‘Yes,’ said Reinhart. ‘Did he touch you?’
‘Touch me? No, he was just helping me to find my hair-slide. This.’
She waved something sky-blue. The chief inspector nodded.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘But shouldn’t you be having breakfast now? Off you go!’
‘All right. Bye-bye!’
They watched the girls slowly ambling towards the red building a little further along the shore.
‘Can I borrow your diving mask now?’ they heard the dark-haired girl ask. ‘I was waiting all the time, and you promised…’
‘Yes, of course,’ said the blonde cheerfully, setting up her hair with a well-practised movement. ‘Let’s have breakfast first, though.’
The chief inspector cleared his throat and went to sit down in the boat.
‘That’s that, then,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to cast off.’
Kluuge tried to glare into the telephone receiver.
It was three in the afternoon, he was in bed and Deborah was massaging his shoulders and chest. She was sitting astride him, and he could feel the baby pressing up against his own stomach. It was a divinely inspired moment, in both a spiritual and physical sense, no doubt about that. And then Chief of Police Malijsen interrupted it with a telephone call!
‘Why the hell didn’t you let me know?’ he screeched. ‘You ought to have known that you couldn’t handle a situation like this on your own. It was just an amazing stroke of luck that it didn’t end in chaos! I shall make sure personally that you get…’
Kluuge placed the receiver under the pillow and thought for three seconds. Then he took it out again.
‘Shut your trap, you stupid bugger!’ he said, and hung up.
‘Well done,’ said Deborah.
40
As far as he could recall, those present were the same as last time, and it was a while before he was alone with the editor.
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Przebuda. ‘I expect you’ve seen it before?’
Van Veeteren nodded.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I can’t say that Mazursky is one of my favourites, but The Tempest is one of his best.’
‘I agree entirely,’ said Przebuda. ‘Three cheers for The Tempest. There’s something special about Crete as well.’
‘There certainly is,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
Przebuda shook his head demonstratively. Then he smiled.
‘No chance,’ he said. ‘But I have a decent meal up my sleeve, and a few good wines. A Margaux ’71 and a Mersault.’
‘Why are we hanging around here, then?’ wondered the chief inspector.
‘Case closed, I take it?’ assumed Przebuda after the mushroom pasty, veal medallions in a lemon sauce, watercress salad and one and a half bottles of wine.
‘Yes,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Case closed. A very nasty business. There are no extenuating circumstances when children are attacked. And heaven remains silent.’
‘And heaven remains silent,’ echoed Przebuda. ‘Yes, it tends to do that. How did you work it out? That he was the one, I mean?’
The chief inspector leaned back and paused for a few moments before answering.
‘It was in the telephone directory,’ he said eventually.
‘The telephone directory?’
‘Yes. Do you remember Ewa Siguera?’
The editor hesitated.
‘Er, that woman in the photograph?’
‘Yes. Her name wasn’t Siguera. It was Figuera. You’d heard wrongly. Or written it down wrongly.’
‘Good God,’ said Przebuda and froze, his glass halfway to his mouth. ‘You surely don’t mean that if…’
The chief inspector shook his head.
‘No. Don’t worry. The dead were already dead. It’s just that things might have gone a bit faster.’
Mind you, on second thoughts he realized that this wasn’t actually the case. The reverse was more likely in fact. If he’d had the right name from the start, he might well never have caught on to the realities. Not in time, anyway – in time to prevent that girl with the blonde hair and the hairslide from… No, he preferred not to imagine what might have happened.
Przebuda was sitting there in silence, and seemed to be meditating.
‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘What the devil had Ewa Siguera – sorry, Figuera – to do with Wim Fingher?’
‘Nothing,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Nothing at all. This really is an excellent wine. It’s so rare to find this very dry aftertaste penetrating even under the tongue…’
‘I have another bottle,’ said Przebuda. ‘Cheers!’
They drank.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing at all, as I said,’ the chief inspector resumed. ‘But when I was preparing to call Figuera, I came across the name Fingher on the same page. The same column, in fact, just a couple of lines further down. It’s not exactly a common name…’
Przebuda tried to nod and shake his head at the same time.
‘Anyway, then I remembered the two comments I’d heard when I called on them the second time, on the Thursday. It must have been Mathias Fingher – the father, that is – who said both of them. He said that they only had one son, and he mentioned that his wife was going to visit a grandchild. Or it could have been her who said that.’
Przebuda said nothing, but toyed with his glass.
‘Nevertheless…?’ he said eventually. ‘It can’t have been a very convincing indication, surely? Why should he be a murderer, just because he’d been married and had a daughter?’
The chief inspector shrugged.
‘I seem to recall that the last time we met, my editor friend spoke warmly about something called intuition. His wife had retained his name – she didn’t know why, but it acquired a significance in the end.’
‘Well I’ll be damned!’ said Przebuda after another pause. ‘It gives the impression of having been stage-managed. Who was this Ewa Figuera, then?’
Van Veeteren lit a cigarette.
‘She was a friend of one of the three women out at the camp,’ he said. ‘She has nothing at all to do with the Pure Life. She just happened to be visiting them for one day only last summer, and…’
‘And that was when I was there and took the picture,’ said Przebuda. ‘It’s absolutely amazing, because if…’
He fell silent and stared up at the ceiling, as if searching for an answer among the dark recesses.
‘… If I hadn’t shown you that picture, and all the rest of it. What an amazing coincidence!’
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence,’ said the chief inspector. ‘This was merely one of the threads leading us to the goal. There are hundreds of other possible threads. If life is a tree, it shouldn’t make all that much of a difference if you happen to land up on one particular branch or any other – if you’re looking for the root, that is. Or whatever else it is you’re looking for.’
Przebuda thought that over for a while.
‘I’ll go and fetch that other bottle,’ he said in due course.
‘What about the women?’ asked Przebuda a little later. ‘Those tight-lipped priestesses – why the hell did they refuse to say anything?’
‘They thought that was the party line,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Presumably Yellinek gagged them in connection with the disappearance of the other girl, before he was murdered himself and vanished into thin air. And then I suppose it was just a question of following the prophet’s word. As usual, you might say. Both Mohammed and Christ have been dead for quite a long time, if I’m not much mistaken.’
Przebuda smiled.
‘How are they now? The women, I mean.’
Van Veeteren hesitated for a moment.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘Two of them left Wolgershuus together this afternoon. The third one, Madeleine Zander, has apparently asked to stay on.’
‘Stay on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah well, perhaps that indicates that she suspects she’s not right in the head,’ muttered Przebuda as he squeezed the last drops out of the final bottle of Burgundy.
‘What about Wim?’ he asked. ‘Wim Fingher?’
The chief inspector shrugged again.
‘A case for the medics, I should think. It’s odd that he can be more or less normal nearly all the time… As far as we know he’s only attacked his own daughter, and then these two. I can’t say if he’ll end up in jail or in a loony bin. I’m not even sure what I think myself.’