“No doubt about that,” said Van Veeteren.
A cold wind suddenly swept through the garden.
“Do you want to go indoors?” asked Bausen.
“No.”
“And you don’t have any suspicions?”
Bausen shook his head and tasted his whiskey and water.
“Too much water?”
“No. Not even any… little glimmers of a suspicion?”
Bausen sighed.
“I’ve been in this job for more than twenty-five years. Half the population I know by name, and I know how they spend their lives-the rest I recognize by sight. There might be a thousand or two, newcomers and the like, whom I haven’t got a finger on, but apart from that… For Christ’s sake! I’ve thought about every one of them, I reckon, and come up with absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing!”
“It’s not easy to imagine people as murderers,” said Van
Veeteren. “Not until you meet them face-to-face, that is. Be sides, he doesn’t have to be from here, does he?”
Bausen thought for a moment.
“You might be right there, of course, but I doubt it. I’d stake all I’ve got on his being one of our own. Anyway, it would be nice to be able to come up with something useful.
For Christ’s sake, we’ve spent thousands of hours on this damned Eggers!”
“There’s no justice in this job,” said Van Veeteren with a smile.
“Not a trace,” said Bausen. “We might as well put our faith in the general public. They always come up with something.”
“You may be right,” said Van Veeteren.
Bausen started scraping out his pipe, looking as if he were turning something over in his mind.
“Do you play chess?” he asked.
Van Veeteren closed his eyes in delight. The icing on the cake, he thought.
Better make the most of everything that comes along. It looked suspiciously as if things might get more difficult.
11
It wasn’t only the radio station and the local press that had taken Chief of Police Bausen’s orders ad notam. On Sunday, several national newspapers issued a serious exhortation to the conscientious burghers of Kaalbringen to go to the police without delay with any scrap of information that might possi bly lead to the rapid capture of the Axman.
When Inspector Kropke and Constable Mooser compiled the results of the general public’s first day of sleuthing, quite a lot of things were crystal clear. It is true that Kropke had not had time to prepare any overhead projector transparencies before he addressed his colleagues in the conference room that evening, but everything was neatly set out in his notebook with detachable pages and dark-blue leather covers:
1) In the course of the day, forty-eight persons had reported to the police station and testified about various aspects of the evening of the murder. Of them, eleven had been interrogated previously. Six of the remaining thirty seven were considered to be irrelevant because they were in the wrong part of town (three), or had been out at the wrong time (two) or had got the date wrong (one-old
Mrs. Loewe, a widow, had been out to buy some cat food on the Monday morning, and had observed and noted down several mysterious characters with axes hidden under their overcoats).
2) The remaining forty-two witnesses, of all ages, had been without exception in the area-Langvej, Hoistraat,
Michel’s Steps, Fisherman’s Square, Harbor Esplanade, municipal woods-at some time between 2300 and 2400 hours. Everyone’s name, address and telephone number had been meticulously recorded, and they had also been forbidden by Kropke to leave the town and its environs for the coming week, in case any of them should be required to present themselves for supplementary questioning. (A measure that smacked very much of abuse of power, of course, but Van Veeteren suppressed his objections. He was not in charge of the investigation, after all.)
3) All the witnesses had at some time or other and in various locations noticed one another, in accordance with an extremely complicated and potentially even more involved pattern that Kropke had failed to program into his PCB 4000, despite repeated attempts. (The fact that this had led to a degree of annoyance and frustration was something Constable Mooser could not have failed to appreciate during the late afternoon, the hierarchy and pecking order of the police force being what it is.)
4) The earlier evidence provided by Miss deWeutz and
Mrs. Aalger, who had been conducting a conversation in
Dooms Alley and had noticed Ernst Simmel walking across the square, had now been confirmed by four new witnesses. Two couples, who had crossed the square at around about 2320, albeit in different directions, had also noticed a lone pedestrian who, now that they came to think about it, could be identified as the deceased property developer.
5) Two teenagers on scooters (as likely as not in circumstances that placed them somewhat to the wrong side of the letter of the law) had ridden across the square toward the Esplanade about a minute later, and claimed to have passed a person who, to all appearances, seems to have been Simmel.
6) A courting couple, of which the lady for certain reasons wished to remain anonymous and therefore preferred to confirm the man’s account by telephone rather than appearing in person at the police station, had been sitting, or more likely semi-recumbent, in a car down by the marina between approximately 2300 and 0100, and at 2330 or thereabouts had seen a man smoking at the edge of the quay, scarcely more than ten yards away from their car. Both were more or less convinced that it was Ernst Simmel.
7) Up in Hoistraat, three new witnesses (to add to the other two) had seen the murdered man on the way from
The Blue Ship. In addition, all three had observed one or possibly two unaccompanied male persons; in all probability this was a case of witnesses observing one another.
8) One lone witness had seen an unaccompanied man come out of Hoistraat and walk down Michel’s Steps sometime between 2310 and 2315, in all probability Ernst Simmel. It is true that the distance between the witness and the person observed was some twenty yards; but since the man was under a streetlight at the time, the witness had been able to register a fairly clear picture of him. The most interesting aspect of this picture was probably that the man in question had been wearing a hat with a broad brim, which had kept his face shaded. This was one of the facts suggesting that this sighting was actually of the murderer; if that really was the case, it was the only direct sighting thus far. No male person wearing a hat had figured in any of the other reports submitted by the citizens of Kaalbringen frequenting their town by night.
The name of the witness was Vincent Peerhoovens, and unfortunately he had been somewhat inebriated at the time of his observation and hence not entirely reliable-a fact he freely admitted and one that was confirmed by several of the other witnesses. Nevertheless, his account must naturally be regarded as extremely interesting with regard to further investigations.
9) Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence to emerge on this Sunday-which had been Chief Inspector
Bausen’s view, at least, when he passed comment on the material summarized by Kropke-came from four young people in their early teens who had been strolling through the woods from the harbor toward Rikken-in other words, the very path the investigation was concerned with. They appeared to have passed by the scene of the murder shortly after 2340. Since Ernst Simmel had been smoking a cigarette down by the marina about ten minutes earlier, according to witness number six, and since none of the young people appeared to have seen him, it could be concluded that when they passed the scene of the crime, the murderer had just struck and was presumably
