‘It’s hard to say goodbye,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s hard.’
‘You never get used to it. But I suppose there’s a point to that as well.’
Parting is a little death, he almost added, but he managed to keep that thought to himself.
‘I don’t like airports,’ she said. ‘I’m always a bit frightened when I’m going to travel somewhere. Erich was the same.’
He nodded. He hadn’t known that, in fact. He wondered how much there was he didn’t know about his children. How much he had missed over the years, and how much could still be repaired or discovered.
‘But I didn’t know him all that well,’ she said after a while. ‘I hope I’ll grow to like Marlene — it feels as if through her he’s left traces of himself behind. I hope to goodness all goes well. It would be awful if…’
She didn’t complete the sentence. After a while he noticed that she had started crying, and he gave her hand a long squeeze.
‘It feels better now, at least,’ she said when it had passed. ‘Better than when I came. I’ll never get used to it, but I occasionally feel almost calm now. Or maybe one just feels numb after all the crying. What do you think?’
He muttered something in response. No, he thought. Nothing goes away, it all just gets worse as time passes. Worse every day as you grow older.
As they began to approach the airport she let go of his hand. Took out a paper handkerchief and dried her eyes.
‘Why did you really pack up being a police officer?’
The question came out of the blue, and for a moment he felt on the spot.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I’d just had enough… I suppose that’s the simplest explanation. I felt that quite clearly, I didn’t have to think deeply about it.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I suppose there’s quite a lot one doesn’t need to think deeply about.’
She paused, but he could hear that she had more on her mind. Had a good idea of what it was as well — and after a minute she started again.
‘It’s odd, but I’ve started to think about something I didn’t think at first would worry me at all… In the beginning, when I first heard that Erich was dead.’
‘What exactly?’ he asked.
‘The murderer,’ she said. ‘The one who did it. I want to know who it was, and why he did it. I want to know that more and more. Do you think that’s odd? I mean, Erich’s gone, no matter what…’
He turned his head to look at her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s odd at all. I think it’s one of the most natural reactions you could possibly imagine. There’s a reason why I packed up being a police officer, but there was a reason why I started as well.’
She looked at him and nodded slowly.
‘I think I understand. And you still think that?’
‘Yes, I still think that.’
She paused before her next question.
‘How’s it going? For the police, I mean. Do you know anything? Are they in touch with you?’
He shrugged.
‘I don’t know much. I’ve asked about it, but I don’t want to poke my nose in too far. When they get anywhere they’ll let me know, of course. Perhaps I’ll give Reinhart a ring and ask how they’re getting on.’
They arrived. He turned into the multi-storey car park, up the narrow ramp, and pulled up in front of a grey concrete wall.
‘Do that,’ she said. ‘Find out how far they’ve got. I want to know who killed my brother.’
He nodded, and they got out of the car. Twenty minutes later he watched her walk off between two uniformed airline staff and disappear into the security-check area.
Yes indeed, he thought. When all’s said and done, that’s the big question that still needs to be answered.
Who?
14
He found it incomprehensible to start with.
His first reaction — the first attempt to explain it — was that he had survived.
That the man in the car park had somehow or other come back to life after being struck down. Crawled out of the bushes and into the restaurant, and been taken to hospital. Pulled through.
With a broken parietal bone and smashed cervical vertebrae?
Then he remembered the facts. That there had been articles in all the newspapers. That there had been reports on the radio and television. There was no doubt about it, of course. That lanky young man he had killed at the golf course was dead. Finally and irrevocably dead.
Ergo? he thought. Ergo I’ve killed the wrong person. That had to be the explanation. Was there any alternative?
Not as far as he could see. It must be the case that… that yet again he had killed somebody by mistake.
That didn’t make it any less incomprehensible.
It had been asking too much, far too much, for him to sleep that Monday night, and after a few fruitless hours he got up. It was two a.m. He drank a cup of tea with a drop of rum in the kitchen, then took the car and drove out to the sea. Sat for an hour and a half by himself with the windows open in a lay-by between Behrensee and Lejnice and tried to think things through while listening to the mighty waves breaking on the shore. The wind was blowing hard from the south-west, and he could hear that the rollers must be several metres high.
The wrong person? He had killed the wrong man. It wasn’t the blackmailer who had emerged from the Trattoria Commedia that evening with the Boodwick carrier bag dangling from his hand. It was somebody else.
Somebody who had gone to the gents and happened to discover the bag in the rubbish bin? Could it be as simple as that?
A coincidence? Somebody who had found it by sheer bad luck before the blackmailer? Could that be what happened?
He excluded that possibility more or less straight away. It was too improbable. Too far-fetched. No, the truth was different, quite different. It didn’t take him long to find the solution.
There was an assistant. Had been. That was who he’d killed. The anonymous letter-writer had chosen to send an assistant to collect the spoils, instead of doing it himself. So as not to run any unnecessary risks. Good thinking, no doubt about it, and not really surprising in the circumstances. He ought to have anticipated that. Ought to have made allowances for that.
In fact it was an inexcusable blunder: the more he thought about it, the more obvious it was. A terrible blunder. While he had been thinking sarcastically about the amateurish conduct of his opponent out there at Dikken, in fact he was up against an exceptionally prudent person. Somebody who had acted with much more caution and precision than he had.
And who had now made his next move. Two hundred thousand, he was demanding. Two hundred grand!
Oh, hell! He swore out loud and hammered his hands on the steering wheel. Fucking hell!
In the wake of his anger came fear. Fear with regard to what he had done, and for the future. The future? he thought. What future? In so far as his life hadn’t already been compromised by what had happened in the last few weeks, it would be in the next few. The next one. It was blindingly obvious. A matter of days, there was no other way of assessing the situation.
Another crucial encounter was in store.
He opened the door and got out of the car. Offered himself up to the mercy of the wind, and started walking along the road. Waves crashed on the beach.
Am I still me? he suddenly asked himself. Am I still the same person as I was before? Am I still a person, in fact?
A billiard ball rolling towards an inevitable fate? Two cannons, two changes of direction… And then what?
Images of the boy in the ditch and of the young man as he raised his eyebrows in surprise a second before the first blow kept recurring increasingly rapidly in his mind’s eye. Intertwining, merging, over and over again, leaving no room for anything else. He tried to think about Vera Miller instead, the laughing, lively, red-haired Vera: but without success.