Someone was walking up the hill towards me. I didn’t think anything of it until he came and stood in front of me. I thought he was going to ask me for the time, or some directions, but all he did was say my name. I didn’t recognise him. Was this the moment I’d been dreading, the appearance of a person from my past? Or was it just another member of the public who’d seen me on TV?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know you.’
‘My name’s Robert Kolan. We met once, in the station café.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, we didn’t meet exactly. I was just leaving.’
The blond hair parted in the middle and tucked back behind his ears. The creaking leather jacket. Robert Kolan.
He wanted to talk about Nina.
‘Let’s talk inside,’ I said. ‘It’s warmer.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Right.’
We sat in black vinyl armchairs, in the corner of the lobby.
‘Nina’s disappeared,’ he said.
‘I know. The police told me.’ I told Kolan what I’d told Munck and Slatnick, how Nina was always disappearing.
Kolan interrupted halfway through. ‘This is different.’
‘What’s different about it?’
‘It was her father’s birthday on the twenty-ninth of December. She never misses her father’s birthday.’
I realised that I’d never heard her mention her father (or her mother, for that matter). I had a sudden sense of how thoroughly she’d excluded me, not just from her apartment but from her life.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s really not my problem now.’
‘You don’t care what happens to her?’
‘I used to. She left me, though.’ I remembered what she’d said about Kolan. My closest friend. ‘I thought you would’ve known that.’
‘I did know.’
‘Well,’ I said, and opened my hands.
‘So she leaves you and suddenly you don’t care about her any more?’ He scraped his hair back behind his ears. He was leaning forwards, his eyes jumping between my face and the floor. ‘Just like that?’
Suddenly he irritated me. All this talk about caring and friendship. This sanctimoniousness of his. He’d probably been dying to fuck her for years. I wanted to shock him.
‘Maybe I wish she was dead,’ I said. ‘Has that occurred to you?’
I stared at the sofa opposite. I thought of Nina’s seat in the station café, which had kept her imprint after she was gone.
‘People who’ve been left by someone,’ I went on, ‘they often wish the other person was dead. That,’ I said, ‘is not uncommon at all.’
‘She meant that much to you?’
I didn’t want to look at him. I looked at the carpet instead — meaningless swirls of orange, brown and black. I heard him light a cigarette. The sharp intake of breath as he inhaled sounded exactly like surprise.
‘Do you know Greersen?’ I asked.
Kolan was silent.
‘I went to see him tonight.’ I paused. ‘I just wondered. Was Nina sleeping with him?’ Kolan’s silence lasted.
‘Greersen,’ I said. ‘The owner of that club.’
‘I know who you mean. She couldn’t stand the guy.’
‘So she wasn’t sleeping with him?’
‘No.’
I believed him. Greersen had lied about it to get at me. That made sense. Why had Nina lied about it, though? And, if she was lying, who was the someone else that she was seeing?
‘You know what Greersen said?’ I went on. ‘He said he hadn’t seen her for weeks.’
‘Nobody’s seen her for weeks.’
‘Do you know who saw her last?’
Kolan hesitated. ‘I thought it was you.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. That’s why I’m here. I thought you might know something.’ He leaned forwards and crushed out his cigarette.
He told me he was over at Nina’s place on the Monday night. Nina had called me up. It was late, maybe three in the morning. She drove to the 14th district to meet me, dropping him off outside the station. Nobody had seen her since.
‘I didn’t realise,’ I said.
‘You can’t tell me anything?’
I shook my head.
He got up out of his chair. He parted his hair again with two hands, training it behind his ears. ‘I should be going.’
‘Have you talked to the police yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What will you tell them?’
‘What I told you.’ He paused. ‘Why? You’ve got nothing to hide, have you?’
I watched him leave through the revolving doors, then I rose to my feet and crossed the lobby. Arnold was watching TV. A lit cigarette lay on a groove in the ashtray; the smoke made a series of spaced loops or coils, the way a spring might if you stretched it. He glanced round at me.
‘The lift’s out of order,’ he said.
‘You know why, don’t you.’
Arnold shook his head. ‘Why?’
‘Sex,’ I said.
It didn’t surprise me when he appeared not to understand. He understood all too well — but he would never admit it.
I took the stairs.
First floor, then the second. And, sure enough, there was the lift. Just standing there, with its doors jammed open. There was nobody inside it. But if you dusted the edges of the doors, at a point not too far above the carpet, you’d almost certainly find delicate deposits of human skin, the faint print of a woman’s hips.
I glanced down the corridor. One couple fucking silently against the wall.
A quiet night.
The following afternoon, as I was shaving, the phone rang. I saw myself in the mirror, hesitating. I couldn’t hear the phone without thinking of Nina, without hoping that it might be her. It wasn’t her, though. It was Munck.
‘We found the car.’
He wanted me to identify it for him. I’d mentioned certain features, he said. The so-called bullethole. The doll.
Half an hour later he picked me up outside the hotel. He opened the door for me and I got in. There was one last pale streak of daylight to the south-west, but otherwise the sky was dark.
It was cold in Munck’s car. He told me the heating was broken. He apologised.
‘A policeman’s salary,’ he said.
Outside, the streets were wet, but the temperature was dropping; they would freeze during the night. There was a tension in the car, which I took to be anticipation.
As we passed beneath the ring road, Munck told me where we were going. A suburb on the outskirts. Right on the edge of the city. I knew the area. Railway arches, scrapyards. High-rise slums. Children tortured cats in concrete corridors. Babies fell out of windows. It was always drizzling.
I peered through the windscreen. We turned down a wide, deserted avenue. A park appeared on the left. The grass was littered with empty bottles, newspaper, women’s shoes.
In ten minutes we were there. Munck jerked the handbrake upwards, then he faced me. I saw his teeth at close range. Not just the texture of celery, but the colour, too: palest yellow-green, a kind of chlorophyll.
‘Have you been here before, Martin?’
I shook my head. ‘Never.’
It wasn’t until he got out of the car that I realised it had probably been a trick question. Was I really here for purposes of identification? Or was I here to incriminate myself?
Munck opened my door. ‘The car’s to your right.’
He walked me towards it.
It was just a piece of waste-ground, near a flyover. The seashell roar of traffic. Blocks of apartments loomed like prison ships. I glanced over my shoulder. Two motorways reared up and tangled with each other in the sky.
‘There’s tyre tracks stretching ten or fifteen metres,’ Munck said. ‘The car braked suddenly, for no apparent reason. Both doors are open, as if the occupants left in a hurry.’