“He didn't leave Freddy's until shortly after half past eleven,” said Moreno. “It takes at least a quarter of an hour to walk to Weijskerstraat. The murderer can hardly have struck before midnight.”
“Between twelve and two, then,” said Rooth. “Ah well, we'll have to find out if anybody saw anything.”
“Or heard,” said Heinemann.
Rooth stuck his index finger into his mouth, then withdrew it with a plopping sound.
“Did you hear that?” he asked. “That's about as much noise as is made when you use a silencer. He must have used one, or he'd have woken up the whole building.”
“Okay,” said Heinemann. “We'll assume that, then.”
Van Veeteren broke a toothpick in half and looked at the clock.
“Nearly midnight,” he said with a deep sigh. “We might as well go home now and get some sleep, but so help me God, we'd better make some progress tomorrow. We have quite a few threads to pull at, this time around; and there's no reason why we should be left floundering. The sooner we solve this business, the better.”
He paused briefly, but nobody took advantage of the opportunity to speak. He could see in his colleagues' faces the same mixture of intense concentration and weariness that he could feel inside his own head. Best to rest for a few hours, no doubt about that. Besides, there wouldn't be much point in waking people up in the middle of the night to answer a few questions. The police had a bad enough reputation as it was; there was no need to make it any worse.
“This is what we'll do tomorrow,” said the chief inspector. “Reinhart and deBries will continue interviewing the neighbors. The whole block, if there's time. I assume they're still at it now, and I suppose they might as well carry on. It could be that somebody has seen something-the murderer must have called round twice, for God's sake. Once to tamper with the lock, and once to kill. It might be that nobody noticed anything, but we'll have to see… Heinemann.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to dig into the background. We have details of the whole of Malik's life. Find out when his and Maasleitner's paths crossed. There must be a link.”
“Let's hope so,” said Heinemann.
“Munster and Rooth will take his family. Or rather, the family that used to be his. I have a list of them here. Moreno and Jung will go to the Elementar school…”
“Oh my God,” said Jung. “That's the school I used to go to…”
Van Veeteren raised his eyebrows.
“When was that?” he asked.
Jung tried to work it out.
“Eighteen years ago,” he said. “Just one term in the seventh grade, then we moved in the spring. I hardly recall a single teacher. I didn't have Maasleitner in any case.”
“A pity” said Van Veeteren. “Talk to the headmaster and some of the staff even so, but tread carefully. They're usually very wary of anybody who intrudes on a seat of learning like that. Remember what happened at Bunge?”
“I certainly do,” said Munster. “Lie low, that's my advice.”
“I'll bear it in mind,” said Jung.
“But leave that Faringer character alone,” said Van Veeteren. “I intend to have a little chat with him myself.”
“A bit of an oddball,” said Munster.
“Of course,” muttered Van Veeteren. “All teachers are. If they're not odd to start with, they become so as the years go by.”
He rummaged in his empty breast pocket and looked around the room.
“Any questions?”
Rooth yawned, but nobody spoke.
“Okay,” said the chief inspector, and started collecting his papers together. “We'll meet for a run-through at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Make sure you make the most of the time until then. This time we're going to get him.”
“Or her,” said Munster.
“Yes, yes,” said Van Veeteren. “Cherchez la femme, if you really must.”
When he got home and had gone to bed, he realized that his tiredness had not yet overcome the tension in his brain once and for all. The image of Rickard Maasleitner's bullet-ridden body kept cropping up in his mind's eye at regular intervals, and after ten minutes of vainly trying to fall asleep, he got up and went to the kitchen instead. Fetched a beer from the refrigerator and sat down in the armchair with a blanket around his knees and Dvorak in the speakers. He allowed the darkness to envelop him, but instead of the unease and disgust he ought to have felt, in view of the two unsolved murders they were struggling with, another sensation altogether took possession of him.
It was a feeling of movement. Of hunting, in fact. The feeling that the drive had begun now, and that the prey was somewhere out there in the hustle and bustle of town, and it was only a matter of time before he would be able to get his teeth into it. Bring down the murderer.
Oh, shit! he thought as he took a swig of his beer. I'm beginning to lose the plot. If I weren't a police officer, I'd probably have become a murderer instead.
It was only a random thought, of course, but nevertheless, somewhere in some obscure corner of his brain, he realized that there was more meaning in it than would be sensible to acknowledge. It had something to do with the concept of the hunt…
In the beginning, at least.
Only in the beginning, if truth be told. Somewhere along the line came the peripeteia, the volte-face, and when he eventually-usually much, much later-stood there with his prey, with the perpetrator, what generally possessed him were exclusively feelings of loathing and disgust. The excitement-the stimulation-was only theoretical.
And in the beginning.
For when you had dug down sufficiently deep into dire reality, his stream of thought told him, when you had dug down as deep as the soil layer of the crime itself, all there was to see was the black and hopeless dregs. The causes. The maggot-ridden roots of warped society.
The back side.
Not that he believed the society in which he lived had higher or lower moral principles than any other. It was simply the way things were-two to three thousand years of culture, and law-making bodies were unable to do anything about it. The veneer of civilization, or whatever you preferred to call it, could begin to crack at any moment, crumble away and expose the darkness underneath. Some people might have imagined that Europe would be a protected haven after 1945, but Van Veeteren had never been one of them. And then things had turned out as they did. Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and all the rest of it.
And of course it was in the same underlying darkness that his own hunting instincts originated. In any case, he had always found it difficult to associate his police activities with any kind of noble deeds. Nemesis, rather. The inexorable goddess of revenge with blood on her teeth… Yes, that was more like it, there was no denying it.
And at some point, the game always turned deadly serious.
In this particular case it had taken two murders for him to begin to feel involved. Were his senses becoming duller? he wondered. What would he be like a few years from now? What would be needed by then to start the notorious Chief Inspector Van Veeteren firing on all cylinders?
Butchered women? Children?
Mass graves?
When would cynicism and world-weariness have overcome his determination to fight once and for all? For how much longer would the moral imperative have the strength to continue screeching in the darkness of his soul?
Good questions. He felt his self-disgust rising and cut off the train of thought. No doubt it had been the contrary nature of January that had made him a little sluggish at the start. Now it was February. February the second, to be precise. What was this Maasleitner business all about?
He started thinking about what had happened that afternoon.
