Hakan Nesser - The Inspector and Silence

Suijderbeck shrugged.

‘Pretty awful. Girl aged thirteen or fourteen. Raped. Crushed larynx, I think. She was lucky in that it happened in reverse order.’

‘What do the forensic guys say?’

‘Dragged here, presumably,’ said Suijderbeck ‘There’s nothing to suggest that the violence actually took place here. But it’s early days yet.’

‘Sperm?’

Suijderbeck shook his head.

‘Apparently not.’

‘But raped nevertheless?’

‘Penetrated, in any case,’ said Suijderbeck with a sigh. ‘With something. And maltreated here and there.’

Van Veeteren shuddered. An elderly, hunch-backed man appeared behind the inspector. He introduced himself as Dr Monsen, and seemed to ring a bell, the chief inspector thought. Rightly, as it turned out.

‘Van Veeteren?’ exclaimed the newcomer when he realized who it was he was talking to. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Moved you on, have they?’

The chief inspector ignored the joke.

‘Do you know what this is all about?’ asked Monsen. ‘What goes on at this place, I mean?’

‘I’ll tell you about that later.’

‘I bet you will. Do you want to take a look?’

Van Veeteren sighed and put his hands in his pockets.

‘I suppose I’ll have to.’

He walked round the boulder and one of the kneeling forensic officers. Focused on what he couldn’t avoid seeing.

Leaning against the trunk of a large aspen tree – grotesquely illuminated by the floodlights – was the thin body of a little girl. Van Veeteren had had plenty of time to prepare himself for the sight, but the unedited reality nevertheless hit him like a punch in the solar plexus. The same old punch he’d felt so often before. Here and there – mainly around the groin, the neck and the chest – the pale corpse was stained by large dark patches, and her thighs were striped with dried blood. Her head was twisted almost unnaturally to one side, her tongue was sticking out slightly between her lips, and her eyes were fixed in an expression of pointless terror.

Clarissa Heerenmacht. He could even remember her name.

He worked out that it must have been about a day and a half since he’d been talking to her in that large room at the summer camp.

Then he felt a moment of dizziness before an attack of heartburn returned him to reality.

There’s something here that doesn’t add up, he thought before turning back into the darkness once more.

The forest was dense and full of brushwood.

He saw no sign of any animals or humans, but he could hear church bells ringing in the distance. Perhaps that was meant to give him the guidance he needed. But the chimes were faint and thin; they also seemed to shift slightly from one moment to the next, and the sound of his own steps in the blueberry sprigs and his heavy breathing constantly threatened to drown out the bells. He was forced to stop occasionally, cup his hand to his ear and listen for the peals; and every time he paused it was even more difficult to shake off the feeling that he’d been going round in circles, and was in fact standing on exactly the same spot as a few minutes previously.

Under the same aspen; that pale body of the little girl with the dark patches seemed familiar, to say the least. Or perhaps the whole forest was full of murdered teenagers, although that seemed undeniably somewhat exaggerated. He wiped the sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his jacket, and hurried on his way, stumbling over stones and fallen branches and tufts of grass. At last the bells were beginning to sound louder. A few minutes later he came to the edge of the forest and could see the church in the valley below, by the dark river. The last of the congregation were making their way in; he spurted down the final slope and just managed to slip inside as the heavy door started to close.

It was his own wedding; nevertheless he could feel no relief at having just made it in time. Only a certain sad feeling of resignation weighing down on his forehead and shoulders as he stood right at the back in the gloom, trying to recover his breath. His bride was already in place in front of the altar, waiting there in her wedding dress of pale, unbleached cotton; but her shock of hair was a promising chestnut-brown colour. He wasn’t sure if this was good or bad, on the whole. The congregation was lost in some sort of prayer, it seemed, and the bells were still chiming loudly as – with considerable dignity – he walked down the central aisle towards his future wife. When he glanced furtively in each direction, he could see that there wasn’t a single person he knew in the pews. Nothing but stern, unfamiliar faces, row after row of them; and nobody paid him the slightest bit of attention.

He finally reached the altar and placed his hand hesitantly on the bride’s shoulder; she spun round with a start so violently that the cheap wig she was wearing slipped to one side – and he could see that it was Renate. The same old Renate as ever, damn her, and with a sly smile on her lips she hissed: ‘Yesss! Now I’ve got you! This time you won’t get away!’ And when, filled with despair and justified anger, he turned to the priest – who had just washed his hands in a chalice of veined marble and was about to begin the rituals – he saw that the man had long, mouse-coloured hair and taped glasses, and realized he was in cahoots with the bride. There was no doubt about that at all. They were smiling at each other, the priest and the bride, and he had to acknowledge that the game was lost. The whole forest was full of dead girls, he was going to have to marry Renate again under the auspices of this accursed pagan prat, and no matter how desperately he searched through his suit pockets he couldn’t find his police pistol. The fact was of course that he’d forgotten it in some desk drawer in his office at the Maardam police station, as usual, and as he sank down in resignation – in a ridiculously long slow-motion sequence – to kneel beside his triumphant bride, the bells became even louder.

Swelled and contorted themselves in polyphonic variations that would have driven the old master Bach into a state of delirium, and eventually became so bizarre and unbearable that he realized he would have to put a stop to it all if he were not to lose the very last dregs of his sanity.

He stretched out a hand, lifted the receiver and answered.

It was Kluuge.

The chief inspector sat up and cleared his throat so loudly that he missed whatever the sergeant began by saying.

‘What did you say?’

‘Good morning, Chief Inspector,’ Kluuge repeated. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up?’

‘Of course not,’ said Van Veeteren, as usual, and fumbled for his wristwatch on the bedside table.

‘It’s half past eleven,’ Kluuge informed him. ‘I thought we’d better get going, so I’ve summoned the others to a meeting at two o’clock, to run through what’s happened so far.’

The others? Van Veeteren wondered – but then he began to recall what had happened during the night, and who had been present. A rapid subtraction suggested he could hardly have slept for more than four hours, and how Kluuge could sound so damned bright and cheery was a mystery. He preferred not to think about the possibility of it having to do with age and general condition. Not just now, at least. He cleared his throat again.

‘Sounds good,’ he said.

‘At the police station, naturally,’ said Kluuge. ‘But there’s something I’d like to consult you about first, Chief Inspector.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Van Veeteren.

There followed a few seconds of silence.

‘I don’t really know how to put this, but the business of who is responsible and so on…’