The Visitor V

See part four here.

”Now, this is how we have planned to do this. I´ll sit up here next to you with the tape recorder. Then we are going to reconstruct the … well, the events as precisely as we can. You listen and use your eyes, and afterwards you tell us if you think everything looked all right.” Margaret Johnson got the feeling that she was talking to Emma Munch as if she were still four years old. A bit embarrassed she signaled to George Price that they were ready to begin the show now.

Contrary to their expectations the super had given his permission, but that was probably because he was waiting for an opportunity to gloat. Margaret was skeptical of the procedure George Price had chosen, but her colleague had assured her he knew exactly what he was doing.

She and Emma had to bend down in order to look through the banister. Not a sound reached them from the hall. Then a policewoman in a blonde wig and a floral dress stepped into the hall from the living room. She opened the front door quietly and let in a tall policeman in a tan wind jacket. Margaret discovered that she had been holding her breath. Until now the pair had followed the script to a T, as far as she could see, but now came the most important part. “You´ve got a new dress,” he said down there.

“No, that is not correct! That is not the way it was!” Emma sounded fragile, and very, very young.

Price stepped into the circle of light down there. “What are you saying, Emma?”

“It was not correct!” Her pupils were huge, and Margaret kept a close eye on her.

“Okay, we´ll try it once again.” He waved the two constables aside and whispered an instruction to them. They disappeared to either side of the hall.

Margaret put a hand on Emma´s shoulder, urging her to sit down again. The young girl was shaking, and she clenched her fists around the rails. Could she really justify that they went on with this performance? She had suggested that they let a psychologist be present, but Emma had turned down the idea vehemently. Why hadn´t she at least insisted they do it in bright daylight?

The woman in the dress stepped forth once again. She opened the door, and the wind jacket entered. “Please turn to the right,” someone whispered, and Margaret bit her lip. The woman leaned back her head, smiling expectantly, and the man bent down awkwardly. “You´ve got a new dress.”

”The ear! Look at his ear,” Emma whispered while she pushed her face up against the banister to get a closer look. And in the bright light from the ceiling lamp they all saw that Erich Munch´s left ear was frayed and torn on top, as if someone had snatched a tiny morsel.

For a second he stood like a statue on a floodlit stage, then he put his hands around the policewoman´s neck, squeezing it with all his might while he roared, “why didn´t I kill her too!”

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”And I swear she was on the point of sucking her thumb and wetting her pants again. But so was I,” Margaret admitted to George Price several hours later when they had finished taken down a murderer´s confession.

The Visitor IV

See part III here.

”Do you have anything at all which can justify spending our resources on this case again?” The superintendent tapped his pen against the green blotting pad.

Margaret Johnson kicked her colleague underneath the table. This meeting had been his idea, and if the boss was in that mood, she was not going to let anyone throw her to the wolves.

George Price rustled his papers. ”Erich Munch´s mother dies, and the following night her flat is burgled. Someone has gone through everything, but as far as we can see, nothing has been taken, or at least not anything valuable. We have the flat searched, and they find her diary from the year that Susanne Munch died stashed away in the cistern of all places.”

“Sounds like someone has been reading too many thrillers,” Margaret mumbled.

Price looked up from his notes for a second, but chose to ignore her remark. “A couple of days after Susanne´s death she writes in the diary: They keep asking me when he came and went. If only I could be sure I did not fall asleep during the film. But I have said what I said, and I can´t change that. And the flat is crawling with Erich Munch´s fingerprints.”

“So you are saying that the guy has left fingerprints in his own mother´s flat?” The corners of the superintendent´s mouth told their own, acid tale.

Price leaned forward, before he continued. “The diary is not as concrete as I had hoped for so we have no decisive new evidence yet. But Erich Munch´s mother was not nearly as certain as she claimed then, and apparently he knew that. Who else would go through her things in the middle of the night? Furthermore we have listened to that tape with Emma Munch´s conversation with the psychologist several times. That girl remembers something even if she doesn´t know it herself. And now next step must be a reconstruction.”

Price had been one of the first policemen on the scene of crime. The case went back to his days in uniform, but Margaret knew he would never forget the sight of the little girl who just sat there above the stairs, clutching a blue blanket.

To be finished on Saturday.

The Visitor III

See part two here.

She remembered the heavy soup of pity she had whirled around in for so long. Pity, or even worse, ill-concealed curiosity. “Wasn´t it your mom who …?” All their sticky eyes and the whispered remarks about the poor little girl which died away when she appeared.

She and Neil had been sent off to her grandparents afterwards. Her mother´s parents, obviously. Neil was just a baby; he didn´t understand a bit of what was going on around him, but they tried to keep Emma away from all the commotion. After that first night she hadn´t seen one single policeman in uniform, and it was also granny who put her foot down after some months and told them that Emma had had enough of all their experts and shrinks. If they left her alone, it would be far easier for her to forget it all.

Granny meant well and did her best, but it must sound strange to other people that it had taken several years until Emma was able to form a reasonably complete overview of what happened that night. Her mother had met a new boyfriend who was going to visit her when she had put the children to bed. She washed her hair, shaved her legs and made up her face meticulously, but not until she was certain Emma and Neil were asleep upstairs. Then she put on a new dress and her best necklace, and at some point she must have tried to get up some Dutch courage. They had found an empty whisky glass on the kitchen table. She also remembered to spray herself well and truly with perfume from the bottle on the dressing table. The last piece of information was one of the only things Emma had not been able to read in the papers and now, fifteen years on, it was very difficult for her to distinguish between what she really remembered, and what she had discovered via frequent research in the local library.

The police did not think anyone had rung the bell. Yet another detail in favour of an attacker whom her mother had expected and opened the door to, before he could wake up the children. Someone had certainly come to visit, someone who woke up Emma and made her sneak out onto the landing. This person kissed her mother, and afterwards… What went wrong between them? All her shiny pearls were spread on the floor, around the immovable body. And Emma just sat there in her wet nightdress. For how long would she have stayed there if the neighbours had not noticed that the lights were on in most of the house?

All that she knew about the investigation and whom the police suspected certainly came from the newspapers. Her father had had right of access to her for several years before she realized that he had been very close to stand trial for the manslaughter of his own wife. What if her grandmother, her father´s mother that is, had not been able to tell them that he had come home to her place and gone to bed in his old room even before the light was switched on in Susanne Munch´s hall?

In their second round the police had concentrated on the boyfriend. Not for long, Emma thought, because far too many witnesses came forward to testify that he had never fulfilled his casual promise to visit her mother that night. He had said something that afternoon which she had taken very seriously while he had gone out bowling with his mates like any other Tuesday evening. When it came to men, mom´s judgment could not have been very good.

It had cost Emma several years´ fight to free herself of all the staring eyes. Granny was like a safe haven, but as soon as the police had given up their suspicion of her father, he was allowed to see his children again of course. Little Neil grew used to him soon and moved in with him in their old home before long. For Emma things had been different. Dad came and visited her at granny´s, but even though she hadn´t quite understood then, she instinctively felt that they were stiff and formal and full of aversion to him during each visit. Before long she had begun wetting her pants and waking up from nightmares every time he had been around her.

She still saw her father now and then, and things were better between them. But they would never achieve a close relationship like the one between him and Neil. And she couldn´t even wear perfume. Just the slightest trace of a flowery perfume, and she could not breathe. She used to tell her friends that she was allergic.

And now her father´s mother had died. Would she be mired down in the same old soup again?

To be continued on Thursday.

The Visitor II

See part I here.

”What do you feel about it all today?” The psychologist folded her hands on the table and let silence fill the room.

Emma ran her fingers through her blonde hair while she did her best to survey what she felt. “I was never really certain what I had seen, but of course it destroyed my relationship with my father. I practically accused him of having strangled my mother. The police knew he couldn´t have done it, but every time I saw him…” She stopped and took a deep breath. It was so silly. She had been through this a million times, yet it was as if she had a black-out when she reached a certain point.

“What makes it so terrible is that until then I loved my dad more than anything. He was so funny and happy, and he was the one who read bedtime stories to me every night. When he didn´t make up his own stories, that is.”

The psychologist took her time, before she asked a new question. “So how did it affect you when your parents split up?”

“I must have missed him ever so much.” Again, Emma paused to think. This was not one of the questions she was used to hearing. “I am sure that if anyone had asked me, I would have chosen to live with my father. But I was so small, and everybody probably just assumed it would be best for me to stay with my mother.”

The psychologist gave her an encouraging nod.

“I suppose my mother coped fairly well. But all of a sudden she had to do it all on her own, look after two small children and a large house, and of course she had to work full time. I know for certain that I missed my bedtime story, because I pestered her all the time, wanting her to read to us. She always said she was tired.” She fiddled with a frayed cuticle.

“Do you remember what your father read to you?”

“Mostly Astrid Lindgren, I think. Or fairy tales. All my books from that time have gone. Somebody must have thought it was best when … He was such an excellent reader, he used different voices for each character, but I loved it even more when he made up a story himself, or told me about his childhood.”

“Do you think he had a good childhood?”

“Well, yes, at least that is the impression I got. I think he preferred to tell me exciting and scary stories, however. Sometimes he had to stay at my bedside and comfort me until I fell asleep, and that would make mommy so angry. For example when he told me about a huge dog that bit him.” Emma began to laugh, but stopped rather abruptly.

The psychologist scribbled something on the writing pad in front of her.

“Has all this something to do with my grandmother´s death?”

She lifted the pen for a second. “Why do you think so?”

“When will you stop treating me like a child?” Emma pushed her chair back and ran out of the room without another word.

To be continued on Tuesday.

The Visitor I

[Danske læsere kan eventuelt følge med her: Skrive-Bloggen]

Yes, I do know I brought this short writing exercise some time ago. In the meantime I have made it into a real short story, however. Part two will be brought tomorrow, part three on Tuesday, part four on Thursday and the ending on Saturday. Unless I have lost all my readers long before then.

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Abruptly she sat up in her bed. A deep voice had forced its way through the dark night into her half-conscious mind. Daddy must have come home!

Emma pattered out on the landing in bare feet, pulling the soft blanket after her like a tail. The floor felt cold under her feet. She watched them through the rails of the banister. They looked really funny in stripes. He was much taller than mommy so she had to lean back her head. “You´ve got a new dress.”

“Silly, you´ll wake up the children,” she whispered, but she didn´t look angry.

Even though it must be in the middle of the night, mommy had not gone to bed yet. She was wearing lipstick, and the new necklace from her birthday. The wrinkles on her forehead had gone. The man put his arms around her and whispered something Emma could not hear. She could only see his hair and the back of his head. She was not sure it was daddy after all.

“Won´t you come in?” Mommy sounded almost like a little girl.

From her perfect little lookout Emma saw him squeezing mommy´s neck. She didn´t really understand why the grown-ups liked that kind of thing. She had tried kissing Simon in the kindergarten, but he had just tasted like a cucumber. She leaned forward to get a better view, and right then she thought she could smell flowers. Mommy was wearing perfume.

Mommy was red in the face, and she did not smile any more. Emma heard her necklace snap, and saw how the light sparkled in the pearls, dancing in the air like a fountain.

She clutched the blanket in her hands and pulled it up to her eyes. Her thumb slid into her mouth while a small puddle formed beneath her feet.

To be continued tomorrow ...