much room for manoeuvre he would have in whatever came next.
He reached no conclusions. Drove back home the same way as he’d come. Noticed to his surprise that he felt calm. Took another pill to see him through the night, and flopped down into bed.
The sun never rose on Monday. He rang work in the morning and advised them that he was unfit for work. Read in the Neuwe Blatt about the woman who had been found murdered in the village of Korrim, and found it difficult to accept that it was her. And that it was him. His memories of the car drive on Saturday night through the seemingly endless fields were dim: he had no idea which route he had taken or where he eventually stopped and dragged her out of the car. He had never heard the name Korrim before.
There were no witnesses. Despite the open countryside he had been able to dispose of the body under cover of darkness, and assisted by the late hour. The police had very little to say about it. The reporter assumed they had no significant clues.
So there we are, he thought. No need to worry. The game is still on, and the balls are still rolling.
The postman arrived shortly before eleven. He waited until he had left in the direction of the day nursery before going out to empty the letter box by his gate.
It was there all right. The same blue envelope as always. The same neat handwriting. He sat at the kitchen table with it in his hands for a while before opening it.
The letter was a little longer this time, but not much. Half a page in all. He read it slowly and methodically. As if he were not much good at reading — or afraid of missing something hidden or merely implied.
It’s time to get down to the details of our little transaction.
If you do not follow the instructions to the letter this time I shall have no hesitation in informing the police. I think you realize that you have tried my patience rather too much.
Do as follows:
1) Place 200,000 in a white plastic carrier bag and tie it securely.
2) At exactly four o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, the first of December put the carrier bag in the rubbish bin beside the statue of Hugo Maertens in Randers Park.
3) Go straight home and wait for a telephone call. When it comes, answer with your name and follow the instructions you receive.
You will have no further opportunity of avoiding justice. This is the last one. I have deposited an account of all your doings in a safe place. If anything happens to me that account will arrive in the hands of the police.
Let us get this business out of the way with no more faux pas.
A friend.
Well thought-out.
He had to acknowledge that. It somehow felt satisfying to be up against a worthy opponent.
And yet he felt that in the end, he would be able to outmanoeuvre him and win. But doing so would doubtless require a considerable effort.
For the moment — sitting here at the kitchen table with the letter in his hand — it was not possible to see what form that solution would take. A game of chess, he thought: a game of chess in which the pieces had a clear profile, but the required moves were nevertheless difficult to analyse. He didn’t know why this metaphor occurred to him. He had never been more than a very average chess player: he’d played quite a lot but had never been able to summon up the necessary patience.
However, his skilful opponent had now stage-managed an attack whose consequences he was unable to discern. Not yet. While he waited for the penny to drop, all he had to do was to make one move at a time and wait for an opening. A weak spot.
A sort of delaying tactic. Were there any other possible solutions? He didn’t think so, not for the moment. But time was short. He looked at the clock and saw that there were fewer than seventeen hours left before he was required to put a small fortune in a rubbish bin in Randers Park.
His opponent seemed to have a predilection for rubbish bins. And plastic carrier bags. Didn’t this suggest a certain lack of imagination? A certain simplicity and predictability that he ought to be able to exploit?
Seventeen hours? Less than a full day. Who? he thought.
Who?
For a while the identity of his opponent pushed to one side the question of what he was going to do. Now that he came to think of it, he realized that so far he had devoted surprisingly little time to that problem. Who? Who the hell was it who had seen him that evening? Was it possible to read anything into the way he was going about things? From the letters? Shouldn’t he be able to get some idea of who it might be by examining the premises he was in possession of?
And it suddenly struck him.
Somebody he knew.
He stored this insight away in his consciousness as if it were made of glass. Afraid of shattering it, afraid of placing too much reliance on it.
Somebody he knew. Somebody who knew him.
The latter above all. His opponent had known who he was even when he saw him with the dead boy that evening. As he stood there holding the boy in his arms in the rain. That must surely be the case.
Yes, he convinced himself. That must be right.
It wasn’t a matter of having registered and memorized the number of his car. The blackmailer had known straight away. He had driven past without stopping, and then when he had read in the newspapers about what had happened, he had put two and two together and made his move. He or she. He, presumably, he decided without really understanding why.
Yes, that’s how it happened. When he thought about it now he realized how implausible his earlier explanation had been. How far-fetched. Who the hell notices and memorizes a car registration number when they are merely driving past a parked vehicle? In the dark, and the rain? Impossible. Out of the question.
So: somebody who knew him. Somebody who knew who he was.
He noticed that he was smiling.
He was sitting there with a pale-blue letter that could ruin his life in less than a day. He had killed three people within a month. But even so, he was smiling.
But who was it?
It didn’t take him long to run through his sparse circle of friends and exclude it.
Or rather, them: all those who, with a modicum of goodwill, he might consider inviting to his wedding or his fiftieth birthday party. Or his funeral. No, none of those: he couldn’t believe that was possible. Of course there were perhaps one or two whom he couldn’t exclude quite as straightforwardly as the others, but there was nothing that made him stop and think. Nobody he suspected.
And there was another thing. To be sure, he wasn’t exactly a well-known name in Maardam, not a local celebrity; but nevertheless there were a few people who knew who he was and recognized him in the street. That was sufficient, of course. Every day he came into contact with people in town without being able to remember later whether he’d seen them or not; but obviously, they knew who he was. Some of them even said ‘hello’ — and were often somewhat embarrassed when they realized that he had no idea who they were.
One of those. It must be one of those, somebody like that, who was his opponent. He found himself smiling again.
Then he cursed out loud when he realized that the elimination process and conclusions were not much help, given the shortage of time.
No help at all. If he allowed himself to assume that the blackmailer lived somewhere in Maardam, that meant he had reduced the candidates from about 300,000 to 300. Perhaps.
Excluding old dodderers and children: from 200,000 to 200.
A considerable reduction, certainly, but futile even so. The plain fact was that there were still too many left.
Two hundred possible blackmailers? Seventeen hours to play with. Sixteen and a half, to be precise. He sighed and eased himself out of his armchair. Went to check the medicine chest and established that there was enough there to keep him going for another ten to twelve days at least.
In ten to twelve days’ time the situation would be quite different. No matter what.
Game over. A draw out of the question.
