Hakan Nesser - The Return

She stands up and makes her way to the stove. Switches on the light over the sink and fills a pan with water.

As it comes to a boil and she stands watching the bubbles break loose and rise to the surface, she thinks about Andrea.

Andrea, who is lying in bed on the other side of the wall behind the stove, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Two years old-two years and two months, to be precise, and she wants to be precise tonight-and lying there underneath Grandma’s crocheted quilt, sucking away at two fingers. She t h e r e t u r n

doesn’t need to see in order to know. The image of her daughter is everywhere; she can summon it up in her mind’s eye whenever she needs to, without any effort at all.

Andrea. The only child she will ever have. It is a miracle that she is alive, and all other considerations are as nothing, compared with that.

All others? she asks herself: But she already knows the answer.

Yes, all others. She takes the pan off the stove.

She sips her tea and opens the cotton curtains slightly. All she can see is the reflection of her own face and a strip of the inte-rior of the kitchen. She closes them again.

I dare not think, she admits to herself. I dare not think clearly. I must keep it at a distance. When the images crop up inside my head, I must learn to close the eyes of my soul.

Must.

They’ve found her now. That’s what she said in the shop, Mrs. Malinska, and there was both controlled and hysterical triumph in her deep voice.

They’ve found her over at Goldemaars swamp.

Dead.

Strangled.

Naked.

And suddenly, in this lonely kitchen, at this lonely hour, she shudders so violently that she spills her cup of tea over the table. The hot tea runs over the checked oilcloth cover and drips onto her right thigh, but several seconds pass before she is able to stop the flow.

It was that Saturday. Eighteen days ago, or however long it was. There’s been no sign of her since then, the slut; that’s when it must have happened.

That Saturday, in the afternoon. She can see so clearly in her mind’s eye as well. I’ll go and clear some brushwood, he’d said, and there was something in his voice and his obstinate look that she recognized and might well have been able to understand, if only she’d tried hard enough.

But why should she? Andrea was the important thing, and it’s Andrea that’s important now. Why should she have to understand what she doesn’t want to understand?

It was late when he came back home, and she knew something had happened. Not what, but something.

She could see it in his big hands as he wrung them, not knowing what to do with himself. In the blood throbbing guiltily through the veins in his temples. In his eyes, crying for help and a reduction in the pain.

In the horror that filled his body.

She had seen it, but not grasped what.

But now she is sitting here, and she knows. Dries her thigh with her hand and feels the pain come creeping back. She knows the girl must not be allowed to know.

Nobody must know. Least of all her. The image of Andrea floats back into her mind and covers all the burning and black knowledge she possesses with a protective balm.

The comforting angel.

The child of oblivion.

Nothing has happened. She has no suspicions.

Only that one.

She stands up once more and pads over to the cupboard; she shakes out two pills from the brown glass jar. Washes them down with a mouthful of water direct from her cupped hand.

For the pain.

For the sleeplessness.

For the dreams and suspicions and knowledge.

Why? she asks herself as she makes her way slowly back up the stairs.

I am so young. My life is close to its beginning, but already I’m bound hand and foot.

To this husband.

To this daughter.

To this aching body.

To this resolve to be forever silent?

From a distance, Munster estimated Leonore Conchis’s age to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five.

When he came nearer and they shook hands over the

smoked-glass counter, it was clear that he would have to add at least twenty years in order to get a little closer to the truth.

Perhaps it was this illusory circumstance that led her to submit to Munster’s questions in the rather dimly lit office; they sat back at opposite ends of a sofa that was so long, they had to raise their voices in order to converse.

So much for youth, Munster thought. A shadowy concept.

It had taken some considerable time to find her. She had changed her address more than ten times since living with Leopold Verhaven for a few months at the end of the seventies. And she had also changed her name.

But only once. She was now called di Goacchi, and for the last eighteen months she and her ancient Corsican husband had been running a boutique selling garish ladies’ clothing in the center of Groenstadt.

“Leopold Verhaven?” she said, crossing one black-nylon clad leg over the other. “Why do you want to interrogate me about Leopold Verhaven?”

“This isn’t an interrogation,” Munster explained. “I’d simply like to ask you a few questions.”

She lit a cigarette and adjusted her blood-red leather skirt.

“Fire away, then,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

I’ve no idea, Munster thought. It’s just that Van Veeteren instructed me to find you.

“Tell me about your relationship with him,” he said.

She exhaled smoke through her nostrils and looked bored to tears. Evidently she was not excessively positive toward the police in general, and it was clear to Munster that there was no point in trying to change that attitude.

“I don’t think it’s much fun either, having to root about in this kind of business,” he said. “Can we get it out of the way pretty quickly, so that I can leave you in peace again?”

That did the trick, it seemed. She nodded and wet her lips with an exaggerated and well-practiced movement of the tongue.

“All right. You want to know if he qualifies as a murderer of women. I’ve been asked that before.”

Munster nodded.

“So I gather.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “We were only together for a few months. I bumped into him by accident just as my second marriage hit the rocks. I was shattered and needed a man to look after me. To bring me back to life, you might say.”

“Could he do that, then?”

She shrugged.

“Are you married, Inspector?”

“Yes.”

“So I don’t need to mince words?”

“Not in the least,” Munster assured her.

“OK.” She pulled a face that might have been a smile. “He was a brutal lover. I enjoyed that at first, it was more or less what I needed, I suppose; but it became wearing in the long run. All that frantic fucking is only good for the first few times, and then you want to take things a bit more calmly, a bit more sensitively and more sophisticated-you know what I mean.

Obviously, a really rough screw can ginger up an aging relationship; but having that all the time isn’t much good, no thank you.”

“Exactly,” said Munster, with a gulp. “But he went at it like a bull all the time, did he?”

“Yes,” she said. “It became too much like hard work. I left him after a few months. It was a hell of a dump to live in as well, in the middle of the woods and all that. But maybe that’s also what I needed just then. . Trees and nature and so on.”

I find it a bit hard to imagine you in his henhouse, Munster thought, and found that he was having trouble keeping his face straight.

“So he was a bit rough, but he didn’t display any serious violence, did he?”