cheese, do you know what she said?”
“No idea,” said Munster.
“That she had to get back home to the boyfriend. He’d come to visit her and was waiting for her at the hostel she was staying at. Or so she said.”
“Hard cheese,” said Munster.
“A real cock-up,” said Rooth. “No, I think I’m getting too old to go running after women. Maybe I ought to try putting an ad in the newspapers instead. Kurmann in Missing Persons 2 9
has found himself a very nice bit of stuff that way. . But you have to have the luck of the devil, of course.”
He concentrated on overtaking a blue removal van before finding himself nose to nose with a No. 12 streetcar. Munster closed his eyes, and on opening them again was able to establish that they had made it.
“What about you?” asked Rooth. “Still no snags with the most beautiful policeman’s wife in the world?”
“Pure paradise,” said Munster; and when he came to think about it, that wasn’t so far from the truth. But Synn was Synn.
The only thing that worried him now and again was what a woman like her could see in him-a badly paid detective ten years older than she was, who worked so hard that he hardly ever had time for her or the children. It was easy to convince himself that he had something more than he deserved. That sooner or later he would be punished for it.
But why worry? He was happily married, had two chil-
dren; perhaps he should just be grateful and accept whatever came his way, for once. In any case, that was not something he had any desire to discuss with Detective Inspector Rooth.
“You should get rid of that beard,” he said instead. “If I were a woman, I’d run a mile from that fuzz.”
Rooth ran his hand over his chin and examined his face in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know, damn it all,” he said. “Doesn’t look all that bad, I reckon. I’m not sure you understand the way women think.”
“OK,” said Munster. “You do what you like. How are we going to deal with Meusse?”
“I suppose we’d better buy him a drink, as usual,” said Rooth as he pulled up outside the forensic clinic. “Or what do you say?”
“Yep, no doubt that will be the simplest way,” said Munster.
Meusse was not yet finished with today’s quota of dead bodies, and rather than interrupt him, Munster and Rooth decided to wait for him in his office.
He turned up twenty minutes late, and Munster could see that he’d had a rough day. His thin, birdlike body seemed skin-nier than ever, his face was ashen and behind his thick glasses his eyes seemed to have sunk deep into their sockets-after having seen enough, and no doubt more than enough, of the evil and perversity this world has to offer, one could safely assume. As far as Munster was concerned, looking at the butchered body for five seconds would have been enough, or ten seconds examining the photographs. He guessed that the forensic specialist must have been poking around in the rotten flesh for at least ten or twelve hours.
Meusse nodded a greeting without saying a word and hung his stained white coat on a hook next to the door. Washed his hands and wriggled his way into the jacket that had been lying on his desk. Stroked his completely bald head a few times and sighed.
“Well, what can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Maybe we’d find it a bit easier to talk over a glass of something tasty in the bar?” Rooth suggested.
The Fix bar was just over the road from the forensic labora-tories-if you left by the back door, that is, and there seemed to be no reason to take any other exit but the usual one today either.
Meusse led the way, hands in pockets and shoulders
hunched, and it wasn’t until he had a double gin and a beer chaser on the table in front of him that he seemed up to discussing his findings. Both Munster and Rooth had been through this many times before and knew there was no point in trying to speed him up-or in interrupting him once he’d got going, come to that. He would answer any questions when he’d said what he had to say; it was as simple as that.
“Well, gentlemen,” he began. “I note that Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is conspicuous by his absence on this occasion.
Can’t say I’m surprised. This body you’ve come across is a pretty nasty object. If a mere pathologist might be allowed to express a wish, it would be that you would make an effort to dig them out a bit sooner in future. We are not exactly inspired by dead bodies that have been rotting away for an age. . Three months, four at most, that’s where the limit ought to be set. The fact is that one of my assistants couldn’t cope and let me down this afternoon. Hmm.”
“How old is this one, then?” asked Rooth, trying to put his oar in while Meusse was busy exploring the depths of his beer glass.
“As I said,” he went on, “it’s an unusually unsavory body.”
Unsavory? Munster thought, and recalled how Meusse had once told him how his life had been changed and made more miserable by his less-than-uplifting profession. How he had been impotent by the age of thirty, how his wife had left him when he was thirty-five, how he’d turned vegetarian at forty, and how he’d more or less stopped eating solid food by the time he was fifty. . His own body and its functions had become more and more repulsive as the years went by. Something he could only feel disgust and aversion for, he had confessed to Munster and Van Veeteren one afternoon when, for whatever reason, the drinks had become more numerous than usual.
Perhaps that was nothing to be surprised by, Munster
thought. Merely a natural development?
“It is difficult to be specific about the time,” said Meusse, lighting a cigarillo. “I would guess about eight months, but I could easily be wrong by a month or two in either direction.
We’ll have the lab report in a week or so. Cause of death will be just as hard to pin down, I fear. The only thing that’s obvious, of course, is that he died some considerable time earlier. . Before he was dumped in the ditch, that is. At least twelve hours, no doubt about that. Maybe as much as twenty-four hours. There is no blood on the carpet, and not much in the body either, come to that. The decapitation and mutilation took place at an earlier stage. The blood had drained away, to put it in simple terms.”
“How did the butchery take place?” Munster asked.
“In an amateurish way,” said Meusse. “An axe, presumably.
It doesn’t seem to have been all that sharp, so it probably took quite a while.”
He emptied his glass. Rooth went to get him a refill.
“What I can say about the cause of death is that it was in his head.”
“In his head?” said Rooth.
“In his head, yes,” said Meusse, pointing at his own bald pate to make his meaning clearer. “He might have been shot through the head or killed by that axe, or something else. But the cause of death was a blow to the head. Apart from the mutilations and natural decay, the body is uninjured. Well, I’m ignoring certain secondary effects caused by hungry foxes and crows who managed to get at it in a few places, but even they haven’t caused all that much damage. The carpet and the water in the ditch have had a certain amount of embalming effect. Or delayed the onset of decay at least.”
Munster had picked up his beer glass, but put it back down on the scratched table.
“As for age and distinctive features,” said Meusse, who was unstoppable once he was in his stride, “we can assume he was between fifty-five and sixty, or thereabouts. He would have been five foot nine or five foot ten, slimly built. Well proportioned, I think I can say. No broken arms or legs, no surgical scars. There might have been some other superficial scars, but they have either rotted away or stuck to the carpet.
Things were made a bit more difficult by what you might call a symbiosis of death between the body and the carpet. They have sort of fused together here and there, or do you say fused into each other?”
“Holy shit!” said Rooth.
“Precisely,” said Meusse. “Any questions?”
“Are there any distinctive features at all?” Munster asked.
Meusse smiled. His thin lips parted and revealed two rows of unexpectedly white and healthy teeth.
“There is one,” he said, and it was obvious that he was enjoying this. The pleasure of being able to keep
