Woman with Birthmark (8 page)

Besides, he wasn't at all sure what he hoped to get out of it. Just a chance to let off steam, presumably. Give vent to his irritation and his feeling of being trampled underfoot. A stubborn old fool with a bee in his bonnet, was that what he would end up becoming? Slowly but surely he could feel exhaustion and pointlessness grasping him by the throat, and when he saw the little German teacher frown and take a ballpoint pen from his inside pocket, he had the feeling that everything was being enacted in the theater of the absurd.

A farce.

Was Faringer going to work out tactics on his paper napkin? Sketch out a manifesto, perhaps? An appeal?

Bloody hell, Maasleitner thought. Who are all these people I'm surrounded by?

Or are they all like this, if you scrape a bit at the surface?

It was not a new question. Barely even a question, come to that.

More of a statement.

More beer, he thought. Might as well blur a few edges. Inertia, come and embrace me!

When they staggered out of the little basement restaurant some considerable time later, the mood was significantly more relaxed. Maasleitner even found it necessary to place his arm over his colleague's shoulders in order to assist his attempts to negotiate the steps leading up to street level. Faringer missed one step altogether,
grabbed hold of the iron rail, and roared with laughter; and when they shortly afterward managed to flag down a taxi, it transpired that he had left his wallet on the table. Maasleitner went back to retrieve it while Faringer lay slumped in the backseat, singing a rude song for the scarcely amused but decidedly unimpressed driver.

As Maasleitner watched the cab's rear lights vanish around the corner by the printing works, he wondered how on earth Enso Faringer would be able to summon up the strength to face his classes the next day.

As far as he was concerned, that was no longer a consideration that he needed to take into account, and thanks to the alcohol flowing sweetly through his veins he suddenly had the feeling that despite everything, all was well with the world. A nice, comfortable lie-in was in store for him the next morning, and then perhaps a little excursion. To Weimarn? Why not? Provided the weather turned out to be reasonable, of course.

It wasn't too bad at the moment. The rain had died away. A warm, gentle breeze caressed its way through the town, and as he slowly began to wander through the familiar, narrow alleys that would lead him home to Weijskerstraat, he had the strong impression that there was not really much point in worrying about the future.

As if to confirm this feeling, at about the same time a lone figure emerged from the dark shadows enveloping the Keymer Church a little farther down the same street.

It followed him about thirty paces behind; discreetly and silently, as Maasleitner walked over the rounded cobbles, across Wilhemsgraacht, into Weijskerstraat, and right up to the front
door. Maasleitner was somewhat surprised to find that it was standing ajar, and that there appeared to be something wrong with the lock. Despite his euphoric state, he paused for a few moments to mutter away about the circumstances—while his pursuer waited patiently in another doorway diagonally across the narrow street. Then Maasleitner shrugged, stepped inside, and took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

He hadn't been home for long, hadn't even had time to get undressed, when there was a ring at the door. The clock over the stove in the kitchen said a few minutes past midnight, and as he went to open up he wondered who on earth it could be, visiting him at this time of night.

Then it dawned on him that it must be Enso Faringer, whose euphoric state had doubtless enabled him to come up with some crazy idea or other, and there was a tolerant smile on his lips as he opened the door.

Some sixteen hours later his seventeen-year-old daughter opened that same door, and if the circumstances had not been so grotesque, it would probably have still been possible to see traces of that smile on his face.

“So there's no doubt, then?” said Heinemann.

“Not really,” said Münster. “Same ammunition—7.65 millimeter. The technical guys were more or less certain that it was the same weapon, but we won't know that for sure until tomorrow.”

“Two bullets in the chest, two below the belt,” said Rooth, looking at the photograph lying on the table in front of him. “I'll be damned if it isn't the same thing all over again, more or less. A copy of Ryszard Malik.”

“Of course it's the same culprit,” said Moreno. “There hasn't been a word in the papers about the bullets below the belt.”

“Correct,” muttered Van Veeteren. “Sometimes the muzzle we put on journalists actually works.”

He looked up from the document he was holding and had just read. It was a very provisional medical statement Miss Katz had popped in to hand over, and it suggested that Rickard Maasleitner had probably died between eleven and twelve o'clock the previous night, and that the cause of death was a bullet that had penetrated the heart muscle. The other shots would
not have brought about instant death; not taken one at a time, that is—possibly in combination, as a result of blood loss.

“A bullet in the heart,” said Van Veeteren, passing the sheet of paper on to Münster, who was sitting next to him.

“He didn't leave Freddy's until shortly after half past eleven,” said Moreno. “It takes at least a quarter of an hour to walk to Weijskerstraat. The murderer can hardly have struck before midnight.”

“Between twelve and two, then,” said Rooth. “Ah well, we'll have to find out if anybody saw anything.”

“Or heard,” said Heinemann.

Rooth stuck his index finger into his mouth, then withdrew it with a plopping sound.

“Did you hear that?” he asked. “That's about as much noise as is made when you use a silencer. He must have used one, or he'd have woken up the whole building.”

“Okay,” said Heinemann. “We'll assume that, then.”

Van Veeteren broke a toothpick in half and looked at the clock.

“Nearly midnight,” he said with a deep sigh. “We might as well go home now and get some sleep, but so help me God, we'd better make some progress tomorrow. We have quite a few threads to pull at, this time around; and there's no reason why we should be left floundering. The sooner we solve this business, the better.”

He paused briefly, but nobody took advantage of the opportunity to speak. He could see in his colleagues' faces the same mixture of intense concentration and weariness that he could feel inside his own head. Best to rest for a few hours, no doubt about that. Besides, there wouldn't be much point in waking people up in the middle of the night to answer a few questions. The
police had a bad enough reputation as it was; there was no need to make it any worse.

“This is what we'll do tomorrow,” said the chief inspector. “Reinhart and deBries will continue interviewing the neighbors. The whole block, if there's time. I assume they're still at it now, and I suppose they might as well carry on. It could be that somebody has seen something—the murderer must have called round twice, for God's sake. Once to tamper with the lock, and once to kill. It might be that nobody noticed anything, but we'll have to see…. Heinemann.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to dig into the background. We have details of the whole of Malik's life. Find out when his and Maasleitner's paths crossed. There must be a link.”

“Let's hope so,” said Heinemann.

“Münster and Rooth will take his family. Or rather, the family that used to be his. I have a list of them here. Moreno and Jung will go to the Elementar school….”

“Oh my God,” said Jung. “That's the school I used to go to….”

Van Veeteren raised his eyebrows.

“When was that?” he asked.

Jung tried to work it out.

“Eighteen years ago,” he said. “Just one term in the seventh grade, then we moved in the spring. I hardly recall a single teacher. I didn't have Maasleitner in any case.”

“A pity” said Van Veeteren. “Talk to the headmaster and some of the staff even so, but tread carefully. They're usually very wary of anybody who intrudes on a seat of learning like that. Remember what happened at Bunge?”

“I certainly do,” said Münster. “Lie low, that's my advice.”

“I'll bear it in mind,” said Jung.

“But leave that Faringer character alone,” said Van Veeteren. “I intend to have a little chat with him myself.”

“A bit of an oddball,” said Münster.

“Of course,” muttered Van Veeteren. “All teachers are. If they're not odd to start with, they become so as the years go by.”

He rummaged in his empty breast pocket and looked around the room.

“Any questions?”

Rooth yawned, but nobody spoke.

“Okay,” said the chief inspector, and started collecting his papers together. “We'll meet for a run-through at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Make sure you make the most of the time until then. This time we're going to get him.”

“Or her,” said Münster.

“Yes, yes,” said Van Veeteren.
“Cherchez la femme
, if you really must.”

When he got home and had gone to bed, he realized that his tiredness had not yet overcome the tension in his brain once and for all. The image of Rickard Maasleitner's bullet-ridden body kept cropping up in his mind's eye at regular intervals, and after ten minutes of vainly trying to fall asleep, he got up and went to the kitchen instead. Fetched a beer from the refrigerator and sat down in the armchair with a blanket around his knees and Dvořák in the speakers. He allowed the darkness to envelop him, but instead of the unease and disgust he ought to have felt, in view of the two unsolved murders they were struggling with, another sensation altogether took possession of him.

It was a feeling of movement. Of hunting, in fact. The feeling
that the drive had begun now, and that the prey was somewhere out there in the hustle and bustle of town, and it was only a matter of time before he would be able to get his teeth into it. Bring down the murderer.

Oh, shit! he thought as he took a swig of his beer. I'm beginning to lose the plot. If I weren't a police officer, I'd probably have become a murderer instead.

It was only a random thought, of course, but nevertheless, somewhere in some obscure corner of his brain, he realized that there was more meaning in it than would be sensible to acknowledge. It had something to do with the concept of the hunt….

In the beginning, at least.

Only in the beginning, if truth be told. Somewhere along the line came the peripeteia, the volte-face, and when he eventually—usually much, much later—stood there with his prey, with the perpetrator, what generally possessed him were exclusively feelings of loathing and disgust. The excitement—the stimulation—was only theoretical.

And in the beginning.

For when you had dug down sufficiently deep into dire reality, his stream of thought told him, when you had dug down as deep as the soil layer of the crime itself, all there was to see was the black and hopeless dregs. The causes. The maggot-ridden roots of warped society.

The back side.

Not that he believed the society in which he lived had higher or lower moral principles than any other. It was simply the way things were—two to three thousand years of culture, and law-making bodies were unable to do anything about it. The veneer of civilization, or whatever you preferred to call it, could begin to crack at any moment, crumble away and expose the darkness
underneath. Some people might have imagined that Europe would be a protected haven after 1945, but Van Veeteren had never been one of them. And then things had turned out as they did. Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and all the rest of it.

And of course it was in the same underlying darkness that his own hunting instincts originated. In any case, he had always found it difficult to associate his police activities with any kind of noble deeds. Nemesis, rather. The inexorable goddess of revenge with blood on her teeth…. Yes, that was more like it, there was no denying it.

And at some point, the game always turned deadly serious.

In this particular case it had taken two murders for him to begin to feel involved. Were his senses becoming duller? he wondered. What would he be like a few years from now? What would be needed by then to start the notorious Chief Inspector Van Veeteren firing on all cylinders?

Butchered women? Children?

Mass graves?

When would cynicism and world-weariness have overcome his determination to fight once and for all? For how much longer would the moral imperative have the strength to continue screeching in the darkness of his soul?

Good questions. He felt his self-disgust rising and cut off the train of thought. No doubt it had been the contrary nature of January that had made him a little sluggish at the start. Now it was February. February the second, to be precise. What was this Maasleitner business all about?

He started thinking about what had happened that afternoon.

The alarm had sounded just as he was preparing to pack up for the day. Half past four. He and Münster had been at the apartment in Weijskerstraat a quarter of an hour later, more or less at
the same time as the forensic guys and the medical team. Rickard Maasleitner was lying in exactly the same posture as Ryszard Malik had been some … how long ago was it now? Two weeks, more or less? Yes, that was correct.

He had been convinced from the very first glance that it was the same killer. And that the method had been the same.

A ring on the doorbell, and then shots the moment the door opened.

A sound method, Rooth had said.

Most certainly. Once it was done, all that remained was to close the door and walk away. What sort of time was involved? Ten seconds? That would probably be long enough. You could fire four shots from a Berenger in half that time, if need be.

He emptied his glass.

And then?

Well, then everything got under way, of course. Police tape around the crime scene, a thorough search, taking care of the poor daughter who had found him. And so on.

Questions.

Questions and answers. No end to it already. And yet it was just the beginning. As already stated.