'Sure,' de Gier said. 'I believed him, and I never believe an ex-husband when his former wife has been murdered. Husbands and ex-husbands are always prime suspects in a murder case.'
'Yes,' Grijpstra said heavily. 'So what else did this prime suspect tell us?'
'That she comes from a good family, high society. Her father is an important businessman. He is still alive, so is her mother. She has several sisters, all beauties. They sent her to Holland and she went to high school here and spent a few years at a university, studying Dutch literature. We'll have to ask the Curacao police to find out what they can. That'll be easy, we can get them on the Telex and we can phone. I have telephoned to before, there's only a few minutes' delay.'
'So what else?'
'Nothing else,' de Gier said. 'We have wasted a day.'
'It's impossible to waste a day,' Grijpstra said. 'We did something, didn't we?'
'We could have stayed home,' de Gier said. 'It's nice to stay at home. I could have read a book on the balcony of my flat. It has been a beautiful sunny day. I could have talked to my cat and I could have gone to a nursery. I want some more plants on my balcony.'
'Plants,' Grijpstra said. 'I spoke to the doctor before we left. He checked those weeds with his friend. You know what they were?'
'No. You know I don't know what they were.'
'One was belladonna, one was deadly nightshade, and the third was datura or thorn apple.'
'So?'
'Poisonous. All three of them. And they are used by sorcerers.'
'Botanists,' de Gier said. 'I told you we would become botanists.'
'Not botanists,' Grijpstra said. 'We'll have to become sorcerers.'
5
That same evening, close to midnight, a large black sedate car was heading for Amsterdam, forty-five minutes away from The Hague, where it had spent an hour parked in front of the Belgian embassy.
The commissaris was asleep on the back seat, his frail body slumped against Grijpstra. Grijpstra was awake and moodily contemplating the dark fields flashing past and remembering the evening's long fruitless conversation, and de Gier and the constable-driver were whispering to each other on the front seat.
'I can't keep my eyes open,' the young constable whispered to de Gier. 'It's hopeless, I am no good as a driver. I have put in my fourth application for a transfer but it will be refused again for the commissaris seems to like me. I have almost killed him and myself and people in other cars, I have driven the car off the road half a dozen times, I have fallen asleep waiting for traffic lights to change color but he won't give in. He says I'll get used to it. I'll never get used to it. The sound of an engine makes me sleepy, I get sleepy as soon as I turn the starter key. And I am sleepy now.'
'Shall I hit you in the face?' de Gier asked.
'Won't help. I only stay awake when somebody talks to me. Tell me a story, sergeant.'
'A story?' de Gier asked. 'What sort of story?'
'Anything,' the constable said, 'but try and make it a good story. You investigate crimes, don't you? You should know lots of good stories. Or you can talk football to me. I am serious, you know. I am falling asleep; I have been on duty since seven o'clock this morning.'
'Some driver,' de Gier said.
'I told you I shouldn't be a driver. Now will you tell me a story or do you prefer me to smash up the car? We are doing exactly a hundred kilometers an hour and it is a heavy car. She'll probably bounce off the steel rail on our left and turn over a few times. The passenger on the front seat always gets hurt worst.'
'Why didn't you sleep in the car while you were waiting for us at the embassy?'
'I tried, but I can't sleep when the car is stationary. It's the combination of movement and the sound of the engine that gets me. Look at my eyelids, they are half down. I can't control the muscles.'
De Gier sighed. 'Once upon a time, some ten years ago, two years after I had become a uniformed constable doing street duty, we had a murderer in the inner city.'
'That's it,' the constable said, 'go on. I am listening.'
'We never saw him but we found his tracks and there were witnesses and gradually we built up a picture of what the murderer was supposed to look like, but it was difficult for he only killed late at night, in dark narrow alleys where nobody lives. The alleys are only alive during the day when the merchants move their stocks in and out of their warehouses; at night nobody goes there except cheap prostitutes and their clients. The few people who claimed to have caught a glimpse of the killer gave strange descriptions. This murderer didn't have teeth like you or me but fangs. He didn't walk, he bounced, with great leaping strides, and he had long black hair and a thick curly beard and bloodshot small eyes, and he dressed in a long black duffelcoat with a hood. Are you listening?'
'Sure, sure,' the constable at the wheel said. 'Go on, sergeant.'
'He only killed women and we used to find the corpses in the morning. He had torn them apart and their limbs were scattered all over the alleys. We found out that he would climb the gables of the warehouses and flatten himself on a windowsill so that he would be no more than a black blob and when the women walked underneath him he would jump them. Sometimes he would throttle them and sometimes he would bite right through their necks, tearing the veins and the muscles.'
'Jesus,' the constable muttered.
'Yes,' de Gier said, speaking in a very low whisper, almost hissing the words, 'in those days we had real crimes. But it got too bad, one night the murderer killed two women and the commissaris decided to go all out and catch him.'
'You said you found his tracks,' the constable whispered. 'What did you find? Footprints? Fingerprints?'
'He wore gloves,' de Gier said, 'but we did find his footprints where he had walked through the blood of his victims. We decided that he was a very big man, well over six feet tall and powerfully built. And we always found peanut shells.'
'Peanut shells?'
'Yes. We also found the empty paper bags. It seemed he lived on peanuts for we would find as many as six bags in one spot where he would have been waiting for some time. The bags were traced to the Chinese quarter, where there were a lot of unemployed people at that time. The Chinese bought cheap peanuts in bulk and roasted them and then sold them on the street for next to nothing.'
'So the commissaris decided to catch him, hey?' the constable said. 'Which commissaris? Our commissaris?'
'The very man,' de Gier said, turning around to look at the back seat where the commissaris was snoring gently, supported by Grijpstra's arm.
'What did he do?' the constable asked.
'He mobilized the entire police force. We had some six hundred men in the old city that night. Everybody had to come, even useless types like clerks and subinspectors and drivers. We had been properly armed for the occasion and all the constables had carbines. The sergeants and adjutants carried submachine guns and hand grenades and I was in charge of three men who knew how to fight with a flame thrower. The mounted men came with us and their horses were snorting all around. Behind us we could hear the motor cops, they still had Harley Davidsons in those days, and the engines, in first gear, growled. The armored cars of the military police had come out as well and their metal tracks grinding over the cobblestones caused sparks which lit up the alleys; the half-tracks looked very spectacular and the moonlight made the helmets of the drivers glint. We had a general warrant and had been given keys to all the ware-houses and the detectives who were following us searched every building, every house. The boats of the State Water Police had joined us too, they were blocking the canals in case the killer should try to escape us in the water. We could hear their diesel engines idling as we were sneaking through the narrow streets on our thick rubber soles.'
'So?' the constable whispered.
'It was the biggest operation I have been part of,' de Gier said, 'and it went on all night but we never had a
