The Unlucky Lottery

that was always the starting point, the starting gun, the opening move in every new case. Every new task.

And the disgust. The disgust that was always there. At the start of his career – when he spent nearly all his working time in freezing cold cars keeping watch during the night, or thanklessly shadowing suspects, or making door-to-door enquiries – he had believed the disgust would go away once he had learned how to face up to all the unpleasantness, but as the years passed he realized that this was not the case. On the contrary, the older he became the more important it seemed to be to protect himself and to keep things at arm’s length. It was only when the initial waves of disgust had begun to ebb away that it made any sense to start digging deeper into the case. To establish and try to become closely acquainted with the nature of the crime. Its probable background. Causes and motives.

The very essence, as Van Veeteren used to put it.

The pattern.

No doubt the chief inspector had taught him some of these strategies, but by no means all. During the last few years – the last few cases – Van Veeteren’s disgust had been even greater than his own, he was quite certain of that. But perhaps that was a right that came with increased age, Munster thought. Age and wisdom.

Hard to say. There was a sort of pattern in the chief inspector’s last years as well. And in his current environment among all those books. That unfathomable concept known as the determinant, in fact, that Munster had never really got to grips with. Never understood what it actually meant. But perhaps it would dawn on him one of these days: time and inertia were not only the province of oblivion, but sometimes also of gradual realization. In fact.

But Waldemar Leverkuhn. Forget everything else! Munster rested his head on his hands.

A seventy-two-year-old pensioner killed in his sleep. Brutally murdered by a hair-raisingly large number of stab wounds – excessive violence, as it was called. A dodgy term, of course, but perhaps it was appropriate in this case.

Why?

For Christ’s sake, why so many stab wounds?

A waitress in a white hat coughed discreetly, but Munster asked her to wait until his companion arrived, and she withdrew. He turned his back on the premises and instead watched two pigeons strutting back and forth on the broad window ledge while he tried to conjure up an image of Leverkuhn’s mutilated body in his mind’s eye.

Twenty-eight stabs. What did that suggest?

It was hardly an insoluble puzzle. Fury, of course. Raging fury. The person who had put an end to this old man had been totally out of self-control. There had been no reason to continue after four or five stabs if the aim had been simply to kill the victim. Meusse had been crystal clear on that point. The last thirty seconds – the last fifteen or twenty stabs – were an expression of something other than the urge to kill.

Frenzy? Insanity? Revenge and retribution, perhaps? An implacable and long-standing hatred that now finally erupted and resolved itself?

The latter possibility was mere speculation; but it was logical, and there was nothing to rule it out.

The possibility that there might be a deep-seated motive, in other words.

Munster tapped on the window pane and the pigeons flew off, their wings numb with cold.

But of course there was nothing to rule out Rooth’s theory either – a crazy drug addict. Nothing at all.

You pays your money and makes your choice, Munster thought.

Still, even if Chief of Police Hiller cuts our resources to the bone, I’m going to have a stab at resolving this case.

Good grief! What am I saying? Munster thought with a shudder. It sometimes seemed as if words acquired a life of their own, and lay in wait ready to ambush him.

Ruth Leverkuhn turned up at ten minutes past twelve: ten minutes late, a fact to which she devoted several explanations. She had been a bit late setting off. Lots of traffic, and then she couldn’t find a parking place, neither in the square nor down at Zwille; she finally found one in Anckers Steeg and had only put money in the meter for half an hour. She hoped that would be enough.

In view of what they had to talk about, Munster received these trivial bits of information with suppressed surprise. Observed in silence as she hung her brown coat over the back of the empty chair at their table, made quite a show of digging out cigarettes and a lighter from her handbag, adjusted her glasses and also the artificial flowers on the table.

She was about his own age, he decided, but quite a bit overweight and the worse for wear. Her brown-tinted shoulder-length hair hung down like shabby and unwashed curtains round her pale face. Restlessness and insecurity surrounded her almost like body odour, and it was only when she lit a cigarette that there was a pause in her nervous chattering.

‘Have you been in touch with your mother?’ Munster asked.

‘Yes.’ She nodded, inhaled deeply and examined her fingernails. ‘Yes, I’ve heard what happened. I phoned her after I’d spoken to you. It’s awful, I don’t understand, it felt as if it were a dream when I got into the car and drove here… A nightmare, rather. But is it really true? That somebody killed him? Murdered him? Is it true?’

‘As far as we can tell,’ said Munster.

‘But that’s absolutely… awful,’ she said again, taking another drag at her cigarette. ‘Why?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Munster. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.’

She nodded and took another drag. The waitress appeared again and took their order: cafe au lait for froken Leverkuhn, black coffee for the intendent. He took out his notebook and put it on the table in front of him.

‘Did you have a good relationship with your father?’ he asked.

She gave a start.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Exactly what I said,’ said Munster. ‘Did you have a good relationship with him?’

‘Well, yes… he was my father after all.’

‘It does happen that children have a bad relationship with their fathers,’ Munster pointed out.

She hesitated. Scratched herself quickly on the outside of her left breast and took another drag.

‘We haven’t had all that much contact lately.’

‘Lately?’

‘Since I grew up, I suppose you could say.’

‘Twenty, twenty-five years?’ Munster asked.

She made no reply.

‘Why?’ Munster wondered.

‘It just turned out that way.’

‘Did the same apply to your brother and sister?’

‘More or less.’

‘How often did you meet your mother and father?’

‘Just occasionally.’

‘Once a month?’

‘Once a year, more like.’

‘Once a year?’

‘Yes… At Christmas. But not always. You might think it sounds bad, but they didn’t take any initiatives either. We simply didn’t socialize, full stop. Why should we have to observe social conventions when nobody concerned was bothered…?’ Her voice trailed away.

‘… I’m a lesbian,’ she added, out of the blue.

‘Really,’ said Munster. ‘What has that to do with it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ruth Leverkuhn. ‘But people talk such a lot.’

Munster watched the pigeons, which had returned, for a while. Ruth put two spoonfuls of sugar into her cup and stirred.

‘When did you last see your father?’

She stubbed out her cigarette and started fumbling for another one while she thought that over.

‘That would be nearly two years ago,’ she said.

‘And your mother?’