The Truth and Other Lies (21 page)

Betty suppressed the urge to call Henry immediately. It was after all conceivable that he had simply forgotten to append the missing pages. “The novel’s finished,” he had said to her, smiling mysteriously. Had he by any chance withheld the end in order to torment her? How irrational would that be? This novel was different from its predecessors. It was more passionate and more emphatic in every detail, but without the missing pages it was nothing but a torso. Incredible, the intuitive power with which Henry could develop his characters from within his armor of indifference, thought Betty, as she drank the remains of the cold peppermint tea. She put the manuscript down beside her.

Henry had painted her portrait. Betty had recognized herself from the very first pages. The same man who took her for his wife’s murderer and didn’t seem capable of developing the slightest feeling for his unborn baby had painted a precise and sympathetic portrait of her. As an editor you learn to separate author and work. It’s not the person but the personality that is reflected in the artist’s work.
We have to love Henry without knowing him
, Martha had said in parting at the door of her apartment. She had apparently loved Henry as the man he was—as the man she didn’t know.

———

At about five in the afternoon, Betty went into the photocopy room in the office and closed the door. She put Henry’s 380-page manuscript into the paper feeder, plugged in her USB stick, and pressed Scan. The machine began to suck in the pages one by one and save them on the stick as a PDF file. Then it spat each page out again. Betty stowed the manuscript in a plastic folder and put it in her handbag. She put the stick in a small Murano glass dish on her desk.

She took the elevator up to Moreany’s office. On the way she felt the movements of the baby, now growing noticeably stronger, and placed her hand on her belly. The movements immediately subsided. The horrific attacks of nausea had vanished. Betty no longer took medication, and for weeks now she had entirely avoided alcohol and cigarettes. She drank tea instead of coffee. Contrary to what she had expected, going without her daily dose of poison was easy, and the abstinence made her even more beautiful. Men openly turned and stared at her. Even the female employees at Moreany’s threw furtive glances at her.

Most of her colleagues had already gone home to drive to the coast for the weekend. Betty cleared the dirty cups away as she passed the central coffee counter. She said hello to the attractive young fellow from the publicity department who was always throwing paper airplanes at her. Then she went into Moreany’s outer office, where Honor Eisendraht stood sorting accounts at her top-secret Bisley filing cabinet—the heart-lung machine of the company, as Moreany called it. Her monitor already had its cover on. Betty saw a pack of Tarot cards next to the keyboard on her desk. The door to Moreany’s office was closed.

“Has Moreany already left?”

Eisendraht spirited away the Tarot deck and took her handbag from the back of the chair. Betty noticed her subtle perfume, her smart hairdo, and her outfit, that offset the color tones of the office.

“He left for an appointment at three.”

Betty tried to gauge from Eisendraht’s eyes whether she was withholding information from her, but the secretary’s face was an unreadable mask, something like what you see on totem poles in anthropological museums. Only the way her glance strayed to Betty’s belly betrayed what was going on inside her.

“Is there anything else?” asked Eisendraht, smoothing her sweater over her navel in a presumably unconscious gesture.

“Yes, I’ve never shown you my appreciation. That was stupid of me and I’m honestly sorry. I respect you and I admire your work. Have a nice day.”

Alone in the outer office, Honor stood motionless for a while. The dragon tree shed a leaf, otherwise nothing changed. And yet. There is a certain irony in hearing the most touching compliments emerge from the mouth of your very enemy, on whose cold disdain you have come to rely. Honor Eisendraht knew too much about women not to see with perfect lucidity that Betty meant her apology seriously, sincerely, and without expecting anything in return. She took her bag and went out of the office shrugging her shoulders. Such things happen. Nothing you can do about it.

———

Henry decided on steak and fries. No ordinary fries these, but
pommes allumettes.
The Thai-style red snapper at the next table looked tempting too, as did the lady with the silicon breasts who had ordered it and who would have simply loved to join Henry if circumstances permitted, which they didn’t. But a steak was enough for Henry. He savored the last of his evening drink. The sun was still high over the sea. His watch now showed 7:07 p.m. He looked in the direction of the restaurant’s lobby; the headwaiter saw his glance and came to his table at once. Of course he saw the empty place, and naturally he understood that Henry wanted to wait to order. There couldn’t be the shadow of a doubt that Henry’s dining companion was female, so he suggested vermouth, the proper drink for a gentleman who is waiting for a lady and does not wish to appear to have an indecent thirst. A moment later, Henry’s phone vibrated. It was Betty.

“Henry, I’m driving along this ghastly dusty road. Can that be right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The air in the car shimmered. Betty looked out the side window that was clouded with dust and let it down a little further. A fine mist of particles rolled into the car, formed clouds, deposited little crystals on her skin, got into her hair and lungs, mingled with the moisture of her mucous membranes.

“What can you see?”

“Well, on the right I can see fields and pylons, and on the left there are these kinds of bushes, and, apart from that, absolutely nothing. It’s ridiculously dusty here. I’m going to look like Ben-Hur after the chariot race when I get there.”

In his mind’s eye, Henry saw that she’d taken the right road. “The pylons lead you straight here.”

Betty looked at the GPS device. “The GPS only shows a dotted road. Two point nine miles to go. Is that possible?”

“You’re doing fine. Keep straight on till you get to the water. It’s an old harbor. That’s the name of the restaurant: Old Harbor. You’re really close. Have you got my manuscript with you?”

“Of course.”

“Great. Shall I order you a drink?”

“No alcohol for me, thanks. OK, see you soon.”

Betty put the phone on top of her notebook computer and Henry’s manuscript in the open handbag beside her. She’d had a good feeling when she left work to meet Henry for dinner. The first step toward reconciliation with Honor Eisendraht had been taken. Malicious it may have been, but Eisendraht’s betrayal had had a purgative effect. She’d done Betty a real favor, even if it couldn’t have been her intention. The ultrasound images had brought the silly secretiveness to an end. No affair is worth denying a child for.

The potholes in the road were getting deeper and deeper. Betty reined in the speed. Rust-ravaged metal containers lay dotted around on the side of the road. Here and there she saw shreds of truck tires. Fountains of dust flew up in the air like powder. She tried to drive in the ruts of the broad tire tracks that had been washed out by the rain and baked into rock-hard furrows by the sun.

The more slowly she drove, the more interminable and absurd the trip seemed to her. But Henry had always had a good nose for remote and stunningly beautiful places. Betty remembered Es Verger on the Puig de Alaró on Majorca. Henry had driven doggedly upward; the engine had shrieked; the car had creaked and clattered. “We’ll get there at some point,” he said, and she had trusted him. After an endless ascent on a narrow, winding road, they had finally reached the mother of all mountain restaurants and eaten the most delicious lamb of their lives. It was that night the baby had been conceived, Betty was quite sure of it.

A sign appeared in the distance. It stood half-sunken on rusty steel posts, almost illegible from so much dust and sun. Betty could make out what looked like a fishing boat and in faded letters “. . . Harbor.” That must be it. Her GPS showed she was less than half a mile away. In rough outline the display showed an oblong site on the seafront. “In seven hundred feet you will reach your destination. You are approaching your destination.” A metal fence surrounded the place. The ugly concrete frontage of an industrial building came into view and seagulls sat on skeletal cranes.

Betty passed through the open gate at a crawl and followed the concrete slabs that were overgrown with weeds. Heaps of windblown rubbish were piled up. Yellow and blue plastic drums rolled around in the wind. A putrid smell hung over everything. Betty let the car roll up to a waist-high wall, where a sign in faded paint read
NO ACCESS
. She stopped the car, got out, and looked around her.

“Follow the arrows,” chirped the GPS.

The terrace was bathed in red evening light. More guests had sat down. A woman was just being led past Henry’s table. He followed her tanned ankles in their backless heels. Henry’s phone buzzed.

“Betty, where are you?”

“I’ve ended up in a rubbish dump and there’s a ‘No Access’ sign in front of me. Is this supposed to be a joke? There’s no restaurant here.”

“Then you’re standing in front of a wall, right?”

“Yes, and I’m not driving any further. It’s really spooky here.”

Henry laughed. “Just ignore the sign. Keep driving a bit. I’ll come to meet you.”

His laughter reassured her. After a brief hesitation Betty got back in the car and drove slowly along the ugly wall. She kept the phone at her ear. She could hear his steady breathing. After a hundred feet the countryside opened out on her left and the sea came into view.

“OK, I’m right by the water now. There’s a hangar here. There are dustbins and old rail tracks all over the place. No one in sight, no car. Where are you?”

“On my way to you. Stop next to the hangar. I’ll be there in a second.”

Betty stopped the car next to the hangar; its enormous door stood open like the jaws of a crocodile. The dust on the windows reflected the light so brightly that she couldn’t make out what might be hidden in the darkness within.

“The restaurant’s not in
there
, is it?”

“I can see you, Betty. Get out, turn around, can you see me?”

Betty opened the car door and got out. A cold wind blew out of the darkness of the hangar. She clutched the phone in her fist and peered around.

“Henry, where are you?”

Jenssen liked statistics. Like most of his colleagues he was of course acquainted with the annual crime stats. Numbers tell stories. Especially if you compare them with one another—for instance, the fact that in Germany in 2009 precisely 38,117 women underwent facial laser treatment compared with 42,623 German men over the same period of time. “What does that tell us?” Jenssen liked to ask whenever he cited such figures in the police headquarters’ canteen.

Homicide offenses, counting both murder and manslaughter, had gone down by 2.2 percent compared with the previous year. The rate of solving crimes had now reached 95.9 percent, which throws a good light on the investigative work of the authorities and a bad light on the acumen of your average perpetrator of violence. It would seem that the almost one hundred percent likelihood of being convicted of murder and severely punished is regarded by most offenders as acceptable. Maybe for the simple reason that it’s only
almost
one hundred percent
, and because the statistics don’t affect them personally—just the others. And not least because crime statistics provide information about detected murders, while the undetected ones, not to say the
successful
ones, remain in the paradise of darkness. Thus it can be assumed with a kind of foreboding that the coming years will see a similar percentage of murders committed and punished.

Martha Hayden’s death by drowning had for Jenssen been a classic case of death by misadventure, because there was no motive or evidence pointing to anything else. The bike on the beach convinced him. It had convinced
everyone.
And yet “fatal swimming accident” was only a hypothesis, based solely on the discovery of the bicycle—a discovery made by her husband of all people. Purely hypothetically, the bike on the beach allowed the conclusion that the owner had been kidnapped by aliens and was now having a whale of a time with underage exomorphs on board their spaceship. Why not?

The disappearance of Bettina Hansen, a thirty-four-year-old editor at Moreany Publishing House, however, was no accident. It certainly wasn’t suicide either. A coast guard helicopter had sighted the burning car wreck at about 10:00 p.m. on a routine nightly flight. By the time the fire department had arrived forty-five minutes later, they could only smother the glowing plastic car parts with foam. This foam destroyed valuable evidence in the immediate vicinity of the wrecked car. The arson squad did not find the remains of a human body.

An hour after the beginning of the early shift, Jenssen arrived on the site of the derelict fish factory. It had been out of use for a decade and made him think of an apocalyptic seaside resort on the Costa Brava. Every muscle in his body was aching because he’d tried to catch up on three weeks of missed training in the gym the evening before. In spite of 1,500 milligrams of ibuprofen he couldn’t walk properly. He could only waddle sideways, his arms dangling like an orangutan’s.

The powder-fine white dust had turned into gray mush in the extinguishing foam around the car. Jenssen’s colleagues from the forensic unit were crawling around in it, looking for a trace of blood or hair, for vestiges of body fat or bone ash. Jenssen blessed his farsightedness in deciding at the beginning of his career not to work in forensics. Not because he found the work dull or pointless—no, the tedious thing was that the clues tended to be microscopic. You found a hair and it assumed the dimensions of a tree trunk. For Jenssen, poking around in the nanosphere like that took away the sensuous pleasures of detection.

Jenssen paced out the distance to the sea, counting forty-two steps. Abandoned rail tracks led down a slightly sloping concrete road into the water, where the skeletons of old freight cars had been left to rust—cars that had once been used to haul cargo from the cutters up onto land, in the good old days when there were still fish.