“Nevertheless, we’ve pinned down an overall picture that seems to hold water. Ninety-five percent, in any case. The murderer appeared in the office a few minutes past five. Asked about the patient Janek Mitter. Said she was a colleague of his, and would like to see him. Nothing unusual about that. Mitter had had several visits earlier.”
“Did he use the word ‘colleague’?” Van Veeteren asked.
“Yes, they’re sure about that. There were two people in reception when she turned up.”
“And both of them have forgotten all about her?” said Reinhart. “Great.”
“Well, it was only one of them who handed over to the night shift later,” said Rooth. “We asked all sorts of questions about the pitch of this person’s voice, of course, and it seems highly likely that it was a man. He found it necessary to ask the way several more times, and everybody had the impression that there was something odd about the voice.”
“Okay,” said Van Veeteren. “We’ve established that it was a man. Go on!”
“As for where he hid himself,” said deBries, “we don’t really know a thing. There are plenty of possibilities-to be precise, sixteen places that weren’t locked: storerooms, lavatories, communal rooms, and no end of cupboards.”
“I had the impression that everything was locked up, apart from the patients,” Reinhart said.
“No, that’s not true,” said Rooth. “But whatever, we haven’t found any clues at all.”
“I don’t think that’s very important,” said Van Veeteren.
“What about the letter?”
Rooth thumbed through his notebook.
“We’ve checked what Mitter was up to that Monday, from the moment he woke up to the time when he handed over the letter to Ingrun.”
“Ingrun?”
“That’s the name of the attendant. He received the letter at precisely five minutes past two. We tried to discover if Mitter could have checked a telephone directory before he started writing-bearing in mind the address, of course. .”
“Tell us about the time after lunch,” said Van Veeteren.
“That will suffice.”
“Yes, probably. We have an interesting piece of information regarding the morning, but we can come back to that later.
Anyway, there’s a telephone kiosk for the use of patients on every floor. And in every kiosk there’s a directory for the local district. Mitter finishes his lunch in the dining room at about a quarter past one, then he sits in the smoking room with several other patients and a few attendants. Then, according to a couple of witnesses, he goes to the lavatory. Comes out again a few minutes after half past. Then there’s a bit of a gap. Some maintain that he goes back to his room for a while, others say that he went straight to the office to collect what he needed to write his letter, and that he had to wait for a few minutes. In any case, Ingrun turns up at the office at a quarter to two. He finds Mitter waiting there, produces a pen, some paper, and an envelope, and takes Mitter with him to the dayroom. He stands outside for the ten minutes it takes Mitter to write the letter; he stays outside because he wants to smoke in peace and quiet. He’s just finished his coffee in the staff canteen.”
“Did Mitter have a note with him?” asked Munster.
“No,” said deBries. “We pressed Ingrun hard on that point.
I suppose you could say that he’s not the most gifted of all the people we questioned, but we’re as sure as you could expect us to be. Mitter had no papers, apart from what he was given by Ingrun.”
“Did this clown notice if Mitter wrote the letter first, or the envelope?” Van Veeteren asked.
“No, unfortunately not,” said Rooth. “He was too preoccupied with his cigarette. I think you’ve met him, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Van Veeteren. “I agree with your assessment of the creature.”
He paused and contemplated the little pile of chewed-up toothpicks on the desk in front of him.
“Anyway,” he said. “The question is if the man wrote to Bunge High School, or to somewhere else. As far as I’m concerned, I shall continue to assume that he wrote to Bunge.
You are welcome to reach a different conclusion. What was all that about something that happened during the morning? I think I know what you are referring to, but it would be as well if everybody was informed.”
Rooth sighed.
“Mitter was in the telephone booth for some time in the morning, but evidently not to look for an address. He called somebody.”
“Very interesting,” said Van Veeteren. “Who did he call, if I might ask?”
“Perhaps you can tell us that yourself, Chief Inspector, if I’ve understood the situation correctly,” said deBries.
“Mmm,” growled Van Veeteren. “Klempje has confessed.”
“Confessed what?” asked Reinhart, blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“There was a call from Majorna to the duty officer last Monday. It was Mitter, who had something to tell us. He asked for me, but I wasn’t in. . Nobody informed me when I did come in.”
“But that’s a bloody scandal!” said Reinhart.
There was a pause for several seconds.
“What happened to Klempje?” asked Jung. “When did you hear about this, Chief Inspector?”
“Yesterday,” said Van Veeteren. “Klempje has been tem-porarily replaced.”
Reinhart nodded. DeBries snorted.
“Anything else from Majorna?” asked Van Veeteren.
Rooth shook his head.
“If we find any more dead bodies out there,” he said, “I suggest that deBries and I should be spared the job of investigating. It’s not a healthy place for fragile police officers to be.”
“Questions?” said Van Veeteren.
“One,” said Reinhart. “If they managed to forget about that visitor all night, isn’t it also possible that he simply cleared off? Left the place without anybody noticing? Much earlier?”
“In principle, yes,” said Rooth. “But hardly through the main entrance.”
“But he could have left through some other door?”
“Of course,” said deBries.
Reinhart emptied the contents of his pipe into the wastebasket.
“Are you sure it’s completely extinguished?” asked Rooth.
“No, but if a fire breaks out, we’ll probably notice. There are seven coppers sitting around in here, after all.”
Van Veeteren made a note in the pad he had in front of him.
“Damnation!” he said. “We’d overlooked that possibility.
Thank you, Reinhart.”
Reinhart flung out his arms.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“So, let’s move on. Bunge! First the letter, please.”
Munster sat up straight.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t get anywhere with that,” he said.
“Reinhart and I put both school janitors and Miss Bellevue through the mangle, but we can’t expect them to remember one little letter that arrived a week ago. They receive nearly three hundred items of mail every day, about two hundred in the morning, and roughly half as many after lunch.”
“Who distributes the mail?”
“On that particular day it was Miss Bellevue and one of the janitors in the morning, and the other one in the afternoon.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“A pity,” he said. “Is there anything that doesn’t fit in?”
“Possibly,” said Reinhart. “But you might well think it’s nit-picking. I’d prepared three envelopes: I knew for certain that two of them had been in last week’s mail to Bunge. . ”
