Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

Maybe this is the very table that Erich was sitting at, he thought.

He ordered the dish of the day from a waitress with blonde plaits: lamb cutlet with potatoes au gratin. And a glass of red wine.

It took half an hour, waiting to be served and then eating the meal. It didn’t taste bad at all, he decided. He had never set foot inside the place before, and for obvious reasons would never do so again; but as far as he could see they served decent food. Golfers in general probably couldn’t be fobbed off with any old rubbish, he assumed.

He gave the dessert a miss. Ordered a coffee and a little cognac in the bar instead.

Perhaps this is exactly where the murderer sat, he thought. Maybe I’m sitting on the very chair my son’s killer had occupied.

When the yellow-shirted barman came to top up his coffee, he took the opportunity of asking if he’d been on duty that evening.

Yes, the young man admitted. He had been. Why was he asking?

Van Veeteren thought for a moment before replying.

‘Police,’ he said.

‘What, another one?’ said the barman, looking somewhat amused.

‘Hmm,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I can imagine they’ve been here like a swarm of flies. I’m from a quite different branch.’

‘Which branch?’ the barman wondered.

‘Special Branch,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Maybe we could have a friendly little chat?’

The bartender hesitated for a moment.

‘Okay, I’m not exactly rushed off my feet at the moment,’ he said.

‘This sausage is a gift from the gods to mankind,’ said Rooth.

‘I can see you’re enjoying it,’ said Jung, eyeing his colleague who was chewing away with his eyes half-closed and an expression of celestial bliss. ‘I’m glad to see you have a spiritual side as well.’

‘It’s the garlic that does it,’ said Rooth, opening his eyes. ‘An excellent old medicinal plant. I have a theory.’

‘You don’t say?’ said Jung. ‘Is it the postage stamp again?’

‘Better than that,’ said Rooth, shovelling some potato salad into his cheek pouches.

Jung waited.

‘Can you make up your mind whether you’re going to eat or to talk?’ he said. ‘That would make it easier to eat my lunch.’

Rooth nodded and chewed away.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Something occurred to me as we were sitting upstairs, discussing the case.’

‘Go on,’ said Jung.

‘Blackmail,’ said Rooth.

‘Blackmail?’ said Jung.

‘Exactly. It would fit. Listen. Erich Van Veeteren is the blackmailer. He has some kind of hold on somebody, and has named a price for his silence. He drives out to Dikken in order to collect his cash. But his victim doesn’t want to pay up, and kills him instead. It’s as plain as a pikestaff, correct me if I’m wrong.’

Jung thought it over.

‘It’s not impossible,’ he said. ‘It’s a credible theory. Why didn’t you say anything about it during the run-through?’

Rooth looked a bit embarrassed.

‘I only thought of it towards the end,’ he said. ‘You lot didn’t seem all that amenable. I didn’t want to drag things out.’

‘You mean you were hungry?’ said Jung.

‘You said that, not me,’ said Rooth.

‘If you regard it as a sort of cancer,’ said Reinhart, ‘it becomes quite clear.’

‘White man, he speak with forked tongue,’ said Winnifred, who was a quarter aboriginal.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Explain.’

They were lying in the bath. The fact that Winnifred Lynch, born in Australia but grown up and awarded a doctorate in England, had moved in with Reinhart and given birth to his child was largely due to that bath. At least, that’s what she usually claimed when he asked her if she really loved him.

It was big and deep. And built-in. Adorned with an irregular mosaic pattern of small green and blue ceramic tiles on the outside, and fitted with an impressive array of copper taps in the middle. Big enough for two adults to half-lie in. One at each end. Like now. With their legs and bodies nicely intertwined. It had cost Reinhart two months’ wages to refurbish his bathroom twelve years ago.

But it had been worth it, obviously.

‘Cancer,’ he said again. ‘A cancerous growth forms metastases — if it doesn’t do so it often escapes detection. It’s the same with a lot of criminal cases, that’s what I mean. This business involving The Chief Inspector ’s son, for example. Are you with me?’

‘I’m with you,’ said Winnifred.

‘Good. We’ve established everything that can reasonably be established regarding what happened. But even so we’ve got nowhere, and that doesn’t bode well for our chances of solving the case… Unless it produces a few buds.’

‘Produces a few buds?’

‘Metastases,’ said Reinhart. ‘Something else has got to happen. That’s what I’m trying to explain. If you just commit an isolated crime — kill somebody, rob a bank or whatever — and leave it at that, well, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it. Especially if you are a pretty law-abiding citizen otherwise. But generally speaking it doesn’t stop at the initial growth stage. The crime gives birth to metastases, we discover them and trace them to where they came from, and so we solve the bloody case. Are you with me?’

Winnifred sighed.

‘Brilliant metaphorics,’ she said, and started wiggling her toes in his armpits. ‘Criminality as a cancer in the body of society. Clever stuff, I give you that. I haven’t heard anything quite as telling for several hours.’

‘Hmm,’ said Reinhart. ‘It was mostly that business of the metastases that I was after.’

‘All right,’ said Winnifred. ‘It has to produce a few buds, otherwise you won’t find Erich’s murderer — is that the point you’re making?’

‘More or less,’ said Reinhart. ‘We’re marking time at the moment. Or treading water if you want a more appropriate-’

He broke off because Winnifred had bitten him in the calf.

‘Ouch,’ said Reinhart.

‘Is there anything to suggest the production of a bud?’

Reinhart thought that one over.

‘How the hell should I know? Cancer is a mystery, isn’t it?’

‘Of course,’ said Winnifred. ‘But if you massage my feet and give me a few facts about the case, I’ll see what I can suggest.’

‘Fair deal,’ said Reinhart. ‘Remove them from my armpits.’

Ulrike Fremdli was displaying a new trait that he hadn’t seen before. A sort of caution. He had been thinking about it for several days, and when she collected him from the antiquarian bookshop at closing time on Thursday evening, he said as much.

‘Caution?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You look at me as if I were a patient,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Stop it. My son has been murdered: if I go out of my mind as a result, I’ll get more than enough of that bloody therapist’s look in the loony bin.’

‘What the hell…?’ she said. Then they walked in silence, arm in arm, past Yorrick’s Cafe before she stopped dead.

‘All right, you may be right. No more being unnecessarily considerate — but in that case you really must open your mouth now and again as well.’

‘Hmm,’ said Van Veeteren.

Ulrike looked at him with a vertical furrow between her eyebrows.

‘I’m with you in that grief doesn’t need to be expressed in words,’ she said, ‘but I refuse to believe that not doing so is the best way of honouring the dead. We ought to celebrate them instead of mourning them… Like they do in Mexico, or wherever it is. The Day of the Dead and all that. Silent grief is only of benefit to somebody who wants to wallow in it.’

Van Veeteren thought that over for a while.