The Unlucky Lottery Page 20

  Ulrike thought for a moment.

  ‘It sounds plausible,’ she said. ‘But I’m not properly awake.’

  ‘There are so many patterns,’ Van Veeteren continued. ‘We get so much information that we generally just let it flash over our heads. A thousand kilos of stimuli every second. We don’t have time to work on them. This is all obvious, but all I really understand is obvious, I have to admit.’

  ‘Dreams?’ said Ulrike.

  ‘For example. But hell’s bells! A dagger hovering over Intendent Münster! You’re not going to tell me that that’s a coincidence? He’s in danger, obviously, even a child can understand that.’

  ‘You thought it was Erich,’ Ulrike pointed out.

  Van Veeteren sighed.

  ‘Erich has been in the danger zone for as long as I can remember,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t be anything new.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  Van Veeteren had to think that over.

  ‘Twenty-six,’ he said. ‘It’s about time I stopped worrying about him.’

  Ulrike shook her head.

  ‘Why should you do that?’ she asked. ‘Once your child, always your child. Even if they’re aged a hundred.’

  Van Veeteren observed her for a while in silence. Felt the warm soles of her feet against his legs. Good God, he thought. This woman . . .

  It was only the fourth or fifth time they had spent a whole night together, and now, just as on all the previous occasions, he was forced to ask himself why it didn’t happen rather more often. As far as he could tell he didn’t seem to be causing her all that much suffering, so why be so damned cautious? Be as unabashed as a hermit. Not as doubtful as a donkey. As far as he was concerned . . . well, as far as he was concerned he wasn’t suffering in the least.

  He looked out of the window at a New Year’s Day that seemed very uncertain. It had been raining during the night, and the sky and the earth seemed to be conjoined by a blue-grey light that certainly didn’t intend to keep darkness at bay for many hours. It struck him that there were grounds for thinking the sun had been extinguished at some point in November – he couldn’t recall seeing it since then, at least.

  ‘Lovely weather,’ he said. ‘Shall we go back to bed for a while?’

  ‘A good idea,’ said Ulrike Fremdli.

  When they woke up the next time it was two o’clock.

  ‘When are your children due?’ he asked in horror.

  ‘This evening,’ she said. ‘They’re not dangerous.’

  ‘My solicitude concerns them and nothing else,’ said Van Veeteren, sitting up. ‘I don’t want to give them a shock, the first thing I do in the new year.’

  Ulrike pulled him back down onto the bed.

  ‘You’re staying,’ she said. ‘They’re grown-up now and have flown the nest, both of them. And they’ve seen a thing or two.’

  Van Veeteren pondered.

  ‘Why do we have weekdays when we could have exclusively Sundays?’ he asked slyly.

  Ulrike furrowed her brow, then sat astride him.

  ‘Don’t think I’m in a hurry,’ she said. ‘But one Sunday every other month is on the thin side.’

  Van Veeteren stretched out his hands and let her heavy breasts rest on them.

  ‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll stay then. I’ll soon be sixty, so maybe it’s time to tie up a few loose ends.’

  ‘The year is starting off well,’ said Ulrike.

  ‘It could have started worse,’ said Van Veeteren.

  But later, as he lay in bed waiting for her to finish in the bathroom, his thoughts reverted to last night’s dream.

  Erich? he thought. Münster? Intendent Münster?

  Is this a dagger I see before me?

  Incomprehensible.

  At least for somebody who generally only comprehends a tiny part that is obvious.

  31

  ‘A Happy New Year,’ said Chief of Police Hiller, adjusting his tie. ‘Good to see you back, Reinhart. We all hope that your leave of absence did you good.’

  ‘Thank you, everybody,’ said Reinhart. ‘Yes, it was relatively bearable. But I don’t understand why I’m being lumbered with this case. There seem to be enough people working on it already. Don’t tell me you’ve got stuck?’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Hiller. ‘I think we’ll leave it to Intendent Münster to fill you in on that score.’

  Münster took out his notebook and looked round the table. Reinhart was right, that couldn’t be denied. There suddenly seemed to be a lot of officers on the case. Himself. Rooth and Heinemann. Jung and Moreno. And now Reinhart as well. Not counting Hiller, of course.

  ‘I suggest we go through what has happened since that find out in Weyler’s Woods,’ said Münster. ‘It will do no harm for us all to get an overview, and Reinhart can also become aware of all the facts.’

  Hiller nodded encouragingly, and made clicking noises with the new Ballograph pen he’d been given as a Christmas present.

  ‘Right, it was the 21st of December when a young girl, Vera Kretschke, found that human head, hidden in a plastic carrier bag. It was pretty clear from early on that it belonged to Else Van Eck, who had been missing since the end of October. Her husband, Arnold Van Eck, identified her straight away: it was a bit too much for him, and he’s been in hospital out at Majorna ever since . . .’

  ‘Poor bastard,’ said Reinhart.

  ‘Apparently he hasn’t opened his mouth for a week,’ said Moreno.

  ‘During the eleven days that have passed since then we’ve found three more carrier bags, but she’s still not complete, as it were. Her left leg and part of her trunk are still missing – her pelvis, to be more precise. Two more bags, presumably. Twelve officers are still searching, but it’s not an easy task, of course, even if we assume that the whole lot was dumped in Weyler’s Woods. Nothing has been buried so far: the murderer just covered the bags up as best he could, with leaves and twigs and suchlike.

  ‘He simply didn’t have a spade,’ said Rooth. ‘Careless type.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ said Münster. ‘In any case, according to Meusse she’s been dead for up to two months, so there’s nothing to suggest that she wasn’t murdered the same night as she disappeared . . . the 29th or soon after. The butchery is not too badly done – I’m quoting Meusse – and could well have been done by somebody with a certain amount of professional skill, he says, although the tools used were of poorish quality. An ordinary, fairly blunt carving knife or something similar. Plus a cleaver, presumably. The actual cause of death seems to have been several powerful blows to the head with a heavy instrument. The parietal bone was well and truly smashed, and bits of bone penetrated the brain; but the killer probably also severed the carotid artery before he started cutting her up . . . Hrrm. As for the plastic carrier bags, they are widely available and apparently they can be bought by the roll in seven out of ten grocer’s shops or supermarkets. The only thing that might be worth noting is that they were yellow. You can buy dark green ones of the same type, and of course using them would have been preferable if you didn’t want them to be easily found.’

  ‘He probably didn’t have any others at home,’ said Rooth.

  ‘It might be as simple as that,’ Münster agreed. ‘All the body parts found so far have been naked. No clothes, no other details that could have left clues. Fingerprints are out of the question, of course, given the length of time that’s passed.’

  He paused and looked round the table again.

  ‘It won’t help us much even if we do find the missing parts,’ said Jung.

  ‘No,’ said Rooth. ‘Presumably not. But it’s no fun sitting with a puzzle that has two pieces missing.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a fun puzzle, no matter what,’ said Moreno.

  ‘It seems not,’ said Reinhart. ‘What do you have in the way of suspicions?’

  There was silence for a few seconds, broken only by the clicking of the chief of police’s new pen.

  ‘Let
’s take the other stuff we know first,’ said Münster, ‘and then we can start speculating. We’ve spoken to quite a lot of people, mainly neighbours in the same building – there isn’t much in the way of relatives and friends – but to sum that up, it has to be said that we haven’t found out very much. Fru Van Eck disappeared during the evening of Wednesday, the 29th of October, while her husband was attending a course at the Riitmeeterska school. She was last seen shortly after six o’clock that evening, one of the neighbours thinks she heard her in the flat at around seven, but she wasn’t there when Arnold Van Eck got home at eight o’clock. No one has been able to tell us any more than that.’

  ‘Could it be one of them?’ wondered Reinhart. ‘The neighbours, I mean. And is it certain that she was the one in the flat at seven o’clock?’

  ‘It could have been one of the other people in the building, of course,’ said Münster. ‘Hypothetically, at least. I think it’s best to discuss that later, when we start looking at links with the other case – Waldemar Leverkuhn. But as for the person who was heard inside the flat, it could have been anybody at all.’

  ‘The murderer, for instance?’ said Reinhart.

  ‘For instance,’ said Münster.

  ‘These Leverkuhns?’ wondered Reinhart.

  Münster sighed and turned over a page.

  ‘I don’t really know, to be honest,’ he said. ‘On the surface it all seems crystal clear . . .’

  ‘Some surfaces can be both crystal clear and paper thin,’ said Reinhart. ‘I’ve been following it to some extent in the newspapers, but we all know how they report things.’

  ‘Start from the beginning,’ said the chief of police.

  ‘Saturday, the 25th of October,’ said Münster. ‘That’s when it all begins. Fru Leverkuhn comes home and finds her husband stabbed to death in his bed. We launch an investigation, of course, and after ten days she phones us and confesses to having done it herself. In an attack of anger. We spend a week interrogating her thoroughly, and before long both we and the prosecutor think we have enough evidence. Anyway, things then follow the usual path, the trial begins in the middle of December and it’s over after three or four days. Nothing remarkable. The prosecutor presses for murder, the defence for manslaughter. While waiting for the verdict, on Sunday the 21st, she hangs herself in her cell . . . She plaits a rope from strips of blanket and manages to hook it onto a jutting-out piece of pipe in a corner of her cell. Obviously, quite a lot has been said about how that could come about, so perhaps we don’t need to go into it here. She’s left a suicide note as well, in which she wrote that she had decided to take her own life in view of the circumstances.’

  ‘The circumstances?’ said Reinhart. ‘What bloody circumstances?’

  ‘That she’d killed her husband, and had nothing to look forward to apart from several years behind bars,’ said Moreno.

  ‘It’s not exactly difficult to understand her motive,’ said Münster. ‘But what is difficult to explain is why she waited so long. Why she allowed herself to be arrested and charged and put on show in court before putting an end to it all.’

  ‘Didn’t she write anything about that in the letter?’ wondered Reinhart.

  Münster shook his head.

  ‘No. It was just a few lines, and of course you can’t expect logical reasoning. She must have been pretty exhausted mentally, and a decision like that must take a lot of time to come to, I’d have thought.’

  ‘You’d think so,’ said Rooth.

  Heinemann cleared his throat and put his glasses on the table.

  ‘I’ve spoken to a woman by the name of Regine Svendsen,’ he began pensively. ‘A former colleague of fru Leverkuhn’s. We spoke about precisely these psychological aspects. She seems to have known her quite well – until a few years ago, at least. It’s obviously risky to draw conclusions in cases like this, and she was careful to stress that—’

  ‘Well, what did she say?’ Rooth cut in. ‘If we cut out the crap.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Heinemann. ‘You could sum up the gist by saying that fru Leverkuhn was a very strong woman. Quite capable of doing all kinds of things. There was a sort of incorruptibility about her, according to fru Svendsen. Or something of the sort, at least.’

  ‘Really?’ said Münster. ‘Well, obviously she has displayed an ability to take action in this case, there’s no denying that.’

  ‘Have you found any diaries?’ Heinemann asked.

  ‘Diaries?’ Münster repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ said Heinemann. ‘I spoke to this woman only yesterday – she’d been away, so I haven’t been able to report on it until now. Anyway, she claims that Marie-Louise Leverkuhn has kept a diary all her life, and if that’s the case and we could manage to take a look at it – or them – well, maybe we could get some insight into quite a lot of things . . .’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Hiller cleared his throat.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘I suggest you go and look for these diaries – it shouldn’t be too difficult, surely?’

  Münster looked at Moreno.

  ‘We’ve . . . Obviously we’ve searched Leverkuhn’s flat,’ said Moreno. ‘But we weren’t looking for diaries.’

  ‘According to fru Svendsen there should be eight to ten of them,’ said Heinemann. ‘She’s seen them, but never read them, of course. Ordinary notebooks with black oilcloth covers, apparently. Each one covering three or four years. Just short notes, presumably.’

  ‘That would cover no more than about thirty years,’ said Reinhart. ‘I thought she was older than that?’

  Heinemann shrugged.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘But I thought it was worth mentioning, anyway.’

  Münster made a note and thought about it, but hadn’t reached any conclusion before the chief of police once again took command.

  ‘Go there and start looking!’ he said. ‘Search the whole damned flat, and dig them out. The place is still under guard, I take it? That wouldn’t be unusual, surely?’

  ‘Not unusual at all,’ said Münster with a sigh. ‘Obviously. I don’t think she had a notebook with her while she was under arrest in any case – but she might have stopped keeping a diary in her old age, perhaps. How long is it since this Regine Svendsen was last in touch with her?’

  ‘About five years,’ said Heinemann. ‘They worked together at Lippmann’s.’

  Reinhart had been filling his pipe for several minutes, under Hiller’s stern gaze. Now he put it in his mouth, leaned back on his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

  ‘The link, what about that detail?’ he said. ‘And wasn’t there somebody else who came to grief?’

  Münster sighed again.

  ‘Absolutely right,’ he said. ‘We have a certain Felix Bonger who’s disappeared as well. One of Leverkuhn’s mates. He hasn’t been seen since the night Leverkuhn was killed.’

  But now Chief of Police Hiller had had enough. He stopped observing Reinhart’s tobacco activities and tapped demonstratively on the table with his Ballograph.

  ‘Now listen here,’ he said. ‘You must damned well make up your minds whether these cases are linked or not – I thought we’d already done that, as a matter of fact. Is there anything – anything at all! – to suggest that Leverkuhn’s and fru Van Eck’s deaths are connected in any way?’

  ‘Well,’ said Münster, ‘one has to say it’s not all that usual for two people living in the same building to be murdered within only a few days of each other, and—’

  ‘I regard the Leverkuhn case as finished and done with!’ interrupted Hiller. ‘At least as long as nothing completely new comes to light. What we have to do now is to find out who murdered Else Van Eck. Mind you, if it was fru Leverkuhn who did her in as well, that would suit me down to the ground.’

  ‘A neat solution,’ said Reinhart. ‘The chief of police ought to have become a police officer.’

  That put Hiller off for a moment, but then he continued with undiminished authori
ty:

  ‘As for this Bonger character, he’s disappeared, and I take it for granted that we shall pursue the same procedures as we would for any other similar case – routine missing person procedures, that is.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Incidentally, I have a meeting in five minutes.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have a smoking break,’ said Reinhart. ‘We’re about due for one.’

  ‘Does anybody else wish to say anything?’ asked Münster diplomatically.

  ‘Personally, I could do with a cup of coffee,’ said Rooth.

  ‘You look a bit tired,’ said Moreno, closing the door.

  ‘That’s probably because I am a bit tired,’ said Münster. ‘I was supposed to be off for seven days over the holidays: I was actually off for two and a half.’

  ‘Not much fun when you have a family, I suppose.’

  Münster pulled a face,

  ‘Yes, having a family is great. It’s all this bloody work that isn’t so great. It makes you lose heart.’

  Moreno sat down opposite him, and waited for him to continue.

  ‘How are things with you?’ Münster said instead.

  ‘Odd,’ said Moreno after a short pause.

  ‘Odd?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Yes, odd. But okay, basically. Does a heartless intendent have the strength to listen? It’ll only take half a minute.’