The Inspector and Silence (34 page)

He was taking a big risk, but he’d decided on that opening gambit. There weren’t really any other possibilities. No alternative moves.

She hesitated for a moment.

‘I think so.’

He could see that there was no point in rushing her. It was more important to give her plenty of time, and let things come out in whatever order seemed most natural to her. Or rather, least unpleasant.

‘We’d been together for eight years before I caught on,’ she began. ‘Eight years, and married for five.’

‘It can be something that suddenly strikes,’ he said. ‘It might not have been there all the time.’

She nodded.

‘I’ve tried to convince myself of that as well, but I don’t know if it would be much consolation. It’s so . . . well, so damned incomprehensible. It’s simply not possible to understand it, that’s the only conclusion I can reach. I just can’t get over it, I have to forget it and bury it. I thought that was my only chance – but now I realize that was also wrong, of course.’

She paused and rummaged in her bag. A waiter appeared, and without even asking Van Veeteren ordered coffee and cognac for them both.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said when she had lit a cigarette.

She scraped with her fingernail at a speck of candle wax on the tablecloth, and blinked several times. The chief inspector was holding his breath; it was his very presence that was digging up these old horrors, but he hoped to reduce the awfulness to a minimum.

‘It went too far,’ she said. ‘What I can never forgive myself for is that I allowed it to go on for so long, instead of reacting to the signs immediately. Over six months . . . I just couldn’t believe it was true. It’s the kind of thing you read about, and . . . Well, you know what I mean.’

Van Veeteren nodded.

‘It was in the bath that I caught him at it. Judith was only five, but old enough to understand what was going on. And to be ashamed. What was hardest to understand was that he could be so unconcerned about it.’

‘Did he admit it?’

She inhaled and took a sip of cognac before replying.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Or maybe yes and no. He pretended that he didn’t know what I was talking about, but on the other hand he agreed to an immediate divorce. He moved out – I made him move out the very same day.’

‘And you no longer meet?’

‘No. When I’d got over the shock I hired a lawyer, of course. Prepared myself for a fight, but there was no fight. He gave up everything and left us without saying a word. That’s what I regard as proof that he admitted what he’d done.’

Another pause. Van Veeteren snapped the toothpick and took a cigarette instead.

‘How far had it gone?’ he asked.

‘A long way,’ was all she said.

‘Did you have her examined?’

She nodded.

‘Yes, I wanted to know. Oh yes, he’d gone all the way. There was no doubt about it.’

The chief inspector felt a surge of disgust rising within him, and he emptied his glass of cognac as an antidote.

‘When exactly was this?’ he asked.

‘Four years ago,’ she said. ‘Four years and two months.’

‘You didn’t report him?’

‘No,’ she said, sighing deeply. ‘I didn’t.’

Van Veeteren observed her hands clamped round her glass. He could have reproached her now. Turned up the heat and asked how the hell she could have failed to follow up something as horrendous as that – but of course, there was no need.

No need to torture her any longer. The whole conversation had taken less than ten minutes, and it had turned out exactly as he’d expected.

Or dreaded, rather.

Knew it would?

‘I’ll try to make sure that you are not involved in what happens next,’ he said. ‘But it’s not easy to see how it will—’

She interrupted him.

‘I’ll say my piece,’ she assured him. ‘You don’t need to worry. I don’t want to make the same mistake twice.’

‘Okay,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I’ll be in touch when the time comes.’

They shook hands again, and he took his leave. When he emerged into the street, he was shivering. It was a chill that had nothing to do with the warm, pleasant summer evening. Nothing at all.

He found a public telephone and called Sorbinowo again, but all he got was a recording of Miss Miller’s voice informing him that the police station was now closed for the day, and providing two numbers to call if he had relevant information to provide regarding the Waldingen affair.

Oh yes, Van Veeteren thought. I have relevant information all right.

But he didn’t make any further calls. There were still several question marks – with regard to Yellinek’s death, for instance – and what he would most like to do was to serve up the solution to his colleagues on a plate. All done and dusted.

That had a whiff of vanity, of course; but if this really was to be his last case, perhaps he could be forgiven that.

And needless to say there was nothing – nothing at all – better able to eliminate any further question marks than a car journey. A long, calm drive through the night.

He pondered for a while. Then made up his mind: together with Penderecki.

Yet again Penderecki.

‘It’s five to twelve,’ said Reinhart. ‘We might as well go straight to the hotel. I wouldn’t have thought they’d still be sitting around deliberating.’

‘We can always phone and check,’ said Jung. ‘Mind you, I don’t know what we can say about these ladies.’

‘Good God, no,’ groaned Reinhart. ‘Although Lauremaa had a point when she talked about them having their differences.’

‘She certainly did,’ said Jung, suppressing a yawn. ‘But surely there was something distinctly unchristian about them, don’t you reckon?’

The visit to Wolgershuus was over and done with, and perhaps the word ‘unchristian’ was not the most appropriate in the context. But when Jung tried to sum up his impressions, he couldn’t think of anything better off the top of his head. All he knew was that he’d never experienced anything like it. Never ever.

So unchristian. Even so, they had followed the agreed tactic to the letter. Discretion. Professional approach; no more fuss than necessity and the law required. Without too much effort they had found a neutral room, away from the main corridors, and summoned the women in order to pass on the news without further ado.

The news of Oscar Yellinek’s death.

One at a time. First Madeleine Zander.

Reaction: none at all. She listened to them for half a minute, then turned on her heel and left the room. Jung thought he had noticed a few twitches at one side of her mouth, but that was all. There was no denying the fact that both he and Reinhart had felt somewhat uncomfortable after that first round – and when Mathilde Ubrecht was ushered in and presented with the same unvarnished facts as her friend, Jung at least was worried that they were going to be faced with the same silent reaction all three times. The same rigid autism.

But that was not what happened. Instead, in the case of Miss Ubrecht, it was a dam bursting. Before they had the chance to take in what was happening, she had already lashed out with several blows and kicks (Jung’s head, Reinhart’s shin, Jung’s back), hurled a chair and a vase across the room and run screaming straight into a wall. The latter – they assumed, at least – was a desperate attempt to knock herself senseless. They eventually forced her down to the floor, and by the time the significantly more hardened medical orderlies arrived, her bellowing had begun to sound more like a sort of epileptic gurgling. The older of the two orderlies produced a syringe and without any hesitation stuck it into her stomach, whereupon she lost consciousness after about ten seconds.

To be on the safe side, the orderlies stayed in an adjoining room when it was time for the third confrontation – with Ulriche Fischer, to whom Jung had already spoken. But when Reinhart delivered the news to her face, this time very cautiously and on his guard, she reacted at first as silently as Madeleine Zander. But then she slumped down over the table, her arms clasped round her head, and burst out crying.

‘I expected this!’ she whimpered, rubbing her fists back and forth over her face and the top of her head. ‘There was no other explanation! He would never have abandoned us like that! He just couldn’t!’

Not much more was said, and Inspector Jung at least was so shattered by now that he felt nothing more than extreme and genuine gratitude to the doctor who had been summoned in connection with Miss Ubrecht’s outburst, who hurried into the room and wondered what the hell was going on.

‘Routine investigation,’ Reinhart explained. ‘But we’ve finished now.’

Jung felt ready to drop when he clambered out of the car in the car park outside Grimm’s Hotel. So much so that he firmly declined Reinhart’s offer of a nightcap, and instead went straight to his room and collapsed onto the bed without having taken off anything but his jacket and shoes.

A hell of a Wednesday as somebody had said.

There was something about Penderecki.

Something about this pain-filled Polish requiem that was quite unlike anything else he knew, and which almost without exception made him feel liberated. Cleansed, and as tall as a cathedral.

Touched by the divine, as Mahler would have said. His good friend the poet, that is. Not the composer.

And of course it was also to do with suspense. Suspense loosening its grip, and suspense building up; a sort of acupuncture of the soul, and an escape route away from the torments of the flesh. Probably also Mahler’s words, he assumed . . . Something that applied to all music, in fact; but nowhere else was it so clear and so painfully beautiful as in Penderecki.

And it was in this space, under this dome of cruel clarity that he drove the two hundred kilometres from Stamberg back to Sorbinowo.

And in that space that he solved the remaining questions in the Waldingen case.

This case that had been going on for two weeks now. No matter how he calculated this never-ending period, filled with evil, it was no more than fourteen days since he had stood in the car park and gazed out over the idyllic summer vista and the dark, glittering water.

Two weeks.

Two raped and murdered young girls. A priest beaten to death.

A burned-down church and a sect in meltdown.

That was the gist of it.

The yield of his final case. A pretty good conclusion, he thought. No doubt about that.

And the solution, what could you say about that? It had come to him via a mundane telephone directory. Thanks to an extremely trivial misspelling. The familiar old thought about lines and patterns and tuning in to existential processes felt so straightforward that he didn’t even bother to keep it in mind.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, he thought. At least one difference between real life and a game of chess.

No, better to try to anticipate what would happen in a few hours’ time, and to concentrate on what remained to be done. The conclusion. Confronting the guilty people with what they were accused of. Making them give in and confess. Make them face up to the overwhelming proof, and watch them break down.

The last verse. The checkmate manoeuvre.

In the lowest possible number of moves.

Needless to say he was tempted to leave this to the others, but it was his duty, he knew that. That as well.

Patterns as patterns.

He allowed himself only a five-minute stop on the way back to Sorbinowo, and when he finally walked through the door into Grimm’s Hotel after an absence of four days, it was no more than half past midnight. He asked to check the hotel ledger, and five minutes later he knocked on the door of Reinhart’s room with two beers in each hand.

Two light and two dark.

For the first time since that afternoon in the boat he felt the stimulus. That tingling feeling in his groin and thighs, and he knew that the time had come once more. Time to come to terms with it.

After watching a rather insipid action thriller on the television, he went to bed around midnight, tried to masturbate himself to sleep, but wasn’t up to it. Lay awake for a few hours, waiting while the urge grew stronger and stronger and eventually dominated more or less every nook and cranny of his being. The compulsion. That evil instinct.

In the end he got out of bed. It was only just starting to get light, and he hesitated for a moment. Stared out of the window at the narrow bands of red over the forest to the east. Thought about the girls. About their outspread legs and fluffy cunts. Their naked helplessness. Then he dressed, checked to make sure he had the condoms in his breast pocket – the little extra pleasure he derived from rolling them into place was not to be scoffed at. He smiled at his indistinct reflection in the mirror, tiptoed down the stairs and out through the kitchen door.

Fetched his bicycle from the shed. Checked the tyre pressure and secured the rubber baton to the luggage carrier. Set off.

It took him twenty minutes to get to the main road. The regular pedalling sparked off an impulse that aroused images in his mind’s eye of what was in store, overpowering and with no room for mercy.