by Håkan Nesser
“Inspector Kropke,” said Kropke, standing to attention.
Idiot, thought Beate Moerk, and introduced herself.
“Inspector Moerk is responsible for all the charm and intuition we have to offer,” said Bausen. “I would advise you not to underestimate her.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Van Veeteren.
“Right, shall we get going?” Bausen started to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Is there any coffee?”
Beate Moerk indicated a tray on a table in the corner.
Kropke ran a hand through his fair, close-cropped hair and fumbled with the top button of his shirt behind the knot in his tie. He was obviously the one charged with holding forth.
Rookie’s up first, presumably, Van Veeteren thought. Perhaps Bausen is teaching him the ropes.
Seemed to be necessary, if he was to be honest.
5
“I thought I’d take the Eggers case first,” said Kropke, and switched on the overhead projector. “In order to brief Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, and also to summarize the situation for the rest of us. I’ve made a few transparencies to make it easier . . .”
He looked first at Bausen, then Van Veeteren in the hope of registering an approving reaction.
“Excellent,” said Beate Moerk.
Kropke coughed.
“On June twenty-eight, early in the morning, a man by the name of Heinz Eggers was found dead in a courtyard behind the railway station. He had been killed by a blow to the back of the head from an ax of some kind. The blade had gone through the vertebrae, the artery, everything. The body was found by a newspaper delivery boy shortly after six o’clock, and he had been dead between four and five hours.”
“What kind of a man was Eggers?” wondered Van Veeteren aloud.
Kropke put on a new transparency, and Van Veeteren could read for himself that the victim had reached the age of thirty-four when his life was suddenly brought to a close. He was born and permanently resident in Selstadt a few miles inland, but he had been living in Kaalbringen since April of this year.
He had no regular work, not in Kaalbringen, or in Selstadt, or in any other location. He had a lengthy criminal record: drug crimes, assault and battery, burglary, sexual offenses, fraud. In all, he had served about ten years in various prisons and institutions, starting when he was sixteen. The local authorities were not aware that he was in Kaalbringen; Eggers had been living in a two-room apartment in Andrejstraat belonging to a good friend of his who was currently serving a comparatively short sentence for rape and threatening behavior. He’d had plans to settle down and go straight in Kaalbringen, get a steady job and so on, but he had not had much success on that score.
“Where does the information come from?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Several sources,” said Beate Moerk. “Mostly from a girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Yes, that’s what she called herself,” said Bausen. “She lived in the apartment with him. But she didn’t kill him, even if she didn’t seem particularly put out by his death.”
“Nobody was,” said Moerk.
“She had an alibi, in any case,” explained Bausen. “Water-tight.”
“How have you gone about the investigation?” asked Van Veeteren, reinserting the toothpick the other way around.
Kropke turned to Bausen for assistance, but received nothing but an encouraging nod.
“We’ve interviewed around fifty people,” he said, “most of them the same sort of dregs of society as Eggers himself. His friends and acquaintances are mostly petty thieves, drug addicts, that sort of thing. His circle of friends in Kaalbringen wasn’t all that large since he’d only been here for a few months. A dozen people, perhaps, all of them well known to us. The usual riffraff, you might say, the sort who spend the day on park benches drinking beer. Getting high in one another’s apartments and selling their womenfolk in Hamnesplanaden and Fisherman’s Square. And then of course we’ve interviewed masses of people following anonymous tips, all of whom have turned out to have nothing to do with the case.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“What’s the population of Kaalbringen?”
“Forty-five thousand, give or take,” said Beate Moerk. “A few thousand more in the summer months.”
“What about crime levels?”
“Not high,” said Bausen. “The odd case of domestic violence now and then, four or five boats stolen in the summer. An occasional brawl and a bit of drug dealing. I take it you’re not interested in financial crime?”
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Not yet, in any case. Anyway, what theories have you got about this Eggers character? You don’t have to give me all the details today. I’d prefer to read up on it and ask if I have any questions.”
Beate Moerk took it upon herself to respond.
“None,” she said. “We don’t know a damn thing. I suppose we had started to think—before the Simmel business, that is— that it must be some kind of inside job. A junkie killing another junkie for some reason or other. A bad trip, or money owing or something of that sort—”
“You don’t kill somebody who owes you money,” said Kropke. “If you do, you’ll never get it back.”
“On the contrary, Inspector,” sighed Moerk. Kropke frowned.
Oh, dear, thought Van Veeteren.
“Coffee?” Bausen’s question was rhetorical, and he was already passing around mugs.
“If it’s true,” said Van Veeteren, “what Inspector Moerk says, then it’s highly probable that you’ve already interrogated the murderer. If you’ve sifted through the... the dregs, that is?”
“Presumably,” said Bausen. “But now Simmel has turned up. I think that changes the situation quite a bit.”
“Definitely,” said Moerk.
Kropke put on a new transparency. It was obviously a picture of where Eggers was found—dumped behind some garbage cans in the rear courtyard of an apartment block waiting to be demolished, by the look of it.
“Was he murdered on the spot?” asked Van Veeteren.
“More or less,” said Kropke. “Only moved a few yards at most.”
“What was he doing there?”
“No idea,” said Bausen. “Drug dealing, I suppose.”
“What time was it?”
“One, two in the morning, something like that.”
“Was he high?”
“Not especially.”
“Why do they have garbage cans outside an apartment block that’s due to be demolished?”
Bausen pondered for a while.
“Dunno... I’ve no idea, in fact.”
Van Veeteren nodded. Kropke poured out some coffee and Beate Moerk opened a carton from the bakery, brimful of Danish pastries.
“Excellent,” said Van Veeteren.
“From Sylvie’s, a top-notch bakery and café,” said Bausen.
“I recommend a visit. You’ll get a twenty percent discount if you tell them you’re a copper. It’s just around the corner from here.”
Van Veeteren removed his toothpick and helped himself to a pastry.
“Anyway,” said Kropke, “as far as Eggers is concerned, we’re rowing against the tide, you might say.”
“What about the weapon?” asked Van Veeteren, speaking with his mouth full. “What does the doctor have to say?”
“Just a moment.”
Kropke produced a new transparency—a sketch of how the ax blade, or whatever it was, had cut its way through the back of Eggers’s neck, passing straight through the vertebrae, artery, gullet—the lot.
“A massive blow?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Not necessarily,” said Beate Moerk. “It depends on what the blade looks like, and it seems to have been extremely sharp—and thin.”
“Which means that not so much force was needed,” added Kropke.
“You can also see,” said Beate Moerk, “that it came at quite an angle, but that doe
sn’t necessarily mean anything special. It could indicate that the murderer was quite short, or rather tall. It all depends on how he held the weapon. And what it looks like, of course.”
“Just think how many different ways there are of hitting a tennis ball,” said Kropke.
Van Veeteren took another Danish pastry.
“And it’s likely that the weapon was an ax?” he asked.
“Of some kind,” said Bausen. “I think we’ll move on to Simmel now. Maybe Inspector Moerk would like to fill us in?”
Beate Moerk cleared her throat and leafed through her notebook.
“Well, we haven’t got very far yet. It was only the day before yesterday, at eight in the morning, that a jogger found him in the municipal woods. He first noticed blood on the path; and when he stopped to investigate, he saw the body just a few yards away. The murderer doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to hide it. He—the jogger, that is—called the police right away. Chief Inspector Bausen and I went to the spot together, and we were able to establish that, well, that we seemed to be dealing with the same killer as last time.”
“Cut down from behind,” said Bausen. “A bit harder and the head would have been severed altogether. It looked like one hell of a mess.”
“The same weapon?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Ninety percent certain,” said Kropke.
“A hundred would be better,” said Van Veeteren.
“Presumably,” said Bausen, “we’re not talking about an ordinary ax. The blade appears to be wider than it’s deep. Maybe six or even eight inches. No sign of either end of the blade in Eggers or Simmel, according to the pathologist, at least. And Simmel especially had a real bull neck.”
“A machete, perhaps?” suggested Van Veeteren.
“I’ve looked into that,” said Bausen. “I wondered if it might be some kind of knife or sword with a very strong blade, but the cutting edge is straight, not curved like a machete.”
“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “Maybe that’s not the most important thing at this stage. What’s the link between Eggers and Simmel?”
Nobody spoke.
“That’s a good question,” said Bausen.
“We haven’t found one yet,” said Kropke. “But we’re looking, of course—”
“Scoundrels, the pair of them,” said Bausen. “But in different leagues, you might say. I reckon Simmel’s business affairs wouldn’t stand all that much broad daylight shining on them, but that’s something for the tax lawyers rather than ordinary mortals like us. He’s never been involved in anything specifically criminal. Not like Eggers, I mean.”
“Or at least, he’s not been caught,” said Moerk.
“Drugs?” said Van Veeteren. “They usually unite princes and paupers.”
“We have no indications of any such involvement,” said Kropke.
It would be no bad thing if we solved this business before a new chief of police takes over, thought Van Veeteren.
“What was he doing in the woods?”
“On his way home,” said Beate Moerk.
“Where from?”
“The Blue Ship restaurant. He’d been there from half past eight until eleven, roughly. There are several witnesses. Went for a stroll through the town, it seems. The last people to see him alive were a couple of women in Fisherman’s Square—at about twenty past eleven, give or take a minute or so.”
“What does the pathologist’s report say about the time of death?”
“The final version is due tomorrow,” said Bausen. “As things look at the moment, between eleven and one. Well, half past eleven and one, I suppose.”
Van Veeteren leaned back and looked up at the ceiling.
“That means there are two possibilities,” he said, and waited for a reaction.
“Precisely,” said Beate Moerk. “Either the murderer was lying in wait by the path, ready to have a go at whoever came past, or he followed Simmel from the restaurant.”
“He might have just bumped into him,” said Kropke. “By accident, in other words—”
“And he had an ax with him—by accident?” said Moerk.
Good, thought Van Veeteren. I wonder if Bausen has entertained the idea of having a female successor? Although it’s not up to him, of course.
6
Four reporters were lying in wait by the front desk, but Bausen was clearly used to sending them packing.
“Press conference tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock sharp. Not a word out of us until then!”
Van Veeteren declined Bausen’s offer of a modest meal and a lift back to the hotel.
“I need some fresh air. Thought I’d buy some newspapers as well.”
Bausen nodded.
“Here’s my phone number in case you change your mind. I expect I’ll be in all evening.”
He handed a business card to Van Veeteren, who put it in his breast pocket. The chief of police clambered into his somewhat battered Toyota and drove away. Van Veeteren watched him go.
Nice fellow, he thought. I wonder if he plays chess as well.
He looked at his watch. Half past five. A couple of hours’
work in his room, and then dinner. That sounded like a good way of passing the time. That was just about the only skill he’d managed to acquire over the years: the ability to kill time.
Well, plus a certain aptitude for finding violent lawbreakers, of course.
He picked up his briefcase and set off in the direction of the harbor.
Fourteen cassettes and three folders.
They were all that constituted the material concerning the Eggers case. He tipped them onto the bed and hesitated for a moment. Then he rang reception and ordered a beer. He tucked the folders under his arm and went to sit on the balcony.
It took him several minutes to adjust the parasol so that he wasn’t troubled by the evening sun, but once he’d sorted that out and the girl had brought his beer, he sat out there until he’d read every single word.
The conclusion he drew was simple and straightforward, and perhaps best expressed in Inspector Moerk’s words: “We don’t know a damn thing.”
He wasn’t exactly looking forward to listening to the recordings of all the interviews. In normal circumstances, if he’d been on home ground, he would have had them typed out as a matter of course; but as things were, it was no doubt best to take the bull by the horns and put the earphones on. In any case, he decided to postpone that chore until later, or even tomorrow. Instead, he moved on to the next murder, as depicted in the newspapers. He’d acquired four—two national ones and two issues of a local rag, today’s and yesterday’s.
The national dailies had suitably large, fat headlines, but the text was decidedly thin. They evidently hadn’t sent any reporters to Kaalbringen yet. No doubt they would turn up at the press conference. The man in charge of the case, Chief Inspector Bausen, had issued a statement but had only revealed the alleged fact that the police were following up several lines of inquiry.
Oh, really? thought Van Veeteren.
The local rag was called de Journaal, and the coverage was more substantial: pictures of Bausen, the place where the body was discovered and the victim—albeit one from when he was still alive. And a photograph of Eggers. The headline on the front page said the axman strikes again. town terror stricken, and on an inside page a couple of questions were highlighted: “Who’ll be the next victim?” and “Are our police up to it?”
He skimmed through the articles and read the obituary of Ernst Simmel, who was something of a local stalwart and hon-orary citizen, it seemed—a member of the Rotary Club, a director of the local football club and on the board of the bank.
He had held several offices previously, before moving to live in Spain... no sooner is he back home than he’s brutally murdered.
De mortuis... thought Van Veeteren, and threw the newspaper onto the floor. What the hell am I doing here?
He took off his s
hirt and padded into the bathroom. What was the name of that restaurant?
The Blue Ship?
The assumption that representatives of the national press would turn up proved to be well founded. As he walked through the hotel foyer, two middle-aged gentlemen darted out of the bar. Their ruddy complexions were a telltale indication of their trade, and Van Veeteren paused with a sigh.
“Chief Inspector Van Veeteren! Cruickshank from the Telegraaf !”
“Müller from the Allgemejne!” announced the other. “I think we’ve met—”
“My name’s Rölling,” said Van Veeteren. “I’m a traveling salesman specializing in grandfather clocks. There must be some mistake.”
“Ha ha,” said Müller.
“When can we have a chat?” asked Cruickshank.
“At the press conference in the police station at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Van Veeteren, opening the front door.
“Is it you or Bausen who’s in charge of the investigation?” asked Müller.
“What investigation?” said Van Veeteren.
The main color used for the interior decoration of The Blue Ship was red. The bar was no more than half full, and there were plenty of empty tables in the dining room. Van Veeteren was seated right at the back, with no near neighbors; but even so, he hadn’t even started his main course before a thin gentleman with gleaming eyes and a nervous smile materialized in front of him.
“Excuse me. Schalke from de Journaal. You’re that chief inspector, aren’t you?”
Van Veeteren didn’t respond.
“I was the last person to speak to him. I’ve been interviewed by Bausen and Kropke, of course; but if you’d like a chat, I’d be happy to oblige.”
He glanced down meaningfully at the empty chair opposite the chief inspector.
“Could we meet in the bar when I’ve finished eating?” proposed Van Veeteren.
Schalke nodded and withdrew. Van Veeteren started to work his way listlessly through something described crypti-cally on the menu as “Chef ’s Pride with Funghi and Moz-zarella.” When he’d finished his meal and paid his bill, he still had no idea what he’d been eating.
