A Spoonful of Luger (61 page)

The anger and shock at having to face a break-in, after all, was only slightly buffered by the thought that at least it hadn’t been Karin who’d degraded me. For a moment my emotions clashed, and I couldn’t move. So many times I’d struggled to understand the distress of burglary victims whom I’d interviewed, but I’d never quite absorbed from them the shock of personal assault. Now I knew. Every nerve cried out in outrage. They’d laid their filthy hands on my life.

They had, too, politely placed my mail and newspaper on the hallstand.

It was ridiculous that I didn’t know what to do. Shock held me, and I do not remember walking into the front room until I was there with my finger on the switch, but with fear preventing me from putting it on. I was afraid to see what they had done, and already my stomach was heaving. Without conscious volition I depressed the switch.

Then the light from the chandelier fixed it in my mind, like the flash from my own camera outfit. A complete shot, in colour, gradation perfect, colours for some reason too bright, but accurate, with every detail superb.

They had wrecked the room. I drew in my breath. But still, behind it all, I felt strangely calm. I was simply observing.

Karin’s cut-glass collection had been swept onto the floor from their cabinet, the books tumbled, scatter-leaved, from the low bookshelf, my hi-fi torn out and dumped across the rug, the vases smashed against the wall, and the roses I’d replaced fresh, in case she returned, lying in the hearth. Amongst the flowers were the remnants of Karin’s own yellow vase, which she’d made herself when she was fourteen. “I used to go to my Aunt Sigrid’s place, Owen,” she’d told me. “She let me practise on her wheel.”

It was strange that she hadn’t taken it with her, I thought vaguely. She hadn’t taken many of her clothes, either.

Still I had not stirred. My hand was over the switch, and time was not moving. There was a thought struggling to get through, and I tried to focus on it, forcing my eyes to absorb the scene. Then I had it. This had not been a burglary, because as far as I could see nothing was missing. It was a search, a frantic one, but a complete one.

Then training and routine took over. I was, again, a police officer, in somebody else’s house, calm and observant and completely impersonal. I left the switch on, and went systematically through the bungalow, leaving lights on in every room.

Across the hall to the main bedroom. It was the same there, destruction and disorder, but nothing missing. The mattress and the base were both slashed open, sheets and cover scattered, pillows slashed and flock everywhere. They’d taken out the drawers from the dressing table and dumped their contents on the carpet, and stripped out the wardrobe. But nothing had been taken.

In the other bedroom, which was really a storeroom, it was a similar picture. Disorder and ransacking, but no theft. The same in the kitchen, and the same in the back room, which was my office. They had completely scrambled my filing system and cleared out the cabinet, but there had been something desperately systematic about it. They had even been through my diaries, though that could’ve given them little more than a picture of my steadily growing professional stature as a photographer—more a picture of Karin than of me, because it was she who’d given me the self-confidence and drive to pursue it so intensely.

Eventually, stomach now in control and my outrage cooled, I went into the kitchen and filtered some coffee. The anger now was that it was something I couldn’t understand, when I already had enough on my mind worrying about Karin. Four days, and not a word! Could this be linked with her extraordinary behaviour? Could it, I wondered, possibly
not
be linked with it?

It had been a careful search. At first I’d thought it was for money, or some such valuables, but my petty-cash box had been gone through and the money in it untouched. The fact that the search had been unsuccessful was indicated by the very completeness of it, as there’d have been no sense in going on after any successful discovery. The fact that this was not a simple mindless loutishness for its own sake was proved by the failure to pour treacle and sauce over the carpets and urinate on the bed.

I drank coffee, and was no further forward when I’d finished it. It didn’t do its work. I was exhausted, and could barely stay awake, and I didn’t want to think about it any more. Shock numbed my mind. For four days it’d been pummelled for an explanation of Karin’s desertion of me, and I could do without anything like this to worry about. I’d come to depend on her. She was the driving force of my life, and I was gradually running down without her.

Miserably, I went to see whether I could make something out of the bed, and found myself, instead, on my knees in the front room, gathering up the remnants of her vase.

How
could
she have left it?

There was no possibility of repairing it—the bits were too small. The only two pieces large enough to fit together—and they did not join when I tried them—were from the thicker base. I turned them over.

On one piece, in black under the glaze, was the abbreviated word: ‘Sil—’, and on the other an ending: ‘—mics’. And on the first piece, put in the wet clay with a toothpick or something, her initials. K.B. Karin Bergstrom. Fifteen years ago she’d done that. She’d weep when I told her. If I ever did. If I could come face to face with her, and ask her why the hell she’d done this to me. Four years to build it up, and four days to smash it, like the vase at my feet.

Then, beneath one of the roses, I saw the corner of a piece of white card, slipped it out, and turned it over. It was a colour photograph that I’d seen before, but only once, right at the beginning. She must have put it into the vase, which would explain why she’d never put flowers into it. She had kept two milestones of her life together.

She had been sixteen at the time—and the vase two years old. God, but she’d been beautiful even then, though now she’d matured and was more serious. In the photograph she was all vivacity and eagerness for life, and was trying to control her laughter for the photographer, and her wonderful grey-green eyes were almost hidden. I knew every plane of that face, having taken dozens of shots of it, the proud line of her nose, the soft curve from jaw to chin, and every nuance and subtlety of her mouth. But in the picture it was all younger, all more delicate, though with the character already there.

She seemed to be standing in front of a church. I knew well the deep shadow of such an arched doorway behind her. She was wearing some sort of folk costume.

She had a red ribbon controlling the silken blonde of her hair, and was wearing a white, long-sleeved blouse with a heavily-flowered scarf draped over it. (Blossomed, I recalled, she had called it.) There was a red, embroidered corselet lifting her immature breasts (which weren’t like that any more), laced across the front and apparently part of the skirt or apron. It was difficult to decide which. The apron was vertically striped in fine lines of white, red and black, and it almost obscured the flared black skirt beneath it. She was wearing (nearly out of the picture) flat-heeled soft black shoes, with red pom-poms on them.

Staring at it, kneeling there with my knees aching and my eyes moist, I was for a moment assaulted by a wave of despair. Then I forced myself to my feet, and went to the phone in the hall and reported the break-in to the police.

This was more from instinct than anything else, a throw-back to my few inglorious years in the force. A crime had to be reported. I was advised to get a bit of sleep, and a man would be round in the morning, sir. Not Owen, I noticed, not Mr Tanner, though he’d have known me. The same old sergeant, still duty officer at the desk. I couldn’t remember his name. Worth a laugh, that, but I was way beyond laughter.

I finally slept, telling myself that the incident had to be connected with Karin, and that it in some way made her leaving less personal.

It proved nothing. I was as lost as ever. But I was asleep before that rationalisation came along to taunt me.

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