Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

Two lives.

You now have two lives on your conscience. I have given you plenty of time to come forward, but you have hidden yourself away like a cowardly cur. The price for my silence is now different. One week (exactly seven days) is available to you for producing 200,000. Used notes. Low values.

I shall get back to you with instructions. Don’t make the same mistake twice, you won’t have another opportunity to buy your freedom. I know who you are, I have incontrovertible evidence against you, and there are limits to my patience.

A friend

He read the message twice. Then he stared out of the window. It was raining, and he suddenly sensed the smell of cold sweat in his nostrils.

Erich Van Veeteren was buried after a simple ceremony on Monday, 30 November. The service took place in a side chapel of the Keymer Church, and in accordance with the wishes of his closest relatives — especially his mother — only a small circle of mourners were present.

Renate had also chosen both the officiating clergyman and the hymns — in accordance with some sort of obscure principles she claimed were important for Erich, but which Van Veeteren had difficulty in believing. Besides, it didn’t really matter as far as he was concerned: if Erich had felt the need for spirituality, it was hardly likely he would have found it within the realm of these high-church ceremonies and under these menacing spires reaching heavenwards, he was convinced of that.

The vicar seemed comparatively young and comparatively lively, and while he spoke and proceeded through the rituals in a broad accent revealing his origins in the offshore islands, Van Veeteren spent most of the time with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in his lap. On his right was his ex-wife, whose presence he found difficult to tolerate even in these circumstances; on his left sat his daughter, whom he loved above everything else on this earth.

Directly in front was the coffin holding the mortal remains of his son.

It was difficult to look at it: perhaps that’s why he kept his eyes closed.

Kept his eyes closed and thought of Erich when he was still alive instead. Or rather, allowed the thoughts to flow freely: and it seemed that his memory picked out images completely at random. Some incidents and memories from Erich’s childhood: reading him stories on a windy beach, he wasn’t at all sure which; visits to the dentist, visits to the skating rink and Wegelen Zoo.

Some from the difficult period much later on: the years when he was a drug addict, the times in prison. The suicide attempt, the long, sleepless nights at the hospital.

Some from their last meeting. Perhaps these were the most important and frequent of all. As these more recent images rolled past, he was also uncomfortably aware of his own egotistical motives — his compulsion to derive something positive from that meeting; but if it is true that every new day carries with it the sum of all the preceding ones, he thought, perhaps he could be excused.

Today, at least. Here, at least, in front of the coffin. He had sat with Erich at the kitchen table at Klagenburg on that final occasion. Erich had come to return an electric drill he’d borrowed, and they had sat down to drink coffee and discuss things in general, he couldn’t recall precisely what. But it had nothing to do with his addiction to this and that, nothing to do with his ability (or inability) to take responsibility for his own life, or with social morality versus private morality. Nothing at all to do with those difficult topics, which had been discussed before at enormous length.

It was just chat, he told himself. Nothing to do with matters of guilt. A conversation between two people, it could have been anybody at all; and it was precisely that, the simplicity and insignificance of what they discussed, which provided the positive outcome of the situation.

Something positive among all the negatives. A faint light in the eternal darkness. He recalled yet again Gortiakov’s walk through the pond carrying a candle in Nostalghia. He did that often. Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia… And now, as he sat there in that ancient cathedral, in front of his son’s coffin, with his eyes closed, with the vicar’s measured litany floating up to the Gothic arches above them, it was as if… as if he had achieved a sort of kinship. Perhaps that was too much to expect; but nevertheless a kinship with so many weighty things. With Erich; with his own incomprehensible father who had died long before Van Veeteren had the slightest chance of getting to understand and become reconciled with him; with suffering and with art and with creativity — all possible kinds of creativity — and eventually also with a belief in something beyond this world of ours, and in the visions and ambitions of those who had built the church in which they were sitting… With life and death, and the never-ending passage of time. With his daughter Jess, who was leaning heavily on him, and occasionally seemed to be convulsed by a shudder. Kinship.

It works, he thought. The ritual works. The forms overcome doubts. We have learned over the centuries to weave meaning around emptiness and pain. A meaning and a pattern. We have been practising that for a very long time.

The spell was not broken until he processed past the coffin with Jess clinging to his arm — not until he had turned his back on it all and started to leave the chancel. Then he was hit by an ice-cold stab of despair instead; he almost stumbled, and had to cling on to his daughter in order not to fall. He was supporting her, she was supporting him. It seemed a vast distance to Renate on Jess’s other side, and he wondered why he found it necessary to keep her so far away. Why?

And once they were outside the heavy church door, standing in the drizzle, his only thought was: Who killed him? I want to know who it was that killed my son.

Who blew out the flame.

‘I haven’t finished sorting stuff out yet,’ said Marlene Frey. ‘Separating his things from mine, that is. I don’t know what is the usual thing to do in these circumstances. Is there anything you’d like to have?’

Van Veeteren shook his head.

‘Of course not. You lived together. Erich’s things are yours now, naturally.’

They were sitting at a table in Adenaar’s. Marlene Frey was drinking tea, he had a glass of wine. She wasn’t even smoking. He didn’t know why that surprised him, but it did. Erich had started smoking when he was fifteen… probably earlier than that, but it was on his fifteenth birthday that he’d caught him at it.

‘Please feel free to come and have a look a couple of days from now, in any case,’ she said. ‘There might be something you’d like as a souvenir.’

‘Photographs?’ it occurred to him. ‘Do you have any photos? I don’t think I have a single one of Erich from the last ten years.’

She smiled fleetingly.

‘Of course. There are some. A few, at least.’

He nodded, and eyed her guiltily.

‘I apologize for not having called round to see you yet. I have.. There’s been so much to do.’

‘It’s never too late,’ she said. ‘Call in when you have time, and I’ll give you a few pictures. I’m at home in the evenings. Usually, that is — maybe it would be an idea to ring first. We don’t need to make a big thing of it.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t.’

She took a drink of her tea, and he sipped his wine as a sort of half-hearted gesture of agreement. Stole a glance at her and decided that she was good-looking. Pale and tired, of course, but with clean-cut features and eyes that met his without deviating as much as a centimetre. He wondered what she had been through in her life. Had she had the same kind of experiences as Erich? It didn’t seem so: the tribulations always seemed to leave deeper traces on women. She’d been through her fair share, of course, he could see that: but there was nothing in her demeanour that suggested a lack of strength.