Ruger blew his nose.
“No, I’m assuming nothing. And thank God your behavior was so idiotic that it will probably earn you more pluses than minuses.”
“What do you mean?”
“You drown your wife in the bathtub. Manage to lock the door from the outside. You get undressed and go to bed and forget all about it. The next morning you wake up, break into the bathroom and find her. . You swallow a couple of pills to ease your headache, phone the police, and start washing clothes. .”
Mitter stood up and walked to his bed. He was suddenly overcome by exhaustion. He wanted nothing more than for Ruger to go away and leave him in peace.
“I didn’t kill her. . ”
He stretched out on the bed.
“No; or at least, you don’t think you did. You know, I think it’s not impossible that the authorities might want to have you examined in order to assess your mental state. What would you have to say about that?”
“Are you saying they can’t force me to do it?”
“Not unless there is sufficient reason.”
“And isn’t there?”
Ruger had stood up and was putting on his overcoat.
“Hard to say. . Hard to say. What do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
He closed his eyes and curled up facing the wall. He could hear Ruger saying something in the far distance, but his exhaustion was now a deep, swirling abyss and he allowed himself to sink down into it, offering no resistance.
5
Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren did not have a cold.
On the other hand, he did have a tendency to be depressed when the weather was poor, and as it had now been raining more or less nonstop for ten days, melancholy had made the most of the opportunity to sink deep roots into his mind.
He closed the door and started the car. Switched on the cassette player. A Vivaldi mandolin concerto. As usual there was a gremlin in one of the speakers. The sound came and went.
It wasn’t just the rain. There were other things as well.
His wife, for instance. For the fourth or fifth time-he had lost count-she seemed to be on her way back to him. Eight months ago they had separated once and for all, but now she had started phoning again.
The point of return had not yet been reached, but it was clear which way the wind was blowing. He was pretty sure he could count on sharing household and bed by the run-up to Christmas, or thereabouts.
Again.
The only thing that could prevent it was for him to say no, but needless to say, there was nothing to suggest such a development on this occasion either.
He turned in to Kloisterlaan and fished up a toothpick from his breast pocket. The rain was pounding down and the wind-shield misting over again. As usual. He wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket, but for a few moments he could see nothing at all.
Death, here I come, he thought. But nothing happened.
He jabbed at the air-conditioning buttons and adjusted the controls. The flow of hot air over his feet became more intense.
I ought to get a better car, he thought.
Not for the first time.
Bismarck was also ill.
Ever since his daughter Jess’s twelfth birthday he had been saddled with the slow-witted Newfoundland bitch, but now all she did was to lie in front of the refrigerator, sicking up foul-smelling yellowish-green lumps, and he was forced to drive home several times a day in order to clean them up.
The dog, that is. Not his daughter.
He hoped that Jess was in much better shape. She was twenty-four now, or possibly twenty-three; lived a long way away in Borges with new dogs, a husband who repaired teeth, and a pair of twins who were busy learning to walk and to swear in a foreign language. He had last seen them at the beginning of the summer holidays, and felt no obligation to force himself upon them again before the New Year.
He also had a son. Erich.
Erich lived much closer. In the state prison in Linden, to be precise, where he was serving a two-year sentence for drug-smuggling. He was being well looked after, in other words. If m i n d ’ s e y e
Van Veeteren felt like it, he could visit him every day-it was just a matter of getting into the car and driving the fifteen miles or so alongside the canals, showing the warder his ID
card, and marching in. Erich was inside there; he had no possibility of avoiding his father, and as long as Van Veeteren took along some cigarettes and newspapers, he generally seemed to be not entirely unwelcome.
But he sometimes wondered what the point was of sitting and staring at his long-haired crook of a son.
He wound down the window to let in a little fresh air. A shower of raindrops fell onto his thigh.
What else?
His right foot, of course.
He’d sprained it during the previous day’s badminton match with Munster: 6-15, 3-15, abandoned due to injury with the score 0–6 in the third set. . The figures told their own story, of course. This morning he’d had difficulty in getting a shoe onto that foot, and every step was agony. Oh, what joy to be alive.
He wiggled his toes tentatively, and wondered if he ought really to have gone to the X-ray department; but it was not a genuine thought, as he was well aware. He only needed to recall his father, that stoic who refused to go to the hospital with double pneumonia, on the grounds that it was unmanly.
He died two days later in his own bed, proud of the fact that he had not cost the health service a single penny and never allowed a drop of medicine to cross his lips.
He was fifty-two years old.
Didn’t quite make his son’s eighteenth birthday.
And now this high school teacher.
Reluctantly, he turned his mind toward work. To be honest, it wasn’t just another humdrum case. On the contrary. If it hadn’t been for all the rest of it, and the damned rain that never seemed to stop, he might have been forced to admit that there was a spark of excitement in it.
The fact is, he wasn’t sure.
Nine times out of ten, he was. Well, even more often, if the truth be told. Van Veeteren was generally able to decide if he was looking the culprit in the eye in nineteen cases out of twenty, if not more.
No point in hiding his light under a bushel. There was always a mass of tiny little signs pointing in one direction or another, and over the years he had learned to identify and interpret these signs. Not that he was able to detect all of them, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that he could see the overall picture. The pattern.
He didn’t find this difficult, and didn’t need to overstretch himself.
Then, finding proof, and building up a case that might hold water in court-that was another matter. But the knowledge, the certainty, always crept up on him.
Whether he liked it or not. He interpreted the signals emitted by the suspect; sometimes he found it as easy to do as reading a book, like a musician can pick out a tune from a mass of notes in a score, or a mathematics teacher can spot an inaccurate calculation. It was nothing special; but of course, it was an art. Not something you could learn in the normal way, and not something it was possible to teach; just an ability that he had acquired after so many years on the force.
