The Unlucky Lottery (16 page)

Perhaps it had been over-optimistic to expect otherwise. Perhaps they had a better chance of receiving a tip following the feeler Krause had sent out into the underworld regarding Leverkuhn, but they had so far drawn a blank there as well. The informant Adolf Bosch had turned up shortly after three, delivered his report and been paid his 200 euros (albeit in reverse order: Bosch was not born yesterday) – and the result of his dodgy researches had been aptly summed up by his own words:

‘Not a thing, Constable Krause, not a fucking thing!’

Before going home for the night Münster allowed himself half an hour’s introspection in his office. He locked the door. Switched off the light. Wheeled his desk chair over to the window and put his feet up on the windowsill.

Leaned back and contemplated the view. It was beautiful in a way, he couldn’t deny that. Beautiful and threatening. The sky hovered over the town like a slowly but inexorably darkening lead dome. The vain attempts to illuminate things from the buzzing streets down below seemed merely to emphasize the indomitable nature of the darkness rather than to offer it any resistance.

A bit like his own work, in fact. The chief inspector used to talk about that – the fact that it is not until we start fighting evil that we begin to understand how all-embracing it is. Only when we light a candle in the darkness do we see how vast it is.

He shook his head in an attempt to rid himself of these questionable thoughts. They were not productive – all they did was provide unnecessary nourishment to feelings of weariness and impotence, which of course had their best growing conditions at this falling, sinking time of year.

Despite Jung’s and his own talk of wet, bare tree trunks and all the rest of it. Inner landscapes?

Anyway, the case! he thought and closed his eyes. The case of Waldemar Leverkuhn.

Or was it the case of Bonger? Or Else Van Eck?

How sure was it that they were interconnected, these three strands? There was an old rule of thumb which said that if the dead bodies of two cinema caretakers were discovered, it was by no means certain that the murders were connected. But if a third one was found – well, you could reasonably assume that all the cinema caretakers in the world should be given special protection.

And now here we are with three pensioners. One murdered and two disappeared. Did that mean that all the pensioners in the world should be given special protection?

One would hope not, Münster thought. Because it was not difficult to restrict the links quite radically. Leverkuhn and Bonger had been good friends. Leverkuhn and fru Van Eck lived in the same block of flats. But on the other hand, Bonger and fru Van Eck had no known connections at all – so if there was in fact some kind of common denominator, it must be Leverkuhn.

And Leverkuhn was the only one of them who was definitely dead. Very dead.

Münster sighed and wished he were a smoker. A smoker would have lit up at this point; as it was, he had to make do with clasping his hands behind the back of his neck and leaning still further back on his chair.

What about the disappearances? he thought. There were differences between them. Big differences. As far as Bonger was concerned, he could have disappeared in a puff of smoke at any time during the night of the murder – or even later. Nobody had seen any trace of him after he had left Freddy’s, but nobody missed him until well into Sunday. At a guess he had never arrived back at his houseboat at all, but that was only a hypothesis. There were masses of alternatives and variations.

It was different in the case of Else Van Eck. Here the margins were reduced to an hour between seven and eight on Wednesday evening, and bearing in mind her size and general profile, that was not a very large space to pass through. Witnesses should – no,
must
– surely turn up, Münster thought. We shall have to carry out yet another door-to-door operation tomorrow!

Then he just sat there for a while with his eyes closed, and imagined the three puzzle pieces dancing around in a deep and increasingly dark space – like that logo of some film company or other did until the letters clung on to one another and formed its name, or at least its abbreviation. He couldn’t remember the name of the film company, and the puzzle pieces Leverkuhn, Bonger and Van Eck never clung on to one another. They simply continued whirling round and round in the same unfathomable and never-ending loops, receding further and further away, it seemed, deeper and deeper into ever-blacker space.

He made a big effort and opened his eyes. Noted that it was turned five o’clock, and decided to go home.

I’d bet my bloody life, he thought as he wormed his way into his jacket, I’d bet my bloody life that if all the detective officers in the world got an hour’s extra sleep per night, five hours per day would be saved. Due to the fact that our brains would have the strength to think more clearly.

Surely it must be better to cut back on wasted time rather than on sleep? Surely sleep can never be wasted?

What’s all this buzzing around in my head? he thought. Am I growing old? And I haven’t made love for two weeks either.

19

‘I can’t shake off this feeling,’ said Rooth.

‘What feeling?’ asked Jung.

‘That I’m sort of lost as far as this investigation is concerned. I can’t get the hang of what the hell is going on. I suppose I ought to be working on a different case.’

Jung eyed him with a cool smile.

‘Such as? I don’t have the feeling that we’ve covered ourselves with glory as far as that berk in Linzhuisen is concerned either . . . Perhaps you ought to pack it in altogether?’

Rooth sighed self-critically. Rummaged around in his pockets after something to pop into his mouth, but only found a lump of elderly chewing gum wrapped up in a crumpled cinema ticket. There was a knock on the door and Krause came in with an envelope.

‘Pictures of Else Van Eck,’ he announced.

‘Okay,’ said Jung, accepting them. ‘Can you tell Joensuu and Kellerman to come to my office – and whoever else it was . . .’

‘Klempje and Proszek.’

‘Right,’ said Rooth. ‘Let’s go for broke.’

Krause left, Jung took the photographs out of the envelope and examined them. Passed one over to Rooth, who stood up and started scratching his head demonstratively.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked Jung.

‘It’s remarkable,’ said Rooth.

‘What is?’

‘That so much can disappear without trace. That everything disappears into thin air and all that, I mean, but even so?’

‘Hmm,’ said Jung. ‘You have a theory, is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘Well,’ replied Rooth. ‘Theory and theory . . . I really daren’t make any further comment about this bloody business. No, keep your own counsel, that’s best.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Jung. ‘What the hell are you on about? Even if they’ve succeeded in bugging this office, there isn’t a newspaper in the whole of Europe that would print anything you say in future. Even you ought to understand that.’

‘All right,’ Rooth continued. ‘It has to do with her bulk.’

‘Bulk?’

‘Bulk, yes. I simply don’t believe that a gigantic woman like Else Van Eck could simply disappear like this.’

‘Like this? What does that mean?’

Rooth sat down again.

‘Don’t you understand?’

‘No.’

‘And yet they’ve made you an inspector?’

Jung gathered together the pictures and put them back in the envelope.

‘High and mighty, unshaven rozzer speaks with cloven tongue,’ he said.

‘I think she’s still in the building,’ said Rooth.

‘Eh?’

‘That Van Eck woman. She’s still in Kolderweg 17.’

‘What do you mean?’

Rooth sighed again.

‘Just that it’s hardly credible that she could have left the building without anybody seeing her. So she must still be there.’

‘But where?’ asked Jung.

Rooth shrugged.

‘I’ve no bloody idea. In the attic, or down in the cellar, presumably.’

‘You’re assuming she’s dead?’

‘That’s possible,’ said Rooth. ‘She might have been butchered and embalmed as well. Or tied up and muzzled. Who cares? The point is that we ought to do a thorough search of the building instead of gadding about the neighbourhood.’

Jung said nothing for a while.

‘You have a point,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go to Münster and talk it over with him?’

‘That’s exactly what I intend to do,’ said Rooth, standing up again. ‘I just wanted to give you a bit of insight into how a bigger brain works first.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jung. ‘It’s been both interesting and instructive.’

Two minutes later the four constables turned up. Jung inspected the quartet while thinking over the priorities.

‘I think we can manage with two of you for the time being,’ he said. ‘Klempje and Proszek. Joensuu and Kellerman can wait down in the duty officer’s room for the time being. We’ve received some new . . . indications.’

Constables Klempje and Proszek spent six hours on Friday showing enlarged photographs of Else Van Eck to a total of 362 persons in and close by Kolderweg. A comparatively large proportion of those people recognized the woman in the photograph immediately – but a comparatively small number had seen her later than six p.m. on Wednesday.

None at all, to be precise.

‘Why the hell don’t they just put a Wanted notice in the newspapers instead of making us work our socks off?’ Proszek wondered when they finally managed to find a sufficiently sheltered corner in the Cafe Bendix in Kolderplejn. ‘This is making me impotent.’

‘You always have been,’ said Klempje. ‘There’ll be one tomorrow.’

‘One what?’

‘A Wanted notice.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Proszek. ‘In that case what’s the point of our farting around like this?’

Klempe shrugged.

‘Perhaps they’re in a hurry?’

‘Kiss my arse,’ said Proszek. ‘And cheers. Where the hell are Joensuu and Kellerman, by the way? Lounging about and lording it at some stake-out again, no doubt.’

Probably neither Joensuu nor Kellerman would have regarded what they were doing on Friday as lording it – always assuming they had an opportunity of commenting, which they didn’t. They spent five hours and forty-five minutes searching Kolderweg 17 from attic to boiler room. They were assisted by two black Alsatians with two red-haired minders, and, for at least half the search, Detective Inspector Rooth in his capacity of instigator of the operation.

The property was built at the end of the 1890s: there was an abundance of remarkable passages, corridors and abandoned cupboards, and nobody still alive had ever seen a plan of the building. That is if you could believe the owner – a certain herr Tibor who turned up in a Bentley with a large collection of keys at lunchtime. But when Rooth himself called off the operation two hours later, it could be stated with confidence that no woman of Else Van Eck’s dimensions – and no other woman come to that! – could have been hidden away in any of the building’s nooks or crannies.

Be they alive or dead.

But on the other hand several of the tenants were feeling distinctly upset. Joensuu’s protestations to the effect that it was just a routine investigation lost credibility as first the attic spaces were emptied, then bath tubs were turned upside down and the bottoms of sofas were cut open.

‘Bloody hooligans!’ snarled herr Engel when the Alsatian Rocky II investigated the collection of bottles under his bed. ‘Where’s that woman who came to see me the other day? At least she displayed a modicum of tact and good sense.’

What did I say! thought Inspector Rooth when it was all over. I’m going to keep this case at arm’s length.

‘Well, how did it go with your theory?’ Jung asked when Rooth returned to the police station.

‘Great,’ said Rooth. ‘I have another theory now. About how it happened.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Jung, looking up from the piles of papers.

‘Fröken Mathisen ground her down in the mincing machine and let Mussolini gobble her up.’

‘I thought Mussolini was a vegetarian?’ said Jung.

‘Wrong,’ said Rooth. ‘It was Hitler who was the vegetarian.’

‘If you say so,’ said Jung.

The run-through with Chief of Police Hiller on Friday afternoon was not a very memorable event. Two dwarf acacias had died during the week, despite having received all the care, nourishment and love of which a human being is capable.

The chief of police was not wearing mourning, although he did have black bags under his eyes.

Things were not much better on the human level. Münster summarized the situation with the assistance of Moreno and Jung (who had spent most of the day locating and interviewing various relatives and acquaintances of Else and Arnold Van Eck – and made about as much progress as a string quartet in a school for the deaf ), and after an extremely uninspiring hour it was decided to keep more or less all the officers currently on the case, to send out a lengthy press communiqué, and to leave all doors wide open for the mass media and any member of the public who might be able to provide relevant information.

Help, thought Münster when he had finally returned to his office. That’s what we need. We don’t know a damned thing, and what’s required now is help.

TV, newspapers, anything at all. The general public, that great detective.

Tip-offs, that’s what they needed.

And yet, it was still only a three-piece puzzle.

Leverkuhn. Bonger. Else Van Eck.

When he tried to think about how it felt, the only conclusion he could draw was that it was not especially uplifting.

20

‘You do realize it’s Saturday, do you?’ said Synn.

‘I rang him yesterday,’ said Münster. ‘The only time he had available was a couple of hours this morning. Do you think he’s found himself a woman?’

Synn raised an eyebrow.

‘You’re not suggesting that he would give her preference rather than work, are you? He must be bloody unique in the world of men if he does, I must say.’

Münster tried to respond, but found that there was some kind of spiritual eructation in the way, and no words came out.