The Unlucky Lottery (18 page)

Besides, I’m in the middle of the month, she added. I’d better look after the sublimation myself.

She smiled at that last thought as she stood waiting for the bus to Kolderweg. Working instead of making love? How totally absurd! If Claus could follow her thoughts for five minutes he would probably never dare to meet her again.

But perhaps that’s the situation in all relationships?

With all women and their men with the beautiful hands?

The bus was approaching.

The door was opened by a woman she had never seen before, and just for a moment Moreno sensed the possibility of a breakthrough. But then the woman introduced herself as Helena Winther, the younger sister of Arnold Van Eck, and the hope was lost.

‘I arrived yesterday,’ she explained. ‘I thought I needed to – he’s not very strong.’

She was a slim woman in her mid-fifties, with the same anaemic appearance as her brother but with a handshake that suggested a certain strength of character.

‘You don’t live here in Maardam, then?’

‘No, in Aarlach. My husband has a business there.’

She led the way into the living room where Van Eck was sitting hunched up in front of the television. He looked as if he had only stopped crying a short while ago.

‘Good morning,’ said Moreno. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Awful,’ said Van Eck with a cough. ‘There’s such a big gap.’

Moreno nodded.

‘I can well imagine,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d just call in and see if anything had occurred to you. These things usually come out of the blue, as I said before’

‘It’s a mystery!’ Van Eck exclaimed. ‘A complete mystery!’

I wonder if he thinks the same way as he talks, Moreno wondered. Whatever, he must surely be a special case even in that male sector she had been thinking about?

‘You can’t remember if your wife acted in an unusual way during the days before she disappeared?’ she asked. ‘Said or did something she didn’t usually say or do?’

Van Eck sighed from the very depths of his martyred soul.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing like that. I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking and thinking, but everything is a complete mystery. It’s like a nightmare even though I’m awake.’

‘And you don’t remember noticing anything unusual when you came back home after your course last Wednesday? That first impression you had the moment you crossed the threshold, if you follow me.’

Van Eck shook his head.

‘Do you think your wife had any male friends you didn’t know about?’

‘Eh?’

For a second Van Eck looked cross-eyed behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, and Moreno realized that the question – like any possible answer to it – was way beyond his imagination.

She also realized that she wasn’t going to get anything more out of him, but before moving on to the people who lived upstairs she had a few words with his sister in the kitchen.

‘Do you have much contact with your brother and your sister-in-law?’ she asked.

Helena Winther shrugged.

‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘There’s the age difference, of course, but we do meet now and then. My husband and Arnold are very different, though.’

‘And Else?’

Winther looked out of the window and hesitated before answering.

‘She’s a bit unusual,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have gathered that. They are not the most normal couple in the world, but in a way they make a real pair. You’ve seen what he’s like without her.’

‘Is he taking any tranquillizers?’

She shook her head.

‘He never takes medicine. He’s never even taken an aspirin for as long as he’s lived.’

‘Why not?’

Winther said nothing, just looked at Moreno with her eyebrows slightly raised, and for a few seconds it was as if the whole masculine mystique was weighed up and fathomed out between those four female eyes.

And found to be unfathomable. Moreno noticed that she was smiling inwardly.

‘You have no idea about what might have happened?’

‘None at all. As he says, it’s a complete mystery. She’s not the type who disappears. On the contrary, if you see what I mean.’

With a slight nod Moreno indicated that she did. Then she shook hands with both her and her brother, and promised to do her utmost to throw light on these sad circumstances.

Fritz Engel wasn’t exactly smelling of violets today either, but he seemed to be sober and there was a half-finished crossword lying on the kitchen table.

‘For the little grey cells,’ he explained, standing up and pointing a dirty index finger at his forehead. ‘Welcome – and that’s a greeting I don’t extend to all police officers.’

Moreno took the compliment with a practised smile.

‘There are just a few things I’ve been thinking about,’ she said. ‘If you have time, that is.’

‘Of course.’

Engel hitched up his trousers, which had a tendency to fall floorwards, and indicated the vacant chair. She sat down and waited for a couple of seconds.

‘What is the link between Leverkuhn and fru Van Eck?’

‘Sorry?’ said Engel, sitting down.

She leaned forward over the table and braced herself.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘What I mean is that there must be some sort of crucial link between these two events in the same building, some vital little factor which explains why it’s these two people who have been . . . been moved out of the way. It could be anything at all, but it’s almost impossible for an outsider to catch on. You have been living close to both of them for twenty years, herr Engel, so you ought to be just the person to come up with something. Can you recall anything at all where both Waldemar Leverkuhn and Else Van Eck had their fingers in the same pie, as it were?’

‘Are you suggesting they were having an affair?’

Moreno choked back a sigh.

‘Not at all. It doesn’t need to be anything as big as that, but it’s hard to be more precise when you don’t really know what you’re looking for.’

‘Yes,’ said Engel, ‘it is.’

He clamped his jaws together with a loud click, and she gathered that just now he was thinking of her in terms of a copper rather than a woman.

‘Are you worried at all that something might happen to you, herr Engel?’

Memories of his masculinity naturally got in the way of his giving her an honest answer to that question. He cleared his throat, straightened his back until it creaked, but she could see nevertheless that fear was coursing through his whole body.

Lay there ominously like dark water under one-night-old ice.

‘I’m not especially frightened, young lady,’ he claimed, trying to keep his gaze steady. ‘One learns to get by in the world we live in.’

‘Is there one of the neighbours you feel slightly less confident about?’ she insisted. ‘When you bump into them on the stairs, for instance?’

‘The neighbours? No, no, of course not!’

He burst out coughing, and as the attack slowly ebbed away Moreno sat there motionless, weighing up his final comment.

Was it really as clear a dismissal of any such thought as he tried to make it sound? Or?

Two hours later, as she slid down into a bubble-bath smelling of eucalyptus, she still hadn’t made up her mind about that.

Inspector Ewa Moreno also slept soundly on Sunday night without waking up at all, and as she sat in the tram in the cold light of dawn the next morning, on her way to the police station, she felt that she had finally caught up with herself. The lack of sleep that had been building up had now been satisfied, and for the first time in weeks she felt eager to start work.

Ready to get to grips with whatever lay in store for her.

But she could hardly have been prepared for what Intendent Münster had to tell her when she entered his office.

‘Anything new?’ she asked.

‘You can say that again,’ said Münster, looking up from the pile of papers he was leafing through. ‘She’s confessed.’

‘What?’ said Moreno.

‘Fru Leverkuhn. She rang at a quarter past seven this morning and confessed that she had murdered her husband.’

Moreno sat down on a chair.

‘Well I’ll be damned!’ she said. ‘So it was her after all?’

‘That’s what she claims,’ said Münster.

THREE

22

The police spent three days with her, and then she was left more or less alone. From the second week onwards her visitors were restricted to a handful of people.

Her lawyer was called Bachmann, and came almost every day – in the beginning, at least. She had met him in connection with the first interrogation at the police station, and he hadn’t made a particularly good impression on her. A well-dressed, overweight man of about fifty with thick, wavy hair that he probably dyed. A large signet ring and strong, white teeth. He suggested from the very start that they should follow the manslaughter line, and she went along with that without really thinking about it.

She didn’t like the man, but reckoned that the more she let him have his own way, the less time she would need to spend discussing matters with him. In the middle of the month, he kept away several times for a few days on end; but in December, as the date of the trial approached, there was a lot to run through again. She didn’t really understand why, but never asked.

Get it over with quickly, she thought: and that was the only request she put to him. Don’t let it become one of those long-drawn-out affairs with special pleading and the cross-examination of witnesses and all the rest that she was used to from the telly.

And Bachmann put his hand on his heart, assuring her that he would do his best. Although there were several things that were unclear, and one simply can’t get away with anything at all in court.

Every time he pointed this out he gave her a quick smile, but she never responded with one of her own.

The chaplain was called Kolding, and was about her age. A low-key preacher who always brought with him a flask of tea and a tin of biscuits, and generally sat on the chair in her cell for half an hour or so, without saying very much. In connection with his first visit he explained that he didn’t want to harass her, but it was his intention to call in every two or three days. In case there was something she would like to take up with him.

There never was, but she had nothing against his sitting there. He was tall and thin, slightly stooping in view of his age, and he reminded her of the vicar who conducted her confirmation classes. She once asked him if they were relatives, but of course they were not.

However, he had worked for a while in the Maalwort parish in Pampas. This emerged from one of their sparse conversations, but as she had only been to church once or twice during all the years they had lived only a stone’s throw away, there was not much to say about this circumstance either.

Nevertheless, he would sit there in the corner several afternoons a week. And made himself available, as he had promised. Perhaps he was simply tired, and needed to rest for a while, she sometimes thought.

In so far as he had any effect on her at all, at least he did not annoy her.

Other people who took the trouble to come and visit her were her two children and the assiduous Emmeline von Post.

Before the trial began, when she counted up the visits, she concluded that Mauritz had been three times, and Ruth and Emmeline twice each. On her birthday, the second of December, Mauritz and Ruth turned up together with a Sachertorte and three white lilies – which for some reason she found so absurd that she had difficulty in not bursting into laughter.

Otherwise she made a big effort – during all these visits and greetings – to behave politely and courteously; but the circumstances sometimes meant that the atmosphere inside her pale yellow cell often felt tense and strained. Especially with Mauritz, there were a few occasions when heated words were exchanged about trivialities – but then she hadn’t expected anything else.

On the whole, however, her time in prison – the six weeks of waiting before the trial began – was a period of rest and recovery, so that when she went to bed the evening before the proceedings started, she felt inevitably a bit worried about what lay in store, but also calm, and quite confident that her inner strength would carry her through these difficult times.

As it had done thus far.

The trial began on a Tuesday afternoon, and her lawyer had promised her that it would be all over by the Friday evening – always assuming that no complications arose, and there was hardly any reason to expect that they would.

However, the first few hours in the courtroom were characterized by ceremonial posturing and a slow pace that made her wonder. She had been placed behind an oblong wooden table with bottles of mineral water, paper mugs and a notepad. On her right was her lawyer, smelling of his usual aftershave; on her left was a youngish woman dressed in blue, whose role was unclear to Marie-Louise Leverkuhn. But she didn’t ask about it.

This was not one of the bigger courtrooms, as far as she knew. The space for members of the public and journalists was limited to about twenty chairs behind a bar at the far end of the rectangular room. Just now, on this first afternoon, the audience was restricted to six people: two balding journalists and four women reassuringly well into pensionable age. It was a relief to find that there were so few: but she suspected that there would be rather more people sitting on the high-backed chairs later on in the performance. Once it was properly under way.

Sitting opposite her, enthroned on a dais barely a decimetre high, was Judge Hart behind a broad table covered in a green cloth hanging down to the floor on all sides – so that one didn’t need to look at his feet. Or up skirts, she fantasized, if the judge happened to be a woman. But she didn’t know. In any case, her own administrator of justice was a man of generous proportions in his sixties. He reminded her very much of a French actor whose name she couldn’t remember, no matter how hard she tried. Ended in
-eaux
, she seemed to recall.

On the right of the judge were two other officers of justice – young and immaculately groomed men wearing glasses and impeccable suits – and on the left was the jury.