Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

… There’s no doubt that he’s right, but still we’re not getting anywhere. It’s a right bug- No, I’ll just have to learn to live with it.’

‘Do you think she was the blackmailer?’ asked Moreno. ‘Vera Miller, that is.’

Reinhart shook his head.

‘No, for some reason or other I don’t think so. Despite the fact that the story about her being linked to a doctor rings true. Why should a woman about whom nobody has a bad word to say stoop to something like that?’

‘Blackmail involves a weakness of character,’ said Moreno.

‘Exactly,’ said Reinhart. ‘Both axe murderers and wife beaters have a higher status in prison. Blackmail is one of the most… immoral crimes there is. Not the worst, but the lowest. Cheap, if that word still exists in this context.’

‘Yes,’ said Moreno, ‘I think you’re right. So we can exclude Vera Miller. And we can also exclude Erich Van Veeteren. Do you know what we have left?’

Reinhart poured out the last drops of wine.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve thought about that as well. We’re left with a blackmailer. And his victim. The victim is the murderer. The question is: has the blackmailer been paid yet?’

Moreno sat quietly for a while, swirling her glass.

‘I don’t understand how Vera Miller became involved in this,’ she said. ‘But if we establish that she’s linked with Erich, well we have

… I suppose we have somebody who has murdered twice in order to avoid paying. If the blackmailer isn’t as daft as the proverbial brush, he will have raised the price a bit and… Well, I’d suppose he was living a bit dangerously.’

‘I’d have thought so,’ agreed Reinhart.

He emptied his glass and lit his pipe for the tenth time in the last hour.

‘That’s what’s so bloody annoying,’ he said. ‘That we don’t know what’s behind it all. The motive for the blackmail. We have a series of events, but we don’t have the first link in the chain…’

‘Nor the last,’ said Moreno. ‘We presumably haven’t seen the last round between the blackmailer and his victim yet, don’t forget that.’

Reinhart looked at her with his head resting heavily on his hands.

‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘And a bit drunk. That’s the only reason why I haven’t said that I’m quite impressed. By your reasoning, that is. A bit, anyway.’

‘ In vino veritas,’ said Moreno. ‘But we could be quite wrong as well. It doesn’t have to be blackmail, and there doesn’t have to be a doctor involved… And perhaps there’s no connection at all between Vera Miller and Erich Van Veeteren.’

‘Oh, don’t start that,’ groaned Reinhart. ‘I thought we were just getting somewhere.’

Moreno smiled.

‘It’s midnight,’ she said.

Reinhart sat up on his chair.

‘Ring for a taxi,’ he said. ‘I’ll wake Rooth up.’

When he got home both Winnifred and Joanna were sound asleep in the double bed. He stood in the doorway for a while, looking at them and wondering what he had done to deserve them.

And what the payment would be…

He thought about The Chief Inspector ’s son. About Seika. About Vera Miller. About what would happen to Joanna in fifteen to twenty years’ time when young men began to take an interest in her… All kinds of men.

He noticed that the hairs on his lower arms were standing on end when he tried to imagine that, and he carefully closed the door. Took a dark beer out of the refrigerator instead, and flopped down on the sofa to think things over.

To think about what, if anything, there was he could be absolutely sure about regarding the Van Veeteren and Miller cases.

And what he could be fairly sure about.

And what he thought.

Before he had got very far, he fell asleep. Joanna found him on the sofa at six o’clock the following morning.

Winnifred had only one seminar on Monday morning, and would be home by noon. After a short discussion with himself, Reinhart phoned the childminder and gave her the morning off. Then devoted himself exclusively to Joanna. Brushed her teeth and hair, drew pictures and flicked through books, and had a nap between nine and ten. Ate yoghurt with bananas, danced and flicked through more books between ten and eleven. Strapped her into the child seat in the car at half past eleven and twenty minutes later collected mother and wife from the university.

‘Let’s go for a drive,’ he said. ‘I think we need it.’

‘Terrific,’ said Winnifred.

It was not difficult to decide to leave the police station to its own devices after the work put in over the last few days. On that December Monday the weather comprised equal doses of wind and a distinctly dodgy absence of rain. Nevertheless, they chose the coast. The sea. Walked along the promenade at Kaarhuis and back — Reinhart with a singing and shouting Joanna on his shoulders — and enjoyed some fish soup at Guiverts restaurant, the only one in town that was open. The tourist season seemed to be further away than Jupiter.

‘Ten days to Christmas,’ said Winnifred. ‘Will you really have a whole week off, as you tried to trick me into believing?’

‘That depends,’ said Reinhart. ‘If we solve the case we’re busy with, I think I can promise you two.’

‘Professor Gentz-Hillier is keen to rent us his cottage up at Limbuijs. Shall I accept?… Ten to twelve days over Christmas and New Year? It would be nice to live the simple life out in the wilds — or what does the chief inspector think about that?’

‘The simple life out in the wilds?’ said Reinhart. ‘Do you mean a log fire, mulled wine and half a metre of books to read?’

‘Exactly,’ said Winnifred. ‘No telephone and a kilometre to the nearest native. If I’ve understood it correctly, that is. Shall I clinch the deal?’

‘Do that,’ said Reinhart. ‘I shall sit down tonight and solve these cases. It’s about time.’

When he entered his office in the police station it was half past five. The pile of cassettes on his desk had grown a little, since during the day Jung, Rooth and Bollmert had been in contact with ten more doctors. There were also a few scribbled notes to the effect that nothing especially exciting had emerged from any of those interviews. Krause had submitted a report after having spoken to the Pathology Laboratory — the contents of Vera Miller’s stomach had been analysed and it had been established that she had consumed lobster and salmon and caviar during the hours before she died.

Plus a considerable quantity of white wine.

So he fed her pretty well before killing her at least, Reinhart thought as he lit his pipe. Every cloud… Lets hope she was a bit numb after drinking all that wine as well — but they’d known about that earlier.

He sat back in his chair and tried to recall the previous day’s conversation with Moreno. Cleared an area of his desk and took a sheet of paper and a pencil and began recapitulating with iron-hard, systematic logic.

At least, that was what he intended doing, and he was still hard at work half an hour later when the telephone rang.

It was Moreno.

‘I think I’ve found him,’ she said. ‘Are you still in your office? If so, I’ll be there shortly.’

‘Shortly?’ said Reinhart. ‘You have three minutes, not a second longer.’

He screwed up his iron-hard thoughts and threw them into the waste-paper basket.

Van Veeteren didn’t think the temperature in the flat had become much better than the previous time he’d been there, but Marlene insisted that there had been a significant improvement. She served tea, and they shared fraternally the apple strudel he had bought in the bakery on the square. The conversation was somewhat inhibited, and he soon realized that there was not going to be a straightforward lead-in to what he really wanted to talk to her about.