Hour of the Wolf

20

‘There is no course in Aarlach,’ said Moreno, sitting down opposite Reinhart. ‘At least, not at the weekend for nurses, every week. How is he?’

‘Fragile,’ said Reinhart. ‘I’d put money on that Aarlach business being a bluff. He doesn’t want to go home, Wollger. He’s lying downstairs in Schenck’s office: a good friend has been to see him, but Schenck had already tranquillized him. Poor sod. The parents are coming this evening — two seventy-five-year-olds coming by car from Frigge. His parents, that is. We haven’t been in touch with hers yet. We’ll have to see how it goes, but no matter what happens we have to get him on his feet so that we can talk to him. Tranquillized or not.’

‘So she was being unfaithful to him, was she?’ said Moreno. ‘Are we to take that for granted?’

‘I’d have thought so,’ said Reinhart. ‘Why else would she lie to him and disappear every Saturday?’

‘There could be other explanations.’

‘Really? Give me one.’

Moreno thought for a moment, then put off answering.

‘What’s he like?’ she said instead. ‘Naive?’

Reinhart stroked his chin and looked thoughtful.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Naive’s probably the right word. Van Berle, that good friend of his, didn’t have much he could tell us about his wife, in any case. She’d evidently entered his life quite recently. She used to live in Groenstadt. Van Berle and Wollger are childhood friends, or so he maintains. He was the one Wollger used to go to the pub with while his wife was out getting screwed by somebody else. If that was what she was doing.’

‘Hmm,’ said Moreno. ‘Perhaps there’s another side to the coin as well. But what the hell does this have to do with Erich Van Veeteren? I don’t get it.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Reinhart. ‘But you know what one of Meusse’s guesses is usually worth.’

Moreno nodded.

‘What do we do now?’

Reinhart stood up.

‘We do this,’ he said. ‘Jung and Rooth talk to her workmates and friends. And relatives, if we can find any. You and I will have another try with Wollger. I think we might as well go down and see him now. There’s no point in waiting for his mum and dad to come — or what do you think?’

‘I don’t think anything at all at the moment,’ said Moreno, following Reinhart to the lift. ‘Are you going to tell him about the course in Aarlach, or shall I do it?’

‘You,’ said Reinhart. ‘I bow to your feminine cunning and empathy. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much now that she’s been murdered. Maybe he’ll take it like a man.’

‘Of course he will,’ said Moreno. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’

Jung had arranged to meet Liljana Milovic in a cafeteria at Gemejnte Hospital. She had no idea why he wanted to talk to her, and he had the less than uplifting task of informing her that her friend and colleague had unfortunately been murdered, and that was why she hadn’t turned up for work this gloomy Monday.

Liljana Milovic was beyond doubt a beautiful woman, and in different circumstances he would have had nothing against holding her in his arms and trying to control her fit of sobbing. Come to think of it, he had nothing against it even in these circumstances — and in fact he spent most of their meeting doing just that. She slung her arms around him and simply wept, that was all there was to it. Slid her chair next to his and hung onto his neck. He stroked her slightly awkwardly over her back and her long, black hair which smelt of honeysuckle, rosewater and God only knew what else.

‘Forgive me,’ she sniffled over and over again. ‘Forgive me, I can’t help it.’

Nor can I, thought Jung, noticing that he had a large lump in his throat as well. Her flow of tears eventually ebbed away and she began to get a grip of herself, but she didn’t break off bodily contact with him. Not completely.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jung. ‘I thought they’d already told you.’

She shook her head and blew her nose. He noticed that the other cafeteria customers at nearby tables were glancing furtively at them. He wondered what they imagined was going on, and asked her if she’d prefer to move somewhere else.

‘No, no, it’s okay here.’

She had only a slight foreign accent, and he guessed she had emigrated from the Balkans when she was a teenager and her homeland was still called Yugoslavia.

‘Did you know Vera well?’

‘She was my best workmate.’

‘Did you meet outside working hours as well?’

She took a deep breath and looked sad. That made her even more beautiful. Under her high cheekbones were faint suggestions of shadow, something that always made Jung go weak at the knees for some reason. He bit his tongue and tried to become a police officer again.

‘Not so much,’ she said. ‘We’ve only been working on the same ward for a few months. Since August. What happened to her? In detail.’

She squeezed his hands tightly in anticipation of his answer.

‘Somebody hit her and killed her,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who.’

‘Murdered her?’

‘Yes, murdered her.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do we. But that’s how it is.’

She looked him straight in the eye, from fifteen centimetres away.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why would anybody want to kill Vera? She was such a lovely person. What exactly happened?’

Jung looked away and decided to spare her the details.

‘It’s not quite clear,’ he said. ‘But we want to talk to everybody who knew her. Have you noticed at all that she seemed a bit worried lately in some way or other?’

Milovic thought for a while.

‘I don’t know, but these last few days perhaps… On Friday she was a bit… I don’t quite know how to put it. A bit sad.’

‘Did you speak to her then, on Friday?’

‘Not so much. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but now that you ask I do recall that she didn’t seem as happy as she usually was.’

‘You didn’t talk about that?’

‘No. We were very busy, we didn’t have time. Just think, if I’d known…’

The tears started to flow again, and she blew her nose. Jung looked hard at her and thought that if he didn’t have his Maureen he would have invited Liljana Milovic to dinner. Or to the cinema. Or to anything at all.

‘Where is she now?’ she asked.

‘Now?’ said Jung. ‘Oh, you mean… She’s at the Forensic Medicine Laboratory. They’re busy with the post-mortem…’

‘And her husband?’

‘Her husband, well…’ said Jung. ‘Did you know him as well?’

She looked down at the table.

‘No, not at all. I’ve never met him.’

‘Are you married yourself?’ he asked, and thought about what he’d read in one of Maureen’s weekly magazines the other day concerning Freudian slips.

‘No.’ She gave a little smile. ‘But I do have a boyfriend.’

He’s certainly not worthy of you, Jung thought.

‘Did she usually speak about her husband? How they were getting on together and so forth?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not often. I don’t think they had so good.’

That was the first time she had made a linguistic slip, and he wondered if it was a sign of something.

‘Really?’ he said, and waited.

‘But she didn’t say anything about it to me. She just said that things weren’t always so good. If you understand?’

Jung nodded and assumed he understood.

‘So you didn’t talk about… private matters?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you think she might have been interested in another man? That she was having a relationship with somebody else?’

Milovic thought that over before replying.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Yes, she may have been. Just recently, there was something.’

‘But she didn’t say anything about it?’

‘No.

‘And you don’t know who it could have been?’

Milovic shook her head and started crying again.

‘The funeral,’ she said. ‘When will the funeral be?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jung. ‘It probably hasn’t been decided yet. But I promise to tell you as soon as I hear about it.’

‘Thank you,’ she said and smiled through her tears. ‘You are a very nice policeman.’

Jung swallowed twice, but couldn’t think of anything else to say.