bit sad.’
‘Did you speak to her then, on Friday?’
‘Not so much. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but now that you ask I do recall that she didn’t seem as happy as she usually was.’
‘You didn’t talk about that?’
‘No. We were very busy, we didn’t have time. Just think, if I’d known…’
The tears started to flow again, and she blew her nose. Jung looked hard at her and thought that if he didn’t have his Maureen he would have invited Liljana Milovic to dinner. Or to the cinema. Or to anything at all.
‘Where is she now?’ she asked.
‘Now?’ said Jung. ‘Oh, you mean… She’s at the Forensic Medicine Laboratory. They’re busy with the post- mortem…’
‘And her husband?’
‘Her husband, well…’ said Jung. ‘Did you know him as well?’
She looked down at the table.
‘No, not at all. I’ve never met him.’
‘Are you married yourself?’ he asked, and thought about what he’d read in one of Maureen’s weekly magazines the other day concerning Freudian slips.
‘No.’ She gave a little smile. ‘But I do have a boyfriend.’
He’s certainly not worthy of you, Jung thought.
‘Did she usually speak about her husband? How they were getting on together and so forth?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not often. I don’t think they had so good.’
That was the first time she had made a linguistic slip, and he wondered if it was a sign of something.
‘Really?’ he said, and waited.
‘But she didn’t say anything about it to me. She just said that things weren’t always so good. If you understand?’
Jung nodded and assumed he understood.
‘So you didn’t talk about… private matters?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Do you think she might have been interested in another man? That she was having a relationship with somebody else?’
Milovic thought that over before replying.
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Yes, she may have been. Just recently, there was something.’
‘But she didn’t say anything about it?’
‘No.
‘And you don’t know who it could have been?’
Milovic shook her head and started crying again.
‘The funeral,’ she said. ‘When will the funeral be?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jung. ‘It probably hasn’t been decided yet. But I promise to tell you as soon as I hear about it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said and smiled through her tears. ‘You are a very nice policeman.’
Jung swallowed twice, but couldn’t think of anything else to say.
21
He slept until eight o’clock on Sunday evening.
When he woke up his first reaction was that something had broken inside his head. That the way he perceived the world had burst. He had dreamt about billiard balls rolling about non-stop on an enormous table without pockets or holes. Unfathomable patterns; collisions and changes of direction, a game in which everything seemed to be just as uncertain and yet as predetermined as life itself. The speed and direction of every ball as it scudded over the moss-green table was the secret code which contained within itself all future events and collisions. Together with all the other balls’ directions and codes of course; but in some mysterious way each individual ball also contained within itself the future of all the others in its own private Mobius curve — at least the ball that was himself did… An infinity of programmed future, he thought as he lay in bed, still trying to find a starting point and something to hold on to… This enclosed infinity. Some time ago he had read some articles on chaos research in one of the journals he subscribed to, and he knew that what was regulated by laws and what was incapable of being calculated could both very well be contained within the same theory. Compatible opposites. The same life.
The same marionette, dangling from those millions of strings. The same sloping plane. This accursed life. The images were legion.
The explosion itself, for that is what had produced the new direction, had happened when he hit Vera Miller on the head with the pipe. As he did so, he could see with absolute clarity that it had been inevitable from the beginning, but also that he couldn’t possibly have known about it.
Not until he was standing there, having done it. A consequence, quite simply; a development which with hindsight was predictable and completely logical… Just as natural as night following day, or sorrow following happiness, and just as unaware as dawn must be about dusk. An effect of causes that had been outside his control all the time, but which were there nevertheless.
A necessity.
Another infernal necessity, then, and when he aimed those desperate blows at her temples and the back of her head, that desperation was no more than a vain confrontation with necessity itself. Nothing more. They were both victims in this accursed, predetermined dance of death known as life, both he and Vera; but in addition, he was the one who had been forced to act as the executioner. In addition: a sort of extra, thank you very much… Stage-managed and ordered, and carried out in accordance with all these hopeless codes and tracks. The big picture. With the key in his hand, he could see that it was required of him, and now he had done it.
Shortly before he woke up he had also dreamt about his mother’s hand on his forehead, on that occasion when he had sicked up yellow bile… And images of the course taken by all the balls of various colours… And the bucket with a drop of water in the bottom… And his mother’s constant tenderness… And the collisions… Over and over again until the moment when everything was finally drenched by a flood of red blood flowing out of Vera Miller’s temples where the first blow had hit her with horrific force, everything in accordance with what was ordained by fate, over and over again, that macabre melodrama, that hyper-intense whirlwind of madness… And it was when all this had transmogrified into repugnance that he woke up and knew that something had broken. Something else.
That membrane. It had finally split.
When he got up he saw that there was plenty of real blood everywhere. In the bed. On the carpet on the floor, on the clothes lying around here and there. On his own hands and on the piece of pipe that had rolled under the bed and that he couldn’t find at first.
In the car in the garage as well. The back seat. Full of Vera Miller’s blood.
He took two tablets. Washed them down with a glass of water and a thumb’s breadth of whisky. Lay down on the sofa, on his back, and waited until he could feel the first blessed effects of the alcohol.
Then he began to get to grips with it all.
The follow-up work. Calmly and methodically, as far as possible. Washing away what it was possible to wash away. Rubbing and scraping and trying various concoctions. He didn’t feel any agitation, no regret, no fear any more. Nothing but ice-cold calm and clarity: he knew that the game was still continuing according to the rules and patterns over which he had no control. Over which nobody had any control, and which one should always be wary of opposing.
The inevitable direction. The code.
When he had done what he could, he drove into town. Sat for two hours in Lon Pejs restaurant down at Zwille, had a Thai meal, and wondered what the next move in this unavoidable game would be. Wondered how
