Murder of Halland (11 page)

‘Funder! Funder, Funder, Funder,’ I repeated to
myself
. I was so worked up that I pressed the wrong keys. The text disappeared. What did it say? When the train arrived, I hesitated but eventually decided to board. I found a window seat, dumped my jacket and went out into the vestibule with my phone. I
realized
I didn’t have Funder’s number and I couldn’t ring the emergency services because there was no
emergency
. What did the text say? I tried to remain calm and methodical. I clicked on my inbox. There was only one message and it was from Halland. I pressed the
OPEN
key.
Where are you?
it said. ‘No, please, please, please,’ I repeated, shaking my head vigorously. ‘That’s not funny. That’s’s not funny!’ Soldiers came through the carriage and one of them asked if I was all right. He had such a kind voice I could hardly bear it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes, I mean.’ He scrutinized me for a moment. I nodded. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said,
repeating
the words after the soldiers carried on through the carriage. Everything’s fine.

The conductor came through and asked for the ticket. I fumbled with my bag, then with my purse and my phone. ‘Is the reception especially poor around here?’ I asked. ‘I need to make a call, but I can’t get a signal!’

‘It’s always weak around here,’ she replied.

‘But I need to make a call!’ I repeated, my voice rising.

‘Is something wrong?’

I bit my tongue. This shouldn’t have happened.
Shaking
my head, I peered into my bag so the conductor wouldn’t see my face. I tasted blood in my mouth.

My jacket still lay on my seat when I got back. A man sitting on the aisle seat was reading a fat crime novel. He got up laboriously while I waited impatiently, fidgeting as if in a hurry. Across the table from us sat two women and our legs had to find space to settle. I took out my newspaper, all the while gripping my phone. I had
finished
the quick crossword on the outward journey. Now I began to read. We were still burdened with the same omniscient, incompetent government. There were still forgotten wars in Africa. We continued to wage war on terrorism: everyone was under surveillance; everything had to be dragged out into the light; soon there would be no secrets any more. I hadn’t paid attention to the
newspapers
’ take on my own story and found myself gazing at Halland’s picture for a while before I recognized him.

Keeping my eye on the signal bars on my mobile, I read about Peter Olsen. Apparently the police had spoken to him and concluded that he could not have shot Halland.
He had an alibi. He had spent the night at his sister’s in Kalvehave. He had driven home only after breakfast; Halland was already dead by then. The police were
running
tests on Olsen’s hunting rifle. I looked out of the window. The sun was still shining, but the light seemed odd; perhaps because of the tinted glass. Poppies
appeared
in the yellow sky. Maybe I was looking at a poppy field? During my childhood lots of poppies used to grow in fields and on building sites. Then they disappeared for years. Now they had returned.

The train came to a stop. The passengers glanced at each other in annoyance. They raised their eyebrows and sighed.

‘Are we running late?’ I asked the man next to me.

‘They just said we’ll be moving in a minute.’

I looked at my phone again. Pressed the number for directory enquiries. No connection. I felt a hot flush and shifted uneasily in my seat. Why did I get hot flushes now?

‘Do you want to get out?’ the man asked.

I shook my head, gasping a bit, then closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing.

‘The same thing happened the last time I took the train,’ he said. ‘Stuck for two hours we were. What a palaver. Can’t open the windows or doors… the recycled air is awful.’

Were they really unable to open the doors? Another hot flush. I couldn’t breathe any longer. Can one forget how to breathe? I wanted to get out. I thought I said so, but the man didn’t seem to have heard me. Who had
Halland’s
mobile? I could play along and reply as though he
were still alive. The loudspeaker crackled. We would be sitting here indefinitely, they couldn’t find the fault. The man looked at his watch.

‘I’ll miss my bus,’ he said.

‘And I need to make a call,’ I said, barely breathing. My mouth was parched.

‘That time last winter, all we could do was sit and wait. No information at all, then all the lights went out. Pitch black it was. We all had to walk back along the tracks to Vejle.’

‘So they
can
open the doors,’ I said, breathing more easily at the thought.

‘Only in emergencies. Highly dangerous business sending folk out onto the tracks.’

I rested my cheek against the windowpane and
relished
the brief chill, pressing my face hard against the glass, moving my lips across it. Could I taste anything? The glass tasted of metal. Soft, soft, dark.

Soft, dark.

I mustn’t make the taste sound luscious. I was
frightened
, really frightened. I have tried to come to terms with my physical self since I was born, just as I assume everyone else has with greater or lesser success. Anyway, you get to know your physical self and every now and then even gain a fleeting sense of pleasure from some part of your body. I had had my ups and downs. But this feeling was new. Perhaps I had never been frightened before. Of course I had felt fear when Halland was lying there. But then I didn’t think anything much because I didn’t know what was happening. Now my body expressed
what I felt and I had no say in the matter. A paranoid itch between the shoulder blades on a bathing jetty was nothing compared to this. I fainted. Or rather, I had a blackout; I think that’s what they would call it. A second or two, perhaps, maybe more. I slumped against the man in the aisle seat. He nudged me; his moustache nearly touched my face. ‘I want to get out,’ I said.

‘They won’t let you.’

‘I want to get out. I really
must
make that call. It’s urgent.’

‘You’ve got claustrophobia. I’m having trouble
breathing
myself.’

‘I want to get out!’ Sitting up, I swivelled my head gingerly, then tried to stand up. The man remained seated. As I stepped over his legs, I straddled him for a moment before he grabbed me. ‘Let go!’ I said. Everyone stared. I wanted to sit down again and be quiet and ordinary, but too late.

Suddenly we jerked into motion. I banged my chin against the man’s head. His breath smelt of eggs. I found my feet, then lost my balance and fell towards the aisle. My phone chimed again as the floor reared up. I stayed on the floor and opened the message. It was from
Halland
:
Where are you?
I rang his number, still on the floor, breathing heavily. The phone rang. I imagined him in the car, perhaps in the narrow bed with Pernille, staring up at the poster of Martin Guerre that hung like an altarpiece above his head, in the living room at home, at the window with his binoculars. No answer.

Funder told me to stay calm and think things through. He wasn’t as shocked as I. I regained control of my breathing and switched off the phone. I drove home from the station intent on my driving. I didn’t sing. I felt dead inside, as though swaddled in cotton wool. The rational part of me knew that I wasn’t dying, that Halland was dead and that whoever had sent me the text messages had not been Halland. The cotton-wool feeling changed into a burning sensation. With the heat I became weightless and short of breath. But I drove home fully focused, although I felt I occupied a no-man’s-land and didn’t really exist.

I have no idea how my brain works. Every few years I used to write a collection of stories. That was what I did. How they came about I no longer know. I read a lot and went for long walks. I was often on my own because Halland travelled a lot. Sometimes we went away together, though never when he was working. I lived mostly on his money, though I seldom gave such matters much thought. Not even now. I sat in the car on the square, feeling too
heavy to get out and go into the house. Brandt’s house was dark and so was mine.

Finding my phone in my bag, I turned it on again, holding my breath. Nothing more from Halland. Six unanswered calls from the ever-alert detective, and one text:
Don’t turn off your phone. Call us immediately if that number contacts you again
. That number. Funder was so very correct. And tanned. I rang Brandt. No one picked up. His house was dark. Where was he? Where was the lodger? Abby was in England. Halland was in the churchyard. I turned off the phone, then took out of my bag the envelope of cash and the photocopy. I opened the car door, so that the automatic light inside the car came on. I peered at the story title, then at the first page. ‘Wondrous Derailment’. I remembered it now. The uncoupling. That was me.

‘Oh dear!’ I exclaimed.

Now I had said ‘Oh dear’ several times. It couldn’t go on. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t just sit here. I had to do something. Buy a pet. Or sell up and move on. Yes, sell up and move on. No, buy a pet – a grey cat. But I couldn’t stand animals. And I was fond of the house, so why should I leave?

I just wanted to lie on the sofa and watch telly. Please don’t think I never watched television. Now things were back to normal and I could finally switch it on again. All I needed for happiness was a detective series. And there were lots to choose from. Simplicity was a virtue. First a murder, nothing too bestial. Then a police inspector. Insights into his or her personal
problems, perhaps. Details about the victim. Puzzles and anomalies. Lines of investigation. Clues. Detours. Breakthrough. Case solved. Nothing like real life. I watched one thriller, then another. But as soon as the penny dropped, I lost interest. The puzzle attracted me – the solution left me cold. Nothing like real life. When only the loose ends were left to tie up, I usually went into the kitchen to fetch something to eat, or went to the loo. But when I got back, the police inspector had almost invariably realized, at the last minute, that the amicable individual in whom he had been confiding was in fact the villain. In the twinkling of an eye, someone found themselves in grave danger. Their rescue involved a few last-gasp killings before the villain was allowed to explain his sick, jealous mind or the abuse he had suffered as a child. Nothing like real life. The plot might have started off plausibly, but then all similarity disappeared. And another thing: this crime thriller appeared far better organized and far more real than my own life.

I decided to make a list to focus my thoughts. Perhaps we could all gather in the drawing room at the end, when the detective had worked it out. Leaning back on the sofa with a notepad on my knee, I chewed on a biro as the opening credits of the next detective thriller scrolled across the screen.

I was none the wiser, unable even to organize those few points. On the back of the sheet of paper I wrote:

As I settled myself more comfortably, my body remembered the morning when I had gone to sleep here not long before Halland was shot. With an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction I had imagined myself reading to him what I had written the previous night. I hadn’t shown him my work for a long time, although in earlier days I often read it out loud to him, sitting on the kitchen counter while he cooked. He took
pleasure
in this routine, I think; sometimes he laughed. Now, just when I had finally made a start on a new book, he had to die. I was angry. My anger was of course unwarranted, but far worse was my desire for revenge. Not towards the murderer – the gunman was too abstract to inspire feeling. Rather, I wanted to kill Halland myself. Was that because of his secrets
or because his death was preventing me from
finishing
the book?

In my life I often thirsted for revenge, though I never managed to satisfy my thirst to the extent my
grandfather
once did. As an adult I came to suspect that he had stolen the tale from someone else, but as a child I couldn’t hear it enough. My grandfather was a difficult child and badly behaved at school. His teacher would beat him with a cane and with his bare hands. No one ever intervened; there was no law against caning. Years later, when my grandfather was twenty-three and had turned into a broad-shouldered bricklayer, he met his former teacher in the street. The teacher greeted him with enthusiasm – a detail that added significantly to the listener’s craving for retribution: the man was completely unaware of the wrongs he had committed! Like a fool, he invited my grandfather home for tea. There, to get his own back, my grandfather beat the living daylights out of him.

I wanted to hear the story over and over again. And yet I never had the courage to ask what the teacher looked like by the time Grandfather had finished with him. Was he bleeding? Lying crumpled on the floor? Sobbing? Were his bones broken? Did he die? None of that seemed relevant. The sense of retribution was the shocking element. I could picture the terror in the teacher’s eyes. But to whom was I to administer a beating now?

My gaze fell on the windowsill facing the garden. Halland’s binoculars stood on top of his bird book, a heavy, rather dog-eared volume. I knew that he annotated
the pages, scribbled little symbols to indicate that he had observed this or that bird, as well as locations, dates and sometimes a commentary on song or behaviour. I had listened when he told me about a particular bird and followed his gestures when he pointed one out. In time, I learnt to spot a few raptors. I could tell the
difference
between a black-headed gull and a tern, and was familiar with winter plumage. I listened to him mainly at the beginning of our relationship. I retrieved the book and returned to the sofa. A piece of paper fell out from between the pages. Halland’s handwriting.
Apus apus
, it said.
The common swift spends almost its entire life in flight. Food and nesting materials are collected on the wing. Drinking, bathing, even sleep too. Normally, a swift will interrupt flight only for the purpose of breeding. When young leave the nest they often remain airborne for three years until returning to breed. ME.

ME
? What did that mean? I read the words out loud, thinking they sounded like poetry that might fill a person with both joy and sorrow. But Halland was no poet, and what he had written was merely fact.
ME
? ‘Oh, stop it!’ I burst out. ‘Just stop it, will you!’