what it had sounded like on the telephone.
He parked in the street outside the low, drab, brown house. Sat there for a minute, composing himself and wondering what exactly it was that prevented him from letting go of this business.
In his infinite wisdom, Chief of Police Hiller had declared that in the name of all that’s holy there was no rational reason for wasting any more resources on this case. Waldemar Leverkuhn had been murdered. His wife had confessed to doing it, and on Thursday she would be found guilty of either murder or manslaughter. He didn’t give a toss which. A certain Felix Bonger had gone missing and a certain Else Van Eck had gone missing.
‘So what?’ Hiller had asked, and Munster knew that he was right, in fact. The average number of people who went missing in their district was 15-18 per year, and the fact that two of them happened to disappear at about the same time as the Leverkuhn business was obviously pure coincidence.
Naturally the police continued to look for the two missing persons – just as they did for all the others who had gone up in smoke – but it wasn’t a job for highly paid (overpaid!) detective officers.
Bugger that for a lark. Full stop. Exit Hiller.
It’s a damned nuisance, having to work on the sly, Munster thought as he got out of the car.
But if you are an uncompromising seeker of the truth, you must grin and bear it.
‘Really, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read about it in the paper,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘Take a biscuit. They used to live over there, and we called on one another almost every day.’
She pointed out of the cluttered window at the house on the other side of the hedge.
‘Over there,’ she repeated. ‘Between 1952 and 1976. We moved in when the house was new in 1948, and since my husband died I’ve often thought I ought to move out, but I’ve never got round to it. Don’t be afraid to dunk if you want to. It’s terrible. We are normal people here in Pampas. Honest working people, not murderers. I talk too much, do interrupt me if you need to. My husband always used to say you have to interrupt me in order to shut me up.’
‘Did you know the Leverkuhns well?’ Munster asked.
‘Well… no, not really,’ said fru de Grooit, blinking a little nervously. ‘We always had more to do with the Van Klusters and the Bolmeks on the other side and opposite, not so much with the Leverkuhns, no… It wasn’t that…’
She fell silent and looked thoughtful.
‘Wasn’t what?’ Munster wondered.
‘It wasn’t that they weren’t good neighbours and good people, but they tended to keep their distance. They were like that, especially him.’
‘Waldemar Leverkuhn?’
‘Herr Leverkuhn, yes. A reserved chap, not easy to talk to; but an honest worker, nobody could possibly suggest anything else… It’s awful. Do you think she really murdered him in that terrible way? I don’t know what to think any more. How was the coffee?’
‘Good,’ said Munster.
It looked for a moment as if fru de Grooit was going to start crying. Munster coughed to distract her while he thought of something apposite to say, but he couldn’t think of anything that might console her.
‘Did you know fru Leverkuhn a little better, then?’ was the best he could do. ‘Better than him, that is. Woman to woman, as it were.’
But fru de Grooit merely shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t the type to get pally with, and if you ever needed to borrow some sugar or flour, it was natural to go to one of the other neighbours – the Van Klusters or Bolmeks. On the other side and opposite. Has she really killed him?’
‘It looks like it,’ said Munster. ‘What were the children like?’
Fru de Grooit fiddled with her coffee cup and didn’t reply immediately.
‘They were also reserved,’ she said after a while. ‘They didn’t have any real friends, none of them. Mauritz was exactly the same age as our Bertrand, we had him late on, but they never became good friends. We tried ten, twenty times, but he always preferred to be at home on his own, playing with his electric train set, Mauritz did – and don’t think that Bertrand was allowed to join in. There was something… something mean, something off- putting about the boy. I think he had a rough time at school as well. And with girls – no, it wasn’t exactly a home with open doors, certainly not.’
‘Have you had any contact with them in recent years?’ Munster asked. ‘Since they left here?’
‘None at all,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘They moved out and disappeared. From one day to the next. The children had already flown the nest, of course, so it was easier for them with a flat – they were never very interested in the garden. They didn’t even leave an address. We heard later that things had gone badly for Irene…’
‘Really?’ said Munster, pretending to be surprised.
‘Nerves,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘She just couldn’t cope, that’s all there was to it. Some people just can’t cope, that’s the way it’s always been. They put her in a home, I don’t know if she’s come out again. They were introverted as well, the sisters – you never saw them with boys. Always kept themselves to themselves. No, it wasn’t a happy family, if you can put it like that. But one knows so little about it.’
She fell silent again, sighed and stirred her coffee. Munster wondered what he had hoped to get out of this conversation, but realized that it was just a matter of blind chance. Yet again.
Maybe something will crop up, maybe not.
That’s not a bad motto for police work overall, he thought. A vain and arbitrary search for a needle in a haystack, that’s exactly what it always seemed to be like.
Or, as Reinhart preferred to put it: a copper is a blind tortoise looking for a snowball in the desert.
There were plenty of appropriate images.
‘I remember one incident,’ said fru de Grooit after a few moments of silence. ‘That Mauritz didn’t have an easy time of it at school, as I said. He was in the same class as our Bertrand, and on one occasion he’d been beaten up by some older boys. I don’t know how serious it was, or what lay behind it, but in any case, he didn’t dare go back to school… And he didn’t dare to stay at home either, scared of what his parents would say or do – fru Leverkuhn was out of work when it happened. So he would pretend to go off to school in the morning, but instead of being in school he was hiding away in the shed at the back of their house all day. He can’t have been more than about eleven or twelve at the time: his sisters knew about it and looked after him… One of them was also without a job and so was at home all day and she used to smuggle sandwiches out to him. He sat there for day after day, for about a fortnight at least…’
‘Didn’t the school ask about where he was?’ Munster asked.
She shrugged. Brushed some imaginary crumbs off the tablecloth.
‘Eventually, yes. I think he got a good hiding from his dad then. For being such a coward.’
‘Not a very good way of making him any braver,’ said Munster.
‘No,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘But that’s the way he was, Waldemar.’
‘How was he?’ asked Munster.
‘Hard, sort of.’
‘You didn’t like him, I gather?’
Fru de Grooit looked a little embarrassed.
‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago. We didn’t have a lot to do with them, and you have to leave people in peace if that’s what they want. It takes all sorts… Everybody is happy in his own way.’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Munster.
He went for a walk among the little detached houses in Pampas when he had taken his leave of fru de Grooit. He was pretty fed up of the little houses, but the weather was pleasant enough for walking.
This Pampas was a rather special part of the town, it couldn’t be denied. And he hadn’t been here for ages. The low-lying, almost swampy area next to the river had not been built on until shortly after the war, when all at once these rows of tiny houses sprang up, all of them with only three or four rooms, on plots barely large enough to accommodate them. A local council project to provide owner-occupied houses for hard-working labourers and junior office workers, if he understood it rightly. A sort of clumsy attempt to boost the lower classes in the direction of equality, and all of them – more than six hundred houses – were still standing in more or less unchanged condition after nearly fifty years. Repaired and modernized and extended here and there, of course, but nevertheless remarkably intact.
