Rupert Thomson - The Insult

Nina.

I was the one she’d left. I should’ve been the only one who was missing her. But suddenly there were dozens of us, all missing her in different ways: Karin Salenko, Jan Salenko, Greersen, Detectives Munck and Slatnick, Robert Kolan …

Christmas had been difficult for me. I stayed up late most nights and went for walks around the frozen lake, thinking of Nina. Once, on New Year’s Eve, I ventured out across the ice, my footsteps echoing as if in some great hall. A fine, powdery snow blew towards me, thin snaking lines of it, reminding me of electricity, or the way light moves on the surface of a swimming-pool. I would never see her again, yet images of her rose constantly before my eyes. In motel rooms, in cafés, in her car. Our dinner at the Metropole. Or the first night, in that mansion near the woods … I had to put her behind me, I knew that. My life would go on without her. Still, I thought it might be easier if I pretended she no longer existed.

To some extent, I must have succeeded. Because, when Munck came to me in January and told me that she’d disappeared, I wanted to say, I know. I made it happen. Like a magician. Of course, he was talking about disappearance at another level. A level that was, to me at least, irrelevant. As far as I was concerned, she couldn’t disappear any more than she already had. It’s the same as someone telling you that someone you used to know has died. Since you were no longer actively aware of their existence, from your point of view they might as well have been dead all along; you might even see their death as a form of overkill. Earlier in the evening Munck had said, They’re saying you could’ve done it. I was being blamed for something that had happened in another dimension. He might as well have told me that I’d killed a ghost. It was abstract, esoteric. Tautological.

I was floating now, the codeine dreaming in my blood. Slowly I turned away from the view. I noticed a car parked on the other side of the road. Its lights were dimmed.

Curious, I walked towards it. I thought I could see someone inside, a shape behind the wheel. But as I walked towards the car, it started to reverse.

‘Who are you?’ I called out.

It was moving backwards, silently, its lights still dimmed. I was already too far away from it to make out who the driver was.

I began to shout. ‘Visser? Is that you?’

I was running now, but I couldn’t keep up.

‘Visser?’ I was shouting. ‘What do you want?’

I watched the car withdraw into the darkness further down the hill. I stood on the road, uncertain what to do. A crack opened in my skull. White light poured in, bounced from one curved piece of bone to another. Gasping, I bent down. I clutched my head between my hands. My cane dropped away without a sound.

I tried to count the seconds — one … two … three … four …

Then I could see again. That codeine, it was dying on me. Or maybe I’d taken too much of it.

Walking back to Loots’ car, I didn’t look behind me once. I didn’t even listen for tyres on the road below, an engine firing in the distance.

But there was a fear.

The fear that, any moment now, I’d feel a gentle nudging at my legs and that, when I glanced over my shoulder, the car would be behind me, right behind me, its front bumper touching the back of my knees and no one at the wheel.

I parked Loots’ car outside his apartment and dropped his keys through the letterbox in an envelope. When he rang me later that day I still hadn’t been to bed.

‘You sound upset,’ he said.

I told him I was fine, just tired. There was a deadened area inside my head, like the shape a hare leaves in the grass where it’s been sleeping.

‘How did it go last night?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘She didn’t show up, did she?’

‘Well —’

‘I thought so.’

I asked him what he meant by that.

‘My car,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look as if it’s moved.’

I stood outside the building where Robert Kolan lived and looked both ways. Rain dripped from the trees on to the paving-stones below. The street was empty. As I paid the taxi-driver, I thought I saw a man in a herring-bone overcoat standing on the corner, but it must have been an illusion, the moon shining through bare branches, a chance pattern of light and shadow.

I’d called Kolan earlier to arrange a meeting. I had to talk to somebody about what Munck had said, and Loots and Gregory were no use to me; they’d just sympathise. I wanted somebody who knew Nina, and Kolan seemed the obvious, almost the only, choice. But when I called him, his first question was: ‘How did you get my number?’

I tried Munck’s theory on him. ‘There are intelligent life-forms out in space,’ I said, ‘and they’re watching you right now.’

‘Don’t give me that shit. I asked you a question.’

I grinned into the phone. ‘What are you so nervous about?’

‘I’m hanging up —’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Kolan’s paranoia didn’t bother me; I’d already prepared an answer. ‘Nina gave it to me once,’ I said. ‘She made me memorise it, in case of an emergency. She told me I had to call you first.’

He seemed satisfied with that. (I’d known he would be; it addressed his vanity.) And once that awkwardness was dispensed with, he agreed to see me.

It was an old house, with tall trees in front of it which resembled the trees outside the clinic. Pieces of plaster and roof-tile had fallen into the garden and a sun-dial lay under a bush, its markings cloaked in moss. Kolan had told me there was a flight of stone steps on the right-hand side of the house. His apartment was at the top. Though it was three in the morning, I could hear music. He was still awake.

I found a door at the top of the steps and knocked on it. I had to knock four times before it opened. Kolan stood there, holding a cigarette. ‘I thought you were the police again.’

‘They’ve been here then?’

He looked past me, into the darkness. ‘You’d better come in.’

The lighting was low in his apartment and there was a stick of incense burning. I watched Kolan as he sat on the threadbare carpet and began to roll a joint.

‘Was it Munck?’ I asked him.

‘They didn’t tell me their names.’

‘They always tell you their names.’

‘In that case, I forgot.’

He trickled grass into a cigarette paper that was already filled with a thin roll of tobacco.

‘The police,’ I said. ‘Did one of them chew gum?’

‘Christ, you’re as bad as they are.’

I sat down on a chair by the window. His music reminded me of the music they play when something unpleasant’s about to happen. You hear it in airports and mental homes. You hear it at the dentist as well. Sometimes you hear it as you lift out of an anaesthetic.

‘They told you about the car,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘They’re saying she might’ve been killed.’ I paused. ‘They think I might’ve done it.’

He licked the narrow strip of glue on the cigarette paper and stuck it down, then he ran his finger and thumb along the length of it several times, making sure it was sealed. There was a kind of fussy expertise about the way he built his joints. He should’ve been exhibiting at country fairs, along with the basket-weavers and the ceramicists.

‘I’ve even got a motive,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘She was leaving me. I didn’t want her to.’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘No.’ I reached into my pocket for my bottle of pain-killers. I tipped two pills on to my hand and knocked them back.

‘What’s that you’re taking?’

‘Codeine. For my head.’

‘Yeah, right.’ His joint crackled as he drew on it. He must’ve missed some of the seeds. ‘Her frame of mind,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking about it.’