Van Veeteren shook his head.
“I just thought I’d take a look. Have you abandoned the fingertip search now?”
“Yes,” said le Houde. “We had orders to that effect. Seems fair enough. Not much hope of anything turning up, I don’t suppose.”
“Have you found anything?”
Le Houde gave a laugh. Took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.
“Quite a lot,” he said, pointing at a collection of black plastic sacks in the patrol wagon with the back doors open. “Six of those. We’ve collected everything that didn’t ought to be in a forest…from an area equal to about twenty soccer fields. It’ll be fun going through it all.”
“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren.
“We’ll be sending a bill to Behren’s Public Cleansing Department. It’s their job after all.”
“Do that,” said Van Veeteren. “Anyway, I’ll have a scout come around.”
“Good luck,” said le Houde, closing the doors. “We’ll be in touch.”
He followed the path. That was where the group from the day nursery had walked, if he understood it rightly. It wasn’t much of a path, mind you, not more than a couple of feet wide, full of roots and sharp stones and all kinds of bumps and potholes. The local police were doubtless right: The murderer had come from a different direction. The probability was that he’d parked on the bridle path on the other side of the little ridge that ran right through the woods—then he must have carried, or dragged, his load fifty or sixty yards through the undergrowth, uphill. The woods were not very well maintained, it was fair to say—so it was quite a task. Unless there had been more than one person involved, the murderer must have been pretty big and strong. Hardly a woman, nor an elderly man: Surely that was a reasonable conclusion to draw?
He reached the spot. The red and white tape still cordoned off the relevant stretch of ditch, but there were no longer any guards on duty. He stopped three or four yards short of the tape and spent half a minute studying the grim plot, wishing he had a cigarette.
Then he stepped over the ditch and made his way toward the bridle path. The murderer’s route, in all probability. It took him seven or eight minutes and resulted in several scratches on his face and hands.
If we’d found him right away, he thought, we could have followed his route inch by inch.
That was impossible now, of course.
Impossible, and not of much interest either, presumably. If they ever did get to the bottom of this, a few broken twigs weren’t going to make any difference. There was no doubt at all that as things stood now, this crime and its perpetrator were far, far away from their grasp. In both time and space.
Not to mention the victim.
He started walking toward the village again.
It suddenly struck him: What if nobody misses him? What if nobody has noticed that he’s disappeared?
Nobody at all.
The thought stayed with him. And if that little fat girl hadn’t happened to see him, years could have passed by without anybody missing him. Or finding him. It could have been an eternity. And meanwhile the process of decay and all the rest of it would have wiped out all trace of him. Why not?
Apart from the odd bone, of course. And a grinning skull. Yorick, where are those hanging lips…. No, come to think of it, there was no head.
And nobody would have needed to lift a finger.
A totally unnoticed death.
It was not a pleasant thought. He tried to dismiss it, but the only thing that replaced it was the clinically lit operating table and a limp, anesthetized body—his own.
And the stranger dressed in green, brandishing razor-sharp knives over his stomach.
He quickened his pace. Darkness had started to fall, and twenty minutes later as he stood outside the railroad station buying a pack of cigarettes, he also felt the first drop of rain on his hand.
7
After some deliberation Rooth decided to phone rather than call round in person. It was more than ten miles to Blochberg and it was nearly half past seven.
Afterward, when he replaced the receiver, he was relieved to think that at least the woman at the other end of the line didn’t know what he looked like. With a bit of luck, she wouldn’t be sure of his name either: He hoped that he had managed to mumble it so indistinctly that she hadn’t picked it up.
It had not been a successful telephone call.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Menhevern?”
“Marie-Louise Menhevern, yes.”
The voice was shrill and discouraging.
“My name is Rooth, from the Maardam police. I’m calling in connection with a missing person. You telephoned us last June to inform us that, unfortunately, your husband seemed to have vanished, is that right?”
“No. I never said anything about it being unfortunate. I merely said he’d disappeared.”
“In June 1993?”
“Precisely.”
“Has he come back home?”
“No.”
“You haven’t had any sign of life from him?”
“No. If I had, I’d have informed the police, of course.”
“And you have no idea what’s become of him?”
“Well, I assume he’s run off with another woman and is hidden away somewhere. That’s the type he is.”
“Really? Where might he be, do you think?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m sitting here watching the telly, constable. Are you sure you’re from the police, come to that?”
“Of course.”
“What do you want, then? Have you found him?”
“That depends,” said Rooth. “How many testicles did he have?”
“What the hell was that you said?”
“Er, well, I mean, most men have two, obviously…. He hasn’t had an operation and lost one, or something like that?”
“Hang on, I’m going to have this call traced.”
“But Mrs. Menhevern, please, it’s not what you think….”
“You are the worst sort, do you know that? You don’t even dare to come and look me in the eye. Telephone pig! If I could lay my hands on you I’d…”
Rooth terminated the call in horror. Sat there for half a minute without moving. As if the slightest careless move might give him away. Stared out of the window as darkness began to fall over the town.
No, he thought, I’m no good with women. That’s all there is to it.
Then he decided to remove Claus Menhevern from the list of possible victims. Which meant there was only one left.
Münster parked outside the dilapidated apartment block on Armastenstraat. Lingered in the car before walking over the street and venturing in through the outside door. An unmistakable stench of cat piss hovered over the stairs, and large lumps of plaster had given up all hope of clinging on to the walls, leaving gaping holes. There was no mention of a Pierre Kohler on the list of tenants in the hallway, but that seemed to be as unreliable as the rest of the building and so he decided to investigate what it said on the doors.
He hit the jackpot on the fourth floor.
Pierre Kohler
Margite Delling
Jürg Eschenmaa
Dolomite Kazaj
it said on a handwritten scrap of paper pinned above the letter slot.
He rang the bell. Nothing happened—presumably it wasn’t working. He knocked several times instead. After almost a minute he heard footsteps and the door was opened by a woman in her fifties. She had a mauve dressing gown wrapped loosely round her overweight body, and she eyed Münster critically up and down.
She was evidently unimpressed by what she saw.
So was Münster.
“I’m from the Maardam police,” he said, flashing his ID for a tenth of a second. “It’s about a missing person. May I come in?”
“Not without a warrant,” said the woman.