The Strangler's Honeymoon (51 page)

It was hard to decide. Not to say impossible. It would make more sense to find a method of testing the validity of it all, he thought as he poured the boiling water over the coffee powder. Blake!

How?

How?
What damned method could he hit upon?

Although he was only an old newly awakened antiquarian bookseller with highly doubtful mental abilities, it didn’t take him long to find the answer. Half a cup of coffee and a cigarette, more or less.

He picked up the telephone and rang Münster at the police station.

The intendent has just gone home, he was informed.

He dialled Münster’s home number.

‘He hasn’t come home yet,’ said Münster’s son Bart.

Blasted slowcoach, Van Veeteren thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead he instructed Bart to ask his father to ring Krantze’s antiquarian bookshop the moment he’d stuck his snitch inside the door.

‘Snitch?’ wondered Bart.

‘The moment he gets home,’ said Van Veeteren.

While he was waiting he checked the weather through the shop window. It was raining.

That’s odd, he thought. Wasn’t the sun shining when I fell asleep in the armchair?

It was half an hour before Münster rang, and his only excuse was that he had done some shopping on the way home. Van Veeteren snorted, but decided to err on the side of mercy.

‘Where are their household goods?’ he asked.

‘Whose what?’ said Münster.

‘The personal property from Moerckstraat, of course. Get a grip! The belongings left behind by the mother and daughter Kammerle.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Münster.

‘Don’t know? Call yourself an investigation leader?’

‘Thank you . . . I expect they are in store somewhere. Why?’

‘Because we need to get hold of them.’

Silence at the other end of the line.

‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes . . . Of course I’m still here,’ said Münster. ‘Why do we need to get hold of their personal belongings?’

‘Because they might contain vital proof there to nail a murderer.’

‘Really?’ said Münster non-committally.

‘A book,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘The girl had a book by William Blake on her shelves, and I have the feeling that the Strangler left his fingerprints all over it.’

Another brief silence.

‘How can . . . ? How can you possibly know that?’

‘It’s not a question of knowledge, Münster! I said I had a feeling. But that’s irrelevant, just make sure you find that book no matter where it is, and make sure the fingerprint boys do their job properly! You’ll get another set of prints to compare with them in a day or so. If they correspond, it’s game, set and match!’

Once again Münster was struck dumb for a few seconds. But Van Veeteren could hear him breathing: he sounded as if he had a cold. Or perhaps he was tense.

Or sceptical?

‘DeFraan’s?’ he asked eventually. ‘Are you talking about Professor deFraan’s fingerprints?’

‘Right first time,’ said Van Veeteren and hung up.

He waited for a few minutes.

Then he rang Winnifred Lynch – who had got back home from both work and the hospital some considerable time ago – and gave her some new instructions and orders.

No, not orders. You don’t give orders to women of Winnifred’s calibre, he thought. You ask for help. And urge her to be careful.

After all that intricate bloodhound work he finished off his cold coffee, locked the shop, and walked home through the rain.

47

Time stood still on Saturday and Sunday.

At least, that’s how it seemed to him. The rain came and went, daylight was sucked down into the wet earth, and he realized how deeply involved he had become in the hunt for this murderer. Whether his name was Maarten deFraan or something else.

Yet again. Yet again a criminal would shortly be captured. It was easy to imagine that such goings-on would never end.

On Saturday evening he played chess with Mahler at the Society, and lost both matches due entirely to a lack of concentration. Despite the fact that Mahler had just undergone an operation on his leg. Despite a spirited Nimzo-Indian defence.

On Sunday they looked after Andrea in the afternoon, as usual: but not even during that time could he prevent himself from thinking about Maarten deFraan. Ulrike wondered how he was, and in the end he gave up and tried to explain what the matter was.

The hunt. The scent of the criminal. The prey.

He said nothing about the moral imperative. Nothing about duty. Instead, she was the one who took up those aspects, and he was grateful to her for doing so. He had always found it difficult to attribute good motives to his own actions. Or to believe in them, at least, for whatever reason.

When they had finished dinner, and Marlene and Andrea had left, he picked up the telephone and dialled deFraan’s home number.

No reply.

Perhaps that was just as well, he thought. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if deFraan had answered.

After washing up and watching the television news, he wandered around the flat for a while like a lost soul. Then explained to Ulrike that he needed to go for a walk to clear his head, took his raincoat and went out. It’s better for her to be rid of me for a while, he thought.

He started with a tour of the cemetery and lit a candle on Erich’s grave; and since it was quite close by – and it was quite a mild evening – he walked to the professor’s address in Kloisterstraat.

Without any real purpose and without any expectations. It was a few minutes past eight when he entered the enclosed courtyard of the big Art Nouveau complex. He couldn’t remember ever having set foot in it before. Not a single time in all the years he had lived in Maardam – a fact that surprised him somewhat, although perhaps it shouldn’t have done. There were plenty of addresses in the town that he had never had any reason to visit. Naturally, criminality was not rife, despite everything. Not really.

The courtyard was surrounded by dark buildings on all four sides. A bare chestnut tree on a small raised rotunda with two benches. A cycle shed with a corrugated iron roof. A low wooden shed for rubbish and refuse.

He counted five entrances with locked doors and entry-phones. Five storeys high on two sides, four on the other two. Steeply sloping black tin roofs and tall, old-fashioned windows, about a third of them lit up, and a third with blue flickering lights indicating that people were watching the television. Nobody out of doors. He sat down on one of the benches and lit a cigarette.

Is there a murderer lying low somewhere up there? he wondered. A brilliant and over-talented university professor with five lives on his conscience?

Do you know that I’m down here, waiting for you?

If so, what are you thinking of doing about it? Surely you’re not simply going to sit there with your arms folded, waiting for me to come and fetch you?

It was that last thought that was the cause of his unease, he knew that. The deepest cause, in any case. Time certainly had sat still since Friday afternoon, but that only applied to his own time. The private hours. Just because he – the bookseller and former chief inspector and farcical bloodhound – was in a quandary and hadn’t a single damned chess move to fall back on didn’t mean that his intelligent prey was also sitting at home, biding his time. Like an injured bird or an ordinary blockhead.

Or had he not caught on, despite everything? Did he not suspect anything?

Or – a horrible thought – was he in fact completely innocent? Had he fenced in the wrong person?

That wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, he thought gloomily. No matter how you looked at it, the so-called chain of circumstantial evidence linking deFraan to the murders was so thin and drawn-out that any prosecutor worth his salt would laugh to scorn the poor officer in charge of the investigation who presented it. No doubt about that. A few abstruse literary characters, a lapel badge dropped in a shoe, a gang of harmless academic freemasons . . . And all of it drowning in an abundance of wild guesswork and speculation!

Firm proof ? Don’t make me laugh! Just the sort of dry, cold laughter that five dead people might be able to produce.

Oh hell, Van Veeteren thought for the hundred-and-tenth time since Friday evening. Let’s hope to goodness those damned fingerprints do exist in that book, otherwise I might as well throw in the towel.

Take the king off the board and acknowledge defeat.

He stared up at the dark façades.

I don’t even know where you live, he thought with a sigh of resignation. I don’t know if you’re at home or not. You didn’t answer the telephone, but there’s no law that forces you to pick up the receiver, even if you hear the phone ringing.

He threw the cigarette butt onto the gravel and trampled on it. Went back out of the entrance gates and into the street. Just had time to see the person sitting in the car parked on the other side of the road.

A woman behind the wheel. A streetlamp shone a certain amount of light onto the side window and he could see the hijab over her head quite clearly. He saw nothing of her hair, and only a glimpse of her face.

But he did meet her gaze for a brief moment before she started the car and drove off.

He never saw the registration number.

But he felt his heart pounding like the kick of a horse in his chest.

In the end, Monday finally came. When he met Winnifred Lynch in the morning, it felt as if a month had passed since he saw her last.

‘Well?’ he said, and thought that if he had a God he would have said a silent prayer at this very moment.

A prayer hoping that something at least had fallen into place. That not all the baited lines he had thrown into the waters would come up without even a nibble. Winnifred cleared her throat and took a sheet of paper out of her shoulder bag.

‘I wrote it down,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘Although that wasn’t necessary, of course.’

He clasped his hands. He had heard worse introductions than that.

‘Fire away,’ he urged her.

She studied what she had written for a few seconds.

‘I think things are starting to shape up,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you are the one who should judge that.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Everything is witnessed and vouched for.’

‘Come to the point now, never mind the preliminaries.’

‘All right. In the first place, that Wallburg business seems to fit in. DeFraan took part in a symposium there lasting four days in June 1999, so he could very well have met that woman.’

‘Excellent,’ said Van Veeteren, fiddling with his cigarette machine. He could feel his pulse beating significantly more strongly.

‘In the second place, I’ve arranged for some fingerprints. I took a few things from his desk – a few books, a tea mug, a few plastic files. I handed them over at the police station a few hours ago.’

She must get paid for this, Van Veeteren thought. If this bears fruit I shall personally squeeze a thousand out of Hiller. Two.

‘And thirdly, my poor husband told me something that very nearly made my heart stop.’

‘Reinhart?’ said Van Veeteren. ‘What do you mean?’

Winnifred took a deep breath before continuing.

‘I went to visit him yesterday evening – incidentally, he’s going to be discharged tomorrow or the day after . . . Anyway, he told me had a dream – or perhaps had begun to remember – about what happened when he was run over. He thinks somebody pushed him in front of that bus.’

Van Veeteren suddenly felt something short-circuiting inside him. A blinding white light flashed inside his skull, and he was forced to close his eyes for a second in order to control himself.

‘What the hell . . . ?’ he snorted, and noted that his temples were pounding like a steam hammer. ‘Do you mean to say that somebody . . . ?’

She nodded solemnly.

‘Yes. That’s what he says.’

‘He says that?’

‘Yes. He lay there thinking about it for two days before mentioning it to me, so he must be pretty sure about it.’

He felt for words, but couldn’t find any. Then he pounded on the table with his fist and stood up.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ he groaned. ‘What a damned . . . Good Lord, thank goodness he survived.’

‘That’s what I think as well.’

‘A priest in front of a train, and a detective officer in front of a bus. Yes, by Jove, things really are starting to shape up, you’re absolutely right!’

Winnifred bit her lower lip, and he suddenly became aware of how scared she was. He sat down on his chair again, and stroked her arm somewhat clumsily.

‘Calm down now,’ he urged her. ‘We shall sort this out. The danger is over.’

She tried to smile, but it came over as a grimace.

‘There’s one more thing,’ she said. ‘He’s cancelled all his lectures for this week.’

‘What? Cancelled?’

‘DeFraan. He sent a fax to the office on Saturday. Very brief. It just said he was going to be away, and the students should be informed.’

Four thousand thoughts exploded inside Van Veeteren’s head, but the only one that came out of his mouth was an obscenity.

‘Fucking hell!’

Spring arrived on Tuesday morning. Mild south-westerly winds swept the sky clear of clouds, and as he walked through Wollerimsparken on his way to the police station, he could feel the ground swelling under his feet. Small birds were hopping around busily in the bushes. The old ladies on the benches were hatless, and had unbuttoned their coats. He was passed by a jogger wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

So I’ve survived another winter, he thought with a sudden flush of surprise.

That was combined with a certain degree of willpower impelling him into the Maardam police station, especially on a day like this: but it was too late to do anything about it now. Intendent Münster had suggested this venue for a meeting to discuss developments, and he hadn’t raised any objections. For whatever reasons. As he approached the shadowy entrance with the sun shining diagonally from behind him, he felt a bit like Dante approaching the gates of hell.

That’s enough of literary allusions! he told himself. There have been more than enough of those in this case.