“It’s open,” said Bausen. “Shall we go in?”
Kropke nodded.
“Do you think the inside will be any better than the out — side?”
“I was here once about twelve or fifteen years ago,” said
Bausen, entering the dingy entrance hall. He looked around. “I don’t think he’s done much in the way of decorating…”
Twenty minutes later they were back in the car.
“A pointless visit,” said Kropke.
“Maybe,” said Bausen. “He has a hell of a lot of books.”
“What do you think, Chief Inspector?”
“What do you think, as new chief of police?”
“I don’t know,” said Kropke, trying to avoid sounding embarrassed. “Difficult to say. Coming here wasn’t much help, though. We need to get hold of the man himself. Give him an aggressive interrogation. I think it would help if we were a bit rougher with him than we usually are.”
“You think so?” said Bausen.
Kropke started the car.
“Where do you think he is?”
“In Fisherman’s Square, presumably,” said Bausen. “I seem to remember he has a stall there on Saturdays-I take it you noticed the greenhouses around the back?”
“Yes… of course,” said Kropke. “Shall we go pick him up?
Or do we have to leave him alone because we didn’t find any bloodstained clothing under the bed?”
Bausen said nothing for some time.
“I think we’d better ask the advice of our guests first,” he said. “We have the little problem of Inspector Moerk as well, or had you forgotten that?”
Kropke drummed at the steering wheel.
“Do you think… do you think they’ve found her?”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Bausen. “Not in the state that you’re hinting at, in any case.”
Kropke swallowed and stepped on the gas. He suddenly saw the previous victims with their almost severed heads in his mind’s eye. He glanced down and saw that his knuckles had turned white.
God, he thought, surely she can’t be…
“Nothing?” asked Bausen.
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Thank God, I suppose you could say. But I’m afraid it’s not much to celebrate-she hasn’t come back from jogging.”
“How do you know?”
“Her car. It’s still parked next to the smokehouse,” said
Mooser.
Bausen nodded.
“What about you?” asked Munster.
“Left the nest,” said Bausen with a shrug.
“The market?” suggested Mooser. “He usually sells vege tables in the square.”
Kropke shook his head.
“No. We’ve just come from there. He hasn’t shown up today.”
“Ah, well,” said Van Veeteren with a sigh, draping his jacket over the back of his chair. “We need to get a grip now. This business is becoming as clear as porridge.”
“Bang,” said Bausen. “Go to Sylvie’s and tell her we need something really special today.”
Bang saluted and left the room. The others sat down around the table, apart from Van Veeteren, who opened the window and stood gazing out over the rooftops. The chief of police leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. He sighed deeply and stared at the portraits of three of his prede cessors on the wall opposite.
“OK,” he said after a while. “What the hell do we do now?
Please be kind to somebody who’s about to become an old aged pensioner! What the hell do we do now?”
“Hmm,” said Munster. “That’s a good question.”
“I have one more week before I retire,” said Bausen, blow ing his nose. “Fate seems to want me to spend it trying to find one of my inspectors. Find her in some damn ditch with her head cut off-that’s what I call a great way to end a career.”
“Oh, shit,” said Munster.
Nobody spoke. Bausen had clasped his hands in front of him now and closed his eyes. For a brief moment it seemed to
Munster that he was praying, but then he opened both his eyes and his mouth again.
“Yes, a big heap of shit is what I’m surrounded by,” he said.
“Ah, well,” said Van Veeteren, sitting down. “That could well be. But perhaps we ought to spend a little less time swear ing and a little more trying to get somewhere-that’s just a modest suggestion, of course.”
“Excuse me,” said Bausen, sighing deeply. “You’re right, of course, but we might as well wait for the coffee, don’t you think? Kropke, you can tell us the Podworsky story, as we intended in the first place.”
Kropke nodded and started sorting out his papers.
“Shall we make this public knowledge?” asked Mooser.
“That she’s… disappeared, I mean.”
“Let’s take that later,” said Van Veeteren. “It can wait for a second or two, I think.”
“Podworsky,” said Kropke. “Eugen Pavel. Born 1935. Came to Kaalbringen as an immigrant at the end of the fifties. Got a job at the canning factory, like so many others. To start with, he lived in the workers’ hostel down there; but when they pulled it down, he moved out to the house on the heath. It had been empty for a few years, and the reason he was allowed to move in was that he was engaged to Maria Massau, whom he was liv ing with. She’s the sister of Grete Simmel-”
“Aha,” said Munster. “Ernst Simmel’s brother-in-law.”
“More or less, yes,” said Bausen. “Carry on!”
“Podworsky has always been an odd type, you could say.
Difficult to deal with, as many people have found to their cost.
On the booze from time to time-the very thought of allow ing that poor woman to live out there on the heath-well, it can’t have been a great time for her…”
“Go on,” said Bausen.
“Then there was that killing in 1968. For some unknown reason-and entirely out of character-Podworsky had in vited some fellow workers out to his house-men only, if I’ve understood it correctly?”
Bausen nodded.
“There was some hard drinking, one assumes, and eventu ally one of them made a pass at Maria-a bit of flirting, proba bly no more than that, but Podworsky was furious. He started an enormous row that ended with him kicking the whole lot of them out of the house, apart from the one who had made the pass. He kept him inside, and beat him to death with a poker later that night-Klaus Molder, his name was.”
“Found guilty of manslaughter,” said Bausen, taking up the tale. “Was inside at Klejmershuus for six years. In the mean time, Maria Massau fell ill with leukemia. She’d had it since she was a child, it seems, but it had been dormant. She got worse and worse, and died the same month that Podworsky was released.”
“Did they let him out on parole to see her?” asked Van
Veeteren.
“Yes, but she didn’t want to see him,” said Kropke, taking over once again. “I don’t think she needed to, in fact. She was living with the Simmels for most of the time-more often in the hospital toward the end, of course. When Podworsky got out, he moved straight back into the house, even though it was
Simmel who owned it and had only allowed him to live there because of the family connection, as it were. Anyway, Simmel tried to kick him out several times, but he eventually gave up.”
“Why?” asked Van Veeteren.
