‘How was it you put it?’
‘Put what?’
‘Your views. “A liberal attitude based on biological and Christian points of view,” I think you said.’
Brunner thought for five seconds
‘I don’t remember,’ he said in due course, with a tired shrug of the shoulders.
‘Even if he didn’t want to talk to the vicar, surely it was quite a long step from that to going to talk to you?’ commented Ulrike Fremdli later that same day. ‘If you have any homosexual traits, you’ve been pretty successful in hiding them from me. But perhaps that wasn’t why he came to see you?’
‘Presumably not,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘No, I prefer women, full stop. But joking apart, it’s a hell of an odd coincidence, there’s no getting away from that. Gassel comes to me and asks for help, and a week or so later he’s run over by a train. If he really wanted to take his own life, surely he could have waited a couple of days and got off his chest whatever it was he wanted to say? Or left me out of it in the first place? And for Christ’s sake, you don’t just happen to fall off a railway platform by mistake.’
‘Was he drunk?’
‘Not even half a pint of beer in his blood, according to Moreno.’
‘And you had no indication of what it was all about? When he came to see you, I mean.’
‘Not as far as I remember,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘That’s what’s so damned annoying, the fact that I don’t remember. I think he said something about a woman. . a woman who had confided in him, I assume. And he’d promised to say nothing about it, and above all not to go to the police. I had the impression that he was afraid something would happen: but that could be something that came to me with hindsight. . There again, I’m pretty sure he did say something to that effect. Something would happen, if precautions were not taken. . Bloody hell!’
Ulrike lifted Stravinsky up from the sofa and started tickling him under his chin.
‘But he wasn’t the one who was in danger?’
‘Not as I understood it. I suppose we could find out if he’d noted down who had come to confess to him — but for Christ’s sake, I’m not in the police force any more, isn’t that true?’
‘Yes,’ said Ulrike. ‘As far as I’m aware.’
‘Huh,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Damn and blast, I don’t think I can just ignore this business.’
Ulrike put Stravinsky down on the floor and leaned against him on the sofa. Sat quietly for a few seconds, stroking the veins on the back of his hand.
‘What alternatives do you have?’
Van Veeteren sighed.
‘A few names, for instance,’ he said. ‘People who knew him. And also a nasty feeling that if I don’t continue to poke away at this business, nothing much will happen. It’s not good, wandering around with a dead priest on your conscience. . Anyway, I suppose we can wait and see if anything occurs to me.’
‘I expect it will,’ said Ulrike. ‘If I know you right.’
‘What on earth do you mean by that?’ said Van Veeteren.
MAARDAM
NOVEMBER 2000
12
Sunday 5 November 2000, was the day when a sneeze threatened to ruin Egon Traut’s marriage.
At least, that gloomy prospect hovered over him for several long hours in the evening, and there is after all a certain difference between a grim outlook and ruins.
Egon Traut was a self-employed businessman. He had a firm making and selling display stands for opticians and shops selling spectacles. The factory was located in Chadow, where he also lived in a spacious, hacienda-inspired villa with his wife and five children, of whom two had flown the nest (for most of the time, at least), two were twins in their teens (and quite a handful), and the fifth (an afterthought called Arnold) suffered from Hörndli’s syndrome and was autistic.
The firm was called GROTTENAU, an anagram of his own name, and at the end of the eighties and throughout the nineties it had slowly but surely increased its market share, at first in Chadow, then in the surrounding area, and eventually the whole country — to such an extent that by the beginning of the new millennium it claimed sixty per cent of the whole cake. In opticians’ circles F/B GROTTENAU was, if not a concept, then at least a name associated with expertise, quality and reliable delivery.
Since 1996 Egon Traut had employed a staff of four. Three of them worked on the production of the display stands in Chadow’s new industrial estate, and the fourth dealt with the paperwork. The last was Betty Klingerweijk, who was exactly ten years younger than he was, and owned a pair of breasts that sometimes kept him awake at night, unable to expunge their image from his head.
When he was lying in the matrimonial bed, that is. It sometimes happened that, instead, he was in the same bed as the aforementioned breasts, and on those (unfortunately all too sporadic) occasions, of course, he did not need to worry about expunging them from his head. On the contrary. Getting them into his head (via his mouth) was something he was only too happy to spend time and effort on. Betty Klingerweijk had been his lover for rather more than three years by this time, and she was the one who sneezed so unfortunately on this rainy November Sunday.
It happened on the motorway between Linzhuisen and Maardam: they were on the way home from a three-day sales trip in the southern provinces, and Traut had just rung his wife on his mobile to ask her for some information.
‘What was that?’ asked his wife.
‘What was what?’ said Traut.
‘That noise. It sounded like somebody sneezing.’
‘Eh?. . I didn’t hear anything.’
‘You don’t have somebody in the car with you, do you?’
‘No. Why should I have?’
‘That’s a good question. It sounded like a woman sneezing in any case.’
‘How odd. Perhaps there was somebody on the line.’
‘Somebody on the line? That’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard. I’m absolutely certain that I heard a sneeze. You have another woman with you in the car, don’t you?’
‘I swear I don’t,’ said Traut.
‘Huh, tell that to the marines,’ said his wife. ‘But it’s what you don’t tell the marines that I’m interested in. What’s her name? Is it somebody I know, or have you just picked her up?’
Traut tried to hit on a counter-move, but his mind was pretty sluggish today and nothing plausible occurred to him.
‘It’s not that vulgar little hussy fröken Klingerweijk, is it?’ yelled his wife as loudly as she could, to make sure she could be heard clearly in the car. Traut glanced at his passenger, and could see she had heard what was said.
Bugger it, he thought. Death to the inventor of the mobile phone.
‘I can assure you,’ he assured her. ‘I’m as much alone in the car as. . as a herring in a church.’
‘A herring in a church? What are you raving on about? There aren’t any herrings in a church. Are you not even sober?’
‘Of course I’m sober. You know I’m always very careful about what I drink when I’m travelling on business. And if there were a herring in a church, it would be feeling pretty lonely, wouldn’t it? Can I get to the point now, or are you going to go on and on, accusing me of God knows what?’
That was quite a clever ploy, and the receiver was silent for a few seconds. But it was not a good silence, he could hear quite clearly that she didn’t believe him. And in the corner of his eye he could see that Betty Klingerweijk was glaring at him, and seemed to be preparing to sneeze again. Out of sheer cussedness.
‘What point?’ asked his wife.
‘Your barmy sister, of course. What’s her new address — you said they’d just moved. I’ll be in Maardam in five minutes.’
That was enough to shift the focus of the conversation — for the time being, at least. His sister-in-law was in fact the reason he had made the call, and doing so was bound to portray him in a more favourable light. His wife had gone on and on about how he really must call in and check on how she was, seeing as he was passing though Maardam in any case. Her sister hadn’t answered the phone for over a month, and something must have happened to her. That was as clear as day, and blood is thicker than daylight.