Helmut’s morose objections without giving them more than three-quarters of a second’s consideration?
Until later. When it seemed to be too late. These days and nights when everything seemed to lose every ounce of significance and value, when she had become a robot and didn’t so much as glance at these old thoughts which were drifting past her consciousness like tattered remnants of cloud over the blue-grey night sky of death. She simply let them sail past, on their disconsolate journey from horizon to horizon.
From oblivion to oblivion. Night to night and darkness to darkness.
From stone thou art.
From your gaping wounds your silent fury seethes up to a dead sky.
The pain of stone. Harder than anything else.
And madness, insanity itself was lying in wait round the corner.
Her eighteenth birthday. A Friday. In July, as hot as hell.
‘I’ll tell her when she comes back from the gym,’ she had said. ‘So you don’t need to be present. Then we can have dinner afterwards in peace and quiet. She’ll take it well, I can feel it in my bones.’
At first merely a sullen silence.
‘If it’s really necessary,’ he’d said eventually. When she was already at the sink, washing the cups. ‘It’s your responsibility, not mine.’
‘I have to,’ she said. ‘Remember that I promised her this when she was fifteen. Remember that it’s a gap that needs to be filled. She’s expecting it.’
‘She’s never said a word about it,’ he said. From the side of his mouth. With his back to her.
That was true. She had to grant him that as well.
‘Daft, but do whatever you like. What’s the point?’
That’s all. Nothing more. Then he left.
Daft?
Am I doing it for her sake, or for mine? she asked herself.
Reasons? Motives?
As blurred as the borderline between dreams and consciousness.
Unfathomable as stone itself.
Nonsense. Verbal sticking plaster. She probably knows anyway.
3
When Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno stopped outside the door of Chief Inspector Reinhart’s office, it was a quarter past three in the afternoon and she was longing for a cold beer.
If she had been born into a different social class, or blessed with more imagination, she might have been longing for a glass of cold champagne instead (or why not three or four?); but today any possibility of thinking straight, any ability to think at all had been sweated away in the early hours of the morning. It was over thirty degrees, and had been about that all day. Both in town and inside the police station. A forgotten manic flat-iron seemed to be pressing down from above, overheating everyone and everything, and apart from chilled drinks, there seemed to be only two possibilities of surviving: the beach and the shade.
There was a noticeable absence of the former in the Maardam police station.
But there were Venetian blinds. And corridors where the sun was certain not to be shining. She stood there with her hand on the door handle, struggling with an impulse (that in itself was sluggish as a bluebottle high on Coca-Cola, so that the outcome could go either way) not to turn it. To retreat discreetly.
Instead of entering and finding out why he wanted to talk to her. There were good reasons for not going in. Or one, at least: in less than two hours’ time she would be going on leave.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty suffocating minutes. If nothing unexpected happened, that is.
Moreno’s intuition told her that he probably hadn’t asked her to come in order to wish her all the best for her holiday. It hadn’t sounded like that, and in any case, to do so wouldn’t be Reinhart’s style.
In a strange way, the unexpected didn’t seem to be all that unexpected. If she’d been offered decent odds, she might well have bet on it. That’s the way it was when you were in the lacklustre police business, and it wouldn’t be the first time. .
So, to beat a retreat, or not to beat a retreat: that was the question. She could always explain that something had turned up. That she hadn’t had time to call in, as he’d put it.
Bugger bugger, she thought. It sounded as potentially deadly as a hungry cobra.
After a brief internal struggle, the drugged-up bluebottle drowned, and her Lutheran-Calvinistic copper’s conscience won the day. She sighed, turned the handle and went in. Flopped down on the visitor’s chair with her misgivings dancing around in her head like butterflies greeting the arrival of summer. And in her stomach.
‘You wanted to see me,’ she said.
Reinhart was standing by the window, smoking, and looking ominous. She noticed that he was wearing flip- flops. Light blue.
‘
‘What do you have to offer?’ Moreno asked, and that cold beer floated into her mind’s eye again.
‘Water. With or without bubbles.’
‘I think I’ll pass,’ said Moreno. ‘If you don’t mind. Well?’
Reinhart scratched at his stubble and put his pipe down on the window ledge beside the flowerpot.
‘We’ve found Lampe-Leermann,’ he said.
‘Lampe-Leermann?’ said Moreno.
‘Yes,’ said Reinhart.
‘We?’ said Moreno.
‘Some colleagues of ours. Out at Lejnice. In Behrensee, to be precise, but they took him to Lejnice. That was the nearest station.’
‘Excellent. And about time, too. Any problems?’
‘Just the one,’ said Reinhart.
‘Really?’ said Moreno.
He flopped down on his desk chair, opposite her, and gave her a look that was presumably meant to express innocence. Moreno had seen it before, and sent a prayer flying out through the window. ‘Not again, please!’ was its essence.
‘Just the one problem,’ said Reinhart again.
‘Shoot,’ said Moreno.
‘He’s not really prepared to cooperate.’
Moreno said nothing. Reinhart fiddled with the papers on his desk and seemed uncertain of how to continue.
‘Or rather, he is prepared to cooperate — but only if he can talk to you.’
‘What?’ said Moreno.
‘Only if he can talk to-’
‘I heard what you said,’ interrupted Moreno ‘But why on earth does he want to talk to me?’
‘God knows,’ said Reinhart. ‘But that’s the way it seems to be — don’t blame me. Lampe-Leermann is prepared to make a full confession, but only if he can lay it at your feet. Nobody else’s. He doesn’t like policemen, he says. Odd, don’t you think?’
Moreno contemplated the picture hanging above Reinhart’s head. It depicted a pig in a suit standing in a pulpit and throwing television sets to a congregation of ecstatic sheep. Or possibly judges wearing wigs, it was
