by Håkan Nesser
A sort of emptiness.
Like after an eleven-year-long childless marriage . . . Yes, there were definitely similarities.
During this period it occurred to him that he must be some kind of hermit. Since Marianne left me, nobody has really meant anything to me. Nobody at all. Things happen to me, but I don’t make anything happen. I exist, but I don’t live.
Why haven’t I found myself a new woman? Why have I hardly ever asked myself that question? And now, suddenly, I’m somebody else.
Who? Who am I?
The fact that such thoughts should start occurring to him after he’d run over a young boy was remarkable in itself, of course, but something prevented him from digging too deeply into the situation. He decided instead to take things as they came, and to do something about it for once, and break new ground. And before he knew where he was – before he’d had time to think about it and perhaps have second thoughts – he had invited a woman round for dinner. He happened to meet her in the canteen: she had come to sit at his table – there was a shortage of space, as usual. He didn’t even know if he’d seen her before. Probably not.
But she’d accepted his invitation.
Her name was Vera Miller. She was cheerful and red-haired, and on the Saturday night – just over three weeks since he had killed another human being for the first time in his life – he made love to another woman for the first time in almost four years.
The next morning they made love again, and afterwards she told him that she was married. They discussed it for a while, and he realized that the fact worried her much more than it worried him.
The letter arrived on Monday.
Some time has passed since you murdered the boy. I have been waiting for your conscience to wake up, but I now realize that you are a weak person who doesn’t have the courage to own up to what you have done.
I have irrefutable evidence which will put you in jail the moment I hand it over to the police. My silence will cost you ten thousand – a piffling amount for a man of your stature, but nevertheless I shall give you a week (exactly seven days) to produce the money. – Do the necessary.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
A friend
Handwritten. With neat, sloping letters. Black ink.
He read it over and over again, five times.
4
‘Is something bothering you?’ Vera Miller asked as they were eating their evening meal. ‘You seem a bit subdued.’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s nothing,’ he assured her. ‘I just feel a bit out of sorts. I think I have a temperature.’
‘I hope it’s nothing to do with me? With us, I mean.’
She swirled the wine in her glass and eyed him solemnly.
‘No, of course not . . .’
He tried to laugh, but could hear that he produced a rasping sound. He took a swig of wine instead.
‘I think it’s all started so well, you and me I mean,’ she said. ‘I so much want there to be a second chapter, and a third as well.’
‘Of course. Forgive me, I’m a bit on the tired side – but it’s nothing to do with you. I think the same as you . . . I promise you that.’
She smiled and caressed his arm.
‘Good. I’d almost forgotten that making love could be as enjoyable as this. It’s incredible that you’ve been lying fallow for four years. How could that happen?’
‘I was waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Shall we go to bed?’
When she left him on Sunday, he found himself longing for her almost immediately. They had made love until well into the early hours, and it was just as she had said: it was almost incredible that it could be as satisfying as this. He crept back into bed and burrowed his head into the pillow. Breathed in her scent and tried to go back to sleep, but in vain. The vacuum was too vast. This really was amazing, bloody amazing.
The biggest difference in the world, he thought. That between a woman still in your bed, and a woman who has just left. A woman you love. A new woman?
He gave up after a while. Went to collect the newspaper, had breakfast and then took out the letter again.
It wasn’t necessary, of course. He knew it off by heart. Every single formulation, every single word, every single letter. Nevertheless, he read it through again twice. Felt the paper – high-quality stuff, no doubt about it; and the letter paper and envelope the same design. Thick, hammered paper: he guessed it had been bought in one of the bookshops in the city centre where you could buy by the sheet rather than in packs.
Sophisticated nuances as well. Pale blue. Stamp with a sporting motif – a woman swinging round before throwing a discus. Meticulously placed in the top right-hand corner of the envelope. His name and address handwritten with the same slightly sloping letters as in the message itself. The name of the place underlined.
That was all. All there was to say about it. Nothing, in other words. Or almost nothing, to be precise. It didn’t even seem possible to establish the writer’s sex. He tended to think it was a man, but that wasn’t much more than a guess. Could be either.
Ten thousand? he thought for the hundred-and-fiftieth time since Monday evening. Why only ten thousand?
It was a considerable sum of money, to be sure, but still – as the letter-writer very rightly pointed out – not exactly a preposterous demand. He had more than twice that in the bank, and he owned a house and various other assets worth ten times that amount. The blackmailer had also used the expression ‘a man of your stature’, suggesting that he was familiar with his circumstances and financial status.
So why only ten thousand? Perhaps not ‘a piffling amount’, but a cheap price even so. Very reasonable, considering what was involved.
A pretty well-educated person too, it seemed, this letter-writer. The handwriting was neat and tidy, there were no grammatical errors, the wording was clear and concise. No doubt the person concerned ought to have (must have?) known that he would have been able to squeeze out more. That the price for his silence was low.
He kept returning to that conclusion. And looking back, he was also surprised by how easy he found it to sit there reasoning with himself along such comparatively rational lines. The letter had arrived like a bomb, but as soon as he’d been able to get used to and accept the fact of its existence, it was the logical and relevant questions arising that occupied his mind.
All week, and now on Sunday afternoon.
So, why only ten thousand?
What were the implications? Was it just a first instalment?
And who? Who had seen him, and was now exploiting the opportunity of earning money from his accident? And the boy’s?
Was it the scooter rider, or one of the two motorists who had passed by while he was standing in the ditch, holding the lifeless body in his arms? Or up on the road.
Were there any other possibilities? He didn’t think so.
In any case, what gave him away must have been the car, his red Audi – he soon decided that this must be the case. Somebody had seen it parked in an unusual place, memorized the registration number and traced the owner via the licensing authority.
He was convinced that this is what must have happened. Increasingly convinced. He soon decided that there was no other possibility – until a dreadful thought struck him.
Perhaps the boy hadn’t been alone that evening. Perhaps there had been two young people, for instance, walking along the side of the road, but it was only Wim who had hit his head against the concrete culvert.
A bit further away, perhaps a couple of metres on the other side of the culvert, there might have been a girlfriend lying dazed . . . No, not a girlfriend: he’d read in the paper that the boy’s girlfriend had stayed behind in town. More likely a friend, or somebody he’d just met, walking in the same direction . . . Lying there unconscious, hidden in the darkness. Or in a state of shock, and scared stiff by the sight of the dead boy and the man holding his body in his arms, with blood drippi
ng down into the boy’s hood . . .
It was an horrific scenario, of course, and even if he managed to convince himself eventually that it wasn’t all that likely, it kept on recurring. He made a purely clinical effort to erase this macabre variation – this unlikely possibility – since it was of no consequence, no matter what. Irrelevant. It didn’t matter who it was who’d seen him that fateful night, nor exactly how the person concerned had found out what had happened. It was the other questions that demanded his attention and concentration.
And resolve.
So, could he be sure that this would be all that was demanded?
Ten thousand. That he would be able to pay that off, then not need to worry about it any more?
Aye, there’s the rub. What guarantee did the letter-writer intend to give, proving that when he (she?) had collected and vanished with the cash, there wouldn’t be a demand for a bit more after a month or so? Or a year?
Or that the blackmailer wouldn’t simply go to the police and report him in any case?
Would any guarantee be given? What could such a guarantee be like?
Or – and this was of course the most important question – should he not accept that the situation was impossible? Should he not realize that the game was up, and it was time to hand himself in to the police?
Was it time to surrender?
By Sunday evening he still hadn’t answered any of these questions. The fact that on Friday he’d slunk into the Savings Bank and withdrawn eleven thousand from his account could not necessarily be regarded as a decision.
Merely as a sign that he was still keeping all doors open.
He also had in the back of his mind the conversation they’d had on Saturday.
‘Your husband?’ he’d asked as they came back to the car after their stroll along the beach. ‘Have you told him?’
‘No,’ she’d said, letting her hair hang loose after having it tucked away inside her woolly hat. Ran her hands through it and shook it in a movement he thought she was exaggerating in order to give herself time to think. ‘I didn’t know how serious things were going to become with you . . . Not to start with, that is. Now I know. But I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet. It sort of needs time and space.’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘That you want to divorce him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why haven’t you got any children?’
‘Because I chose not to have any.’
‘With your husband, or at all?’
She made a vague gesture with her head. He gathered she’d rather not talk about it. They stood in silence for a while, watching the choppy sea.
‘We’ve only been married for three years. It was a mistake from the very beginning. It was idiotic, in fact.’
He nodded.
‘What’s his job?’
‘He’s unemployed at the moment. Used to work for Zinders. But they closed down.’
‘That sounds sad.’
‘I’ve never said it was especially funny.’
She laughed. He put his arm round her shoulders and hugged her close.
‘Are you sure you’re not wavering?’
‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to live with him, I’ve known that all the time.’
‘Why did you marry him in the first place?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Marry me instead.’
It slipped out before he could stop himself, but he realized immediately that he actually meant it.
‘Wow,’ she said, and burst out laughing. ‘We’ve been together a couple of times, and at long last you ask me to marry you. Shouldn’t we go home and have a bite to eat first, as we’d planned to do?’
He thought it over.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m ravenous.’
During the rest of the evening he hadn’t repeated his offer of marriage – but nor had he retracted it. He liked the idea of it hanging in the air, as it were, without their needing to address it or comment on it. It was a sort of string between them that didn’t need to be plucked, but which was there nevertheless, binding them together. He also had the impression that Vera had nothing against it. That she felt more or less the same.
A sort of secret. A link.
And when they had sex later, it was as if they had drunk from the well of love.
Incredible. In a way, it was incredible.
How could life take off in entirely different directions without warning? Directions which turned all the habits one had acquired, all one’s powers of reason and all one’s worldly wisdom upside down? How was it possible?
And to cap it all, in just a few weeks. First that horrific Thursday evening, then Vera Miller and true love. He couldn’t understand it. Was it possible to understand it?
He spent most of the rest of that Sunday evening lying on the sofa with just one candle lit, thinking about how he seemed to be being hurled from one extreme to the other. Between feelings of doubtful, confusing, inadequate conceptions of reality on the one hand, and a very calm and rational interpretation of his existence on the other. Reason and emotions, but without connections, without synapses.
He eventually decided that despite appearances to the contrary, there was only one reality and that applied constantly: his feelings regarding it and his attempts to control it might vary, but it was only the point of view that varied. The perspective.
Two sides of the same coin, he thought. Like a toggle-switch. The mundane and the incomprehensible. Life and death? The thin band that separated them.
Remarkable.
After the eleven o’clock news on the radio he took out the letter again. Read it one more time before sitting down at his desk again. Sat there for a good while in the darkness, giving free rein to his thoughts, and soon – very soon – he began to discern another way of approaching things when he had previously comprehended only two.
A third way. It appealed to him. He sat there for a long time, trying to weigh up its advantages and disadvantages.
But it was still too soon to choose. Much too soon. Until he had received more detailed instructions from ‘A friend’, all he could do was wait.
Wait for the next day’s postal delivery.
5
He was twenty minutes early. While he waited behind the wheel of his car in the almost empty car park, he read the instructions one more time. Not that it was necessary – he’d been rereading them all day: but it was a way of passing the time.
The money: banknotes in bundles of fifties and one hundreds packed in double plastic bags and placed inside a carrier bag from the Boodwick department store.
Place: Trattoria Commedia at the golf course out at Dikken.
Time: Tuesday, six p.m. exactly.
Instructions: Sit down in the bar. Order a beer, take a few swigs, go to the gents after about five minutes. Take the carrier bag containing the money with you, leave it well camouflaged by paper towels in the rubbish bin. If there are others in the gents, wait until they have gone. Then leave the toilets, go straight out to your parked car and drive away.
That was all.
The same sort of paper as last time. The same handwriting, presumably the same pen.
The same signature: A friend.
No threats. No comments about his weakness.
Nothing but the necessary instructions. It couldn’t be any simpler.
At two minutes to six he opened the side window and got out of the car. He had parked as far away from the restaurant as possible, next to the exit. Without seeming to hurry, he walked quickly the fifty or so metres over the windswept gravel to the restaurant. It was low and L-shaped, its façade plastered with dark pebble-dash. Gaudi windows with black steel frames. He opened the imitation jacaranda door and went in.
It looked pretty deserted, but nevertheless inviting. He had never set foot in the place before: he assumed it was probably a favourite haunt of golfers, and that it
could hardly be high season, given the chilly late-autumn weather. The bar was on the left as you entered: a lone woman in her forties sat smoking in the company of an evening newspaper and a green drink. She looked up when he came in, but decided that the newspaper was more interesting.
Before sitting down he peered into the restaurant section. It branched off at right-angles to the bar, and most of the tables he could see were empty. An unaccompanied man was busy eating a pasta dish. A fire was crackling away in the hearth. The furniture and fittings were a mixture of dark brown, red and green, and a piano sonata was struggling to find its way out of hidden speakers. He put the carrier bag down at his feet and ordered a beer from the bartender, a young man with a ponytail and a ring in one ear.
‘Still windy, is it?’ asked the barman.
‘It certainly is,’ he replied. ‘You’re not exactly jam-packed this evening, it seems.’
‘You can say that again,’ said the barman.
His beer was served in a tapered effeminate-looking glass. He paid, drank about half of it and asked where the gents was. The bartender pointed towards the open fire, he thanked him, picked up the bag and made his way there.
It smelled of pine forests and was strikingly empty. And clean. The bin between the two washbasins was only a third full of used paper towels. He put the Boodwick carrier bag into the bin and covered it over with new paper towels that he pulled out of the holder one by one, crumpling them up slightly. All in accordance with the instructions. The whole procedure took ten seconds. He remained standing there for another ten, contemplating with some surprise his reflection in the slightly scratched mirror over the washbasin. Then he left the room. Nodded to the barman as he made his way to the door and continued to his car. There was a tang of frozen iron in the air.