Night

by Bernard Minier

  Personally, Kirsten would have liked to ram that shit-faced little Nazi’s metalhead guitar into one of his orifices. And in any case, she’d heard all sorts of stories about what went on in French police stations.

  She pressed the button on the remote control and a TV screen at the back of the room lit up. Everyone turned to look. After a few seconds of snow, the first images appeared. Metallic cross struts, a footbridge with a steel grating floor, a raging ocean beyond: images from the platform’s video surveillance cameras.

  At the end of the footbridge a figure appeared and walked up to the camera. Kirsten paused the video. Servaz stared at the ghost from the past frozen on-screen. It was him, indisputably. His hair was a bit longer and danced around his face in the wind. But otherwise, he was exactly as Servaz remembered him.

  ‘Hirtmann worked on this platform for two years. The address he gave his employer was fake, as were his CV and ID papers. The documents found in his cabin do not provide much information – with one exception, which I will get to. After requisitioning the bank where he had an account for depositing his salary, we were able to piece together some of his movements, at least; but only partially, because Hirtmann transferred quite a bit of money into other accounts in tax havens. The Norwegian police suspect him not only of this woman’s murder but also of being behind the disappearance of several other women in the Oslo region. That is one of the reasons for my presence here.’

  She refrained from mentioning the other reasons at this stage, looking all around the room.

  ‘In all likelihood Hirtmann left Norwegian territory quite a while ago. He escaped from the, uh …’ she checked her notes ‘… Wargnier Institute in December 2008. He passed through your region in June 2010. Then through Poland in 2011. In Poland, the remains of several of his victims were found in an isolated house near the Bialowieza forest. Young women only. That was five years ago now. Five years amounting to a black hole, other than these last two years when he worked on this oil rig in the North Sea. Let’s be under no illusions: a man like Julian Hirtmann is capable of disappearing for a long time, and we may not find his trail again for months, or even years.’ She glanced over at Servaz, but he still seemed lost in thought, staring at the screen where the apparition was frozen in the position Kirsten had left him. ‘In addition, a man like this cannot spend five years without killing. It’s unthinkable. The purpose of this investigation is to track his criminal career, taking full advantage of the fact that at last we have recent data concerning him to try and retrace his steps. We will proceed on the assumption that he has been on European soil all this time, but even then – given his profession, which enabled him to accumulate air miles and therefore to travel cheaply anywhere in the world – there is no guarantee of that, either. We will issue a description of him. We know the way he works from his writing, and we know the profile of his previous victims. Nearly all of them were young women who lived in regions bordering on Switzerland: the Dolomites, Bavaria, the Austrian Alps. Then a few in Poland. Previous attempts to locate him have yielded nothing. I don’t need to tell you that our chances of success are extremely slim …’

  She broke off and looked at Servaz, who translated as best he could for those who didn’t speak English. Then she handed the photograph of Gustav to her neighbour on the right.

  ‘Pass it around,’ Servaz said.

  ‘The second element of the investigation concerns this child. This photograph was found among Hirtmann’s belongings. We do not know who this boy is. Or where he is. Or even if he is still alive. We know nothing about him.’

  ‘Hirtmann never went after children,’ said the ugly young woman, the one called Samira; her English was impeccable. ‘He’s not a paedophile. His victims have always been adult women – young and attractive, as you pointed out.’

  Kirsten noticed that she was wearing a little death’s-head necklace beneath her leather jacket and that she had propped her feet, clad in a pair of imitation python boots, on the edge of the table, while her chair rocked on its two rear legs.

  ‘Exactly. We think this child might be his son. Or the son of one of his victims.’

  ‘What else do we know about him?’ asked a tall bald man as he scribbled something on his notepad – a portrait of the Norwegian policewoman, by the looks of it.

  ‘Nothing at all, beyond his first name. We don’t even know his nationality. We just know where this photograph was taken. In Hallstatt, in Austria. The Austrian federal police are involved. But as it’s very popular with tourists, it could be the boy was only passing through.’

  ‘Hirtmann playing the tourist?’ said Samira, her tone sceptical.

  ‘In the middle of a crowd of other people,’ added Vincent. ‘Not such a bad idea … where better to hide a tree than in the middle of the forest?’

  ‘Yeah, but what is our role in all this?’ asked the tall bald man. ‘Aren’t we beginning to waste our time, here? I don’t know about you lot, but I have other things to do.’

  The man had spoken in French and Kirsten didn’t understand, but she could tell from his tone and the others’ awkward silence that he had made a rude comment.

  ‘Naturally at the oil platform we questioned his roommate and colleagues at length,’ she said. ‘It would seem he was fairly solitary and extremely discreet about his activities on land. On board, he spent his free time reading and listening to music. Classical.’

  She looked over at Servaz.

  ‘But the most important thing is the photographs of your commandant. They show that Hirtmann stayed in your town for a long time, and that, inexplicably, something always brings him back here and, um, to you, Martin,’ she said, keeping her eyes on him. ‘The requisition at the bank regarding his finances has confirmed our hunch: over the last two years Hirtmann came here quite often.

  ‘It could well be that he will try to come back here again,’ she said, addressing everyone in the room now. ‘Since he already has on numerous occasions. I’ll say it again: we know the way he operates. And the profile of his victims. We’ll search the region and beyond for any similar crimes: disappearances of young women over these past few months.’

  ‘We already have,’ said Samira, ‘and we came up with nothing.’

  She saw several heads nodding in agreement.

  ‘That was a few years ago,’ said Servaz. ‘Since then, we’ve been working on other things.’

  Kirsten saw Vincent exchange a look with Samira. She knew what they were thinking: too simple, too easy.

  ‘I know you’ve been doing remarkable work,’ she said diplomatically, ‘even if it hasn’t yielded any results. I intend to stay here for a while. I have permission from Commissioner Stehlin to collaborate with Commandant Servaz. I know you have other things to do and that this is not a priority for you, but just bear this in mind: if Hirtmann is here, it might be worth keeping your eyes open and digging a little deeper, don’t you think?’

  If Hirtmann is here. Clever, thought Servaz. Very clever. He saw her words spreading over their consciousness like a layer of ice. She was bluffing but it had worked: he could see it in their eyes. The Swiss ghost was going to infect their thoughts the way he had already infected Servaz’s, and he would not leave them alone.

  That was what Kirsten wanted.

  11

  Evening

  On the Karlsplatz in Vienna, the neo-classical facade of the Musikverein – full name Haus des Wiener Musikvereins, House of the Friends of Music in Vienna – stood out against the Austrian night, where a few snowflakes were drifting. With its Doric columns, high arched windows and triangular pediment, all bathed in light, it evoked a temple, which indeed, it was: a temple of music, with some of the best acoustics in the world, a unique sound experience for music lovers. At least officially, because among themselves the Viennese specialists sometimes complained that the programming was insipid, with nothing but Mozart and Beethoven concerts ad nauseam – a lot of schmaltz for tourists with lazy ears.

  This evening,
however, beneath the gilt of the Musikverein, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was performing Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, ‘Songs on the Death of Children’, conducted by Bernhard Zehetmayer. At the age of eighty-three, ‘the Emperor’, as he was known, had lost none of his spirit. Or his demanding passion for the right note, which sometimes caused him to ruthlessly lecture any musicians who struck him as amateurish during rehearsal. Legend had it that he once left his podium and wove his way through the members of the orchestra to a mediocre second violin who was talking to his neighbour, and slapped him so hard that the violinist fell off his chair.

  ‘Did you hear how that slap was in tune?’ he was said to have declared before returning to his podium.

  It was a myth, of course. But there were plenty of others surrounding the most ‘Mahlerian’ conductor in Vienna since Bernstein. Given the very personal nature of these lieder, the concert was not held in the prestigious Golden Hall but in the smaller Brahms Hall. It was the Emperor who had decided this, despite the administrator’s protests, because the Golden Hall could seat 1700 people, whereas the Brahms Hall held only 600. Zehetmayer was merely following the master himself, at the time the work was first performed in January 1905. Similarly, although nowadays most of the lieder were performed by female soloists, he had called, like Mahler before him, for a tenor and two baritones.

  The ceiling of the Brahms Hall resounded with the last bars of the coda, elegiac and full of serenity after the uncontrolled furore of the opening bars; the horn’s hazy voice joined the dying tremolo of the cellos in a final sigh. For a few seconds, silence reigned, then the hall exploded. The audience leapt to their feet to acclaim the Emperor and his orchestra. Zehetmayer lapped up the praise quite openly, because all his life the old man had been vain. He gave a deep bow, as deep as his bad back, the pain in his lumbar region, and his pride would allow, then he caught a glimpse of a face in the audience, made a discreet sign, and returned to his dressing room.

  Two minutes later there was a knock on the door.

  ‘Come in!’

  The man who entered was roughly the same age – eighty-two – with bushy eyebrows, but while Zehetmayer was nearly bald, this man had a fine white mane, and he was small and stocky where the musician was tall and thin. It would never have occurred to him to label the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra ‘the Emperor’. If there was one imperator in this room, it was him, Josef Wieser: he had built one of the most powerful industrial empires in Austria – of petrochemicals, cellulose and paper – thanks firstly to the generous Austrian forests, and then to an excellent marriage, which had brought him capital as well as the necessary introductions into the little Viennese circle of wheeler-dealers and decision-makers (he had remarried twice, since, and was now contemplating a fourth marriage to a financial journalist forty years his junior).

  ‘What’s going on?’ said the visitor.

  ‘There has been a development,’ said the conductor, slipping a clean, starched white shirt over a vest.

  ‘A development?’

  Zehetmayer gave him a look that was sparkling and feverish, a look worthy of German expressionist cinema.

  ‘We’ve picked up his trail.’

  The billionaire stood there with his mouth open.

  ‘What?’ His voice trembled with emotion. ‘Where?’

  ‘In Norway. On an oil rig. One of our sources sent me the information.’

  When his friend did not react, Zehetmayer continued: ‘Apparently, the bastard was working there. He killed a woman in a church in Bergen, then vanished into thin air.’

  ‘He managed to get away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit …’

  ‘It will be easier to get at him outside than in prison,’ the conductor pointed out.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘There is something else …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A child.’

  Wieser gave the conductor at a funny look.

  ‘What do you mean, a child?’

  ‘They found a photograph of a five-year-old kid in his belongings. And guess what his name is?’

  The billionaire shook his head.

  ‘Gustav.’

  Wieser stared at the musician with round eyes, clearly experiencing an onslaught of thoughts and contradictory emotions – perplexity, hope, incomprehension.

  ‘Do you think it could be—’

  ‘His son? It’s possible.’ The conductor’s gaze vanished into the mirror opposite him, where he contemplated his own stern, sad face, lost in the mean little eyes beneath his old man’s eyebrows that were every bit as bushy as his friend’s. ‘This opens up possibilities, don’t you think?’

  ‘What more do we know about the boy?’

  ‘At the moment, not a great deal.’ The Emperor hesitated. ‘Other than that he must care about the kid, if he hangs on to his photograph,’ he added, handing Wieser the picture of Gustav.

  The two men looked at each other. They had ‘found’ one another – twist of fate or pure chance – at the end of another performance of the Kindertotenlieder, one that had been a triumph for Bernhard Zehetmayer. Sitting in the hall, Josef Wieser had been deeply moved by this interpretation of the lieder, and by the time the music stopped, the billionaire was weeping, something that he had not done for a long time. For these lieder spoke directly to the ravaged heart of a father who had lost his daughter. And the interpretation the orchestra had just given was proof that its conductor had a deep, personal understanding of this premonitory work – since Mahler himself went on to lose his eldest daughter to scarlet fever not long after the lieder were first performed.

  At the end of the concert, Wieser had asked to greet the prestigious Viennese conductor, and the organisers had led him to Zehetmayer’s dressing room. Still very moved, he congratulated the maestro and asked him what his secret was, to have attained such truth in the interpretation.

  ‘You have to have lost a child, that’s all,’ Zehetmayer replied.

  Wieser was both astonished and upset.

  ‘And did you?’ he asked, his voice trembling.

  The conductor looked at him coldly.

  ‘A daughter. The sweetest, most beautiful creature. She was studying music in Salzburg.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Wieser ventured to ask.

  ‘She was killed by a monster.’

  The billionaire felt as if the floor was opening beneath him.

  ‘A monster?’

  ‘Julian Hirtmann. Prosecutor at the high court of Geneva. He has killed more than—’

  ‘I know who Julian Hirtmann is,’ interrupted Wieser.

  ‘Ah. You read the papers.’

  Wieser turned to face him.

  ‘No. I myself have … a daughter who was … murdered by that monster. At least, that is what we suppose. We never found her body. But Hirtmann was in the vicinity when she disappeared. The police are almost certain …’

  He had spoken so quietly he was not sure the other man had heard him. But the Emperor was staring at him, stunned, then he motioned to the other people in the room to leave.

  ‘And what do you feel?’ he asked when they were alone.

  Wieser lowered his head and looked at the floor.

  ‘Despair, anger, unbearable yearning, a father’s heartbroken love …’

  ‘And any desire for revenge? Hatred?’

  Wieser looked up again and straight into the eyes of the conductor, who was much taller than he. And there he saw a deep, ferocious hatred – and a spark of madness.

  ‘I have hated him since the day I found out what happened to my daughter,’ said Zehetmayer. ‘That was fifteen years ago. Since then I have awoken every morning with this hatred. Pure, intact, unchanged. I thought it would diminish over time, but the opposite is happening. Has it occurred to you that the police might never find him if we don’t help them?’

  So they had become friends – a strange friendship, founded not on love but on h
atred, two old men communing in grief and a cult of vengeance. Two monomaniacal friends with a shared secret obsession. And just like others who spend all their savings on a passion, living only for and through that passion, they did not care about expense. In the beginning, they merely joined hunting parties together and had desultory conversations in Vienna cafés. They constructed their theories and exchanged information. Mainly in one direction: Zehetmayer had read and seen nearly everything that had been published and broadcast about Hirtmann in German, English or French: books, articles, television programmes, documentaries … But madness is contagious, and before long Wieser began immersing himself with ever-increasing interest in the mass of documentation the conductor had passed on to him. They went on talking. For weeks, months. Their plan began to take shape. Initially it only meant using their money and their contacts – Wieser’s above all – to try to track down the Swiss killer. They had resorted to private detectives, without much success. Wieser had also contacted a few Austrian policemen he knew. To no avail. They then decided to use the Internet and social networks. They managed to raise over €10 million, which would be a reward for anyone who knew Hirtmann’s whereabouts; €1 million would also be paid for any valuable information. A website had been created to enable the candidates for the generous reward to get in touch. They had received hundreds of useless messages, but they had also been contacted by professionals: detectives, hacks, and even cops from a number of countries.

  ‘This is Hallstatt, isn’t it?’ said Wieser, pointing to the picture.

  ‘Of course it’s Hallstatt,’ said Zehetmayer curtly, as if the billionaire had said, ‘Is this the Eiffel Tower?’

  ‘It’s a bit too obvious, don’t you think?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well honestly! He might as well have sent us a map of Austria and written on it, “Here I am.”’

  ‘The photograph wasn’t supposed to end up in our hands, or in the police’s.’