.
But it was hard to believe that Mikaela Lijphart was making it all up. Really hard. She seemed more like an open book, Moreno thought — with those big, bright eyes and straightforward features. Obviously, she could be mistaken — but she was hardly your blue-eyed innocent.
‘So now you’re on your way to meet him, are you?’ she asked. ‘Your dad. Where does he live?’
‘Lejnice,’ said Mikaela. ‘He’s in a home just outside the town. I’ve rung and spoken to them — they know I’m coming. So they were going to prepare him. . Yes, that’s what they said. Prepare him. Ugh, I’m scared stiff. But I know it’s got to be done.’
Moreno tried in all haste to find something consoling to say to her.
‘You have to do what you have to do,’ she said. ‘Is it really the case that you didn’t know you had a dad until yesterday?’
Mikaela smiled briefly again.
‘Yes. Obviously, I know that a virgin birth isn’t all that common nowadays. But I’ve had a stepfather since I was three, and known that he wasn’t my real father since I was fifteen. And then. . Well, I had to wait for another three years until my mum told me who my real father was. Arnold Maager. . I don’t really know if I like that name or not. .’
‘But why?’ Moreno couldn’t help herself from asking. ‘I mean, it’s nothing to do with me, but. .’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mikaela.
‘You don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t know why she couldn’t tell me. Or didn’t want to tell me. She went on and on about responsibility and maturity and all that, my mum did, but. . No, no details at all. Something happened when I was very young, that’s all I know.’
Moreno looked out of the window, and saw that they had now come to Boodendijk. Not far to go to Lejnice. A couple more stops, probably. Behind the row of buildings she could already see the sand dunes. The sky seemed almost hysterically blue.
What the hell can I say to her? she wondered. The poor girl must feel completely abandoned.
‘Did you consider taking somebody with you?’ she said. ‘If you feel worried about it. A friend. . Or your mum. .’
‘I wanted to meet him on my own,’ said Mikaela. ‘My mum didn’t want me to go to see him at all — but once you’re eighteen years old, you do what you have to do.’
‘Quite right,’ said Moreno.
A few seconds passed. The train set off again.
‘I don’t understand why I’m sitting here, telling all this to somebody I’ve never seen before,’ said Mikaela, trying to look a little more cocksure. ‘You must think I’m a real crackpot. . Not to mention my mum and dad. A real crackpot family. Maybe we are, but I don’t usually-’
‘It can be a good thing to talk to strangers now and then,’ said Moreno, interrupting her. ‘You can say whatever you like, without having to take other things into consideration. I often start conversations like this one.’
The girl’s face was consumed by a smile, and Moreno registered that she was even more charming when the all-pervading worry dispersed momentarily.
‘You’re right! That’s exactly what I think about my dad. About meeting him, I mean. We’re strangers, after all. I don’t want to have anybody else present when I speak to him for the first time. It would be. . It wouldn’t be right, somehow. Do you see what I mean? It wouldn’t be right as far as he’s concerned.’
Moreno nodded.
‘So you’re getting off at Lejnice, are you?’
‘Yes. Where are you going?’
‘I’m getting off at Lejnice as well. It’ll all turn out okay, trust me! That business with your dad, I mean. I can feel it.’
‘So can I!’ said Mikaela optimistically, sitting up straighter. ‘I think we’re nearly there — I’d better go to the toilet and wipe away my tears. Thank you for letting me talk to you.’
Moreno suddenly felt that she needed to blink away a few tears as well. She tapped Mikaela’s thigh and cleared her throat.
‘Do that! I’ll wait for you. Then we can go into the station together, okay?’
Mikaela stood up and headed for the toilet at the far end of the carriage. Moreno took a deep breath. Put her book back into her bag and established that you could see the sea through the window.
Checked her watch and noted that they were due to arrive in three minutes’ time.
She said goodbye to Mikaela Lijphart in the forecourt outside the station building, where Mikaela boarded a yellow bus that would take her to the Sidonis Foundation, a care home about a kilometre or so north, and a similar distance inland.
Moreno took a taxi, as she wasn’t at all sure where the Lejnice police station was situated.
It turned out to be in a square a couple of hundred yards from the station, and the young driver wondered if she’d like him to take her to the church and back as well, so that he could have something to register on his taximeter.
Moreno laughed and said she would be needing a cab to take her to Port Hagen in an hour or two’s time, and he gave her his card with a direct telephone number she could ring.
Lejnice police station was a two-storey, rectangular building in dark pommer stone with small, square windows impossible to look in through. Evidently built shortly after the war, and flanked by a butcher’s shop and a funeral parlour. Above the less than impressive entrance was a tiny balcony with iron railings and an even tinier flag, wafting in the breeze on something that could well have been a broomstick. Moreno was reminded of a decadent nineteenth-century French colony — or at least a film about such a colony — and when she caught sight of Chief Inspector Vrommel, she had the distinct impression that he preferred that century to the new one that was about to begin.
He was standing in the entrance: tall and lanky, wearing a sort of loose-fitting khaki uniform that Moreno could also only recall having seen in a film. He was about sixty, she decided, possibly closer to sixty-five. Reinhart’s guess that he was red-haired might well have been correct — but that would have been ten years or more ago. Now there wasn’t a lot of hair on Vrommel’s head. In fact, one might say he was bald.
Round spectacles, frameless, a large reddish-brown nose and a moustache that was so thin and skin- coloured that she didn’t notice it until they’d shaken hands.
‘Inspector Moreno, I presume. Pleased to meet you. Did you have a good journey?’
He doesn’t like female police officers, she thought.
‘Excellent, thank you. A bit on the warm side, though.’
He didn’t respond to the invitation to talk about the weather. Cleared his throat and stood up straight instead.
‘Welcome to Lejnice. This is where the powers that be hold sway round here.’ He made a gesture that might possibly — but only possibly — be interpreted as ironic. ‘Shall we go in? That Lampe-bastard is waiting for you.’
He held the door open, and Moreno entered the relatively cool Lejnice police station.
The interrogation room was about six feet square, and looked like an interrogation room ought to look.
Like all interrogation rooms the world over ought to look. A table and two chairs. A ceiling light. No windows. On the table a tape recorder, a jug of water and two white plastic mugs. Bare walls and an unpainted concrete floor. Two doors, each with a peephole. Franz Lampe-Leermann was already on his chair when Moreno entered through one of the doors. He’d probably been sitting there for quite a while, she assumed: he looked fed up, and the smile he gave her seemed strained. Large damp patches of sweat had formed under the arms of his yellow shirt, and he had taken off both his shoes and his socks. He was breathing heavily. The air-conditioning system that served the rest of the building evidently didn’t extend as far as this hellhole.
Or perhaps Vrommel had switched it off.
Thirty-five degrees, Moreno thought. At least. Good.
