Hakan Nesser - The Inspector and Silence

‘I suggest we go for a little walk in the grounds,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘It’s a lovely evening.’

She didn’t respond. Continued looking at him while leafing through the Bible and breathing through her half-open mouth. He wondered if she might suffer from asthma or some kind of allergy – it looked like it. After a while she nodded vaguely, and stood up. Matthorst, who had evidently been waiting outside the door, accompanied them along the corridor; as they passed the television room, the chief inspector gave him a nod as an indication that he could go back to watching his programme.

Or to more high-minded pursuits, always assuming he had any.

The sun had set by the time they went outside, and the groups of green and white people had gone indoors for the night. Van Veeteren let Mathilde Ubrecht choose the route, and they set off slowly in the direction of the pond at the other end of the grounds. North-west, unless he was mistaken. The evening breeze, the gentle whispering he had heard in the forest as he made his way up to Wolgershuus, had now died away altogether; the only noise remaining was their steps on the gravel, and Mathilde Ubrecht’s slightly strained breathing. There was a faint aura of tension over her movements, and he was careful to keep a half-metre behind her so as not to influence her route and possible decisions.

Nor did he say a word until they came to the artificial pond with water lilies and softly murmuring water trickling out of a mythological bronze statue. They sat down on one of the brown-coloured benches and Van Veeteren lit a cigarette.

‘I have three questions,’ he said. ‘Your silence is protecting a murderer. I take it for granted that you will give me honest answers.’

Mathilde Ubrecht didn’t react. Didn’t even indicate in any way that she had heard what he’d said. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and braced himself.

‘Question number one,’ he said. ‘Do you know who murdered Clarissa Heerenmacht?’

Silence. He contemplated the dark forest over the top of the high wall. She’s not going to answer, he thought.

‘No,’ she said.

Van Veeteren nodded. Allowed a minute to pass. Stubbed out his cigarette.

‘Number two,’ he said. ‘Do you know what happened to Katarina Schwartz?’

Another wait. Then she took a deep breath; he could hear the irregular wheezing in her bronchial tubes.

‘No.’

‘Thank you,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Oscar Yellinek Do you know where he is?’

She paused longer this time, but when the answer eventually came it sounded just as definite as the previous ones.

‘No.’

He sat for a while, mulling things over.

‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

Instead of answering she stood up and made a gesture indicating that she wanted to go back indoors. He nodded, and they started to walk back through the increasingly blue silence.

Matthorst was waiting for them at the entrance, and Van Veeteren realized he must have been watching them through the window.

He didn’t go inside with her, merely handed her over to a carer. But nevertheless he had a moment’s eye contact with her before she vanished through the door, and it was that farewell look that accompanied him all the way back.

Through the hospital grounds. Through the dark forest. Along the sparsely lit road back to the little town.

He had received three negative replies to his three questions. But also a look that said… Well, what did it say?

Intuitively – before he had begun to analyse and weigh everything up – he had no doubt about the answer:

I’ve told you the truth. Believe me.

But then it went off the rails. Did he dare to trust her? Did he really dare to believe that this mad priestess – or whatever epithet one chose to hang around her neck – really didn’t have any information worth telling him?

Be it about the murder, or the girl who had disappeared, or the shepherd who had done the same thing?

He knew that everything depended on his judgement of these matters. And of course it wasn’t out of the question that she had given him a mixed bag of answers – served him up two truths and one lie, or vice versa, and as he strolled slowly back to the little town, he had the impression that his journey was not unlike the usual tightrope walk – along the blurred and tarnished borderline between true and false.

How far could he trust her? How far could he trust her three negative replies? How much was his intuition worth on this occasion?

And when shortly afterwards he sat down in the dining room at Grimm’s Hotel, he still didn’t know. But nevertheless, he had made a few decisions.

For after all, somebody needed to make interpretations and solve doubts. Mene tekel.

Mene mene tekel.

Suijderbeck ignored the warning notice, instead flung the gate open wide so that the whole fence shuddered. Sure enough, half a second later two fifty-kilogram German shepherds came racing round the corner of the house.

Suijderbeck stopped.

‘Sit!’ he roared when the beasts were only two metres away and the adrenaline swirled like a cloud of steam around their jowls.

It had the same effect as usual. The dogs were transformed instantly into two phlegmatic black sheep whose only ambition seemed to be to sink down into the earth at the feet of their newly acquired master.

‘Shit-scared cowards,’ muttered Suijderbeck and continued along the gravel path.

A woman in cut-off jeans and a checked man’s shirt came out onto the patio, fists clenched by her sides. Suijderbeck paused and looked her up and down. Realized that a single barked command wouldn’t work in her case.

Although it would have been fun to try. No doubt about that.

‘Mrs Kuijpers?’ he asked instead.

‘And who the devil are you?’

‘Suijderbeck. Police,’ said Suijderbeck, walking up the steps with his hand outstretched politely to greet her.

‘ID,’ said the woman, instead of shaking hands.

Suijderbeck fished it out of his inside pocket. When he held it up ten centimetres in front of the woman’s face, he could smell the strong drink on her breath. He decided to remove his silk gloves.

‘I have a few questions to ask you,’ he said. ‘Would you like to come with me in the car, or can we sort it out here?’

‘What the hell?’ said the woman. ‘Coming here and-’

‘It’s about the murder at the summer camp,’ snapped Suijderbeck, interrupting her and gesturing with his hand towards the forest and the road he’d just come driving along. ‘I assume you’ve heard what’s happened.’

‘Of course.’ She immediately seemed rather more tractable, he noticed. ‘Er, please sit down.’

She sat down on one of the plastic chairs on the patio, and Suijderbeck sat down opposite her.

‘But we haven’t done anything,’ she said without being prompted. ‘I mean, Henry came out last spring, and since then we’ve lived like angels out here.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Suijderbeck.

‘Who the hell is it?’ a gruff-sounding man’s voice enquired from inside the house.

‘The police!’ shouted the woman in a tone pitched somewhere between hope and despair.

The man appeared in the doorway. A copy of his wife, in fact, Suijderbeck noted. Big, powerful, the worse for wear. Approaching fifty it seemed.

Mind you, only the woman sported bleached hair and a nose ring.

‘Kuijpers,’ said the man, extending a hairy hand. ‘I’m as innocent as a newly wed virgin.’

The wheezing splutter was presumably laughter. Suijderbeck lit a cigarette. What a pair of idiots, he thought. If I just hold my tongue, they’ll have confessed to illicit distilling and receiving stolen goods within a quarter of an hour.