Hakan Nesser - The G File

Lady Macbeth, he thought. Nice to meet you.

‘Dig,’ she reminded him. ‘If I’m going to explain a few things to you, I expect you to keep working while I do so.’

‘Of course.’

He started by measuring out the outlines. Scratched out an oblong shape with the edge of the spade — about two metres by sixty centimetres. He realized it was going to take quite a while. At least twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour.

His allotted time.

Assuming she didn’t lose her patience and shoot him sooner than that.

‘I’m sorry I needed to kill him,’ she said. ‘It was your fault — yours and that damned private detective’s. But he seemed to weaken somehow.’

Aha, he thought. She feels a need to explain herself.

‘Weaken? Hennan?’

‘Yes. It happened as he got older.’

He thought for a moment.

‘Men grow gentler with age,’ he said. ‘So do some women, I think. But if there is any of your victims that you don’t need to feel sorry for, surely it’s your husband?’

She regarded him with an expression he was unable to interpret.

Indifference? Contempt for men in general?

Or was she sitting there and wondering whether to increase the pressure on the trigger slightly? He thought it looked like it. Now, he thought. The time has come.

But nothing happened.

‘Don’t get any ideas into your head!’ she said after a while. ‘Don’t get any ideas at all. If you start getting awkward I’ll shoot you without further ado.’

For a moment he tried to imagine what it would feel like when the bullet entered into him.

Pain. A brief, white-hot pain of course — but where? Where would it begin, where would it spread to, and would he lose consciousness before he was actually dead?

Would it be all over in one second, or five?

He suppressed the thought. No matter what happened, there was no need to experience it twice.

‘Linden,’ he said again. ‘How did you manage that?’

She dropped her cigarette end on the ground and stamped it down into the soft soil. Changed her position on the fallen tree trunk. If I can get close enough to her, he thought, I can attack her with the spade.

One chance in a hundred, but those are the best odds I’m ever going to get.

‘She was a whore,’ she said. ‘Her name was Betty Fremdel — we collected her from Hamburg.’

‘Hamburg?’

‘Yes. We needed to go abroad, of course, so as to avoid the risk of anybody putting two and two together. We spent several weeks up there before we found her. But there are quite a few of her sort around the Hauptbahnhof. . Even a few who are not drug addicts — or there were at that time at least. Once we had chosen her, it was easy.’

‘What did you tempt her with?’

‘Making a film. Pornography, of course. We didn’t give her any details, but we paid her well. . Very well. And discretion was the order of the day, needless to say: she wasn’t allowed to tell anybody what it was all about, or where she was going. . She didn’t know herself, naturally. All she knew was that she was going to be away for a few days, making a film.’

She paused and seemed to be thinking it over.

‘I collected her up in Oostwerdingen and drove her down to Linden. I was wearing a blonde wig, it never dawned on her how similar we looked. . I had made a point of dying my hair the same awful reddish tint as hers. . And I even had a copy of her tattoo done on my arm — no, as I said, it was all pretty straightforward. And we’d waited a month before setting it up as well.’

She fell silent again. Van Veeteren thought over what she had said, but couldn’t think of any comment to make.

‘She was encouraged to wander around the house for an hour or two and drink a fair amount and leave fingerprints all over the place. Eventually we climbed up into the tower where we were going to take a few pictures. . we’d set up a camera there. She got undressed and put on the swimming costume. I stood behind the camera and pretended to film her, and as she stood there posing and showing herself off, I gave her a shove. I went down to check that she was dead, then I drove off and kept out of the way. Nobody had any doubt about it being me who was lying there at the bottom of the swimming pool. Did they?’

Van Veeteren stood up straight.

Good God, he thought. So incredibly straightforward. So brilliantly simple. Was it really possible?

‘Did they?’ she said again.

He realized that it was indeed possible. He recalled that they had tried to get dental records from the USA, but had never received anything. Not as far as he could remember, at least. No, she was right. Nobody had been in any doubt about it being Barbara Hennan lying there in that damned empty swimming pool. Nobody at all.

And that was why he was going to die?

After fifteen years of pondering, he now had the solution to the G File. He had received it from the murderer herself, and the price was going to be his own life.

It was as if there were a sort of justice in that.

Some logic, at least.

‘What about the identification?’ he asked nevertheless, mainly in order to keep the conversation going.

His final conversation.

‘Surely you remember that,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t present personally, but according to my husband everything went according to plan. As everybody suspected him of the murder, the question of the identity of the dead body was never raised. Verlangen swallowed everything — lock, stock and barrel. We had thought that he might be able to help us with the identification, but it wasn’t needed. It was enough with Jaan and that awful woman next door.’

‘Yes, I remember her,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Fru Trotta. But he identified you fifteen years later instead, didn’t he? Verlangen, that is.’

She gestured that he should continue digging, and he took hold of the spade once more. He had removed the surface layer now. Dug down a few centimetres and not yet encountered an impossible root or large stone. It will be obvious that this is a grave, he thought. Maybe they will find me one of these days, and move me?

‘Yes, he did,’ she said. ‘It cost him his life and two others besides. . And she hasn’t been resurrected, that prostitute. Can you see any point in him starting rooting around again?’

Van Veeteren had a fleeting memory of something he had discussed with Bausen years ago. During the axe-murderer case nine years ago.

About equations that should be left unsolved.

Chess games that should never be concluded.

Bausen had maintained that there were quite a lot of such phenomena, and that they had to be accepted. He had not been so sure.

And now here he was with the solution to the G File (Equation? Chess game?), and his own death was baked into the answer. Like that of Verlangen and G himself.

Yes, there was a certain logic in it. A necessity in a diabolical pattern.

Or was it a quite trivial pattern? And a quite banal evil? Why exaggerate things?

‘I hated him,’ he said. ‘Your husband, that is. I take it you know that he raped his little sister regularly for five years? He killed a little boy when we were at school as well.’

She didn’t react. Not as far as he could tell, at least. And he reminded himself that he was standing there talking to Lady Macbeth. Perhaps she had known about the little sister, perhaps not.

‘My husband didn’t hate you,’ she said after a lengthy silence. ‘He was merely contemptuous of you — so am I. You mustn’t think that all this talking will do you any good.’

‘Did you kill Philomena McNaught as well? Or was it him?’

She suddenly looked scornful. As scornful as a bad actor at an unsuccessful audition.

‘Together,’ she said. ‘We did it together. She was a terrible woman. Dig now, I’m growing tired of waiting.’