Hakan Nesser - The Weeping Girl

After a few minutes he cleared his throat and stood up. Paced hesitantly back and forth for a while, then stood by the door.

‘I want to go out,’ he said. ‘I usually go out for a walk in the grounds at about this time.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Mikaela. ‘And I want you to tell me what happened. I’ve no intention of leaving here until you’ve done that. Is that clear?’

Her dad went out of the door without responding.

10–11 July 1999

‘So, you have to go back and continue the interrogation on Monday?’ said Mikael Bau. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

Moreno nodded, and took another sip of wine. She felt that she was starting to feel a bit drunk — but what the hell? she thought. It was the first evening of her four-week-long holiday after all, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last allowed herself to drink away her inhibitions. It must have been years ago. What inhibitions, incidentally?

She could sleep in tomorrow. Take a towel, saunter down to the beach. Lie down and lap up the sun all day. Have a good rest and let Mikael look after her, just as he’d said he would do.

And an hour or two’s work the day after tomorrow wasn’t all that much of a problem, surely? In the afternoon — so it wouldn’t affect her lie-in.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Just a couple of hours. He wasn’t as cooperative as he said he was going to be, that scumbag Lampe-Leermann.’

‘Scumbag?’ said Mikael with a frown. ‘I take it the inspector is talking off the record.’

Off the record? she thought as she shuffled around and tried to make herself comfortable on the sagging plush sofa. I suppose so — but for God’s sake, I’m on holiday after all! Mikael was lolling back at the other end of the outsize piece of furniture, and they had just about as much bodily contact as was compatible with a comfortable digestion process. He’d found a suitable fish, needless to say, just as he’d promised to do. Not just any old fish either: a sole that he’d cooked a la meuniere with a divine white wine sauce and crayfish tails. It was such a luxurious delight that she’d found it quite difficult to really enjoy it. The problem was striking a balance between gorging herself and doing justice to his culinary skills. Something to do with her ability to really let herself go, presumably. . But why should that be a problem?

When she admitted as much, he’d simply burst out laughing and shrugged.

‘Just eat,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to talk blank verse.’

She drank another slug of wine. Leaned her head back on the cushion and realized that she had a sort of idiot smile on her lips. It didn’t seem willing to go away.

‘Franz Lampe-Leermann is a scumbag,’ she declared. ‘Off or on the record, it makes no difference.’

Mikael looked mildly sceptical.

‘But why does it have to be you, and nobody else? Surely anybody can interrogate a scumbag?’

‘Presumably for the same reason that I’m lolling back here,’ said Moreno. ‘He likes me. Or rather, he likes women more than he likes men.’

‘Really? And so he can dictate how he’s going to be treated, can he? Is this the police force’s new softly-softly approach?’

‘I suppose you could say that. In any case, he prefers me to the local chief of police, and I have to say that I understand him. Vrommel isn’t exactly a breath of fresh air. .’

‘Vrommel?’

‘That’s his name. A stiff sixty-year-old, stiff-collared, stiff-necked pain in the neck and everywhere else you can think of. .’

She hesitated, surprised at how easily the words flowed over her lips. It must be that sauce, she thought. Summer, sun and Sauvignon blanc. .

‘I know who he is,’ said Mikael.

‘Who?’

‘Vrommel, of course.’

‘You do? How can you know who Vrommel is?’

Mikael flung out his arm and spilled a little wine.

‘The house,’ he explained. ‘This one. Don’t forget that I’ve lived here in the summer for the whole of my life. I know Port Hagen better than the back of my hand. Lejnice as well. . That’s the Big City in these parts.’

Moreno thought for a moment.

‘I see. But the chief of police? I assume this means that you are involved in criminal activities. . You and your family, that is.’

Mikael growled cryptically.

‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘Not exactly. I happen to remember Vrommel because he came here once. It must have been at the beginning of the eighties, when I was about fifteen or sixteen. One of my sisters had a friend who was mixed up in something. I can’t remember what. . Or didn’t know, to be more precise. Anyway, he came to interview Louise. . Or perhaps he interrogated her? Tall and red-haired, this Vrommel, right? A bit of a rough diamond.’

‘Bald as a coot nowadays,’ said Moreno. ‘But he’s certainly a rough diamond. . But why the hell are we lying here nattering on about bald policemen?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mikael. ‘It seems daft when there are hairy cops at much closer quarters.’

He took hold of her bare feet and started massaging them.

Hairy cops? Moreno thought.

Then she burst out laughing.

‘I think I need a walk along the beach,’ she said. ‘I’ve drunk too much. And gobbled too much sauce.’

‘Same here,’ said Mikael. ‘Shall we take a blanket? The moon’s shining.’

‘We can’t possibly manage without a blanket,’ said Moreno.

They got back from the beach shortly before dawn, and on Sunday she slept in until noon.

So did Mikael, and after breakfast, which consisted mainly of juice and coffee, they went out and lay back in a couple of deckchairs in the garden with more juice and mineral water within easy reach. Now that she’d had time to think about it, Moreno began to realize what a marvellous house she had come to stay in. A big and somewhat ramshackle wooden building with a veranda all the way round it and balconies on the upper floor. Creaking staircases and lopsided nooks and passages that were bound to make an indelible impression on any young child’s mind. Bay windows with dried flowers, old-fashioned scratchy window panes, and furniture from four or five generations and in ten times as many styles.

How the Bau family had come to own a place like this — its name was Tschandala, for some unknown reason — was hidden in the mists of time: nobody in the family had ever been known to have more money than was needed to buy their daily bread, Mikael insisted; but according to the most persistent theory of how the house had been acquired, it had been won by a certain Sinister Bau at a strange and notorious poker party at the beginning of the 1920s. It was also rumoured that the same evening he had lost his young fiancee to a Ukrainian gypsy king, so the family reckoned that honours were even and they had every right to own Tschandala.

Mikael Bau told her all this and more besides while they lay back naked in their deckchairs. The thicket of scraggy dwarf pine trees and Aviolis bushes was rampant and formed an effective screen so that they couldn’t be overlooked. Moreno kept asking herself if he were just making it all up on the spur of the moment.

But then, perhaps the whole situation was some kind of illusion? The house and the weather and the naked man who had just stretched out his hand and placed it over her left breast — surely it couldn’t all be real? It was more likely to be something she had dreamt up at home while lying in bed and waiting for the alarm clock to announce the arrival of yet another rainy Tuesday in November — that seemed to be far more likely, dammit.

She eventually decided that it didn’t matter in any case. She recalled that the Chief Inspector — Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, that is, who had weighed anchor and left the police station some years ago, and now spent his days in Krantze’s antiquarian bookshop in Kupinskis Grand — had once talked about that very thing. The fact that it didn’t matter two hoots if everything turned out to be no more than a film or a book. Or if it was real. The conditions were the same — even if it was by no means clear what they were, they were the same anyway.