Grijpstra grunted. A thousand! A laborer's wage. A skilled man working for a full month would get that money. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses, looking balefully at the corpse.
But he corrected himself. He was merely surmising. Perhaps the poor woman hadn't charged at all. Perhaps she had invited men for company and they had used her and perhaps she had been grateful. In any case he, Grijpstra, shouldn't judge. He had to find the killer and produce a good round case so that the public prosecutor would know what to do. A simple task. No morals.
His mind at rest he began to look around him again. A pleasant room, lots of light, windows on three sides. A woman's room. She wouldn't receive her visitors up here. This was the room where she could be by herself and make dresses and listen to records and look after her plants. There were plants on all windowsills. He recognized some of them. Christ's-thorn, pig's ears, the shrimp plant with a pink growth at the end of each stalk. Some of the plants he didn't recognize. They looked like weeds. He searched his mind for knowledge about weeds. And as he was trying to think, the police cars arrived and began to maneuver for parking space outside.
The commissaris had arrived as well, and Grijpstra, who had left the boat to the photographers, the fingerprint men, and the doctor, was reporting with de Gier at his side, at a respectable distance but still part of this small inner circle.
"Dead hey?" the commissaris said. "So the Secret Service was right for once. The last time they used us we wasted three weeks on an old army uniform and that was all there was to find. Remember?"
"Yes sir," de Gier said. He had found the uniform. It had been discarded by an American sergeant in a hotel room. But the Secret Service had given the case top priority. There had been no case. There had been no secrets, no spies, nothing. But a lot of work, work in the dark, for neither Grijpstra nor de Gier nor the half dozen other policemen involved in the search had known what they were after. They had been given hazy orders and lots of addresses and they had tramped around until, one evening, they had been told that the alarm was false.
"Yes, I remember, sir," de Gier said again.
"But now they have guided us to a corpse," the commissaris said, "so maybe they have intelligence."
"A murdered corpse," Grijpstra said.
The commissaris smiled his old man's smile. The comers of his mouth moved.
"Well," he said, "I won't go in. They'll be busy for a while in there. I'll take your car and drive myself back and you can come home with the others. The chief inspector will be sorry to miss all this but I won't call him back. You and I will have to solve the case and he can sit in the sun for a few more weeks. Good day."
"Sir," the two men said, and de Gier gave the commissaris the keys of the gray VW.
The ambulance had arrived and the two brothers of the Health Service came out of the boat, carefully carrying their stretcher, followed by the police doctor.
"Morning," he said to Grijpstra. "She has been dead for two days at least. The knife went right in."
"Could it have been thrown in?" Grijpstra asked.
"Could be," the doctor said. "It's an unusual knife. Never seen one like it. I'll be able to tell you tomorrow."
"Has the body been moved, you think?" Grijpstra asked.
"No."
The doctor was close to his car when Grijpstra remembered the plants. He ran to the car.
"Excuse me, doctor. Do you know anything about plants?"
The doctor looked startled. "Plants?"
"Yes. Plants. Weeds."
"I know a little," the doctor said. "You don't think she was poisoned, do you?"
Grijpstra explained what he meant.
"I see," the doctor said. "We'll have to go back."
Together they studied the potted plants with de Gier, mystified, in the background.
"Hmm," the doctor said.
Grijpstra waited.
"I am not sure," the doctor said. "I'll have to take them with me. They are weeds all right, and pretty nasty weeds, I should say. Poisonous."
Grijpstra grunted.
"How did you manage to notice them?" the doctor asked, turning around at the grunt. "You know anything about plants?"
"Not really," Grijpstra said, "but I had to spend some time in this room by myself and I thought these weeds looked like weeds, not like the sort of plant everybody has around."
"What's all this?" asked de Gier. "What are we? Botanists?'
"Have you never heard about weeds, friend?" the doctor asked, looking at de Gier pleasantly.
"I have heard about the weed," de Gier said, "and I have some geraniums on my balcony, and something with little white flowers which my aunt gave me. Asylum I think it is called."
"Alyssum," the doctor said. "Fifty cents a plant on the street market. Bought some myself the other day, very pretty, heavy smell of honey. But these weeds are different. If they are what I think they are they are poisonous. There are three types, you see. I'll check them out with a friend of mine; he also works for the city, assistant chief of all our parks. He should know."
"Poisonous, you say," Grijpstra said.
The doctor lit his pipe and looked at the plants again. "Poisonous, for sure. But perhaps they can be used for other purposes. A witch might make a love potion out of them. Or an ointment. If you rub the ointment in your armpits and all over your penis and balls you may have some interesting sensations."
"Yes?" de Gier asked.
"You might find yourself flying through the sky, my friend, on a broomstick, on your way to a party."
Grijpstra put a heavy hand on de Gier's shoulder. "Wouldn't you like that, de Gier?" he asked.
"I would," de Gier said.
"There would be plenty of fun at the party," the doctor said.
"What sort of fun?" de Gier asked, staring at the plants with bulging eyes.
"Sex," the doctor said. "Good clean sex."
"Boy!" de Gier said.
"You can help me carry them down to my car."
A little later de Gier was staggering down the stairs holding the largest pot. The doctor had a smaller pot, and Grijpstra was carrying a very small pot, gingerly, as if the innocent-looking weed would explode in his face.
"A witch," de Gier was mumbling to himself.
3
"What I like about the police," De Gier said, "Is our teamwork."
Grijpstra looked at the last car leaving the small parking area near the houseboat. He looked thoughtful.
"You shouldn't have lent our car to die commissaris," he said.
"Ha," de Gier said.
Together they walked to the small houseboat which housed their first suspect, Bart de Jong. They walked slowly.
"You have any ideas yet?" de Gier asked.
Grijpstra produced a large dirty white handkerchief and sneezed in it.
"Don't sneeze. Answer me."
Grijpstra sneezed again. De Gier jumped back. It was a loud sneeze and expressed Grijpstra's contempt of the world.
"Ideas," Grijpstra said. "Yes. Why not? The lady is a prostitute, we are told. Supposed she is a prostitute, she probably is, so we can safely suppose. Prostitutes don't like their customers, in fact they hate them. They blame their clients for what they are, and they are right. Everybody is always right, we mustn't forget that. It's a basic truth. So the prostitute hates her client and makes him feel her power. He needs her. He comes back. He doesn't really want to come back but he does, because he has to. His desire is much stronger than his will power. She sees him coming back and she humiliates him. The client doesn't want to be humiliated. The client is right too. He tries to hurt her. And killing is an extreme form of hurting."