by Håkan Nesser
‘Of course we shan’t touch anything,’ said deBuijk. ‘We’re not complete idiots.’
Kristeva nodded, Inspector Sammelmerk sighed, and Rooth started to inspect the flat.
The first thought about a possible connection cropped up in Moreno’s mind shortly after she had left the chief of police’s office. She had sat in his greenhouse for an hour and a half, going through the documentation of the Surhonen affair with Hiller: comments had been made, both on the television and in the press, about the way in which the police had handled this delicate business which also involved a delegation of foreign police officers, and as usual Hiller had given several undertakings.
It struck her just after she had completed that distressing task. It was hardly a thought, in fact: more of a faint suspicion that flitted through her consciousness for a split second; but it left an impression even so.
And that impression suddenly became visible again not long afterwards when she sat down at a table in the canteen to eat her salad lunch. God only knows why, she thought, but all of a sudden, there it was. The suspicion.
That there might be a connection. Between the Strangler and that missing woman.
That he might have been the person Ester Peerenkaas had come up against.
Needless to say there was nothing specific to support this gratuitous hypothesis. Not a thing. And in all probability the chances were no more than one in a thousand. She started eating, and wondered why the thought had occurred to her. Presumably it was simply because the two tasks had collided by accident, merely because they both happened to be inside her head at the same time.
In more or less the same way that she used to connect true love with funeral parlours, because her first serious lover (she was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time, if she remembered rightly) happened to have a father who owned one.
Her suspicion was probably no stronger than that link, and when Reinhart came to join her she decided it would be silly to mention it.
Especially as Reinhart seemed to be more gloomy than usual. She couldn’t help but wonder how he was. At first she managed to refrain from asking him straight out, but when he spilled coffee over his shirt and swore so loudly that his voice echoed all round the room, she put the question.
‘I’m okay,’ said Reinhart. ‘It’s just this damned case that is gnawing away at my soul all the time.’
‘I didn’t know you had a soul,’ said Moreno: but the thought fell on stony ground. He simply ignored it.
‘And then there’s that other case as well,’ he muttered instead. ‘That missing woman. Have you spoken to Inspector Sammelmerk since yesterday?’
‘No,’ said Moreno. ‘Why?’
Reinhart took a bite of his sandwich and thought for a while before answering.
‘She spoke to one of the woman’s friends, just like you did. I bumped into her briefly this morning, and she’d been given this name.’
‘What name?’
‘I can’t get it out of my head. Fröken Peerenkaas had mentioned the name of the man she was about to start a relationship with, and it’s a name I can’t get out of my head . . . I’ve been thinking about it for over two hours now. Damn and blast!’
‘What was his name?’ asked Moreno, and felt her heart beating faster.
‘Brugger,’ said Reinhart.
‘Brugger?’
‘Yes, Amos Brugger. I’ve looked it up in the telephone directory, but there’s nobody of that name in Maardam and district . . . It rings a bell, but I can’t think why. Amos Brugger . . . Is there the sound of a bell ringing in your pretty head when you hear that name?’
Moreno ignored the compliment, and listened out for bells. Five seconds passed, Reinhart was staring hard at her all the time, as if he were doing all he could to assist her.
‘No,’ she said in the end. ‘I can’t hear a single tinkle.’
‘Damn and blast!’ said Reinhart again. ‘This smells of duck shit, as my mother used to say.’
He slid the sandwich to one side and lit his pipe instead.
32
After searching through Ester Peerenkaas’s flat in Meijkstraat, Rooth and Sammelmerk walked as far as Café Renckmann just round the corner of the street leading down to Willemsgraacht. Peerenkaas’s friends Kristeva and deBuijk had been thanked for their efforts and allowed to leave, and Rooth thought it was high time they had a bite to eat and an opportunity to summarize their impressions.
Sammelmerk had some difficulty in understanding what impressions he might be referring to, but she kept a straight face and played along.
‘Well,’ said Rooth as they sat down. ‘That wasn’t very productive.’
‘No,’ agreed Sammelmerk. ‘Still, what we do know is that nothing happened in her flat. It looked very neat and tidy, I thought.’
‘More or less like my own place,’ said Rooth. ‘But the fact that the two ladies couldn’t even find so much as a strand of hair out of place must indicate that she hadn’t had any strangers visiting her lately. Or what does your feminine intuition tell you?’
‘I think that’s right,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘But she hasn’t been at home either, for that matter . . . Not since last Tuesday. The left side of my brain tells me that something odd is going on.’
Inspector Rooth was by now deeply involved with a Danish pastry, and didn’t respond.
‘We ought to pay a visit to that restaurant,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Keefer’s. Somebody might remember them, even though it was over a month ago. Or are there other things we ought to be doing?’
Rooth shook his head and carried on chewing.
‘It’s the only place we know for sure that she was together with this Brugger character . . . But I don’t really know. You are more familiar with the details of the case, it’s up to you.’
Rooth swallowed and looked at the clock.
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘If we sit here for a bit longer, it will be time for lunch, and we can have it at Keefer’s. I’m told they do a beef stroganoff that’s up there with the best of them – and Reinhart likes us to take the initiative.’
So that was that.
‘Brugger?’ said Münster. ‘No, it doesn’t ring any bells. I’m afraid.’
‘Not for me either,’ said Inspector Krause, looking for a moment as if he’d just been informed that he’d failed an exam. ‘Amos Brugger, did you say?’
‘Yes,’ said Reinhart with a sigh. ‘That’s apparently what he was called. And there’s nobody by that name in the whole of this area, as far as we can tell. I suppose it’s possible he came from further afield, but talk about Blind Date! Anyway, if you could chase the name up in other parts of the country, we can see if there’s anything worth following up.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Krause, and left the room.
Münster waited until he’d closed the door.
‘Why are you putting so much effort into this missing person case?’ he asked. ‘I thought we had other priorities.’
Reinhart snorted and shuffled all the piles of documents on his desk around.
‘Priorities? Do you mean Surhonen? Or are you suggesting that we turn over every bloody stone in the Kammerle– Gassel case one more time? Or what are you getting at?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Münster, rising to his feet. ‘In any case, I think it’s probably best to leave you in peace. ‘You seem to be a bit premenstrual, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Reinhart, looking round for something to hit him with – but Münster was already in the corridor.
The distance from Café Renckmann to Keefer’s restaurant in Molnarstraat was no more than three hundred metres, but as it had started raining they took the car. Even so they had to walk quite a long way through the downpour – it was lunchtime, after all, and the shortage of parking spaces was as severe as usual.
Rooth thought it best to sort out the food first before turning their attention to the staff. Sammelmerk voiced no objections,
and as it was quite early they managed to get a window table with a view over the canal.
‘It’s a bit much to hope that they will remember details about customers they had a month ago,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Unless they’ve been here again since then, of course.’
‘I would avoid that,’ said Rooth. ‘If I found a woman I wanted to kill, I hardly think I’d take her out to a restaurant several times before bumping her off. Certainly not the same one.’
‘We don’t know that he did kill her,’ Sammelmerk pointed out. ‘We don’t even know that she’s dead.’
‘There’s quite a lot we don’t know,’ said Rooth. ‘On the other hand, we do know rather a lot about this particular aspect of this particular case. So I suppose that’s why we keep making guesses. What was it like working up in Aarlach?’
Sammelmerk shrugged.
‘I quite enjoyed it. But even there we had to guess our way forward at times, I must admit.’
‘It goes with the territory,’ said Rooth, looking around the half-empty premises. ‘Anyway, this is what we’ll do. When we get our food, I’ll give the photograph to the waitress, and she can hawk it around her colleagues while we’re eating. If we do that, it will take care of itself as it were, and we shan’t have to do anything.’
‘A good idea,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ said Rooth, with a routine smile.
Even if the method had a touch of genius, it didn’t produce any results.
When Rooth and Sammelmerk left Keefer’s nearly two hours later, the whole of the staff on lunch duty – ten in all – had examined the picture of Ester Peerenkaas.
None of them could recall seeing her as a customer in the restaurant, neither on 8 December nor on any other occasion. Nor anywhere else, come to that. Of the nine staff, only four had been on duty on the evening in question, but none of those recalled having seen a gentleman wearing a red tie sitting at a table together with T. S. Eliot. Red ties did turn up occasionally, they said, especially around Christmas time, but books were very rarely observed. Irrespective of colour.
Then again, of course, nobody could swear to not having seen a couple answering to that description. On a routine evening there were some sixty or seventy customers to look after, and on a Friday there could easily be over a hundred.
‘We understand,’ said Rooth. ‘In any case, many thanks. The beef wasn’t too bad. Even if it was on the expensive side. How many more staff would there have been working on that particular evening? And how can we get in touch with them?’
A woman in her fifties with dyed blonde hair and wearing spectacles that must have weighed half a kilo, looking as if she were some kind of manager, explained that there would normally be a dozen or so members of staff working the evening shift, plus one or two extra on Fridays and Saturdays. Naturally she had no idea who had been taking orders and serving food on 8 December, but she gave Rooth a scrap of paper with a telephone number he could ring. If he called he would get through to the chief financial officer, one Zaida Mergens: she had access to all the staff and wages details.
‘Excellent,’ said Rooth, folding the paper and putting it away in an inside pocket. ‘We’ll no doubt be in touch again.’
‘Perhaps you might like to come for dinner,’ suggested the woman. ‘If you do, I recommend that you book a table in advance. What’s happened? Or maybe you’re not allowed to tell us that?’
‘We’d love to tell you,’ said Rooth. ‘The problem is, we have no idea.’
Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno had been clear for a long time what a perfect morning would look like.
After making passionate and deeply satisfying love to the man of her life, she would wake up well rested. Stretch like a cat for a while, and eat a substantial breakfast in bed while glancing through the morning paper. Sleep for another quarter of an hour, then take a long, satisfying shower.
Then she would be ready to go to work.
At the moment – in January 2001, shortly before her thirty-fourth birthday – there were two serious obstacles in the way of her experiencing one of those ideal mornings.
In the first place, she was not sure that she had yet found the man of her life – although it was becoming more and more likely that Mikael Bau would take on that role. If he still wanted to, that is. But there was nothing to suggest that was not the case, and something told her that the crucial moment was rapidly approaching.
In the second place, she would have to get up at about four o’clock in order to fulfil all the requirements.
As she raced down the stairs that morning after no more than half a cup of tea and two minutes in the shower, she wondered how it would be possible to make passionate and deeply satisfying love, and then wake up well rested at four o’clock?
Impossible. So those perfect mornings had nothing to do with the meaning of life, despite everything.
Besides, she had slept badly. She had been dreaming about the Kammerle girl and her classmates caked with black makeup – the two young ladies she had talked to in that cafe a few months ago. In the dream they had been on a beach – a large and deserted sandy beach, with Monica Kammerle crying her eyes out and crawling around, looking for her missing legs while her so-called friends mocked her and wound her up. Moreno herself was lying on a beach towel some way away, trying to read a book, but unable to do so thanks to the girls.
What gave her food for thought was her own role in the dream: she couldn’t shake off the feeling of shame. She hadn’t bothered at all about the crippled girl, in fact, and just hoped she would crawl off in another direction so that Moreno could read her book in peace and quiet.
As she stood waiting for the tram, she found herself thinking once again about the link that had occurred to her the previous evening. The thought that there could be a connection between the Kammerle case and the disappearance of Ester Peerenkaas.
Always believe in passing whims! she recalled the Chief Inspector saying on one occasion. Give them a chance, at least, it doesn’t cost you anything.
The tram arrived and she elbowed her way on board. She even managed to find a seat – between an overweight man reading the Bible and a woman looking like an unusually thin Barbie doll – and continued thinking about it.
She started recapitulating the grim fate of the isolated family in Moerckstraat – was ‘family’ the right word, in fact? It was just a matter of two people: a mother and her daughter. Could such constellations properly be called families?
‘My family consists of one person,’ she recalled reading somewhere. ‘Me.’
Anyway, both of them were no longer with us. Martina and Monica Kammerle. Dead.
Killed.
There’s a murderer on the loose, as the saying goes. Perhaps he had murdered several women? That woman up in Wallburg, for instance? And maybe he had – this is where the passing whim came into it – maybe he also had something to do with the disappearance of Ester Peerenkaas?
It seemed to be beyond question that the man behind it all was the wild card she had gone to meet at the restaurant. The man who called himself Amos Brugger.
Ester Peerenkaas had told her friend that he’d said that was his name.
Amos Brugger.
But there was nobody by that name in Maardam, Reinhart had announced, and he had also suggested that it must mean something.
Mean something? Moreno thought. Names don’t usually mean anything at all, surely?
She looked out of the window. The tram was just pulling up at the Ruyders Plejn stop.
She checked her watch.
A quarter to nine. She had another sudden thought, and got off.
‘The day’s starting well,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I hadn’t expected to see such a pretty detective inspector among all these piles of paper.’
‘Come off it,’ said Moreno. ‘A hundred years from now and we’re all nothing but a pile of bones. I think it was the Chief . . . that it was you who taught me that.’
‘You’re probab
ly right,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘On both counts. But if you have something to talk to me about, you’re lucky. I’m not usually here at work at nine in the morning . . . Would you like some coffee?’
‘If you can supply a rusk or something to go with it,’ said Moreno. ‘I didn’t have time for breakfast this morning. Perhaps I ought to phone Reinhart and tell him I’m going to be a bit late. It’s just an idea I’ve had . . . That I’d like to discuss with you.’
‘Really?’ said Van Veeteren, looking somewhat surprised. ‘I have lots of ideas I’m only too happy to discuss. Blame yourself . . . Anyway, let’s lock the door and retire to the kitchenette.’
‘Well, what’s it all about, as it says in the Koran?’ he wondered when the cups were on the table and Moreno had just taken her first bite of the ciabatta bread he had heated up in the oven. ‘I take it that you haven’t called on me simply because you’re hungry and are interested in books.’
‘No – although I’m not really sure,’ said Moreno. ‘I just wanted to hear what you think. I had an idea, as I said . . .’
‘Might one guess that it has to do with the Strangler again?’ asked Van Veeteren, starting to roll a cigarette.
‘Hmm,’ said Moreno. ‘Of course it has . . . But I suppose that wasn’t too difficult to work out.’
‘Nothing new has happened, has it? I haven’t seen a word in the press for several weeks now.’
‘It’s at a stand-still,’ said Moreno. ‘But we’ve had reported a missing woman. I got the feeling that there might be a link. That’s my idea.’
Van Veeteren finished rolling his cigarette and gave her a searching look.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘About a week ago . . . Well, a week-and-a-half.’
‘Here in Maardam?’
‘Yes.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘About the same as you, roughly speaking?’
‘More or less,’ admitted Moreno.
