fingerprints or dropped cigarette butts?”
“Not even a grain of dandruff,” said Reinhart. “Shall we run through the interviews instead? Starting with the widow?”
“No, starting with the victim,” said Van Veeteren. “Even though I assume he didn't have much to say for himself.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Reinhart, producing a loose sheet of paper from his notebook. “Let's see now… Ryszard Malik was fifty-two years of age. Born in Chadow, but has lived in Maardam since 1960 or thereabouts. Studied at the School of Commerce. Got a job with Gundler & Wein in 1966. In 1979 he started his own firm together with Mauritz Wolff and Jan Merrinck, who jumped ship quite early on-Merrinck, that is. Aluvit F/B, and for God's sake don't ask me what that means. Malik married Ilse, nee Moener, in 1968. One son, Jacob, born 1972. He's been reading jurisprudence and economics in Munich for several years now. Anyway, that's about it…”
He put the sheet of paper back where it came from.
“Anything off the record?” Rooth wondered.
“Not a dickie bird,” said Reinhart. “So far, at least. He seems to have been a bit of a bore, as far as I can see. Boring marriage, boring job, boring life. Goes on vacation to Blankenbirge or Rhodes. No known interests apart from crossword puzzles and detective novels, preferably bad ones… God only knows why anybody should want to kill him, but apart from that I don't think there are any unanswered questions.”
“Excellent,” said Van Veeteren. “What about the widow? Surely there's a bit more substance to her, at least?”
Munster shrugged.
“We haven't been able to get much out of her,” he said. “She's still confused and doesn't want to accept what's happened.”
“She might be hiding something, though,” said Heinemann. “It's not exactly anything new to pretend to be mad. I recall a Danish prince…”
“I don't think she is,” interrupted Munster. “Neither do the doctors. We know quite a lot about her from her sister and her son, but it doesn't seem to have anything much to do with the murder. A bit pitiful, that's all. Bad nerves. Prescribed drugs on and off. Taken in for therapy once or twice. Finds it hard to get on with people, it seems. Stopped working at Konger's Palace for that reason, although nobody has said that in so many words… As far as we can see, Malik's firm produces enough cash to keep the family going. Or has done until now, I should say.”
Van Veeteren bit off the end of a toothpick.
“This is more miserable than the weather,” he said, spitting out a few fragments. “Has Moreno anything to add?”
Ewa Moreno smiled slightly.
“The son is rather charming, actually,” she said. “In view of the circumstances, that is. He flew the nest early, it seems. Left home as soon as he'd finished high school and he doesn't have much contact with his parents, especially his mother. Only when he needs some money. He admits that openly. Do you want to know about the sister as well?”
“Is there anything for us to sink our teeth into?” asked Rein-hart with a sigh.
“No,” said Moreno. “Not really. She also has a stable but rather boring marriage. Works part-time in an old folks' home. Her husband's a businessman. They both have alibis for the night of the murder, and it seems pretty unlikely that either of them could be involved-completely unthinkable, in fact.”
All was quiet for a while. Rooth produced a bar of chocolate from his jacket pocket and Heinemann tried to scrape a stain off the table with his thumbnail. Van Veeteren had closed his eyes, and it was more or less impossible to make out if he was awake or asleep.
“Okay,” said Reinhart eventually. “There's just one thing I want to know. Who the hell did it?”
“A madman,” said Rooth. “Somebody who wanted to test his Berenger and noticed that the lights were on in the house.”
“I reckon you've hit the nail on the head,” said Heinemann.
“No,” said Van Veeteren without opening his eyes.
“Oh, really?” said Reinhart. “How do you know that?”
“By the prickings of my thumb,” said Van Veeteren.
“Eh?” said Heinemann. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Shall we go and get some coffee?” suggested Rooth.
Van Veeteren opened his eyes.
“Preferably a hot toddy, as I said before.”
Reinhart checked the time.
“It's only eleven,” he said. “But I'm all for it. This case stinks like a shit heap.”
On the way home from the police station that gloomy Monday, Reinhart stopped off at the Merckx shopping center out at Bossingen. It was really against his principles to buy anything in such a temple of commerce, but he decided to turn a blind eye to the crassness of it all today. He simply didn't feel up to running around from one little shop to the next in the center of town, after rooting about in the unsavory details of Ryszard Malik's background.
Half an hour later he had acquired a lobster, two bottles of wine, and eleven roses. Plus a few other goodies. That would have to do. He left the inferno and a quarter of an hour later went through the front door of his apartment in Zuyderstraat. Put away his purchases in their appointed places, then made a phone call.
“Hi. I've got a lobster, some wine, and some roses. You can have them all if you get yourself here within the next hour.”
“But it's Monday today,” said the woman at the other end.
“If we don't do anything about it, it'll be Monday for the rest of our lives,” said Reinhart.
“Okay,” said the woman. “I'll be there.”
Winnifred Lynch was a quarter Aboriginal, born in Perth, Australia, but raised in England. After a degree in English language and literature in Cambridge and a failed and childless marriage, she'd landed a post as guest lecturer at Maardam University. When she met Reinhart at the Vox jazz club in the middle of November, she'd just celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday. Reinhart was forty-nine. He went home with her, and they made love (with the occasional pause) for the next four days and nights-but to the surprise of both of them, given their previous experiences, it didn't end there. They carried on meeting. All over the place: at concerts, restaurants, cinemas, and, above all, of course, in bed. As soon as the beginning of December it was clear to Reinhart that there was something special about this slightly brown-skinned, intelligent woman, and when she went back to England for the Christmas holidays he felt withdrawal symptoms, the like of which he hadn't experienced for nearly thirty years. A sudden reminder of what it was like to miss somebody. Of the fact that somebody actually meant something to him.
The feeling scared him stiff, no doubt about that; it was a warning, but when she came back after three weeks he couldn't help but go to meet her at the airport. Stood waiting with a bunch of roses and a warm embrace, and of course it started all over again.
This Monday was the fifth-or was it the sixth?-occasion since then, and when he thought about it he realized that it could hardly have been more than ten days since she'd returned from vacation.
So you could bet your life that he had something special going.
“Why did you become a policeman?” she asked as they lay back in bed afterward. “You promised you'd tell me one day.”
“It's a trauma,” he said after a moment's thought.
“I'm human, you know,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
She didn't answer, but after a while he imagined that he understood.
“All right,” he said. “It was a woman. Or a girl. Twenty years old.”
“What happened?”
He hesitated, and inhaled deeply twice on his cigarette before answering.
“I was twenty-one. Reading philosophy and anthropology at the university, as you know. We'd been together for two years. We were going to get married. She was reading languages. One night she was going home after a
