The Stranglers Honeymoon

36

He rubbed his aching throat as he read through the Wanted notice in the morning paper.

Studied the photograph on the front page, and decided that it did her more than justice. The photograph must have been taken quite a long time ago, maybe even ten years ago, he thought. The same eyes, the same self-assured smile but more vital. More naive, healthier. He wondered what had happened to her since the photograph was taken — and what it would have been like to meet her then, instead of that December evening when she was on the verge of middle age.

Ten years?

That was an aeon. Such an enormous expanse of time that his mind couldn’t cope with it. Nor could he convince himself that he had been the same person in 1991 as he was now.

There was no continuity. No calm river representing his own existence that could be followed from the clear, sparkling spring of his childhood and over the flat landscape of his life towards the estuary where it flowed into the sea in the autumn of his days. As he had been thinking only the other evening as he sat reading Auden. . W. H. Auden, one of his favourites — but then, he had several. It was only in poetry that he could rediscover himself and the spirit of his earlier life. Nowadays.

A shift had taken place, and pointlessness — his own and that of everybody else — had extended its sterile desert to include all the dried-out furrows and streams — his own and those of everybody else: he had tried to write poems about precisely that, but given up. Emptiness didn’t need any words. Any fuss.

Death does us the greatest of all favours, he had decided instead. But being its agent was neither noble nor evil. Just pointless.

He was sleeping better at night now that the new year had dawned. He hadn’t remembered any dreams at all for several weeks, only that fragment of a memory that kept returning at regular intervals. It didn’t matter if he was awake or asleep. . My first murder, he thought. . It was so close to that source, but it wasn’t me, she was the one who arranged it, who planned it and staged it. The house burning away that freezing cold February morning, her even colder hand squeezing his own as they stood there in the wet village street together with all their neighbours, the smell of wet soil and coldness despite the raging fire as they watched the flames devouring their home and his father. . It was remarkable that both the air and her hand could be so cold when the fire must have been so hot. .

‘If anybody hurts you, eliminate him!’ she had said, and kissed his mouth. Those were her remarkable words, and that evening he had slept in her bed in the boarding house where they stayed for some days after the event. . Eliminate him.

Or her. He felt a longing to be back on that Greek island once more, for some kind of homecoming, but he suppressed it. Squeezed out another dab of yellow ointment onto his fingertips instead, and rubbed it in carefully where his throat was hurting. The slightest touch was very painful, but nevertheless it was more bearable than it had been at the beginning. The first few days, not to mention the first few hours: he had never been so close to the core of pain and madness before. . Never any closer than that.

He turned to page twelve and read more about the speculations.

The police had zoomed in on that night at Keefer’s in any case, but that was just about all they had achieved. They knew that Ester Peerenkaas had met a man she didn’t know on 8 December, and that this man might have had something to do with her disappearance.

They were keen to get in touch with him, and urged everybody who had been to the restaurant that evening to contact the Maardam CID as soon as possible.

Or their nearest police station.

He checked today’s date at the top of the newspaper, and counted backwards in his head. Fifty-four days had passed.

More or less eight weeks.

Eight weeks had passed since somebody might have noticed them at the hidden table behind one of the trellises at Keefer’s. No more than two-and-a-half weeks since her ‘disappearance’, but there were no other persons present at the meeting which preceded that. No presumptive witnesses.

Just him and her.

He smiled hastily, his skin tightened over his cheeks and neck.

And no mention of the other happenings.

Not a word to suggest that the murders in September — nor the one last summer in Wallburg — could have any connection with that vulgar Ester Peerenkaas.

Dilettantes, he thought with a weary sigh, and a sort of cold feeling of satisfaction took possession of him. A pleasure that was worth no more than a pale, austere smile, but nevertheless a positive force in the barren landscape of his emotions.

The barren landscape of my emotions? he thought. No, that won’t do.

And what about the name? What did they have to say about the carefully composed name he had used on that latest occasion?

Nothing. Not a word.

Pearls, he said, folding up the newspaper. Talk about casting pearls before swine. I could kill one of their own, and they still wouldn’t catch me.

The thought struck a chord. One of their own?

He noticed that the thought interested him no end.

WALLBURG, MAARDAM

FEBRUARY 2001