for.
Moira would have to look after the three- and four-year-olds inside the hut, while she would take the older children with her into the woods.
Older? she thought. Five and six years old. Seven of them.
“We’ll walk in a line at ten-yard intervals,” she explained.
“We’ll keep shouting all the time, and keep in sight of each other. Is that clear?”
“Yes, boss!” yelled Wally, giving her a salute.
It was Wally who eventually found her.
“She’s sitting in a goddamn ditch, hiccupping,” he said.
“Over there. She says she’s found a dead body without a head.”
Elisabeth knew right away that this was the truth. The time was ripe for the day’s highlight.
In fact it wasn’t only the head that was missing. The body-
what was left of it-had been wrapped up in a thick carpet, and there was no time to extract from Eunice an explanation of why on earth she had wanted to investigate it. Perhaps a bone had been sticking out. In any case, the well-built and strong little girl had managed to drag it far enough out of the ditch for her to be able to unroll it. The carpet was soaked through. . and covered in mold and fungi and every imagina-ble kind of decay, it seemed to Elisabeth. It was falling to pieces in some parts, and the body in the middle of it was no doubt in just as bad a state.
No head, then. No hands, no feet.
“Back to the hut!” she bellowed, clutching the shivering Eunice tightly in her arms.
She suddenly felt violently sick, and it struck her that what she had just been staring at was one of those visions that would turn up faithfully in her mind’s eye every dark night for the rest of her life.
3
“Report, please,” said Hiller, clasping his hands.
Reinhart gazed up at the ceiling. Munster dutifully performed the throat-clearing ritual and Van Veeteren yawned.
“Well?” said Hiller.
“Let me see,” said Munster, leafing through his notebook.
“Come on now, get a grip!” said the chief of police, checking his rolled-gold wristwatch. “I have a meeting in twenty-five minutes from now, an outline report will suffice.”
Munster cleared his throat again.
“Well, we’re dealing with the body of a man,” he began.
“Found at about one yesterday afternoon in some woods on the outskirts of Behren, about twenty miles from here. Found by a six-year-old girl. . she was on an outing organized by the day nursery she attends. The body was wrapped up inside a carpet in a ditch about forty yards from the nearest passable road, and it had been lying there for a long time.”
“How long?”
“A good question,” said Reinhart. “A year, perhaps. Maybe more, maybe less.”
“Can’t that be established accurately?” Hiller asked.
“Not yet,” Van Veeteren said. “Meusse is working flat out on it. But at least six months in any case.”
“Hmm,” said Hiller. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Munster, “it hasn’t been possible to identify the body as the murderer cut off his head, his hands and his feet. . ”
“Can we be certain that it was a murder?” asked the chief of police. Reinhart sighed.
“No,” he said. “Obviously, it could be a straightforward natural death. Somebody who couldn’t afford a proper
funeral, though. It’s an expensive business nowadays. . The widow no doubt donated his head and the rest to medical research, in accordance with the wishes of the deceased.”
Van Veeteren coughed.
“It’ll presumably take a while to pin down the cause of death,” he said, inserting a toothpick into his lower teeth. “It seems there are no signs of fatal injuries on what’s left of the body-although people generally do die if you cut their head off, of course.”
“Meusse isn’t exactly thrilled by this corpse,” said Reinhart.
“You can see his point. It’s been lying in that rotting carpet all winter, maybe longer. Freezing, then thawing out, freezing again, thawing again. The odd animal has had a nibble here and there, but they evidently didn’t think much of him either.
I suppose he was a bit hard to get at as well. He’s been lying half submerged, and that’s helped to preserve him or there wouldn’t have been much left apart from the skeleton. He looks a bit of a mess, to be honest.”
Hiller hesitated.
“Why are. . Why are these parts of the body missing, do we know that?”
We? Munster thought. Do we know that? What is this
damn place, a police station or a hospital? Or a madhouse, like Reinhart usually suggests? Sometimes it was hard to say.
“Hard to say,” said Van Veeteren, reading his thoughts.
“We do occasionally come across a bit of butchery in this line of business, but the point must surely be to make identification difficult.”
“You have no idea who it is?”
Van Veeteren shook his head.
“Obviously, we’re going over the area with a fine-tooth comb,” Munster said. “But then, you ordered that yourself.
Twenty officers have been searching the woods since yesterday afternoon-not during the night, though, of course.”
“Waste of time,” said Reinhart, taking his pipe from his jacket pocket.
“You can smoke when we’ve finished,” said the police
chief, checking his watch again. “Why is it a waste of time?”
Reinhart put his pipe away and clasped his hands behind his head.
“Because they won’t find anything,” he explained. “If I kill somebody and take time to cut off his head and hands and feet, I’m not going to be damned stupid enough to leave them lying around where the rest of the body is. The fact is that there’s only one place in the whole wide world where we can be absolutely certain of not finding them, and that’s where we’re looking. Clever stuff, you have to admit.”
“All right,” said Hiller. “Van Veeteren wasn’t here yesterday, and I thought. .”
“OK,” said Van Veeteren. “I suppose there’s no harm in taking a close look at the place where the body was found, but I think we’ll put a stop to that this evening. Not many clues are going to survive a whole winter, no matter what, and I think we can be pretty sure he wasn’t killed there anyway.”
Hiller hesitated again.
“How are we going to set up the investigation, then?” he asked. “I’m a bit short of time. . ”
Van Veeteren made no attempt to hurry.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose we’d better think that over.
How many officers do you want to give us?”
“There’s those damned robberies,” said Hiller, rising to his feet. “And that blackmailer. .”
“And those racists,” said Reinhart.
“This blackmailer. .,” said Hiller.
“Racist bastards,” said Reinhart.
“Oh, what the hell,” said Hiller. “Stop by tomorrow, VV, and let’s see where we’ve got to. Is Heinemann still
