Hakan Nesser - The Inspector and Silence

So as not to stir up any unnecessary suspicions, he parked the car some way short of the summer camp. Switched off the lights and set off walking along the dirt road. A full moon had risen over the lake, and made it possible to overcome the darkness. He began walking slowly along the narrow road – extremely carefully, and on the very edge so that his footsteps were swallowed up by grass and soil.

By the time he passed the main buildings, it was five past eleven and all the lights were out except for two. But he didn’t see a single person, nor could he hear any noises to suggest that somebody was around. Without pausing, he continued along the slight upward slope on the other side, counting his steps, and after about fifty metres he lit his torch and began looking for the path.

He found it with no difficulty. Before turning into it, he switched off the torch. Stood stock-still in the darkness for a few seconds, and listened again. But all he could hear was the faint soughing from the tops of the trees, the unceasing scratching of the crickets and an occasional love-sick frog from the edge of the lake. Resolutely, he switched the torch on again, and strode out along the path.

Fear took hold of him just as he was aiming the beam from his torch at the gigantic boulder. It suddenly occurred to him that the madwoman on the telephone maybe wasn’t quite as silly as he had presumed, and that it could be time now… Maybe it was only a matter of seconds before he was confronted by his first corpse. He could feel his mouth going dry almost instantaneously at that very thought, and his pulse pounding so relentlessly that he could hear his own blood.

He raised his torch and shone it into the trees.

There was no doubt. No doubt at all, to be honest; he raised the beam to shine into the crown of the tree, and could see with no shadow of a doubt that it was an aspen, a gigantic aspen growing just a few metres behind the boulder. Its whispering crown was hovering high above him in the darkness like a harbinger of evil deeds and God only knew what else. He shuddered, and shook his head. Imagination, he told himself. Nothing more than imagination. Fantasy, superstition and old wives’ tales. He walked around the rock and shone his torch onto the lower part of the trunk. Carefully shifted to one side with his foot several fallen leaves and twigs, and when he leaned forward to look more carefully he could see clearly – as clearly as possible – that the whitish object sticking out from the undergrowth was in fact a hand.

A perfectly normal, quite thin and bloodless little girl’s hand – and he had just enough presence of mind to move swiftly several metres to one side before sicking up both Deborah’s broccoli pie and the eight chocolates he had managed to consume while watching the television.

And it was clear to Sergeant Kluuge that at this very moment – this solitary, eternally long moment in the middle of the forest – he had been subjected to an experience which would cast its shadow over all other experiences for as long as he lived. Both negative and positive. Past and future.

I’ve just grown up, he thought in surprise. Grown up. It felt like having been cast out into a foreign, desolate land; a harsh but inevitable reality that he knew he would never be able to push to one side, or behind him, or indeed ever to get away from.

There was something else there as well: a sort of bitter satisfaction that was not to be denied, and that he couldn’t really come to terms with.

But this was not the right time for such speculation. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, switched off the torch and hurried back to the car.

Reinhart always used to claim that there was really only one foolproof method of kick-starting an investigation that had come to a dead end: drink a pint of whisky and four beers, and when you’ve gone to bed it’s guaranteed that within twenty minutes the phone will ring and you’ll be saddled with another corpse.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite as bad as that this warm evening in Sorbinowo, but when Van Veeteren read the two messages left by Kluuge, he decided he’d better take a long, cold shower before stepping out into the darkness.

A summer night’s no time for sleep! – the memory came back to him. Perhaps certain thoughts ought to be punctured before they had a chance to float up to the surface, he thought as he stood in the shower, trying to rinse the Burgundy out of his face. They had such a damned awkward tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies!

But nevertheless his ability to concentrate was slowly coming back.

What the hell had happened out there? Actually, Kluuge’s two messages had been as plain as a pikestaff. Especially the second one: Dead girl in Waldingen. Reinforcements on the way. Kluuge

I wonder if the press is there already, Van Veeteren thought as he stepped out of the shower. The bright young girl in reception didn’t seem to have had any difficulty in understanding the sergeant’s bulletins, at least. The chief inspector wondered if he ought to call Przebuda, maybe he hadn’t yet gone to bed; but he decided not to. Better to have mercy on him and let him have a decent night’s sleep. In any case, his time as a front-line reporter must surely be over by now.

When he climbed into the waiting taxi, it was a few minutes short of one o’clock. According to the receptionist Kluuge’s second message had arrived just before midnight, so there were grounds for assuming that both forensic and medical officers were already in Waldingen. Unless he was much mistaken, teams from Rembork would be closest at hand, but of course Kluuge would know all about that.

‘What the hell do you want to go out there for in the middle of the night?’ asked the podgy driver, and yawned so widely that the back of his neck was covered in creases.

‘Let’s go,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Switch off the radio and cut the talk.’

There were three other cars at the scene in addition to Kluuge’s. Sure enough two of them were from Rembork, and apart from the crime scene team they had also brought two detectives. Van Veeteren went over to the third car and peered inside: a young man with a beard and glasses was clutching a mobile phone. The chief inspector reached in through the open window and snatched the phone from his grasp.

‘What the hell…?’

Van Veeteren, Detective Chief Inspector. You are getting in the way of the investigation. Who do you work for?’

‘Allgemejne.’

‘All right. If you lie low for an hour, I promise to give you correct information instead.’

The young reporter hesitated.

‘How do I know you’re not tricking me?’

‘I never trick anybody,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Ask your editor-in-chief, he knows me.’

Kluuge appeared out of the darkness.

‘She’s lying up there,’ he explained, pointing along the road. ‘One of the Rembork boys is examining her. And the crime scene team is there as well, of course. She is… She’s been strangled and raped in any case, that’s very obvious.’

‘How long have they been here?’ asked the chief inspector.

Kluuge checked his watch.

‘Half an hour or so. I found her at round about twenty past eleven.’

Van Veeteren gestured towards the summer camp. There were lights in some of the windows in the main building, but the wings were in darkness.

‘What’s the state of play in there?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Kluuge. ‘The other detective is there, but I haven’t had time to check. Shall I go with you to… to where she is?’

Van Veeteren lit a cigarette.

‘It’ll be better to let them work in peace for the time being,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like to investigate what’s going on with the church crowd first. If you stay in the car, you can show me the body later.’