Hour of the Wolf (23 page)

If it hadn’t been for that evil killer, a knifeman on that occasion, a drugged-up madman who had stabbed her to death one evening in Wollerims Park without the slightest trace of a reason.

Or at least, nothing more than the twelve guilders she had in her purse.

And now
The Chief Inspector
’s son. Bloody hell, Reinhart thought. He’s absolutely right, it was a long time ago that the Good Lord stopped doing us favours.

‘I went out to Dikken to have a look around,’ said Van Veeteren, interrupting his train of thought.

‘What?’ said Reinhart. ‘You?’

‘Me, yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I took the liberty – I hope you’ll forgive me.’

‘Of course,’ said Reinhart.

‘I spoke to a few people at that restaurant. It’s more like a sort of therapy really. I don’t expect to find anything that you lot won’t find, but it’s so damned hard just sitting around, doing nothing. Can you understand that?’

Reinhart paused for a few seconds before answering.

‘Do you remember why I joined the police?’ he asked. ‘My fiancée in Wollerims Park?’

Van Veeteren nodded.

‘Of course I do. Okay, you understand. But anyway, there’s one thing I wonder about.’

‘What?’ said Reinhart.

‘The plastic carrier bag,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘That plastic carrier bag that changed owners. Or was supposed to change owners.’

‘What bloody plastic bag are you on about?’ said Reinhart.

Van Veeteren said nothing for a moment.

‘So you don’t know about it?’

Oh, shit, Reinhart thought. Now he’s put us on the spot again.

‘There was somebody who said something about a plastic carrier bag,’ he said, trying to sound offhand about it. ‘That’s true.’

‘It seems that this Mr X, who is presumably the killer . . .’ said
The Chief Inspector,
noticeably slowly and in a tone of voice that sounded to Reinhart painfully like some pedagogue explaining the obvious to ignorant pupils, ‘. . . had a plastic carrier bag by his feet when he was sitting in the bar. And it appears that Erich was carrying that bag when he left the restaurant.’

He raised an eyebrow and waited for Reinhart’s reaction.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Reinhart. ‘To tell you the truth . . . Well, to tell you the truth I’m afraid it looks as if we’d missed this. The second half, that is. Several witnesses said Mr X had a plastic carrier bag with him, but we haven’t heard anything about Erich having taken it over. How did you find out about that?’

‘I happened to meet the right people,’ said Van Veeteren modestly, contemplating his newly rolled cigarette. ‘One of the waitresses seemed to recall having seen him carrying a plastic bag when he left the restaurant, and when she said that the barman remembered it as well.’

And you
happened
to ask the right questions as well, no doubt, Reinhart thought, and felt a flood of deep-rooted admiration surging through his consciousness, removing all trace of anger and embarrassment. Admiration for that psychological insight that
The Chief Inspector
had always been blessed with, and which . . . which could cut like a scalpel through a ton of warm butter faster than a hundred riot police in bullet-proof vests could work out the whiff of a suspicion.

Intuition, as it was called.

‘So what conclusion do you draw?’ he asked.

‘Erich was there to collect something.’

‘Obviously.’

‘He drove out to the Trattoria Commedia in order to collect the plastic carrier bag in an agreed location – perhaps in the gents.’

Reinhart nodded.

‘He didn’t know who Mr X was, and it was not the intention that he should know.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘If it had been possible for them to meet without concealing their identities, they could just as well meet anywhere at all. In the car park, for instance. Why mess about with that bloody masquerade if it wasn’t necessary?’

Reinhart thought that over.

‘Mr X was disguised,’ he said.

‘He was going to murder my son,’ Van Veeteren pointed out. ‘And he did so. Of course he was going to be disguised.’

‘Why hand over the carrier bag if he was going to kill him anyway?’ said Reinhart.

‘You can answer that yourself,’ said Van Veeteren.

Reinhart sucked twice at his pipe, which had gone out.

‘Oh, shit,’ he said. ‘He didn’t know who he was. Neither of them knew who the other was. He didn’t know who it was until he saw him with the carrier bag in his hand . . . He’d be out in the car park, waiting for him, of course.’

‘Presumably,’ said Van Veeteren, rolling another cigarette. ‘That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn as well. What else? What do you think it was all about? Who’s calling the shots, and who’s obeying?’

A good question, Reinhart thought. Who is calling the shots and who is obeying?

‘Erich calls the shots, and Mr X obeys,’ he says. ‘To start with, at least. Then Mr X reverses the roles. That’s why . . . Yes, that’s why he does it. That’s why he kills him.’

Van Veeteren leaned back on his chair and lit the cigarette. His son, Reinhart thought. For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about his murdered son.

‘And what do you think it was all about?’

The narcotic cloud hung in the way, and blurred Reinhart’s thinking for five seconds: then he hit on the answer.

‘Blackmail,’ he said. ‘It’s as clear as bloody day.’

‘He maintains that Erich had never indulged in anything like that,’ Reinhart explained to Winnifred an hour later. ‘I believe him. Besides, it seems incredible that he’d be so bloody stupid simply to drive out to that restaurant and sit there waiting for the money . . . Not if he knew what it was all about. Erich was a messenger boy. Somebody else – the real blackmailer – had sent him out there: when you come to think about it it’s pretty obvious. Everything falls into place.’

‘What about this Vera Miller woman, then?’ said Winnifred. ‘Was she behind it all, somehow or other?’

‘It’s very possible,’ said Reinhart. ‘The murderer thought it was Erich who was the blackmailer, and killed him quite unnecessarily. Maybe he got the right person when he killed Vera Miller.’

‘Did Erich know Vera Miller?’

Reinhart sighed.

‘Unfortunately not,’ he said. ‘That’s where it all comes to a stop for the moment. We haven’t found a single little thing to link them together. But there might be one. If we assume that he – the murderer, that is – is a doctor at the Gemejnte, it’s quite possible that Vera Miller had some kind of hold over him. An operation that he made a mess of, something of that sort perhaps. Could be any damned thing. It’s unforgivable for a doctor to make a mistake. He might have killed a patient through sheer carelessness, for instance. She saw an opportunity to earn a bit of cash, and took it. That it turned out as it did is another matter altogether, of course. Anyway, it’s a theory at least.’

Winnifred looked sceptical.

‘And why did she have to go to bed with him? That’s what she did, isn’t it?’

‘Hmm,’ said Reinhart. ‘Were you born yesterday, my lovely? That’s where a man reveals his true self. It’s in bed that a woman gets to know all a man’s merits and shortcomings.’

Winnifred laughed in delight and snuggled up close to him under the covers.

‘My prince,’ she said. ‘You are so right, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for a few days before you can demonstrate your merits to me.’

‘That’s life,’ said Reinhart, and switched off the light. ‘And I have hardly any shortcomings.’

A quarter of an hour later he got up.

‘What are you doing?’ wondered Winnifred.

‘Joanna,’ said Reinhart. ‘I thought I heard something.’

‘You didn’t at all,’ said Winnifred. ‘But go and fetch her so that we can lie here, all three of us. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?’

‘More or less,’ admitted Reinhart and tiptoed over to the nursery.

My wife knows what I’m thinking before I do, he told himself as he lifted up his sleeping daughter. How the hell does she do that?

25

On Wednesday, 9 December it was plus ten or eleven degrees, and the sky was high and bright.

The sun seemed to be surprised, almost embarrassed at having to display itself in all its somewhat faded nudity. Van Veeteren phoned Ulrike Fremdli at work, was informed that she would be finished by lunchtime, and suggested a car trip to the seaside. They hadn’t seen the sea for quite some time. She accepted straight away: he could hear from her voice that she was both surprised and pleased, and he reminded himself that he loved her. Then he reminded her as well.

The living must look after one another, he thought. The worst possible outcome is to die without having lived.

As he sat in the car outside the Remington dirt-brown office complex he wondered if Erich had lived. If he had managed to experience the fundamentals of life, whatever they might be. He had read somewhere that a man must do three things during his life: raise a son, write a book and plant a tree.

He wondered where that had come from. In any case, Erich had not achieved the first two of those requirements. Whether or not he had planted a tree he had no idea, of course: but it didn’t seem all that likely. Before he had time to think about how far he himself fulfilled those requirements, he was interrupted by Ulrike flopping down in the seat beside him.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said. ‘What a marvellous day!’

She kissed him on the cheek, and to his surprise he found that he had an erection. Life goes on, he thought, somewhat confused. Despite everything.

‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.

‘Emsbaden or Behrensee,’ she said without hesitation. She had evidently been thinking about it ever since he’d rung.

‘Emsbaden,’ he said. ‘I have a bit of a problem with Behrensee.’

‘Why?’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Something happened there a few years ago. I’d rather not be reminded of it.’

She waited for an explanation, but there wasn’t one. He started the car and drove off instead.

‘My secretive lover,’ she said.

They spent an hour wandering around the dunes, then had a late lunch at the De Dirken inn, almost adjacent to the lighthouse in Emsbaden. Lobster tails in dill sauce, coffee and carrot cake. They spoke about Jess and Ulrike’s children and their future prospects.

And eventually also about Erich.

‘I remember something you said,’ Ulrike told him. ‘Then, when you’d found the woman who murdered Karel.’

Karel Innings was Ulrike’s former husband, but not the father of her children. They had been the product of her first marriage to an estate agent, who had been a good and reliable paterfamilias until his inherited alcoholism got the better of him.

‘We never found her,’ Van Veeteren pointed out.

‘But you found her motives,’ said Ulrike. ‘In any case, you maintained that from her point of view – in one sense at least – killing my husband had been justified. Do you remember that?’

‘Of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But it was only true in a way. From a very individual, limited point of view. It’s a distortion if you put it like you did.’

‘Isn’t that always the case?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Isn’t it always the case that the murderer – or any other criminal, come to that – thinks that his crime is justified? Doesn’t he have to think that to himself anyway?’

‘That’s an old chestnut,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But you are right in principle, of course. A murderer always justifies his motives – acknowledges them also, naturally. Mind you, it’s a different matter if somebody else points them out. There are reasons for everything we do, but the dogma of original sin never seems to convince members of the jury nowadays. They are much more thick-skinned than that.’

‘But you believe in it?’

He paused for a moment and gazed out over the sea.

‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘I don’t defend evil deeds, but if you can’t understand the nature of crime . . . the motives of a criminal . . . well, you won’t get very far as a detective. There is a sort of twisted logic which is often easier to discover than the logic that governs our everyday actions. As we all know, chaos is the neighbour of God: but everything’s usually neat and tidy in hell . . .’

She laughed, and took a bite of her carrot cake.

‘Go on.’

‘All right, since you ask me so nicely,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Anyway, this malicious logic can affect us all when we are trapped in a corner. It’s not a problem to understand why an Islamic brother murders his sister because she’s been going to discotheques and wants to be a Westerner. No problem at all if you are familiar with the background. But the fact that the deed itself is so disgusting that the very thought of it makes you want to throw up, and that your spontaneous reaction is to take the killer and demolish a skyscraper on top of him – well, that’s something else. Something completely different.’

He fell silent. She eyed him gravely, then took hold of his hand over the table.

‘A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual,’ said Van Veeteren, and immediately wondered if that really was generally true.

‘And if they find Erich’s murderer,’ said Ulrike. ‘Will you understand him as well?’

He hesitated before answering. Gazed out over the beach again. The sun had gone away, and the weather was as it presumably was before some god or other hit on the idea of creating it. Plus eight degrees, slight breeze, white cloud.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want to meet him face to face.’

She let go of his hand, and frowned.

‘I can’t understand why you want to expose yourself to something like that,’ she said. ‘Sitting opposite your son’s murderer. Sometimes I just don’t understand you.’

‘I’ve never claimed that I do either,’ said Van Veeteren.

And I’ve never said that I wouldn’t want to put a bullet between those eyes either, he thought; but he didn’t say so.

On the way home Ulrike came up with a suggestion.

‘I’d like us to invite his fiancée to dinner.’

‘Who?’ said Van Veeteren.

‘Marlene Frey. Let’s invite her to dinner tomorrow evening. At your place. I’ll ring and talk to her.’