Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
A crabby old grouch recovering from removal of a benign tumour is incarcerated in a side ward with another but this one is dying: angry, intelligent, articulate and appallingly voluble. I love them both.
We’re on the Swiss border: Basel at the end of winter. Outside it’s snowing, in here the two old men argue helplessly recalling their anarchic youth when they had planned to bring down governments and change the world, of how they progressed, had become authoritative figures, integral parts of that world, one a banker, the other a cop, one dying, the other ostensibly useless, retired.
Women appear: Hedwig, ex-Inspector Hunkeler’s partner, visits, bringing the wrong kind of apple but some kind of cheer. A beautiful night nurse gives him a pill and injects his fragile room-mate with peculiar savagery. In the morning the other bed is empty and he’s told the banker died in his sleep. Hunkeler concludes that he’s had an hallucination because the girl in his dream was slightly different from the regular night nurse: one with a diamond ring on her right hand, the other a ruby. A morphine dream?
Spring arrives in Basel: an exquisite season in a clean and cultured city sited so conveniently between the Jura and the Black Forest, a frontier town. Outside Hunkeler’s apartment, the walls are awash with wistaria while in his second home, an old Alsatian farmhouse, he communes with cats and bees and an aged cockerel called Fritz. His estranged daughter comes back to him with a goat, all feast and drink and make merry but the bucolic freedom is shattered by a summons from his old bosses in Basel.
Financiers are dying violently. An investment banker has been shot while hunting boar in the forest; a wealthy leader of the Liberal party was bludgeoned in the street; mystery surrounds the death of a former boss of the Volksbank, the current director has been arrested on arrival in New York. The police have a theory. All the dead men had been members of leftist groups when young; it was almost a rite of passage in the sixties but there was a small minority, a splinter group that remained loyal to the Cause and now, regrouping, its members are systematically executing those it considers traitors. As a man who had been an activist in his own youth Hunkeler is required to put his experience to good use, in other words, to finger his old mates and produce a killer.
Hunkeler tears this theory to shreds and walks out of the conference. He is following his own devious road. Convalescing in Alsace, he had read voraciously, becoming obsessed with the role that Switzerland had played in World War Two when, as a neutral country, she became banker to the world: never questioning the provenance of private accounts, never called to account. Until now when a Swiss banker is held in New York, his passport retained, and it appears that America, in the guise of Wall Street, is muscling in on Zurich. There are no more frontiers; money and power rule globally, protected by secrecy.
Interesting, thinks the philosopher in his bee-loud orchard, but it means little to him that some of the great financiers of Europe are being despatched. He has solved a mystery to his own (and our) satisfaction, and he has his own secret. He saw one of them die at the hands of a beautiful girl wearing a ruby ring and he’s content to maintain that it was a chimera, a figment of the night, no more than a morphine dream.
