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7
MARK
As soon aswe reached our hotel room, I called Brina and asked her to conduct the interviews we had failed to do earlier. Then I asked Dino to bring us all the files, which should keep us busy for the rest of the night.
It wasn’t Dino who showed up at our hotel room, but Simon. And he didn’t have the files, but two sets of apartment keys.
“You can stay at the task force apartment above the office,” he said as he handed me the keys, which I didn’t take right away. “I don’t need it as much anymore, since I’ve been staying with Ida a lot lately. She just got an apartment here in Ljubljana a couple of weeks ago and it’s too big for one person.”
He blushed and chuckled as he said that last part, and I gratefully took the keys from him then. Finding a short-term lease apartment would’ve been a nightmare as I quickly realized this morning when I called a few numbers and learned that anything under a six-month lease would either be impossible or way too expensive.
Simon told us he had already cleaned out the apartment, but that was an exaggeration. When we got there, most of his stuff is still in boxes and suitcases along the nearly empty of furniture hall of the apartment.
The rest of the apartment is very sparsely furnished too and it’s all in Simon’s signature style, namely the morgue-like aesthetic he went for in furnishing the office before hiring any of us.
The black leather sofa in the living room is identical to the ones he put in the offices downstairs, but here it also matches the headrest and frame of the king-size bed that takes up almost the whole of the bedroom. The rest of the room is taken up by a sleek, gleaming blackish-blue built-in closet, which matches the minimalistic TV unit in the living room.
The rest of the furniture is either steel-framed or has the blackish-blue gleam to it, including all the cabinets in the kitchen. Coupled with the overcast grayness of the world outside the apartment’s large windows, which persists for weeks on end in the winter, it’s just damn depressing. But beggars can’t be choosers and the office is just an elevator ride away. And I can practically see the maternity hospital from the living room windows.
Those are both very comforting pieces of information, seeing as I’m sure Eva won’t hear the word no when it comes to being in the center of this investigation at all times.
She’s back at the apartment, going over the four boxes of evidence and files that pertain to the twelve cases she thinks are connected to this one. Twelve solved and closed cases.
I’m sitting at the bar of a nearly empty Irish Pub near the office, debating whether to get a whisky to go along with my beer. The bartender is leaning on the counter and not paying attention to me though. He’s just staring at the wall and nodding his head to the morbid Irish ballad playing at full volume.
Sojer had finally agreed to meet me here after dodging my calls all afternoon. If we’re going to step in on his case, he needs to hear it from me and in a friendly way. It’s the only way to avoid the hostile air between us, which will just hinder everything like it did the last time.
I wave the bartender over and get that whisky, because this is one of the few times in my life I think I might need a little Dutch courage. It’s been a long and trying day. Ending it with speaking to Sojer most certainly won’t be the highlight of it. Though he’s already fifteen minutes late, so he might not show up at all.
But Sojer arrives just as the bartender sets the amber liquid-filled tumbler down in front of me. He orders another for himself along with a pint of Guinness, then tells him we’ll be sitting at one of the tables in the back. I pick up my drinks and follow him there.
“So, you want to bury the hatchet, is that it?” he asks once I’m seated across from him on a creaky, wobbly wooden chair that might break at any moment. The matching table’s not in a much better shape.
“Something like that,” I say and take a swallow of my whisky, which doesn’t burn my throat as much as I thought it might. “We’re looking into the stabbing last night. Eva is convinced the man you have in custody didn’t do it and I agree with her.”
He glares at me with his beady, light blue eyes, but doesn’t say anything because the waitress is hovering by our table, setting down his drinks. As soon as she leaves, he’ll probably blow up at me, so I drink the rest of my liquor to prepare for that.
But he takes a sip of his beer instead and wipes the froth off his lips with the back of his hand before leaning forward to face me.
“I think you both might be right,” he says, taking me completely by surprise, so I can’t do much more than gawk at him.
He chuckles, leans back and drinks some more of his beer. “Did I shock you?”
Yes, he did, but I’m not going to admit that. His breath reeks of alcohol and I don’t think it’s just from the beer he’s sipping now. He’s had a drink, or a few, before meeting me here.
“So you’re OK with us investigating this case?” I ask. We’re doing it either way, and it doesn’t matter if he is or not, but he knows what I’m actually asking.
He narrows his eyes at me for a second, then nods. “I want to help you do that. But first, I want to apologize for the way I acted towards you on the last case. You were right and I was wrong, and I got a lot of shit for it from my colleagues and superiors about it, which made me angry. I want to put all that behind us. What do you say?”
He extends his hand for me to shake and after a few moments I take it.
“You were just doing your job,” I tell him.
He has a firm handshake, but his hand is dry and cold.
“Not very well,” he says and chuckles again. “And I was an ass about it after you showed me up.”
“What makes you think Milo’s not the killer now?” I ask, since I’ve had quite enough of this heart-to-heart, and I don’t really know what to do with his apology.
