E We could hear what they were doing.
W Really?
E They were screwing so frantically that the whole house was shaking.
Moreno put the papers on one side. Checked the clock. A quarter to one. This was the third interrogation transcript she’d read, and the picture was becoming clear.
Depressingly clear, she thought.
What a creep, she thought. No wonder he went and hid himself away in a loony bin. No wonder he went mad.
A wife and a two-year-old daughter.
Was this what Mikaela discovered when she visited the Sidonis home?
Was this what his wife suspected had happened?
No, it wasn’t difficult to understand why he had gone out of his mind. Most certainly not. Screwing a sixteen-year-old girl in front of five witnesses, more or less. And the whole house was shaking. . For Christ’s sake!
And then killing her when she had the nerve to get pregnant.
Detective Inspector Moreno leaned her head on her hands and gazed out at the Sunday-deserted square. The cold front was still persisting, but the rain had stopped as yesterday turned into today.
Basic instincts? she thought.
Sex backed up by a certain amount of heart. The brain adrift in a dinghy with no oars. And drunk, to be on the safe side.
The parallel between the Maager incident and her own deflowering had been nagging at her for several days, and now she could see the incident in her mind’s eye more clearly than for many years.
That cramped hotel room in the Piazza di Popolo in Rome. The eternal city. Eternal love.
Moreno. A seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. Only one year older than Winnie Maas — and only a year later chronologically, it now struck her, to her horror. 1984. A school trip for those studying languages. Early summer. Good to be alive.
Him. A thirty-six-year-old Latin teacher.
Strong. Learned. Sophisticated.
A man of the world with a hairy chest and warm hands. They hadn’t made love so frantically that the whole hotel shook, but they’d had quite a lot of sex even so, and had managed it without being observed. He promised to leave his wife for her sake, and she believed him.
So much so that she eventually telephoned his wife to discuss the situation with her.
Afterwards: his cowardice. His monumentally pitiful performance.
It was the first time she had come across anything so humiliatingly weak-kneed, and when she met his wife several years later they had a very fruitful woman-to-woman conversation. She had left her Latin teacher, and as far as she knew he was still busy seducing schoolgirls in charmingly cramped rooms in Rome.
With warm hands, a hairy chest and a ready wit.
But he wasn’t the prat at the centre of the current emergency. Nor was Ewa Moreno one of the players.
It was all about a dead girl by the name of Winnie Maas. And a girl they hoped was still alive, Mikaela Lijphart.
And the latter’s father, Arnold Maager.
He had had sixteen years in which to prepare his story before he met his daughter. Sixteen years alone with his thoughts and his remorse, presumably.
Sixteen hundred wouldn’t have been enough, Moreno thought. Time heals many wounds, but not those caused by shame. She recalled a line of poetry, she couldn’t remember the context:
She put the files back on the shelf. Glanced at the door to Constable Vegesack’s room and established that he was still asleep in his desk chair. His head leaning back and his mouth open.
She had intended to have a word with him about his conversation with Maager at the Sidonis home, but decided to let it pass.
On purely humanitarian grounds. In case he and his girlfriend didn’t intend to sleep tonight either.
Instead she left the Lejnice police station, and crossed over the square to Vlammerick’s sweetshop to buy a peace-offering for her boyfriend (fiance? bloke? lover?).
And to some extent also to balance out her own premenstrual blood sugar deficiency.
21
The call came just after she had parked in the shade of an elm tree, and she thought twice before answering.
‘I just thought you’d like to know,’ said Munster.
For a confused second she had no idea what he was on about.
‘Know?’
‘Lampe-Leermann. That paedophile business.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Moreno.
‘I’ve found the journalist.’
How is that possible? Moreno thought. I’ve almost managed to forget all about the Scumbag after only a couple of days. .
‘So there really was a journalist, after all?’
‘It seems so,’ said Munster, and sounded more sombre than she could ever remember him being.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Munster cleared his throat.
‘I’m in a bit of a jam,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a bugger, this business — as they say.’
‘Why are you in a jam?’
‘Well, maybe not in a jam — but the whole business is very dodgy. Lampe-Leermann wasn’t a problem: he told us the name in exchange for a guarantee that he would be sent to the Saalsbach prison. I think he has enemies in a few of the other establishments, and felt threatened. Anyway, he gave me the name of that reporter, no beating about the bush.’
‘Why are you not telling me his name?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Munster.
‘Do you mean you don’t know what he’s called, or that you don’t know why you don’t want to tell me his name?’
‘I know what he’s called,’ said Munster.
‘Have you spoken to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
She suddenly felt that hand squeezing her throat again.
‘He admits that he’s spilled the beans to Lampe-Leermann,’ said Munster. ‘While drunk, of course. He claims that he has the name of one of our officers. He has pictures to prove it, and has been given ten thousand to hush it up — exactly what Lampe-Leermann told us, in other words.’
‘God help us,’ said Moreno.
‘Exactly,’ said Munster. ‘And there’s another little snag.’
‘What?’
