Borkmann's Point by Håkan Nesser Page B

She switched off her desk
lamp and suddenly Kaalbringen was illuminated, lit up by
myriad lamps that come into their own when night falls. The
main thoroughfares and features were clearly marked—
Bungeskirke, Hoistraat, Grande Place, the town hall, the tower
blocks out at Dünningen...The Fisherman’s Friend. Yes, that
must be the restaurant hanging up there on the edge of the
cliff; she hadn’t thought of that before. He’d walked past all
that; the murderer had walked all the way from The Blue Ship
with his victim only a few yards ahead, and there must...
There must be witnesses.
That was as obvious as can be. People simply must have
seen the Axman as he skulked in the shadow of the walls along
Langvej and Hoistraat, as he scampered down the steps, as he
sneaked across Fisherman’s Square...There’s no other possibility. Whoever he is, he’s not invisible. What does that indicate?
Just as obvious was that tomorrow they would open up
their doors, and that famous detective the general public
would come teeming into the police station; and sooner or
later somebody—possibly several people—would turn up and
prove to have seen him. They didn’t know it was him, obviously; but nevertheless, they’d seen him and now they were
reporting that fact. They’d seen him full in the face, they had
even said hello to him!
That was the way it was. She put the light on again. In a few
days they’d have the name of the Axman hidden away among
the mass of completely irrelevant information; and nobody
would know which one it was, and there’d be no way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Or would it be worth sifting
through it all? Would anybody regard it as being worth the
trouble? Kropke, perhaps.
Shit! she thought. Just the job for Kropke. If that’s how it’s
going to turn out, we might as well acknowledge defeat in
advance.
But surely there must be some shortcuts? Cribs? Some way
of cutting through the mass of irrelevant data? There must be.
So what was the question she could write on the next page
with quadruple underscoring?
It was already there.
“Connection???” it said. She stared at it for a while. Then
she drew a triangle. Wrote the names Eggers and Simmel in
two of the corners. Hesitated for a moment before putting
Axman in the third. Contemplated her handiwork.
What on earth am I doing? she thought. What kind of rubbish is this? What childish drivel!
Nevertheless, the drawing certainly looked plausible. If
only I had a computer, she thought, I’d simply feed Simmel
into one end and Eggers into the other. The patterns that came
up on the screen would sooner or later highlight a point, or
produce a bundle of lines that indicated something that made
sense. A single name would emerge from the chaos or whatever the mathematical term was, and it would be the name of
the Axman. It would be as easy as that!
Oh, come on, thought Beate Moerk. I’m losing my grip! If
there’s one thing in this world that I don’t understand, it’s computers.
She closed her notebooks and saw from the clock that it
was too late for that Italian film on the TV that she hadn’t
really intended watching anyway. No, she was not one for the
quantitative approach. Not for her the tedious search through
haystack after haystack; Kropke could get on with that, with
the help of Mooser and Bang. She had better things to do.
She looked up again, just in time to see the moon glide into
the rectangle formed by her window. Full and round...Juno!
It was a sign, no doubt about it. There were other criteria to be
applied to this case. Different assumptions. Intuition! Woman!
None of this confounded left side of the brain! Yin, not yang!
She sat smiling at the moon. I’m an idiot, she thought. A damn
fool! Time to go to bed. Yes, no doubt about it. Lucky that
nobody else knows how I’m using my brain. Or rather, abusing it!
She stood up and went into the hall. She slid out of her
dressing gown and