by Håkan Nesser
“No,” said Mooser. “I think she and Gertrude Dunckel used to run together sometimes.”
“Who’s she?” asked Münster.
“A friend of hers. Works at the library—”
“Did she have a boyfriend?” asked Van Veeteren.
Mooser thought.
“She used to . . . but not at the moment. She was with a guy for a few years, then he left her, I think. And then there was Janos Havel, but I think that’s all over as well.”
“Yes, it’s all over,” said Münster. “Do we have to go through her whole life story before we do something?”
Mooser cleared his throat.
“The beach out and the woods back?”
“Just the woods,” said Van Veeteren. “They’d have already found her if she was on the beach—he doesn’t usually bother too much about hiding them.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Münster.
“I assume the car was her starting and finishing point,” said Van Veeteren, ignoring Münster. “Do you know if there’s more than one path? Through the woods, I mean?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mooser. “It’s only a narrow stretch of trees, in fact. There’s a path that most people use—quite hilly. Shall we try that?”
“Let’s get going, then!” said Van Veeteren. “We haven’t got all day.”
33
“Don’t drive so damn fast,” said Bausen. “We must be clear about what we’re going to do when we get there.”
Kropke slowed down.
“Have you got your weapon with you?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Bausen. “I had the feeling something funny was going on. I take it you have yours as well?”
Kropke slapped under his arm.
“Thank God, it isn’t dangling against your thigh, at least,” muttered Bausen. “Stop! This is where we turn off.”
Kropke braked and turned onto the narrow ribbon of asphalt running over the heath. A flock of big black rooks busy with the dead body of some small animal or other took off from the road and landed again the moment they’d passed. Cawing loudly, and self-assured.
Bausen turned to gaze over the desolate wilderness. In the far distance he could make out the skeletons of a row of low buildings, more or less dilapidated—a few walls, roofs destroyed by the rain; once upon a time, half a century or more ago, they had served a purpose. When peat was still being cut from these marshy wastes, he recalled. Odd that the drying sheds were still standing; he recalled how they had fulfilled a different function when he was a kid—love nests for the young people of the district with no homes to go to. It had been quite an undertaking to get out here, of course, but once that detail had been fixed, these isolated buildings provided excellent opportunities for all kinds of intimacies—almost like the urgas of the Mongols, it struck him. Holy sites dedicated to love. He had no difficulty in remembering two, no, three occasions when it really did happen . . .
“That’s it just ahead of us, isn’t it?” said Kropke.
Bausen turned to look ahead and agreed. There it was. Eugen Podworsky’s house, scantily protected by a rectangle of spruce firs. He was familiar with its history. Built toward the end of the previous century, it had served for a few decades as the home of the more senior peat-cutter families, before the bottom fell out of the industry and it became uneconomical early in the twentieth century; and eventually, like so much else in Kaalbringen and vicinity, it fell into the hands of Ernst Simmel. And eventually into the none-too-tender care of Eugen Podworsky.
“It looks like hell,” said Kropke as he parked in the shelter of a comparatively bushy double spruce.
“I know,” said Bausen. “Can you see the truck anywhere?”
Kropke shook his head.
“No point in trying to creep up on him,” said Bausen. “If he’s at home, he’ll have been watching us for the last five minutes—plenty of time to load his shotgun and take position in the kitchen window.”
“Ugh,” said Kropke. “No wonder Simmel didn’t succeed in evicting him.”
“Hmm,” said Bausen. “I don’t understand why he even bothered to try. Who do you think would want to buy a place like this?”
Kropke considered that one.
“No idea,” he said. “Some naïve newcomer, perhaps. What shall we do, then?”
“We’d better get inside and check the place out,” said Bausen. “Now that we’re here. I’ll go first. Keep some way behind me, and have your pistol at the ready in case anything happens. You never know—”
“OK,” said Kropke.
“But I don’t think he’s in.”
Bausen got out of the car and followed the row of straggly fir trees, passing through the gateway, where a rusty, peeling mailbox bore witness to the fact that the post office still made the effort to drive the extra miles over the heath—presumably because Podworsky had threatened to kill the manager if he withdrew the service, Bausen thought. He took the newspaper out of the mailbox.
“Today’s,” he confirmed. “You can put your revolver back in your armpit. He’s not at home.”
They walked along the path to the veranda. On either side of the door was a worn-out leather armchair and a hammock. Evidently Eugen Podworsky was in the habit of making the most of warm summer and fall evenings. About ten crates of empty bottles were stacked up against the wall; piles of newspapers were all over the place, and on a rickety metal table were a transistor radio, a large can full of sand with cigarette butts sticking out of it, and a badly washed beer glass. A yellowish gray cat rubbed itself against the table leg; another one, slightly darker, lay outstretched in front of the door.
“Well,” said Kropke, “now what?”
“God only knows,” said Bausen. “Who interrogated Podworsky after the Simmel murder? I take it we’ve interviewed him?”
Kropke scratched his unoccupied armpit.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Moerk . . . yes, it was Moerk, I’m sure of it.”
Bausen lit a cigarette. He walked up the veranda steps and over to the door. The cat hissed and shifted a couple of feet to one side.
“It’s open,” said Bausen. “Shall we go in?”
Kropke nodded.
“Do you think the inside will be any better than the outside?”
“I was here once about twelve or fifteen years ago,” said Bausen, entering the dingy entrance hall. He looked around. “I don’t think he’s done much in the way of decorating . . .”
Twenty minutes later they were back in the car.
“A pointless visit,” said Kropke.
“Maybe,” said Bausen. “He has a hell of a lot of books.”
“What do you think, Chief Inspector?”
“What do you think, as new chief of police?”
“I don’t know,” said Kropke, trying to avoid sounding embarrassed. “Difficult to say. Coming here wasn’t much help, though. We need to get hold of the man himself. Give him an aggressive interrogation. I think it would help if we were a bit rougher with him than we usually are.”
“You think so?” said Bausen.
Kropke started the car.
“Where do you think he is?”
“In Fisherman’s Square, presumably,” said Bausen. “I seem to remember he has a stall there on Saturdays—I take it you noticed the greenhouses around the back?”
“Yes . . . of course,” said Kropke. “Shall we go pick him up? Or do we have to leave him alone because we didn’t find any bloodstained clothing under the bed?”
Bausen said nothing for some time.
“I think we’d better ask the advice of our guests first,” he said. “We have the little problem of Inspector Moerk as well, or had you forgotten that?”
Kropke drummed at the steering wheel.
“Do you think . . . do you think they’ve found her?”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Bausen. “Not in the state that you’re hinting at, in any case.”
Kropke swallowed and stepped on the gas. He suddenl
y saw the previous victims with their almost severed heads in his mind’s eye. He glanced down and saw that his knuckles had turned white.
God, he thought, surely she can’t be . . .
34
“Nothing?” asked Bausen.
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Thank God, I suppose you could say. But I’m afraid it’s not much to celebrate—she hasn’t come back from jogging.”
“How do you know?”
“Her car. It’s still parked next to the smokehouse,” said Mooser.
Bausen nodded.
“What about you?” asked Münster.
“Left the nest,” said Bausen with a shrug.
“The market?” suggested Mooser. “He usually sells vegetables in the square.”
Kropke shook his head.
“No. We’ve just come from there. He hasn’t shown up today.”
“Ah, well,” said Van Veeteren with a sigh, draping his jacket over the back of his chair. “We need to get a grip now. This business is becoming as clear as porridge.”
“Bang,” said Bausen. “Go to Sylvie’s and tell her we need something really special today.”
Bang saluted and left the room. The others sat down around the table, apart from Van Veeteren, who opened the window and stood gazing out over the rooftops. The chief of police leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. He sighed deeply and stared at the portraits of three of his predecessors on the wall opposite.
“OK,” he said after a while. “What the hell do we do now? Please be kind to somebody who’s about to become an old-aged pensioner! What the hell do we do now?”
“Hmm,” said Münster. “That’s a good question.”
“I have one more week before I retire,” said Bausen, blowing his nose. “Fate seems to want me to spend it trying to find one of my inspectors. Find her in some damn ditch with her head cut off—that’s what I call a great way to end a career.”
“Oh, shit,” said Münster.
Nobody spoke. Bausen had clasped his hands in front of him now and closed his eyes. For a brief moment it seemed to Münster that he was praying, but then he opened both his eyes and his mouth again.
“Yes, a big heap of shit is what I’m surrounded by,” he said.
“Ah, well,” said Van Veeteren, sitting down. “That could well be. But perhaps we ought to spend a little less time swearing and a little more trying to get somewhere—that’s just a modest suggestion, of course.”
“Excuse me,” said Bausen, sighing deeply. “You’re right, of course, but we might as well wait for the coffee, don’t you think? Kropke, you can tell us the Podworsky story, as we intended in the first place.”
Kropke nodded and started sorting out his papers.
“Shall we make this public knowledge?” asked Mooser. “That she’s . . . disappeared, I mean.”
“Let’s take that later,” said Van Veeteren. “It can wait for a second or two, I think.”
“Podworsky,” said Kropke. “Eugen Pavel. Born 1935. Came to Kaalbringen as an immigrant at the end of the fifties. Got a job at the canning factory, like so many others. To start with, he lived in the workers’ hostel down there; but when they pulled it down, he moved out to the house on the heath. It had been empty for a few years, and the reason he was allowed to move in was that he was engaged to Maria Massau, whom he was living with. She’s the sister of Grete Simmel—”
“Aha,” said Münster. “Ernst Simmel’s brother-in-law.”
“More or less, yes,” said Bausen. “Carry on!”
“Podworsky has always been an odd type, you could say. Difficult to deal with, as many people have found to their cost. On the booze from time to time—the very thought of allowing that poor woman to live out there on the heath—well, it can’t have been a great time for her . . .”
“Go on,” said Bausen.
“Then there was that killing in 1968. For some unknown reason—and entirely out of character—Podworsky had invited some fellow workers out to his house—men only, if I’ve understood it correctly?”
Bausen nodded.
“There was some hard drinking, one assumes, and eventually one of them made a pass at Maria—a bit of flirting, probably no more than that, but Podworsky was furious. He started an enormous row that ended with him kicking the whole lot of them out of the house, apart from the one who had made the pass. He kept him inside, and beat him to death with a poker later that night—Klaus Molder, his name was.”
“Found guilty of manslaughter,” said Bausen, taking up the tale. “Was inside at Klejmershuus for six years. In the meantime, Maria Massau fell ill with leukemia. She’d had it since she was a child, it seems, but it had been dormant. She got worse and worse, and died the same month that Podworsky was released.”
“Did they let him out on parole to see her?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Yes, but she didn’t want to see him,” said Kropke, taking over once again. “I don’t think she needed to, in fact. She was living with the Simmels for most of the time—more often in the hospital toward the end, of course. When Podworsky got out, he moved straight back into the house, even though it was Simmel who owned it and had only allowed him to live there because of the family connection, as it were. Anyway, Simmel tried to kick him out several times, but he eventually gave up.”
“Why?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Dunno,” said Kropke.
“No,” said Bausen. “It’s unclear if he simply got tired of trying, or if there was some other reason, as rumor had it. Has had it for years.”
“What kind of rumor?” wondered Münster.
“All kinds,” said Bausen. “That Podworsky had scared the shit out of Simmel, for instance—to put it bluntly—or that he had some kind of hold over him.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“OK,” he said. “They weren’t especially well liked in Kaalbringen, either of them, if I’ve understood the situation correctly?”
“Right,” said Kropke.
“Why was Podworsky given early retirement?” asked Van Veeteren. “Was that immediately after he was released from jail?”
“More or less,” said Bausen. “He’d managed to pick up a back injury or something of the sort while in prison—didn’t have much chance of getting another job anyway, I suppose.”
“And so he’s been living out there on his own ever since,” said Kropke. “Since 1974 . . . a real prairie wolf, you could say.”
“No more brushes with the law since then?” asked Münster.
“Well . . .” said Bausen. “It was rumored that he was distilling and selling moonshine, or buying it from the Eastern bloc duty-free. I was out there at the end of the seventies, but I didn’t find anything. Maybe he’d been tipped off.”
Van Veeteren scratched his head with a pencil.
“Yep,” he said. “And then there’s this Aarlach business . . .”
“I must say it’s a damn peculiar coincidence,” said the chief of police. “Don’t you think? What the hell was he doing there? It’s a hundred and fifty miles from here, and Eugen Podworsky has never been renowned as a great traveler, quite the contrary. What was the date, by the way?”
“March 15, 1983,” said Kropke. “For some reason or other he gets involved in a violent barroom brawl with two young medical students, one of whom is Maurice Rühme. They smash up furniture and fittings to the tune of thousands of guilders, and both Podworsky and Rühme’s pal are hospitalized for several weeks. There’s talk of prosecution, but eventually a settlement is reached—”
“Jean-Claude Rühme?” said Van Veeteren.
“Presumably,” said Bausen. “We have to dig deeper into this, I guess. Get more flesh on the bones from Melnik; and track down this other student, Christian Bleuwe, wasn’t that his name?”
“Unfortunately—” said Van Veeteren.
“Unfortunately what?”
“He’s dead. It doesn’t say so in the report, but I phoned Melnik this morning and he told me. Died in connecti
on with an explosion two years ago. I asked Melnik to find out more details of that brawl as well. He says he’ll get back to me.”
Kropke was making notes. Bausen frowned.
“An explosion?” he said.
Van Veeteren nodded and dug into his breast pocket.
“No toothpicks left,” he said. “Do you happen to have a cigarette?”
Bausen handed over a pack.
“What kind of explosion?”
“A terrorist thing, it seems,” said Van Veeteren, clicking away at his lighter. “Basque separatists, according to Melnik, but he wasn’t sure.”
“Where?” asked Münster.
“Where?” said Van Veeteren, managing to light his cigarette at last. “In Spain, of course. Somewhere on the Costa del Sol. Car bomb. Bleuwe and two Spaniards killed—”
Kropke stood up and seemed to be chewing his words.
“Was it . . . was it in . . . what the hell’s the place called?”
“Could it be that you are trying to think of Las Brochas?” wondered Van Veeteren, attempting to produce a smoke ring.
He sometimes almost excels himself, thought Münster.
“Las Brochas, yes, that’s it!” almost yelled Kropke.
“Not quite,” said Van Veeteren. “Fuengirola, but that’s only a dozen miles away.”
“But what the hell does all this mean, in fact?” said Kropke. “Can somebody explain it to me?”
Bausen was filling his pipe, and looked at Van Veeteren.
“Well,” said Van Veeteren. “Hard to say. In any case, we’ll have to wait until we hear more about that barroom brawl. It could be just a strange coincidence—there are more of those than we often imagine. But it’s possible that it might be of significance, of course.”
Nobody spoke for a few seconds, and suddenly Münster could detect a tremor in the air. The concentration and intense thinking being done by everyone in the room seemed tangible, and a familiar shiver ran up his spine. Was this the moment when things started to fall into place? Were they about to start wrapping it up now?
“I’ll contact Melnik,” said Bausen.
“What are we going to do about Moerk?” asked Kropke.