Open Grave: A Mystery (22 page)

“Excuse me,” Agnes began, “I saw that you were outside.”

“Yes, I am most of the time,” said the man with a smile.

“I was thinking … it looks so nice there where you’ve pruned, and perhaps you might want to look over our overgrown bushes too.”

The man let his eyes travel over the professor’s yard.

“There are lots of things that are neglected,” Agnes continued. “The trees too for that matter.”

He had taken off his work gloves and set them up on Bunde’s fence. There was something thoughtful in his features. He appeared to hesitate, as if he did not know how he should respond to the offer.

“Maybe you don’t have time?”

“Time lives a life of its own,” the gardener said.

Agnes stared at him with surprise.

“You don’t rule over it,” he added.

Agnes shook her head.

“What’s the matter?”

He reached out one hand, as if he thought she would fall down over the fence.

“You’re as pale as a sheet.”

Agnes backed up a couple of steps.

“What did you say?”

“That you’re pale.”

She turned around and walked quickly back to the house.

Twenty-two

The rear of
Ohler’s house
was in darkness. No lights were on and the many overgrown apple trees effectively blocked the sparse light from the neighboring lots. Only two windows were illuminated, but they were at the other end of the house.

Karsten Haller had changed his mind several times while he waited for it to get dark. He would get up from his hiding place to leave Lundquist’s yard and go home, and then sit down again on the upside-down bucket he was using as a chair. It was an idiotic idea, he understood that, but once it had taken hold he had a hard time letting common sense decide.

Now and then he had been startled when an apple fell with a dull thud to the ground. Otherwise it was eerily quiet. Even the organ music from the neighbor had fallen silent.

He pushed aside a few branches in the brushy thicket where he had hidden to keep an eye out. The light in yet another window had been turned off. He looked at his watch. Both the professor and the old housekeeper certainly must go to bed early. He had realized that she was not, as he thought at first, home assistance from outside, but that she lived in the house. He drew that conclusion after their conversation earlier in the day when she offered him work in the professor’s garden. What surprised him was her strange reaction to something he had said. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

An hour ago she had gone around and drawn the curtains in what he thought was the library.

Another half hour, he thought, letting go of the branches. He was very tired. Hungry besides. But since his time in Etosha he was used to sitting for long hours on shift simply biding his time. He had developed a kind of mental technique for sinking into a trance that could be immediately broken when required. He made use of that capability now. He saw and heard but was taking it easy, resting.

What did he want to achieve with his expedition? He had repeatedly asked himself that question, but was not able to give any complete and unambiguous answer. Sure, he wanted to see the environment, the home where his mother worked and which changed her life forever and thereby also affected his, that was true. But curiosity could never be a reason for breaking into another person’s residence.

He suspected a deeper motivation. It was a thought that he did not dare let out, not even vaguely formulate into a complete sentence. “Damage”—he had been content to summarize the vague motivation to sneak his way in under cover of darkness. He thought he knew how to conduct himself. Once inside the house he would have to see what that might lead to.

When half an hour had passed he got up, picked up the bolt cutters, left the bushes, and walked quickly over to the fence. He had decided to make his way over to Ohler’s by way of the organ man’s lot. That maneuver was the riskiest. For a short time he would be visible, with only a currant bush that could partially conceal him. He waited, but everything was calm except for a dog barking in the distance. He quickly climbed over the fence, disappeared crouching behind the bush, then ran a couple of meters and squeezed through the hedge onto the professor’s lot.

He caught his breath. Several seconds had passed. He had scratched himself on the face and it stung. It bled a little, but he was not worried about the injury. He was used to such things.

It was perhaps ten meters up to the house. He could move in deep shadow except for where a narrow band of faint light came in from the street. He let his heart quiet down before he made a run for it.

He pressed himself against the wall, slipped carefully up to the cellar access he had aimed for. It was a classic old design with two doors that raised up. Perhaps in the past they had brought in wood and coal this way. An iron rod sat over the doors, secured with a padlock. Cutting open the lock with the powerful bolt cutters was a moment’s work. He put it in his pocket and then lifted away the iron rod, opened one door, and slipped down. The stairway was narrow and steep. He listened but heard nothing, then turned on the flashlight which he had covered with a cloth so that it only shone with a thin beam. Along the side of the stairs ran a slide that confirmed his theory that the cellar doors had been an intake for fuel.

The door into the cellar was unlocked. When he opened it he was met by an odor of paint. He let the flashlight play across floor and walls, then took the cloth off the flashlight so he could form an impression of how the room looked. Sure enough, along one wall cans of paints were stacked.

A passage led into the inside of the cellar. On either side openings could be seen. He passed a space that was almost completely filled by an old oil furnace. Next was a spacious laundry room with a large, obsolete semiautomatic washing machine, a couple of stainless-steel rinse tubs and a dryer of a centrifuge type he remembered from his childhood. The laundry room had surely not been used for many years.

He could picture his mother lugging wash back and forth in the passage. She had always been slender, but tough when it came to physical work.

At the far end was a storeroom for old garden furniture and other leftover rubbish and at the end of the passage a door. He opened it and was met by a landscape of furniture, boxes piled on each other, antique trunks and much else. From the ceiling garment bags and chandeliers were hanging. On the opposite wall a stairway led up to a door.

He looked around and quickly determined that he was in luck. All the windows were covered with black paint. He could turn on the lights without anyone seeing from outside. The switch was most likely at the top of the stairs. He made his way there and turned on the lights. The cellar was bathed in a clinical white glow.

Here his mother had undergone an abortion in 1944.

He could spot where the operation occurred. In her diary she described the pipes that ran along the ceiling above the place where it all happened—the rape, the conception, as well as the expulsion of the ten-week-old fetus. Two pipes that ran parallel along the entire long side and the bed had stood where the one pipe suddenly turned off. It all tallied. Perhaps the bed that stood not far from there was the same one? A solid piece of furniture in some kind of dark wood.

It was Bertram von Ohler who committed the rape, but for the abortion he had help from his father, the renowned skillful gynecologist Carl von Ohler, and Bertram had served as his assistant.

Two days later Anna Andersson had turned twenty.

Karsten Haller went down the stairs and collapsed on the bottom step. He wept. Was this what he had wanted to see? Was it the cellar that subconsciously had been his goal?

Suddenly steps were heard that echoed from the house. Karsten got up quickly and took a few steps up the stairs, but realized that he would never make it up in time to turn off the lights. The steps were heard more and more clearly. Instead he ran back down in the cellar and looked around for someplace to hide. The door to the cellar opened and he positioned himself behind some hanging garment bags.

He tried to breathe calmly. The bags smelled of mothballs. He had bumped into one of them and it rocked slowly on its hook. He reached out his hand to stop the movement.

Careful steps were heard from the stairs. In a gap between the bags he glimpsed first a pair of legs, then the trunk, and finally Professor von Ohler’s dogged face. He recognized him from the newspaper. Karsten suspected, considering the strained expression, that the stairs were a worry for the Nobel Prize winner.

Where did the professor intend to go? What was he doing in the cellar? It did not seem normal, staggering down into a cellar this late. It was past ten. Karsten peeked out. They were perhaps seven or eight meters from each other. If Ohler were to turn in behind the massive dining room chairs that were to the right of Karsten, there was a great risk that he would be discovered. A narrow corridor, surrounded by moving boxes, led straight up to the hiding place.

The old man shuffled along, supported himself against something and muttered angrily. He was coming closer and closer. By the chairs he turned and in doing so came into the corridor. Haller held his breath. What should he do? Silence the old man and run away? He had an advantage and that was the element of surprise. True, the cellar was illuminated but with a quick charge out of the cellar, the same way he had come, the professor would perhaps not even have time to realize what happened, much less create an impression of the fugitive’s appearance.

He would fling himself forward, bump into the old man so that he fell over the boxes and then take to his heels.

Suddenly the professor stopped. Karsten heard a rattling, metal against metal. The old man was muttering something again and with his feet dragging went back toward the stairs. It took him a minute to make his way up to the door. Karsten could see how he rested between every other step and he heard the labored breathing.

The light was turned off and the door up to the house closed. Karsten exhaled. The beating of his heart slowed down somewhat. His armpits and palms were soaked with sweat. The sense of unreality made him collapse on a trunk. He had found himself perhaps two meters from his mother’s tormentor, the rapist and illegal abortionist Bertram von Ohler.

What had the old man been doing in the cellar? The whole thing seemed suspicious. That clanging of metal could mean only one thing: The professor had left something behind in the cellar, a metal object, most likely a smaller item.

Karsten waited for ten minutes before he once again slipped up the stairs and turned on the lights. He followed the professor’s path, turned by the chairs and took the narrow corridor between the boxes, searching with his eyes for an explanation.

In a carton, one tab of which was open, he found the answer. In the bottom of an old can that had once contained a kilo of ground coffee was a sturdy key and two smaller ones, connected with a ring.

Karsten Haller immediately saw where they would lead. To a Hauptmann safe. He had seen a similar set of keys at his uncle’s office in Windhoek. Hauptmann was one of the more well-known manufacturers of safes during the interwar period, and according to his uncle the most reliable producer. Karsten recognized the
H
that formed the bit of the key.

According to Uncle Helmuth this was a foolproof safe with triple-locking mechanism made of the most refined Krupp steel.

Karsten fished up the keys and weighed them in his hand. He smiled.
Uncle Helmuth,
he thought,
you and your safe, whose contents you so anxiously guarded: an old revolver, a bundle of South African rand and an even thicker pack of American dollars, the family photos from Germany, and a stack of pornographic pictures. You thought no one knew that you were a relatively rich man and that, despite your racist rhetoric, you had a certain fondness for pictures of young black boys.
But Karsten had figured out where the key was. One day when his uncle was out on the farm in Bero he had opened to check what it was that Helmuth so carefully concealed from the rest of the family.

He chuckled to himself. He now knew how he could injure Ohler. A man who panting and on shaky legs made his way down into the cellar at ten thirty at night, like Uncle Helmuth used to do, had important things in his safe, perhaps secrets. In Ohler’s case it was probably not pedophile photos or weapons, but certainly valuable documents and perhaps money.

Where was the safe? Should he make his way up into the house and start searching? He looked at the keys that were in his work glove. Snooping in the cellar was one thing, but sneaking around in the house something else altogether. For such an expedition he must prepare himself better. More flexible gloves, lighter shoes, a smaller flashlight, and a small bag, if he found anything interesting to take with him.

He looked one last time up toward the pipes in the ceiling and carefully put the keys back in the coffee can. He had transformed himself from gardener to burglar. The thought exhilarated him.

Twenty-three

The bank clerk was embarrassed.
That was easy for Sammy Nilsson to see, but it did not make him any more kindly disposed.

“You cancelled the loan because Sigvardsson was ‘careless’?”

“Could you please tone it down a little?”

“Tone it down? The hell I will! And there’s no neglect here, is there? Not in your fine bank accounts, no, no. How much have you embezzled with your so-called good advice? How much has she taken for herself in bonuses, the old witch in management?”

Emanuel Roos was perhaps twenty-five years old. He had certainly encountered dissatisfied and sometimes angry customers, but he had probably never been confronted with a furious policeman, who was spitting out his contempt.

“Perhaps Sigvardsson read about that in the local rag before he shot his wife and himself. Have you ever heard of financial stress?”

Roos nodded eagerly, happy to be able to answer a question affirmatively.