Moreno wrote a tick after Marie-Louise Leverkuhn. And a question mark after Else Van Eck.
Herr Van Eck had returned from the police station at about half past one in a rather pathetic state, and Moreno ticked him as well.
That left the athletic lovers Menakdise and de Booning on the first floor, and herr Engel and fröken Mathisen on the second. Viewed dispassionately these four were not yet involved in the case. Neutral observers (question mark again) and possible witnesses.
She had started with the young couple.
Or rather, with Filippa de Booning, as Tobose Menakdise was studying medicine and had lectures all day. However, fröken de Booning promised to ask him when he came home if he had seen or heard anything in connection with the caretaker’s wife that could throw some light on her disappearance. She herself had nothing to contribute. She had been at home most of Wednesday, revising for an imminent exam on cultural anthropology, but she hadn’t seen any sign of fru Van Eck at all.
‘Thank goodness,’ she added, then bit her tongue. ‘Oh, sorry about that, but she always pays us special attention. I take it you know why?’
Moreno smiled and nodded. She felt a sudden shooting pain in her inside thigh as she momentarily envisaged the red-headed and very white-skinned Filippa in her sexual wrestling match with her Tobose who – if the framed photograph in the hall was to be believed – was blacker than the blackest black.
You two are still alive, she thought. Congratulations.
Ruben Engel had had just as little to contribute – even less if you took the shooting pain into consideration. He had felt out of sorts and spent the whole of Wednesday in bed, he explained. Not least the evening. Moreno looked around, and drew the provisional conclusion that it might have been due to his taking the wrong medication. If you didn’t feel too well in the morning, it presumably didn’t help if you then proceeded to swig glass after glass of claret, beer and mulled wine for the rest of the day. Engel also seemed to be very upset about what was going on elsewhere in the building, she noted, and she had difficulty in ignoring his moaning and groaning about law and order and moral decadence. But there were obvious elements of the dirty old man in his outpourings: there was little doubt that he did his best to drag out her visit for as long as possible. She declined his offer of coffee, mulled wine and gin, and eventually managed to extricate herself by half-promising to keep him informed about how the case was developing. In person.
What an unpleasant old fart, she thought when she finally succeeded in leaving his flat.
But then, she told herself after a few seconds, it can’t be all that much fun being old, lonely and smelly.
No fun at all, presumably.
The only possible gleam of light came from fröken Mathisen, who Moreno thought seemed very reminiscent in appearance of a cream puff pastry. Big, spongy and rather delicious. What Mathisen had to say was perhaps nothing to write home about, but what she was quite clear over was that she had gone out at around seven o’clock on Wednesday evening – a few minutes past, if she remembered rightly – and that she was pretty sure that she had heard noises coming from the caretaker’s flat as she walked past the door. She couldn’t be more precise about what sort of sounds they were, apart from being sure that it seemed as if somebody was busy doing something in the hall – a somebody who must have been fru Van Eck, seeing as her husband was over at Riitmeeterska, painting designs onto porcelain ornaments.
Moreno read through her notes on this conversation as well, and ticked it off together with the remaining names – de Booning, Engel and Mathisen.
There was not much more to add. Krause had come to relieve her at about noon, and spent the afternoon interrogating the neighbours. That was not too complicated as fru Van Eck had been a well-known figure in the locality.
Sure enough, she had been to three of the shops in Kolderplejn, had left the last of them at about a quarter to six and been seen by at least two witnesses walking back home. So it was not difficult to make a timetable for what seemed to be the crucial part of Wednesday evening:
c. 18.00 Fru Van Eck arrives back home
c. 19.00 Fru Van Eck is still at home (in the hall)
c. 20.00 Fru Van Eck has disappeared
It could possibly be added that none of Krause’s many witnesses had seen the very substantial caretaker’s wife after six p.m.
Moreno contemplated her summary. Brilliant detective work! she concluded, and closed her notebook.
Münster and Jung took it in turns with Arnold Van Eck.
Bearing in mind developments at Kolderweg, Hiller had agreed to release both Rooth and Jung and transfer them to the Leverkuhn case, in so far as Münster needed them. The serial rapist in Linzhuisen had been lying low for over two months, and that investigation had come to a standstill.
Despite persistent efforts, mainly by Jung – there was something about Arnold Van Eck’s character that made Münster reluctant to interrogate him and even made him angry (perhaps it was that image of the run-over kitten spooking him again) – they did not succeed in extracting much information over and above what had emerged during the conversation at the kitchen table. Their picture of the somewhat peculiar and childless marriage became a little clearer, but on the whole no progress was made regarding the actual disappearance of the wife. No matter how hard Jung tried to penetrate the relationship and the shared lives of the couple, Van Eck was unable to produce even a hint of an explanation as to why his wife would have left him voluntarily.
If she had done so thirty or forty years ago, it would of course have been the most natural thing in the world – even Van Eck himself could see that. But now – why leave him now?
And so, both Münster and Jung concluded, she had not done so. There must be some other explanation. And a pretty powerful one at that: fru Van Eck was not the sort of woman you could knock over with a feather duster, as Jung put it before leaving.
When he was alone in his office Münster listened to the whole tape again, and if he were to be honest he thought it sounded, at least in part, more like a therapeutical conversation than an interrogation.
But be that as it may, the fact remained: Else Van Eck, 182 centimetres tall, weight 94 kilos, 65 years old, had disappeared. Probably wearing a bluish pepper-and-salt coat, well-fitting brown ENOC shoes (size 43), various other items and a black felt hat. She had left her home at some time between seven and eight p.m. (the precise time had been established with the aid of Constable Krause, who had informed them of fröken Mathisen’s observations) on Wednesday evening.
The Wanted message was sent out as early as two o’clock, but by five o’clock, when Münster was preparing to go home, there had still been no response from that great detective, the general public.
Perhaps it had been over-optimistic to expect otherwise. Perhaps they had a better chance of receiving a tip following the feeler Krause had sent out into the underworld regarding Leverkuhn, but they had so far drawn a blank there as well. The informant Adolf Bosch had turned up shortly after three, delivered his report and been paid his 200 euros (albeit in reverse order: Bosch was not born yesterday) – and the result of his dodgy researches had been aptly summed up by his own words:
‘Not a thing, Constable Krause, not a fucking thing!’
Before going home for the night Münster allowed himself half an hour’s introspection in his office. He locked the door. Switched off the light. Wheeled his desk chair over to the window and put his feet up on the windowsill.