In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery (9 page)

Studer stood up and started pacing up and down the
room, from the door to the window and back again.
Fraulein Kolla had rested her heaving bosom on the
table and was following him with her eyes. He stopped
by the window, opened it and leant out: a lawn, newly
mown, iron poles with clothes lines stretched between
them, sheets waving in the gentle breeze. He could
hear the hum of a machine.

"What's that?" Studer asked.

"The laundry's next door," Fraulein Kolla explained. "One of the machines must be spinning to
make that kind of whirring noise."

And Studer thought of all the things needed in a
clinic like this: countless shirts, socks, handkerchiefs,
sheets, nightdresses, all marked, all arranged in piles,
all counted. He caught himself thinking that he
wouldn't mind if the investigation took a while so that
he could see how such an organization worked.
He felt like spending some time here, in this realm
that was ruled over by a spirit called Matto, who had
been invested with such great power ... Sergeant
Studer would quite like to make this Matto's acquaintance...

He stared out of the window.

"Is that the female 0 Ward?" he asked, gesturing
with his hand at the building opposite.

"Yes."

Studer heard Fraulein KOlla's reply, but by then he
was already leaning out of the window, watching a girl
who was hurrying towards the entrance to the ward,
bent forward, holding her handkerchief over her eyes.

A woman crying. It could mean everything and
nothing, but to Studer it suggested that silly young
thing Nurse Irma Wasem, who imagined she was soon
going to be Fran Director Borstli.

He called the fat cook to come over quickly, pointed
out of the window at the girl and asked who it was.

That was the girl they'd just been talking about, she
said, that Irma Wasem who ... But Fraulein KOlla's
explanation tailed off in a giggle as Studer swung himself up over the window-ledge, ran across the grass,
getting entangled in a sheet, and caught up with the
girl just as she was putting her key in the lock. He
placed his hand on her shoulder and said, in a very
gentle, fatherly voice, "What's happened?" Then he asked if she would come for a short walk with him,
there were some questions he'd like to ask.

The handkerchief was sopping wet. The tears were
still running down her cheeks ...

More by instinct that conscious reflection, Studer
realized that the only way to calm the girl down was a
matter-of-fact approach. He abandoned his usual sympathetic tone and asked in a dispassionate voice, "Are
congratulations in order, Fraulein Wasem? Is it Fran
Direktor Borstli now?"

A stare ... A look of defiance ... The tears dried up.

"Who're you?"

"Detective Sergeant Studer."

"Lord above! I knew it! Has something happened to
Ueli?"

Ueli ... Dr Ulrich Borstli MD, Director of Randlingen Psychiatric Clinic, was simply Ueli. Lucky old
Dr Borstli. Actually, Studer would certainly not have
objected himself if Irma Wasem had called him "KObi"
or, even better, "KObeli". His wife had got into the
habit of calling him "Dad". There were times when it
got on his nerves ...

"We don't know yet," Studer said. "Have you spoken
to anyone else?"

A shake of the head.

Sergeant Studer came to a decision. "The Director's office looks as if there's been a fight there," he
said. "Traces of blood on the floor, the typewriter's
bitten the dust ..." Studer shook his head. Why on
earth was he using Dr Laduner's jokey expression?
Then he finished with, "The Director's disappeared
and-"

"Jutzeler! The men's staff nurse in 0 Ward!"

That was not at all what Studer had been going to
say. "And Pieterlen's run off," was what he had been about to add, so Irma Wasem's interruption took him
aback for a moment.

"What's this about Jutzeler?" he asked.

"They had an argument. Ueli ... the Director and
the staff nurse."

"When?"

"That's why I had to wait so long, almost three quarters of an hour. I could see them through the glass
door in the central block. Jutzeler stopped the Director and started going on at him. He was obviously
furious. Then they both went into the office. I saw
them. Half an hour later he came out by himself and
went up to his apartment. When he came down he'd
put his loden cape on and he had a leather briefcase
under his arm. I asked him what he was doing with the
briefcase, but he waved my question away. `We're
going tomorrow morning,' he said. `Go back to your
room.' He accompanied me to 0 Ward and then went
back."

"At half past one?"

"Yes, it was around half past one. This morning he
was going to go to Thun with me. I waited for him at
the station for a long time."

"And you didn't hear anything after he left you,
Nurse Wasem?"

"No. That is, I did wonder, at around a quarter to
three or so, if someone had cried out for help. But we
have so many people crying out round here. . ."

"You sleep by yourself ... ahem, er ... I mean, do
you have a room to yourself?"

"No, there's another nurse who shares the room
with me."

"And no one checks up on what time the nurses get
back?"

"The others, yes, but me ... no!"

Studer sighed. If you were the Director's sweetheart
even the Matron, or whatever title the old trout had,
would turn a blind eye to anything you did.

In the corner between wards P and T ... A cry for
help ... Perhaps Matto, as Schiil called the spirit of
madness, had been plaguing one of his subjects with a
horrible nightmare.

Studer stood in the middle of one of the paths and
looked round. An uneasy feeling crawled up his spine.
He was surrounded on three sides by the red-brick
walls of the clinic, and the fourth side was closed off,
too. That was where the kitchen was. He felt as if the
many windows, glittering with a multiplicity of tiny
panes, were insect eyes observing him. He had nothing
to hide, nothing at all. He was carrying out an investigation, it was his right to be with a lassie who might
have some information. But he felt uncomfortable all
the same. The windows were squinting at him, giving
him questioning looks. What was the man doing?
What's he going to do now? It would be better if he got
away from here and had a look at the corner from
where the cry for help had come the previous night;
the cry that had sounded like the squawk of a hungry
young crow.

Dr Laduner was playing tennis. The courts were beside
the railway line, on the other side of the village of
Randlingen.

"Game," cried Dr Laduner. He sounded as if he was
in good spirits.

He was playing with a woman. As Studer got closer
he saw that it was the assistant doctor who had not said
a word during the rounds. Without her doctor's coat
she looked slim, agile, only her legs were too skinny ...

"Herr Doktor," Studer called out, sticking his nose
through the the wire-mesh fence.

"Hey, it's you, Studer. What's new?"

Dr Laduner came over, balancing his racket on the
ball of his hand. The "doctor-on-his-rounds" smile was
on his lips, the half-mask again.

"I've found the Director," said Studer in a low voice.

"Dead?"

Studer nodded.

"Have you told anyone yet?"

Studer shook his head.

"My dear girl," Laduner said to the woman, who was
standing at the net, staring at the ground, "I have to go
back to the clinic ... Listen, I told my wife I'd get some
sausages, but I haven't time for that now, would you be
so kind ... ?

The woman nodded earnestly, ignoring Studer
entirely. He calls her "my dear girl," he thought to
himself, and remembers the sausages he's supposed to be getting, while in the boiler room, at the foot of the
iron ladder leading to the furnace door, the Director's
lying on the floor with a broken neck ... But perhaps
the errand's just an excuse to get rid of the lady ... ?

"Excellent. Bye then ... Take my racket too, will
you."

A white shirt, white linen trousers, white shoes. Just
his face was brown, and a strand of hair was sticking up
at the back of his head.

"Let's go then," said Dr Laduner.

They walked down a long avenue of apple trees, the
branches covered in pale lichen and with tiny apples
hanging from them, green as grass. At the end of the
avenue the central block loomed up, crowned by a little tower with a bell in it. The hammer was raised, fell
... The sound was sharp, sharp as the apples must
taste. Studer counted the strokes ... Three o'clock in
the afternoon. All kinds of things were going through
his head as he walked along beside Dr Laduner. The
first sentence of the report that was still to be written,
for example: "In the course of my investigation, at 2.30
p.m. on 2 September, I found the body of a man in late
middle age in the basement housing the heating plant
below T Ward of Randlingen Psychiatric Clinic. His
pockets were empty. . ."

"Where?" Dr Laduner suddenly asked.

"The heating plant of the male T Ward."

"You know your way round the clinic pretty well
already, Studer. But you let us down at lunchtime. I
like listening to Fraulein Kolla myself, but just you
beware. She's more dangerous than a movie vamp."

Another wrong note, but he couldn't quite grasp it
... You can't grasp a note anyway.

"And he was dead?"

"Dead as a doornail," said Studer.

Dr Laduner stopped. He breathed in deeply and
stretched until the material of his white shirt was tight
across his chest.

In a low voice Studer said, "Yesterday night, quite
late, Staff Nurse Jutzeler had an argument with the
Director. In the office ..."

"Jutzeler?" Dr Laduner's surprise was genuine, but
then he waved the matter away as being of no interest.
"Oh yes, that's quite possible. But it will have been a
difference of opinion about politics. Jutzeler wanted to
get the staff organized in a union, the Director was an
arch-conservative."

At the foot of the stone steps leading up to the main
entrance, in the same spot as that morning, Dr
Laduner halted. Studer kept his eyes on the ground.
When the silence remained unbroken, however, he
glanced discreetly at the other man. Dr Laduner had
his jaws clamped so tightly together the muscles stood
out like cords under the skin of his cheeks.

"Now presumably we'll have to look for Pieterlen ...
won't we, Herr Doktor?"

"Pieterlen? Sure-ly. We'll get on the telephone. You
think it's murder?"

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders and waggled
his head from side to side. "I don't know," he said.

But he said nothing about his find. On the landing,
at the top of the iron ladder leading down to the furnace door, he had found something that looked like a
huge salami: a good fifteen inches long, twice as fat as a
man's thumb, made of coarse linen, filled with sand
and sewn tight. A handy cosh. And the cloth was the
same as that he had found under the mattress in
Pieterlen's room.

Nor did Studer say anything about the envelope in
the breast pocket of his jacket. It contained dust, dust he had combed out of the thick, white hair of the
corpse. Perhaps a microscopic examination would
reveal some tiny, glittering grains of sand among all
the ash that would doubtless be there ...

Why did he not mention his find, and the precautionary measure he had taken, to Dr Laduner?
Studer could not have said, at least not at that
moment. Sometimes he had the feeling there was a
fight to be fought out between himself and the slim,
intelligent doctor. A fight? ... No, not quite that.
Wasn't it more a trial of strength? A friendly way of
getting his own back? Dr Laduner had "particularly
asked" for Studer in order to be "covered by the
police". Was it not a matter of honour to prove to the
doctor that he was more than a convenient shield? Or,
to put it better, more than an ordinary umbrella you
opened when it started to rain?

The hall of the central block was cool, the gilt letters
shimmered on the green marble of the benefactors'
plaque. Dreyer, the porter, was nowhere to be seen.

Down the steps into the courtyard they went, the two
unequal companions: the sergeant in his off-the-peg
suit beside Dr Laduner, white, clean, with a spring in
his step and still determinedly brisk, as if to say, "Come
on, come on, I've no time to spare, I've got things to
do. Even if the Director's been killed ten times over,
what's it to do with me?"

But perhaps he was mistaken in imputing such
thoughts to the psychiatrist?

They passed the casino on their left and crossed over
to the corner between P and T wards. The sun was
still high in the sky, reflecting off the windows, which
dazzled like tiny spotlights.

Studer hunched forward a little and squinted up
at the window above his guest room from which, according to the war invalid Schiil, Matto darted out
and in, out and in. A superstitious belief, definitely.
That morning Studer would have laughed if anyone
had told him he would come to fear Matto. But now,
after what he had found in the boiler room? It put an
entirely different complexion on the situation.

They went through the door to the basement.
A corridor, long and echoing, with a vaulted roof, a
cement floor ... A door painted with grubby yellow
gloss paint ...

"Give me your passkey, Studer," Dr Laduner commanded. He put the key in the lock, turned the
handle, pulled the door open and went in. His movements, his steps, were as swift and precise as they had
been that morning. He went down the iron ladder. On
the fifth rung from the bottom, he stopped. The feet
of the corpse were in his way. Resting his right hand on
a rung at shoulder height, Laduner balanced on the
balls of his feet, jumped off and landed with a perfect
knee-bend. Then he straightened up, tall, broad
shouldered and white in the grey dust. Studer stood at
the top, following the slim man's every movement. He
could see the dead body, too, and the thought that
came to him was that in a report he would never be
able to convey the impression the dead Director made.