Read Online Borkmann's Point by Håkan Nesser - Free Book Online Page B

“I have so
many ideas and loose ends buzzing around in my head that I
don’t know where to start. I’ve spent most of today wondering
if there really is a connection, when you get right down to it.”
“Explain!” said Van Veeteren.
“Of course we’re dealing with the same murderer; I take
that for granted—for simplicity’s sake if for no other reason.
The same murderer, the same method, the same weapon. But
the link between the victims—that’s what I’m a bit doubtful
about. I’m a bit afraid of finding out something that we might
jump at simply because we’ve found it. That they were on the
same package holiday in Sicily in 1988, or were in the same hos
pital in October 1979, or some other damn thing.”
“Two people always cross each other’s path somewhere or
other,” said Van Veeteren.
“Something like that, yes, and the fact that they do doesn’t
necessarily mean a thing. It can, but it doesn’t have to, by any
means.”
“Don’t forget that we’re talking about three paths,” said
Van Veeteren. “The murderer’s as well.”
“Yes, fair enough; of course we have to look for the third
link as well if we’re going to make a breakthrough. It’s just that
I have the feeling it might be different in this case.”
“You mean that Eggers and Simmel might have been picked
out at random?”
“Possibly,” said Bausen, staring out into the darkness. “Of
course he has picked on Eggers and Simmel on purpose, but
it’s not certain that they have much to do with him personally.
There could be much looser connections, as it were.”
“A list picked out at random from the phone book?” suggested Van Veeteren. “There are precedents, as you know. Harridge, if you remember him. He shut his eyes and stuck a pin
into the Coventry edition of the telephone directory. Then
went out and strangled them, one after another.”
“I know,” said Bausen. “One every Saturday...finished off
five before they got him. Do you know what scuppered him?”
Van Veeteren shook his head.
“One of the people he’d picked out, Emerson Clarke, if I
remember rightly, was a former boxing champion. Harridge
simply couldn’t cope with him.”
“Tough luck,” said Van Veeteren. “But he ought to have
taken the boxers off his list before he got started.”
“Serves him right,” said Bausen.
They both lit a cigarette and sat in silence for a while listening to the gentle rustling among the roses. A few hedgehogs
had appeared and sniffed around before drinking from the
saucer of milk outside the back door, and a few swallows were
still sailing back and forth from underneath loose tiles. Perhaps
not exactly the sounds and creatures of the jungle, but Van
Veeteren still had a distinct feeling of the exotic.
“Of course, we’ll be in a different position altogether if he
beheads somebody else,” said Bausen.
“No doubt about that,” said Van Veeteren.
A cold wind suddenly swept through the garden.
“Do you want to go indoors?” asked Bausen.
“No.”
    “And you don’t have any suspicions?”
Bausen shook his head and tasted his whiskey and water.
“Too much water?”
“No. Not even any... little glimmers of a suspicion?”
Bausen sighed.
“I’ve been in this job for more than twenty-five years. Half
    the population I know by name, and I know how they spend
their lives—the rest I recognize by sight. There might be a
thousand or two, newcomers and the like, whom I haven’t got
a finger on, but apart from that...For Christ’s sake! I’ve
thought about every one of them, I reckon, and come up with
absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing!”
    “It’s not easy to imagine people as murderers,” said Van
Veeteren. “Not until you meet them face-to-face, that is. Besides, he doesn’t have to be from here, does he?”
    Bausen thought for a moment.
“You might be right there, of course, but I doubt it. I’d
stake all I’ve got on his being one of our own. Anyway, it
would be nice to be