Caspary was coming out the door. He pretended to hang up. He pretended to be himself. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I guess we wait for the body. A hiker in the woods. Kids playing where they’re not supposed to.’
* * *
It took Mrs Gassner a matter of seconds to answer the door, as if her hausfrau exterior belied the body of an Olympic sprinter. ‘Inspector,’ she said, looking at him with a spark of curiosity. ‘Please come in.’
He demurred. ‘This will only take a minute.’ He brought out Pilgrim’s letter. ‘We have just found this at Mr Ernst Koppler’s house. I wondered if you might know how it got there.’
‘No.’
‘There’s no criminal intention here, Mrs Gassner, but I feel your help — your honesty — is important. Mr Koppler has gone missing.’ He handed her the letter. She took it, regarded it with great mystery. ‘It’s addressed to you,’ he said. ‘How did it come to be in Mr Koppler’s house?’
For a long minute she debated with herself. Could she concoct an adequate lie? Or might she apportion the truth? Strebel could almost hear her rifling through her options.
At last Mrs Gassner decided: ‘I didn’t know him, only in passing, at the market, the apothecary. I knew he married that Turkish woman.’ Strebel thought to correct her but let it go. ‘She trapped him into marriage. These immigrants are all the same and he was a fool. But the little girl, he didn’t deserve that.’
Strebel was attentive, neutral, and she glanced up, almost imploring: ‘I was doing the right thing, no matter what the law says.’
‘Please, just tell me.’
She nodded. ‘He came, a few days after the accident. At first I didn’t recognize him. He was dirty, unwashed. He said he needed to go upstairs to Mrs Lankester’s apartment. He didn’t want to steal anything or make a mess, he just needed to see where she lived. Myself, I don’t understand what it was about but I didn’t see the harm.’
‘So you gave him the key?’
‘Several times.’
‘And he was here that morning I came by?’
The very faintest movement of her head, just one nod. Strebel felt a surge of protective anger — almost jealousy. He wondered if Pilgrim had known of the violation, and had decided not to tell him. What had Mr Koppler done in there? What had he wanted?
‘And the letter?’
‘After the inquest — you know, it was a travesty to find no fault. Someone, even that Mrs Berger with the dog, should be held to account. This country is becoming too liberal. It started when they gave women the vote.’
Strebel remained impassive. ‘And Miss Jones left without paying the phone bill?’
‘Incredible! I found an envelope under the door with payment for the months remaining on the lease and her key. I went up. The place was empty. I found most of her things in the rubbish in the basement. Bags of clothes. Books, shoes, things like that. She didn’t have much. It was a furnished apartment, you see.’
‘And yet she forgot to pay the phone bill,’ Strebel said, tapping Pilgrim’s letter thoughtfully on his hand.
‘That’s the kind of person she was. Careless.’
‘But she sent you the money.’
Mrs Gassner attempted to sidestep, ‘I notice she has begun calling herself Jones. She must be on the lookout for a new man.’
‘And then you gave this letter to Mr Koppler. Why?’
Now she was silent. And he felt she wasn’t searching for a lie but for the truth — an explanation that made sense, that she could extract from the tangle of her justifications. ‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘He looked terrible, he was suffering. We passed each other on the pavement by the cemetery. I suppose he was visiting his wife, his daughter. Can you imagine? Both in one year? He asked me if I knew where she was. I didn’t see the harm.’
The harm, no one ever saw the harm.
‘When was this?’
‘A few days ago,’ she said, and then, gesturing to the letter, ‘Why were you at Mr Koppler’s house? Has he…? Is he…?’
‘What day?’
‘Three days ago.’
‘Monday?’
‘Yes. Has he… has he—’
‘Gone,’ Strebel finished for her.
‘Gone?’
‘It appears so at this time.’
‘He asked me where she was, that’s all, that’s all,’ Mrs Gassner blurted. ‘Africa. She’s in Africa. On a photographic safari, I’m sure of it. Having fun.’
* * *
On his way back to the precinct Caspary phoned: she’d traced Mr Koppler’s car to Zurich airport. Two days ago he took a Swissair flight to Dar es Salaam.
Strebel took a deep breath.
‘Everything all right, sir?’ the pilot asked, even though he was already pulling up the steps.
‘Fine,’ Strebel nodded. ‘Yes, yes, not to worry.’
The pilot gave him a mock salute and shut the door. Strebel backed away from the plane and aimed for a lone tree on the edge of the runway. The propellers revved, bits of dried grass and dust blew up from the blast, and then the plane bumped off to the far end of the runway. Strebel watched it take off. The sound faded and was overtaken by the violent zzzeeeeee of cicadas.
He squinted. His pupils were pinpricks, terrorized by the sun. He was completely alone. Initially, this pleased him. He felt adventurous, a white man in the African bush. And the beauty of the flight from Dar es Salaam was still with him: the blue of the Indian Ocean, the fringe of turquoise suggesting shallows closer to shore, a ruffle of surf along the fringing reef, and the land eclipsed by wild green.
But the heat was absurd.
It hung on him like a great hairy animal, so that he could barely breathe, barely move. He was soaked with sweat — amazed at the speed with which this had happened. He’d been out of the Cessna’s air-conditioned comfort for less than three minutes and he was sweating in places he had completely forgotten about. The sweat collected behind his knees, behind his ears, at his throat. It trickled between his buttocks and into his groin, causing his thighs to rub. He was sure his eyebrows were sweating.
Blanched light, hot and white and unrelenting as a strobe, shot through the tree above him, creating not shade but a patchwork of lighter and darker. It fell messy and uneven on the dry soil at his feet. Where there were ants. A dozen or so, delicately meandering through the leaf litter, fully occupied with their ant tasks.
Christ, even his feet were sweating. He shifted his gaze from the ants to his feet in his sandals, the horny toenails and hair that leapt excited in little tufts from his toes. The feet of a middle-aged man were horrible.
Strebel switched his black leather bag to the other shoulder. A Christmas present from Ingrid. He would have preferred brown leather. He considered that she knew this very well, his penchant for brown leather, his clearly — adamantly! — stated dislike of black leather. She always bought him black leather: gloves, wallet, belt.
The wounds were never mortal.
Never too much to bear.
Peering down to the end of the runway where the short, cut grass yielded to long yellow grass and then to a copse of rough trees, he thought he could discern a white car in the shade. But his distance vision was increasingly bad. Anything past a hundred metres was a blur. He began to walk.
It was miles — ten, twenty, perhaps fifty; the longest airstrip in the world. Was this how it had been for Livingston? His thighs chafing? A stream of sweat down the side of his nose that dripped off his chin and onto his shirt collar? As Strebel neared the trees, he was certain the white blob was indeed a car; but closer still, he felt less assured by the Toyota Corolla, for it was mottled in equal measure by white paint and rust. One wheel was obviously a spare, several sizes too small. In a remote Swiss village, sheep would have been living in this car. But here was the driver — he had the seat tilted all the way back and was fast asleep.