Mandrijn looked out the window.
“Just between you and me?” he asked after a while.
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t impressed, I have to say. I don’t suppose they meant any harm, but they weren’t very nice… well, a bit vul gar, I suppose you could say. Rich but cheap. No class, if you’re allowed to say that nowadays. Especially him, of course.”
“Why did they come back?”
Mandrijn shrugged.
“I’ve no idea. They told us at the beginning of December that they intended coming back home, and they wanted us out of the house by February first. Pretty short notice, in fact. A damnably bad way of going about things, to be blunt about it, but we didn’t want to stir things up. We’d already bought a plot, so all we needed to do was to start building.”
Van Veeteren pondered for a moment.
“Do you have any theory of your own about why Ernst
Simmel was murdered?”
If he says it was a Lunatic or No Idea, that will be the fifti eth time in a row, he thought. Mandrijn took his time, rubbing away at one of his ear lobes.
“Yes,” he said, astonishing Van Veeteren. “I’ve thought a lot about that. I think quite simply that it was somebody who couldn’t bear to see him around Kaalbringen again. He was a real bastard, Chief Inspector. A real bastard.”
You don’t say, thought Van Veeteren.
He made a detour on the way home. He felt a distinct need to stretch his legs, and to put some distance between himself and the case. Maybe also to escape… perhaps it wasn’t all that sur prising. Nothing to get agitated about. He explored a few roads he’d never been on before-not difficult around here, of course; found himself in unknown places and out-of-the-way havens, and eventually finished up on a ridge with a bird’s-eye view of the town down below.
This was the countryside, not the urban environment. He followed the edge of the forest in an easterly direction, toward the restaurant Bausen had spoken about. Wandered lonely as a cloud up here, his hands clasped behind his back and the wind in his face. Some of the trees had already started to shed their leaves, thanks to the dry summer, and it suddenly struck him that there was some kind of promise in the air, or perhaps a portent. Pure imagination, of course, but premonitions are like that. When he came to the ruined monastery, he sat down with a cigarette and some unformulated questions; and it was only when he heard a dog barking in the distance that he stood up and started walking down the steps in the hillside-carved directly out of the limestone, slippery and not easy to walk on.
This would be an ideal place to have an accident, Van
Veeteren thought.
When he reached the bottom, he found himself next to the graveyard-St. Pieter’s Church, if he remembered rightly the graveyard that looked out over the sea. It must have been leveled and terraced at some point in the past when they started to use it, he thought, and he spent a little time wonder ing what it was really like down there in the loose, artificial earth among all the caskets and cavities. He noticed the outline of The See Warf on the other side of the graves, and decided to take the most direct route.
He threaded his way through the graveyard, zigzagging along the raked gravel paths. As he passed the gravestones, he read a year here, a name there; but it was not until he’d passed through them all and was about to open the gate and leave the cemetery from the other side that he noticed him: Chief
Inspector Bausen’s burly figure, head bowed, standing by one of the memorial stones.
What had he said? Two years ago?
He couldn’t be sure if the chief of police was actually pray ing. He found that hard to believe; but in any case, there was something solemn and spiritual about his expression-serene, even-and for a brief moment he felt a pang of envy. He decided on the spur of the moment not to announce his pres ence. To leave the chief inspector in peace by his grave.
How on earth can I envy a man who is mourning the death of his wife? he thought as he passed through the gate. Some times I don’t even understand myself.
Back in his hotel room he lay down on his bed with his feet on the footboard. Lay there and stared up at the ceiling with noth ing more in mind than smoking and giving free rein to his thoughts.
He was back in the habit: smoking, as usual, when work was getting on top of him. When an investigation was not flowing along the channels he’d dug out, or wished he had.
When everything came up against a brick wall, when the breakthrough never came.
Nevertheless, that’s not really how it felt.
He thought about Bausen’s two-week rule. If it was right, they had five days left. He’d spent a week in Kaalbringen by this time, and when he tried to sum up his input into the inves tigation so far, he got no further than the uncomfortably round number of zero.
Zero, zilch.
I can’t stand hanging around here another five days, he thought. I’m going home on Sunday! Hiller will just have to send somebody else-Rooth or deBries or any other bastard he feels like. Nobody gains by my hanging around here any longer!
Living out of a suitcase in a hotel. Drinking the chief of police’s wine, and being beaten at chess! The renowned Chief
Inspector Van Veeteren!
The only thing that could change matters, he told himself, was the possibility Bausen had floated a few days back.
If he struck again. The Axman.
Not much chance of that, according to the experts they’d called in. If he strikes again, we’ll get him!
But there again… At the same time, he had this remark able feeling that all they needed to do was wait. To hang in there. That this remarkable case would be solved, or solve itself, in some way that thumbed a nose at all the rules, and that neither he nor anybody else would be able to stop or influence…
After thinking these rambling thoughts and smoking four (or was it five?) cigarettes, Van Veeteren went to stretch out in the bathtub. He spent an hour pondering how to develop a Russian or Nimzo-Indian opening. Much more tangible, of course, but he didn’t reach any conclusions on this either.
15
When Beatrice Linckx had parked and locked her car in Leisner
Alle, the clock in the Bunges church tower struck eleven p.m.
She’d been on the road since four in the afternoon, having skipped the final evaluation session of the conference, and now there were only three things she was longing for.
A glass of red wine, a hot bath, and Maurice.
She glanced up at their apartment on the third floor, saw that the light was on in the kitchen, and concluded that he was waiting up for her. It was true that she hadn’t been able to get through to him when she’d tried to phone on the way home, but he knew she was due back tonight. No doubt he’d opened a bottle of something, and maybe he’d have some toasted sandwiches up his sleeve as well. Onion rings, mushrooms, fresh basil and cheese… She took her bags out of the trunk and crossed the street, stiff after the long journey but looking forward to what lay ahead… keen to get into the apartment.
To come home.
What Beatrice Linckx hadn’t the slightest inkling of was that the kitchen light had been on for more than twenty-four hours and that although Maurice was in fact up there, he was by no means in the state she’d expected. Nor were there any toasted sandwiches, and nobody had opened a bottle of wine to breathe-and she wouldn’t be
