Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

‘Enlighten me!’ he said.

Moreno sat in silence for a while, sucking a pencil.

‘If he made up his mind to pay,’ she said in the end, ‘and actually did so… Well, there would be no reason for him to run away and hide, surely? Something more must have happened, I don’t know what, but it seems illogical otherwise. In any case, it can’t have simply been that he just coughed up. For God’s sake, two hundred thousand isn’t exactly pin money.’

‘Two hundred and twenty,’ muttered Reinhart. ‘No, you’re right, of course — but when we catch him we’ll no doubt discover the explanation.’

There was a knock on the door and Rooth came in, carrying a chocolate cake.‘Peace be with you,’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear the one about the obstetrician and the angels?’

‘Why not?’ sighed Reinhart.

It took Rooth a quarter of an hour to report on his conversation with Dr Brandt. Reinhart made notes while listening, then ordered Rooth to find the other ‘brothers’ and collect more information about Pieter Clausen’s all-round character. Plus what he had been doing and saying this last month.

‘Try to get Jung and deBries involved as well,’ said Reinhart. ‘So that you’ve finished the job by this evening. This Smaage character first of all, of course.’

Rooth nodded and left the room. He bumped into Krause in the doorway.

‘Have you got a moment?’ Krause asked. ‘I’ve spent the afternoon following something up.’

‘Really?’ said Reinhart. ‘What kind of a something?’

Krause sat down beside Moreno and opened a notebook with a certain degree of ceremony.

‘Van Veeteren,’ he said. ‘He phoned this morning and gave me a tip-off.’

‘A tip-off?’ said Reinhart, sceptically. ‘ The Chief Inspector phoned and gave you a tip-off?’

‘Yep,’ said Krause, and couldn’t resist a slightly smug smile. ‘He was careful to stress that it maybe wasn’t all that important, but I’ve done a bit of research in any case.’

‘Can you come to the point, or would you like an ice cream first?’ wondered Reinhart.

Krause cleared his throat.

‘It was to do with a name,’ he said. ‘Erich Van Veeteren’s fiancee — Marlene Frey — had found a name scribbled on a scrap of paper that she had forgotten to tell us about. Only a few days ago, it seems.’

‘And what was the name?’ asked Moreno neutrally, before Reinhart had a chance to interrupt again.

‘Keller,’ said Krause. ‘Spelt like it sounds. It was only a surname on a small scrap of paper. Erich had scribbled it down in haste just a day or two before he died, apparently, and it wasn’t a name in his address book. Anyway, there are only twenty-six people called Keller in the Maardam section of the telephone directory, and they are the ones I’ve checked up on… if for no other reason than that The Chief Inspector wanted me to. Hmm.’

‘And?’ said Reinhart.

‘I think there’s one that could be of interest to us.’

Reinhart leaned forward over his desk and gritted his teeth.

‘Who?’ he said. ‘And why is he interesting?’

‘His name’s Aron Keller. He works in the orthopaedic department at the New Rumford… In the prosthesis workshop, if I’ve understood it rightly. And he lives out at Boorkhejm.’

Reinhart opened his mouth to say something, but Moreno got in first.

‘Have you spoken to him?’

She could have sworn that Krause made a dramatic pause before answering.

‘No. They don’t know where he is. He hasn’t turned up for work since Friday.’

‘Christ almighty!’ said Reinhart and knocked eighteen cassettes down onto the floor.

‘His address is Malgerstraat 13,’ said Krause.

He tore a page out of his notebook, handed it to Inspector Moreno and left the room.

The search of Aron Keller’s flat in Malgerstraat 13 took place almost exactly twenty-four hours after the one at number seventeen.

As expected, it went quite quickly. The technical team had finished their work by as soon as half past twelve; after then there was no real reason why Reinhart and Moreno should stay on. But stay on they did for a few hours, in the hope (Reinhart insisted — and with no technical aids apart from our own five bloody senses, Inspector!) of finding clues that might possibly indicate what had happened to the loner of a tenant. And where he had disappeared to.

It was not an easy task. Everything suggested that Keller had not been in the flat since the previous Friday: he might even have gone off, or disappeared, as early as the Thursday night — he didn’t subscribe to any daily newspaper, but a considerable amount of mail lay jumbled up in the metal cage on the inside of the door, and the potted plants were shrivelled and half-dead in both the bedroom and the kitchen. The two large hibiscus plants in the bay window in the living room seemed to have fared rather better, but they were fitted with a watering system that only needed filling once a week.

Or so Moreno maintained — she had a similar set-up in her two-roomed flat in Falckstraat.

Everything in the flat was more or less immaculately neat and tidy. There was no washing-up in the kitchen. No items of clothing lying around, either in the bedroom or anywhere else. No newspapers, no overflowing ashtrays, no odds and ends where they shouldn’t be. The few books on the bookshelves, cassettes and CDs (three-quarters horse jazz, maintained Reinhart with distaste, the rest cheap versions of pop hits) were neatly lined up. Two pairs of well-polished shoes in the rack in the hall, a jacket and an overcoat on hangers. And the desk was as tidy as a display window for an office furniture firm. The same applied to cupboards, drawers and bureaux. The only thing Reinhart missed was small labels with the correct place and classification on every item — although if everything had been like this for the past twenty years, he realized after a little thought that such labels were not necessary.

What the flat told them about the man Aron Keller — apart from the fact that he had a fanatical feeling for order and neatness — was that he had an interest in sport. Especially football and athletics. There were a few books on football (yearbooks with red and green spines from as far back as 1973) in a prominent place in the bookcase, and several years of complete issues of the monthly magazine Sport Front, piled in a beer crate at the back of one of the wardrobes — the latest issue was lying on the kitchen table, and no doubt was the usual accompaniment to the Keller breakfast. In any case, that was the conclusion Reinhart drew, with an irritated snort.

Next to the telephone on the desk in the bedroom was an address book with a total of twenty-two people listed. Three of them were called Keller: none of them lived in Maardam (two in Linzhuisen, one in Haaldam) and Reinhart decided to postpone sorting out the precise family relationships until a bit later.

‘The man must have a square head,’ he said. ‘Finding him shouldn’t be a problem.’

Despite the obvious lack of leads, they stayed on until it turned three o’clock. Searched through every drawer and cupboard, examined every nook and cranny without really knowing what they were looking for. Reinhart also discovered a key marked ‘Store-room’, and spent an hour in the attic among old clothes, shoes and boots, tennis rackets, various items of furniture and some cardboard boxes full of comics from the sixties. Moreno found it a little difficult to understand why they were searching through the flat in this haphazard way, but she kept her counsel. She had no idea what the outcome might be, but knew that she would probably have made the same decision if it had been up to her…