The Living and the Dead in Winsford

29

I must get to grips with this.

Must bring my fear out into the daylight. It’s the unformulated apprehensions that are the worst, and once you have dared to put a face on the monster you are halfway to overcoming it. I recall that Gudrun Ewerts used to use images like that, and when I get up on Saturday morning after a chaotic night, I realize that it’s high time.

What exactly is it that is scaring me? What am I imagining? My goal is simply to outlive my dog, after all. Isn’t it?

But first the routines, otherwise chaos will take over. I must make a fire and have a shower. Wake Castor up. Make the bed. Note down my meteorological observations.

Five degrees at nine o’clock. Moderate wind, misty, visibility fifty metres or so.

We walk in the direction of Dulverton: those are the fairly dry paths we know best, and where we meet the ponies three mornings out of four. And as we are walking I think through everything in detail. Or at least try to formulate the apprehensions. Put a face on the monster. Return to Miȩdzyzdroje.

*

So:

More than six weeks have passed. One-and-a-half months. If he did manage to get himself out, he must have done so that first day.

Otherwise he’d have frozen to death.

Been eaten up by the rats.

Or?

Okay, two days. Two days maximum. I decide on that.

So, assume that Martin has been free since the twenty-fifth of October. Alive. What would he have been doing all that time? Would he have spent over forty days looking for me? I erased all traces of my movements after Berlin. Was there something I overlooked?

Has he been looking for me without making his presence known? Is that a possibility? Surely it sounds impossible. Or is it in fact as impossible as that?

Has he somehow found a trail leading to England?

Rented a silver-coloured Renault and followed a new trail to Exmoor?

Found our car? No doubt it’s possible that the registration number is on a data list at the tunnel terminal in Calais — but how could he have got hold of such a document?

And Winsford?

Rubbish. It simply doesn’t add up.

But if he really did get out of the bunker — I think, hypothetically — he must have kept everything secret. Somehow or other. There’s no doubt about that: he must have chosen not to have revealed the truth. Everybody thinks we are in Morocco. Everybody I am in touch with, that is. Gunvald. Synn. Christa. Bergman. Soblewski. G, whoever he is.

Other people as well — colleagues in the Monkeyhouse, colleagues in the Sandpit, Violetta di Parma and our neighbours with whom we never socialized. . The fact is that every man jack who knows who we are also knows that we chose to leave Sweden because of certain improper goings-on at a hotel in Gothenburg. Together. Surely. . Surely there would have been some sort of mention in the e-mails if Martin had suddenly turned up and put a stop to all the illusions and circumstances I so carefully cobbled together? In Stockholm or somewhere else. Surely?

Surely?

I pause briefly at this point because a little bird appears from nowhere and perches on the back of a pony. Only ten metres away from us. It sits there wagging its tail for a few seconds before flying away. I don’t know if it’s an especially remarkable event, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. The pony paid no attention to it in any case, just carried on grazing calmly.

I shake my head and pick up the thread again. How. . How could he possibly have traced me to the edge of an obscure little village in Somerset? We were supposed to be going to Morocco, after all.

It’s a more or less rhetorical question. I haven’t used a bank card or a mobile phone since I left Berlin, I am using an assumed name, there are no connections between the fictitious writer Maria Anderson and the former television personality Maria Holinek. None at all.

In the relative light of day during a familiar morning walk it is not difficult to reach this conclusion. The fact that I’m fighting against figments of my imagination. If Martin were alive, I would know about it. Everything else is out of the question. Everything else is fantasy.

Unless. .

I pause again and think. Unless this is exactly the strategy he has decided to follow.

This sort of revenge, to be more precise: to slowly, extremely methodically and cunningly let me know that he is on my heels. . Revenge is a dish best served cold. . Letting me know that he knows where I am, and then, nudge nudge, scaring me over the edge into a nervous breakdown before finally. . Well, before doing what exactly?

Would he be capable of acting like this?

I have to ask myself that question in all seriousness. Would Martin Holinek, the man with whom I have shared house and home for the whole of my adult life, be capable of doing something like that? Would it be in line with his character?

To my horror I realize that I can’t answer no to that question without reservations.

Especially if I consider the fact that the person he is after is his lawful wedded wife who tried to take his life by shutting him into a bunker full of hungry rats — and I really do have to take that circumstance into account, no matter what.

I start walking again. I feel sick. I can feel the first drops of what promises to be a heavy rain shower, and speed up in order to get back indoors as soon as possible.

But would it be possible to do that? I ask myself. Even theoretically possible? All he had with him when I left him there was the clothes he stood up in. How could he possibly have managed it?

An accomplice.

That thought strikes me just as we are clambering over the wall that separates Darne Lodge from the moor, and I realize immediately that it is a legitimate conclusion. Ergo: if Martin somehow managed to extricate himself from that confounded bunker and is still alive, he must have acquired an accomplice more or less immediately. There is no other possibility.

Somebody who assisted him with his plans, and helped him in every way necessary. Silence, money, support.

But how? I wonder. How could he possibly have found somebody like that?

Who?

When we had come indoors I tried to look at the situation from the other direction, from my point of view. What indications do I have? What exactly is there to suggest that these might be the facts of the situation? That the professor of literature Martin Emmanuel Holinek is in fact alive, and has a plan.

A silver-grey hire car with two daily newspapers in it?

Dead birds outside my front door? But it’s several weeks now since the pheasant appeared there: would Martin really have been on Exmoor for as long as that?

No, I think. It doesn’t add up. It’s too implausible for it to be true. He would already have killed me if he had been here.

I don’t know how convinced I really am about the correctness of this conclusion, but I curse myself for my stupidity. Curse myself for not having had the sense to make a note of the registration number of that car on either of the two occasions I’ve seen it. Armed with the number, it shouldn’t be impossible for me to find out who hired the car from the Sixt rental company.

If I have a third opportunity I certainly won’t waste it.

When we’ve been back at home for a while another thing occurs to me. If Martin Holinek is alive, he has exactly the same opportunity as I have for going into an internet cafe and checking his e-mails. For example. . For example, reading the messages he himself is alleged to have sent to various recipients.

And surely he must ask himself who is looking after his e-mail correspondence so efficiently in his absence. Is there more than one candidate?

Using computers with their own unique IP addresses — for I haven’t used our own computers, not in Minehead, and not in Winsford. If you have that number, that address, surely you must also be able to find out exactly where in the world that computer is located?

Could that be how it happened? Is that what he has done?

But I reject the idea. Martin has always been just as ignorant about and uninterested in computers as I am.

Perhaps it was that accomplice, then?

I reject him (her?) as well. Put two pieces of firewood on the fire and pour out a glass of port. Take two large swigs and feel my unease receding.

I take out the playing cards — I feel too unfocused to be able to read. Not even about John Ridd and Lorna Doone, ‘a simple tale told simply’.

I reject the hazy hypotheses of fear.

Martin Holinek is dead. We met one day in June thirty-four years ago, at a garden party in Stockholm’s Gamla Stan. We lived our lives together, and now he has gone. Naturally. Eaten up by rats and impossible to identify when some curious walker wandering along the beach on the Baltic coast of Poland feels moved to take a look inside a filthy old bunker.

That’s the way it is. It’s just that I have chosen not to spell it out previously with such brutal clarity. I’ve done exactly the same as the author E, and let it hide itself away between the lines: please forgive me for that detail, Gudrun Ewerts, when you read this up in your heaven.

I check that I have locked the door. Empty my glass of port and pour myself another, and set out the game of Spider Harp.