The Stranglers Honeymoon (47 page)

‘How many has he killed?’

‘If he really is the one, he could well have killed five people.’

‘Good Lord,’ whispered Winnifred, and he realized it was only now that all the implications of the situation had really registered with her. That this wasn’t some kind of theoretical riddle.

‘Go to bed now and think about something else,’ he recommended.

‘I shall just have another whisky first,’ said Winnifred. ‘How about you?’

He declined the offer, and left.

Ulrike was already asleep by the time he got home in Klagenburg.

Perhaps that was just as well. He wouldn’t have been able to resist discussing with her the outcome of his conversation with Winnifred, and the sensible thing was of course to avoid involving anybody else in this ploy. Not even Ulrike. Not even as a sounding board – the method and what he planned to do next would probably not be able to cope with no end of viewpoints and female intuition.

What he planned to do next wasn’t all that clear at the moment: but he had a name now.

A name without a face. He hadn’t yet seen Maarten deFraan, neither in a photograph nor in real life. It felt odd. An odd way to find a murderer. He wondered if he had ever gone about tracking down a criminal in as clinical a way as this. Probably not.

He went to the larder and looked somewhat half-heartedly to see if there was a bottle of dark beer left, but decided not to bother. If there had been any whisky left in the house he would probably have allowed himself a wee dram: but he knew they had drunk the last drop during the Christmas holidays, and hadn’t got round to replenishing stocks.

In any case, he was not into hard liquor. Red wine or beer. The darker the better. In both cases. And Ulrike’s taste was the same in this respect, as in so many others.

But what mattered now was not drinking habits. All that mattered was the Strangler. He dug out a CD of Pärt’s
Für Alina
, and switched it on at low volume. Stretched out on the sofa in the darkness, with a blanket over him.

Professor deFraan? he thought. Who the hell are you?

Private detective Van Veeteren? he then thought. Who the hell do you think you are?

Clever stuff. A way of proceeding that he might be able to make use of in his book of memoirs – if he ever got round to finishing it off. He hadn’t added anything to it for over three months now. He was stuck in that accursed G File, and not for the first time. The only case he had failed to solve after thirty years in the police force – that wasn’t too bad a record, of course, but G could still keep him awake at night.

Be off with you! he snarled at G. We’re going to concentrate on the Strangler now!

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

The plan. What should he do? How should he approach him?

How should he go about tricking Professor deFraan into giving himself away, to put it bluntly? What was the best way of confronting him? In what situation could he be expected to be fooled into giving the game away sufficiently for a cynical antiquarian bookseller to be able to catch on?

To produce that absolutely unique expression that appears in every murderer’s eyes. In certain situations.

Perhaps not every murderer, he decided after a couple of seconds. But in most of them.

At the moment when the murderer looks for the first time into the eyes of his nemesis – the person who knows.

That is the moment, Van Veeteren thought, that fraction of a second when a veil descends over the murderer’s eyes, and nothing can be more explicit for anybody who knows how these things happen. Nothing.

But there is another sort as well, he reminded himself.

Another sort of murderer who is immune to a sense of shame. G, for instance. Van Veeteren was forced to make a mental effort to abolish his image.

And if Maarten deFraan was in fact guilty, but made of the same hard stuff as G, Van Veeteren’s method would never succeed.

But that remained to be seen. A lot remained to be seen, that was for sure.

He yawned. Wondered if he ought to remain lying there on the sofa and listen to the rest of Pärt. Or whether he ought to join Ulrike in bed.

It was not a difficult decision to make.

44

The lecture room looked as if it could accommodate about a hundred students, and was about three-quarters full. He chose a fairly discreet seat in the last row but one. Sat down, adjusted the shelf that turned his seat into a little desk, and tried to look like a twenty-three-year-old student.

This didn’t come naturally to him. He looked around and reckoned that he was the oldest person present by a margin of at least fifteen years – only a few women sitting two rows diagonally in front of him looked as if they had passed the thirty mark, and provided him with a modicum of consolation. Swayed no doubt by jealousy and prejudice, he decided that they were a group of secondary school teachers making the most of the half-term holiday to brush up their English language and literature, and celebrate not having to teach.

The rest of those present were young and talented. More or less as they had been when he himself spent a few years at university round about 1960 – reading various subjects with varying degrees of success. To his surprise, he realized that he missed that experience. He would love to relive those halcyon days – and was decidedly jealous of all these young people whose lives were as yet an unwritten page.

But needless to say, it wasn’t as straightforward as that. Obviously. It hadn’t been the case then, and was not the case now. He had boobed left, right and centre in the course of his life: for these talented young people, most of their mistakes were yet to come. It was a toss-up when it came to deciding which of them was most to be envied.

He recalled the smell as well. He didn’t know if it emanated from the spacious lecture theatre with its high, barred windows, worn seats and warm, dusty radiators – or if people aged about twenty-three always generated a smell like this. But it didn’t matter. Neither then nor now. It also felt unexpectedly odd – as if he had ended up in a time warp which forty years of experience were incapable of sorting out . . . A kind of pocket of resistance, perhaps? Despite all so-called progress. The older we become, he thought, the more our conception of time becomes circular. There seems to be less difference between today and tomorrow. But that’s not especially strange, of course.

He took out his notebook and the papers he had been given by Winnifred Lynch, and wondered if there might be some kind of attendance register. Not that it mattered all that much – Winnifred had assured him that it would be highly unlikely, and that in no circumstances would he be thrown out. Professor deFraan’s lecture on Conrad, Borrow and Trollope was open to students enrolled for various courses, and it was not unusual for members of the general public to sneak in and listen simply because they found it interesting. So he didn’t need to regard himself as an outsider. Even if that’s what he was.

The personal details about Maarten deFraan took up two densely written pages. He had been given them by Winnifred in her office a mere five minutes ago, and hadn’t had time to do more than glance at them. If the lecture turned out to be sleep-inducing, he could no doubt take a closer look at them – discreetly, of course.

This also felt remarkably familiar – having a sort of alternative occupation to keep him going during lectures. That was presumably how he had regarded the situation in the sixties, he now realized. No wonder he hadn’t progressed very far in the academic circus, Van Veeteren thought, and yawned.

But there was presumably no reason to cry over spilled milk in this connection either.

DeFraan appeared at exactly fifteen minutes past eleven, and the hushed murmur became a more or less respectful silence. Van Veeteren had to acknowledge that he did not have an immediate impression that this was the man he was looking for. Unfortunately – but no doubt that would have been too much to ask for. DeFraan looked healthy and in quite good shape. On the tall side, quite sturdy and with a face that reminded Van Veeteren vaguely of an American actor whose name he had long since forgotten. Bushy hair, dark and with a trace of grey here and there; his thin oval-shaped spectacles and neatly trimmed beard gave him an air of strength and intellectual integrity. Dark polo-necked sweater and a modest dark grey jacket. It seemed highly likely that women would find him attractive.

He welcomed his audience. Took off his wrist watch, placed it on the lectern in front of him, and set off without further ado.

A short but elegant summary of the English nineteenth-century novel in barely five minutes, before he came to the first of the three authors named in the title of his lecture: Joseph Conrad.

He occasionally wrote on the whiteboard, and Van Veeteren was somewhat surprised to see that his audience were taking notes for all they worth. Some of the students even had small portable tape recorders on their desk lids – that had never happened forty years ago, and he began to realize that Professor deFraan was regarded as an authority.

But he soon found it difficult to concentrate. There was evidently a shortage of oxygen in the lecture theatre, and he couldn’t ignore the influence of gravity on his eyelids. He had read both Conrad and Trollope; had his own views on Conrad at least, and wasn’t really interested in having his judgements reassessed or modified.

Not by a potential murderer, in any case.

He only knew Borrow by name – and hardly that. He found himself yawning again, and it was remarkable how soothing it was, sitting there in that room.

DeFraan’s voice was strong but restrained. As he delved into the white man’s burden in
The Heart of Darkness
, Van Veeteren found it increasingly difficult to assign to this man the role that was the main reason for his being there.

DeFraan didn’t act like a strangler, in fact. Didn’t sound like a murderer.

Didn’t act like a strangler
?

Van Veeteren shook his head at that amateurish judgement. ‘We need to be clear that even a criminal usually acts normally’ – that was a rule that old Borkmann had inculcated into him many years ago. ‘In certain circumstances it can even be impossible to distinguish between a bus-load of psychopaths and a totally harmless collection of unimpeachable citizens,’ he had maintained, and grinned characteristically. ‘For instance, a gang of undertakers on a Sunday outing.’

Van Veeteren smiled to himself when he realized that he had remembered it word for word.

He didn’t sound like a murderer!

Borkmann would have laughed at that wording. You can never tell. Van Veeteren decided to leave the professor in the heart of darkness, and instead to look a little more closely at the information about him that Winnifred had found on her computer.

Needless to say it concentrated on academic qualifications. Examinations passed. Posts held. Published books and articles. Symposiums and conferences deFraan had attended, research projects he had been involved in. Van Veeteren skimmed quickly through all that. Noted that his doctoral thesis had been entitled
Narrative Structures in Popular Fiction
, and that he had been Professor of English at Maardam University since 1996. Before that he had spent four years as a lecturer at the considerably less venerable seat of learning in Aarlach, which is where he had studied as a student.

The more personal data took up about half the second page, and stated among other things that he was born in Lingen on 7 June 1958. That he had been married, but had been a widower since 1995, that he had no children, and lived at Kloisterstraat 24.

That was about all. Van Veeteren read through the whole document from start to finish once again, to see if there might possibly be something – the tiniest detail or circumstance – that might suggest he really was the man they were looking for. The Strangler. The notorious and elusive lunatic who had murdered three people with his bare hands.

The murderer with a capital M.

He looked up and contemplated the well-dressed man standing in front of the whiteboard. He was writing something now: several book titles with publication dates. Could these hands . . . this hand (which had a plaster on the back of it, Van Veeteren noted automatically) – could these fingers that were now holding the blue marker pen and writing these letters, in a different situation and in certain circumstances wrap themselves round a woman’s neck and . . . ?

It seemed absurd. He had met wolves in sheep’s clothing many times during his career, but this seemed too ridiculous for words.

The private detective sighed and checked his watch: there were twenty minutes of the lecture still to go. He was longing for something to drink.

In order to give himself something to occupy his mind he took
Strangler’s Honeymoon
out of his briefcase and started thumbing through it. He had started looking for it in the beginning of December, and eventually received a copy from Dillman’s in London in the middle of January. He’d read it, but not thought much of it.

It was just that damned name that haunted him.

Kerran. Benjamin Kerran.

He found it difficult to associate it with that neatly dressed academic berk holding forth from his pulpit. Very difficult.

No matter what Borkmann might have had to say.

Two of the female students – a short, plump, dark-haired one and a tall, blonde girl with a ponytail – had aspects of Trollope to discuss with deFraan, and Van Veeteren had to wait for a while before he could have a private word with the professor. But the girls finished eventually – although it was clear that they would have liked to carry on rather longer, but lacked the ability. Both the intellectual capability and the feminine guile, it seemed. They thanked him excessively and at great length, put their pens and notebooks away in their rucksacks, curtseyed and sauntered out of the room. DeFraan adjusted his glasses and looked attentively and enquiringly at Van Veeteren.

‘Excuse me, but do you have a moment?’

DeFraan smiled and put his lecture notes away in a yellow plastic folder.