The Accident Read Free Page A

the pianist said that she had read about it in reports of the deaths, that she was really very tired, and that the only thing she could tell them was that she was sure it had not been Rovena St. but a totally different woman in the cab.
    Most reports underlined this last phrase, but the interviewers would have refused to believe her and might not have come back to this point, or even to the suspicion of murder in general, if they had not stumbled upon other evidence – this time from “his” side.
    This testimony, apparently the only one of its kind, came from an old college friend of Besfort Y., with whom he had had a conversation on the first floor of the Davidoff Bar in Tirana, one autumn day, a few months before his death.
    According to the witness, Besfort had been in a sombre mood. Asked what the matter was, he at first answered vaguely. He had problems. Later he came back of his own accord to his incomplete reply. He had got badly mixed up . . . with a young woman.
    Knowing the sort of man he was, the witness had not asked any more questions. Besfort, unusually for him, volunteered a little more. He thought he had made a mistake. The witness had the impression that Besfort considered any relationship with this woman to be a mistake. To his surprise, he used the word “fear”, though whether he was scared of the relationship or of the woman herself, the witness could not tell.
    After a long silence, he repeated that he had gone wrong somewhere. He offered no further explanation, but said that he would try to get out of this mess. He could do it. He became less and less coherent. He believed that when the time came – that is, at the right moment – he would know what to do.
    The tone of his conversation brooked no interruption. Facial expression? Manner? Cold. “Oh no, not like a murderer at all. I would just say cold. Pitiless.”
    The interviewers went back to the suspicions of Liza Blumb, and even to her almost delirious words about a doll found in the bushes, torn by dogs, but the pianist, erratic as ever, or stricken by remorse at having talked so much, refused to cooperate further.
    This did not stop the inquiry proceeding. In fact, now that the pianist was out of the picture, the intelligence officers unexpectedly became all the more keen. Not often had a suspicion of murder led them to examine such minute details to the point that they would forget what they were looking for.
    The analysts sifted through all the information, including the new material gathered during the latest research, with a dedication beyond the call of duty.
    They returned to the first two statements given by the Dutch couple and the driver of the Euromobil truck. Initially they seemed to agree (the taxi’s open doors, the bodies thrown out), but a careful examination showed this not to be the case. According to the couple, the bodies of the victims were still together as they fell through the air, their arms round each other’s necks, as if trying to hold tight to one another. But the truck driver insisted that the bodies were apart as they fell.
    But the evidence of Rovena’s friend Shpresa in Switzerland, who recalled cryptic remarks on the phone, also pointed towards murder.
    Yet this explanation was hardly tenable. Other stubborn facts, mysterious scattered phrases and cryptic remarks on the phone, according to the evidence of Rovena’s friend in Switzerland, roused suspicions of another kind.
    In a letter written less than a year previously, Rovena had said, “You seem so calm now. I preferred your old irritability, that short temper which brought me such unhappiness, to this terrifying reticence.”
    In another note, apparently written quite some time afterwards, she recalled a phone call of the previous evening: “What you said to me last night may have been superficially kind, but was essentially, I don’t know how to put it, frightening, destructive, as cold as outer space.”
    At about the same time she admitted to