By lunchtime the picture of the wanted woman calling herself Maria Adler had reached every nook and cranny of the whole country and those who had managed to avoid it could only have been the blind and anyone sleeping off the effects of their Saturday night boozing.
According to Inspector Reinhart's understanding of the situation, that is.
By as early as eleven o'clock, the number of calls had passed the five-hundred mark, and by not much more than an hour later, that figure had doubled. Four operators were at the switchboard receiving calls; a couple of officers made a preliminary assessment and sorted them into two (later three) groups according to urgency, whereupon the material was sent upstairs to the fourth floor, where Van Veeteren and the others tried to make a final assessment and decide on what further action to take.
Another three women (to add to Munster's four) had called to say their name was Maria Adler. None of them had anything at all to do with the murders and could prove it, and none of them seemed to be too happy at being called Maria Adler at the present time. A poor woman up in Frigge, the wife of the lord mayor, was called something entirely different, but evidently looked exactly like the picture in the newspapers-she had been reported by four different people in her hometown, and had phoned the police in tears, both locally and at the headquarters in Maardam. The lord mayor himself was intending to sue.
However, the majority of all the calls came from the Deijkstraa area. All of them claimed-no doubt correctly- that they had come across this Miss Adler in various places during the month she had been living in Mrs. Klausner's house. In the supermarket. At the post office. In the street. At the bus stop on the Esplanade… and so on. No doubt most of these sightings were also correct; but, needless to say they were of little value to the investigation.
What they were looking for were two types of information, as had been stressed in the press release and repeated in the newspapers and the broadcast-news bulletins.
First: information that could (directly or indirectly) link the wanted woman to any of the murder scenes.
Second: evidence to indicate where Miss Adler had gone after leaving Mrs. Klausner's house on Friday afternoon.
By noon only a regrettably small number of calls had been received in those categories. There might have been indications suggesting that Maria Adler had taken a northbound train round about six o'clock on Friday evening. One witness claimed to have seen her in the station, another standing on a platform where he was waiting for a friend-a woman who didn't quite look like the picture of her in the mass media, but might well have been her even so.
If these two claims were correct, the train in question must have been the 1803, and shortly after half past noon Van Veeteren decided to send out a follow-up message to the mass media, urging anybody who had been traveling on that train and might have seen something to get in touch with the police.
A few hours later a handful of passengers had contacted the police, but what they had to say was hardly of significance. It sounded more like a collection of irrelevant details and guesses, and there were therefore grounds for believing that the train line (as Reinhart insisted on calling it) was not very promising.
By three o'clock, the officers in charge of the investigation were beginning to show the strain. They had spent the day in two rooms, Van Veeteren's and Munster's offices, which were next to each other, and the piles of paper and empty coffee mugs had increased steadily for six hours.
“Hell's bells,” said Reinhart. “Here's another call from the old witch who's seen our woman in Bossingen and Linzhuisen and Oosterbrugge. Now she's seen her in church at Loewingen as well.”
“We ought to have a better map,” said deBries. “With flag pins or something. I think we've had several tips from Aarlach, for instance. It would make things easier…”
“You and Rooth can fix one,” said Van Veeteren. “Go to your office so that you don't disturb us.”
DeBries finished off his Danish pastry and went to fetch Rooth.
“This is a real bugger of a job, sheer drudgery,” said Reinhart.
“I know,” said Van Veeteren. “No need to remind me.”
“I'm beginning to think she's the most observed woman in the whole country. They've seen her everywhere, for Christ's sake. In restaurants, at football matches, parking lots, cemeteries… in taxicabs, buses, shops, the movies…”
Van Veeteren looked up.
“Hang on,” he said. “Say that again!”
“What?” asked Reinhart.
“All those places you chanted.”
“What the hell for?”
Van Veeteren made a dismissive gesture.
“Forget it. Cemeteries…”
He picked up the telephone and called the duty officer. “Klempje? Get hold of Constable Klaarentoft without delay! Yes, I want him here in my office.”
“Now what are you onto?” asked Reinhart.
For once things went smoothly and half an hour later Klaa rentoft stuck his head around the door after knocking tentatively.
“You wanted to speak to me, Chief Inspector?”
“The photographs!” said Van Veeteren.
“What photographs?” wondered Klaarentoft, who took an average of a thousand a week.
“From the cemetery, of course! Ryszard Malik's burial. I want to look at them.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. Every damned one.”
Klaarentoft was beginning to look bewildered.
“You've still got them, I hope?”
“Yes, but they've only been developed. I haven't printed them out yet.”
“Klaarentoft,” said Van Veeteren, pointing threateningly with a toothpick. “Go down to the lab this minute and print them! I want them here within an hour.”
“Er, yes, of course, will do,” stammered Klaarentoft, and hurried out.
“If you can do it more quickly, so much the better!” yelled the chief inspector after him.
Reinhart stood up and lit his pipe.
“Impressive issuing of orders,” he said. “Do you think she was there, or what are you after?”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“Just a feeling.”
“Feelings can be helpful at times,” said Reinhart, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “How are Jung and Moreno doing, incidentally? With Innings and that Friday evening, I mean.”
“I don't know,” said Van Veeteren. “They've found the right place, it seems, but not whoever was with him.”
“And what's Heinemann doing?”
“He's in his office nosying into bank-account details, apparently,” said Van Veeteren. “Just as well, this would be a bit much for him.”
“It's starting to be a bit much for me as well, to tell you the truth,” said Reinhart, flopping back down on his chair. “I have to say I'd prefer her to come here in person and give herself up. Can't we put that request in the next press release?”
There was a knock on the door. Munster came in and perched on the edge of the desk.
“Something occurred to me,” he said. “This woman can hardly be older than forty That means she would have been ten at most when they were at the Staff College…”
“I know,” muttered Van Veeteren.
Reinhart scratched his face with the stem of his pipe.
“And what are you trying to say in view of that?”
“Well,” said Munster, “I thought you'd be able to work that out for yourself.”
It took Klaarentoft less than forty minutes to produce the photographs, and when he had put them on Van Veeteren's desk he lingered in the doorway, as if waiting for a reward of some kind. A coin, a candy, a few grateful and complimentary words at least. The chief inspector grabbed hold of the pictures, but Reinhart had
