In Matto's Realm: A Sergeant Studer Mystery (7 page)

Dr Laduner cleared his throat. Jutzeler was about to
answer, but the deputy director cut him short.

"Pieterlen had been assigned to the decorating
unit," he said in a matter-of-fact voice. "The group's
most recent task was painting the walls in the female 0
Ward, in the course of which Pieterlen fell in love with
Nurse Wasem. It does happen. There are imponderables. . ."

"Imponderables," said the woman doctor from the
Baltic coast with a sage nod of the head; Dr Neuville
gave an audible snigger.

"Wasem ... Irma Wasem," said Studer dreamily.
"And did the lassie reciprocate?" As he spoke he subjected his fingernails, which were short and flat, to a
detailed inspection.

Embarrassed silence. Embarrassed? No, not only
that. Studer sensed that the silence was also intended
to express displeasure: displeasure at the lack of
respect his line of questioning showed. What concern
of a simple detective sergeant were the internal
affairs of a medical establishment, that was what the
silence was meant to express. And the displeasure
that was being expressed was also directed at Dr
Laduner, which was presumably the reason why he
answered.

"At first certainly ... Definitely ... I was kept
informed..."

But then Dr Laduner's halting explanation was
interrupted by a squeaky, singsong voice. It was the
senior nurse, Weyrauch, fat, at ease with himself and
the world, his little piggy eyes glinting behind his hornrimmed spectacles, reminding them of his corpulent
presence.

"With your permission, Herr Dokt'r, I have some
information," he said. "Recently Nurse Wasem has quite often been seen going for a walk with the
Director in the evening-"

Dr Laduner waved Weyrauch away, so violently that
it looked as if he were being attacked by a swarm of
midges. Studer smiled to himself. A blue card with
schoolgirlish handwriting: I'll give you a ring at ten and
we can go for a strol.

But Dr Blumenstein, consultant and distant brotherin-law of the Director, said angrily, "That's just
gossip, Weyrauch. You should be ashamed of yourself,
reporting things like that to outsiders."

The fat man was not so easily embarrassed, however.
He answered with the lack of concern of a man whose
position is much more secure even than that of a consultant. His thick Swiss dialect boomed round the
dormitory, as he laughed and said, "But everyone in
the hospital knew the Director wasn't averse to a kiss
and a cuddle."

Dr Laduner blinked, but his smiling mask did not
change. Studer took the charcoal drawing with the
chocolate-box girl's face out of his pocket, showed it to
the senior nurse and asked, "Is that Irma Wasem?"

"I should say so!"

Turning to Jutzeler, Studer asked, "You answered the
telephone yesterday and called the Director. Who was
it asking for him? I mean, was it a woman's voice?"

"No, no," said Jutzeler, "it was a man's voice."

Studer was astounded. "A man's voice?" he asked in
disbelief.

"Yes. I'm quite certain of it." The staff nurse clearly
felt his word was being doubted.

Studer thought. There was something wrong there.
He needed to continue his questioning, but it was difficult under these circumstances. When there were so
many others listening, people refused to come out of their shell. He ought to take each of them separately,
then he could give them a real grilling. He looked from
one to the other. Blank faces. Behind them, at the small
table, Bohnenblust with the darned pullover and bushy
moustache was sitting, a contented expression on his
face, glad that he seemed to have been forgotten. He
was breathing so gently the wheezing from his chest
was no longer audible. Don't worry, thought Studer,
your turn will come. Perhaps, however, it won't be
necessary. He was still hoping things would turn out all
right. Though the fact that it was a man's voice ...

"Tell me, Jutzeler, were you still in the vicinity of the
telephone while the Director was talking?"

"Yes."

"You didn't listen, of course. But you might have
noticed something? A change of tone in the Director's
voice, say?"

Jutzeler thought, then nodded. "At first he was very
curt; he seemed to be furious and slammed the
receiver down. But it rang again straight away and the
Director answered. He smiled. . ."

So Ulrich Borstli had spoken to two people on the
phone. It was starting to look as if this might be a murder investigation, even though at the moment it was
only the disappearance of a patient - Pieterlen - that
was on the agenda. Wasn't it still possible the Director
had simply taken himself off, gone on a trip somewhere? But there were so many things that contradicted that. Studer walked up and down the dormitory,
several pairs of eyes following him.

Three doors in one of the longer walls. He tried the
handles - they were locked. To open them you needed
just a passkey, not a triangular key.

"We have to get on, Studer," said Dr Laduner,
standing up. "I'll get the senior nurse ... Weyrauch, give the sergeant a passkey and a triangular key so he
can go where he likes. I assume you don't need to go to
the female ward, Studer?"

Studer shook his head. "Just one more question. Is
Irma Wasem in the building?"

It was the corpulent senior nurse who answered. "It's
her day off," he said, with a wink from behind his hornrimmed spectacles.

So they'd discussed the case during the morning
reports, thought Studer, going over to the last door,
the one next to the raised cubicle with the bathtubs. It
was less than three yards from the side room. From the
other side came the hum of voices.

"By the way," Studer asked, "do you happen to know
where Pieterlen's accordion is?"

Jutzeler blushed, which looked rather odd, and
stammered a little as he answered in a low voice that
the accordion was not to be found.

"Then I suppose Pieterlen will have taken it with
him, wherever he's gone," said Studer, shaking his
head. He simply could not picture this Pieterlen in his
mind, whom Laduner had described as a classic case. A
classic case! Why?

"If you're going to stay in 0, Studer," said Dr
Laduner, "then I'll introduce you to my friend Schul. A
poet, is our Schiil. Not the most beautiful sight; a hand
grenade exploded right in front of him during the war.
Made quite a mess of his face. But he's a very intelligent man, I think you'll get on well with him. Also, he
was a great friend of Pieterlen, the vanishing patient."

With demonstrative thoroughness, Studer took his
little notebook out of his pocket and wrote down:
Wasem, Irma, nurse,

"How old was she?" he asked, and when Weyrauch
told him, he added: 22 years old.

Like all the corridors in the clinic, the main corridor
smelt of floor polish and dust. A narrower one
branched off to the right, leading to the kitchen. This
was painted a light blue and wasn't really a kitchen,
just a large room for washing up. There was a sink in
one corner, with hot and cold taps over it, and two
huge windows at right angles to each other, one looking out onto the central block, the other onto a lower
building in the middle of the courtyard with a chimney
rising up at the end of it.

"Hey, Schiil," said Gilgen, the red-haired nurse who
had been delegated to show Studer round.

A man in a blue apron, who had been busy stacking
soup plates on a large tray, looked round. His face was
one big scar. His nose had been flattened and in place
of nostrils the ends of two silver tubes stuck out; his
mouth looked like a poorly healed cut.

"I've brought someone to see you, Schul," said
Gilgen, rolling up the sleeves of his blue shirt even
further. "Greetings from Dr Laduner, and you're to
keep the sergeant company for a while."

The man with the scarred face dried his hands on
his apron, then held one out to Studer. It, too, was
covered in scars. And he had protuberant eyes.
Bloodshot.

He spoke rather stilted, formal German that had
little of the Swiss dialect about it. In fact, it sounded
more French, which was hardly surprising since Schiil, as he told Studer, had spent twelve years in the Foreign
Legion and had fought in the Great War with the
Regiment de Marche under Colonel Rollet.

He told him - little bubbles of spittle formed at the
corners of his mouth - that he had been seriously
wounded in the war ("un grand blesse de guerre!" as he
put it). A hand-grenade - Dr Laduner had presumably told him? - yes, a hand grenade had exploded in
front of him, ripping apart not only his face, but his
hands and his whole body as well. He pulled up his
trouser leg to show him, and Studer just managed to
stop him pulling his shirt up over his head to bare his
torso.

"Look at the way they treat heroes," Schul complained. "You give your all for a country's freedom, I'm
a chevalier of the Legion d'honneur, I've been awarded
the Medaille Militaire and I'm paid the full pension.
And who do you think pockets it? The Director!" Schul
bent down to whisper in Studer's ear and the sergeant
had to make an effort not to draw away. "Who pockets
my pension? The Director! But that blasted moneygrubber will get his comeuppance! Matto will teach
him a lesson. You cannot torture a man who stands
under the protection of an important spirit and get
away with it."

He suddenly grasped Studer by the sleeve and
dragged him over to the window that looked out onto
the central block.

"Up there, do you see?" Schul whispered. "The attic
window? Above Dr Laduner's apartment? Can't you
see him darting out and in, out and in? That's him,
that's Matto. He dictated a poem to me, I'll show it
you, I'll write out a copy for you so you'll have a
souvenir of him, of Matto."

Studer couldn't help feeling a little disconcerted. Even with his poor sense of direction, he had no
difficulty establishing that the window Schiil had
pointed out was right above the guest room Fran
Laduner had given him.

Schiil continued to chat away while he looked for
the poem in a cupboard crammed full of papers.

Matto had cried out last night, he said, cried out
again, a long-drawn-out, plaintive cry. In the corner
between T Ward and P this time. He interrupted his
search for a moment to show Studer the place.

There was a good overall view from the window that
looked out onto the central block. Firstly, of all the
central block itself, with the doctors' apartments - in
the afternoon Studer would learn that the Director's
apartment lay immediately beneath Laduner's - then
P, the ward for placid patients, and, at right angles to it
but in the same wing as 0, where he was at the
moment, T, the Treatment Ward for those suffering
from a physical illness. And in that corner, where a
door led to the basement, someone had cried out.
When Schiil went back to rummaging around among
his papers, Studer asked the red-haired nurse whether
he could believe him.

Gilgen shrugged his shoulders, as if he had been put
on the spot. In general, he said, Schiil was quite observant, and it wasn't impossible he might have heard
something, since he slept directly above this kitchen,
in a room whose windows had bars on the outside, so
was left open all night.

" Schiil," Studer asked, "what time was it you heard
the cry?"

"Half past one," Schiil said in a matter-of-fact voice.
"The clock in the tower struck immediately afterwards.
Here's the poem."

It wasn't a poem in the usual sense, rather a passage of rhythmical prose, written out in Schul's neat
handwriting.

Sometimes, when the Fohn spins the mist into soft threads, he
sits by my bedside, whispering and telling me things. Long are
the green, glassy nails on his fingers, and they shimmer as he
waves his hands in the air ... Sometimes he sits on the top of
the clock tower, casting threads, coloured threads, far and
wide over the villages and towns, and over the houses that
stand alone on a hillside ... His power and glory stretch far
and wide, and no one can escape him. He waves and throws
his coloured streamers and War sails up like a blue eagle; he
flings a red ball and Revolution flares up to the heavens and
explodes. But I committed the murder in Doves' Gorge, at least
that's what the police say, I know nothing about it. My blood
was spilt on the battlefields of the Argonne, but now I am
locked away and ifI did not have my friend, Matto the Great,
who rules the world, I would be alone and might perish. But
he is good to me and he digs his nails of glass into the brains
of those who torment me, and when they groan in their sleep,
he laughs ...

"What's all this about the murder in Doves' Gorge,
Schiil?" Studer asked, that being the one sentence that
fell into his own area of expertise. The rest sounded
quite good, especially the bit about Matto being
responsible for the war breaking out, but he also felt it
was rather overblown.

It was Gilgen, the nurse with the rolled-up sleeves,
who answered. It was just an idea SchfAl had, he said.
Old SchfAl never hurt a fly. Then he asked Studer if he
would like to go with him to the day room, it was eleven
o'clock and he had to relieve a colleague, lunch was at
half past, did the sergeant fancy watching a few rubbers of jass, or even joining in?

Studer shook Schul's scar-covered hand and
thanked him for the lovely poem; the patient promised
him a copy for the following afternoon. Then Studer
followed his guide.

As they were going out of the door, Schul called after
them in his hoarse voice, "Matto looks after his own,
you'll see. He freed Pieterlen. And he came for the
Director. . ."

So what, Studer thought. The only thing he found
slightly disturbing was Schiil's claim that Matto had set
up his headquarters in the very attic that lay above the
guest room.