Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

‘I don’t think anything at all at the moment,’ said Moreno, following Reinhart to the lift. ‘Are you going to tell him about the course in Aarlach, or shall I do it?’

‘You,’ said Reinhart. ‘I bow to your feminine cunning and empathy. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much now that she’s been murdered. Maybe he’ll take it like a man.’

‘Of course he will,’ said Moreno. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’

Jung had arranged to meet Liljana Milovic in a cafeteria at Gemejnte Hospital. She had no idea why he wanted to talk to her, and he had the less than uplifting task of informing her that her friend and colleague had unfortunately been murdered, and that was why she hadn’t turned up for work this gloomy Monday.

Liljana Milovic was beyond doubt a beautiful woman, and in different circumstances he would have had nothing against holding her in his arms and trying to control her fit of sobbing. Come to think of it, he had nothing against it even in these circumstances — and in fact he spent most of their meeting doing just that. She slung her arms around him and simply wept, that was all there was to it. Slid her chair next to his and hung onto his neck. He stroked her slightly awkwardly over her back and her long, black hair which smelt of honeysuckle, rosewater and God only knew what else.

‘Forgive me,’ she sniffled over and over again. ‘Forgive me, I can’t help it.’

Nor can I, thought Jung, noticing that he had a large lump in his throat as well. Her flow of tears eventually ebbed away and she began to get a grip of herself, but she didn’t break off bodily contact with him. Not completely.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jung. ‘I thought they’d already told you.’

She shook her head and blew her nose. He noticed that the other cafeteria customers at nearby tables were glancing furtively at them. He wondered what they imagined was going on, and asked her if she’d prefer to move somewhere else.

‘No, no, it’s okay here.’

She had only a slight foreign accent, and he guessed she had emigrated from the Balkans when she was a teenager and her homeland was still called Yugoslavia.

‘Did you know Vera well?’

‘She was my best workmate.’

‘Did you meet outside working hours as well?’

She took a deep breath and looked sad. That made her even more beautiful. Under her high cheekbones were faint suggestions of shadow, something that always made Jung go weak at the knees for some reason. He bit his tongue and tried to become a police officer again.

‘Not so much,’ she said. ‘We’ve only been working on the same ward for a few months. Since August. What happened to her? In detail.’

She squeezed his hands tightly in anticipation of his answer.

‘Somebody hit her and killed her,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who.’

‘Murdered her?’

‘Yes, murdered her.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do we. But that’s how it is.’

She looked him straight in the eye, from fifteen centimetres away.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would anybody want to kill Vera? She was such a lovely person. What exactly happened?’

Jung looked away and decided to spare her the details.

‘It’s not quite clear,’ he said. ‘But we want to talk to everybody who knew her. Have you noticed at all that she seemed a bit worried lately in some way or other?’

Milovic thought for a while.

‘I don’t know, but these last few days perhaps… On Friday she was a bit… I don’t quite know how to put it. A bit sad.’

‘Did you speak to her then, on Friday?’

‘Not so much. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but now that you ask I do recall that she didn’t seem as happy as she usually was.’

‘You didn’t talk about that?’

‘No. We were very busy, we didn’t have time. Just think, if I’d known…’

The tears started to flow again, and she blew her nose. Jung looked hard at her and thought that if he didn’t have his Maureen he would have invited Liljana Milovic to dinner. Or to the cinema. Or to anything at all.

‘Where is she now?’ she asked.

‘Now?’ said Jung. ‘Oh, you mean… She’s at the Forensic Medicine Laboratory. They’re busy with the post-mortem…’

‘And her husband?’

‘Her husband, well…’ said Jung. ‘Did you know him as well?’

She looked down at the table.

‘No, not at all. I’ve never met him.’

‘Are you married yourself?’ he asked, and thought about what he’d read in one of Maureen’s weekly magazines the other day concerning Freudian slips.

‘No.’ She gave a little smile. ‘But I do have a boyfriend.’

He’s certainly not worthy of you, Jung thought.

‘Did she usually speak about her husband? How they were getting on together and so forth?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not often. I don’t think they had so good.’

That was the first time she had made a linguistic slip, and he wondered if it was a sign of something.

‘Really?’ he said, and waited.

‘But she didn’t say anything about it to me. She just said that things weren’t always so good. If you understand?’

Jung nodded and assumed he understood.

‘So you didn’t talk about… private matters?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you think she might have been interested in another man? That she was having a relationship with somebody else?’

Milovic thought that over before replying.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Yes, she may have been. Just recently, there was something.’

‘But she didn’t say anything about it?’

‘No.

‘And you don’t know who it could have been?’

Milovic shook her head and started crying again.

‘The funeral,’ she said. ‘When will the funeral be?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jung. ‘It probably hasn’t been decided yet. But I promise to tell you as soon as I hear about it.’

‘Thank you,’ she said and smiled through her tears. ‘You are a very nice policeman.’

Jung swallowed twice, but couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He slept until eight o’clock on Sunday evening.

When he woke up his first reaction was that something had broken inside his head. That the way he perceived the world had burst. He had dreamt about billiard balls rolling about non-stop on an enormous table without pockets or holes. Unfathomable patterns; collisions and changes of direction, a game in which everything seemed to be just as uncertain and yet as predetermined as life itself. The speed and direction of every ball as it scudded over the moss-green table was the secret code which contained within itself all future events and collisions. Together with all the other balls’ directions and codes of course; but in some mysterious way each individual ball also contained within itself the future of all the others in its own private Mobius curve — at least the ball that was himself did… An infinity of programmed future, he thought as he lay in bed, still trying to find a starting point and something to hold on to… This enclosed infinity. Some time ago he had read some articles on chaos research in one of the journals he subscribed to, and he knew that what was regulated by laws and what was incapable of being calculated could both very well be contained within the same theory. Compatible opposites. The same life.

The same marionette, dangling from those millions of strings. The same sloping plane. This accursed life. The images were legion.

The explosion itself, for that is what had produced the new direction, had happened when he hit Vera Miller on the head with the pipe. As he did so, he could see with absolute clarity that it had been inevitable from the beginning, but also that he couldn’t possibly have known about it.