Borkmann's point

5

“I thought I’d take the Eggers case first,” said Kropke, and switched on the overhead projector. “In order to brief Chief

Inspector Van Veeteren, and also to summarize the situation for the rest of us. I’ve made a few transparencies to make it easier…”

He looked first at Bausen, then Van Veeteren in the hope of registering an approving reaction.

“Excellent,” said Beate Moerk.

Kropke coughed.

“On June twenty-eight, early in the morning, a man by the name of Heinz Eggers was found dead in a courtyard behind the railway station. He had been killed by a blow to the back of the head from an ax of some kind. The blade had gone through the vertebrae, the artery, everything. The body was found by a newspaper delivery boy shortly after six o’clock, and he had been dead between four and five hours.”

“What kind of a man was Eggers?” wondered Van Veeteren aloud.

Kropke put on a new transparency, and Van Veeteren could read for himself that the victim had reached the age of thirty four when his life was suddenly brought to a close. He was born and permanently resident in Selstadt a few miles inland, but he had been living in Kaalbringen since April of this year.

He had no regular work, not in Kaalbringen, or in Selstadt, or in any other location. He had a lengthy criminal record: drug crimes, assault and battery, burglary, sexual offenses, fraud. In all, he had served about ten years in various prisons and institu tions, starting when he was sixteen. The local authorities were not aware that he was in Kaalbringen; Eggers had been living in a two-room apartment in Andrejstraat belonging to a good friend of his who was currently serving a comparatively short sentence for rape and threatening behavior. He’d had plans to settle down and go straight in Kaalbringen, get a steady job and so on, but he had not had much success on that score.

“Where does the information come from?” asked Van Veeteren.

“Several sources,” said Beate Moerk. “Mostly from a girl friend.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yes, that’s what she called herself,” said Bausen. “She lived in the apartment with him. But she didn’t kill him, even if she didn’t seem particularly put out by his death.”

“Nobody was,” said Moerk.

“She had an alibi, in any case,” explained Bausen. “Water tight.”

“How have you gone about the investigation?” asked Van

Veeteren, reinserting the toothpick the other way around.

Kropke turned to Bausen for assistance, but received noth ing but an encouraging nod.

“We’ve interviewed around fifty people,” he said, “most of them the same sort of dregs of society as Eggers himself. His friends and acquaintances are mostly petty thieves, drug ad dicts, that sort of thing. His circle of friends in Kaalbringen wasn’t all that large since he’d only been here for a few months.

A dozen people, perhaps, all of them well known to us. The usual riffraff, you might say, the sort who spend the day on park benches drinking beer. Getting high in one another’s apart ments and selling their womenfolk in Hamnesplanaden and Fisherman’s Square. And then of course we’ve interviewed masses of people following anonymous tips, all of whom have turned out to have nothing to do with the case.”

Van Veeteren nodded.

“What’s the population of Kaalbringen?”

“Forty-five thousand, give or take,” said Beate Moerk. “A few thousand more in the summer months.”

“What about crime levels?”

“Not high,” said Bausen. “The odd case of domestic vio lence now and then, four or five boats stolen in the summer.

An occasional brawl and a bit of drug dealing. I take it you’re not interested in financial crime?”

“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Not yet, in any case. Anyway, what theories have you got about this Eggers character? You don’t have to give me all the details today. I’d prefer to read up on it and ask if I have any questions.”

Beate Moerk took it upon herself to respond.

“None,” she said. “We don’t know a damn thing. I suppose we had started to think-before the Simmel business, that is that it must be some kind of inside job. A junkie killing another junkie for some reason or other. A bad trip, or money owing or something of that sort-”

“You don’t kill somebody who owes you money,” said

Kropke. “If you do, you’ll never get it back.”

“On the contrary, Inspector,” sighed Moerk. Kropke frowned.

Oh, dear, thought Van Veeteren.

“Coffee?” Bausen’s question was rhetorical, and he was already passing around mugs.

“If it’s true,” said Van Veeteren, “what Inspector Moerk says, then it’s highly probable that you’ve already interrogated the murderer. If you’ve sifted through the… the dregs, that is?”

“Presumably,” said Bausen. “But now Simmel has turned up. I think that changes the situation quite a bit.”

“Definitely,” said Moerk.

Kropke put on a new transparency. It was obviously a pic ture of where Eggers was found-dumped behind some garbage cans in the rear courtyard of an apartment block wait ing to be demolished, by the look of it.

“Was he murdered on the spot?” asked Van Veeteren.

“More or less,” said Kropke. “Only moved a few yards at most.”

“What was he doing there?”

“No idea,” said Bausen. “Drug dealing, I suppose.”

“What time was it?”

“One, two in the morning, something like that.”

“Was he high?”

“Not especially.”

“Why do they have garbage cans outside an apartment block that’s due to be demolished?”

Bausen pondered for a while.

“Dunno… I’ve no idea, in fact.”

Van Veeteren nodded. Kropke poured out some coffee and Beate Moerk opened a carton from the bakery, brimful of Dan ish pastries.

“Excellent,” said Van Veeteren.

“From Sylvie’s, a top-notch bakery and cafe,” said Bausen.

“I recommend a visit. You’ll get a twenty percent discount if you tell them you’re a copper. It’s just around the corner from here.”

Van Veeteren removed his toothpick and helped himself to a pastry.

“Anyway,” said Kropke, “as far as Eggers is concerned, we’re rowing against the tide, you might say.”

“What about the weapon?” asked Van Veeteren, speaking with his mouth full. “What does the doctor have to say?”

“Just a moment.”

Kropke produced a new transparency-a sketch of how the ax blade, or whatever it was, had cut its way through the back of Eggers’s neck, passing straight through the vertebrae, artery, gullet-the lot.

“A massive blow?” asked Van Veeteren.

“Not necessarily,” said Beate Moerk. “It depends on what the blade looks like, and it seems to have been extremely sharp-and thin.”

“Which means that not so much force was needed,” added Kropke.

“You can also see,” said Beate Moerk, “that it came at quite an angle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything special. It could indicate that the murderer was quite short, or rather tall.

It all depends on how he held the weapon. And what it looks like, of course.”

“Just think how many different ways there are of hitting a tennis ball,” said Kropke.

Van Veeteren took another Danish pastry.

“And it’s likely that the weapon was an ax?” he asked.

“Of some kind,” said Bausen. “I think we’ll move on to

Simmel now. Maybe Inspector Moerk would like to fill us in?”

Beate Moerk cleared her throat and leafed through her notebook.

“Well, we haven’t got very far yet. It was only the day before yesterday, at eight in the morning, that a jogger found him in the municipal woods. He first noticed blood on the path; and when he stopped to investigate, he saw the body just a few yards away. The murderer doesn’t seem to have made much of an effort to hide it. He-the jogger, that is-called the police right away. Chief Inspector Bausen and I went to the spot together, and we were able to establish that, well, that we seemed to be dealing with the same killer as last time.”

“Cut down from behind,” said Bausen. “A bit harder and the head would have been severed altogether. It looked like one hell of a mess.”

“The same weapon?” asked Van Veeteren.

“Ninety percent certain,” said Kropke.

“A hundred would be better,” said Van Veeteren.

“Presumably,” said Bausen, “we’re not talking about an ordinary ax. The blade appears to be wider than it’s deep.

Maybe six or even eight inches. No sign of either end of the blade in Eggers or Simmel, according to the pathologist, at least. And Simmel especially had a real bull neck.”

“A machete, perhaps?” suggested Van Veeteren.

“I’ve looked into that,” said Bausen. “I wondered if it might be some kind of knife or sword with a very strong blade, but the cutting edge is straight, not curved like a machete.”

“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “Maybe that’s not the most important thing at this stage. What’s the link between Eggers and Simmel?”

Nobody spoke.

“That’s a good question,” said Bausen.

“We haven’t found one yet,” said Kropke. “But we’re look ing, of course-”

“Scoundrels, the pair of them,” said Bausen. “But in different leagues, you might say. I reckon Simmel’s business affairs wouldn’t stand all that much broad daylight shining on them, but that’s something for the tax lawyers rather than ordinary mortals like us. He’s never been involved in anything specifi cally criminal. Not like Eggers, I mean.”

“Or at least, he’s not been caught,” said Moerk.

“Drugs?” said Van Veeteren. “They usually unite princes and paupers.”

“We have no indications of any such involvement,” said Kropke.

It would be no bad thing if we solved this business before a new chief of police takes over, thought Van Veeteren.

“What was he doing in the woods?”

“On his way home,” said Beate Moerk.

“Where from?”

“The Blue Ship restaurant. He’d been there from half past eight until eleven, roughly. There are several witnesses. Went for a stroll through the town, it seems. The last people to see him alive were a couple of women in Fisherman’s Square-at about twenty past eleven, give or take a minute or so.”

“What does the pathologist’s report say about the time of death?”

“The final version is due tomorrow,” said Bausen. “As things look at the moment, between eleven and one. Well, half past eleven and one, I suppose.”

Van Veeteren leaned back and looked up at the ceiling.

“That means there are two possibilities,” he said, and waited for a reaction.

“Precisely,” said Beate Moerk. “Either the murderer was lying in wait by the path, ready to have a go at whoever came past, or he followed Simmel from the restaurant.”

“He might have just bumped into him,” said Kropke. “By accident, in other words-”

“And he had an ax with him-by accident?” said Moerk.

Good, thought Van Veeteren. I wonder if Bausen has enter tained the idea of having a female successor? Although it’s not up to him, of course.