The Truth and Other Lies (28 page)

“Now and again,” Henry continued, “Martha would talk to Ms. Hansen about how my work was progressing. Probably when they were out swimming. Betty would convey the gist of it to her boss Moreany and pass it off as her own editing. When I realized this I was outraged. I was furious. How
can
you pass off someone else’s creative efforts as your own? But my wife just laughed and said: Leave her alone. Everyone does the best they can. Everyone is good at something. That was Martha for you. She only ever thought well of people.” Henry looked once again at the photos of his decomposed wife on the board. “Now I think that was a mistake.”

“You said your novel had disappeared. Now it’s turned up again.”

“The novel was finished. The date of publication was fixed. After my wife had disappeared I gave Betty the manuscript. She was supposed to take it to Moreany. She didn’t. The manuscript must have been burned in the car with her. Have they found out what happened to her yet?”

You’ll never find her and you know it, thought Henry. Even he didn’t know where Obradin had dumped her.

At last Jenssen found the right question for the large number of answers lying around all over the place. “And how did you find it again, your novel?”

“I didn’t. Honor Eisendraht who’s now running the publishing house discovered it by chance. On a USB stick. Ms. Hansen had secretly scanned the manuscript. I don’t know why.”

The coffin was made of rough-hewn pinewood and very small. Four iron mounts were fixed to the sides. Henry had decided that his wife’s remains should be cremated. Martha would not have wanted anything else. That way, nothing would be left of her but a quick blast of fire and then ashes. The heavy steel plate of the cremation furnace rose, waves of heat poured out, an electric conveyor belt shunted the coffin inside, the wood combusted, white light dazzled Henry, and the steel plate descended again. The fan started up, the computer-controlled furnace performed its automated work. Henry thought there was a certain reverential air about the whole process with its lack of all human involvement.

Martha’s funeral took place not far from Moreany’s family mausoleum. In accordance with the cemetery’s regulations, the undertakers carried the urn to a hole that had already been neatly dug, edged with a square wooden frame and covered with a green mat of artificial turf. On the black granite stone was just her name without a date. There had been no death notice and Henry had not invited anyone to the interment; only he would see the urn disappear into the earth. It was an almost anonymous funeral. As Henry had never been interested in God or life after death, there was no priest present, and no one delivered a eulogy. A strange woman holding a watering can paused, then kept going to her dead husband’s grave.

As Henry stood in front of the hole that now contained the urn, he was overcome by an immense weariness and wondered what to do with the rest of his life. His guest performance as an author had come to an end. Sonja hadn’t been in touch since the storm. She must have realized that there’s no such thing as a complete life with a man like him, that everything remains a mere fragment. Henry had carried off the perfect crime, but now he was alone again. There would be no more novels published, no woman to wait for him, no child to come out of school, no one to welcome him home except his dog. Even the police would lose interest in him sooner or later. Henry was aware that he would leave nothing behind but a highly entertaining story of imposture—but to whom was he to tell it? The only thing left was to make himself scarce. The undertakers began to fill in the little hole. Henry watched them.

At the cemetery gate Jenssen was waiting next to Martha’s little bike. He had saved it from destruction, for the chronically jam-packed police exhibit room was being enlarged, and exhibits with no legal relevance were being destroyed. Henry didn’t ask Jenssen how he knew about Martha’s funeral. After all a policeman is paid to know about the movements and activities of a suspect. You pretty much expect him to know more than you think possible. Together they loaded the bike and Martha’s swimming things into the trunk of Henry’s Maserati.

“Have you found new questions for your answers yet?” Henry asked sarcastically as he shut the trunk.

Jenssen ran his hand through his hair, and his shirtsleeves strained over his monumental biceps. “I don’t understand you, Hayden. I’ve tried, but it’s no good.”

“What is there to understand?”

“You lose your wife. You see those appalling pictures and remain calmness itself. You don’t even cry.”

“If I cry, I can’t see anything.”

Jenssen waved this aside. “You save the life of a man who’s evidently following you and don’t say a word about it, but you pay his hospital bills. You don’t even know the guy. What makes you do it?”

Henry took off his dark jacket and threw it into the car. He took two steps toward Jenssen. “You’re a hunter, Jenssen. You hunt people. Why the devil don’t you shoot?”

Jenssen placed a leg behind him and pushed his shoulders forward. “I don’t hunt people. I search for the truth.”

“
In me?
” Henry yelled in his face. “There’s no truth in me. The truth has been eaten up by the fish, the truth has been burnt up in the furnace, the truth is ashes.” Henry calmed down again. “You think I’m a murderer. You’d like to hunt me down—and what do you do? You try to understand me. If you want to hunt, then hunt. If you want to understand, then start with yourself. But I can tell you now, you won’t find the truth.” Henry walked back to his car again. “If you call the deer, you drive them away. They don’t come until they feel safe.”

Henry got in and started up the engine. Jenssen laid his broad hand on the roof of the car and bent down to him.

“Where is your mother?”

———

The estate was in the waking coma of industrial decay, which had set in when the big corrugated-iron factory shut down in the seventies. The afternoon sun shone on the west-facing fronts of the remaining houses. Most of them were already abandoned. Only here and there were chest-high hedges still growing, and only some of the front lawns were mowed. Parallel to the street, a disused narrow-gauge railway formed a boundary to overgrown fields and heaps of rubble and slag. Sorrel grew between the sleepers, along with the occasional birch and Virginia creeper.

The iron gate at number 25 was secured with a padlock. Behind the fence, bushes ran wild. The path to the house was completely overgrown. “If you were interested in botany, I expect you’d find quite a bit here,” Henry said as he unlocked the padlock. “You don’t happen to have a machete on you?”

Jenssen immediately noticed the new, gleaming padlock. The men fought their way through the garden; in the high grass an animal made a rustling noise. Jenssen was struck by grass-covered heaps of earth.

“The brute lives there at the back.” Henry pointed to a low shed set among hazel bushes. Jenssen stayed where he was and shaded his eyes with his hand. The sun was noticeably lower at this time of day than when they’d first met in May. “I used to play in there when I was little. The shed was my palace.
Beauty and the Beast
—have you read it?”

“I’ve seen the film.”

Henry continued to forge ahead to the entrance of the house, which was boarded up with massive sheets of chipboard. Burrs caught on his mourning suit, but he ignored them. “Guess who I was?”

“The Beast?”

Henry laughed and pulled a key on a chain out of his pocket. “I had a feeling you were going to say that. Beauty—I was Beauty.”

Jenssen wanted to ask who the Beast had been, but refrained. The lock on the chipboard was new too. Henry unlocked it and lifted the chipboard from the door. Jenssen felt for the Heckler & Koch in the holster on his belt and released the belt-strap over the weapon. The front door showed clear signs of having taken a beating and was split lengthwise. Jenssen recognized the remains of a faded police seal still stuck on the old keyhole.

Henry pushed open the unlocked door. “You’re the first guest for a very long time. Make yourself at home.”

Sun fell through the open door into the hallway. The rest of the house was in darkness. Jenssen took his LED penlight from the inside pocket of his jacket. At the door the cement floor was still intact, but three paces in it had been broken up with a crowbar. Instead there were planks left resting on the foundations and on old iron girders.

“I bought the house seven years ago. It was municipal property, hadn’t been lived in all that time, and was, as you might expect, pretty cheap. Like everything around here.”

Henry picked his way across the planks like a cat. “Watch where you put your feet.”

Jenssen pointed his torch into the darkness between the planks. “Is that a cellar down there?”

Henry stood still. “The boiler room. Not brick—just clay and earth.”

Jenssen shone his torch into a small kitchen. Here too the floor was broken up, even under the stove, and, at every step, small insect shells cracked underfoot.

“Do you want to see the stairs?” Henry asked from behind. Jenssen followed him through a room full of nooks and crannies that might once have been the dining room to a narrow staircase with banisters, not much broader than his shoulders. An old synthetic carpet was still stuck to the stairs.

Jenssen looked up. The stairs were steep and not more than ten feet long. “Here?” he asked.

Henry climbed past and turned to face him. “My father landed right where you’re standing now.” Jenssen shone the torch on him from the bottom of the stairs. As soon as he moved the beam of light, Henry’s outline disappeared.

“You saw it?”

“I was standing up here.”

Jenssen let the light play up and down the staircase. “That was the same day your mother disappeared?”

“As I said, for a very long time I thought my mother had just gone to live somewhere else. I waited for her. Here in this house. But she never came back. There was never any sign of her. It’s over thirty years ago now.”

Jenssen climbed the stairs. “You said you were standing at the top of the staircase. Why the top?”

“My room’s up here. Come and see.”

Henry opened a little door. Jenssen stood beside him and shined his torch in. The floor was intact. The child’s bed stood under a boarded-up window. The bed was neatly made up and black with mold and mouse droppings. “My father came up to look for me. But I was hiding.”

“Where?”

“Under the bed.”

“Why?”

“He was very angry and disappointed in me. So he pulled me out from under the bed and asked me if I knew what the son of a whore was.”

“The son of a whore?”

“Yes, the son of a whore.”

“What did you reply?”

Henry laughed. “As I said, I was nine years old. At nine you don’t know what that is. I could imagine it was something bad. My father explained it to me. ‘Henry,’ he said, very quiet and friendly, ‘you’re the son of a whore, because your mother’s a whore. You’re not my child.’ That seemed instantly plausible.”

Jenssen scratched his head behind his ear. “And what do you think now?”

“Now I understand that he was angry with me, because I wasn’t his child, and the discovery must have been painful to him. But I didn’t know that at the time.”

“Even so, you call him father.”

“I have no other.”

“Why did he come into your room that night?”

“He came to get me. He pulled me to the top of the stairs. I clung to the banisters. He yanked at me with all his strength. Then my pajamas ripped. They were completely soaked because I’d wet the bed. He lost his balance and fell down the stairs. Forever.”

“What did you do?”

Henry laughed. “I went back to bed. Do you want to see the cellar?”

As they were fighting their way through the garden to the street, Jenssen stopped again. He placed a foot on a grass-covered mound of earth. “What’s this?”

Henry wiped the dust and burrs from his sleeve. “Holes. I dug everything up—looked for her all over the place. But I never found my mother.”

They reached the parking lot outside the cemetery after nightfall. For a while they sat beside each other in silence, then Jenssen opened the door. “Mr. Hayden, do you know where Betty Hansen is now?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here.”

“And where would you be?”

“At home with my wife.”

———

Henry Hayden disappeared without a trace before the novel was published. Contrary to all expectations, the book did not become a bestseller. Critics described the ending as strange and distressing. A year after Hayden’s disappearance, Obradin Basarić received a postcard from a stranger, on which was written in exquisite handwriting and brown ink: “Better always alone than never.”