town hall, the tower blocks out at Dunningen… The Fisherman’s Friend. Yes, that must be the restaurant hanging up there on the edge of the cliff; she hadn’t thought of that before. He’d walked past all that; the murderer had walked all the way from The Blue Ship with his victim only a few yards ahead, and there must…
There must be witnesses.
That was as obvious as can be. People simply must have seen the Axman as he skulked in the shadow of the walls along
Langvej and Hoistraat, as he scampered down the steps, as he sneaked across Fisherman’s Square… There’s no other pos sibility. Whoever he is, he’s not invisible. What does that indi cate?
Just as obvious was that tomorrow they would open up their doors, and that famous detective the general public would come teeming into the police station; and sooner or later somebody-possibly several people-would turn up and prove to have seen him. They didn’t know it was him, obvi ously; but nevertheless, they’d seen him and now they were reporting that fact. They’d seen him full in the face, they had even said hello to him!
That was the way it was. She put the light on again. In a few days they’d have the name of the Axman hidden away among the mass of completely irrelevant information; and nobody would know which one it was, and there’d be no way of sepa rating the wheat from the chaff. Or would it be worth sifting through it all? Would anybody regard it as being worth the trouble? Kropke, perhaps.
Shit! she thought. Just the job for Kropke. If that’s how it’s going to turn out, we might as well acknowledge defeat in advance.
But surely there must be some shortcuts? Cribs? Some way of cutting through the mass of irrelevant data? There must be.
So what was the question she could write on the next page with quadruple underscoring?
It was already there.
“Connection???” it said. She stared at it for a while. Then she drew a triangle. Wrote the names Eggers and Simmel in two of the corners. Hesitated for a moment before putting Axman in the third. Contemplated her handiwork.
What on earth am I doing? she thought. What kind of rub bish is this? What childish drivel!
Nevertheless, the drawing certainly looked plausible. If only I had a computer, she thought, I’d simply feed Simmel into one end and Eggers into the other. The patterns that came up on the screen would sooner or later highlight a point, or produce a bundle of lines that indicated something that made sense. A single name would emerge from the chaos or what ever the mathematical term was, and it would be the name of the Axman. It would be as easy as that!
Oh, come on, thought Beate Moerk. I’m losing my grip! If there’s one thing in this world that I don’t understand, it’s com puters.
She closed her notebooks and saw from the clock that it was too late for that Italian film on the TV that she hadn’t really intended watching anyway. No, she was not one for the quantitative approach. Not for her the tedious search through haystack after haystack; Kropke could get on with that, with the help of Mooser and Bang. She had better things to do.
She looked up again, just in time to see the moon glide into the rectangle formed by her window. Full and round… Juno!
It was a sign, no doubt about it. There were other criteria to be applied to this case. Different assumptions. Intuition! Woman!
None of this confounded left side of the brain! Yin, not yang!
She sat smiling at the moon. I’m an idiot, she thought. A damn fool! Time to go to bed. Yes, no doubt about it. Lucky that nobody else knows how I’m using my brain. Or rather, abus ing it!
She stood up and went into the hall. She slid out of her dressing gown and examined herself in the mirror. Hmm, not too bad, she thought. Could easily be twenty-five, twenty six, or thereabouts. A pity there isn’t a man waiting for me in my bed.
But she certainly didn’t want him there tomorrow morning as well!
And when she started to doze off a quarter of an hour later, all that drifted into her subconscious through the darkness were the imaginary images of the murderer. Insofar as there are any imaginary images…
The Axman?
Could they even be sure that it was a man?
That question registered just as she abandoned her final foothold and submitted to the boundless embrace of slumber.
There was no time to consider whether or not Wundermaas would have assigned her to one of the potentially fruitful haystacks.
10
“I sometimes get the feeling there is a guiding hand, despite everything,” said Bausen, handing Van Veeteren a glass.
“God’s finger?”
“Or the other one’s. Cheers! This is not strong; I didn’t want to kill off your taste buds. I thought we could sample a few decent things later.”
They drank and the wicker chairs creaked in sympathy. Van Veeteren lit a cigarette. He’d succumbed to temptation and bought a pack at the newsstand outside his hotel. It was the first one since Erich had left him, so he felt entitled to it.
“Anyway,” said Bausen, producing a shabby tobacco pouch vaguely reminiscent of something Van Veeteren had seen in
Ernst Simmel’s throat. “We lead a fairly quiet life here. Lock up a few drunks, clear up the occasional case of assault and bat tery, confiscate a few bottles of the hard stuff from the boats coming in from the east, and suddenly we’re landed with this.
Just when I’m about to call it a day. Don’t try to tell me that’s not a pointer!”
“There are certain patterns,” said Van Veeteren.
Bausen sucked fire into his pipe.
“I’ve even given the racists a rap on the knuckles.”
“Ah, yes. You have a refugee camp out at Taublitz, if I remember rightly,” said Van Veeteren.
“We certainly do. These characters started stirring up trouble a few years ago, and in November last year there was a gang going around setting fire to things. They burned two huts down to the ground. I arrested eight of them.”
“Excellent,” said Van Veeteren.
“Four of them are busy rebuilding the cabins; can you imag ine that? They’re working alongside the asylum seekers! They were allowed to choose between two years in jail or commu nity service. Damned fine judge. Heinrich Heine his name was, the same as the poet. And now they’ve learned their lesson.”
“Impressive,” said Van Veeteren.
“I agree. Maybe it is possible to make human beings out of anybody at all, providing you go for it hook, line and sinker.
Mind you, four of them preferred jail, of course.”
“Are you intending to go on October first anyway, no matter what happens?” asked Van Veeteren. “They haven’t approached you about staying on, or anything?”
Bausen snorted.
“No idea. I’ve not heard any hints yet, in any case. I expect they hope you’ll sort this out in a couple of ticks so that they can send me packing in the usual manner when the day comes.
I hope so as well, come to that.”
Same here, thought Van Veeteren. He picked up his glass and looked around. Bausen had cleared the table and put a cloth on it, but apart from that, the patio looked the same as the previous time-books and newspapers and junk every where. The serpentine rambling roses and the overgrown gar den sucked up every noise and
