“No. It was a loan between friends.”
“Were you seeing her regularly?”
“No, not anymore. I hadn’t seen her since she lent me the money, and that was half a year ago, as I said.”
“Was she expecting you?”
“No.”
“Did you have the impression that she was expecting anybody else?”
The baboon got up and stretched. The three policemen looked at the short legs that dwarfed the man; when he dropped his arms they swung loosely.
“Yes, she was very well dressed, overdressed, I would say. At first I thought she was planning to go out and I asked her where she was going. She said she wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Did she seem nervous?”
“Yes. I thought it was the gale. It was a strange night, the gale had already started up. She talked a good deal, but she didn’t exactly make me welcome.”
“Did she offer you anything? A drink?”
“No.”
“Do you smoke, Mr. Vleuten?”
“I’m trying to give it up. I have cigarettes here but I don’t carry them anymore. I only smoke when I have to, about ten cigarettes a day now.”
“So you didn’t smoke while you were with Mrs. Camet last night?”
“No.”
The commissaris was following the conversation but the words seemed far away; his breathing had slowed down and he was controlling the pain. He noticed that the baboon wasn’t asking Grijpstra to explain his questions. He forced himself to sit up and observe the suspect. The baboon’s and the commissaris’s eyes met for an instant. There was a slight gleam in the man’s eyes. He seemed amused but there was also sadness, mainly in the lines of the wide lips.
“What time did you leave?”
“Around eight. I only stayed a quarter of an hour, I think.”
Grijpstra sat back and the commissaris raised a hand. “Your money was found, Mr. Vleuten. I had a message, just before I came here, from Gabrielle Carnet. She found a hundred thousand guilders, which must be the sum of your twenty thousand and the eighty thousand Mrs. Carnet collected from her company’s bank account recently. Do you have any idea what she may have wanted to do with that eighty thousand?”
“No.”
“The hundred thousand was found under her mattress, a strange hiding palace, don’t you think? She did have a safe.”
The baboon’s hand reached out to a side table and came back with a pack of cigarettes. He smiled apologetically. ‘Time to smoke. Under the mattress, you said, that is a strange place. I know her safe. It isn’t really a safe: it’s fireproof but not burglarproof, it opens with a normal key. She never kept much money in there. I made a hiding place in her bedroom, under a loose board. It has a spring lock. You have to press a very small knob near one of the legs of her bed. If she wanted to hide money she would have hidden it in there.”
Nothing was said for a while and the commissaris looked around. The apartment seemed to consist of only one room stretching from the front to the rear of the house. The furniture was sparse but of good quality, not from the showrooms of Carnet and Company. Good Victorian furniture and not too much of it. A quiet room, refined, with large empty surfaces, both in floor and wall space. The sergeant had got up and was wandering around.
“Sir?”
The commissaris got up too. The sergeant was looking at a painting. The painting showed a rat realistically drawn, each long brittle hair in place, the mouth half open showing pointed cruel teeth, the red eye glared. It was rearing on its spindly hind legs and its long tail, of an obscene, glaring naked pink, hung down.
“Unusual, don’t you think, sir?”
The tail went beyond the painting, curving over its frame and continuing on the wall. The part that protruded from the painting’s flat surface had become three-dimensional, molded out of some plastic material but so well shaped that it seemed alive. There was another strange detail in the painter’s subject matter. The rat was ridden by a little boy dressed in a dainty suit of dark red velvet.
The childish face sat in a high collar of ruffled lace, and the boy’s small pudgy hands held reins that were slipped through the rat’s mouth.
“Do you like it?” the baboon’s voice asked from the other side of the room.
“It wasn’t made to be liked, I dunk.” The commissaris was still studying the painting. “Your work, Mr. Vleuten?”
“In a way. The combination is mine. The original is an illustration to a child’s tale and I enlarged it and worked in some of the details. I’ve done more work like this, more elaborate, but in the same vein, I would think.”
The baboon got up and pressed a button at the side of a large cupboard. A deep hum filled the room and the cupboard’s door swung open. The apparition mat rode out of the cupboard came straight at the sergeant, who jumped out of its way, but it changed direction and he had to jump again. The commissaris wasn’t able to determine the nature of the apparition immediately, he only knew he felt nauseated.
He followed it as it moved around and returned to the cupboard.
It was a structure of human bones, clipped together and held upright by a transparent plastic rod. The head seemed to be a cow’s skull, very old and moldy, with a gaping hole in its forehead framed in dry moss. Part of the skull was covered by a mask of frayed purple corduroy but the eye sockets and the long mouth with rows of pale yellow teeth had been left bare. The cupboard’s door closed and the hum stopped. The commissaris looked at the floor. A pair of rails had been sunk into the smooth polished boards, evidently the specter had ridden on a small cart powered by electricity.
“A toy,” the baboon said.
De Gier was staring at the cupboard door, his legs astride. Grijpstra stood next to the sergeant, bent slightly forward. Only the commissaris hadn’t moved, not even when the ghoul’s weapon, a rusted Sten gun, had brushed the back of his sleeve.
He sat down again. “You are an artist, Mr. Vleuten, and your creations are spectacular. I’m sure the municipal museum would be interested and give you space to exhibit. I’m interested too. What prompted you to make that structure?”
“A vision,” the baboon said slowly, “a vision when I was drunk. I don’t normally drink much, but I did happen to get very drunk some years ago and I passed out. My body stopped functioning but my mind worked well, too well, perhaps. The sensation was unpleasant. I wanted to go to sleep but I had been caught in a maelstrom. You probably know the experience. Dizziness, increasing until everything turns, not only what the mind experiences but the mind itself joins its reflections. A crazy dance, and in my case also macabre.”
The commissaris smiled. “If I remember correctly mat particular sensation doesn’t last too long. One gets sick and vomits and then there is nothing but sleep until the hangover the following day.”
“I didn’t get sick. I spent hours being part of the maelstrom, trying not to be sucked into the abyss that lurked at its bottom. I had everything against me that night. There was much to be seen although I didn’t want to see it. In the edge of the swirl different scenes were acted out and I was in all of them. The main actors, apart from myself, were a human skeleton with a masked cow’s head and a little boy riding his rat.”
It was the commissaris’s turn to get up and wander around the room and the baboon followed him. They were of about the same height, and Grijpstra leaned out of his chair to keep track of their moving shapes.
“So what have we caught now?” de Gier whispered.
“Shhh!”
“Normally a man would try to get away from his fears,” the commissaris was saying, “but you went to great trouble to picture them. It seems that you do the opposite of what is to be expected. The effort is deliberate?”
“Yes.”
“Like when you had the Camet and Company firm in the palm of your hand, so to speak, and you threw it away?”
