Free The Strangler's Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser Page B

suspects nothing and will not be given any reason to suspect anything; if anybody else finds out about our connection with Benjamin Kerran, there is no reason to link that connection with his death . . . My mother, I mean, my mother will not be connected with his death, there is no reason to do so, he has no doubt kept her just as secret as he has kept me, and when they find him nobody will suspect anything . . . They’ve probably only met about five or six times in all . . . no, there are no clues linking him to my mother or to me. They will look for a murderer, of course, male or female; but it will never occur to anybody to start looking around in a cramped little flat in Moerckstraat with ceilings so low that even a domestic pet would have to crouch down in order to move around, there’s no reason for anybody to search for anything in a place like that. No reason to be afraid, no reason to be scared any more, no reason to . . .
    The waiter arrived with her new glass and she broke off her train of thought. Just like cutting off a piece of thread that was too long. Paid, and waited until he had gone away. Then emptied the glass into her half-drunk cup of coffee, as she had seen her mother do, and as she remembered her father doing, and tasted the brew. Added a spoonful of sugar, stirred it and tried again. Much better, it almost tasted good, and warmed her up inside. She had never smoked – apart from a few giggly puffs at less than elegant dances when she was in class five or six – but now she suddenly fancied a cigarette to suck at as she sat in this gloomy cafe as the rain poured down outside.
    But instead that voice came back to her. The thought of that voice. It burst into her head like a sour-tasting belch – Benjamin Kerran’s cry from the bathroom just before she slammed the door and raced down the stairs.
    Monica!
    Was it possible? Wasn’t it just her imagination? A hallucinatory cry from beyond the grave?
    Or could it be that she really had heard him? That he really had shouted from that warm clinker floor in the bathroom with a pair of scissors stuck ten centimetres into his gut, his cock hanging helplessly like a piece of rag and his trousers crumpled around his ankles?
    That he hadn’t died?
    That he was still alive, despite everything?
    Then, at least: that he was still alive then, at the moment when she left him and rushed out into the night like a terrified madwoman, her brains crushed like a crust of ice by the heavy boot of reality?
    Where do all these words come from? she wondered. The heavy boot of reality? Something she had read, presumably. Lonely girls read more books than anybody else in the world, a woman teacher had told a gathering of parents when she was in class four. She wondered what pedagogical value such a disclosure could have; but of course there was little point in wondering about that just now, in sitting there and trying to trace the dodgy origins of her dodgy thoughts . . . It was more important to sharpen them, to focus them and introduce a modicum of clarity. Decide what to do next. Was she drunk? Intoxicated already after no more than one-and-a-half glasses? It wasn’t impossible. She hadn’t had much to eat these last three days, next to nothing in fact, and alcohol had a greater effect on people if they had an empty stomach, even she knew that. Even Monica Kammerle knew that – but there was something else she didn’t know, and that was in fact the most important thing in the world for her to know just now.
    Was he dead?
    Had Benjamin Kerran really died up there in the bathroom? Had she finished him off by stabbing him with a pair of scissors, or had she only wounded him?
    Oh hell, she thought, emptying her cup. Bloody hell, I simply don’t know. I’m such a damned useless idiot that I don’t even know if I’ve killed him or not! Idiot, Monica Kammerle, you are just a poor little idiot, and you’ll soon be as mad as your mother and the pair of you will end up in