track. But not even the editor was aware of that geographical fact.
‘Ah well,’ said Przebuda as they approached the built-up area again. ‘Whichever way you look at it, it’s a very nasty business. I hope you can sort it out. But I must admit that I’ve got nothing much to contribute, I’m afraid… Anyway, I think we’re coming to a parting of the ways. That’s Grimm’s down there, as you can see – but if ever you need a Dr Watson again, my tiny brain is at your disposal.’
‘Thank you,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Two tiny brains are better than one, I suppose.’
They said goodbye, but before Andrej Przebuda had climbed even five of the steps up to Kleinmarckt, he paused.
‘Do you think you’re going to solve this case?’ he asked. ‘Do you usually solve your cases?’
‘Most of them,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘But you have some unsolved cases, do you?’
‘One,’ admitted the chief inspector. ‘But let’s not go into that. Every new day brings enough problems, as I’ve said before.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Przebuda, and Van Veeteren thought he could hear his friend smiling in the darkness. ‘Goodnight, Chief Inspector. May the angels sing you to sleep.’
No, Van Veeteren thought grimly when Przebuda had disappeared. Let’s not start thinking about the G file as well. We’ve got enough on our hands without that.
By the time he strode through the milk-white glass doors of Grimm’s Hotel, his dejection had caught up with him.
We ought to have talked about other things, he thought. We ought to have focused on something else.
Katarina Schwartz, for instance. Or Ewa Siguera. Or potential violent criminals in the area. I’m damned sure he’d have been able to come up with something useful if we’d done that!
But perhaps his self-criticism was unfair. In any case, the disappearance of the Schwartz girl was still something they’d managed to keep away from the journalists – after nearly a week under the spotlights. That was probably due more to good luck than good management; and besides, one might ask if there was any point in keeping it secret. Perhaps, perhaps not.
And they hadn’t heard a word from the French police.
Becalmed, the chief inspector thought (although he had only been in a sailing boat twice in the whole of his life – both times together with Renate). For the whole of that Saturday in Sorbinowo there had hardly been a breath of wind, and the case had not moved forward even a fraction of an inch.
Becalmed.
He recalled the potentially meaningful silence up at Wolgershuus the previous day, and realized that there was more to coming to an end and dying than people generally imagined.
Madeleine Zander and Ulriche Fischer! he then thought with a feeling of disgust as he stood at the reception desk, waiting for his key. Were things really so bad that he would have to tackle them as well?
When the night porter eventually appeared, it transpired that there was another woman’s name to frustrate him.
Albeit in a slightly different way.
Reinhart had left a message for him. It was short and sweet: There’s no damned Ewa Siguera anywhere in this country. Shall I continue with the rest of the world?
Van Veeteren’s reply was more or less just as stringent: Europe will be enough. Many thanks in advance.
Ah well, he thought when he had eventually gone to bed, I suppose I might just as well carry on as planned, no matter what.
25
The second of the victims of the sect murderer – as several newspapers would call the person concerned – was discovered at about six on Sunday morning by a sixteen-year-old boy scout and a fifteen-year-old girl guide who were part of a biggish group on a hike in the forests north-west of Sorbinowo. At the pair’s urgent request, no attempt was made to find out what they were doing some three kilometres away from their tents at that time in the morning, but Chief of Police Kluuge – who was once again the first on the scene – naturally had his suspicions.
The body of the young girl was under a pile of brushwood and dry twigs about twenty metres from the narrow road from Waldingen to Limbuis and Sorbinowo, and the distance to the nearest of the summer camp buildings was no more than a hundred and sixty metres or so. The distance between where the two bodies had been discovered was measured later and found to be about three times that, and perhaps one could reasonably have expected that the police team that had spent two days searching the area after the first murder would have found the body; and perhaps also – Kluuge thought a propos of nothing in particular – the unusually pale colour of the girl guide’s face might have had to do with the fact that she found it hard to forget what she had been doing next to, and even hidden behind, the pile of twigs in question.
In any case, that was the conclusion he drew as the three of them sat on a stack of logs watching the sun rise over the trees to usher in a new day, waiting for the medical team and the crime scene officers to arrive – and he was also aware that these irrelevant speculations only came into his head as a way of keeping his thoughts under control.
When he compared the Katarina Schwartz who had spent almost two weeks in the form of a dead body, reduced to a mass of chemical processes, with the photograph of a smiling young girl with blonde plaits he had in his wallet, there was no doubt that his thoughts needed all the distractions they could possibly get.
I’ve grown old, he thought. Even though it’s no more than a week since I grew up.
The first report from more or less all the experts at the scene was ready by shortly after one p.m. and confirmed that the dead child was Katarina Emilie Schwartz, thirteen years old, resident in Stamberg. She had been raped (no trace of sperm) and strangled, suffered pretty much the same type of injuries as the other victim, Clarissa Heerenmacht, and had probably met her killer somewhere between twelve and sixteen days earlier. No clothes – nor indeed any trace of clothes – had been found at or in the vicinity of the place where the body was discovered, and it was considered to be highly likely that the girl had been killed at some other location. The press communique issued later in the afternoon contained all known details of the tragic discovery – apart from the fact that the police had known about the girl’s disappearance for quite a while.
At the same time the police issued two Wanted notices.
One was a repeat of the appeal for information about Oscar Yellinek.
The other was new and aimed at tracing the girl’s parents.
By coincidence, a little later that same afternoon a fax arrived from the French police: Mr and Mrs Schwartz had been traced to a so-called gite on a farm in Brittany. Before the sun had set over Sorbinowo that long Sunday, the unfortunate couple had set off on the journey home in order to be confronted as soon as possible by the earthly remains of their daughter.
And when old Mrs Grimm – the hotel’s owner who was at bottom indifferent to anything not connected with royalty or Bohemian porcelain – checked through the hotel ledger even later that evening, she found that not only was every room taken, but that the number of guests who had given their occupation as ‘journalist’ or something similar was strikingly large.
As for Mr Van Veeteren (watchmaker and horologist), who had been staying in room number 22 for the last ten days, by midnight he still hadn’t returned from the excursion he had set out on that morning.
But as he seemed to have left most of his belongings in his room, she was not particularly worried that he might have run off with no intention of returning to pay his bill.
After all, he had given the impression of being an honest man, on the whole.
FIVE
