The Unlucky Lottery

His main travelling companion was oppressive exhaustion, and it was not until he had drunk two cups of black coffee at a service station by the motorway that he began to feel anything like awake and clear in the head. Van Veeteren used to say that there was nothing to compare with a long car journey – in solitary majesty – when it came to unravelling muddled thoughts, and when Münster set off he had cherished a vague hope that the same would apply to him as well.

For there was certainly quite a lot to get to grips with. And a lot of tangles to unravel.

First of all, Synn. His lovely Synn. He had hoped that they would have been able to have a heart-to-heart talk the previous evening after the children had gone to sleep, but that’s not how it had turned out. Quite the reverse, in fact. Synn had settled down on her side and turned out the light before he had even got ready for bed, and when he made tentative moves to try and make contact with her, she had already fallen asleep.

Or pretended to, he wasn’t sure which. He lay awake until turned two, and felt awful. When he finally dropped off, he dreamed instead of Ewa Moreno. Nothing seemed to be going right.

Is the relationship coming to an end? Münster wondered as he came to the hills around Wissbork. Is that what happened when two people started drifting away from each other? As they say.

He didn’t know. How the hell could he know?

All you can do is look after your own life, he thought. That is the only consideration. All comparisons are gratuitous and would-be-wise. Synn is unique, he is unique, and so are their family and their relationship. There are no guidelines, no pattern to follow. All you can do is rely on your feelings and intuition. Dammit all.

I don’t want to know, he suddenly realized. I don’t want to know how it’s going to turn out. It’s better to be blind, and to hope.

But Synn was right in one respect in any case, even a worn-out detective-intendent could understand that. Things couldn’t go on like this – no way. Not their lives, or other people’s for that matter. If they couldn’t succeed in changing the conditions, making some radical changes to the way things were at present, well . . . It was like sitting in a train that was slowly but inexorably approaching a terminus where there was no alternative but to get off and go their separate ways. Whether they wanted to or not.

Has she as bad a conscience as I have? he wondered in a sudden flash of insight.

Or was that aspect also infected by the sex roles? Perhaps that was another shield against a nagging conscience, he wondered now that he was looking more closely at the situation – that calm, female sense of certainty, which could evidently survive no matter what the circumstances, but which he could never understand.

But which he loved.

Hell’s bells, Münster thought. The more I think about it, the less I understand.

He had driven more than a hundred kilometres before he was able to concentrate his thoughts on his work and the investigation.

The Leverkuhn case.

Leverkuhn–Bonger–Van Eck.

He worked out that it was now over ten weeks since the whole thing began. And they had been standing still for most of that time, if he were to be honest: November and half of December while fru Leverkuhn had been on remand and they failed to find the slightest trace of Else Van Eck.

But then the investigation had exploded into action the week before Christmas. Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s suicide and the discovery in Weyler’s Woods.

It was as if everything had conspired to ruin his Christmas break, he told himself glumly. To take away from him the opportunity to stop that train heading for ruin. And new incidents kept on cropping up after that as well – tin after tin of red herrings, as Rooth had put it.

The information about the diaries, for instance. Did any diaries still exist? They had existed, that was clear; but if he would ever be able to read what was in them (assuming there was something of importance) – well, that was probably a vain hope.

And that woman’s report to Moreno, to take another example. About family relationships by the seaside over a few summers in the sixties. What was the significance of that?

Or yesterday’s discussion with Reinhart. Although he didn’t know all that much about the investigation, Reinhart seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Münster himself. But perhaps that wasn’t too surprising – Reinhart was generally more perceptive than most.

Then there was that conversation with Ruth Leverkuhn after the funeral. A woman difficult to warm to. It hadn’t yielded much, either. A pity he didn’t know about what Lene Bauer had said at the time. It would have been interesting to ask her to comment, if nothing else.

Yes, there were a few openings, no doubt about that.

Or pitfalls, if one preferred to adopt Rooth’s pessimism.