The Unlucky Lottery (28 page)

I don’t want to know, he suddenly realized. I don’t want to know how it’s going to turn out. It’s better to be blind, and to hope.

But Synn was right in one respect in any case, even a worn-out detective-intendent could understand that. Things couldn’t go on like this – no way. Not their lives, or other people’s for that matter. If they couldn’t succeed in changing the conditions, making some radical changes to the way things were at present, well . . . It was like sitting in a train that was slowly but inexorably approaching a terminus where there was no alternative but to get off and go their separate ways. Whether they wanted to or not.

Has she as bad a conscience as I have? he wondered in a sudden flash of insight.

Or was that aspect also infected by the sex roles? Perhaps that was another shield against a nagging conscience, he wondered now that he was looking more closely at the situation – that calm, female sense of certainty, which could evidently survive no matter what the circumstances, but which he could never understand.

But which he loved.

Hell’s bells, Münster thought. The more I think about it, the less I understand.

He had driven more than a hundred kilometres before he was able to concentrate his thoughts on his work and the investigation.

The Leverkuhn case.

Leverkuhn–Bonger–Van Eck.

He worked out that it was now over ten weeks since the whole thing began. And they had been standing still for most of that time, if he were to be honest: November and half of December while fru Leverkuhn had been on remand and they failed to find the slightest trace of Else Van Eck.

But then the investigation had exploded into action the week before Christmas. Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s suicide and the discovery in Weyler’s Woods.

It was as if everything had conspired to ruin his Christmas break, he told himself glumly. To take away from him the opportunity to stop that train heading for ruin. And new incidents kept on cropping up after that as well – tin after tin of red herrings, as Rooth had put it.

The information about the diaries, for instance. Did any diaries still exist? They had existed, that was clear; but if he would ever be able to read what was in them (assuming there was something of importance) – well, that was probably a vain hope.

And that woman’s report to Moreno, to take another example. About family relationships by the seaside over a few summers in the sixties. What was the significance of that?

Or yesterday’s discussion with Reinhart. Although he didn’t know all that much about the investigation, Reinhart seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Münster himself. But perhaps that wasn’t too surprising – Reinhart was generally more perceptive than most.

Then there was that conversation with Ruth Leverkuhn after the funeral. A woman difficult to warm to. It hadn’t yielded much, either. A pity he didn’t know about what Lene Bauer had said at the time. It would have been interesting to ask her to comment, if nothing else.

Yes, there were a few openings, no doubt about that.

Or pitfalls, if one preferred to adopt Rooth’s pessimism.

Speaking of openings, he couldn’t help wondering about the conversation with Van Veeteren yesterday evening. The chief inspector had rung shortly before nine to ask about the latest developments. Münster had failed to discover exactly what he wanted to know, or what he had in mind. He had hummed and hawed and spoken in riddles, almost as he used to do when something special was brewing. Münster had met him halfway and told him about his plans, and Van Veeteren had urged him to be careful. Warned him to watch his step, in fact; but it was impossible to get him to be more precise or to give any positive advice.

This was quite remarkable, surely? Was he on his way back? Had he grown tired of life as an antiquarian bookseller?

Impossible to say, Münster decided. As so often where Van Veeteren was concerned.

And in Kolderweg the de Booning-Menakdise couple were busy moving out. The screwing machines! Or
la Rouge et le Noir
, as Moreno had christened them, rather more romantically. Why? Why move out just now? It sometimes seemed as if everything depended on getting out of that building. The Leverkuhns had gone. The caretaker and his wife as well. And now this young couple. Only fröken Mathisen and old Engel were left.

Very strange, Münster thought. What’s going on?

At one o’clock he still had an hour’s drive ahead of him, and decided it was time for lunch. Turned off the main road just north of Saaren and entered yet another of those postmodern rest bunkers for post-modern drivers. As he sat at his window table – with a view of the rain and the car park and four stunted larch trees – he made up his mind to inject his thoughts with a little more systematics. He turned to a new page in his notebook, which he had taken in with him, and started writing down all the things he had been thinking about during the last hour in the car. Telegram style. Then, as he sat chewing his healthy schnitzel, he had the list in front of him, and tried to extract from it some new, bold conclusions. Or at any rate a few cautious old ones: there were five centimetres of blank page left at the bottom where he could note down these thoughts.

When he had finished eating, the centimetres were still blank; but nevertheless, for some abstruse reason, he felt sure of one thing. Just the one.

He was on the right track.

Fairly sure. The blind tortoise was approaching the snowball.

It was blowing at least half a gale in Frigge. When Münster had struggled out of his car in the circular open plaza in front of the railway station, he was forced to lean into the wind in order to make any progress at all. Inside the station he was given a map and a route description by an unusually helpful young woman in the ticket office. He thanked her for her efforts, and she explained with a smile that her husband was also a police officer, so she knew what it was usually like.

There you are, Münster thought. The world is full of understanding policemen’s wives.

Then he went out into the storm again, this time leaning backwards. Clambered back into his car and studied the information he’d been given. It seemed that Mauritz Leverkuhn lived in a suburb. Detached houses and modern terraced houses, no doubt, and only an occasional block of flats, anything but a skyscraper. It looked like it. He checked his watch. It was only half past three, but as Mauritz Leverkuhn was supposed to be suffering from influenza, there was no reason to worry that he might not be at home.

He had no intention of ringing in advance to arrange a meeting. Certainly not, Münster thought. If you’re going to take the bull by the horns, there’s not a lot of point in asking for permission first.

The suburb was called Gochtshuuis. It was on the western outskirts of the town. He started the car and drove off.

It took him a little more than fifteen minutes to find the place. A rather dull 1970s development with two-storey terraced houses alongside a canal, and a somewhat sparse strip of trees pointing at the low marshland and the sea. A windbreak, presumably. All the trees were leaning eastwards at the same angle. Mauritz Leverkuhn’s house was furthest away, where the road petered out with a postbox, a refuse recycling station and a turning area for buses.

Concrete grey. Two low storeys high, ten metres wide and with a pathetic swamp of a garden at the front. Probably a similar one at the back, facing the trees. Dusk was already in the air, and Münster noted that lights were on in two of the windows.

Here we go, he thought as he got out of his car.

If Intendent Münster had bothered to take his mobile with him when he’d had lunch, he would certainly have had an opportunity to fill in the last empty lines of the page in his notebook.

Not with any conclusions, that’s for sure, but with another point in the list of new developments in the case.

Shortly after half past one Inspector Rooth had tried to contact him – in vain, of course – in order to report the latest find in Weyler’s Woods. The fact that nobody remembered to ring again later in the day can be ascribed partly to the fact that it was overlooked in the general excitement caused by the find, and partly to the fact that – despite everything – it was still not clear how great a significance the discovery would acquire.

If any at all. But in any case, what happened when the usual search party a dozen or so strong was out in the woods, by now well trampled by large numbers of feet, was that they found the remains of Else Van Eck’s so-called intimate parts – surrounded by a section of pelvis, a length of spine, and two appropriately large buttocks in comparatively good condition. As usual it was all carelessly stuffed into a pale yellow plastic carrier bag, and equally carelessly concealed in an overgrown ditch. Inner organs, such as intestines, liver and kidneys had been removed, but what made this find more interesting than all the others was that when it was all tipped out onto a workbench at the Forensic Medicine Centre, they discovered a scrap of paper sticking out of one of the many folds that must inevitably be formed in the body of a woman the size of fru Van Eck.

It wasn’t large, but still . . . Dr Meusse himself carefully lifted up a section of the rotting flesh and removed the strip of paper without tearing it.

Nothing to write home about, Meusse insisted, but quite a feat even so. A flimsy scrap of paper about the size and shape of a two-dimensional banana, more or less. Stained by blood and other substances, but nevertheless, there was no doubt that it was from a newspaper or magazine.

Naturally, Meusse appreciated the importance of the find and had it transported by courier to the Laboratory for Forensic Chemistry in the same block. Rooth and Reinhart were informed more or less immediately about the development, and spent most of the afternoon at the Forensic Chemistry Lab – if not to accelerate the results of the analysis then at least to keep themselves informed about them. Needless to say they could just as well have waited for information via the telephone, but neither Rooth nor Reinhart were of that bent. Not today, at least.

In the event the results emerged bit by bit, reported with a degree of scientific pomp and ceremony by the boss himself, Intendent Mulder – the least jovial of all the people Rooth had ever met.

After an hour, for instance, it was obvious that the object really was part of a page from a newspaper or magazine. We know that already, you boss-eyed berk, thought Rooth: but he didn’t say so.

Forty-five minutes later it was established that the quality of the paper was quite high – not in the weekly magazine class, but nevertheless not from an ordinary daily newspaper such as
Neuwe Blatt
or
Gazett
.

Mulder pronounced the names of the two newspapers in such a way that it was obvious to Rooth that only in a state of dire emergency would he condescend to wipe his arse with either of them.

‘Thank God for that,’ said Reinhart. ‘If it had been from the
Blatt
, we might just as well have thrown it in the stove without more ado.’

At about the same time they received a photocopy of the strip of paper. Reinhart and Rooth – and Moreno, who had just arrived – crowded round it and established that the banana shape was unfortunately in a vertical plane, as it were, and that it was not possible to extract anything meaningful from the fragments of text. Not at the moment, at least – despite the fact that the technicians had managed to define individual letters with unexpected clarity. Nine-tenths of the reverse side seemed to be covered by a very murky black-and-white picture that was at least as impossible to interpret. Rooth maintained that it was a cross-section of a liver in an advanced state of cirrhosis, but his opinion was not shared by his colleagues.

By shortly after three o’clock they had also started to draw cautious conclusions about the typeface – even if that was not something within the range of competence of the forensic chemistry technicians, as Mulder was careful to point out. It was not one of the three or four usual faces in any case – so not Times or Geneva – which obviously enhanced the long-term possibilities of eventually establishing the origins of the scrap of paper.

At five o’clock Inspector Mulder shut up shop for the day, but nevertheless expressed a degree of optimism – scientifically restrained – with regard to the continued analysis the following day.

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Reinhart. ‘But what are the odds?’

‘The odds?’ wondered Mulder, slowly raising one well-trimmed eyebrow.

‘The probability of whether or not you will be able to tell me exactly what rag the bit of paper comes from before you go home tomorrow.’

Mulder lowered his eyebrow.

‘Eighty-six out of a hundred,’ he said.

‘Eighty-six?’ said Reinhart.

‘I rounded it off,’ said Mulder.

‘Wrapping paper,’ commented Reinhart later in the car, as he gave Moreno a lift home. ‘Just like at the butcher’s.’

‘But surely they don’t wrap meat up in newspaper?’ said Moreno. ‘I’ve never come across that.’

‘They used to,’ said Reinhart. ‘You’re too young, you’re just a little girl.’

I’m glad there are some people who still think that, Moreno thought as she thanked him for the lift.

35

He had to ring the bell three times before Mauritz Leverkuhn opened the door.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Münster. ‘It’s me again.’

Presumably it took Mauritz a few seconds to remember who the visitor was, and perhaps it was that short space of time that put him out of step somewhat from the very start.

Or perhaps it was his illness. In any case, when it had registered with him that it was the police again he didn’t react with his usual aggression. He simply stared at Münster with vacant, feverish eyes, shrugged his coat-hanger shoulders and beckoned him in.

Münster hung up his jacket on a hook in the hall and followed him into the living room. Noted that it looked bare. It seemed temporary. A sofa and two easy chairs round a low pine table. A teak-veneered bookcase with a total of four books, half a metre of videotapes and a collection of various ornaments. A television set and a music centre in black plastic. On the table was a girlie magazine and a few advertising leaflets, and the two-metre-long windowsill was livened up by a cactus five centimetres high, and a porcelain money-box in the shape of a naked woman.