order and moral decadence. But there were obvious elements of the dirty old man in his outpourings: there was little doubt that he did his best to drag out her visit for as long as possible. She declined his offer of coffee, mulled wine and gin, and eventually managed to extricate herself by half-promising to keep him informed about how the case was developing. In person.
What an unpleasant old fart, she thought when she finally succeeded in leaving his flat.
But then, she told herself after a few seconds, it can’t be all that much fun being old, lonely and smelly.
No fun at all, presumably.
The only possible gleam of light came from froken Mathisen, who Moreno thought seemed very reminiscent in appearance of a cream puff pastry. Big, spongy and rather delicious. What Mathisen had to say was perhaps nothing to write home about, but what she was quite clear over was that she had gone out at around seven o’clock on Wednesday evening – a few minutes past, if she remembered rightly – and that she was pretty sure that she had heard noises coming from the caretaker’s flat as she walked past the door. She couldn’t be more precise about what sort of sounds they were, apart from being sure that it seemed as if somebody was busy doing something in the hall – a somebody who must have been fru Van Eck, seeing as her husband was over at Riitmeeterska, painting designs onto porcelain ornaments.
Moreno read through her notes on this conversation as well, and ticked it off together with the remaining names – de Booning, Engel and Mathisen.
There was not much more to add. Krause had come to relieve her at about noon, and spent the afternoon interrogating the neighbours. That was not too complicated as fru Van Eck had been a well-known figure in the locality.
Sure enough, she had been to three of the shops in Kolderplejn, had left the last of them at about a quarter to six and been seen by at least two witnesses walking back home. So it was not difficult to make a timetable for what seemed to be the crucial part of Wednesday evening:
It could possibly be added that none of Krause’s many witnesses had seen the very substantial caretaker’s wife after six p.m.
Moreno contemplated her summary. Brilliant detective work! she concluded, and closed her notebook.
Munster and Jung took it in turns with Arnold Van Eck.
Bearing in mind developments at Kolderweg, Hiller had agreed to release both Rooth and Jung and transfer them to the Leverkuhn case, in so far as Munster needed them. The serial rapist in Linzhuisen had been lying low for over two months, and that investigation had come to a standstill.
Despite persistent efforts, mainly by Jung – there was something about Arnold Van Eck’s character that made Munster reluctant to interrogate him and even made him angry (perhaps it was that image of the run-over kitten spooking him again) – they did not succeed in extracting much information over and above what had emerged during the conversation at the kitchen table. Their picture of the somewhat peculiar and childless marriage became a little clearer, but on the whole no progress was made regarding the actual disappearance of the wife. No matter how hard Jung tried to penetrate the relationship and the shared lives of the couple, Van Eck was unable to produce even a hint of an explanation as to why his wife would have left him voluntarily.
If she had done so thirty or forty years ago, it would of course have been the most natural thing in the world – even Van Eck himself could see that. But now – why leave him now?
And so, both Munster and Jung concluded, she had not done so. There must be some other explanation. And a pretty powerful one at that: fru Van Eck was not the sort of woman you could knock over with a feather duster, as Jung put it before leaving.
When he was alone in his office Munster listened to the whole tape again, and if he were to be honest he thought it sounded, at least in part, more like a therapeutical conversation than an interrogation.
But be that as it may, the fact remained: Else Van Eck, 182 centimetres tall, weight 94 kilos, 65 years old, had disappeared. Probably wearing a bluish pepper-and-salt coat, well-fitting brown ENOC shoes (size 43), various other items and a black felt hat. She had left her home at some time between seven and eight p.m. (the precise time had been established with the aid of Constable Krause, who had informed them of froken Mathisen’s observations) on Wednesday evening.
The Wanted message was sent out as early as two o’clock, but by five o’clock, when Munster was preparing to go home, there had still been no response from that great detective, the general public.
Perhaps it had been over-optimistic to expect otherwise. Perhaps they had a better chance of receiving a tip following the feeler Krause had sent out into the underworld regarding Leverkuhn, but they had so far drawn a blank there as well. The informant Adolf Bosch had turned up shortly after three, delivered his report and been paid his 200 euros (albeit in reverse order: Bosch was not born yesterday) – and the result of his dodgy researches had been aptly summed up by his own words:
‘Not a thing, Constable Krause, not a fucking thing!’
Before going home for the night Munster allowed himself half an hour’s introspection in his office. He locked the door. Switched off the light. Wheeled his desk chair over to the window and put his feet up on the windowsill.
Leaned back and contemplated the view. It was beautiful in a way, he couldn’t deny that. Beautiful and threatening. The sky hovered over the town like a slowly but inexorably darkening lead dome. The vain attempts to illuminate things from the buzzing streets down below seemed merely to emphasize the indomitable nature of the darkness rather than to offer it any resistance.
A bit like his own work, in fact. The chief inspector used to talk about that – the fact that it is not until we start fighting evil that we begin to understand how all-embracing it is. Only when we light a candle in the darkness do we see how vast it is.
He shook his head in an attempt to rid himself of these questionable thoughts. They were not productive – all they did was provide unnecessary nourishment to feelings of weariness and impotence, which of course had their best growing conditions at this falling, sinking time of year.
Despite Jung’s and his own talk of wet, bare tree trunks and all the rest of it. Inner landscapes?
Anyway, the case! he thought and closed his eyes. The case of Waldemar Leverkuhn.
Or was it the case of Bonger? Or Else Van Eck?
How sure was it that they were interconnected, these three strands? There was an old rule of thumb which said that if the dead bodies of two cinema caretakers were discovered, it was by no means certain that the murders were connected. But if a third one was found – well, you could reasonably assume that all the cinema caretakers in the world should be given special protection.
And now here we are with three pensioners. One murdered and two disappeared. Did that mean that all the pensioners in the world should be given special protection?
One would hope not, Munster thought. Because it was not difficult to restrict the links quite radically. Leverkuhn and Bonger had been good friends. Leverkuhn and fru Van Eck lived in the same block of flats. But on the other hand, Bonger and fru Van Eck had no known connections at all – so if there was in fact some kind of common denominator, it must be Leverkuhn.
And Leverkuhn was the only one of them who was definitely dead. Very dead.
Munster sighed and wished he were a smoker. A smoker would have lit up at this point; as it was, he had to make do with clasping his hands behind the back of his neck and leaning still further back on his chair.
What about the disappearances? he thought. There were differences between them. Big differences. As far as Bonger was concerned, he could have disappeared in a puff of smoke at any time during the night of the murder – or even later. Nobody had seen any trace of him after he had left Freddy’s, but nobody missed him until well into Sunday. At a guess he had never arrived back at his houseboat at all, but that was only a hypothesis. There were masses of alternatives and variations.
It was different in the case of Else Van Eck. Here the margins were reduced to an hour between seven and eight on Wednesday evening, and bearing in mind her size and general profile, that was not a very large space to pass through. Witnesses should – no,
