The G File

The G File

van Veeteren [10]

Håkan Nesser

Sweden (2014)

Anyone walking along a beach sooner or later meets somebody else.

Unknown

She knew that she would wet the bed during the night, and she knew Auntie Peggy would be angry.

It was always the same. Whenever she had to sleep at Auntie Peggy’s instead of with her own mother, that’s what happened.

Mami. She wanted to be with Mami. To sleep in her own bed in her own room with her doll Trudi under the duvet and her doll Bamba under her pillow. That’s what ought to happen; and when it did happen and she fell asleep with the lovely smell of Mami in her nostrils, her bed was never wet when she woke up. Well, hardly ever.

Auntie Peggy didn’t smell anything like Mami. She didn’t want Auntie Peggy to touch her – and thank goodness, she didn’t do. But they slept in the same room, separated by a big blue curtain with splashes of red and some sort of dragon pattern, or maybe it was snakes; and sometimes other people slept there as well. She didn’t like it.

Neither did Trudi and Bamba. When they slept at Auntie Peggy’s, Trudi had to sleep under the pillow as well, so she didn’t get any pee on her. It was cramped and awkward – but obviously she couldn’t leave her dolls at home as Mami had suggested. Sometimes Mami could come out with the most ridiculous things.

One week, for instance, she had said: You can stay with Auntie Peggy for a week – I have to be away in order to earn lots of money. When I get back you’ll have a new dress and as much ice cream and goodies as you can eat.

A week was a lot of days. She didn’t know how many, but it was more than three and all that time she would have to sleep in that awful room with cars and buses driving past in the street all night long, hooting and braking and rattling non-stop. She would wet the bed, and Auntie Peggy wouldn’t bother to change the sheets, just hang them over the back of a chair to dry during the day – and Trudi and Bamba would be so sad, so very sad, that it simply wasn’t possible to console them, no matter how hard she tried.

I don’t want to be with that awful Auntie Peggy, she thought. I wish Auntie Peggy was dead. If I pray to God and ask Him to take her away and if He does that, I promise not to pee a single drop all night long: and when Mami comes to collect me next morning and takes me home, I won’t need to be here ever again. Never ever.

Do you hear me, God? Please send Mami back to me, and take away all the pee and Auntie Peggy. Kill her, or put her on an aeroplane to Never-Never Land.

She clasped her hands so tightly that her fingers hurt; and Trudi and Bamba prayed along with her as ardently as they possibly could. Perhaps things would turn out as she wished, despite everything.

On his way to work on Wednesday, 3 June, Private Detective Maarten Verlangen bought six cans of beer and six new vacuum-cleaner bags.

The first-named purchase was routine, but the second was exceptional. Not since Martha left him five years ago had his cleaning ambitions soared to such heights, and it was with a slightly unfamiliar feeling of a good conscience that he unlocked the steel door, treated with anti-corrosive paint, and occupied his office.

It was easily done. The room measured four by four by four metres, and no architect the world over would have dreamt of writing the word ‘office space’ on the plans. It was in one of the filthy old tenement houses at the far end of Armastenstraat, next to the railway line, and half a flight of stairs lower than the entrance to the building. It had presumably been intended from the start to be a sort of storeroom for the caretaker – a space where odds and ends needed by the tenants could be kept: spare lavatory furniture, shower hoses, hotplates and other utensils that frequently need replacing.

But now it was an office. Albeit scarcely a fashionable one. The walls had been covered from the start in dirty, earth-coloured plaster, the floor had been painted dark blue some twenty or thirty years ago, and the only source of natural light was a small sort of porthole at street level, i.e. just below the ceiling. The furniture was simple and functional: a desk and a desk chair. A grey filing cabinet made of sheet steel, a low bookcase, a buzzing 1950s refrigerator, a kettle and a threadbare visitor chair. Hanging on one wall was a calendar advertising a petrol station, and on another a reproduction of a gloomy Piranesi lithograph. The other two walls were bare.

Apart from the calendar, which Verlangen changed with the precision of a sleepwalker every year at the end of January or the beginning of February, the office looked exactly the same as it had done for the last four years. Ever since he had moved in, in other words. One should never underestimate the ability of one’s surroundings to provide one with stability and security, he used to tell himself. One should not despise the dust that the years deposit on our shoulders.

He switched on the ceiling light as the desk lamp was broken, hung up his light windcheater on a hook on the back of the door, and put the beers into the refrigerator.

He sat down on the desk chair and put the vacuum-cleaner bags in the top right-hand drawer of his desk. He had no intention of using them in the office, certainly not. The Melfi vacuum-cleaner he owned – one of the very few items he had retained after the divorce, possibly because it worked about as badly as his marriage had done – was in his flat in Heerbanerstraat. That was where he intended doing the vacuum-cleaning. That was where the limit had been reached. He wondered whether he ought to leave the bags out on the desk: if he put them away there was a risk that they would be forgotten and left in the drawer when he went home after work, but he decided to take that risk. Vacuum-cleaner bags were not among the items a client expected to see in the office of a private detective of repute.

Verlangen’s Detective Agency
. That is what it said on a simple but neat and tidy plate on the office door. He had made it himself and enclosed it in a plastic cover: it had taken him a whole morning, but the result didn’t look too bad at all.

He consulted his timetable for the day. He was due to attend a meeting at the insurance company in the afternoon, but that was all. He checked to make sure that there were no messages on the telephone answering machine, then took out a beer from the refrigerator and lit a cigarette.

He checked the clock: ten minutes past ten.

If I don’t have a client before noon, I’ll treat myself to a slap-up lunch at Oldener Maas, then shoot myself in the head, he thought and smiled grimly to himself.

It was a thought that came to him every morning, and one of these days he might actually do it. He was forty-seven years old, and the number of people who would miss him could be counted on the thumb of one hand.

She was called Belle, and was his daughter. Seventeen, almost eighteen. He contemplated her laughing face in the photograph next to the telephone directory, and took another swig of beer. Blinked away the tears that the bitter taste had brought to his eyes, and belched loudly.

How come that a swine like me could have a daughter like her? he wondered.

That was also a frequently recurring thought. Quite a lot of things kept coming back into Maarten Verlangen’s brain. Especially old, complicated questions that were impossible to answer. In occasional moments of clarity, this was a fact that could scare the life out of him.

But there was a remedy for fears that struck in moments of clarity. Luckily. He took another swig of beer and inhaled deeply on his cigarette. Stood up and opened the window. And sat down.

It was now thirteen minutes past ten.

She rang shortly before eleven o’clock, and turned up half an hour later.

Quite a tall woman aged about thirty-five. Auburn, shoulder-length hair. A narrow face with high cheekbones and delicate features. Slim and shapely, with strikingly prominent breasts. She was wearing well-fitting black trousers and a wine-red blouse with very short sleeves. Neatly plucked eyebrows. He thought she was beautiful.

She glanced quickly around the room. Paused for a moment when she registered the Piranesi print before finally focusing on Verlangen’s melancholy physiognomy.

‘Do you mind if we speak English?’

Verlangen explained that he hadn’t forgotten the language during the thirty minutes that had passed since they spoke on the telephone. There was a trace of a smile on her face as she settled down on the visitor chair. She crossed her legs and cleared her throat. Verlangen offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head and instead produced a packet of Gauloises from her red handbag and lit one with an elegant little gold lighter.

‘So you are a private detective, are you?’

Verlangen nodded.

‘There are not so many of those about nowadays, I gather?’

‘There are a few.’

‘Only five here in Maardam.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I checked the telephone directory.’

‘I don’t suppose they’re all in there.’

‘Really? That’s where I found you anyhow.’

Verlangen shrugged. Noted that she had a small tattoo at the top of her left arm, just underneath the edge of her blouse sleeve. It looked like a swallow. Some kind of bird, at least.

He also noted that she was a little sunburnt. She must have been soaking up quite a lot of sun already, he thought, despite the fact that it’s only the beginning of June. Her skin had a pleasant tone reminiscent of café au lait: he wondered what it would be like stroking it with the tips of his fingers.

But then again, perhaps she was just one of those solarium chicks?

‘What would you like me to help you with?’ he asked.

‘I’d like you to keep an eye on somebody.’

‘Keep an eye on somebody?’

‘Or whatever you call it. I take it that’s one of the things you do?’

‘Of course. And who is it you’d like me to keep an eye on?’

‘My husband.’

‘Your husband?’

‘Yes. I want you to keep an eye on him for me, for a few days.’

‘I see.’

He turned to a new page in his notebook and clicked his ballpoint pen a couple of times.

‘So what’s your name, if I might ask?’

She had declined to give her name over the telephone, and hadn’t introduced herself when she came to his office. She seemed to hesitate for a moment now as well, as she took a drag of her cigarette.

‘Barbara Hennan.’

Verlangen noted it down.

‘I’m American. My maiden name is Delgado. I’m married to Jaan G. Hennan.’

He had written as far as the middle initial before pausing.

Jaan G.
? he thought. Good Lord!
Jaan G. Hennan
.

‘We’ve only been living in this country for a couple of months – although my husband comes from Maardam originally. We’re renting a house out at Linden . . . Thirty kilometres from here – I take it you know where it is?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Could there be several people called Jaan G. Hennan? Maybe. But what were the odds against this being one of the others? And how? . . .

‘How much do you charge?’

‘That depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘The kind of work involved. The time it takes. The costs incurred . . .’

‘I want you to keep an eye on my husband for a few days. From morning till night. You won’t have time to undertake any other work.’

‘Why do you want him kept under observation?’

‘I’m not going to go into that. All I want is for you to check what he gets up to, and then report back to me. Okay?’

She raised an eyebrow and looked even more beautiful.

Classic, he thought. I’ll be damned if this isn’t a classic case. It wasn’t often that he felt like Philip Marlowe – not while he was sober, at least. Perhaps he ought to suck away at this sweetie for as long as it lasted . . .

‘It’s not exactly an unusual commission,’ he said. ‘But I do have a number of questions.’