He got up from the armchair and noticed immediately that the last glass of Burgundy had been stronger than he’d thought.
There won’t be a lot of reading done tonight, he thought. It’ll probably be more a question of trying to stay awake long enough to get into bed before I fall asleep.
Which was of course no more than a pious hope – especially in view of what lay in store for him during the rest of the night.
But as yet he hadn’t the slightest bit of knowledge about that – be it empirical or intuitive.
14
In normal circumstances – when he wasn’t standing in as chief of police in the Sorbinowo police district – he would naturally have delegated all calls in a situation like this to his answering machine. No question. He and Deborah had nestled down at opposite ends of the new Wassmeyer sofa with a box of chocolates within easy reach; the film starring Clint Eastwood hadn’t yet got as far as the first ads break, and a pleasant, warm breeze was wafting in through the open French windows. Gently and tenderly he was massaging her bare feet.
From a purely physical point of view, it was more or less a perfect evening.
‘Phone call,’ said Deborah, sliding a chocolate between her red lips.
Kluuge sighed, and heaved himself up from the sofa. The nearest telephone was in the bedroom, and he closed the door behind him, so as not to disturb his wife’s enjoyment of the film.
Typical, he thought. But if you’re on duty, that’s the way it is.
‘Chief of Police Kluuge.’
‘Hello?’
That was quite enough for him to recognize the voice. In a mere split second, Clint and his wife and the chocolates were banished from his mind.
‘Yes, Kluuge here.’
‘It’s me again.’
‘So I hear. What do you want?’
‘I want to give you a tip.’
‘A tip?’
‘There’s the dead body of a girl at Waldingen.’
‘We are busy investigating…’
‘I know. But you’re not getting anywhere. If you go there and find the body, perhaps you will believe me.’
‘I don’t believe there is a body,’ said Kluuge. ‘You keep on calling just to draw attention to yourself. We have-’
‘Drive out to the summer camp.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’ll describe the way for you.’
‘The way to where?’
‘To the body. I’ll tell you exactly where it is, so you can go there and look at it. Then you might understand that I’m telling you the truth.’
Kluuge gulped.
‘Er…’ was all he could manage.
‘A hundred metres past the camp buildings there’s a little path off to the right. Go down it, and just after you’ve passed a big boulder on your left you’ll see an enormous aspen tree. She’s lying just a few metres behind the rock. It’s no more than fifteen metres off the path.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Kluuge. ‘I must fetch a pen.’
‘You don’t need one,’ said the woman. ‘A hundred metres past the main building. A path to the right. Close to the aspen behind the big boulder. You’ll find her there.’
A mass of questions suddenly piled up inside Sergeant Kluuge’s brain, but before he could ask any of them, the caller had hung up.
Oh hell! he thought. Hell and damnation!
He thought for fifteen seconds, then dialled the number to Grimm’s Hotel. It rang twelve times before anybody in reception answered, and the only information he received was that Mr Van Veeteren had gone out several hours ago without leaving any indication of where he was going. Nor when he would be back.
Kluuge hung up. Stared out through the open window. Darkness was slowly embracing the warmth of summer still dancing outside. Grasshoppers were chirruping away. The clock on the bedside table indicated 22.20.
What the hell should I do now? he wondered. Somewhere deep down inside him he could hear a faint voice whispering that he should go back to the sofa. Simply return to Deborah and her warm tootsy-wootsies. The easy way out, of course, would be to simply forget the whole business and pretend that nobody had called. That he’d never heard a word about a dead little girl or a path or a boulder. But shame at the very suggestion that such a thought could ever have occurred to him soon took the upper hand. Grew bigger and redder.
Never, he thought. No chance. I must take full responsibility now.
He thought for a few more minutes, then called Grimm’s Hotel again and left a message for the chief inspector: Red-hot tip in the Waldingen case. Have gone there. Kluuge
Five minutes later he had already kissed his wife goodnight and was on his way out into the night.
So as not to stir up any unnecessary suspicions, he parked the car some way short of the summer camp. Switched off the lights and set off walking along the dirt road. A full moon had risen over the lake, and made it possible to overcome the darkness. He began walking slowly along the narrow road – extremely carefully, and on the very edge so that his footsteps were swallowed up by grass and soil.
By the time he passed the main buildings, it was five past eleven and all the lights were out except for two. But he didn’t see a single person, nor could he hear any noises to suggest that somebody was around. Without pausing, he continued along the slight upward slope on the other side, counting his steps, and after about fifty metres he lit his torch and began looking for the path.
He found it with no difficulty. Before turning into it, he switched off the torch. Stood stock-still in the darkness for a few seconds, and listened again. But all he could hear was the faint soughing from the tops of the trees, the unceasing scratching of the crickets and an occasional love-sick frog from the edge of the lake. Resolutely, he switched the torch on again, and strode out along the path.
Fear took hold of him just as he was aiming the beam from his torch at the gigantic boulder. It suddenly occurred to him that the madwoman on the telephone maybe wasn’t quite as silly as he had presumed, and that it could be time now… Maybe it was only a matter of seconds before he was confronted by his first corpse. He could feel his mouth going dry almost instantaneously at that very thought, and his pulse pounding so relentlessly that he could hear his own blood.
He raised his torch and shone it into the trees.
There was no doubt. No doubt at all, to be honest; he raised the beam to shine into the crown of the tree, and could see with no shadow of a doubt that it was an aspen, a gigantic aspen growing just a few metres behind the boulder. Its whispering crown was hovering high above him in the darkness like a harbinger of evil deeds and God only knew what else. He shuddered, and shook his head. Imagination, he told himself. Nothing more than imagination. Fantasy, superstition and old wives’ tales. He walked around the rock and shone his torch onto the lower part of the trunk. Carefully shifted to one side with his foot several fallen leaves and twigs, and when he leaned forward to look more carefully he could see clearly – as clearly as possible – that the whitish object sticking out from the undergrowth was in fact a hand.
A perfectly normal, quite thin and bloodless little girl’s hand – and he had just enough presence of mind to move swiftly several metres to one side before sicking up both Deborah’s broccoli pie and the eight chocolates he had managed to consume while watching the television.
And it was clear to Sergeant Kluuge that at this very moment – this solitary, eternally long moment in the
