‘More or less,’ admitted Reinhart and tiptoed over to the nursery.
My wife knows what I’m thinking before I do, he told himself as he lifted up his sleeping daughter. How the hell does she do that?
25
On Wednesday, 9 December it was plus ten or eleven degrees, and the sky was high and bright.
The sun seemed to be surprised, almost embarrassed at having to display itself in all its somewhat faded nudity. Van Veeteren phoned Ulrike Fremdli at work, was informed that she would be finished by lunchtime, and suggested a car trip to the seaside. They hadn’t seen the sea for quite some time. She accepted straight away: he could hear from her voice that she was both surprised and pleased, and he reminded himself that he loved her. Then he reminded her as well.
The living must look after one another, he thought. The worst possible outcome is to die without having lived.
As he sat in the car outside the Remington dirt-brown office complex he wondered if Erich had lived. If he had managed to experience the fundamentals of life, whatever they might be. He had read somewhere that a man must do three things during his life: raise a son, write a book and plant a tree.
He wondered where that had come from. In any case, Erich had not achieved the first two of those requirements. Whether or not he had planted a tree he had no idea, of course: but it didn’t seem all that likely. Before he had time to think about how far he himself fulfilled those requirements, he was interrupted by Ulrike flopping down in the seat beside him.
‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she said. ‘What a marvellous day!’
She kissed him on the cheek, and to his surprise he found that he had an erection. Life goes on, he thought, somewhat confused. Despite everything.
‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked.
‘Emsbaden or Behrensee,’ she said without hesitation. She had evidently been thinking about it ever since he’d rung.
‘Emsbaden,’ he said. ‘I have a bit of a problem with Behrensee.’
‘Why?’
‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Something happened there a few years ago. I’d rather not be reminded of it.’
She waited for an explanation, but there wasn’t one. He started the car and drove off instead.
‘My secretive lover,’ she said.
They spent an hour wandering around the dunes, then had a late lunch at the De Dirken inn, almost adjacent to the lighthouse in Emsbaden. Lobster tails in dill sauce, coffee and carrot cake. They spoke about Jess and Ulrike’s children and their future prospects.
And eventually also about Erich.
‘I remember something you said,’ Ulrike told him. ‘Then, when you’d found the woman who murdered Karel.’
Karel Innings was Ulrike’s former husband, but not the father of her children. They had been the product of her first marriage to an estate agent, who had been a good and reliable paterfamilias until his inherited alcoholism got the better of him.
‘We never found her,’ Van Veeteren pointed out.
‘But you found her motives,’ said Ulrike. ‘In any case, you maintained that from her point of view — in one sense at least — killing my husband had been justified. Do you remember that?’
‘Of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But it was only true in a way. From a very individual, limited point of view. It’s a distortion if you put it like you did.’
‘Isn’t that always the case?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it always the case that the murderer — or any other criminal, come to that — thinks that his crime is justified? Doesn’t he have to think that to himself anyway?’
‘That’s an old chestnut,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But you are right in principle, of course. A murderer always justifies his motives — acknowledges them also, naturally. Mind you, it’s a different matter if somebody else points them out. There are reasons for everything we do, but the dogma of original sin never seems to convince members of the jury nowadays. They are much more thick-skinned than that.’
‘But you believe in it?’
He paused for a moment and gazed out over the sea.
‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘I don’t defend evil deeds, but if you can’t understand the nature of crime… the motives of a criminal… well, you won’t get very far as a detective. There is a sort of twisted logic which is often easier to discover than the logic that governs our everyday actions. As we all know, chaos is the neighbour of God: but everything’s usually neat and tidy in hell…’
She laughed, and took a bite of her carrot cake.
‘Go on.’
‘All right, since you ask me so nicely,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Anyway, this malicious logic can affect us all when we are trapped in a corner. It’s not a problem to understand why an Islamic brother murders his sister because she’s been going to discotheques and wants to be a Westerner. No problem at all if you are familiar with the background. But the fact that the deed itself is so disgusting that the very thought of it makes you want to throw up, and that your spontaneous reaction is to take the killer and demolish a skyscraper on top of him — well, that’s something else. Something completely different.’
He fell silent. She eyed him gravely, then took hold of his hand over the table.
‘A crime is born in the gap between the morality of society and that of the individual,’ said Van Veeteren, and immediately wondered if that really was generally true.
‘And if they find Erich’s murderer,’ said Ulrike. ‘Will you understand him as well?’
He hesitated before answering. Gazed out over the beach again. The sun had gone away, and the weather was as it presumably was before some god or other hit on the idea of creating it. Plus eight degrees, slight breeze, white cloud.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want to meet him face to face.’
She let go of his hand, and frowned.
‘I can’t understand why you want to expose yourself to something like that,’ she said. ‘Sitting opposite your son’s murderer. Sometimes I just don’t understand you.’
‘I’ve never claimed that I do either,’ said Van Veeteren.
And I’ve never said that I wouldn’t want to put a bullet between those eyes either, he thought; but he didn’t say so.
On the way home Ulrike came up with a suggestion.
‘I’d like us to invite his fiancee to dinner.’
‘Who?’ said Van Veeteren.
‘Marlene Frey. Let’s invite her to dinner tomorrow evening. At your place. I’ll ring and talk to her.’
Such a thought had never struck him. He wondered why. Then he felt ashamed for two seconds before saying yes.
‘On condition that you stay the night with me as well,’ he said.
Ulrike laughed and gave him a gentle punch on the shoulder.
‘I’ve already promised that,’ she said. ‘Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Jurg’s away at a school camp.’
‘Excellent,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I sleep so damned badly when you’re not there.’
‘I don’t come to you in order to sleep,’ said Ulrike.
‘Excellent,’ said Van Veeteren again, unable to think of anything better to say.
Chief of Police Hiller clasped his hands on the pigskin desk pad and tried to establish eye contact with Reinhart. Reinhart yawned and looked at a green, palm-like thing that he seemed to recall he knew the name of, once upon a time.
‘Hmm, well,’ said Hiller. ‘I happened to bump into the chief inspector this morning… I mean The Chief Inspector.’
Reinhart shifted his gaze to a benjamin fig.
‘It’s taken its toll on him, this business with his son. I think you should be aware of that. Not so strange. After all these years and all the rest of it… Anyway, I think it’s a point of honour, this business. We really must solve this case. It mustn’t slip though our fingers. How far have you got?’
‘Quite a way,’ said Reinhart. ‘We’re doing all we can.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Hiller. ‘I don’t doubt that for a moment, of course. Everybody — and I mean everybody — must feel the same way about it as I do. That it’s a point of honour. If we have to allow a few murderers to go free, one of them must on no account be this one. Not in any circumstances. Do you need more resources? I’m prepared to lean over backwards, a long way backwards. Just say the word.’