Hour of the Wolf (3 page)

Inside the car, on the driver’s seat, was just one cause for concern: a dark oval-shaped stain, about the size of an egg, on the extreme right-hand edge of the beige-coloured upholstery. He had good reason to assume it must be blood, and he spent half an hour trying to scrub it away. But in vain: the stain would not go away, it had evidently penetrated the cloth through and through, and he decided to buy a set of seat covers before too long. Not immediately, but after a week or so, when the outcry after the discovery of the body had begun to fade away.

There were quite a lot of other traces of the boy’s blood, on both the steering wheel and the gear lever, but it was no problem getting rid of them. As for the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening, he gathered them carefully together and burned them in the open fire in the living room, creating quite a lot of smoke. When he had finished, he was suddenly gripped by a moment of panic at the thought of somebody asking about them. But he calmed down quite quickly: it was of course highly unlikely that anybody would get onto his trail, or demand him to account for something so utterly trivial. A pair of ordinary corduroy trousers? An old jacket and a bluish-grey cotton shirt? He could have disposed of them in a thousand above-board ways – thrown them away, given them to a charity shop, all kinds of possibilities.

But most of all: nobody would get onto his trail.

Later in the afternoon, as dusk began to fall and it had started drizzling, he went to church. To the old Vrooms basilica a twenty-minute walk away from his home. Sat for half an hour in one of the side chancels, his hands clasped in prayer, and tried to open himself up to his inner voices – or to something more elevated – but nothing spoke to him, nothing made him feel uneasy.

When he left the deserted church, he realized how important it had been to make the visit, to take the trouble of sitting there in the chancel like that, with no specific intentions or aspirations. With no false pretences or motives.

Realized that it had been a sort of test, and that he had passed it.

It was remarkable, but the feeling was strong and unambivalent when he emerged from the dark building. Something similar to catharsis. On the way home he bought two evening papers: both had a picture of the boy on their front page. The same picture, in fact, but in different sizes: a boy smiling cheerfully with dimples, slightly slant-eyed, dark hair combed forward. No hood, no blood. He didn’t recognize him.

When he got home he read that the boy was Wim Felders, that he had celebrated his sixteenth birthday only a few days ago, and that he had been a pupil at Weger Grammar School.

Both newspapers were full of details, information and speculations, and the overall attitude that was perhaps summed up by the headline on page three of
Den Poost
:

HELP THE POLICE TO CATCH
THE HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER!

There was also a lot written about possible consequences if the police succeeded in tracing the culprit. Two to three years’ imprisonment was by no means out of the question, it seemed.

He added in his alcohol consumption – which could no doubt be established by interviewing the restaurant staff – and increased the term to five or six years. At least. Drunken driving. Reckless driving and negligent homicide. Hit-and-run.

Five or six years under lock and key. What would be the point of that? Who would gain from such a development?

He flung the newspapers in the rubbish bin and took out the whisky bottle.

3

He dreamt about the boy for three nights in a row, then he vanished.

Just as he’d vanished from the newspapers, generally speaking. They wrote about Wim Felders on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but when the new working week began on Monday, reporting was restricted to a note saying that the police still had no leads. No witnesses had turned up, and no technical proof had been ascertained – whatever that meant. The young boy had been killed by an unknown driver who had then fled the scene, assisted in his efforts to remain anonymous by the rain and the darkness. This had been known from the start, and was still known four days later.

He also went back to work on Monday. It felt like a relief, but also an escape route to more normal routines. Life was trundling on once more along the same old pathways – familiar and yet also remarkably alien – and during the course of the day he was surprised to find himself pondering on how frail the link was between the mundane and the horrific.

How frail, and how incredibly easy to break. That link.

After work he drove out to the supermarket in Löhr and bought some new seat covers for his car. He found a set almost immediately in more or less exactly the same shade as the existing upholstery on the seats, and when he eventually managed to work out how to fit them in the garage later that evening, he had the feeling that he was home and dry at last. The parenthesis was over and done with now. The parenthesis around nothing. He had put in place the final element of the safety strategies he had evolved after long and careful consideration. All steps had been taken, all traces erased, and he was somewhat surprised to note that it was still less than a week after the accident happened.

And there was nothing for the police to hit on and follow up. He hadn’t discovered the slightest thing to suggest that he ought to own up to what had happened during those fateful seconds on Thursday evening. Those horrific and increasingly unreal seconds that were rapidly hurtling away further and further into the darkness of the past.

He would pull through this. He took a deep breath and knew that he would pull through this.

To be sure, it had been claimed – both in some of the newspapers and in the television news broadcasts that he had happened to catch – that the police had certain leads that they were working on, but he realized that this was a lot of hot air. A heavy-handed attempt to give the impression that they knew more and were more competent than was really the case. As usual.

There had been no mention of a red Audi parked at the side of the road near the scene of the accident with its lights on. That is what he had been most afraid of: perhaps not that somebody would have noticed the colour or the make, never mind the registration number; but that they might have seen a vehicle parked there. Two cars had passed by while he was down in the ditch . . . or was it while he was still standing on the road? He couldn’t remember that any more. But in any case he recalled quite clearly seeing two cars and a scooter. The driver of the car coming from the opposite direction to where he was heading – from Boorkhejm or Linzhuisen – might even had taken his Audi for an oncoming vehicle, he reckoned; but the other two surely must have registered that the car was parked on the edge of the road with its lights on.

Or was that the kind of thing that people forget all about? Bits of memory dust that only remain in the brain for a few seconds or half a minute at most, then vanish without trace for ever? Hard to say, hard to know, but definitely a question that kept him awake at night. These presumptive, latent pieces of evidence.

On Thursday, after a few days of silence in the media and a week after the accident, an appeal was made by the boy’s family: his mother, father and a younger sister. They spoke on the television and the radio, and their pictures appeared in various newspapers. All they wanted was quite simply for the perpetrator to listen to his own conscience and make himself known.

Confess to what he had done, and take his punishment.

It seemed obvious that this move was yet another indication that the police were at a loss and had nothing to work on. No leads, no clues. When he watched the mother – a dark-haired, unexpectedly self-controlled woman of about forty-five – sitting on her sofa and looking him in the eye from his television screen, he felt distinctly uneasy; but the moment she disappeared from the screen, he immediately regained his composure. Acknowledged that from time to time he was bound to be subjected to such attacks of anxiety, but that he would always have the strength to pick himself up again. To find a way out of his weakness. As long as he kept his head.

It was good to know that he had it, that he possessed this essential quality. Strength of mind

Nevertheless he would have liked to talk to her.

Why? he had asked himself.

What would be the point of putting me in jail for five years?

I have killed your son, I regret it with all my heart – but it was an accident, and what would be gained by my contacting the police?

He wondered what her answer would have been. Would she have had anything to reproach him for? The whole business was an accident, and accidents don’t have any culprits. No active participants at all, just factors and objects beyond control.

Later that evening he also toyed with the idea of sending an anonymous message to the family. Or just ringing them up and explaining his point of view. But he realized it was too risky, and he dismissed any such thoughts.

He also dismissed the alternative of trying to arrange for a wreath to be delivered for Wim Felders’ funeral, which took place in a packed Keymer Church on the Saturday ten days after the accident.

For the same reason. The risks.

Apart from relatives and friends, the congregation comprised most of the pupils and teachers from Weger Grammar School plus representatives of various traffic organizations. He read about this in great detail in the Sunday issue of the
Neuwe Blatt
, but that was also the final large-scale news coverage of the case.

To his surprise he found that on Monday he felt strangely empty.

As if he had lost something.

Like when I lost Marianne, he thought later on, similarly surprised; it was an odd comparison, but then, he needed to relate it to something. Something important in his life. For ten days the horrific happenings had been dominating his whole existence. Seeping into every nook and cranny of his consciousness. Even if he had managed to take control of his panic relatively quickly, it had been present all the time. Lurking, ready to break out. His thoughts had been centred on that hellish car journey almost every second. That slight thud and the jerk of the steering wheel; the rain, the lifeless body of the boy and the slippery ditch . . . Always present in the background, day and night: and now at last when he was starting to have periods when he didn’t think about it, it felt in a way as if something was missing.

A sort of emptiness.

Like after an eleven-year-long childless marriage . . . Yes, there were definitely similarities.

During this period it occurred to him that he must be some kind of hermit. Since Marianne left me, nobody has really meant anything to me. Nobody at all. Things happen to me, but I don’t make anything happen. I exist, but I don’t live.

Why haven’t I found myself a new woman? Why have I hardly ever asked myself that question? And now, suddenly, I’m somebody else.

Who? Who am I?

The fact that such thoughts should start occurring to him after he’d run over a young boy was remarkable in itself, of course, but something prevented him from digging too deeply into the situation. He decided instead to take things as they came, and to do something about it for once, and break new ground. And before he knew where he was – before he’d had time to think about it and perhaps have second thoughts – he had invited a woman round for dinner. He happened to meet her in the canteen: she had come to sit at his table – there was a shortage of space, as usual. He didn’t even know if he’d seen her before. Probably not.

But she’d accepted his invitation.

Her name was Vera Miller. She was cheerful and red-haired, and on the Saturday night – just over three weeks since he had killed another human being for the first time in his life – he made love to another woman for the first time in almost four years.

The next morning they made love again, and afterwards she told him that she was married. They discussed it for a while, and he realized that the fact worried her much more than it worried him.

The letter arrived on Monday.

Some time has passed since you murdered the boy. I have been waiting for your conscience to wake up, but I now realize that you are a weak person who doesn’t have the courage to own up to what you have done.

I have irrefutable evidence which will put you in jail the moment I hand it over to the police. My silence will cost you ten thousand – a piffling amount for a man of your stature, but nevertheless I shall give you a week (exactly seven days) to produce the money. – Do the necessary.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

A friend

Handwritten. With neat, sloping letters. Black ink.

He read it over and over again, five times.

4

‘Is something bothering you?’ Vera Miller asked as they were eating their evening meal. ‘You seem a bit subdued.’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It’s nothing,’ he assured her. ‘I just feel a bit out of sorts. I think I have a temperature.’

‘I hope it’s nothing to do with me? With us, I mean.’

She swirled the wine in her glass and eyed him solemnly.

‘No, of course not . . .’

He tried to laugh, but could hear that he produced a rasping sound. He took a swig of wine instead.

‘I think it’s all started so well, you and me I mean,’ she said. ‘I so much want there to be a second chapter, and a third as well.’

‘Of course. Forgive me, I’m a bit on the tired side – but it’s nothing to do with you. I think the same as you . . . I promise you that.’

She smiled and caressed his arm.

‘Good. I’d almost forgotten that making love could be as enjoyable as this. It’s incredible that you’ve been lying fallow for four years. How could that happen?’

‘I was waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Shall we go to bed?’

When she left him on Sunday, he found himself longing for her almost immediately. They had made love until well into the early hours, and it was just as she had said: it was almost incredible that it could be as satisfying as this. He crept back into bed and burrowed his head into the pillow. Breathed in her scent and tried to go back to sleep, but in vain. The vacuum was too vast. This really was amazing, bloody amazing.