Free The Weeping Girl by Håkan Nesser Page B

little mum always used to tell me . . . But it’s such a
sensitive subject nowadays, and people are up in arms about what’s been happening. Anyway . . .’
    He made a dramatic pause while he stroked his dyed moustache, and it struck Moreno that she’d never seen anything like this. Nor heard. Scumbag was far too complimentary a name for this
creature. She clenched her teeth and kept a straight face.
    ‘Anyway, I met that hack, and he told me he’d been given ten thousand to keep his mouth shut.’
    ‘Keep his mouth shut?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘About what?’
    ‘Keep his mouth shut about that name. The name of that paedophile.’
    ‘Who?’
    Lampe-Leermann shrugged.
    ‘I don’t know.
I
don’t know. It’s the hack who knows, but I’m the one who knows the name of the hack. Are you with me, Miss Copper?’
    ‘Of course,’ said Moreno. ‘And?’
    ‘It’s his job that makes it interesting. I wouldn’t call it a titbit if it weren’t for the place where he works. This chappie with the inclinations. What do you think,
Inspector?’
    Moreno said nothing. But she noted that for the first time since they began the conversation, he had referred to her as Inspector. She wondered if that was significant.
    ‘He lives in your little nest. How about that, eh? He’s a detective officer . . . One of your crowd.’
    He smiled and leaned back.
    ‘What?’ said Moreno.
    Lampe-Leermann leaned forward again. Pulled a hair from out of his right nostril, then smiled once more.
    ‘I’ll say it again. There’s a paedophile in the Maardam police station. One of your sleuths. He paid my informant ten thousand to keep his gob shut. It would be daft to pay up
if you had nothing to hide, don’t you think?’
    What the . . . Moreno thought. What the hell is he saying?
    The information was reluctant to register in her consciousness, but somehow it did so in the end. Seeped slowly but inexorably through the defences of her reason and emotions and experiences and
crystallized as a comprehensible message.
    Or rather, incomprehensible.
    ‘Go to hell,’ she said.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Lampe-Leermann. ‘In due course, perhaps . . .’
    ‘You’re lying . . . Forget all the brownie points you thought you had amassed. I’ll see to it that you get eight years. Ten! You bastard!’
    His smile grew broader.
    ‘I can see that you are upset. You have no sympathy, eh, you neither? Incidentally I don’t know if he took the money from his own pocket, or if it came from the public purse, as it
were . . . That would depend on his rank, of course, and I don’t know what that is. But the hack does.’
    He fell silent. For a brief moment Moreno thought the room was shaking – just a slight swaying, as if the film they were taking part in was short of three frames instead of the full
twenty-four and made a little jump . . . Or how it must feel some distance from the epicentre of an earthquake.
    An earthquake?
    That could hardly be a metaphor that simply cropped up without reason. She contemplated Lampe-Leermann as he lolled back on the other side of the table. In slightly less civilized circumstances
– they only needed to be
slightly
less – she wouldn’t have hesitated more than a mere second to kill him. If she had the chance. She really would. Like a cockroach under
the heel of her shoe. The thought didn’t worry her one jot.
    But then she worried precisely because she hadn’t been worried.
    ‘Is that all?’ she asked. She tried to make her voice sound so ice-cold that he would realize he could expect no mercy whatsoever.
    ‘That’s all,’ he said. His smile shrank ever so slightly. ‘I can see that you’ve got the message. Let me know when it’s sunk in.’
    Moreno stood up. Went over to the rear door and tapped on it with her bunch of keys. Before she was let out, Lampe-Leermann had time to explain one more detail.
    ‘It was because of this titbit that I wanted to talk to a woman police officer. I hope you didn’t