The Gloaming (21 page)

 

The number had been disconnected due to non-payment. What kind of person didn't pay the phone bill, Strebel wondered. Someone careless, irresponsible, vague? He drove to her address, a subdivided chalet on the high road above Arnau. It was an unexceptional place. What was she doing here? In this village where people raised children or retired with their knitting. Her file said she was in the middle of a divorce from a British human rights lawyer based in Geneva. Perhaps the divorce explained the phone bill: an argument over money, the unexpected stress of disarticulating a relationship. Was this relevant?

And why Arnau? Why this exile of faux stucco chalets and window boxes? Strebel could find no trace of a connection to this village or canton—anything that might have drawn her here. Americans were very nostalgic, he believed, they loved their ancestry; but Pilgrim Lankester-née-Jones had no roots here, not a trace of Swiss blood. She was misplaced.

When he rang her doorbell and there was no answer, he tried the concierge. A small woman with a wiry nest of gray hair came to the front door. She wore an apron and slippers. He introduced himself, showed her his ID. She peered at it, checked the photo against his face. She did not give her name in return, but he assumed it was Gassner, the name on the concierge's bell.

‘Are you Mrs Gassner?'

A curt nod.

‘I'm looking for Mrs Lankester, apartment two.'

‘You have come to arrest her.'

‘No,' Strebel corrected. ‘Just to speak with her. Her phone isn't working.'

‘I warned her! I said, “They cut you off no mercy.” She didn't listen, did she? And now look! Americans. They think they know everything. They think the rules don't apply to them.'

‘Mrs Gassner, do you know when Mrs Lankester will be back?'

‘It's shocking, what she's done. Killing those children. I couldn't live with myself.'

Silently, Strebel begged to differ. People lived with a lot of awful things, some of them very comfortably. ‘Please, Mrs Gassner,' he said. ‘I'd just like to know when you think she'll be back.'

‘She left an hour ago. Just carrying on as if nothing has happened.'

‘Where?'

‘I don't ask. Probably shopping. Spending her rich husband's money. Ex-husband. He divorced her, you know.'

Strebel let this pass with total indifference. ‘Do you think I might wait for her?'

Mrs Gassner did an odd thing: she blushed. And then spoke very quickly, telling him that he absolutely could not, she wouldn't have it, a respectable building like this. He studied her—the sudden, clumsy discomfort—and noticed that she couldn't help but twice glance up the stairs. Was someone there?

‘Are you sure Mrs Lankester isn't in?'

Unconsciously, Mrs Gassner glanced up the stairs again. Christ, she was transparent! Someone was up there, but not Pilgrim Lankester.

‘No, no, no. I told you she has gone out. I saw her myself.'

Strebel imagined Mrs Gassner peering through the curtains. She knew exactly who came and went and when. And who was up there now. She'd probably let whoever it was in. Still, he conjured politeness: ‘Please tell Mrs Lankester to contact me when she gets back. Here is my card.'

‘You have to make her pay,' Mrs Gassner said with renewed enthusiasm. ‘She must pay. An eye for an eye. It's your job to make her pay.'

‘Please give her my message.' He made a point of peering inquisitively over her shoulder and up the stairs. ‘Perhaps she can use your phone.'

When Strebel turned around to walk back to his car, she came out on his heels, ‘Those children, broken and twisted, I can't bear to think about it, and she just carries on with her fancy life, oh, not so fancy now that the husband left, I can tell you, but he's still paying the bills.'

Strebel was in the car and Mrs Gassner was up against the window glass: ‘She shouldn't even be in this country. She's divorced! He left her. For another woman. They have a child! And yet she's still here. On what visa? These people are all tramps, camping on our doorstep. Throw them out.'

Strebel started his car. ‘Please give her the message.'

He drove off. Mrs Gassner's spittle had freckled the window. Before he turned into the main road, he glanced back in his rearview mirror at the chalet. Mrs Gassner stood in the doorway. But above her, he was certain he saw someone in the second floor apartment—just a fleeting glimpse. A man? The figure was gone, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps Mr Gassner was fixing a broken light.

But Strebel's feeling had a darker texture, which he hesitated to call instinct, and which never failed him. The feeling of what he might find on the other side of a door, in the trunk of a car, in the thick bracken of woods where a murder of crows had gathered.

* * *

It was after nine. Strebel rubbed his eyes, looked around his office. In his youth—before this was his office—the shelves had been stacked with paperwork. A detective might be overwhelmed by the amount of work, but at least he could see that it was there, being done. Now everything was computerized, the records kept in invisible folders in an invisible cabinet.

Strebel considered the virtual world. You could put things there, like files and photographs. And yet they didn't exist in the traditional interpretation of existing: i.e. something you could spill coffee on. He wanted—did he?—to be part of the modern police force, the bright young sparks who could tap-tap-tap and tell him the weight of water.

But at fifty-five, he remained awed by the landline telephone. How a voice could travel down a wire for thousands of miles. How? Physics didn't quite explain it. He could recall the first telephone in his village, a heavy, elegant rotary dial.

A few years ago, he and Ingrid had bought a microwave, the latest mod-con. They'd cooked a potato and stared at it like the Christ Child. Look at the little miracle! Hadn't they even laughed at themselves? But when was a few years ago? He felt a sick lurch when he realized he was thinking of the early eighties.

More than three decades ago. He was a
grandfather
now.

He tapped on the computer keyboard, opened the folder of the Arnau incident scene. He kept coming back to this case, as if it held some great mystery that he had to uncover. But it was the most mundane of accidents. Everyone involved was ordinary. Even the deaths of the children were ordinary—the ordinary result of an ordinary vehicle traveling at 60kph hitting an ordinary child's body weighing an ordinary 32kgs.

A little pink backpack. Two shoes, from the two different boys. The dark wine stains of blood. Glass everywhere. The ruptured edifice of the bus stand. The smashed car. The images were all data now, turned into rows and rows of digits by a computer genius in California. He wondered if Ernst Koppler had kissed Sophie goodbye before he said ‘You'll be in the way.' If he had held her and pressed his lips to her soft cheek and felt his awkward body fill with love, that great lightsaber love for a child which he would never feel again.

‘I keep losing things. My handbag, the house keys. My gloves,' Simone Emptmann had said to Strebel that morning, her voice coming to him now as if through a loudspeaker. ‘I keep thinking he's staying with his grandparents and I can't remember when I'm supposed to pick him up.'

He was seeing her now in his mind. She'd sat very still in her kitchen. A pretty, uncomplicated woman who now looked as if she'd scalded her head in a pot of boiling water. Her eyes were red, cheeks flushed, the skin under her eyes was swollen and raw. A female relative—a sister? a cousin?—had come to take her little baby for a stroll so she could talk to Strebel without distraction.

‘Earlier in the morning,' she'd said. ‘That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn't see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it's what they do; it's their purpose, to leave you. I don't think you're ever ready. Are you? Do you have children, Inspector? You know they'll grow up and have imperfect lives and people will hurt them and they'll be unsatisfied and selfish, and so I think maybe by leaving now he's only known happiness and love. That's what I tell myself. He's been spared disappointment.'

She'd folded her hands in her lap neatly, and he thought of little dead birds.

‘I'm so sorry,' he'd said.

Now, he clicked the file of photographs shut and turned off the computer.

* * *

The office was dark and mostly quiet. Somewhere down the hall, the cleaner was pushing her trolley; one of the wheels squeaked. If something happened—a bomb, for instance—the squeaking would become important. Crucial. Interviewed by fellow police officers, the rubble still smoking behind him, he would strive to recall the squeaking in detail. The pitch, the direction. As he had never heard the squeak before, could this suggest a different cleaner—an interloper, the terrorist—had pushed a cleaning trolley? In the absence of a bomb, the squeaking wheel had no meaning at all.

Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphysically unstable idea: too general, too big; cause and effect going all the way back to first dates, to ancestors surviving winter storms, to dinosaurs, to organisms in a puddle.

But detail could also torment. He recalled Simone's terror, how it peeked out like a flash of red beneath the veneer of disbelief. ‘You vaccinate them, you make them wear helmets on their bikes and seat belts in the car. You find ways to make vegetables tasty and not let them watch too much TV. You do everything right.'

You do everything right
. And yet the minutiae of life—she'd forgotten her phone, she'd gone back for it and left the children in the bus stand. ‘Wait here, I'll be right back,' she'd told them. The phone—so necessary, just in case—had lured her. She'd had her hand on the car door when she heard the noise. The car crashing, the universe splitting open.

At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.

Strebel began to gather his things but then he realized how much he did not want to go home. He was
in
something, as if traveling in another country, and did not want Ingrid's banal intrusion. The broken toilet or the latest idiocy from their son-in-law. He called her again.

‘I'm staying at the office tonight.'

‘But I made you dinner. Trout.'

‘I'm sorry. Put it in the fridge and I'll have it tomorrow.'

‘Come on, Paul.'

Come on? Come on, what? ‘I'm sorry,' he repeated, hoping to sound sincere. No: not even hoping. His apologies to her were mere habit, like washing his hands before a meal. ‘Goodnight,' he concluded. He didn't wait for her to say anymore, just hung up. And lay on the sofa.

He thought sleep would be impossible, the sofa was not comfortable, the lights were all on. But he did sleep, waking at dawn to the sound of rubbish lorries in the street below. He had no recollection of falling asleep. Time had jumped forward and the only evidence of how he'd spent the night was the red mark of the sofa's seam across his cheek.

 

‘It is Detective Chief Inspector Paul Strebel,' he said through the intercom. ‘I came a few days ago, I tried to phone—'

‘Yes, I'm sorry, it's disconnected,' she said. ‘Please come up.' An American voice, but softly accented. He hadn't had many dealings with Americans and he was aware of the stereotypes he tended toward, and also his initial suspicion of her character.

Pilgrim Lankester was pretty, even beautiful, standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs. ‘The bill, I forgot to pay it.' Why? he immediately asked in his head. There would have been many increasingly agitated reminders.

As he moved into the room, he glanced around, taking in the oddly impersonal space. There were no photos or reminders on the fridge, no magazines or mail on the counter; no stack of notices from the phone company littering the tabletop. He thought of a businessman's hotel room. But the feeling he had wasn't of transience; rather of tentativeness—someone unable or unwilling to make an impression.

She offered him tea. He studied her as she boiled the kettle, retrieved the cups. Despite the bruises on her face, there was an undercurrent of elegance to her. Well-cut clothes and hair, cheekbones and deep-set eyes: Mrs Lankester was the kind of woman, intimidating in her perfection, whom he saw in Zurich or Geneva stepping out of boutiques or chic little bistros. He could smell her. Faintly almond. Not perfume, but a soap or cream.

Her manners and beauty masked her essential timidity. Most people wouldn't notice the way she bit her lip before speaking or hesitated mid-sentence. He guessed this behavior was habitual, not the result of trauma from the accident. He recalled she was only thirty-two, five years older than his own daughter. And while Pilgrim Lankester was vastly more sophisticated than Caroline, his daughter was confident, even bawdy. He suspected that Mrs Lankester had married young, and he would find Tom Lankester to be a strong character.

When her hand trembled on the teapot he said, ‘Don't be afraid.'

‘Of the tea?'

‘No. Of me.'

She thought it was her fault. ‘No,' he said, firmly, ‘It wasn't your fault.'

Strebel would have been fine if she hadn't cried. Crying made her ugly, her eyes puffed and red, her cheeks blotchy. He felt sadness, loneliness coming off her in waves, and this triggered in him what he begged to be a paternal response, but what he knew was lust. ‘Vulnerable women are beautiful,' a colleague had once remarked, and Strebel had disagreed. In fact, they'd almost had an argument, because Strebel took the line that there was something predatory in finding weak women sexual. He'd been around too many rapists.

But now he felt the urge to touch this young woman, to hold her and comfort her—and he could not pretend the urge was simply protective. He was appalled. And in equal measure, he was stunned by the small hollow at the base of her throat, by the upturn of flesh where her upper lip bowed. It was as if she'd suddenly come into focus; she was clear, so brilliantly, perfectly clear and distinct against the gray, oaty mass of his life. He felt a surge of happiness—of being
alive
.