Hour of the Wolf (31 page)

About once a year. At Christmas time.

Sometimes he came, sometimes he didn’t.

As for his life and way of living, there was hardly anything to say. He had been a bit odd ever since he fell off a tractor and hit his head when he was about ten. Perhaps even before that. He had been married to a woman just as pig-headed as he was, and they had split up after less than a year. She’d been called Liz Vrongel, and was probably still called that.

His only interest had been silence. And football.

‘Hmm,’ said Reinhart. ‘Well, at least they won’t need to send him an invitation this Christmas. He won’t be going.’

‘How do you know that?’ wondered deBries, who was unaware of the message from Sechshafen.

‘He’ll be celebrating Christmas in New York,’ said Reinhart with a sigh. ‘The bastard. We’ll get round to that in a minute. What about the other Keller in the book? I seem to recall that there were three.’

‘His father,’ said deBries, pulling a face. ‘A seventy-five-year-old boozer up in Haaldam. Lives in some kind of home, some of the time at least. He hasn’t been in touch with any of his children for twenty years.’

‘A marvellous family,’ said Moreno.

‘Idyllic,’ said deBries. ‘The old man’s a right pain in the arse, it seems. Perhaps his son takes after him?’

‘I expect so,’ said Reinhart. ‘Any other information?’

‘Yes,’ said Bollmert. ‘We think we know how Erich Van Veeteren knew him. Aron Keller worked as a probation officer for a few years.’

Reinhart produced something reminiscent of a snarl.

‘Isn’t that just bloody typical!’ he said. ‘It’s scandalous that they let types like him become probation officers. Who do they think is going to be helped to fit back into society by an arsehole like Keller . . .? The only meaningful relationship he can have is with a vacuum cleaner.’

‘He hasn’t had any customers for three years,’ said deBries. ‘If that’s any consolation. We’re not sure yet if he took care personally of Erich Van Veeteren, but it won’t take long to check that out.’

‘Why haven’t you done it already, then?’ asked Reinhart.

‘Because you wanted us here at one o’clock,’ said deBries.

‘Ah,’ said Reinhart. ‘Sorry.’

He stood up and watched the snow falling for a while.

‘I wonder . . .’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s it, of course.’

‘What?’ said Moreno.

‘He must certainly have had some kind of hold over Erich. They can hardly avoid it in that business . . . And then he must have used it to get the lad to go and collect the money for him. Damn and blast! Damn and bloody blast!’

‘We did say that blackmailers aren’t usually very nice people,’ said Moreno. ‘Keller seems to be no exception.’

Reinhart returned to his chair.

‘I’ll ring and look into that probation business,’ he said. ‘If it’s true, and I assume it is, I reckon we can say that we’re clear about most of what happened. You can all take the afternoon off.’

‘Good,’ said deBries. ‘I’d thought of proposing that myself. I haven’t had any time off since Easter.’

He left together with Bollmert. Reinhart sat in silence, staring at the cassettes which would never be listened to. Not by him, or by anybody else.

‘All that work,’ he muttered, and glared at Moreno. ‘All that blasted work and all that wasted time. If you can answer one question for me, I’ll put a good word in for you to Heller and suggest he gives you a winter holiday.’

‘Shoot,’ said Moreno.

‘What did Keller do to Clausen last Thursday evening? What the hell went on?’

‘I need some time to think about that,’ said Moreno.

‘You can have all afternoon,’ said Reinhart. ‘Go and sit in your office and watch the snow. It makes thinking easier.’

Van Veeteren took out a newly rolled cigarette and lit it.

‘So you know who did it?’ he said.

Reinhart nodded.

‘Yes, I think we’ve found the right man. It’s not a pleasant story, but then it never is. It all started with an accident, more or less. This Pieter Clausen is driving along a dark road at night, hits a young boy and kills him. He drives off, but doesn’t know he’s been seen. He might have stopped to check what happened, that seems likely. He’s on his way home to Boorkhejm, and so is a certain Aron Keller – probably on his scooter. It’s foul weather, heavy rain and strong winds, but he recognizes Clausen. They are near neighbours. Keller decides he’s going to make some money out of what he’s seen . . . We’re dealing with a very nasty piece of work, I think I can promise you that.’

‘Blackmailers are rarely nice chaps,’ said Van Veeteren.

‘Too right,’ said Reinhart. ‘Anyway, he sends your son out to Dikken that Tuesday to collect the money. I don’t know if you are acquainted with Keller, but he was the probation officer in charge of Erich for a few years . . . It’s not even clear that Erich was going to be paid for what he did. Keller might well have had some kind of hold on him. Clausen doesn’t know who the blackmailer is, he already has one death on his conscience, and doesn’t want to find himself constantly under threat. He kills Erich, thinking he’s killed the blackmailer.’

He paused. After five seconds which seemed like five years to Reinhart, Van Veeteren nodded and indicated he should continue.

‘Then we have the murder of Vera Miller. Do you want to hear about that as well?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t know why Clausen kills her, but it must have something to do with Keller and Erich. Clausen and Vera Miller were having an affair, they’d only started shortly beforehand. Anyway, we were finally beginning to understand what it was all about. You put us onto the blackmail motive, and Aron Keller. The annoying thing is that we were so late in catching on. Something must have happened on Thursday or Friday last week – presumably it was time for Clausen to pay up once and for all. He’d had a loan granted by the Spaarkasse. Withdrew two hundred and twenty thousand in cash – and then he disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘We know what that could imply,’ said Reinhart curtly. ‘It’s not too difficult to guess what might have happened. Aron Keller flew to New York last Saturday. He’s no longer in the hotel where he checked in – we’ve exchanged a few faxes with them. We don’t know where Pieter Clausen is. There’s no trace of him, but it doesn’t look as if he’s done a runner as well. His passport and even his wallet are still in his house. I have only one theory, and that is that . . . well, that Keller has done him in. Killed him and buried him somewhere. Unfortunately. I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid you might never come face to face with your son’s murderer.’

Van Veeteren took a swig of beer and looked out of the window. Half a minute passed.

‘What we can hope for is that we find his body in due course,’ said Reinhart, and wondered immediately why he had said that. As if that would be some kind of consolation.

Making contact with the body of the man who has killed your son? Absurd. Macabre.

Van Veeteren said nothing. Reinhart studied his own hands, and searched in vain for something to say.

‘I have a photo of him,’ he said in the end. ‘So you can take a look at him, if you’d like to. And Keller as well, come to that.’

He took two photocopies out of his briefcase and handed them over.
The Chief Inspector
looked at them for a few moments, frowning, then handed them back.

‘Why would Keller have killed him?’ he asked.

Reinhart shrugged.

‘I don’t know. He must have got the money, otherwise he would hardly have been able to slope off to New York. That’s what I reckon, at least. You can indulge in a bit of speculation, of course. Maybe Clausen discovered his identity somehow or other. Keller is a very odd customer . . . And he knew that Clausen wouldn’t hesitate to kill. So he played it safe, as simple as that. If Clausen knew who the blackmailer was, Keller must have realized that he was living dangerously.’

Van Veeteren closed his eyes and nodded vaguely. Another half a minute of silence passed. Reinhart abandoned his awkward efforts to find something positive to say, and instead tried to imagine how
The Chief Inspector
must be feeling. Naturally enough he had been doing that all the time, more or less; but it wasn’t any easier now that he started concentrating on it. Having his son murdered, that was bad enough; and then the murderer being swept out of the way by another evildoer, who in a way was just as guilty of Erich’s death as the man who had actually killed him. Or was that not an acceptable way of looking at it? Did it matter? Did such considerations have any significance when it was your son at the heart of the matter?

He didn’t find an answer. Didn’t come anywhere near finding an answer.

Whatever, no matter how you looked at it, Erich Van Veeteren had been no more than a pawn in a game that had nothing to do with him. What a pointless way to die, Reinhart thought. A completely wasted victim. The only one who could have conceivably benefited from his death was Keller, who presumably raised the price for his black arts once Clausen had another death on his conscience.

What a bloody mess, Reinhart thought for the fiftieth time that day. The choreographer of the nether regions had struck again.

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Van Veeteren.

‘We’ve issued a Wanted notice in the USA for Keller,’ said Reinhart. ‘Of course. Maybe one of us will have to go over there sooner or late . . . But it’s a big country. And he’s got enough money to see him through for quite a while.’

Van Veeteren sat up straight and looked out of the window again.

‘It’s snowing hard now,’ he said. ‘Anyway, many thanks. You’ve done all you could. Maybe we can keep in touch – I’d like to know how things go.’

‘Of course,’ said Reinhart.

When he left
The Chief Inspector
alone at the table, he felt like crying for the first time in twenty years.

He spent Wednesday evening and half of Thursday in an old Art Nouveau-style mansion in the Deijkstraat district. Krantze had bought the whole of a private library on the owner’s death: in round figures there were four-and-a-half thousand volumes to be examined, assessed and packed into crates. As usual there were three categories to be considered: books that would be hard to sell and of doubtful value (to be sold off by the kilo); books worthy of a place on the shelves of the antiquarian bookshop that would no doubt find a buyer in due course (no more than two to three hundred in view of available shelf space); and books he would love to see in his own bookcase (five at most – over time he had learned to transform moral questions into unambiguous numbers).

It was no unpleasant task, wandering around this old bourgeois mansion (the family had been lawyers and appeal judges for several generations, if he had read the genealogy correctly), thumbing through old books. He could take as long as he needed – the hereditary gout that now afflicted Krantze prevented him from doing work that could not be carried out while sitting down. Or lying down. Naturally he had first established that there were no scientific tracts from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the collection, the narrow field that, in the autumn of his life, had become his real passion (and his only one, Van Veeteren had unfortunately been forced to conclude).

When his Wednesday work was finished, he ate a solitary, lugubrious dinner, watched an old De Sica film on Channel 4, and read for a few hours. For the first time since Erich’s death he found that he was able to concentrate on such matters. He didn’t know if it had to do with the latest conversation with Reinhart. Maybe, maybe not. And in that case, why? Before he fell asleep he lay for a long time, recapitulating the grim series of events that had led to the murder of his son. And to that nurse suffering the same fate.

He tried to conjure up the murderer. Noted that he hadn’t in fact been the motor driving the whole business. Rather, he seemed to have been dragged into a situation, an increasingly intense and infernal dilemma that he had tried to solve with every means available to him. He had killed and killed and killed with a sort of desperate, perverted logic.

And nevertheless, in the end, become the victim himself.

No, Reinhart was right. It was not a pleasant story.

That night he dreamt about two things.

Firstly about a visit he’d paid to Erich when he was in prison. It wasn’t an especially eventful dream: he simply sat in Erich’s cell, and Erich lay on the bed. A warder came in with a tray. They drank coffee and ate some kind of soft biscuit without speaking to each other – it was in fact a memory rather than a dream. A memory which perhaps had nothing more to say than what it portrayed: a father visiting his son in prison. An archetype.

He also dreamt about G. About the G file, the only case he had failed to solve over all his years as a police officer. Nothing actually happened in this dream either. G sat in the dock during his trial, wearing his black suit, and gazed at Van Veeteren from the depths of his dark eyes. There was a sardonic smile on his lips. The prosecuting counsel walked back and forth, firing questions at him, but G didn’t answer, simply sat there looking at Van Veeteren in the public gallery with that characteristic mixture of contempt and mockery.

He felt much greater distaste at this short dream sequence, but when he woke up he couldn’t even recall in which order he had dreamt them. Which one had come first. As he ate his breakfast he wondered if they could have somehow been merged into each other, as if in a film – Erich in prison and G in the courtroom – and in that case what the message of such a parallel dream might be.

He didn’t find an answer, perhaps because he didn’t want to. Perhaps because there wasn’t one.

When he had finished packing on the Thursday afternoon, and marked all the boxes, he took his own carrier bag of books to his car, drove to the swimming baths and spent a couple of hours there before returning home to Klagenburg at about six o’clock. There were two messages on the telephone answering machine he had been given as a present by Ulrike. One was from her: she intended visiting him on Friday with a bottle of wine and some morel pâté, she announced, and wondered if he could use his own initiative to buy a few small gherkins and whatever other accessories he felt would be appropriate.