The G File (54 page)

It could also be too late, he thought; but he didn’t say that.

‘All right,’ said deKlerk. ‘I’d already intended to do that, of course. But what else should we do, I meant?’

‘What else?’ muttered Bausen. ‘We must help Rooth and Münster. Check with the neighbours to see whether anybody noticed a blue Opel in Wackerstraat yesterday . . . And we can also cross our fingers – and arms and legs and eyes and everything else. Would you like me to come to the station?’

DeKlerk hesitated for half a second.

‘Yes, please,’ he said. ‘That would be best, I suppose.’

Münster and Rooth entered the Nolans’ house via a ventilation window at the back.

They then spent five or six minutes wandering aimlessly around from room to room in the vain hope of stumbling upon something that could give an indication of what had happened.

Always assuming that anything at all had happened.

‘What are we looking for?’ Münster wondered.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ said Rooth. ‘But if you find whatever it is, I’ll let you know.’

‘Good,’ said Münster. ‘I have always admired your ability to explain things.’

Rooth didn’t respond. Münster looked around the spacious living room. There was no trace of Elizabeth Nolan – not as far as they could see, in any case.

Or rather, nothing that suggested where she might have gone. Naturally there were plenty of conceivable legitimate reasons for her not being at home – they had already ascertained that the two cars, the Rover and the Japanese, were in their usual places in the garage and on the drive: but this was a fact that didn’t really throw light on very much. There were buses and trains, for example. Not to mention aeroplanes, if one had reason to travel rather further away. When Münster checked for the third time that fru Nolan was not in her bed, nor hanging in the wardrobe in her bedroom, he began to feel frustrated over the situation.

‘We’re getting nowhere,’ he said to Rooth, who had just come out of the bathroom for the second time. ‘We’re farting around like a pair of idiots. We’re wasting our time here. We must find something more rational to do.’

Rooth shrugged helplessly, and looked out of the window in time to see Beate Moerk and Probationer Stiller getting out of a car.

‘Reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Now there are four of us. Shall we take a neighbour each after all . . . and hope that they haven’t already left for work?’

Münster looked at his watch. It was twenty past seven, and he was still feeling sick. It had got worse, in fact.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I suppose it can’t do any harm.’

‘Coffee?’ asked deKlerk.

Bausen shook his head and sat down at the desk opposite his thirty-year-younger successor.

‘The S.O.S. messages have been sent out,’ said deKlerk. ‘They’ll be broadcast in news bulletins on the telly and the radio every half hour until—’

‘I know,’ said Bausen, interrupting him. ‘I heard it in the car on the way here. What’s happening in Wackerstraat?’

‘They’re busy interviewing the neighbours. Fru Nolan wasn’t at home. That doesn’t necessarily imply anything, but for the moment we have no other clues to follow up.’

Bausen nodded dejectedly.

‘It’s enough, I fear,’ he said. ‘If we take Rooth’s little detail seriously, and assume she in fact only pretended to pass out, well . . . In that case Elizabeth Nolan isn’t somebody to take lightly.’

‘It’s only quite a small detail,’ suggested deKlerk.

‘Maybe. But that doesn’t matter. We have an either-or situation, as they say.’

‘Either-or?’

‘Yes. If Rooth was right, we mustn’t make light of it. She tried to give the impression of being in shock, but in fact she wasn’t. That can only mean one thing. The death of her husband was not a surprise to her . . . And the next step isn’t difficult to take either.’

‘You mean she killed him?’ said deKlerk.

‘We can take that as a hypothesis. For the moment, at least. And that she presumably had good reasons for doing it . . . And so on. No matter how we think about it, it must all go back to that business fifteen years ago. Don’t ask me how. But for heaven’s sake, I’ve got to know Van Veeteren pretty well over the years, and I’ll be damned if he’s the kind of person who just disappears into thin air for no good reason.’

‘What do you think act—’ began deKlerk, but was interrupted by the telephone ringing.

He picked up the receiver and listened. Put his hand over the mouthpiece and informed Bausen in a stage whisper:

‘A woman with information. In connection with the S.O.S.’

He continued listening, asked a few questions and wrote down notes for a few minutes. Bausen leaned back on his chair and watched him attentively – and as it became clear what the call was all about, he began to feel something loosening up inside him. As if he had been holding his breath all morning.

Or had a firmly clenched fist in the middle of his solar plexus.

At last, he thought. At last something is being resolved in connection with this damned business.

But for God’s sake, don’t let . . .

He never formulated the thought. He didn’t need to.

‘I’ve finished now.’

She stood up from her place on the fallen tree trunk.

‘How do you know that?’

He clambered up out of the grave, stretched his back muscles cautiously and took hold tightly of the spade handle with both hands. Was careful to ensure that the blade didn’t sink into the ground, but simply rested on a tussock of grass.

‘I don’t think I want to lie any deeper than that.’

She examined the grave briefly and seemed to be weighing something up. He checked his watch. It was five minutes to seven. The forest had come to life now. He perceived it in a sort of distant and semi-conscious way: by means of sensual impressions that were so subtle, he never registered them singly. Or bothered to register them. Faint noises, faint smells, faint movements.

‘Close to heaven,’ he said. ‘I think I prefer to lie as high as possible. If it were your grave I would dig it a little deeper, of course.’

She had no answer to that. She just gritted her teeth so that her mouth became no more than a thin streak, and raised the gun.

‘May I have one final wish?’

‘One final wish? Let’s hear it then.’

She laughed. A little nervously, despite everything. He cleared his throat and grasped the spade handle even more tightly. Tensed the muscles in his legs and arms.

‘A bird. I’d like to see a bird as I die. Can you wait until one appears?’

He looked up at the pale sky above the trees. He heard her producing a sort of noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh.

Then he saw that she was also looking up at the sky.

Now, he thought.

He took a short pace forward and swung the spade.

Heard the shot and felt the pain at the same moment.

A pain so intense that he could never have imagined it. Never.

Then dazzling whiteness.

Then darkness.

Fru Laine was a widow, very old and as gnarled as the fruit trees that surrounded her house at the edge of the forest. When she came out onto the steps to greet them, she looked as frail and vulnerable as a spent dandelion – her transparent white hair formed a sort of halo over a face criss-crossed by a century’s worth of wrinkles. Within a year or two.

But her bright eyes indicated that there were wrinkles inside her as well, Münster thought – he was the first to shake her hand.

‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ she chuckled, kicking aside a speckled cat that came to rub up against the visitors. ‘I haven’t seen as many people as this at once since my ninetieth birthday! If you want coffee you’ll have to make it yourselves, as I need to take my morning nap shortly. I’ve been on the go since six.’

Münster nodded and assured her that wouldn’t be necessary. But she was certainly right in that there were several of them. The three cars had arrived at more or less the same time. Bausen and deKlerk from the police station. Himself, Rooth, Stiller and Moerk from Wackerstraat, where they had called off the knocking on doors as soon as they heard about what fru Laine had seen.

Six of them. Yes, she was justified in her comments.

‘So you saw that car, did you?’ asked deKlerk. ‘Whereabouts exactly? I was the one you spoke to on the telephone, incidentally.’

‘Down there.’

She pointed with a crooked index finger towards the edge of the forest. Five pairs of police eyes and a pair of former police eyes stared in the direction indicated. The road that meandered down to fru Laine’s house from the main road continued in diminished form – barely wide enough to allow the passage of a vehicle in fact – across the meadow and in among the tall, gently swaying aspens and beeches.

‘I go for a walk every morning with Ginger Rogers,’ she said in a voice loud enough for everybody to hear. ‘Every damned morning. To the sea and back – we both need the exercise. Rain or shine.’

‘Your dog?’ wondered Bausen.

‘My dog, yes. I recognize you by the way. She’s fourteen years old, and a mixture of just as many different breeds . . . I sometimes have to carry her home – she’s lazier than a priest, damn her . . . She’s fast asleep now in front of the stove.’

‘You heard the S.O.S. on the radio, is that right?’ asked Inspector Moerk.

Fru Laine nodded and adjusted her false teeth with her tongue.

‘I always listen to the news at half past seven. But you’ll have to sort it out yourselves now – it’s just a matter of following the road. The car’s a couple of hundred metres into the trees. It’s blue, as you said.’

Münster shook hands with her again, and thanked her. Fru Laine turned on her heel, went back to the warmth of her stove and closed the door behind her.

Stiller and Moerk were already twenty metres ahead of the others.

It was Stiller and Moerk who first came across the car. They paused and waited for the others to catch up.

‘Is that it?’ wondered Stiller.

‘I think so,’ said Moerk. ‘A blue Opel, registration number—’

‘That’s it all right,’ said Münster over her shoulder. ‘Hell’s bells.’

Rooth opened the driver’s door and peered in.

‘The keys are still in the ignition,’ he said. ‘Whatever that might mean.’

‘Open the bonnet,’ said Bausen. ‘It might be worth knowing if the engine’s still warm.’

Rooth put the keys in his pocket, found the right lever under the instrument panel and pulled at it. Bausen opened the bonnet and stuck in his hand. Münster did the same.

‘Not quite cold,’ said Bausen. ‘So it can’t have been standing here all night, in any case. What do you think?’

‘A few hours at most,’ said Münster. ‘But what that implies, I don’t know.’

Rooth slammed the door closed.

‘Bollocks to implications,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk about what to do next instead.’

Münster looked at the rest of those gathered there. They all seemed to be infected by the same tense unrest, the same suppressed worries that were bubbling away inside himself.

I’ll never forget this, he suddenly thought. This damned morning in this damned forest will keep on cropping up in my nightmares for the rest of my life. If this were a film I’d leave the cinema now and go home right away – I don’t want to be present when—

DeKlerk cleared his throat and interrupted his train of thought.

‘We have to search,’ he said, gesturing with his arm. ‘If we take this side of the road first . . . fifteen metres in, and, well, let’s keep on searching for ten or fifteen minutes. Then the other side, if we don’t find . . . anything.’

He looked round at them all, hoping for agreement. He found it at last from Bausen in the form of a nod and a curse.

‘All right,’ said Rooth. ‘Why not? What have we got in the way of weapons? If it turns out that . . .’

The rest of the sentence remained hanging in the cool morning air while each of them produced their service pistol.

‘I don’t have one,’ said Bausen. ‘But with all due respect, I don’t think that matters.’

‘It’s up to you to do whatever you think fit,’ said deKlerk.

‘Shall we get going, or are you going to hang around humming and hawing any longer?’ wondered Beate Moerk.

With a certain degree of ceremony they lined up along the narrow road, covering a length of about a hundred metres, and when deKlerk and Münster gave the signal from each end of the line, they set off searching among the trees.

‘Make sure you keep in eye contact with the persons nearest you,’ said the chief of police, ‘and don’t fail to shout out if you come across anything.’

Münster looked at his watch, and walked round an uprooted tree.

A quarter past eight. He felt a drop of cold sweat trickling down his brow.

It took less than five minutes, and it was Bausen who found it.

After an overgrown area of aspen and birch shoots he came to a small clearing with rye grass and fescue grass, and was confronted by a sight that made him stop short.

In front of him, only a few metres away, was a grave that had just been dug. There was no doubt about it. The hole was about two metres long and half a metre wide, and lay there like an open wound in the ground. Not especially deep – the dug-up earth was in a neat pile next to one of the long sides of the grave, and the spade was lying in the grass some distance away – but that was not the sight that made Bausen turn away and sick up the simple breakfast he had eaten that morning.

Only one-and-a-half metres away from the spot where he stood was a human head.

A woman’s head with dark hair and a wide-open mouth – and equally wide-open eyes, which seemed to be staring at him in a sort of frozen surprise.

And with a sort of totally grotesque smile. Blood and bloody innards had gushed out of the neck to form a dark pool, and he was reminded fleetingly – but just as grotesquely – of a dessert he had eaten with Mathilde at Fisherman’s Friend a few weeks ago.

Lemon chocolate sorbet with raspberry dressing.

Maybe that was why he vomited.

The rest of the body was two metres away, next to the spade, and it only took a second for Bausen to realize what must have happened.