Merel smiled and said, “Dan, please, let’s leave the ladies to look at photographs. If you come to the study with me, I’ll get you those details, and see if there’s anyone else who might be of assistance.”
Dan could imagine Inger’s response to being cast in that way, the ladies left in the drawing room while the men got on with business, but he was relieved not to have to look at photos himself. He followed Merel into the study and stood there in silence as he made a note of the two names with addresses and phone numbers.
He looked up then and said, “We have a contact for the police too, but I imagine you have that side of things covered?”
“Yes, we do.” On the one hand, he was thinking a police contact might have been useful, but it seemed unlikely the kind of person they’d been given as a liaison would be much use to Dan. Merel handed him the piece of paper and he said, “Thanks. I hope we’ll be back in time to visit them tomorrow.”
“I’ll call this evening and let them know.” He glanced at the door, then, and said, “It’s impossible for you to know how important this is for us, for our whole family. But for my wife, especially, it’s become . . . an obsession. The finding of the murderer.”
“I understand.”
Merel nodded, but as if he hadn’t heard.
“I worry sometimes, what will happen to her if the murderer is found, because then there is no barrier left between us and our loss—we have to face it raw.”
“I understand that too.”
“Yes, I believe you do, Dan. I see in the newspaper, reports of murder, and it’s such a simple thing; a man is murdered here, a woman there, covered in a few lines, so easily forgotten. But it’s complex too, no? For those of us left, it’s a puzzle we’ll never solve, no matter what we learn.”
“You still want to know.”
“Naturally,” said Merel. He looked ready to say something else, but only fell back sadly on the same word. “Naturally.”
Dan could barely imagine the level of their grief, but he could understand how this unsolved crime, the need to find the person who’d taken her from them, had become something to hang their lives on. And if it went, if the murderer was caught, they would have to face all over again the stark early morning truth that it solved nothing, that Sabine was still lost for ever.
Even knowing that, though, as he stood there in Merel’s study, vaguely aware of Catherine Merel and Inger talking in the other room, Dan wanted nothing more than to provide this decent and dignified couple with those answers. If it secured his own future into the bargain, all well and good, but if it didn’t, at least he’d have done one irrefutably good thing in his life, and finished the work that a better man than him had started.
Chapter Twenty-two
They took a cab back to the hotel, the streets busy with the buzz of early evening. Inger seemed subdued, but he wasn’t sure what to say and his own energy levels had taken a knock, so they sat in silence.
They went to their adjoining rooms with some vague idea of having dinner downstairs. Dan slipped the piece of paper with the contact details into his bag, then heard a door open and turned to see Inger standing there with a surprised look on her face.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I thought it was just . . .” There was a connecting door between the two rooms, something Dan hadn’t noticed himself until now. She laughed a little, but she still looked down, and a bit of him wondered if the mistake of opening that door had been intentional, if she just wanted some company.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded but without conviction, and then she said, “I think it’s just, I never lost anybody, you know. Well, a friend at school when I was fourteen who died from some rare kind of cancer, but no family members, nothing like you’ve known, or them. It was just difficult being there. They were lovely people, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, I liked them, but it was tough. Must have been tough looking through the photographs.”
She lowered her head, as if unable to sum up how difficult it had been; pictures of Sabine from across the short span of her life, each with a happy association, but all equally possessed of a terrible sadness, a sepia tint visible only to those who knew.
“It made me think of you too, the way you lost your son.”
Fleetingly, he regretted telling her about Luca, because he was certain he didn’t deserve her sympathy, but at the same time, he couldn’t deny that it felt right in some way that he’d finally shared it with someone, and that the someone was her.
Even so, he said, “What happened to Luca is . . . What I mean to say is, you can’t compare my loss with theirs. Even I can’t begin to imagine what they’ve been through.”