“Clear off,” said Van Veeteren. “Is the door open, by the way?”
“The key’s hanging from a nail under the gutter,” said Munster. “On the right.”
“Thanks,” said Van Veeteren.
Munster got back into the car, managed to turn around in the narrow road and set off through the trees toward the village.
It’s amazing, he thought. We must have spent a hundred hours sniffing around this place. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he found something we’d missed.
Not surprised in the least.
Van Veeteren stayed by the roadside until Munster’s white Audi had vanished among the trees. Then he forced his way though the hedge and took possession of The Big Shadow.
The garden was overgrown, no two ways about that. He
stuck a toothpick in his mouth and looked around. He began walking around the house but was forced to give up about halfway when he found himself up to the armpits in nettles.
No matter, he thought. It wasn’t too difficult to get an impression of what it must have looked like once upon a time. A plot of land taken over by man around the middle of the last century, tamed by plow and harrow, a lot of hard work and tender loving care. But now well on the way back into the arms of Mother Nature. Aspen and birch saplings had eaten into large chunks of the orchard; paved areas, the cellar and outhouses were lost in undergrowth and covered in moss; and the big barn, which had presumably been the famous poultry farm, would surely not survive many more winters. It was very clear that a border had been crossed-the limit beyond which it was no longer possible to reclaim what nature had taken hold of.
Not for an old lag living on his own, at least.
The Big Shadow?
With hindsight it was obvious that the house name was prophetic. He found the key, and after considerable effort succeeded in opening the door. He had to bend down so as not to hit his head on the door frame, and inside there was only just sufficient headroom for him to stand upright. He recalled having read in the newspapers about a month ago that the average height of people had shot up remarkably over the past hundred years. His own six feet two inches would presumably have been considered abnormal when the first settlers moved into this house.
Two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor. A narrow, creaking staircase led up from a three-foot-square hall to a loft full of old newspapers, broken furniture and other junk. A faint smell of soot and sun-warmed dust clung to the raft-ers. He sneezed several times, then went back down to the kitchen. He felt the big iron stove, as if expecting to find it hot.
Examined the bad reproduction of an almost equally bad original landscape painting hanging over the sofa, then entered the living room. The cracked windowpanes. A sideboard. Table and four ill-matched chairs. A sofa and a typically 1950s television set. A sagging bookshelf with getting on for a hundred books, most of them cheap crime novels or adventure stories.
On the wall to the right of the stove was a mirror and a framed black-and-white photograph of a runner breaking the finish-ing tape. His face seemed tormented, almost tortured. At first he thought it was Verhaven himself, but when he went up to it and examined it more closely, he saw the caption and recognized the man: Emil Zatopek. The Czech locomotive, as he was called. The self-torturer. The man who overcame the pain barrier.
Had he been Verhaven’s ideal?
Or was it just typical of the time? Zatopek had been the king of the track in the early fifties, if his memory served him rightly. Or one of them, at least.
He left the living room for the bedroom and stood gazing at the double bed that, despite its modest size, took up almost all the floor space.
But a double bed? Yes, of course, Verhaven had lived with a lot of women. Not all of them had been murdered. At least, he assumed not.
“Was this your bedroom, then?” muttered Van Veeteren, fumbling for a new toothpick. “Did you get one night’s sleep as a free man, or didn’t he even allow you that?”
He left the bedroom.
What the hell am I doing here? he thought suddenly. What am I kidding myself that I can sort out by strutting around here? Even if I begin to form an impression of what Verhaven was really like, that’s not going to get me one inch closer to the answer.
The answer to the question of who murdered him, that is.
He was overcome with exhaustion and sat down at the kitchen table. Closed his eyes and watched the flickering yellow light that floated past from right to left. Always from right to left: He wondered what that might be due to. They had warned him that he would have moments of weakness, but he hadn’t fully realized that they would be as treacherous as this, practically making his legs give way under him.
He rested his head in his hands. Reinhart always said you should never try to think about anything important when your head’s not right. It’s better to shut down altogether, otherwise you’ll only fill it with a lot of garbage.
An unusually ugly tablecloth, he thought therefore, when he had opened his eyes again. But it seems somehow familiar.
Didn’t Aunt K. have one like it when I visited her in summer about the beginning of the fifties? In that boathouse heated by the summer sun, where you could hear the water lapping under the floorboards. It felt a long way away from The Big Shadow in both time and space, but it must have been around the time when Verhaven left his father here in Kaustin to lead his own independent life.
Forty years ago, or thereabouts.
And then things turned out the way they did. .
That’s life, Van Veeteren thought. One big goddamn lottery!
Or wasn’t it like that, in fact? Were there directions and patterns?
A determinant?
Munster leaned against the old gravestone and looked at the clock.
Ten minutes past ten. There were voices inside his head stubbornly urging him to go to the car and immediately drive back to The Big Shadow. The chief inspector had been on his own for more than an hour at this point-recently operated on, weak and sickly; it could be regarded as irresponsible not to keep an eye on him.
But there were other voices as well. Van Veeteren hadn’t actually insisted on any more than one hour of solitary majesty, although he had set the limit at half past ten. Munster had to choose between arriving too soon and arriving too late.
An awkward choice, certainly; but if he stuck to the later time, at least he would escape being told off for disturbing the chief inspector’s holy thought processes. If Van Veeteren turned out to be unconscious somewhere among all the junk, that would be a serious matter, to be sure. But he’d rather turn up as an angel of mercy than as an unwelcome and premature intruder.
Munster closed his eyes. From inside the church came the muted, monotonous chanting of today’s sermon. He had watched the whole flock-about twenty pious souls-come wandering at regular intervals along the newly raked gravel path to the church door, where the shepherd had greeted each one with a handshake and a watery smile. Munster had tried to remain discreetly in the background, but the prelate had naturally got wind of him and fixed him with his beckoning gaze. Who was this person remaining willfully outside the temple gates?
But Munster had resisted. The other sheep had trotted slowly and patiently inside. The shepherd followed them in.
The bells binged and bonged ten o’clock, a flock of tempo-rarily homeless pigeons fled the steeple, and the service got under way.
The average age was unusually high, Munster noted as the doors closed behind them. It was clear to him that all the faithful would doubtless have deepened and sealed their relationship with the church within ten to fifteen years at most. By lying down to rest in the churchyard, that is.
Or being laid to rest, rather.
On a day like today he was almost inclined to envy them, just a little bit. Or at the very least to detect something serene and transfigured in this well-tended graveyard surrounding the ancient stone-built church with its recently repaired and profane red-tiled roof and black lacquered weathercock. Here, obviously, there was no cruel and avenging God. No trumpets sounding on the day of judgment. No eternal and inevitable damnation.
