Free The Stranglers Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser Page A

staircase and hangs in the air until she is outside in the courtyard with its bicycle stands and rubbish shed and elm tree and bench, because it is a sound-film running in the cinema of her memory. And there is another sound lingering in the air: she doesn’t know if it is real or merely an illusion – a hallucination or an audible mirage: just as she slammed the door, perhaps half a second beforehand, did she hear him shout her name?
    Monica!
    Is that possible? Did she really hear that?
    And just look how she is running through the rain. Racing here and there along the dark streets that seem to be rocking and swaying and branching off in hitherto unknown directions, so that she loses all sense of where she is and of the way home. She continues in this manner for at least an hour – perhaps she doesn’t really want to reach home . . . She pauses three or four times, leans against walls and tries to throw up: she succeeds on one occasion, but not on the others, and when she staggers into the kitchen in Moerckstraat the clock, the old, everlasting brass mantelpiece clock that she and her father bought at an auction when she was only five, is showing a quarter past eleven and her mother is sitting in the living room gaping at a blue-coloured crime series on the telly, and doesn’t even say hello.
    She doesn’t even say hello, nor does she ask where her daughter has been.
    And her daughter doesn’t tell her that she has just killed their shared lover. She simply stands there for a while in the doorway of the big room, which is certainly one of the smallest big rooms in the whole of the town, staring at the uncombed back of her mother’s head and the fast-moving, jerky pictures on the television screen. Then she goes into her own room and stays there for three days.
    Three nights and three days.
    Seventy-two-and-a-half hours.
    Then she goes out.
    The cafe was called Duisart’s, and was evidently open until three.
    It was in one of the alleys between Armastenplejn and Langgraacht: she had never seen it before, but then, this was not her home district. The light was dirty yellow and the premises seemed a bit on the shabby side, but she found a corner where she was hidden away and didn’t have to look at any other of the sparsely distributed customers crouching over small plastic tables with their coffees, drinks and cigarettes. Men, almost exclusively men. Aged between thirty-five and a hundred. On their own or in pairs. An elderly, intoxicated lady with a spotted dog sat in a corner.
    She ordered coffee and a glass of cognac: the waiter, with a ponytail, a nose ring and a flower tattooed on one cheek seemed to be wondering how old she might be, then shrugged and came back after less than a minute with the cup and the glass on a tray.
    She sipped at the coffee and at the strong drink in the glass. She was not used to drinking alcohol, far from it: but a voice inside her told her that she needed it now. Something strong. Something uncompromising.
    She needed to think straight, quite simply. And needed help in order to be able to think straight.
    Needed to switch off that worn-out film show that filled her memory, and get to grips with things. Here and now. She emptied her glass in one gulp, and beckoned the waiter to bring her another one.
    I have killed somebody, she began.
    A man who was my mother’s lover. And my lover.
    Who deserved to die. Didn’t deserve to live.
    Not any more.
    Why? Why did he deserve to die?
    Because he had been exploiting them. Herself and her mother and their extraordinary fragility.
    My guilt is light, she thought. As light as a feather. I shall be able to bear it, and nobody need know about it. Nobody knows what I have done, nobody knows about Benjamin Kerran and me, it is all and has all been exclusively between me and him, and now it is hidden away in my head, nowhere else. It hurts and chafes and drives me mad, but that is the only place where it exists. And it will pass . . . my mother