10 The detective

“He could just as well be wrong!”

In fact, my day can only get better after words like that, served instead of morning tea by jealous colleagues at six am. They didn’t know I could hear them. Around the corner, I was standing on the dirty floorboards of the worn-out hallway as they waited whispering in front of the grinding coffee machine. Nevermind, I should have answered. A ghostly voice from the hallway, saying, “We’ll see about that.”

I’m not wrong, I’m sure: he’s here. I sense him, like the sea when it is around the corner, and the closer you get to it, the less you have to actually see it so as to picture its waves. I’ve always had a sixth sense when it comes to things like that, and in our job you need it: a feeling, a nose for all those little things that the eyes will never expose. As for the sea, I’ve never been wrong. When it comes to work, I might have been, though. In my ten years as a detective, let me think… – only once.

Not this time. He is here to see her one last time. Most of them come to say goodbye when their victims had a meaning, and surely Lina must have been meaningful to him. Why else the mutilation? The disfigured face, and the clean cut on her throat? The latter implies intimacy, because you won’t allow anyone to touch your neck who you don’t really know. It is like that with cats. Only certain people will get to crawl a spot as vulnerable as that.

“He’s only obsessing!” They said in my unit. Am I really, though?

It’s not like they couldn’t be right at all. We’ve known Lina for half a year now and at the very start she told us she felt followed. When she first came in, a colleague questioned her, but I still remember what she wore back then: a plain hoodie – thick and gray – on a bright and sunny summer day and sunglasses to disguise her eyes.

We let her down. The prosecutor did, who decided to drop her case, after the whole town assured us that Lina was known to be an exhibitionist. The butcher on the market square claimed to have done her outside in broad daylight, while her neighbor said he saw her naked several times. We didn’t even think of her ever again until her body was found down the river bend and early on the neighbor – who would have guessed it – was our suspect number one.

His wife gave him an alibi. But could she have been lying? Why is he here today – a row in front of me – with discomfort in his eyes? Did he see me? At the time, it was me who questioned him, although I never believed he could have killed her. Will I change my mind today?

For a church, the space beneath the high ceilings is packed and I am straining my eyes, knowing that a killer is close by. What if he slips away today? I guess my colleagues might have been right that I am obsessed…