Hakan Nesser - Hour of the wolf

‘You don’t know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it,’ Reinhart had explained, blowing smoke into her face. ‘That applies to a lot of situations, Miss Police Inspector, not just the here and now!’

‘The chief inspector is as bright as a poodle,’ Moreno had answered. ‘And I mean a bitch, of course.’

The reward came at a quarter to three. She had emptied the half-full waste-paper basket (which was under the desk, and contained only paper of course — nothing that could decay such as apple cores, teabags or banana skins) onto the living-room floor, and had started working her way half-heartedly through it when she found it. It.

A crumpled, ruled sheet of A4 paper, torn from a notepad. Presumably the one on the shelf to the right over the desk. She smoothed it out and read it.

Five weeks since you murdered the bo

That was all. Six words only. Six-and-a-half. Written in a neat, somewhat sexless style, blue ink. She stared at the brief, interrupted message and thought for a couple of minutes.

Bo? she thought. What does bo mean?

Could it possibly be anything else but boy?

She shouted for Reinhart, who had come down from the attic space and was cursing with his head in one of the bedroom wardrobes.

‘Well?’ said Reinhart. ‘What have you found?’

‘This,’ she said, handing him the piece of paper.

He read the text and looked at her in confusion.

‘Bo?’ he said. ‘What the hell is the bo? The boy?’

‘Presumably,’ said Moreno. ‘You said something about not having the first link. I think we’ve got it here.’

Reinhart looked at the crumpled piece of paper and scratched his head.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Absolutely bloody right. Come on, it’s time for a bit of discussion.’

The run-through was brief and accompanied by neither wine nor sandwich layer cake. Such extravagances were no longer needed, now that the fog had started to lift, Reinhart explained.

The fog that had shrouded the cases of Erich Van Veeteren and Vera Miller. It was time now to see things clearly, and take action. No time-wasting speculations were necessary any longer. No theories nor hypotheses, they suddenly knew what it was all about and what they were looking for. It was time to… to tighten the noose round those involved.

Round Pieter Clausen and Aron Keller. The murderer and his blackmailer.

The only slight problem was that the noose would presumably be empty when they tightened it. Or so Rooth stated, as he unwrapped a Mozart chocolate ball.

‘Yes, it’s a real bugger of a case,’ admitted Reinhart. ‘There’s a long way to go before we have them under lock and key, let’s be quite clear about that; but we weren’t all that far out in our guesses, were we? Keller had some sort of a hold on Clausen and demanded money for not exposing him. He sent young Van Veeteren to collect the money, and we all know what happened then… God knows how Vera Miller was involved, but we’ve found wisps of her hair and lots of other traces in Clausen’s flat… Not least blood stains, in the bedroom and in the car. It’s as clear as day. He killed her in the same way that he killed Erich Van Veeteren.’

‘What about the link between Keller and Erich?’ deBries wanted to know. ‘There must be one.’

‘We don’t know yet,’ said Reinhart. ‘That’s something we still need to find out. And it’s not the only thing. Both Clausen and Keller have disappeared. Neither of them seems to have been seen since last Thursday… And it was also last Thursday that Clausen withdrew two hundred and twenty thousand from the bank. Something must have happened then, later that evening perhaps, and we’ve got to find out what. And we need to find them, of course.’

‘Dead or Alive,’ said Rooth.

‘Dead or Alive,’ agreed Reinhart after a moment’s thought. ‘They’re pretty similar types, in fact, these gentlemen, when you look a bit closer at them. Middle-aged single men with not much of a social life. Keller is a real lone wolf, it seems. Bollmert and deBries can look into whether he has any friends and acquaintances at all. His colleagues didn’t have much to say about him, at any rate… Isn’t that right?’

‘True,’ said Rooth. ‘There are only eight people working in the wooden leg workshop, but they all say that Keller’s a bloody pig-headed mule.’

‘Do they really say that?’ asked Jung.

‘They don’t express themselves quite as colourfully as I do,’ said Rooth, ‘but that’s the gist of it.’

Reinhart circulated a copy of the note Moreno had found in Keller’s waste-paper basket.

‘What do you say to this?’ he asked. ‘We found it in Keller’s place.’

Nobody spoke for a few moments.

‘Well, what do you reckon bo stands for?’

‘The boy,’ said deBries. ‘There’s no other possibility.’

‘Of course there is,’ Rooth protested. ‘Loads of them… Bosun, boxer, bowmaker…’

‘Bowmaker?’ said Jung, ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Makes bows,’ said Rooth. ‘You use them for shooting arrows.’

‘Very clever, Mr Sleuth,’ said Reinhart. ‘But I don’t think I can recall a bowmaker being found murdered. Nor a bosun nor a boxer, come to that — not lately, at least. Nor a bodybuilder nor a bobble-hat vendor… Okay, there are several other possibilities. We can agree on that, but for the moment let’s stick with the boy. There’s no doubt that’s the most likely. We can assume that Clausen killed a boy some time around the beginning of November, and that’s what set the whole thing off. We don’t know exactly when Keller wrote this note, but if we think in terms of an incident around the end of October-stroke-beginning of November — a week or so either way — let’s see what we can come up with.’

‘So it couldn’t refer to Erich Van Veeteren?’ wondered deBries.

Reinhart thought for a moment.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘He was almost thirty. And the time doesn’t fit in… “Several weeks since you murdered the bo”… No, that’s out of the question.’

‘All right,’ said deBries.

‘A murdered boy?’ said Jung. ‘Surely we must know if a lad was killed around that time? It can hardly have escaped the attention of the police. Not if it was in this district, that is…’

‘It doesn’t need to have been in Maardam,’ said Moreno. ‘And there doesn’t have to have been somebody suspected of a crime. It could have been something else. Something at the hospital he tried to brush under the carpet. Clausen, that is. And nearly got away with it.’

‘Not the hospital again…’ said Rooth. ‘The very thought makes me feel ill.’

Nobody said anything for a while.

‘He isn’t a surgeon, is he, this Clausen?’ said deBries. ‘So he doesn’t do operations?’

Reinhart checked the information he had on a sheet of paper.

‘Internal medicine,’ he said. ‘But you can kill somebody in that line of business as well. If you’re a bit careless, for instance. We must find out about deaths that took place on his ward during this period. Rooth and Jung can go back to the Rumford — it should be enough to speak to the doctor in charge. Or take a look at the journals, perhaps?’

‘A boy who died unexpectedly?’ said Jung.

‘A young male patient who died during the night,’ said Rooth. ‘Despite enormous efforts to save him. They have a fantastic esprit de corps, don’t forget that… And I think it would be best if you do the talking with Leissne. I seem to have got into his bad books.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Jung. ‘That’s astonishing.’

‘And what are you and I going to do?’ asked Moreno when their colleagues had trooped off.

Reinhart placed his hands on his desk and straightened his back.