Hakan Nesser - Borkmann's point

“Aah!” he said. “You are rising in my estimation, Mr. Chief of Police. This denotes without doubt the pinnacle of civili zation.”

Bausen chuckled.

“Exactly! What you see here is what will become my main occupation when I’ve retired. I’ve worked out that if I restrict myself to three bottles per week, they’ll last ten years. I doubt if I’ll want to continue any longer than that.”

Van Veeteren nodded. Why haven’t I been doing something like this? he thought. I must start digging the moment I get home!

It might be a bit problematic in view of the fact that he lived in an apartment block, of course, but maybe he could start by purchasing the goods instead. Perhaps he could rent an allot ment or something of the sort? He made up his mind to take it up with Reinhart or Dorigues as soon as he was back home.

“Please choose two for us to drink,” said Bausen. “A white and a red, I think.”

“Meursault,” said Van Veeteren. “White Meursault, do you have any of that?”

“A few dozen, I should think. What about the red?”

“I’ll leave that to the boss of the investigation team,” said Van Veeteren.

“Ha ha. All right, in that case I’ll propose a Saint Emilion ’71. If my friend the chief inspector doesn’t disapprove.”

“I expect I’ll be able to force it down,” said Van Veeteren.

“Not too bad an evening, on the whole,” he maintained two hours later. “It would be no bad thing if life were to be enhanced by rather more of this kind of thing-good food; intelligent conversation; sublime wines, to say the least; and this cheese.” He licked his fingers and took a bite of a slice of pear. “What do I owe you, by the way?”

Bausen chuckled with pleasure.

“Haven’t you figured it out? Put the Axman behind bars, for God’s sake, so that I can grow old with dignity!”

“I knew there’d be a catch,” said Van Veeteren.

Bausen poured out the last drops of the Bordeaux.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll have a whiskey to round it off later. Well?”

“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “It might be better if we take what you have to say first. You’ve been in it from the start, after all.”

His host nodded and leaned back in his chair. He kicked off his shoes and put his feet up on a wooden crate of empty jars.

Wiggling his toes for a while, he seemed to be lost in thought.

“God only knows,” he said after a minute or two. “I have so many ideas and loose ends buzzing around in my head that I don’t know where to start. I’ve spent most of today wondering if there really is a connection, when you get right down to it.”

“Explain!” said Van Veeteren.

“Of course we’re dealing with the same murderer; I take that for granted-for simplicity’s sake if for no other reason.

The same murderer, the same method, the same weapon. But the link between the victims-that’s what I’m a bit doubtful about. I’m a bit afraid of finding out something that we might jump at simply because we’ve found it. That they were on the same package holiday in Sicily in 1988, or were in the same hos pital in October 1979, or some other damn thing.”

“Two people always cross each other’s path somewhere or other,” said Van Veeteren.

“Something like that, yes, and the fact that they do doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. It can, but it doesn’t have to, by any means.”

“Don’t forget that we’re talking about three paths,” said

Van Veeteren. “The murderer’s as well.”

“Yes, fair enough; of course we have to look for the third link as well if we’re going to make a breakthrough. It’s just that I have the feeling it might be different in this case.”

“You mean that Eggers and Simmel might have been picked out at random?”

“Possibly,” said Bausen, staring out into the darkness. “Of course he has picked on Eggers and Simmel on purpose, but it’s not certain that they have much to do with him personally.

There could be much looser connections, as it were.”

“A list picked out at random from the phone book?” sug gested Van Veeteren. “There are precedents, as you know. Har ridge, if you remember him. He shut his eyes and stuck a pin into the Coventry edition of the telephone directory. Then went out and strangled them, one after another.”

“I know,” said Bausen. “One every Saturday… finished off five before they got him. Do you know what scuppered him?”

Van Veeteren shook his head.

“One of the people he’d picked out, Emerson Clarke, if I remember rightly, was a former boxing champion. Harridge simply couldn’t cope with him.”

“Tough luck,” said Van Veeteren. “But he ought to have taken the boxers off his list before he got started.”

“Serves him right,” said Bausen.

They both lit a cigarette and sat in silence for a while listen ing to the gentle rustling among the roses. A few hedgehogs had appeared and sniffed around before drinking from the saucer of milk outside the back door, and a few swallows were still sailing back and forth from underneath loose tiles. Perhaps not exactly the sounds and creatures of the jungle, but Van

Veeteren still had a distinct feeling of the exotic.

“Of course, we’ll be in a different position altogether if he beheads somebody else,” said Bausen.

“No doubt about that,” said Van Veeteren.

A cold wind suddenly swept through the garden.

“Do you want to go indoors?” asked Bausen.

“No.”

“And you don’t have any suspicions?”

Bausen shook his head and tasted his whiskey and water.

“Too much water?”

“No. Not even any… little glimmers of a suspicion?”

Bausen sighed.

“I’ve been in this job for more than twenty-five years. Half the population I know by name, and I know how they spend their lives-the rest I recognize by sight. There might be a thousand or two, newcomers and the like, whom I haven’t got a finger on, but apart from that… For Christ’s sake! I’ve thought about every one of them, I reckon, and come up with absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing!”

“It’s not easy to imagine people as murderers,” said Van

Veeteren. “Not until you meet them face-to-face, that is. Be sides, he doesn’t have to be from here, does he?”

Bausen thought for a moment.

“You might be right there, of course, but I doubt it. I’d stake all I’ve got on his being one of our own. Anyway, it would be nice to be able to come up with something useful.

For Christ’s sake, we’ve spent thousands of hours on this damned Eggers!”

“There’s no justice in this job,” said Van Veeteren with a smile.

“Not a trace,” said Bausen. “We might as well put our faith in the general public. They always come up with something.”

“You may be right,” said Van Veeteren.

Bausen started scraping out his pipe, looking as if he were turning something over in his mind.

“Do you play chess?” he asked.

Van Veeteren closed his eyes in delight. The icing on the cake, he thought.

Better make the most of everything that comes along. It looked suspiciously as if things might get more difficult.

It wasn’t only the radio station and the local press that had taken Chief of Police Bausen’s orders ad notam. On Sunday, several national newspapers issued a serious exhortation to the conscientious burghers of Kaalbringen to go to the police without delay with any scrap of information that might possi bly lead to the rapid capture of the Axman.

When Inspector Kropke and Constable Mooser compiled the results of the general public’s first day of sleuthing, quite a lot of things were crystal clear. It is true that Kropke had not had time to prepare any overhead projector transparencies before he addressed his colleagues in the conference room that evening, but everything was neatly set out in his notebook with detachable pages and dark-blue leather covers: