‘Do you know what’s happened to one of your friends?’
Marieke Bergson nodded.
‘Clarissa Heerenmacht,’ said the chief inspector. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Yes.’ Her voice quivered somewhat.
‘Somebody must have killed her. I expect you understand that we have to try to catch whoever it was that did it?’
‘Yes. I understand that.’
‘Will you try to help us?’
Another nod, and another sip of Coca-Cola.
‘Can you tell me why your friends don’t want to help us?’
‘They told us not to.’
‘Who did?’
‘The sisters.’
‘They told you that you shouldn’t answer questions put to you by the police?’
‘Yes. We weren’t to say anything.’
‘Did they explain why?’
‘Yes. It was a test. God would test if we were strong enough… To be able to continue.’
‘Continue with what?’
‘Er… I don’t know.’
‘Continue to stay at the camp?’
‘I think so.’
Marieke Bergson couldn’t suppress a sob. Judging by her red eyes, she had been crying a lot. He hoped that she had wept sufficiently to keep her head above water. Most probably neither he nor the psychologist were sufficiently skilled to cope with a teenage breakdown. He recalled fleetingly a few failures in such circumstances from his own past.
‘So they said you’d be sent home if you helped us to find the murderer?’
‘Yes… Well, no, that wasn’t what they meant. But everything just seemed to go wrong… I mean, they can’t have known what had happened last Monday…’
‘But they didn’t change anything after they’d got to know?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t want to go back out there to the camp?’
‘No.’
Her answer was so faint that he could hardly hear it. A whisper so that not even God could catch on to what she said, he thought.
‘How did you get to hear that Clarissa was dead?’
She hesitated.
‘It was… er… we knew on Sunday evening that she wasn’t there any more. She wasn’t there at assembly nor at the evening meal. But they didn’t say anything then.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not until Monday morning. Then Sister Madeleine told us that she’d gone home.’
‘Hang on a minute. Can you remember the last time you saw Clarissa?’
Marieke Bergson thought that one over. Looked him in the eye for the first time, without averting her gaze, as she bit her lip and seemed to be thinking about it.
‘It was last Sunday,’ she said. ‘In the afternoon. We had a free period, four o’clock I think it was, and I know that she and some of the others went down to the road. Yes, that would be about half past four, I think.’
‘You had a free period?’ Van Veeteren asked. ‘So you should really have been doing something else?’
‘Yes, we were supposed to be having role play.’
‘Role play?’
‘Yes. About the Ten Commandments.’
Van Veeteren nodded. A timetable change, he thought. Why? That was less than two hours after he’d got into his car and driven away from there.
‘And you’re quite sure that you didn’t see her again after that.’
She thought that over again.
‘Yes. I didn’t see her after that.’
‘Do you know who was with her?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘We’ll come back to that,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘So you knew that Clarissa was no longer at the camp on Sunday evening – or at least, not on Monday morning. When did you discover that she hadn’t in fact gone home, but was dead?’
‘That was, er… when you came and woke us up and told us. And we saw her. Although we…’
‘You what?’
‘We didn’t believe you. That was the fact of the matter.’
‘But you saw her, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t understand. Do you think you could explain it a bit better?’
‘We’d expected you to come from the Other World and say terrible things. That was the test, I suppose you could say.’
‘But even so you understood that Clarissa really was dead?’
Marieke Bergson gave a sob.
‘Yes, when I saw her I understood that, of course.’
The chief inspector nodded. He was the one who had insisted they should see the dead body, and although he’d had his doubts about it afterwards, he now conceded that it had been the right thing to do.
The situation had required firm action.
But for Christ’s sake! It was incomprehensible that none of the young girls had broken down when confronted with what had happened. Five o’clock in the morning, summoned out of their warm beds in order to be faced with the sight of a murdered friend. Only the face, admittedly, but still?
On the other hand he’d gone no further than making the girls file past the ambulance and look in through the doors. And he hadn’t started cross-questioning them immediately. He’d allowed them an hour for breakfast first. Deep down he was well aware that the whole set-up was a sort of revenge on the tight-lipped sisters – but maybe he could have saved a day if he’d put the boot in a bit harder?
Put the boot in a bit harder? he thought. What on earth am I going on about?
‘Was there anything else?’ asked the psychologist, and he realized that he must have been lost in thought for quite some time.
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot more.’
‘Is there a toilet?’ asked Marieke Bergson. ‘I need to…’
‘Just outside, over there,’ said Van Veeteren, and switched off the tape recorder.
When she came back, she took the initiative straight away.
‘There’s the Katarina thing as well,’ she said.
‘Katarina?’
‘Yes, she was also at the camp to start with, but then one morning they said she’d gone home. She’d done something silly. We’ve been friends since last spring…’
‘What was her second name?’
‘Schwartz. Katarina Schwartz. She had the bed next to me.’
‘Katarina Schwartz,’ repeated the chief inspector, noting it down. ‘Is she also from Stamberg?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old?’
‘Thirteen, nearly fourteen. She moved to Stamberg last spring. She used to live in Willby before.’
‘I don’t suppose you remember her address and telephone number?’
‘Yes, I do.’
