Munster nodded.
‘Yes, good thinking,’ he said. ‘Shall I send Krause or somebody to help?’
‘In an hour from now,’ said Moreno. ‘Then at least I won’t need to walk back to the station.’
She checked her watch. Van Eck’s stomach was evidently taking its time.
‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘I must say I haven’t a clue. Why on earth should this woman go and disappear?’
‘Search me,’ said Munster. ‘It must mean something, of course, and I have the feeling we need to take it seriously. Even if it all seems like a farce.’
He leaned back on his chair and looked out of the window. The melancholy weather was persisting. Heavy clouds were scudding in from the sea, and the pane was dappled in damp and fuzzy, even though it wasn’t actually raining.
Gloom, Munster thought. Who would not want to vanish in weather like this?
There was the sound of the lavatory flushing. Van Eck came out.
‘I’ve finished,’ he said, as if he were a three-year-old at a potty-training camp.
‘Okay, then let’s go,’ said Munster. ‘Inspector Moreno will stay behind and investigate a few things.’
Van Eck’s lower lip started trembling, and Moreno tapped him cautiously on the shoulder.
‘This will sort itself out, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘There’s bound to be a perfectly natural explanation.’
Presumably, Munster thought. So much seems to be natural nowadays.
18
Inspector Moreno checked out of Hotel Bender at about four o’clock on Thursday afternoon. The nose-ringed receptionist tried to make her pay for a second night, since she had occupied the room after twelve noon, but she refused. For the first time for ages (or maybe the first time ever? she asked herself) she chose to use her work status for her personal gain.
As it was only a matter of 140 euros, perhaps she could be excused.
‘I’m a detective inspector,’ she explained. ‘We needed the room in order to keep an eye on a certain transaction taking place in this hotel. That mission is now completed. Unless you want your name mentioned in less than flattering circumstances, I suggest you debit me for one night and no more.’
The young man, as thin as a rake, thought for a couple of seconds.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Let’s say just the one night, then.’
There was no Claus sitting outside her door when she got home, but she phoned him as soon as she had downed half a glass of wine.
She explained, without beating about the bush, or becoming emotional, that she had a demand to make. An ultimatum, if he liked. If there was going to be any possibility of repairing the relationship they used to have – and even as she spoke those words she understood that by doing so she was giving him false hope – she demanded two weeks without being disturbed.
No telephone calls, no greetings. No damned roses.
Two whole weeks. Fourteen days from today. Did he agree?
He did, he announced, after what seemed rather too long a silence. But only if he really could count on their meeting and discussing things properly once that time had run out. And neither of them would initiate anything else during those two weeks.
Initiate? Moreno thought. Anything else…?
She agreed to the discussion demand, and avoided the other by making no comment and hanging up.
Then she drank the remaining half-glass of wine. So there, she thought. I’ve delayed his execution by two weeks. Cowardly. But it feels good.
She curled up in a corner of the sofa with another glass of wine and the notes she had made at Kolderweg. Adjusted the cushions and switched on the reading lamp: the light it produced was so restricted that it almost felt like sitting inside a one-man tent, a tiny bright cone in the darkness where she could hide herself away, cut off from all the surroundings that she would rather forget. Men, darkness and so on.
At last, she thought. Time to concentrate on the case, and pay no attention to herself or the world around her.
Especially herself.
She had written down the tenants in Kolderweg 17 on the first page of her notebook. From the top down:
The facts were first and foremost that Waldemar Leverkuhn was dead. She crossed his name out and continued.
Marie-Louise Leverkuhn? What was there to say about the widow?
Not a lot. She had returned from the charity shop soon after noon. Moreno had a short conversation with her, but in view of what the poor woman had already been through in terms of traumatic experiences and rigorous interviews, she restricted herself to what was absolutely necessary. Fru Leverkuhn said she had drunk coffee with Else Van Eck in the latter’s flat on Tuesday afternoon, had then bumped into her on the stairs the following morning (when she was on her way to the police station to talk to Intendent Munster), but apart from that, she claimed, she had neither seen nor heard anything of the caretaker’s wife.
Moreno wrote a tick after Marie-Louise Leverkuhn. And a question mark after Else Van Eck.
Herr Van Eck had returned from the police station at about half past one in a rather pathetic state, and Moreno ticked him as well.
That left the athletic lovers Menakdise and de Booning on the first floor, and herr Engel and froken Mathisen on the second. Viewed dispassionately these four were not yet involved in the case. Neutral observers (question mark again) and possible witnesses.
She had started with the young couple.
Or rather, with Filippa de Booning, as Tobose Menakdise was studying medicine and had lectures all day. However, froken de Booning promised to ask him when he came home if he had seen or heard anything in connection with the caretaker’s wife that could throw some light on her disappearance. She herself had nothing to contribute. She had been at home most of Wednesday, revising for an imminent exam on cultural anthropology, but she hadn’t seen any sign of fru Van Eck at all.
‘Thank goodness,’ she added, then bit her tongue. ‘Oh, sorry about that, but she always pays us special attention. I take it you know why?’
Moreno smiled and nodded. She felt a sudden shooting pain in her inside thigh as she momentarily envisaged the red-headed and very white-skinned Filippa in her sexual wrestling match with her Tobose who – if the framed photograph in the hall was to be believed – was blacker than the blackest black.
You two are still alive, she thought. Congratulations.
Ruben Engel had had just as little to contribute – even less if you took the shooting pain into consideration. He had felt out of sorts and spent the whole of Wednesday in bed, he explained. Not least the evening. Moreno looked around, and drew the provisional conclusion that it might have been due to his taking the wrong medication. If you didn’t feel too well in the morning, it presumably didn’t help if you then proceeded to swig glass after glass of claret, beer and mulled wine for the rest of the day. Engel also seemed to be very upset about what was going on elsewhere in the building, she noted, and she had difficulty in ignoring his moaning and groaning about law and
