The Quiet Mother

2

Marta parked her car in front of the stairwell and stepped out, taking her e-cigarette with her. She was in one of the city’s neighbourhoods that alternated between blocks of flats and terraced houses, with a detached house or two thrown in for those whose pockets were better lined. The neighbourhood was built in the early seventies and had seen better days. Police were dispatched there sometimes to deal with rowdiness and drunkenness, and graffiti artists had a free hand there with their particular form of vandalism. Break-ins and theft also found their way into the police department’s case files on the neighbourhood, but no real serious crime had ever been committed there. The residents were both surprised and shocked when news of what had happened got out, after police vehicles, their sirens blaring, an ambulance and a car from the police department’s Forensics Unit began lining up in front of the block and people in uniforms started streaming up the stairwell to the second floor of the building, where cameras began flashing.

The woman was lying in the hallway in front of her door, making it nearly impossible to enter the flat without taking a big step over her. She was probably about seventy years old, wearing a cardigan over a blouse, brown trousers and glasses on a slender chain around her neck. Her hair was almost completely grey. Her face reflected the violence that precipitated her death. Her eyes were bulging and her mouth was wide open as if she’d used the last bit of her strength to draw in oxygen.

Her flat had been trashed. The woman’s belongings lay on the floor, some broken. Drawers were open, books had been shoved off the shelves, furniture overturned. The woman owned a number of paintings, some of which hung askew on the walls. Apparently, none had been stolen.

Marta stood at the door of the flat and raised her e-cigarette to her lips. She’d stopped smoking slender menthol cigarettes, having fallen for the hype that e-cigarettes were healthier for people than regular ones. She liked vanilla best, but otherwise, the flavour didn’t matter. She used fairly strong nicotine and got a bit of a buzz from it if she inhaled fast enough, sucking the vapour in deeply. Sometimes she trailed plumes of vapour as if from a geothermal power plant.

‘Do you have to do that here, while we’re working?’ asked a Forensics tech, obviously irritated.

‘Relax,’ she said, before turning to the district medical officer, who’d come to verify the woman’s death. ‘Can you determine the cause of death?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? She couldn’t breathe,’ said the doctor. ‘Suffocated. And it happened a short time ago, maybe half an hour or so. How did you all get here so quickly?’

‘So she was strangled, you mean?’

‘No. It’s more like something was put over her head. A plastic bag, maybe. Tightened around her neck,’ he added, pointing to a line faintly visible there. ‘She tried to defend herself. Her fingernails are broken. But the autopsy should determine exactly what happened.’

‘Who called this in?’ Marta asked.

‘It was anonymous,’ said a police officer standing in the hallway, and who had been first on the scene. ‘The caller said that there’d been an assault here, and that a woman might be lying injured in her flat.’

‘Can we trace the call?’

‘They say it could be difficult.’

‘Maybe it was the person who did this?’ Marta said. ‘And then regretted the outcome? Hadn’t intended to go that far?’

Her questions weren’t directed at anyone in particular, and no one had an answer to them. It had been a short time since the woman was attacked, and there were no witnesses apart from the assailant himself. Or assailants. Maybe there’d been more than one, and they’d decided to let the police know. The woman had opened the door without checking who it was first, and someone immediately attacked her and knocked her to the floor. Or she’d been fleeing the assailant and made it only to the door. If that was the case, then she’d probably let him in. Had possibly known him.

E-cigarette in hand, Marta stepped out into the hallway and looked up the stairs and then down towards the floor below. She walked down the stairs, then continued down to the basement. She switched on a light in the dark basement hallway, which had storeroom doors on both sides. At the end of the hallway was a spacious laundry room with a casement window at chest height, which looked out onto a large back garden. The window had a holder set halfway open, and there were signs on the windowsill — dirt and shoeprints — that someone had recently entered through it.

‘Did you crawl in here, you sleazebag?’ Marta whispered to herself as she ran her eyes over the signs. The offender hadn’t been in such a hurry that he didn’t take the time to reset the window holder, as if that would suffice to cover his trail. Marta tried looking through the window to see if the grass in front of it was trampled, but it was dark outside and she saw nothing.

After going back upstairs, she let the Forensics techs know about the basement window. They were dressed in thin white coveralls, with hoods over their heads, and one of them immediately took his equipment and went downstairs. Before long, they gave Marta permission to enter the flat, as long as she promised not to touch anything. People in that stairwell’s flats had been kindly asked to remain in them, but a number of spectators were clustered in front of the block. The woman’s body was carried down the stairs and taken to the National Hospital for an autopsy. The name Valborg was printed on the doorbell.

Marta regarded the destruction that met her eyes. More often than she cared to remember, she’d gone to investigate a house that had been broken into and, at a glance, it was impossible to see that this was any different from them. Nooks and crannies had been searched for things of value, and no effort had been spared to find them.

Marta wondered if the criminal had been looking for something special. On the bedroom floor lay a small jewellery box that had been emptied. A handbag had been dumped out and its contents strewn over the floor. Nearby was a wallet, empty of banknotes and credit cards.

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was bare; everything torn from it in the same frenzied way. An empty medicine box was lying in the bathtub, and there were several items in the toilet as well: nail clippers, a soap dispenser. A blister pack of Atacor cholesterol tablets was floating at the top of the bowl. The woman had had high cholesterol. Marta reached for the box lying in the bathtub, and as far as she could tell, the woman had also been suffering a serious illness.

She found no computer, neither a desktop nor laptop. No mobile phone or tablet, either. She presumed that the woman hadn’t had profiles on Facebook or Twitter. An old-fashioned telephone that had been standing on a table in the hall had toppled to the floor. Marta knew elderly people who didn’t want any of that computer rubbish in their houses and believed the internet was evil. Still, she thought the woman in the flat was a bit youngish to have denied the computer revolution altogether.

There was a desk in one corner of the living room, and papers and newspapers lay scattered around it. Prescriptions and bills from medical specialists, all sorts of memos, shopping lists and other notes lay either on top of the desk or under it. Marta picked up a few of them and looked them over, until, in one of the memos, she noticed a phone number that she knew well. No name was written along with it, and Marta stared at the number for several moments, wondering what connections there could possibly be between it and the woman. Deciding not to wait to find out, she took out her mobile phone and called the number. After a moment or two, a familiar voice answered the phone.

‘Konrád.’

‘Am I disturbing you?’

‘What’s up?’

‘Do you know a woman named Valborg?’

‘No.’

‘She seems to know you,’ said Marta.

‘Hmm? Valborg? I don’t remember...’

There was a short silence on the line.

‘Yes, hold on, is she an elderly woman?’ Konrád asked.

‘I found your number on her desk. She’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you at her place? Did something happen to her? What are you doing over there?’

‘Her house was broken into and she was suffocated,’ said Marta. ‘With a plastic bag, probably.’

‘Are you serious?!’

‘How do you know her?’

‘I don’t know her at all,’ Konrád said, and Marta sensed over the phone how startled he was at this news. ‘If it’s the same woman. She knew I’d been on the force and wanted to meet me. It was around two months ago, I guess... Did you say a plastic bag?’

‘What did she want from you?’

‘Is she dead?’ Konrád stammered. ‘It took me a moment to place her name, but I remember her well because what she wanted was rather unique. She asked if I could find her child.’