It was as if everything had conspired to ruin his Christmas break, he told himself glumly. To take away from him the opportunity to stop that train heading for ruin. And new incidents kept on cropping up after that as well – tin after tin of red herrings, as Rooth had put it.

The information about the diaries, for instance. Did any diaries still exist? They had existed, that was clear; but if he would ever be able to read what was in them (assuming there was something of importance) – well, that was probably a vain hope.

And that woman’s report to Moreno, to take another example. About family relationships by the seaside over a few summers in the sixties. What was the significance of that?

Or yesterday’s discussion with Reinhart. Although he didn’t know all that much about the investigation, Reinhart seemed to be thinking along the same lines as Munster himself. But perhaps that wasn’t too surprising – Reinhart was generally more perceptive than most.

Then there was that conversation with Ruth Leverkuhn after the funeral. A woman difficult to warm to. It hadn’t yielded much, either. A pity he didn’t know about what Lene Bauer had said at the time. It would have been interesting to ask her to comment, if nothing else.

Yes, there were a few openings, no doubt about that.

Or pitfalls, if one preferred to adopt Rooth’s pessimism.

Speaking of openings, he couldn’t help wondering about the conversation with Van Veeteren yesterday evening. The chief inspector had rung shortly before nine to ask about the latest developments. Munster had failed to discover exactly what he wanted to know, or what he had in mind. He had hummed and hawed and spoken in riddles, almost as he used to do when something special was brewing. Munster had met him halfway and told him about his plans, and Van Veeteren had urged him to be careful. Warned him to watch his step, in fact; but it was impossible to get him to be more precise or to give any positive advice.

This was quite remarkable, surely? Was he on his way back? Had he grown tired of life as an antiquarian bookseller?

Impossible to say, Munster decided. As so often where Van Veeteren was concerned.

And in Kolderweg the de Booning-Menakdise couple were busy moving out. The screwing machines! Or la Rouge et le Noir, as Moreno had christened them, rather more romantically. Why? Why move out just now? It sometimes seemed as if everything depended on getting out of that building. The Leverkuhns had gone. The caretaker and his wife as well. And now this young couple. Only froken Mathisen and old Engel were left.

Very strange, Munster thought. What’s going on?

At one o’clock he still had an hour’s drive ahead of him, and decided it was time for lunch. Turned off the main road just north of Saaren and entered yet another of those postmodern rest bunkers for post-modern drivers. As he sat at his window table – with a view of the rain and the car park and four stunted larch trees – he made up his mind to inject his thoughts with a little more systematics. He turned to a new page in his notebook, which he had taken in with him, and started writing down all the things he had been thinking about during the last hour in the car. Telegram style. Then, as he sat chewing his healthy schnitzel, he had the list in front of him, and tried to extract from it some new, bold conclusions. Or at any rate a few cautious old ones: there were five centimetres of blank page left at the bottom where he could note down these thoughts.

When he had finished eating, the centimetres were still blank; but nevertheless, for some abstruse reason, he felt sure of one thing. Just the one.

He was on the right track.

Fairly sure. The blind tortoise was approaching the snowball.

It was blowing at least half a gale in Frigge. When Munster had struggled out of his car in the circular open plaza in front of the railway station, he was forced to lean into the wind in order to make any progress at all. Inside the station he was given a map and a route description by an unusually helpful young woman in the ticket office. He thanked her for her efforts, and she explained with a smile that her husband was also a police officer, so she knew what it was usually like.

There you are, Munster thought. The world is full of understanding policemen’s wives.

Then he went out into the storm again, this time leaning backwards. Clambered back into his car and studied the information he’d been given. It seemed that Mauritz Leverkuhn lived in a suburb. Detached houses and modern terraced houses, no doubt, and only an occasional block of flats, anything but a skyscraper. It looked like it. He checked his watch. It was only half past three, but as Mauritz Leverkuhn was supposed to be suffering from influenza, there was no reason to worry that he might not be at home.

He had no intention of ringing in advance to arrange a meeting. Certainly not, Munster thought. If you’re going to take the bull by the horns, there’s not a lot of point in asking for permission first.

The suburb was called Gochtshuuis. It was on the western outskirts of the town. He started the car and drove off.

It took him a little more than fifteen minutes to find the place. A rather dull 1970s development with two- storey terraced houses alongside a canal, and a somewhat sparse strip of trees pointing at the low marshland and the sea. A windbreak, presumably. All the trees were leaning eastwards at the same angle. Mauritz Leverkuhn’s house was furthest away, where the road petered out with a postbox, a refuse recycling station and a turning area for buses.

Concrete grey. Two low storeys high, ten metres wide and with a pathetic swamp of a garden at the front. Probably a similar one at the back, facing the trees. Dusk was already in the air, and Munster noted that lights were on in two of the windows.

Here we go, he thought as he got out of his car.

If Intendent Munster had bothered to take his mobile with him when he’d had lunch, he would certainly have had an opportunity to fill in the last empty lines of the page in his notebook.

Not with any conclusions, that’s for sure, but with another point in the list of new developments in the case.

Shortly after half past one Inspector Rooth had tried to contact him – in vain, of course – in order to report the latest find in Weyler’s Woods. The fact that nobody remembered to ring again later in the day can be ascribed partly to the fact that it was overlooked in the general excitement caused by the find, and partly to the fact that – despite everything – it was still not clear how great a significance the discovery would acquire.

If any at all. But in any case, what happened when the usual search party a dozen or so strong was out in the woods, by now well trampled by large numbers of feet, was that they found the remains of Else Van Eck’s so- called intimate parts – surrounded by a section of pelvis, a length of spine, and two appropriately large buttocks in comparatively good condition. As usual it was all carelessly stuffed into a pale yellow plastic carrier bag, and equally carelessly concealed in an overgrown ditch. Inner organs, such as intestines, liver and kidneys had been removed, but what made this find more interesting than all the others was that when it was all tipped out onto a workbench at the Forensic Medicine Centre, they discovered a scrap of paper sticking out of one of the many folds that must inevitably be formed in the body of a woman the size of fru Van Eck.

It wasn’t large, but still… Dr Meusse himself carefully lifted up a section of the rotting flesh and removed the strip of paper without tearing it.

Nothing to write home about, Meusse insisted, but quite a feat even so. A flimsy scrap of paper about the size and shape of a two-dimensional banana, more or less. Stained by blood and other substances, but nevertheless, there was no doubt that it was from a newspaper or magazine.

Naturally, Meusse appreciated the importance of the find and had it transported by courier to the Laboratory for Forensic Chemistry in the same block. Rooth and Reinhart were informed more or less immediately about the development, and spent most of the afternoon at the Forensic Chemistry Lab – if not to accelerate the results of the analysis then at least to keep themselves informed about them. Needless to say they could just as well have waited for information via the telephone, but neither Rooth nor Reinhart were of that bent. Not today, at least.

In the event the results emerged bit by bit, reported with a degree of scientific pomp and ceremony by the boss himself, Intendent Mulder – the least jovial of all the people Rooth had ever met.

After an hour, for instance, it was obvious that the object really was part of a page from a newspaper or magazine. We know that already, you boss-eyed berk, thought Rooth: but he didn’t say so.

Forty-five minutes later it was established that the quality of the paper was quite high – not in the weekly

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