The G File

34

The news about the dead body in the mushroom woods received not only a prominent headline on the front page plus half the available space on the placards, but also a three-quarter-page article in Monday’s de Journaal, the most important daily newspaper in Kaalbringen and the district.

They also reproduced the old photograph of Verlangen, the one that had been sent round local hotels at the beginning of May, and a message from the Kaalbringen police urging all conscientious citizens to be in touch if they thought they had seen the man in the picture at any time in the spring or early summer.

Or — needless to say — if they had any other kind of information which might be useful in connection with the investigation. The article went on to stress that the quiet little coastal town had been free from serious crime in recent years, but now it seemed as if the real world had arrived here. Nowhere was safe in these global times, not even Kaalbringen, maintained the author of the article Hermann Schalke — who had reported on the notorious axe-murderer case almost ten years ago, and had no difficulty in remembering it. No difficulty at all. Our beautiful world is full of evil and our lives are afflicted by its henchmen and proselytes, he wrote philosophically at the end of his gloomy disquisition.

And as early as the morning of this warm August Monday the first three informants duly turned up at the police station, where Chief of Police deKlerk was so kind as to share the duties with Inspector Moerk and Probationer Stiller — the latter was only twenty-four years old, had only just graduated from the police college, and had only been in post and in the seaside town since the middle of February.

However, as things turned out all three informants could be dismissed as of no interest quite quickly. Two of them thought they had seen Verlangen as recently as July, by which time he had been dead for at least a month — and the third was a young but already seriously wayward man by the name of Dan Wonkers. He was obviously quite drunk despite the early hour, and equally obviously unwilling to pass on his red-hot tip unless there was some sort of financial reward hovering in the wings.

There was not, and he left the police station shouting indignantly about bourgeois swine and police fascists — familiar phrases he had most probably had imprinted in his brain while drinking his mother’s milk and listening to his father, whose name was Holger Wonkers, a red-wine radical from the sixties who had survived against all the odds. He was famous — or rather infamous — in Kaalbringen and beyond.

Shortly after lunch, however — it was a quarter past one and more or less simultaneous with the arrival of Intendent Münster and Inspector Rooth from Maardam — a witness of a totally different character turned up at the police station.

Her name was Katrine Zilpen, and as Inspector Moerk was acquainted with at least one of their newly arrived colleagues — and Probationer Stiller had not yet arrived back after lunch — it was the chief of police himself who received her in his office.

‘Please sit down,’ he started by saying. ‘I gather you have come in connection with our appeal for information, is that right? I understand your name is fru Zilpen.’

‘Correct,’ said Katrine Zilpen, sitting down opposite him. ‘I don’t know if we’ve met?’

‘I very much doubt it,’ said deKlerk.

She was quite a powerfully built woman in her forties, and he thought he recognized her — in the way he had begun to recognize more or less every inhabitant of the town. After eight years you might not be able to register and memorize twenty-two thousand faces, he used to think: but quite a lot even so.

And Katrine Zilpen’s face was anything but anonymous. By no means. She had a large mop of copper-red hair arranged in a sort of pineapple shape with the aid of a thin yellow scarf. Clean-cut features and green eyes in a shade that reminded him of the salt-water aquarium in Oudenberg where he had worked as a guide for a few summer months in his younger days.

If she were a little less vulgar she would be rather pretty, he thought.

She made a sort of rolling movement with her lips (he assumed she had applied new lipstick just before entering through the glass doors of the police station, and that doing so before making visits was one of her routines), and she asked if she might smoke. He produced a packet of cigarettes from a drawer and slid it over to her side of the desk. Then he moved his chair a little closer to the open window and asked her to explain why she had come.

‘That dead body,’ she began after lighting a cigarette. ‘I think I’ve seen him. While he was still alive, that is.’

‘Excellent,’ said deKlerk. ‘Where and when?’

‘At Geraldine’s. Some time in April, I can’t remember exactly when, but it was a weekend in any case.’

‘Geraldine’s?’ said deKlerk, frowning. ‘Do you mean that camping site?’

‘Camping and camping. Geraldine’s Caravan Club, it’s called. It only has stationary caravans — I don’t know if you’d call that a camping site.’

‘Out at Wilgersee?’

‘Not quite as far away as that. It’s a kilometre or so after Fishermen’s Friend. It’s a field with ten or a dozen caravans — my husband and I sometimes go there for the weekend. To get away from it all. We’ve been doing so for quite a few years.’

‘April?’ wondered deKlerk.

‘There’s heating in the caravans. In most of them, at least. She lives there all the year round.’

‘Who does?’

‘Geraldine Szczok. The woman who owns the place.’

DeKlerk asked her to spell the name, and wrote it down.

‘So that’s where you met the man we want information about, is it?’

‘I think so.’

‘Think so?’

‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, of course. I’m not an idiot.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you? Good. Anyway, I saw that photo in the newspaper this morning, and thought straight away that it was that man. But if you don’t think it’s reliable enough, it doesn’t matter to me.’

‘Now, now — we’re not that finicky, fru Zilpen. Would you like a cup of coffee, by the way?’

‘No thank you. I have to be back at work in a quarter of an hour. But I’m pretty sure it was him, anyway. We exchanged a few words with him as well, both my husband and I. He was living in one of the other caravans — most of them were empty because it was so early in the year.’

‘So you spoke to him, did you? Excellent. What about?’

‘Nothing special. Just a few politeness phrases really. . About the weather, about what it was like living in a caravan, that sort of thing. We only stayed for two nights, my husband and I. He’d been there for a few days by the time we arrived.’

‘And he was still there when you left, was he?’

‘Yes. We packed up and went home on the Sunday afternoon. He was sitting outside his caravan. We said goodbye and wished him all the best, the way one does.’

‘Did he say his name?’

‘Maybe his first name, but I don’t remember.’

‘Do you recall what he was wearing?’

Zilpen drew deeply on her cigarette and thought for a while.

‘No. But nothing unusual in any case. Jeans and jumper and trainers, most likely. . But I don’t remember, to tell you the truth.’

‘Did he say why he was staying at the camping site?’

‘I think he mentioned to Horst that he had some sort of job in Kaalbringen.’

‘Horst?’

‘My husband.’

‘I see. Some sort of job?’

‘I think that’s what Horst said. . But if you are interested you’d better talk to him instead. Or to Geraldine. . She must surely know a bit more about him.’

‘Of course. We shall be in touch with her. . And no doubt with your husband as well. What about the timing? Can you possibly pin down which weekend in April it was? If you check on a calendar or in a diary, for instance?’

Fru Zilpen shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette.

‘I suppose so. Yes, I can try to do that — if you think it’s necessary.’

Chief of Police deKlerk cleared his throat.

‘It most certainly is necessary, fru Zilpen. And we are very grateful to you for coming to us with this information. Have you left your address and telephone number in the office, so that we can get in touch with you?’

‘Of course,’ she said, looking ostentatiously at her watch.

‘Just one more moment: will you and your husband be at home this evening?’

She thought for a moment.

‘I’ll be at home. My husband’s on night shift and he’ll be leaving around six o’clock.’

‘Good. Would it be convenient for us to call round before then and ask him a few questions?’

She nodded and stood up.

‘I suppose so. You can always ring first, of course.’

‘Naturally.’

DeKlerk also stood up and reached out over the desk. As far as he could judge she hesitated for half a second before shaking his hand.

Ah well, he thought. I didn’t exactly fall in love with her either.

Van Veeteren and Inspector Ewa Moreno met Belle Vargas at Darms Café in Alexanderplejn on Monday afternoon. It was Belle herself who had suggested that they meet somewhere in town, and when they had sat down at a fairly isolated table, she explained why.

‘I need to get away from home. I’ve taken some days off work. . I think people might think it was indecent if they found out that I’d carried on working as usual just after my father had been found murdered. But the fact is that I have nothing to do. Those who know what has happened daren’t ring and disturb me, my husband’s at work, the children are at school and nursery school. . What the hell is there for me to do? Sit and mourn? Discuss the burial with the undertaker? — Although I suppose I’m not allowed to do that yet anyway. .’

‘It would be as well if you waited for a few days,’ said Moreno. ‘As you know there are always delays in a situation like this one. . But I can quite see that it must be hard for you.’

‘The eye of the storm,’ said Van Veeteren, observing her with a worried furrow between his eyebrows. ‘You’re sitting in the eye of the storm, and that’s never a very pleasant place to be. How do you feel?’

Vargas sighed deeply and shook her head.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I assumed from the start that he was dead. And knowing the facts is better than not knowing — but I wish he had met a different end. What has happened is. . well, it’s simply awful.’

She scraped her coffee cup against the saucer and blinked away a few tears.

‘Murdered?’ she said. ‘Good God, my poor solitary dad murdered? Did you suspect that?’

Van Veeteren exchanged looks with Moreno.

‘No,’ he said. ‘But to be honest, we’re not all that surprised either. You know as well as we do that he had his reasons for travelling up to Kaalbringen. That old business we talked about in the spring. I think. .’

He paused, suddenly unsure about what to say next. Vargas blew her nose into a paper handkerchief and managed to take a drink of coffee.

‘Please forgive me. I thought I was in control of my emotions, but I’m evidently not. Of course, I was aware that he might be in some sort of danger. . But even so, it is hard to accept what has happened. Has he been lying dead up there in the forest since April?’

‘Presumably,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But one hopes that people don’t suffer once they are dead. We are the ones who suffer, the mourners.’

She looked at him in surprise.

‘You may be right,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m suffering, that’s for sure.’

‘I hope you accept that we need to ask you a few questions,’ said Moreno, changing the subject. ‘Your father has been murdered, and we want to catch whoever did it.’

‘I know,’ said Vargas, taking another tissue out of her handbag. ‘I assume you want to catch that Hennan character — I take it he must be the one behind all this?’

‘That’s not impossible,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘But we don’t know yet.’

‘Fire away,’ said Vargas. ‘What do you want to know?’

Van Veeteren took out his yellow notebook.

‘We must start by concentrating on the period before your father disappeared from Maardam.’

‘Before he disappeared?’

‘Yes, the end of March to the fifth or sixth of April, or thereabouts. No matter how you look at it, something must have happened during that time that made your father follow up some kind of lead in connection with Jaan G. Hennan. . And he must have discovered something relevant to what happened in 1987. We don’t have much to go on at the moment — only that telephone call to your son and the notes on the sheet of paper on the kitchen table. Perhaps he has left some other tracks?’

‘Tracks?’ said Vargas, looking thoughtful. ‘I don’t really know. .’

‘He might have made a note somewhere or spoken to a friend, perhaps,’ said Moreno.

Vargas gazed blankly at her for a while before responding.

‘I don’t think he had any friends,’ she said. ‘He was a terribly lonely person, my father. Why didn’t the police worry a bit more about all this in April?’

‘Because. .’ began Moreno — but then she realized what she was about to say and bit her tongue.

‘Because the importance of my father has increased out of all proportion thanks to the fact that he’s been murdered,’ said Vargas. ‘I understand exactly how things stand, you don’t need to elaborate.’

There ensued a few seconds of silence.

‘How exactly can I help you?’ asked Vargas eventually with an obvious tone of indignation in her voice.

Van Veeteren cleared his throat demonstratively.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘There may be something in what you say, and you may well feel that we are putting you under undue pressure. But I’m afraid we don’t have any choice. Is his flat still undisturbed?’

She nodded and bit her lip.

‘I’m sorry, I’m a bit. . You know. Yes, we’ve been paying the rent every month, despite the fact that I haven’t set foot in the place. If you want to examine it, I happen to have the key with me — the same as last time. .’

‘Good,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Why delay matters unnecessarily? We can talk to the neighbours while we’re at it. Perhaps there might be somebody who had a bit of contact with him, despite what you say.’

Vargas handed over the same key that he had used four months ago.

‘Forgive me for saying things I shouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to be obstructive — obviously I want you to find my father’s murderer.’

‘We agree absolutely on that score,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘We’ll do our best, and I suggest you should start work again tomorrow. Forget all that nonsense about people finding things indecent, that’s my advice.’

Belle Vargas smiled at him.

‘I’ll think about that,’ she promised.

‘And we’ll be in touch again with more questions,’ said Moreno.

‘I know,’ said Vargas.

‘That was a damned unpleasant reflection on her part,’ said Van Veeteren after they had left the cafe. ‘What she said about his importance before and after his death.’

‘Yes,’ said Moreno. ‘Unpleasant is putting it mildly.’

‘Quite correct, though, for if — a hypothetical assumption, of course — if we did solve this damned G case thanks to the murder of Maarten Verlangen, well, I have to admit that I would have spontaneous feelings of satisfaction. . But only if I avoided thinking the kind of thoughts she had.’

Moreno thought for a while before answering.

‘I understand what you’re saying,’ she said in the end. ‘But what’s done is done. Verlangen has been murdered, and the worst possible outcome would be that it didn’t lead us anywhere. . We can’t ignore the facts and simply indulge in pious thoughts.’

‘I agree,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘You’re as bright as a button, young lady. Incidentally, did you think I acted in the cafe as if I were a member of the police force? I even accepted the key.’

‘That thought did occur to me,’ admitted Moreno.

‘That was a hell of a pretty inspector,’ said Rooth. ‘Do you know if she’s married?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Münster.

‘No idea? Wasn’t she around when you were last up here?’

‘That was nine years ago,’ said Münster in annoyance. ‘As far as I recall she wasn’t married then.’

‘Good,’ said Rooth. ‘So it’s about time she settled down now.’

Münster eyed him incredulously.

‘You are outrageous, Rooth. Absolutely outrageous. Don’t you think we should concentrate on what we’ve come here to do rather than go on about your putative love life?’

‘By all means,’ said Rooth. ‘Just this once. What have we come here to do, in fact?’

Münster could see that it was in a way a justified question.

‘The same old story, I assume,’ he said, holding the lift door open for his colleague. ‘We’ve come to solve a murder case. . to march uninvited over as many thresholds as we can find, nosey around as much as we can in people’s private lives, find a killer and make him confess using every method we have at our disposal. Why do you ask?’

Rooth strode out through the hotel entrance and found the afternoon sun in his eyes.

‘It’s good weather at least,’ he said. ‘But there’s a bit more to it this time than all that marching and noseying around — come on, admit it. Would you recognize Hennan if you were to bump into him, for instance?’

Münster hesitated.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Especially if I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time with him. But it’s hard to say.’

‘I suppose that’s why you’ve been picked out to come here,’ said Rooth. ‘Because you were quite active fifteen years ago.’

‘Presumably,’ said Münster. ‘Where the hell did we leave the car?’

‘Over there,’ said Rooth, pointing. ‘But I wonder why they picked me. . I was very much in the background, hardly visible at all.’

‘You are my slave, hasn’t that dawned on you yet?’ said Münster. ‘I devise the strategies and you do all the rough work.’

Rooth put half a bar of chocolate into his mouth and chewed it slowly as they crossed over the square.

‘I don’t believe that,’ he said when he had swallowed enough for him to be able to speak. ‘I reckon they decided this case needed a gifted theoretician with a bit of perspicacity. Tell me when you get stuck — you don’t need to be ashamed.’

‘Good God,’ said Münster as he unlocked the car. ‘Have you got the address with you at least?’

‘Sure,’ said Rooth, taking a slip of paper out of his breast pocket. ‘Horst Zilpen, Donners Allé 15. If you drive, I’ll read the map.’