‘What did you mean by something fishy behind this?’
For a brief moment it looked as if the chief of police blushed.
But it’s probably just his daily cerebral haemorrhage, Van Veeteren thought, then realized that was an expression he’d borrowed from Reinhart. He stood up.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’d better go there and see what’s happening.’
Hiller handed over the sheet of paper with the details. Van Veeteren glanced at it for two seconds, then put it in his pocket.
‘That hortensia’s looking a bit miserable,’ he said.
The chief of police sighed.
‘It’s not a hortensia,’ he explained. ‘It’s an aspidistra. It ought to be coping well with the heat, but it obviously isn’t.’
‘Then there must be something else it can’t cope with,’ said Van Veeteren, turning his back on the chief of police.
6
Among the information on the sheet Hiller had given him was Sergeant Kluuge’s private telephone number. The chief inspector waited until he’d got home before ringing it. A young woman answered promptly, and announced that the acting chief of police was in the shower at the moment, but perhaps the caller could try again a little later. Van Veeteren explained who he was, and suggested that instead the sergeant should call him as soon as possible, if he really did have something of importance to discuss.
Kluuge called three minutes later and they had a short conversation. Van Veeteren had always been allergic to telephones, and once he had established that there might be a grain of truth in the story, they arranged to meet the following day.
If nothing else, it might be an idea to check out the alleged idyllic nature of the location.
‘I’ll come by car,’ he said. ‘Arriving about noon. You can fill me in over lunch.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ said Kluuge. ‘Thank you for agreeing to help.’
‘No problem,’ said Van Veeteren, and hung up.
Then he sat for a while, wondering what to do next. Decided eventually to stay at home rather than eat out; took out bread, beer, sausages, cheese and olives and sat down on the balcony under the awning. Stood up again after the first swig of beer and went back inside. Hesitated again before picking out an Erik Satie CD. Put on the Gymnopedies and went back outside into the summer evening.
Wilfred Malijsen, he thought. That damned crackpot.
As he sat there enjoying the scent of the blossoming lime trees drifting in over the balcony railings and watching the sun set over the tiled roof of the Kroelsch Brewery, his mind wandered back to the only occasion he had met this colleague he hardly knew.
He reckoned it must have been nearly twenty years ago now, but it might be worth fishing up the details from the muddy waters of his memory.
1978, he thought. Or possibly 1979.
Anyway, a one-week course for high-ranking police officers and detectives. Time: late autumn, October or November. Place: a tourist hotel, one or two stars, by the sea in Lejnice. Purpose: lost in the murky depths of time.
The incident, the thing that made this week more memorable than similar lugubrious jamborees, had taken place – if his memory served him correctly – on the Wednesday after three or four days of lectures by bearded psychologists in sandals, and pointless group sessions, and later and later evenings in bars and pubs. A young desperado who was staying at the same hotel as the police contingent barricaded himself into his room with a young woman he had abducted at gunpoint.
It soon transpired that this weapon was a Kalashnikov, and the young man’s demand was that the police should bring his ex-girlfriend to his room together with a million guilders, otherwise he would turn his blonde hostage (who was three weeks pregnant, to make matters worse) and anybody else who was foolhardy enough to come anywhere near him into minced meat.
The timescale did not leave the police much room for manoeuvre: two hours, not a second more.
As the terms were more or less impossible – apart from anything else the ex-girlfriend was on holiday somewhere in Italy, and in all probability not especially interested in cooperating in any case – the local police leaders in consultation with the top-ranking officers attending the conference decided to attempt a rescue operation. Tactics were drawn up in great haste despite a mass of contrary opinions, Van Veeteren was judged suitable to play a leading role, and after a fairly successful ploy he suddenly found himself in the barricaded room with the desperado and his hostage. The intention was that he should trick the youth to move towards the window and start negotiating for at least ten seconds – long enough for one of the sharpshooters on the roof opposite to take aim and liquidate him by means of two or three well-directed bullets in the head and chest.
The gunman, that is, not Van Veeteren.
However, the young man turned out to be less than enthusiastic about this scenario. Instead of standing by the window, he bundled Van Veeteren into the far corner of the room and urged him to close his eyes and offer up a final prayer to his creator, assuming he thought he had one.
Van Veeteren was unable to hit upon a suitable deity on the spur of the moment, and instead started counting from one to ten. When he got as far as seven there was a commotion on the balcony and Malijsen barged into the room – in accordance with plans that nobody else had had a hand in devising, nor even had any idea about. Van Veeteren opened his eyes just in time to hear Malijsen fire and see the young man’s head transformed into something beyond description, but a sight that for many years afterwards was not infrequently in his head when he woke after a bad dream.
‘You can thank your lucky stars I happened to be passing,’ were Malijsen’s first words.
They had spent several hours together on subsequent evenings, and the lasting impression Van Veeteren had of his rescuer was that he was a rather untalented crackpot holding a series of – more or less seriously meant – ideas and principles about practically everything. Unfortunately. A middle-aged boy scout, as Reinhart would no doubt have called him: weird, overweening, and a warmonger. Van Veeteren was sick and fed up of his company after only half an hour, but as the fact was that this podgy policeman had saved his life, he had no alternative but to treat him to an occasional beer.
During the rest of the conference there had been a great deal of discussion about competence and the scope for individual initiatives in advanced police work, and only a few months after the incident in Lejnice Van Veeteren had read in the police journal that Inspector Wilfred Malijsen had just been appointed chief of police in Sorbinowo.
It was not outside the bounds of possibility that there could be a connection.
Malijsen? Van Veeteren thought as he took two olives. Time to pay off an old debt?
Then he turned his mind to other things. First to Crete, and then to a variation of the Scandinavian Defence he had read about, and that might be worth trying in his next match.
The club’s premises in Styckargrand were almost deserted, as they often were in summer, and the air felt pleasantly cool under the domed ceiling when the chief inspector walked through the door. As usual, Mahler was sitting right at the back, under the Durer print. For once he was looking gloomy, and Van Veeteren recalled that he had just returned from Chadow where he had attended the funeral of an aunt.
‘Do you miss her?’ he asked in surprise. ‘I thought you said she had a personality like a verruca.’
‘They’re squabbling about her inheritance,’ Mahler explained. ‘A depressing business. If those are the bastards I’m related to, there’s not much hope for me either.’
‘I’ve never held out much hope for you,’ said the chief inspector, sitting down. ‘But I’ll get the first beer in if you set up the pieces. I’m intending to murder you tonight with a new opening gambit.’
Mahler brightened up slightly.
‘He who murders last murders best,’ he said, adjusting the board.
The first game took an hour and a half, and they agreed on a draw after nearly eighty moves.
