Herman Koch - Dear Mr. M

In a little while, his car would refuse to start. He would go walking with Herman and Laura, or only with Herman, or completely on his own, to Sluis — he figured he and Herman, just the two of them, was the most likely scenario.

Somewhere along the way he would have to shake Herman, he didn’t know how, but it shouldn’t be too hard. If need be he could just take off running, yes, that wasn’t such a bad idea. “He just took off running,” Herman would report later, it would sound completely unbelievable, so implausible that Herman would only incriminate himself.

Once he had given Herman the slip he would have to find a suitable place. A remote place, a hollow in the dunes close to the bird sanctuary, behind a bush or amid the reeds along a frozen ditch, a place where they wouldn’t find him too quickly, at least not before the next day, when the search began.

At that remote place he would use a big stone or a heavy branch (a stone would be best, but he wasn’t sure whether there would be any of those along the road or in the fields around here) to hurt himself so badly that he would lose consciousness. Practically speaking, he didn’t know whether it was possible to knock yourself out with a big stone (or a heavy branch). In any case, it would have to produce a lot of blood. He figured that he could let the big stone come down a few times on his nose, mouth, and eyes before he passed out. It would have to look like he’d been battered by someone who hated him. And even if he didn’t succeed in knocking himself unconscious with a final blow to the temple, that would be no real disaster. The most important thing was not to be found right away, at the earliest in the course of the next day — by which time, at this temperature, conscious or no, he would have frozen to death.

There were a few technical catches: he could leave no fingerprints on the stone (or heavy branch), but he would be wearing mittens anyway, so that was no problem. And then there was the snow, or the footprints in the snow, rather. Only his own footprints would be found, nothing belonging to a possible murderer. In selecting the remote spot, therefore, he would also have to make sure it wasn’t all too far from a road or path. A road or path with plenty of footprints from walkers and other passersby. From the path to the spot where the corpse (his corpse!) would be found, he would walk back and forth a few times to wipe out all the tracks. As though the murderer had tried to cover the tracks, he thought with a grin, lying in his cold bed in the attic.

Conclusions would be drawn swiftly enough. Everything would be brought out in the open, but what did that matter? He wouldn’t be around to see it.

A teacher visits two students at a house in Zeeland Flanders. He and the girl had once had a brief affair. The next morning his car refuses to start. The boy offers to lead him to a garage in Sluis. But they never get there. The boy returns home alone. His statements seem confused (to say nothing of suspicious). He just took off running. The next day (two days, three days, a week later), the teacher’s body is found in a ditch or a hollow in the dunes. His head has been battered with a large stone (heavy branch). An autopsy will determine whether he was beaten to death or whether it was the cold that killed him.

The accounts given by the two students sound less than believable. At first, both of them are held for questioning. But after only a few days the detectives assigned to the case will begin to doubt whether the girl is guilty. Because Laura herself, in the best of all possible scenarios, will have started doubting whether Herman has really told her everything. He came back to the house alone that day. The teacher had supposedly taken off on his own. Would Laura, in spite of everything, continue to believe in Herman’s innocence? It didn’t really matter much anymore. Her life, too, would be largely ruined. It wouldn’t be long before people began questioning her version of events as well.

That girl, do you think maybe she put that boy up to murdering the teacher?

After that the suspicions would never be completely dispelled, she would be associated with the murder for the rest of her life — as an accomplice. We’ll never really know the whole truth. That was enough, nothing else was needed.

It was already almost light in the attic; a gray, cloudy day, he noted after pressing his face against the icy window. The plan made sense, down to the slightest detail, even those details he himself could never have anticipated beforehand.

The teacher, Laura and Herman would claim, had said he’d only made a slight detour before driving on that day, or the next morning, to see friends in Paris. But it wasn’t a slight detour at all, you couldn’t call it that, not with the best will in the world. Wasn’t it strange that someone going to Paris would have no guidebook or map of that city in his car? Or at least a map of France?

Imagine that there was a thorough police investigation and that, besides the evidence already rapidly piling up, they discovered that the car’s battery was dead. Run down, because a battery doesn’t just go dead. When the battery was charged, the roof light would go on. Aha, so that was it! The car wasn’t locked. It would have been easy as pie for one of the students to sneak out during the night and turn on the reading lamp, so that the teacher couldn’t leave the next morning.

At that moment he had heard them talking downstairs, very quietly, almost in a whisper, but in this house every sound went straight through the thin wooden walls and floors. What could they be talking about? He had to go downstairs quickly now, he would surprise them by making breakfast. He would pretend to be cheerful. Most people on the verge of suicide were cheerful for the last few days, that’s what those closest to them always said afterward. The future suicide smiled a bit more than usual, he played games with the children, he told jokes — and the next day they found him hanging from a beam.

He shivered as he picked up his cold clothes from the chair at the foot of the bed. And as he put on his socks and shoes, he suddenly thought about his two daughters. His little daughters would grow up without a father. What’s more, for the rest of their lives they would be the daughters of a murdered father, a father whose life had been taken by brute force. He thought about his wife. In a certain sense, she would be getting her just deserts, she would never recover. She would feel guilty, about what he wasn’t quite sure, but he believed it was true: his wife would think she could have prevented his death if she’d been a little more accommodating. If she hadn’t threatened him with seeing his daughters less often, perhaps not at all anymore. With a little more compassion, she could have cured him of his obsession with a seventeen-year-old student. She would be consumed with regret at her own stubbornness. She would age quickly. Later, she would have a lot to explain to her growing daughters. But why did Daddy go away, Mom? Was it really so bad, what he did? Shouldn’t you have helped him instead?

And it was there and at that moment, as he pulled on his clammy socks and slid his feet into his ice-cold shoes, that he’d had his second brilliant flash of inspiration.

A modified Plan B.

Yes, he thought. That’s how I’ll do it. Much better. Better for everyone: not least of all for myself, but in any case better for my girls.

Landzaat and I would walk out to the Zwin. At that moment I didn’t know what I was planning to do out there, but whatever happened we were not going to Sluis, not to a garage.

In a certain sense it was all very illogical, I was quite aware of that. The sooner we found a garage, after all, the sooner Landzaat’s car could be fixed, and the sooner he could go away too, away, out of our lives.