The G File (3 page)

He inhaled a few times, and thought the matter over. Was it really all that likely that it was the same old story, the same old motive? Had Barbara Hennan née Delgado come to him because she suspected her husband was having an affair with another woman? After only a few months in the new country?

Or was there some other reason? – In which case, what?

He would have liked to ask her straight out – he had been on the point of doing so several times during their conversation, and he didn’t usually beat about the bush in such circumstances. But something had held him back.

Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to embarrass her. But perhaps there were other reasons as well.

Just what they might be was something he couldn’t be sure about. Not then, when she had been sitting on the other side of the table; and not now, as he sat there in his cramped and stuffy lair, trying to think things over and work out a strategy.

A strategy? he thought. Rubbish. I don’t need a strategy. I’ll drive there tomorrow morning. Sit in my car outside his office all day, staring at him. Smoking myself to death. Given the extent to which I’ve grown older, there’s no chance of him recognizing me.

This is an easy job. A classic. If it was a film, the building would no doubt blow up at about half past four.

He drank the rest of the beer, and wondered if he should allow himself another one before going to bed. During the course of the day he had drunk eight. That was close to the maximum – which was ten – but why not allow himself the luxury of a clear conscience for once?

Two still to go? Somewhere deep down inside him, of course, a voice was whispering somewhat pitifully that ten beers a day wasn’t a deal that was beyond discussion. But what the hell, he thought. Everything is relative apart from death and the anger of a fat woman. So what?

He had read that last thought somewhere. Quite a long time ago, in the days when he could remember what he had read in books.

He belched, and stubbed out the last cigarette of the day. Did what was necessary in the bathroom in just over a minute, then wriggled his way into his unmade bed. His pillow smelt vaguely of something unpleasant – unwashed hair perhaps, or sadness, or something of that sort. Turning it over didn’t help matters.

He set the alarm clock for half past six, and switched off the light.

Linden? he thought. If I book a room in a hotel, at least I won’t have to sleep in dirty sheets for a few nights.

Five minutes later Maarten Baudewijn Verlangen was snoring, with his mouth open wide.

Belle rang next morning just as he was coming out of the shower. As usual, the very sound of her voice set something alight in his chest. A spark of paternal pride.

Apart from that, the call did not give him much cause to be cheerful. They had more or less agreed to meet at the weekend. To spend a day together. Possibly two. He had been looking forward to it – in the grimly reserved way he ever dared to look forward to things nowadays: but she had now been invited along on a boat trip out to the islands instead. So if he didn’t mind . . . ?

He didn’t mind. Who was he to begrudge a seventeen-year-old daughter he loved more than anything else in the world the opportunity of going on a boat trip with like-minded friends – instead of having to trudge around with an overweight, prematurely grey-haired and frequently drunk old fart of a father? God forbid.

‘Are you sure?’ she wondered. ‘You’re sure you won’t be upset? Maybe we can meet up next weekend?’

‘Quite sure,’ he assured her. And he claimed that strictly speaking, next weekend would be better for him as well. He had rather a lot of work to get through at present.

Maybe she believed him. She wasn’t all that old yet.

She sent him a kiss down the line, then hung up. He swallowed to remove a small lump from his throat, and blinked away a trace of dampness from his eyes. Went down to the corner shop to buy the
Allgemejne
. Have your breakfast and read the paper, you big softie! he told himself.

And that is exactly what he did.

He was at Aldemarckt in Linden by a few minutes past nine, and a quarter of an hour later he had found his way to Kammerweg. He parked diagonally opposite Villa Zefyr, wound down the side window and settled down to wait.

Linden was not much more than a small provincial town – round about twenty or thirty thousand people. A few small industries. Quite a well-known brewery, a church from the early thirteenth century, and housing estates that mainly sprang up after the war – little family houses and occasional blocks of flats, within easy commuting distance of Maardam. He recalled having met a girl from Linden when he was a teenager: she was cool and pretty, but he had never dared kiss her. She was called Margarita. He wondered what had become of her.

But there wasn’t much more to Linden than that. The sluggish little beck Megel – no doubt also cool and pretty, and if he remembered rightly a tributary of the River Maar – meandered its way through the town and then over the plains to the north-west. To the south of the beck was a ridge, and that was the location of Kammerweg – a good four kilometres from the centre of Linden with a town hall, a police station, a square, and all the trimmings of civilized living. Plus that thirteenth-century church.

And a brewery – he began to feel thirsty.

Verlangen sighed, put on his dark glasses although the sun had not yet succeeded in breaking through the greyish-white clouds, and lit a cigarette. Gazed at the house, which could only just be made out behind the rows of trees and flowering shrubs that had been planted alongside the street precisely to prevent passers-by from peering in, and tried to assess its market value.

Not less than a million, he decided. Probably not even less than one-and-a-half. Mind you, they were only renting it, if he had understood fru Hennan correctly.

The situation was ideal in many respects. A large plot with some kind of woods or overgrown park at one end, and another plot at least as big at the other end, with a house that was also half hidden among greenery. He guessed that must be where the Trottas lived – the pilot family with the awful children – but you can never tell for certain.

On the side of the street where he was parked there were no buildings at all, just a steep slope down to an asphalted cycle path alongside the beck into town.

Rather splendid isolation, in fact, decided Verlangen with an involuntary stab of envy. The Hennan house that he could just about see in among the greenery was pale blue – not the prettiest colour he had even seen, but what the hell? His own forty-five-square-metre flat contained more glaring nuances than Kandinsky could ever have dreamt of . . . And just to the right of the house was a clinically white diving tower – or at least, that’s what he thought it must be.

So they had a swimming pool as well. And why not a tennis court and a sizeable cocktail terrace round the back? He couldn’t help wondering how easy it might be to torch the whole set-up – preferably with G surrounded by flames on all sides while the private dick played the hero and rescued the young wife, carrying her over his shoulder to safety. But he was forced to cut short all such thoughts when a shiny blue Saab glided slowly out between the two black granite pillars that marked the entrance to the drive of the house. They stood there like two immobile but well-dressed and somewhat ominous lackeys, making no attempt to hide their silent disapproval of any unwelcome visitors.

The only occupant was the male driver, and Verlangen had no doubt that it was none other than Jaan G. Hennan himself – despite the fact that he only had a very vague impression of him.

Who else could it possibly have been? Surely one could take it for granted that Barbara Hennan had given Verlangen the correct address . . .

He gave the Saab a fifty-metre start, then switched on the engine of his faithful old Toyota and began tailing him.

A classic set-up, he thought with an intentional lack of emotion.

Hennan parked in one of the narrow alleys behind the church, then walked the hundred or so metres down towards the square and vanished through the main entrance of a three-storey block of shops and offices of typical beige-coloured fifties design. Verlangen managed to squeeze his Toyota into a cramped space on the other side of the street. Switched off the engine, lit another cigarette and wound down the window again.

He fixed his gaze on the row of featureless rectangular windows in the storey above the ground-floor shops – a shoe shop, an undertaker’s, a butcher’s.

After a couple of minutes one of the windows over the undertaker’s opened: Jaan G. Hennan leaned out and emptied half a cup of coffee onto the pavement below. Then closed the window.

Typical, Verlangen thought. Born a bastard, always a bastard. He didn’t even bother to look down and see if he might be pouring the coffee onto a passer-by.

He adjusted the back of his seat so that he could lean back in comfort, took out the sport section of the
Allgemejne
and checked his watch. A quarter to ten.

So there we are, then, he thought. Out working again.

When he had read even the obituaries for the second time and smoked about ten cigarettes, Verlangen began to regret his decision to have an alcohol-free day.

It was twenty minutes past eleven, and he reconsidered his position and adjusted his abstinence to the morning. Surely he could allow himself a couple of beers with his lunch – always assuming he had any lunch – after enduring these blue-grey hours keeping an eye on his suspect. It would be as boring as meditations in a Buddhist monastery. A good friend of Verlangen’s had gone off on one of those jaunts a few years ago. Tibet or Nepal, or some such bloody place . . .

Hennan was also more or less invisible. He had appeared once more in the window, but that was all. Stood motionless for a few seconds, staring up at the clouds as if he were thinking hard about something. Or perhaps just suffered a minor stroke. Then he had turned away and vanished from Verlangen’s horizon.

His prey. The object of his surveillance. The reason why Verlangen was sitting around here in his worn-out Japanese oven of a car frittering away his worn-out life for three hundred guilders a day. Carpe diem, my arse.

He returned to thinking about Hennan. The impressions he had registered of him – not very many, to be sure – during the preliminary investigation into his crimes a dozen years ago.

The actual process had been quite painless. Once a few underlings had been pressurized into starting talking, the proof of Jaan G. Hennan’s misdeeds had been overwhelming. Over a number of years he had bought and sold cannabis, heroin and amphetamines via couriers, built up an efficient network and had probably tucked away a million or two – especially in view of the fact that he seemed not to have been a drug user himself.

Not an especially remarkable story, in other words, but it was mainly thanks to the assiduous efforts of Verlangen and his colleague Müller that the case had been successfully concluded. That G had got what he deserved – two years and six months – and that as a result it was presumably highly unlikely that they – G and Verlangen – would ever exchange birthday or Christmas cards. Not even if they lived for another five hundred years.

He recalled Hennan’s ice-cold, almost personal contempt during the interrogations. His unreasonable refusal to ascribe any kind of moral aspects to his dirty work. ‘There’s no space inside G for morals,’ Müller had once suggested, and there was something in that. His self-confidence – and the desire for revenge that occasionally flared up in his dark, somewhat oscillating gaze – had been such that one simply could not sweep it aside.

And his comments. Like some forgotten B-film from the forties: ‘I’ll be back one of these days. You’d better look out then, you damned cretins!’

Or: ‘Don’t think I’ll forget you. You think you have won something, but this is only the beginning of a defeat for you. Believe you me, you bloody lackeys, clear off now and leave me in peace!’

Self-assured? Huh, that was not nearly a strong enough term for it. Thinking back now, Verlangen couldn’t recall anybody or anything more stubborn and egotistic during all the years he had served in the police force. Fourteen of them. There was something genuinely threatening about Jaan G. Hennan, wasn’t that the top and bottom of it? A sort of slowly smouldering hatred that simply could not be shrugged off. A bone-chilling promise of reprisals and retribution. Obviously, threats of various kinds were bread and butter as far as police officers were concerned; but in Hennan’s case they had seemed unusually real. Nothing less than a form of evil. If Hennan had been an illness rather than a person, he would have been a cancer, Verlangen thought: no doubt about it.

A malignant tumour in the brain.

He shook his head and sat up straight. He could feel pains coming on at the bottom of his spine, and decided that a short walk was called for. Just a little stroll to the square and back: that was no more than fifty metres or so, and he could do that without even letting his prey out of his sight.

In any case, if Hennan was really interested in shaking him off his trail, it would be the easiest thing in the world. All he would need to do was to nip out of the rear of the building and vanish. No problem.

But why would he want to do that? He didn’t even know he was being watched.

And the man keeping him under observation had no idea why he was doing so.

Good God, thought Maarten Verlangen as he closed the car door. Give me two reasons for staying sober in this world we live in.

At half past twelve Jaan G. Hennan went out for lunch. Verlangen left his car once again, and followed him over the square and to a restaurant called Cava del Popolo. Hennan chose a window table, while Verlangen sat down in a booth further back in the premises. There were not many customers, despite the fact that it was lunchtime. The shadow had a good view of the person he was shadowing, and optimistically ordered two beers to go with the pasta special of the day.

Hennan sat there for forty minutes, and all that happened was that he read a newspaper, ate some kind of fish soup and drank a small bottle of white wine. Verlangen also managed a coffee and a cognac, and it was with a pious hope of being able to sleep for an hour or even an hour-and-a-half that he walked back to his car.