That was what he had thought when he sat down in front of the monster half an hour ago, and that is what he was still thinking. And somewhat reluctantly he had to admit that the technology was quite impressive. The confounded thing was certainly practical!
It was half past ten by now, and he was alone in the flat. Maureen was on a two-day course connected with her work, and Sophie was sleeping over at her boyfriend’s place: his name was Franek, and it was beginning to look as if he was about to become her other half.
The flat was almost as new as the computer. Recently acquired, at least, and it was with a feeling of humble astonishment that Jung was beginning to accept that this was his home. His and Maureen’s new home. And Sophie’s, of course, who would soon be celebrating her twentieth birthday, was in her first year at university, and would no doubt fly the nest shortly. Any day now, if he had interpreted the signs correctly.
Four rooms and a kitchen in Holderweg. On the fourth floor with a view over the southern part of Megsje Bojs and Willemsgraacht. Newly refurbished with ceilings three-and-a-half metres high, and underfloor heating in the bathroom. And an open fire.
When he thought about it — and he did so almost all the time — he thought he was happy. That things had turned out so well in his life that he ought to find himself a god and thank Him on his bare knees. All that, and Maureen as well!
Plus a super-computer for use at home whenever the mood took him. Such as now. Such as this November evening, sitting at home in the darkness with the rain pattering against the window panes and Lou Reed whispering quietly on a CD in the background.
Benjamin Kerran. That was his opening move. The only name he had left to investigate. The only one remaining from the forty-six he had started with.
A name that had frustrated him and his colleagues, as there was no such person in Maardam according to their enquiries that afternoon. Not in the whole surrounding area either. And not even — assuming Rooth was right in what he claimed shortly before they shut down for the day at the police station — not even in the whole damned country!
It had taken Jung some time to venture out into the Internet, and more time before he realized what he needed to do in order to set up a search. He had no luck at all, using the first of the programs he tried. Just a number of faulty hits, in which the surname — usually wrongly spelled — was right, but not the first name. But then, when he worked out how to use a more powerful program, it suddenly turned up on his screen.
Benjamin Kerran.
Ha! Jung thought. Let nobody come and tell me I don’t know how to handle computers.
He leaned forward and began reading. In increasing astonishment — rapidly increasing, as it was only a matter of a couple of lines.
Benjamin Kerran was not a living person. Nor a dead one, come to that. He was a literary character. Fiction. Evidently.
Created by an English author by the name of Henry Moll, according to what it said on the screen. Jung had never heard of him, but when he carried on clicking he discovered that this Moll had written a number of little-known travelogues at the beginning of the twentieth century. Plus a series of even less well known crime novels — yes, it actually said ‘even less well known’.
And it was in one of those novels that this character Benjamin Kerran appeared.
In a book with the bizarre title Strangler’s Honeymoon, to be precise. First published (and no doubt for the only time) in London in 1932, by a firm called Thurnton amp; Radice. As far as Jung could gather, Benjamin Kerran was a sort of leading character — a serial killer, one of the very early ones, who prowled around in the badly lit areas of the capital strangling prostitutes wholesale, in accordance with instructions given to him by voices addressing him from inside his head, in accordance with some sort of perverted divine ordinance.
Jung stared at the screen.
What on earth could this mean? He read the text one more time.
Could it be anything other than pure coincidence?
He went into the living room and switched off the CD. Could Martina Kammerle have read Strangler’s Honeymoon?
That seemed implausible. There had not been many books in the flat in Moerckstraat, but the ones that were there were in Monica Kammerle’s bookcase. The girl had evidently read quite a lot.
But an obscure crime novel from the thirties? Henry Moll?
Hardly credible, Jung thought and returned to the computer. And even if she had read it, why should she write down the name of this literary murderer in her notebook?
No, the link was too implausible, he decided. It must be pure coincidence. A coincidence and a hit in over-informative cyberspace where almost anything at all could happen. Where no end of strange knowledge was stored, and where the most hair-raising cross-fertilizations could take place.
A name without a telephone number in a missing girl’s notebook, and a fictitious English murderer?
No, thought Jung. There are limits after all, even to what these computers are capable of.
He switched off the computer and went to bed.
But the name Benjamin Kerran persisted in the back of Jung’s mind, and when he woke up in the middle of the night, a few hours later, he knew immediately why he had dreamt of those strangled women and those narrow, crowded streets in Covent Garden and Soho where he had spent a week on holiday with Maureen a couple of years earlier.
And as he stood there on the warm bathroom floor, having a pee, he decided he would tell Rooth what he had hacked his way through to that evening.
After all, you never know.
22
Afterwards — when he told his wife and their children, or told Gandrich and Kellernik at the pub in Lochenroede — Henry Ewerts blamed everything on the wind.
The change in wind direction, he explained with a brief, grim smile. If the wind hadn’t veered from south-west to north-west during the night, I wouldn’t have changed my usual route. In which case, we’d never have found her.
Not that day, at least. And not me and the dog.
And when his listeners (especially Kellernik, who never believed anything except in vino veritas) looked at him in sheepish incomprehension, he explained with an even shorter and grimmer smile that he always followed it. Always. The wind.
Headwind out, following wind home: that was how he had planned his jogging routes every damned morning for the last nine years, ever since they had bought that house in Behrensee after selling the company at exactly the right moment just before the depression in the nineties. He’d got wind of it just in time, you might say.
The wind was always blowing from the west, of course, but often from the south-west. That’s how it had been for eleven or twelve days at a stretch, if he remembered rightly: but now there was a touch of colder air from the north, and he branched off onto one of the paths that headed in that direction over the dunes and down to the beach. Thatcher had only needed a little gesture for her to catch on to the change of plan. She was more receptive than most human beings: he’d told Kellernik and Gandrich that lots of times, and even if they didn’t really agree or understand what he was getting at, that was merely proof that he was right on this matter as well. He had often thought he was pretty fed up with the pair of them, but didn’t want to hurt them by cutting them off.
But on the other hand, he could always rely on Thatcher. That morning she had kept abreast with her boss until they passed over the crest of the hill and saw the sea down below, grey and tossing gently as always at this time of year. He tapped her on the head, and she set off at a fast pace in solitary majesty. As usual, free to do whatever she wanted. Henry pulled off the outermost of his jogging tops and hung it over one of the benches. Noted that his watch said 07.10, headed down towards the firmer sand at the edge of the water, and increased his pace.