Anyway, there were six left. Three who still hadn’t said a word, two who seemed to be about to do so, and one who had made a clean breast of it and was waiting to be picked up.
Plus Marieke Bergson, of course. She was still at the police station, under the wing of Miss Miller and a Roman Catholic Sister of Mercy (the latter had turned up out of the blue the previous evening and offered her services – for professional and ethical reasons, not to mention pressure from her trade union, the psychologist had fled the scene long ago). Her name was Vera Saarpe, and she had let the girl stay at her place overnight.
It was only this morning, early on, that they had managed to contact Marieke’s parents, and apparently they would be arriving during the course of the afternoon to take care of their daughter. Kluuge had spoken on the telephone to the mother, and established that the apple hadn’t fallen very far away from the tree in this case either.
He sighed deeply. It was far from easy to keep tabs on everything, he thought.
Far from easy.
Then he sighed even more deeply – when he began to think about Katarina Schwartz, the girl who seemed to have gone missing from the camp some ten to twelve days ago. Marieke Bergson’s claim regarding her sudden disappearance had been backed up by all the others who had spoken up so far, and it seemed reasonable to assume that it was this Katarina who had been referred to in the first two telephone calls from the anonymous woman.
To crown it all, they hadn’t succeeded in making contact with her parents. They were evidently on holiday, touring France by car. But if in fact Katarina had simply run away from the camp, it was quite possible that she was sitting in the same car as her mother and father. Or in a rented cottage, or in a deckchair. In Brest or Marseilles or wherever the hell they happened to be. Why not Lourdes, come to that?
Servinus had been in touch with the French police, who had promised to send out SOS messages to track down the couple and their car; but Servinus had dealt with his French colleagues before, and wasn’t especially optimistic.
In any case, there were indications to suggest that the girl might have had good reason to run away; but just how strong they were was something Kluuge hadn’t yet established. Nor had anybody else, come to that. The probability was that this scenario was no more than wishful thinking – neighbours, friends and relations of the Schwartz family had seemed to be quite certain that Katarina had not been in the car that set off on the journey south-west the previous week.
But the timing did fit in, as Kluuge had noted when he thought the matter over. If the daughter had suddenly turned up unexpectedly the evening before they set off – well, it wasn’t out of the question that she might have travelled with them the next morning without anybody else knowing.
In which case they had only one murder to solve.
Which was bad enough, of course.
It also occurred to him – as he sat in the car sweating and driving far too fast on the zigzagging road – that all these interrogations, all these telephone calls and all the various measures they were taking seemed to be irrelevant. They were simply taking up an enormous amount of time and energy and resources, without actually leading anywhere.
Apart from in circles. What little they found out was what they had already worked out for themselves.
When – and how – he would find the time and energy to sit down and think about the actual murder and how to solve it, well, he found that very hard to see just at the moment.
Is this the way it always was? he wondered at the back of his mind. In all the cases I’ve been involved in?
Merwin Kluuge sighed yet again, and checked his watch.
A quarter to two.
That meant a window of twenty minutes for Deborah. Half an hour at most.
I must buy her some flowers on Friday, he thought. No time for that today, that’s for sure.
At about the same time as Merwin Kluuge gently – but perhaps not quite as gently as was his wont – stroked his wife’s stomach and his as yet unborn son, Van Veeteren left Elizabeth Heerenmacht to allow her to say farewell to her murdered niece down in the cold-storage room at Sorbinowo hospital, to which the battered body had just been moved after two and a half days at the forensic clinic in Rembork.
Elizabeth Heerenmacht was not a member of the Pure Life church – although after spending half an hour in her company the chief inspector found it hard to understand why not. She seemed to have all the qualifications, to put it mildly: that was the harsh conclusion he had drawn, unfortunately.
But perhaps that was a bit unfair, given the nature of this grim and roasting-hot day. It was difficult not to be prejudiced when the sweat was flowing freely, then froze to ice down in the mortuary before starting to pour off him again when he emerged once more into the sun.
Earlier in the morning he had devoted quite a lot of time to another woman – the mysterious Ewa Siguera. At least, he wanted to convince himself that she was mysterious, that there was just as much mystery about her in reality as there was about her name and her smile in the photograph Przebuda had taken of her the previous summer.
Rubbish, he then thought in a moment of pungent self-criticism. That kind of thinking would be more appropriate in a novel.
But what the hell was one supposed to do? he thought. The less contact you had with the opposite sex, the more fond you grew of it – or of certain examples of it, anyway. Nothing new about that.
He had been advised by the registration authorities that Ewa Siguera did not live in Stamberg. He had also asked Lauremaa and Tolltse to confront the confirmation candidates with her photograph, but as far as he could tell nobody had come up with any helpful information.
The plot thickens, he thought with a feeling of bitter self-satisfaction. Then he removed a chewed-up toothpick from his mouth and shook his head. Oh shit! he exclaimed, I’m a travesty of a police detective! Of myself. Am I looking for a murderer, or for a woman? In the warmed-up cold sweat on my face? One with chestnut-brown hair…?
After an hour’s fruitless search, he called Reinhart and passed the task on to him. Asked him to track down Ewa Siguera and report back the moment he found her. There had been other possible paths to follow, of course, but as he suspected that the inspector was simply twiddling his thumbs while waiting for his holiday to begin – or devoting himself to his beautiful and newly married wife – he might as well be made to do something to earn his wages.
Reinhart had little in the way of objections. He promised loyally to get in touch as soon as he discovered anything. Within the next twenty-four hours at most.
So his assumptions about Reinhart’s thumbs and his wife had been an accurate guess, the chief inspector thought.
‘And how are things with the bloodhound himself?’ Reinhart had asked. ‘Sunbathing, swimming and fishing all day long, eh?’
‘You’ve forgotten the wine and the women,’ Van Veeteren informed him.
He began with the Finghers, as he could see that they were at home.
He only managed to say hello to Mrs Fingher, a sinewy farmer’s wife in her fifties – she was on her way to look after a grandchild, she announced, as she hurried past him in the direction of an old, hand-painted Trotta parked on the road outside the house – but both Mr Fingher and his son Wim seemed to have plenty of time for a chat.