“I wouldn’t say no to a beer,” he said.
Perhaps there was something else about her, he thought as he watched her head for the kitchen. Something he was well acquainted with.
A bad conscience, no less?
“Fire away,” he said. His notebook with the questions he’d planned to ask could wait a bit. He might not even need to produce them at all.
“Where shall I start?” she asked.
“At the beginning, perhaps,” he suggested.
“Yes, I suppose that would be best.”
She took a deep breath and settled down in her chair.
“We have never been in close touch,” she said. “You will obviously have gathered that we severed all connections after these. . this murder business. But to tell you the truth there wasn’t much contact before that either.”
She took a sip of tea. Jung put a slice of cheese on a cracker and waited.
“There were three of us siblings. My elder brother died two years ago, and I’ll be seventy-five this fall. Leopold was an afterthought, as they say. I was seventeen when he was born.
Both Jacques and I had left home by the time he started school.”
Jung nodded.
“Then my mother died. He was only eight. He and Dad
were the only ones left.”
“In Kaustin?”
“Yes. Dad was a blacksmith. But at that time he was away fighting the war, of course. They gave him special dispensa-tion to go home six months before it was all over, to look after Leo. I helped out a bit, but I was married and had my own children to look after. Lived in Switzerland, so it wasn’t all that easy to drop everything and do one’s bit. My husband ran a company in Switzerland, and I was needed to make a contri-bution there as well.”
Oh yes, Jung thought. A guilty conscience, as usual.
“But you didn’t live in the house your brother eventually bought? Not then, when you were a child?”
“No, we lived in the village. The smithy has closed down, but the house is still there.”
Jung nodded.
“Leopold bought that smallholding when he moved back
there. That was after the athletics scandal.”
“Tell me about it,” said Jung. “I’m all ears.”
She sighed.
“Leo had a lot of problems when he was growing up,” she said. “I think he was a very lonely child. He had a hard time at school, found it hard to get on with his schoolmates, if I’ve understood it rightly. But you can no doubt find out more about this from others. He left school at twelve, in any case.
Helped Dad in the smithy for a while, but then moved out to Obern. Just packed up and moved out: I assume there was some kind of row between him and Dad, but we never knew any details. He must have been fifteen, sixteen. It was 1952, if I remember rightly.”
“But things went well for him in Obern?”
“Yes, they did. He wasn’t afraid of work, and there were plenty of jobs at that time. Then he joined that athletics club and started running.”
“Middle distance,” added Jung, who was quite interested in athletics. “He was a brilliant runner-I’m a bit too young to have seen him, but I’ve read about him. Middle distance and upward.”
Mrs. Hoegstraa nodded.
“Yes, they were good years, in the mid-fifties. Everything seemed to be going well.”
“He held several records, didn’t he? National records, that is. . For the fifteen hundred and three thousand meters, if my memory serves me correctly.”
She shrugged and looked apologetic.
“Forgive me, Inspector, but I’m not very good at sports.
And in any case, he was stripped of them all afterward.”
Jung nodded.
“It was an enormous scandal, obviously. Banned for life- that must have been a bitter blow for him. . very bitter. Had you any contact with him during those years?”
Mrs. Hoegstraa looked down.
“No,” she said. “We didn’t. Neither my brother nor I.”
Jung waited for a while.
“But we were not the only ones at fault. That’s the way he wanted it. He was a loner, always preferred to be on his own.
He was always like that. Obviously, we would have preferred it to be different, but what can we do about it now? What could we have done then?”
She suddenly sounded weary.
“I don’t know,” said Jung. “Can you bear to go on a bit longer?”
She took another sip of tea, then continued.
“He left everything and moved back to Kaustin. Bought that house-he’d evidently managed to save a bit of money, from his work and his running. He was found guilty of taking drugs, and for. . what do they call it? Breach of amateur regulations?”
Jung nodded again.
“I’ve read about it,” he said. “He collapsed during a five-thousand-meter race while going for the European record.
He’d been promised a large sum of money if he broke it, on the quiet, of course. . And they discovered the amphetamine and quite a few other things when they got him to hospital.
He was one of the first athletes to be caught for drugs offenses in the whole of Europe, I think. Ah well, please go on, Mrs.
Hoegstraa.”
“Well, he bought that house, as I said. The Big Shadow, as they used to call it when I was a child, I don’t know why. It’s a bit off the beaten track, of course. It had been empty for a few years, and he got it cheap, I suppose. And then he got going with his chickens. He’d been working in that line while he was in Obern and had no doubt seen the potential. He could be quite enterprising when he put his mind to it. Had a good business sense, that sort of thing.”
She paused. Jung took a swig of beer, then asked:
“And then there was Beatrice?”
She suddenly looked very dejected.
“Do we really have to take that as well, Inspector?”
I don’t know, he thought. Besides, I’m not an inspector yet.
Might never be, come to that.
“Just a few little questions?” he suggested.
She nodded and clasped her hands on her knees. He started to feel for the vocabulary book in his inside pocket, but decided yet again to do without it.
“Did you ever meet her?”
“Not when she was grown up. I knew her when she was a child in Kaustin. They were more or less the same age. In the same class at school.”
“But she hadn’t stayed put in the village either, had she?”
“No. She came back a few months after Leopold. She’d been living in Ulming for a time, I think. Left a man behind there as well.”
Jung pondered. Didn’t really know what he was trying to find out. What it was permissible to ask about, and what the point of it was. Surely this poor old lady couldn’t have anything to do with it? What was the justification for his sitting here and plaguing her with memories she’d spent all her life trying to forget?
There again, one never knows.
