‘Are you sure Mrs Lankester isn’t in?’
Unconsciously, Mrs Gassner glanced up the stairs again. Christ, she was transparent! Someone was up there, but not Pilgrim Lankester.
‘No, no, no. I told you she has gone out. I saw her myself.’
Strebel imagined Mrs Gassner peering through the curtains. She knew exactly who came and went and when. And who was up there now. She’d probably let whoever it was in. Still, he conjured politeness: ‘Please tell Mrs Lankester to contact me when she gets back. Here is my card.’
‘You have to make her pay,’ Mrs Gassner said with renewed enthusiasm. ‘She must pay. An eye for an eye. It’s your job to make her pay.’
‘Please give her my message.’ He made a point of peering inquisitively over her shoulder and up the stairs. ‘Perhaps she can use your phone.’
When Strebel turned around to walk back to his car, she came out on his heels, ‘Those children, broken and twisted, I can’t bear to think about it, and she just carries on with her fancy life, oh, not so fancy now that the husband left, I can tell you, but he’s still paying the bills.’
Strebel was in the car and Mrs Gassner was up against the window glass: ‘She shouldn’t even be in this country. She’s divorced! He left her. For another woman. They have a child! And yet she’s still here. On what visa? These people are all tramps, camping on our doorstep. Throw them out.’
Strebel started his car. ‘Please give her the message.’
He drove off. Mrs Gassner’s spittle had freckled the window. Before he turned into the main road, he glanced back in his rearview mirror at the chalet. Mrs Gassner stood in the doorway. But above her, he was certain he saw someone in the second floor apartment — just a fleeting glimpse. A man? The figure was gone, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps Mr Gassner was fixing a broken light.
But Strebel’s feeling had a darker texture, which he hesitated to call instinct, and which never failed him. The feeling of what he might find on the other side of a door, in the trunk of a car, in the thick bracken of woods where a murder of crows had gathered.
* * *
It was after nine. Strebel rubbed his eyes, looked around his office. In his youth — before this was his office — the shelves had been stacked with paperwork. A detective might be overwhelmed by the amount of work, but at least he could see that it was there, being done. Now everything was computerized, the records kept in invisible folders in an invisible cabinet.
Strebel considered the virtual world. You could put things there, like files and photographs. And yet they didn’t exist in the traditional interpretation of existing: i.e. something you could spill coffee on. He wanted — did he? — to be part of the modern police force, the bright young sparks who could tap-tap-tap and tell him the weight of water.
But at fifty-five, he remained awed by the landline telephone. How a voice could travel down a wire for thousands of miles. How? Physics didn’t quite explain it. He could recall the first telephone in his village, a heavy, elegant rotary dial.
A few years ago, he and Ingrid had bought a microwave, the latest mod-con. They’d cooked a potato and stared at it like the Christ Child. Look at the little miracle! Hadn’t they even laughed at themselves? But when was a few years ago? He felt a sick lurch when he realized he was thinking of the early eighties.
More than three decades ago. He was a grandfather now.
He tapped on the computer keyboard, opened the folder of the Arnau incident scene. He kept coming back to this case, as if it held some great mystery that he had to uncover. But it was the most mundane of accidents. Everyone involved was ordinary. Even the deaths of the children were ordinary — the ordinary result of an ordinary vehicle traveling at 60kph hitting an ordinary child’s body weighing an ordinary 32kgs.
A little pink backpack. Two shoes, from the two different boys. The dark wine stains of blood. Glass everywhere. The ruptured edifice of the bus stand. The smashed car. The images were all data now, turned into rows and rows of digits by a computer genius in California. He wondered if Ernst Koppler had kissed Sophie goodbye before he said ‘You’ll be in the way.’ If he had held her and pressed his lips to her soft cheek and felt his awkward body fill with love, that great lightsaber love for a child which he would never feel again.
‘I keep losing things. My handbag, the house keys. My gloves,’ Simone Emptmann had said to Strebel that morning, her voice coming to him now as if through a loudspeaker. ‘I keep thinking he’s staying with his grandparents and I can’t remember when I’m supposed to pick him up.’
He was seeing her now in his mind. She’d sat very still in her kitchen. A pretty, uncomplicated woman who now looked as if she’d scalded her head in a pot of boiling water. Her eyes were red, cheeks flushed, the skin under her eyes was swollen and raw. A female relative — a sister? a cousin? — had come to take her little baby for a stroll so she could talk to Strebel without distraction.
‘Earlier in the morning,’ she’d said. ‘That morning. When we were having breakfast. I looked at Markus. The sun was on his face and he was busy eating and didn’t see me and I felt such sadness that my child was leaving me. But it’s what they do; it’s their purpose, to leave you. I don’t think you’re ever ready. Are you? Do you have children, Inspector? You know they’ll grow up and have imperfect lives and people will hurt them and they’ll be unsatisfied and selfish, and so I think maybe by leaving now he’s only known happiness and love. That’s what I tell myself. He’s been spared disappointment.’
She’d folded her hands in her lap neatly, and he thought of little dead birds.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d said.
Now, he clicked the file of photographs shut and turned off the computer.
* * *
The office was dark and mostly quiet. Somewhere down the hall, the cleaner was pushing her trolley; one of the wheels squeaked. If something happened — a bomb, for instance — the squeaking would become important. Crucial. Interviewed by fellow police officers, the rubble still smoking behind him, he would strive to recall the squeaking in detail. The pitch, the direction. As he had never heard the squeak before, could this suggest a different cleaner — an interloper, the terrorist — had pushed a cleaning trolley? In the absence of a bomb, the squeaking wheel had no meaning at all.
Detail established truth. The color of the dog. Without detail, truth was a metaphysically unstable idea: too general, too big; cause and effect going all the way back to first dates, to ancestors surviving winter storms, to dinosaurs, to organisms in a puddle.
But detail could also torment. He recalled Simone’s terror, how it peeked out like a flash of red beneath the veneer of disbelief. ‘You vaccinate them, you make them wear helmets on their bikes and seat belts in the car. You find ways to make vegetables tasty and not let them watch too much TV. You do everything right.’
You do everything right. And yet the minutiae of life — she’d forgotten her phone, she’d gone back for it and left the children in the bus stand. ‘Wait here, I’ll be right back,’ she’d told them. The phone — so necessary, just in case — had lured her. She’d had her hand on the car door when she heard the noise. The car crashing, the universe splitting open.
At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.
Strebel began to gather his things but then he realized how much he did not want to go home. He was in something, as if traveling in another country, and did not want Ingrid’s banal intrusion. The broken toilet or the latest idiocy from their son-in-law. He called her again.
‘I’m staying at the office tonight.’