Sascha Arango - The Truth and Other Lies

“Your heroes are men of action, Mr. Hayden,” Jenssen enthused by way of greeting. “Always something going on. And you never know what’s going to happen next. Strange happenings, dark secrets, dangers lurking everywhere, and really brilliant villains.”

Henry took to him at once. He wasn’t so keen on his female colleague who always stood half a pace behind him. She was skinny and obviously unqualified, because she didn’t know any of Henry’s novels.

“Do you have a photo of your wife?” she asked, without a trace of sympathy or understanding.

Henry went into his study and returned with a vacation photo of Martha and him together in Portugal. The policewoman examined it for a long time as if she wanted to creep inside it. Her pinched face with its narrow eyes under a bushy unibrow made Henry think of an opossum. Maybe he could pair her off with the marten in his roof at some point; it might result in some interesting offspring. The silver streaks in her dark hair seemed to suggest that she was severely over-acidified as a result of professional mistrust.

She passed the photo on to Jenssen and curiously sniffed at the air, which Henry found irritating. Was she somehow checking for molecules of guilt and fear? All dogs can smell fear; some can even smell epilepsy and cancer. Why not guilt? Guilt emissions must linger around everyone who is afraid of discovery or punishment. Fortunately there are not yet any devices finely tuned enough to detect such molecules. But they may yet come.

Henry’s suspicion intensified in the kitchen when the woman bent over the packet containing Martha’s clothes and sniffed it.

“What color is her swimsuit?”

“Blue. What do you smell?” he asked.

“Can we take this with us?” came her reply.

“Will I get them back again? They’re very private things.”

“How often did your wife go swimming in the sea?”

Her habit of not answering Henry’s questions was getting on his nerves. “My wife goes swimming every day. Even in the winter when it snows. She’s a fantastic swimmer. Do you swim too?”

“Do you know the sea here?”

“Only to look at. I don’t go in.”

Jenssen now showed off his nautical knowledge — no doubt a legacy from his ancestors — and described the strong northwesterly currents. There were often shoes washed ashore after swimming accidents, especially plastic shoes; they drifted as far as Greenland, sometimes with a foot still inside. Henry remembered Obradin telling him he occasionally saw ownerless shoes floating in the sea. He suddenly thought of Obradin. Why hadn’t he come to offer his condolences?

“But your wife wasn’t wearing swimming shoes when she went in the water.”

The opossum was pointing at Martha’s swimming shoes with her spindly finger. The blood rose in Henry’s throat when he realized his annoying mistake. He hadn’t been thinking. It was logical that Martha would have gone in the water wearing her swimming shoes — why would she leave them on the beach?

“To be honest, I’m surprised at that too,” Henry replied. “My wife always wears her rubber sandals when she goes in the water, because of the sharp stones. She has sensitive feet.”

“It’s possible,” put in Jenssen, who had noticed Henry’s stoic use of the present tense, “that her shoes were washed up and then blown over the beach by the wind. That’s why you found them.”

A good explanation. Henry was coming to like the fellow more and more. He decided to take a risk.

“You know all about this kind of thing, Mr. Jenssen. Is it possible that my wife was kidnapped?”

The policeman knit his brows. “Has anyone been in touch?”

Henry shook his head.

“Would you pay a ransom for your wife?” the evil colleague asked.

This question showed that her sense of smell was considerably better developed than her cerebral cortex. Of course he’d pay! No sum would be too large if it would bring back his wife.

“Money’s no object,” Henry replied with emphasis.

“Did your wife leave a farewell letter?”

Oh, these uneducated people! They didn’t know Martha. She wouldn’t have announced her suicide in writing or — worse still — given reasons for it. Everything she did, she did without giving reasons; everything was l’art pour l’art for her. Besides, it went against Martha’s fine sense of drama to announce something that then happened in any case.

“No. She didn’t want to say good-bye, definitely not. Not to me, and not to life.”

“Did she suffer from depression? Was she on medication?”

“She laughs a lot and likes eating fish, if that’s what you mean.”

The policeman ran his hand thoughtfully through his butter-yellow hair. He had no sense of humor. “If I may ask a rather straight question — you didn’t have any marital problems, weren’t planning to get divorced, were you? Just a question.”

Henry touched the skin under his right eye. The numb feeling was coming back.

“No way. Never.”

Afterward, Henry showed the two of them through every room in the house. He spoke quietly, answered all their questions, gave a detailed and truthful description of the search for his wife, and of how he’d made dinner for her the evening before — and then burst into tears standing in front of her empty bed.

Henry continued to speak of Martha in the present tense, as if she were still alive. He finished by showing them around the cellar, stables, barn, garden, and chapel. He gave them an old cardboard box for Martha’s clothes and then helped them lift her bicycle into the police car.

Jenssen gave Henry his card.

“Please let me know immediately if you find any trace of my wife,” Henry said as they parted. “No matter what it is.”

After they left, he fetched a heavy mallet from the barn and started to smash up the wall behind Martha’s bed.

There was something not quite right about Henry’s story. Martha hadn’t drowned on the beach. Betty didn’t believe she had returned home from the cliffs. What was clear was that her Subaru was still missing — who knew, maybe it was rusting away at the bottom of the sea with Martha in the driver’s seat. This all meant that Betty herself was mixed up in the affair. Strictly speaking, she was even partly to blame for Martha’s death, because she had stolen her husband from her — or had that been fate? If the car were to be found, there’d be a great many awkward questions. Betty decided to look on the bright side for the time being. Martha’s death had cleared the way for a life with Henry and the baby.

She remembered how Henry had once said that if you make your dreams come true you have to live with them. He’d made happiness sound like a traumatic experience you could never entirely come to terms with. He himself no longer had any dreams, Henry had added; he’d already achieved everything. Apart from that, Henry had revealed hardly anything about himself. He never spoke of his past, as if it were some unsavory thing that had to be hidden away before the guests arrived for dinner. If he spoke at all, he spoke about the time after Betty had met him. She had the feeling that, for each person, Henry chose a past to suit the occasion. He twisted it like a kaleidoscope, always revealing a different aspect of the same thing.

Moreany had proposed to her in his Jaguar in the parking lot outside the office. He spoke frankly of his feelings for her and of the fortune she would inherit when he was no longer around. Betty was surprised and genuinely touched. At the same time she felt another wave of nausea and asked him for some time to think it over, which she later regretted, because there wasn’t anything to think over. They parted with a kiss on the cheek. Moreany walked across the parking lot with a spring in his step; Betty unlocked her rental car to drive to the police. From long-established habit, she glanced up at the fourth floor. Honor Eisendraht was standing at the window.