Page 59 of The Instruments of Darkness

Sabine didn’t even pause.

“Green, but a dirty green. Hard-wearing, with padded fingers. A workman’s gloves. They, too, smelled bad.”

“You’re very sure of that,” said Pascal.

“Not I. Verona.”

“Well, someone has good recall, down to small details.”

“Aren’t small details important in a case like this?”

“All details are important.”

“Well, there you are. I remember everything Verona told me. Don’t you think you’d remember all that a dead girl said to you?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever had the experience.”

“You should count yourself lucky.”

Sabine rummaged in her purse, produced a packet of tissues, and blew her nose noisily.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Allergies.”

When she was done, she carefully placed the used tissue in a plastic Ziploc bag before sanitizing her hands. Years later, with the coming of COVID-19, such actions would become unremarkable. To Pascal, at this time, they only added to the woman’s eccentricity.

“You still doubt me,” she said. “I don’t blame you—honestly, I don’t—but it will become very tedious before too long. So why don’t we just take it as given that you’ll treat everything I say with a degree of skepticism, and therefore you won’t have to keep expressing it aloud or by grimacing?”

If she was a fruit loop, as Pascal remained tempted to believe, she was at least a self-possessed, self-aware one. And there was that business about the abductor’s odor—

“What else did she tell you?” he asked. “Did she see a vehicle?”

“Verona thinks it was a cream car, or perhaps yellow. She was panicking, so she can’t be sure. He put her facedown in the trunk and covered her head. When she kept struggling, he hit her—not too hard, but enough to subdue her. Then he tied her hands behind her back, and bound her legs.”

“And in all that time, she didn’t get a look at his face?”

“He was wearing sunglasses, and a scarf wrapped across his mouth. Then the hood went on.”

“Anything else about the car?”

“It smelled much the way he did.”

“Like garbage?”

“Yes, like garbage.”

Pascal made another note, although it wasn’t necessary. He knew he was procrastinating. He didn’t yet want to progress to the next stage: the death of the girl. He was a father himself, of two daughters. One could not be both empathic and objective, and only the latter would serve any purpose here.

“You’re hesitant to ask about what happened next, aren’t you?” Sabine asked. “Even though we need to talk more about how she died, or what happened after.”

“You ought to be a psychologist.”

“Maybe I am, in my way.”

“For the living, I mean.”

“Oh, generally the living are even less interesting than the dead,” she said. “Who’d want to listen to their problems, even at payment by the hour? Leastways the dead have real cause for complaint.”

That, thought Pascal, was undeniable.

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