Hour of the Wolf

32

The search of Aron Keller’s flat in Malgerstraat 13 took place almost exactly twenty-four hours after the one at number seventeen.

As expected, it went quite quickly. The technical team had finished their work by as soon as half past twelve; after then there was no real reason why Reinhart and Moreno should stay on. But stay on they did for a few hours, in the hope (Reinhart insisted — and with no technical aids apart from our own five bloody senses, Inspector!) of finding clues that might possibly indicate what had happened to the loner of a tenant. And where he had disappeared to.

It was not an easy task. Everything suggested that Keller had not been in the flat since the previous Friday: he might even have gone off, or disappeared, as early as the Thursday night — he didn’t subscribe to any daily newspaper, but a considerable amount of mail lay jumbled up in the metal cage on the inside of the door, and the potted plants were shrivelled and half-dead in both the bedroom and the kitchen. The two large hibiscus plants in the bay window in the living room seemed to have fared rather better, but they were fitted with a watering system that only needed filling once a week.

Or so Moreno maintained — she had a similar set-up in her two-roomed flat in Falckstraat.

Everything in the flat was more or less immaculately neat and tidy. There was no washing-up in the kitchen. No items of clothing lying around, either in the bedroom or anywhere else. No newspapers, no overflowing ashtrays, no odds and ends where they shouldn’t be. The few books on the bookshelves, cassettes and CDs (three-quarters horse jazz, maintained Reinhart with distaste, the rest cheap versions of pop hits) were neatly lined up. Two pairs of well-polished shoes in the rack in the hall, a jacket and an overcoat on hangers. And the desk was as tidy as a display window for an office furniture firm. The same applied to cupboards, drawers and bureaux. The only thing Reinhart missed was small labels with the correct place and classification on every item — although if everything had been like this for the past twenty years, he realized after a little thought that such labels were not necessary.

What the flat told them about the man Aron Keller — apart from the fact that he had a fanatical feeling for order and neatness — was that he had an interest in sport. Especially football and athletics. There were a few books on football (yearbooks with red and green spines from as far back as 1973) in a prominent place in the bookcase, and several years of complete issues of the monthly magazine Sport Front, piled in a beer crate at the back of one of the wardrobes — the latest issue was lying on the kitchen table, and no doubt was the usual accompaniment to the Keller breakfast. In any case, that was the conclusion Reinhart drew, with an irritated snort.

Next to the telephone on the desk in the bedroom was an address book with a total of twenty-two people listed. Three of them were called Keller: none of them lived in Maardam (two in Linzhuisen, one in Haaldam) and Reinhart decided to postpone sorting out the precise family relationships until a bit later.

‘The man must have a square head,’ he said. ‘Finding him shouldn’t be a problem.’

Despite the obvious lack of leads, they stayed on until it turned three o’clock. Searched through every drawer and cupboard, examined every nook and cranny without really knowing what they were looking for. Reinhart also discovered a key marked ‘Store-room’, and spent an hour in the attic among old clothes, shoes and boots, tennis rackets, various items of furniture and some cardboard boxes full of comics from the sixties. Moreno found it a little difficult to understand why they were searching through the flat in this haphazard way, but she kept her counsel. She had no idea what the outcome might be, but knew that she would probably have made the same decision if it had been up to her…

‘You don’t know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it,’ Reinhart had explained, blowing smoke into her face. ‘That applies to a lot of situations, Miss Police Inspector, not just the here and now!’

‘The chief inspector is as bright as a poodle,’ Moreno had answered. ‘And I mean a bitch, of course.’

The reward came at a quarter to three. She had emptied the half-full waste-paper basket (which was under the desk, and contained only paper of course — nothing that could decay such as apple cores, teabags or banana skins) onto the living-room floor, and had started working her way half-heartedly through it when she found it. It.

A crumpled, ruled sheet of A4 paper, torn from a notepad. Presumably the one on the shelf to the right over the desk. She smoothed it out and read it.

Five weeks since you murdered the bo

That was all. Six words only. Six-and-a-half. Written in a neat, somewhat sexless style, blue ink. She stared at the brief, interrupted message and thought for a couple of minutes.

Bo? she thought. What does bo mean?

Could it possibly be anything else but boy?

She shouted for Reinhart, who had come down from the attic space and was cursing with his head in one of the bedroom wardrobes.

‘Well?’ said Reinhart. ‘What have you found?’

‘This,’ she said, handing him the piece of paper.

He read the text and looked at her in confusion.

‘Bo?’ he said. ‘What the hell is the bo? The boy?’

‘Presumably,’ said Moreno. ‘You said something about not having the first link. I think we’ve got it here.’

Reinhart looked at the crumpled piece of paper and scratched his head.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Absolutely bloody right. Come on, it’s time for a bit of discussion.’

The run-through was brief and accompanied by neither wine nor sandwich layer cake. Such extravagances were no longer needed, now that the fog had started to lift, Reinhart explained.

The fog that had shrouded the cases of Erich Van Veeteren and Vera Miller. It was time now to see things clearly, and take action. No time-wasting speculations were necessary any longer. No theories nor hypotheses, they suddenly knew what it was all about and what they were looking for. It was time to… to tighten the noose round those involved.

Round Pieter Clausen and Aron Keller. The murderer and his blackmailer.

The only slight problem was that the noose would presumably be empty when they tightened it. Or so Rooth stated, as he unwrapped a Mozart chocolate ball.

‘Yes, it’s a real bugger of a case,’ admitted Reinhart. ‘There’s a long way to go before we have them under lock and key, let’s be quite clear about that; but we weren’t all that far out in our guesses, were we? Keller had some sort of a hold on Clausen and demanded money for not exposing him. He sent young Van Veeteren to collect the money, and we all know what happened then… God knows how Vera Miller was involved, but we’ve found wisps of her hair and lots of other traces in Clausen’s flat… Not least blood stains, in the bedroom and in the car. It’s as clear as day. He killed her in the same way that he killed Erich Van Veeteren.’

‘What about the link between Keller and Erich?’ deBries wanted to know. ‘There must be one.’

‘We don’t know yet,’ said Reinhart. ‘That’s something we still need to find out. And it’s not the only thing. Both Clausen and Keller have disappeared. Neither of them seems to have been seen since last Thursday… And it was also last Thursday that Clausen withdrew two hundred and twenty thousand from the bank. Something must have happened then, later that evening perhaps, and we’ve got to find out what. And we need to find them, of course.’

‘Dead or Alive,’ said Rooth.

‘Dead or Alive,’ agreed Reinhart after a moment’s thought. ‘They’re pretty similar types, in fact, these gentlemen, when you look a bit closer at them. Middle-aged single men with not much of a social life. Keller is a real lone wolf, it seems. Bollmert and deBries can look into whether he has any friends and acquaintances at all. His colleagues didn’t have much to say about him, at any rate… Isn’t that right?’

‘True,’ said Rooth. ‘There are only eight people working in the wooden leg workshop, but they all say that Keller’s a bloody pig-headed mule.’

‘Do they really say that?’ asked Jung.

‘They don’t express themselves quite as colourfully as I do,’ said Rooth, ‘but that’s the gist of it.’

Reinhart circulated a copy of the note Moreno had found in Keller’s waste-paper basket.

‘What do you say to this?’ he asked. ‘We found it in Keller’s place.’

Nobody spoke for a few moments.

‘Well, what do you reckon bo stands for?’

‘The boy,’ said deBries. ‘There’s no other possibility.’

‘Of course there is,’ Rooth protested. ‘Loads of them… Bosun, boxer, bowmaker…’

‘Bowmaker?’ said Jung, ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Makes bows,’ said Rooth. ‘You use them for shooting arrows.’

‘Very clever, Mr Sleuth,’ said Reinhart. ‘But I don’t think I can recall a bowmaker being found murdered. Nor a bosun nor a boxer, come to that — not lately, at least. Nor a bodybuilder nor a bobble-hat vendor… Okay, there are several other possibilities. We can agree on that, but for the moment let’s stick with the boy. There’s no doubt that’s the most likely. We can assume that Clausen killed a boy some time around the beginning of November, and that’s what set the whole thing off. We don’t know exactly when Keller wrote this note, but if we think in terms of an incident around the end of October-stroke-beginning of November — a week or so either way — let’s see what we can come up with.’

‘So it couldn’t refer to Erich Van Veeteren?’ wondered deBries.

Reinhart thought for a moment.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘He was almost thirty. And the time doesn’t fit in… “Several weeks since you murdered the bo”… No, that’s out of the question.’

‘All right,’ said deBries.

‘A murdered boy?’ said Jung. ‘Surely we must know if a lad was killed around that time? It can hardly have escaped the attention of the police. Not if it was in this district, that is…’

‘It doesn’t need to have been in Maardam,’ said Moreno. ‘And there doesn’t have to have been somebody suspected of a crime. It could have been something else. Something at the hospital he tried to brush under the carpet. Clausen, that is. And nearly got away with it.’

‘Not the hospital again…’ said Rooth. ‘The very thought makes me feel ill.’

Nobody said anything for a while.

‘He isn’t a surgeon, is he, this Clausen?’ said deBries. ‘So he doesn’t do operations?’

Reinhart checked the information he had on a sheet of paper.

‘Internal medicine,’ he said. ‘But you can kill somebody in that line of business as well. If you’re a bit careless, for instance. We must find out about deaths that took place on his ward during this period. Rooth and Jung can go back to the Rumford — it should be enough to speak to the doctor in charge. Or take a look at the journals, perhaps?’

‘A boy who died unexpectedly?’ said Jung.

‘A young male patient who died during the night,’ said Rooth. ‘Despite enormous efforts to save him. They have a fantastic esprit de corps, don’t forget that… And I think it would be best if you do the talking with Leissne. I seem to have got into his bad books.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Jung. ‘That’s astonishing.’

‘And what are you and I going to do?’ asked Moreno when their colleagues had trooped off.

Reinhart placed his hands on his desk and straightened his back.

‘I have a date with a certain Oscar Smaage,’ he said. ‘Convener of Verhouten’s Angels. You stay here and see if we have any unsolved deaths. Missing persons as well… It’s not certain that it has anything to do with the hospital, even if there’s plenty to suggest it might have.’

‘Okay,’ said Moreno. ‘I hope Smaage has something to contribute, though I can’t see what. I think everything depends on one thing, in fact.’

‘Thursday?’ said Reinhart.

‘Yes. What the hell happened last Thursday evening? It seems obvious that’s when he was supposed to hand over the money. Or what do you think?’

‘Definitely,’ said Reinhart. ‘It would be remarkable if nobody turns up who’s seen or heard about them — or one of them at least — after the handover. We just need to bide our time. Have some patience — didn’t somebody recommend that some time ago?’

‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Moreno.

It took her no more than an hour to find what she was looking for. In any case, she felt instinctively that it was right, when the name came up on her computer screen. Her heart missed a beat, and the hairs on her forearms stood on end — those were usually sure signs.

Tell-tale signs of female intuition. Hers at least.

Wim Felders, she read. Born 17.10.1982. Died 5.11.1998. Or possibly 6.11. Found by a passing cyclist on road 211 between Maardam and the suburb of Boorkhejm at six o’clock in the morning. The investigation carried out by the traffic police (headed by Chief Inspector Lintonen) showed that he had probably been struck by a vehicle and died after hitting his head against a concrete culvert at the side of the road. A Wanted notice had been publicized in all the media, but no perpetrator had come forward. No witnesses of the accident. No suspects. No tip-offs. The guilty driver had disappeared and refused to make himself known.

She remembered the incident. Recalled reading about it, and seeing reports in news bulletins on the television. The sixteen-year-old-boy had been on his way home to Boorkhejm. He had been visiting his girlfriend somewhere in the town centre, and was assumed to have missed the last bus.

He had evidently been walking along the side of the road in bad weather, both fog and rain, and been hit by a driver who had fled the scene.

It could have been anybody at all.

It could have been Clausen.

Keller could have passed by shortly afterwards and seen it all. Or been sitting next to Clausen in the passenger seat, if they knew each other… Although so far there was nothing to suggest that they did.

A road accident?

That was certainly a possibility. When she began thinking about how probable it seemed, she noticed that she found it difficult to feel certain. Perhaps it was no more than a coincidence, a fleeting fantasy: but in any case, the thread needed to be followed up until it broke.

Intuitively, she knew that this was exactly what had happened. She had found the first link. No doubt about it.

She saw that it was now half past five, and wondered what to do next. Decided to go home and phone Reinhart later that evening. If it could be established that Clausen had been driving home from the town centre on that day, at that time — on evidence supplied by Wim Felders’ girlfriend they knew that the accident had happened shortly before midnight — well, there could be no more doubts.

How it would be possible to establish or be certain that Clausen had been driving the car was another thing altogether: but as they had already linked him with two other murders, perhaps that didn’t matter.

On the other hand, if he had indeed been in central Maardam that evening, surely he must have met somebody? Somebody who could provide evidence.

Let’s hope it wasn’t Vera Miller, she thought. It would be better if it were those angels, whatever they were called. Verhouten’s…?

But more important than all that was finding Clausen. Naturally.

And Keller.

Having got that far, Ewa Moreno switched off the computer and went home. However she looked at it, she reckoned she had done a good day’s work.