Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Accomplish? What do you mean accomplish?’

  ‘I have a plan,’ said Urban Kleerwot. ‘We can’t sit here with our arms crossed. Can we? You really did scream.’

  I sat up. Pulled back the curtain and noted that the sun was shining this day too. Summer went on; thirty years had passed, they didn’t seem to weigh anything.

  ‘Do you want to know?’ said Urban.

  I shook my head. It didn’t help, he initiated me anyway.

  ‘First a good, nutritious breakfast. Then an offensive against Hotel Continental. The more straightforward, the simpler. What do you say?’

  ‘I’ll take a swim and think about it,’ I promised.

  8

  I stayed in the car – Urban’s old, splotchy green Audi – while Urban visited the Continental. As I was hanging my elbow out the rolled-down side window, I caught sight of my face in the misdirected side mirror. Discovered that I looked ravaged. Almost hunted. Circles under my eyes, two days’ stubble. Fish eyes. My temples were pounding too, as usual the morning after; I got out of the car and bought a bottle of mineral water in the kiosk across from the hotel. Best to take care of my water balance at least, I thought.

  Urban came back after just a few minutes.

  ‘Nada,’ he said, sinking down in the driver’s seat. ‘No progress.’

  ‘How did you proceed?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Inquired at reception, of course.’

  ‘Who was there?’

  ‘Callow youth with nose ring. I said that I was looking for a certain Vera Kall. He didn’t react. I explained that I thought she was employed at the hotel, he explained that she wasn’t. He knows everyone who works there . . . in all functions, he maintained, wonder if they have a couple of whores too? There’s no Vera Kall, anyway.’

  ‘Didn’t he know about the story?’

  Urban shook his head and lit a Pfitzerboom. ‘Apparently not. I never asked.’

  ‘And you didn’t speak with anyone else?’

  ‘Didn’t see anyone.’

  I finished the bottle of mineral water. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  He spat out a few tobacco flakes and started the car. ‘Plan B. We follow her footsteps . . . or bicycle tracks. Get the map out of the glove compartment.’

  It was not particularly hard to find the way out to Samaria. First, just under ten kilometres along a reasonably wide asphalt road through the open landscape. Then, at the junction in the village of Kerran, a couple of kilometres on a winding gravel road through the forest. After a while we came up to a yellow, flaking sign with the name Samaria on it, and stopped for a brief discussion.

  The new side road had a strip of grass in the middle and seemed barely navigable by car; no houses were visible, just warm, aromatic coniferous forest and an abundance of lupins, Queen Anne’s lace and chamomile by the roadside. Two mailboxes were hanging on a post, one with the name Clausen on it, printed in fresh yellow letters. We drew the conclusion that there was still life in Samaria.

  Urban got out of the car, stepped across the ditch and peed against the trunk of a pine.

  ‘Let’s turn around,’ I said when he was done. ‘What good will this do?’

  ‘Reconstruction,’ said Urban.

  ‘You’re delirious,’ I said. ‘We’re driving on Vera’s bicycle route thirty years later, and you call that reconstruction? Let’s drive home and fish instead. Plan C.’

  ‘In due course,’ said Urban. ‘We’ll just turn up and take a look since we’re here anyway. We’ll go with the journalist shtick.’

  ‘Journalist?’

  ‘Exactly. I’m in the process of writing a series of articles about unsolved crimes. We’re out looking for a little atmosphere. You’re my photographer.’

  ‘I don’t have a camera.’

  ‘There’s one in the bag on the back seat.’

  I reached across the back support and dug in the worn shoulder-strap bag. Brought out a little red automatic camera.

  ‘This one? Do you think a professional photographer goes around with one of these little toy cans?’

  Urban threw out his hands. ‘You get to be my chauffeur, if you prefer. Now let’s go.’

  Samaria consisted of a yellow, newly renovated farmhouse and two run-down, grey annexes. Apparently it was an old homestead; numerous acres of cultivated ground were cleared around it in two and a half directions. To the north and north-west the forest continued untouched. It was just as apparent that the ground had been fallow for quite some time; brush of aspen and birch grew man-high out on the fields and on the farmyard were two fairly new cars, evidence that it wasn’t the surrounding earth that gave a livelihood for today’s inhabitants. Urban drove up to the farmyard and parked alongside the larger of the cars, a shiny red Volvo. We got out. Two children, a boy and a girl of about eight and ten, came to meet us with furtive expressions.

  ‘God’s peace,’ Urban greeted them. ‘Is there a mama or papa at home?’

  There was both. A man and a woman in their thirties had soon been lured down to the white garden furniture that stood in a shady corner of the lawn. Urban praised in turn the house, the grass, the flowerbeds, the jasmine bushes, the children, the Volvo, the discreet location and Mrs Clausen’s batik-print T-shirt. I sat silently and tried to pull in the beard stubble.

  When Urban got to the point, the woman went in and put on coffee.

  ‘Of course we know about it,’ the man said, lighting a cigarette. ‘We’re not from this area, but the estate agent told the whole story when we bought the house. Three years since we moved in.’

  ‘You bought from the Kall family.’

  ‘Mrs Kall,’ Clausen corrected him. ‘She was almost eighty and had lived here alone since her husband died. Ten years, if I remember right. She didn’t have the energy any more, moved directly to some kind of nursing home . . . died just this April, by the way, we saw the obituary in the newspaper.’

  ‘Did you speak with Mrs Kall?’

  ‘A little,’ said Clausen. ‘She was still living here when we came out and looked the first time. Had a hard time moving around, it’s not easy for old people to live like this.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything about her daughter?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, why would she have? It was the agent who informed us, as I said. Terrible story, right before graduation and everything . . . it’s supposed to feel even worse if you don’t really know, I’ve heard. Harder with uncertainty than with the grief, they say. Although she was quite certainly murdered, at least Jessmar, the agent, maintained that . . .’

  Urban nodded. Kicked me on the shin under the table, I understood that it was time to photograph a bit.

  I did my duty. Took a few pictures of the house from various angles. Wondered a bit vaguely about which could have been Vera’s room and soon had a lump in my throat. Then went back a little way along the road and tried to capture an overall impression. The boy and the girl followed me at a safe distance and at last I had to snap a few times at them too.

  Then we had coffee and talked about the advantages of living out in the woods. Both Mr and Mrs Clausen seemed to have a rather great need of being reminded of this. Both by themselves and by others.

  After half an hour Urban had eaten up all the cookies and we took our leave. He promised to send both text and pictures, noted down name and address and patted the children on the head.

  ‘Successful operation,’ I noted as we took off. ‘It’s hard not to be impressed, Holmes.’

  ‘Bah,’ said Urban. ‘You never know. This was the road she cycled on anyway.’ He signed meaningfully towards the forest on both sides. ‘If . . . I say if . . . she truly was murdered, then it’s quite likely that she’s lying somewhere in here. Buried along with her bicycle in some bog . . . well, perhaps there’s not that much left at this point, of course.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Urban. ‘My thoughts run away with me.’

  �
�Thoughts is saying a lot.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Urban said sullenly. ‘Do you want clarity about this, or what the hell do you want?’

  ‘The clearer, the better,’ I said. ‘It’s mostly the methods I’m wondering about. Why don’t we look in a phone book, for example? If there is a Vera Kall in K– . . . she may have come back quietly.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Urban. ‘Why would she come back, if she got away from here so elegantly? There is no Vera Kall in the phone book. Not in the census register either. Not in K– or anywhere else in the country either.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I’ve checked. You know, if you get up in the morning it’s possible to get a few things done. No, it’s possible that it didn’t produce that much, but in any case we know that her parents are dead.’

  I thought a moment.

  ‘If there’s anything else to know, we’ll find out on Saturday.’

  Urban nodded thoughtfully a few times. ‘I’m not so sure of that,’ he said. ‘After all, we have no idea who it is we’re dealing with, right?’

  I sat silently for a moment. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Either it comes to nothing, or else something happens. It’s all the same to me.’

  Urban slowed down and looked at me. ‘You don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘You screamed in your sleep last night, I’m no idiot. Anyway, we need to talk with someone who knows something about this.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The Snake Flower, of course,’ he snorted. ‘The case of Vera Kall. He’s coming to see us tomorrow, I promised him some new information and he actually sounded really interested. Even though it’s past the statute of limitations.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, although I’d already started to suspect it.

  ‘Inspector Keller,’ said Urban, picking up speed. ‘The one who was in charge of the investigation in 1967. He just turned seventy, but on the phone he sounded sharp as a forty-nine-year-old.’

  I heaved a sigh and closed my eyes.

  9

  While Urban prepared dinner on Wednesday evening, I took the boat and rowed out on the lake for an hour. Sat out there in the great solitude and tried to put my thoughts in order.

  What did I really think about all this? There were only two conceivable courses of action, but when I started analysing the consequences of these courses – one at a time, in order – I felt that I was very quickly sliding out on slippery ice.

  If it really was the case that Vera Kall was alive, then she must have decided to disappear right after our marvellous night of love thirty years ago. My first, her first. Two days before graduation.

  Why?

  I knew for certain that she experienced our hours together just as strongly as I did; if nothing else the message she’d written showed that.

  And where would she have gone? Was it actually possible to pull off such a manoeuvre at that age? Nineteen years old. At that time, in that little town?

  Or could she have been abducted? By who? Abducted but still alive?

  And why show up in K– again? Right now. As stated.

  The questions were legion and I found no acceptable answer to any one of them.

  So she is dead, I decided. Just like everyone believed and assumed. She died that night.

  So who was this new Vera Kall who wanted to talk with me? Someone who knew something?

  But no one could know anything. I pondered. The only one who could know anything about Vera and me must be a person who either spied on us, or who saw Vera before she died.

  I ruled out the spy alternative. One possibility remained. Just one. Vera had met someone after she left me in the middle of the night.

  Could this someone be someone other than the one who . . .?

  I sat absolutely motionless in the boat for several minutes while I pondered this conclusion; gave it an honourable chance to take hold in my volatile awareness.

  Maybe it succeeded, maybe not. In retrospect it’s hard to decide. I looked at my watch, took hold of the oars and started to row back.

  We had venison stew with rice and mortadella. Drank a full-bodied Burgundy with it. Lemon parfait for dessert. Coffee, cognac, chocolate macaroons and a cigar. I had one too, haven’t smoked for fifteen years, but the mosquitoes were stubborn and Urban insisted. It didn’t taste bad at all.

  I did the dishes and then read three chapters of The Fly and Eternity. It truly held its style, I expressed my appreciation to Urban; he chuckled self-consciously and picked at his beard.

  Then we sat there and talked about old teachers for a while – lecturer Bluum, language adjunct Lingonstroem, senior master Uhrin, of course – but we let the Snake Flower rest. As if we had an agreement. A little later we fired up the sauna and spent numerous hours with hot steam, leafy branches, beer and quick dips in the night-dark water.

  Plus a considerable quantity of old bullshit.

  I think it was past two when we went to bed.

  Inspector Keller arrived in an old Buick at eleven o’clock on Thursday. I didn’t recognize him, but then I didn’t have much of a recollection either. Didn’t speak with him during the investigation, only saw his face in the newspaper. I had been questioned in the same way as everyone else – in two rounds, both times in the care of a ruddy and rather anonymous constable. And a tape recorder.

  My first impression of the inspector this warm morning was that he was in the process of shrinking out of life. Everything seemed too large for him: the suit, the glasses, the car, the brown briefcase that with some exertion he tossed up on our rickety outdoor table. I wondered whether he could even come up to a third of Urban’s weight, but also thought that you shouldn’t judge a person by their shell. Homo Bananicus non est, as Uhrin used to say when he made a joke every other semester.

  ‘Brought along a few old papers from the case,’ Keller explained. ‘Are you Henry Maartens?’

  We greeted each other and settled down. Urban took three beers out of the barrel and opened them. Keller hung his jacket on the back of his chair and started rolling up his shirt sleeves; it was clearly noticeable that the old dead policeman had come to life inside him. He leant forward on his elbows and moved his gaze between me and Urban. There was something birdlike about his physiognomy, especially the head and his way of moving it on the slender hymenopteran of a neck that stuck up from a collar four sizes too big. He smoothed out his thin moustache and his even thinner greyish-white hair and started.

  ‘Facts in the case of Vera Kall. What the hell do you two have to say?’

  After a good half hour he was content. Leant back and emptied his beer glass; the pointed larynx went up and down a few times like an overheated tachograph.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he then summarized. ‘So you’ve been sitting on vital information for thirty years. The case is prescribed, of course, but if I weren’t so old I would punch you on the jaw.’

  ‘I didn’t want to scandalize her,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Keller. ‘After-the-fact construction. The dead don’t care about scandals.’

  ‘I was thinking more about the survivors,’ I attempted. ‘Her mother and father.’

  ‘You were thinking about your own hide,’ said Keller.

  ‘Hmm, yes,’ Urban interjected. ‘Anyway, he kept quiet. There’s not much we can do about that now. The question is, what would it have meant for the investigation if Henry had come forward?’

  Keller observed his empty beer glass and wiped his moustache clean. ‘Depends on what you mean by that,’ he muttered, glaring at me. ‘You would have been a suspect in any event, you should be clear about that.’

  I didn’t reply. Urban lit a cigar and exhaled a diversionary cloud of smoke. ‘Did you ever have a suspect?’ he asked.

  ‘Not so much as a hen,’ Keller snapped in irritation. ‘We expended thousands of work hours, but if you don’t even have a corpse, suspects are hard to come by. We dug up a couple of conceivable characters; a rapist who’d b
een let out six months earlier and an old swindler who lived along her travel route. Both of them had alibis.’

  ‘Witnesses then?’ Urban asked. ‘Who saw her somewhere during the night, or something.’

  Keller opened the briefcase and started rooting in a folder. ‘No one reliable,’ he noted, taking out a sheet of paper. ‘Just some hysterics and nitwits. This one, for example.’

  He remained silent a moment while he studied the information he was holding in his hand. ‘A certain Miss Paisinen,’ he explained. ‘Maintained that she’d seen an angelic figure on a bicycle at quarter to four in the morning. Baarenstraat on the outskirts of Pampas. A dark-haired angel on her way westward, to be precise . . . the lady came forward after a month when she’d read forty column kilometres about the case in the newspapers . . . but sure as hell she may have been right. We dismissed her mostly on the basis of the time. If Vera Kall left the party at eleven o’clock, she ought to have made it further in five hours, we thought . . . if she wasn’t doing something else during that time, that is. Harrumph.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  Urban served more beer, while Keller kept digging in his briefcase. I took a substantial gulp and wondered about what actually would have happened if I had come forward and told at once. What would my parents have said? And Vera’s? The teachers at Doggers? Would I have even got the white graduation cap? It was hard to find any bright spots in such a scenario, and in silence I thanked my lucky stars that I’d had the sense to keep my mouth shut.

  Although perhaps it didn’t have that much to do with sense. If one were to be honest.

  ‘Theories?’ said Urban. ‘What theories did you have? There must have been a few things that didn’t come out to the general public.’

  Keller sighed. ‘Of course I had theories. Two tons of theories and half an ounce of facts. You should know that I didn’t let go of the Snake Flower for years. But I never got any wiser . . . it was at a standstill from the very start and it continued that way.’

  ‘I can believe that,’ said Urban. ‘You assumed that she was killed in any event?’