery and treacherous: he doubted whether he would be able to get a sufficient foothold. No cars passed by while he stood there, but he heard a moped approaching. Or possibly a low-powered motorbike, he thought. When it passed by he could hear that it was in fact a scooter, and he was momentarily blinded by its headlight. Presumably – or so he thought later on with hindsight – presumably it was that very second of blinding light that started him functioning again.

  Functioning, and thinking rational thoughts.

  He lay the body down again next to the culvert. Wondered if he should wipe the blood from his hands onto the wet grass, but decided not to. Scrambled up onto the road, and hurried back to his car.

  He noted that he must have automatically switched off the engine, but left the headlights on. Noted that the rain was pouring down like some sort of elemental force. Noted that he felt cold.

  He slid down behind the wheel and closed the door. Fastened his safety belt and drove off. He could see rather better now through the windows, as if the rain had cleaned the inside of the glass as well.

  Nothing has happened, he thought. Nothing at all.

  He felt the first signs of a headache coming on, but then he remembered his mother’s cool hands again – and suddenly he was convinced that there was a drop left of that eucalyptus foam bath gel after all.

  2

  He woke up, and his first feeling was immense relief.

  It lasted for three seconds, then he realized it had not been a nasty dream.

  That it was reality.

  The pouring rain, the sudden slight jerk of the steering wheel, the slippery ditch: it was all reality. The weight of the boy he was carrying in his arms, and the blood dripping into the hood.

  He stayed in bed for another twenty minutes, as if paralysed. The only sign of life was the shudders that took possession of his body from time to time. They started in the ball of his foot, made their way up through his body and culminated in the form of white-hot flashes of lightning in his head: every time it felt as if some vital part of his brain and his consciousness had crumbled away. Frozen to death or burnt to a cinder, incapable of ever being revived to start working again.

  Lobotomy, he thought. I’m being lobotomized.

  When the insistent red figures on his clock radio had reached 07.45, he picked up the telephone and rang his place of work. Explained in a voice as fragile as newly formed ice on a mountain tarn that he was suffering from flu, and would have to stay at home for a few days.

  Influenza, yes.

  Yes, it was unfortunate – but that’s life.

  Yes of course, by all means ring if anything special cropped up.

  No, he would stay in bed. Take a few tablets and drink lots of fluids.

  Yes. Yes of course. No.

  He got up half an hour later. Stood by the kitchen window and looked out at the gloomy suburban street, noting that the rain had faded away to be replaced by a heavy, grey, early-morning mist. As he stood there he entertained once more, slowly and gradually, a thought that he remembered from last night – and later, during the many hours he had lain awake, plagued by despair, before finally falling asleep.

  Nothing has happened. Nothing at all.

  He went out into the kitchen. There was an unopened bottle of whisky in the larder. Glenalmond, bought on holiday last summer. He unscrewed the top and took two large swigs. Couldn’t remember having ever done that in his life before – drinking whisky straight from the bottle. No, never ever.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and waited for the alcohol to spread throughout his body.

  Nothing has happened, he thought.

  Then started to make coffee and analyse the situation.

  There was no mention in the morning papers. Neither in the Telegraaf, which he subscribed to, nor in the Neuwe Blatt, which he went out to buy from the kiosk. For a few seconds he almost managed to convince himself that it had all been a dream after all, but as soon as he remembered the rain and the ditch and the blood, he knew that it was wishful thinking. It was real. Just as real as the whisky standing on the table. As the crumbs around the toaster. As his hands, impotently and mechanically searching through the newspapers – he dropped them onto the floor, and returned to the bottle of whisky.

  He had killed a young boy.

  He had driven his car while under the influence of drink and killed an adolescent boy aged about fifteen or sixteen. He had stood there in the ditch and the rain with the boy’s dead body in his arms – and then he’d abandoned him and driven home.

  That’s the way it was. Nothing to be done about it. No use crying over spilt milk.

  It wasn’t until a few minutes to ten that he switched on the radio, and heard confirmation in the ten o’clock news.

  Young boy. Probably on his way home to Boorkhejm. Unidentified as yet.

  But accurate details about the location.

  Some time during the night. Probably between eleven and one. The body wasn’t discovered until early this morning.

  Death had most probably been instantaneous.

  No witnesses.

  Hit by a car – also most probably. The driver couldn’t possibly have failed to notice what had happened. An appeal to all who had driven past the scene of the accident to come forward, and to anybody who thought they might have relevant information to tell. The police were very keen to contact everybody who . . .

  The scene of the accident cordoned off, the rain had made police work more difficult, certain lines of investigation established . . . The police want to interview the driver who failed to stop . . . Renewed appeal to all who . . .

  He switched off. Took two more swigs of whisky and went back to bed. Lay there for quite some time, his head swimming. But when he eventually got up again that misty Thursday morning, three thoughts had crystallized.

  Three significant thoughts. Conclusions chiselled out in minute detail that he had no intention of compromising. Of abandoning, come what may. He had made up his mind, full stop.

  First: the boy in the ditch was dead, and he was guilty of killing him.

  Second: no matter what he did, he could not bring the boy back to life.

  Third: there was nothing to be gained by giving himself up. Nothing at all.

  On the contrary, he thought in connection with this number three. Why compensate for a ruined life by sacrificing another one? His own.

  As he thought along these lines he knew that at long last he was on the right track. At long last he recognized himself again. At long last. It was just a matter of being strong. Not weakening.

  That was all there was to it.

  He devoted the afternoon to practical matters.

  Washed the car in the garage, both inside and out. No matter how carefully he scrutinized the right side of the front and wing of the car, he could find no trace of any damage or marks: he assumed he must have hit the boy quite low down – at about knee height, with the bumper most probably, just a glancing blow. It seemed – when he tried to relive the scene down in the wet ditch – it seemed that the fatal outcome of the accident was due to the boy’s hitting his head on the concrete culvert rather than contact with the car at road level. Which – in a rather strange, perverted way – made his guilt rather easier to accept. That’s how it felt, at least. That’s how he wanted it to feel.

  Inside the car, on the driver’s seat, was just one cause for concern: a dark oval-shaped stain, about the size of an egg, on the extreme right-hand edge of the beige-coloured upholstery. He had good reason to assume it must be blood, and he spent half an hour trying to scrub it away. But in vain: the stain would not go away, it had evidently penetrated the cloth through and through, and he decided to buy a set of seat covers before too long. Not immedia
tely, but after a week or so, when the outcry after the discovery of the body had begun to fade away.

  There were quite a lot of other traces of the boy’s blood, on both the steering wheel and the gear lever, but it was no problem getting rid of them. As for the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening, he gathered them carefully together and burned them in the open fire in the living room, creating quite a lot of smoke. When he had finished, he was suddenly gripped by a moment of panic at the thought of somebody asking about them. But he calmed down quite quickly: it was of course highly unlikely that anybody would get onto his trail, or demand him to account for something so utterly trivial. A pair of ordinary corduroy trousers? An old jacket and a bluish-grey cotton shirt? He could have disposed of them in a thousand above-board ways – thrown them away, given them to a charity shop, all kinds of possibilities.

  But most of all: nobody would get onto his trail.

  Later in the afternoon, as dusk began to fall and it had started drizzling, he went to church. To the old Vrooms basilica a twenty-minute walk away from his home. Sat for half an hour in one of the side chancels, his hands clasped in prayer, and tried to open himself up to his inner voices – or to something more elevated – but nothing spoke to him, nothing made him feel uneasy.

  When he left the deserted church, he realized how important it had been to make the visit, to take the trouble of sitting there in the chancel like that, with no specific intentions or aspirations. With no false pretences or motives.

  Realized that it had been a sort of test, and that he had passed it.

  It was remarkable, but the feeling was strong and unambivalent when he emerged from the dark building. Something similar to catharsis. On the way home he bought two evening papers: both had a picture of the boy on their front page. The same picture, in fact, but in different sizes: a boy smiling cheerfully with dimples, slightly slant-eyed, dark hair combed forward. No hood, no blood. He didn’t recognize him.

  When he got home he read that the boy was Wim Felders, that he had celebrated his sixteenth birthday only a few days ago, and that he had been a pupil at Weger Grammar School.

  Both newspapers were full of details, information and speculations, and the overall attitude that was perhaps summed up by the headline on page three of Den Poost:

  HELP THE POLICE TO CATCH

  THE HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER!

  There was also a lot written about possible consequences if the police succeeded in tracing the culprit. Two to three years’ imprisonment was by no means out of the question, it seemed.

  He added in his alcohol consumption – which could no doubt be established by interviewing the restaurant staff – and increased the term to five or six years. At least. Drunken driving. Reckless driving and negligent homicide. Hit-and-run.

  Five or six years under lock and key. What would be the point of that? Who would gain from such a development?

  He flung the newspapers in the rubbish bin and took out the whisky bottle.

  3

  He dreamt about the boy for three nights in a row, then he vanished.

  Just as he’d vanished from the newspapers, generally speaking. They wrote about Wim Felders on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but when the new working week began on Monday, reporting was restricted to a note saying that the police still had no leads. No witnesses had turned up, and no technical proof had been ascertained – whatever that meant. The young boy had been killed by an unknown driver who had then fled the scene, assisted in his efforts to remain anonymous by the rain and the darkness. This had been known from the start, and was still known four days later.

  He also went back to work on Monday. It felt like a relief, but also an escape route to more normal routines. Life was trundling on once more along the same old pathways – familiar and yet also remarkably alien – and during the course of the day he was surprised to find himself pondering on how frail the link was between the mundane and the horrific.

  How frail, and how incredibly easy to break. That link.

  After work he drove out to the supermarket in Löhr and bought some new seat covers for his car. He found a set almost immediately in more or less exactly the same shade as the existing upholstery on the seats, and when he eventually managed to work out how to fit them in the garage later that evening, he had the feeling that he was home and dry at last. The parenthesis was over and done with now. The parenthesis around nothing. He had put in place the final element of the safety strategies he had evolved after long and careful consideration. All steps had been taken, all traces erased, and he was somewhat surprised to note that it was still less than a week after the accident happened.

  And there was nothing for the police to hit on and follow up. He hadn’t discovered the slightest thing to suggest that he ought to own up to what had happened during those fateful seconds on Thursday evening. Those horrific and increasingly unreal seconds that were rapidly hurtling away further and further into the darkness of the past.

  He would pull through this. He took a deep breath and knew that he would pull through this.

  To be sure, it had been claimed – both in some of the newspapers and in the television news broadcasts that he had happened to catch – that the police had certain leads that they were working on, but he realized that this was a lot of hot air. A heavy-handed attempt to give the impression that they knew more and were more competent than was really the case. As usual.

  There had been no mention of a red Audi parked at the side of the road near the scene of the accident with its lights on. That is what he had been most afraid of: perhaps not that somebody would have noticed the colour or the make, never mind the registration number; but that they might have seen a vehicle parked there. Two cars had passed by while he was down in the ditch . . . or was it while he was still standing on the road? He couldn’t remember that any more. But in any case he recalled quite clearly seeing two cars and a scooter. The driver of the car coming from the opposite direction to where he was heading – from Boorkhejm or Linzhuisen – might even had taken his Audi for an oncoming vehicle, he reckoned; but the other two surely must have registered that the car was parked on the edge of the road with its lights on.

  Or was that the kind of thing that people forget all about? Bits of memory dust that only remain in the brain for a few seconds or half a minute at most, then vanish without trace for ever? Hard to say, hard to know, but definitely a question that kept him awake at night. These presumptive, latent pieces of evidence.

  On Thursday, after a few days of silence in the media and a week after the accident, an appeal was made by the boy’s family: his mother, father and a younger sister. They spoke on the television and the radio, and their pictures appeared in various newspapers. All they wanted was quite simply for the perpetrator to listen to his own conscience and make himself known.

  Confess to what he had done, and take his punishment.

  It seemed obvious that this move was yet another indication that the police were at a loss and had nothing to work on. No leads, no clues. When he watched the mother – a dark-haired, unexpectedly self-controlled woman of about forty-five – sitting on her sofa and looking him in the eye from his television screen, he felt distinctly uneasy; but the moment she disappeared from the screen, he immediately regained his composure. Acknowledged that from time to time he was bound to be subjected to such attacks of anxiety, but that he would always have the strength to pick himself up again. To find a way out of his weakness. As long as he kept his head.

  It was good to know that he had it, that he possessed this essential quality. Strength of mind

  Nevertheless he would have liked to talk to her.

  Why? he had asked himself.

  What would be the point of putting me in jail for five years?

  I have killed your son, I regret it with all my heart – but it was an accident, and what would be gained by my contacting the police?

  He wondered what her answer would have been. Would she have had anything to re
proach him for? The whole business was an accident, and accidents don’t have any culprits. No active participants at all, just factors and objects beyond control.

  Later that evening he also toyed with the idea of sending an anonymous message to the family. Or just ringing them up and explaining his point of view. But he realized it was too risky, and he dismissed any such thoughts.

  He also dismissed the alternative of trying to arrange for a wreath to be delivered for Wim Felders’ funeral, which took place in a packed Keymer Church on the Saturday ten days after the accident.

  For the same reason. The risks.

  Apart from relatives and friends, the congregation comprised most of the pupils and teachers from Weger Grammar School plus representatives of various traffic organizations. He read about this in great detail in the Sunday issue of the Neuwe Blatt, but that was also the final large-scale news coverage of the case.

  To his surprise he found that on Monday he felt strangely empty.

  As if he had lost something.

  Like when I lost Marianne, he thought later on, similarly surprised; it was an odd comparison, but then, he needed to relate it to something. Something important in his life. For ten days the horrific happenings had been dominating his whole existence. Seeping into every nook and cranny of his consciousness. Even if he had managed to take control of his panic relatively quickly, it had been present all the time. Lurking, ready to break out. His thoughts had been centred on that hellish car journey almost every second. That slight thud and the jerk of the steering wheel; the rain, the lifeless body of the boy and the slippery ditch . . . Always present in the background, day and night: and now at last when he was starting to have periods when he didn’t think about it, it felt in a way as if something was missing.