windswept bushes took over. Deep inside the salt marshes birds were wheeling in broad, lazy circles, filling the air with their melancholy cries.
Van Veeteren checked his watch and paused. Hesitated for a moment. In the hazy distance he could just make out the church steeple in s’Greijvin, but it was a long way away. If he kept on walking, it would certainly be another hour before he could sit down with a beer in the cafe on the square.
It might have been worth the effort, but now that he had paused, it was hard to convince himself of that. It was three o’clock. He had set out after lunch-or brunch, depending on how you looked at it. In any case, at about one o’clock, after yet another night when he had gone to bed early but failed to drop off to sleep until well into the small hours. It was hard to tell what was the root cause of his worries and restlessness as he lay there, tossing and turning in the sagging double bed, as the gray light of dawn crept ever closer… hard to tell.
He had been on vacation for three weeks now, quite a long time by his standards, but not exceptional, and as the days passed, during the last week at least, his daily routine had been delayed just a little. Four more days and it would be time for him to return to his office, and he had the distinct impression that when he did so, there would not be much of a spring in his stride. Even though he hadn’t really done much apart from resting. Lain back on the beach, reading. Sat in the cafe at s’Greijvin, or nearer at hand in Hellensraut. Strolled up and down these never- ending sands.
The first week out here with Erich had been a mistake.
They had both realized that after the first day, but the arrange ment couldn’t easily be changed. Erich had been allowed out on parole on condition that he stay with his father on this remote stretch of coast. He still had ten months of his sen tence left to serve, and the last time he had been out on parole the outcome had left much to be desired.
He gazed out to sea. It was just as calm and unfathomable as it had been for the whole of this last week. As if nothing could really make an impression, not even the wind. The waves dying a natural death on the beach seemed to have traveled vast distances bearing neither life nor hope.
This is not my sea, Van Veeteren thought to himself.
In July, as his vacation had approached, he had been look ing forward to these days with Erich. When they finally arrived, he could hardly wait for them to end, so that he could be left in peace; and now, after a dozen days and nights of soli tude, he wanted nothing more than to get back to work again.
Or was it quite as straightforward as that? Was that perhaps just a convenient way of describing what it was really all about-did there come a point, he had started to wonder, be yond which we no longer look forward to something coming, but only to getting away from what has passed? Getting away.
Closing down and moving on, but not looking forward to starting again. Like a journey whose delights decrease in direct proportion to the distance traveled from the starting point, whose sweetness becomes more and more bitter as the goal comes closer…
Get away, he thought. Put an end to it. Bury it.
This is what they call going downhill. There’s always another sea ahead.
He sighed and removed his sweater. Tied it around his shoulders and started retracing his steps. He was walking into the wind now, and he realized that it would take him longer to get back home… just as well to have a few extra hours this evening, come to that. The house needed tidying up, the fridge emptying, the telephone unplugging. He wanted to set off early tomorrow. No point in hanging around unnecessarily.
He kicked an abandoned plastic bottle over the sands.
It will be fall tomorrow, he thought.
He could hear the telephone ringing when he came to the gate. Automatically he started moving more slowly, shortening his strides, fiddling with his keys, in the hope that it would stop ringing by the time he entered the house. In vain. The sound was still carving stubbornly through the gloomy silence. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Van Veeteren?”
“That depends.”
“Ha ha… Hiller here. How are things?”
Van Veeteren suppressed an urge to slam the receiver down.
“Splendid, thank you. It’s just that I was under the impres sion that my vacation wasn’t over until Monday.”
“Precisely! I thought you maybe fancied a few more days?”
Van Veeteren said nothing.
“I’ll bet you’d love to stay a bit longer by the coast if you had the chance, wouldn’t you.”
“…”
“Another week, perhaps? Hello?”
“I’d be grateful if you would come to the point, sir,” said
Van Veeteren.
The chief of police seemed to have a coughing fit, and Van
Veeteren sighed.
“Yes, well, a little something has turned up in Kaalbringen.
That’s only about twenty or thirty miles away from the cottage you’re staying in; I don’t know if you’re familiar with the place.
We’ve been asked to help out, in any case.”
“What’s it all about?”
“Murder. Two of them. Some madman running around and cutting people’s heads off with an ax or something. It’s all in the papers today, but maybe you haven’t-”
“I haven’t seen a paper for three weeks,” said Van Veeteren.
“The latest one-the second, that is-happened yesterday, or rather, the day before. Anyway, we have to send them some reinforcements, and I thought that as you were in the area already, well…”
“Thank you very much.”
“I’ll leave it up to you for the time being. I’ll send up Mun ster or Reinhart next week. Assuming you haven’t solved it by then, of course.”
“Who’s chief of police? In Kaalbringen, I mean.”
Hiller coughed again.
“His name’s Bausen. I don’t think you know him. Anyway, he only has another month to go before he retires, and he doesn’t seem all that thrilled to have been handed this on his plate just now.”
“How very odd,” said Van Veeteren.
“You’ll go straight there tomorrow, I take it?” Hiller was starting to wind up the conversation. “That will mean you don’t have to double the journey unnecessarily. Is the water still warm enough for swimming, by the way?”
“I spend all of every day splashing around.”
“Really… really. Well, I’ll phone them and say you’ll be turning up tomorrow afternoon. OK?”
“I want Munster,” said Van Veeteren.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Hiller.
Van Veeteren put down the receiver and stood for a while staring at the telephone before pulling out the plug. It sud denly dawned on him that he’d forgotten to buy food. Damn!
What made him think of that now? He wasn’t even hungry, so it must have something to do with Hiller. He fetched a beer from the fridge and went out onto the patio and settled back in a deck chair.
Ax murderer?
He opened the can and, pouring the beer into a tall glass, tried to remember if he’d ever come across this sort of vio lence before. He’d been a police officer for thirty years-more than that-but no matter how hard he searched and ransacked his brain, he couldn’t dig out a single ax murderer from the murky depths of his memory.
I suppose it’s about time, he thought, taking a sip of beer.
