The Inspector and Silence

32

After the conversation with Uri Zander, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren drove back to town and had lunch at the Stamberger Hof. It was nearly half past one when he started eating, and as he decided he needed at least three courses – pate, sole and figs in cognac – it was turned three by the time he’d finished.

After some hesitation (but the casting vote was dictated by considerations of the digestive process), he returned to his car and left Stamberg again. Drove in an easterly direction for fifteen minutes and then found, without a lot of effort, an attractive and shady slope covered in beech trees down to the River Czarna. With the aid of a blanket and a pillow he made a rudimentary bed, took off his shoes and lay down for a postprandial nap.

Once again he dreamed of a peaceful little antiquarian bookshop, a chestnut-haired woman and a sparkling blue sea, and when he woke up forty minutes later he recalled that he actually had a ticket for a flight due to leave Maardam in less than two days’ time. He sat up.

It was all very promising, both the dream and the future prospects. Especially in view of the fact that right now he was sitting by an unfamiliar sluggish river, watching a herd of similarly unfamiliar and sluggish cows gaping at him from the high grass on the other side.

What the hell am I doing? he asked himself, well aware that this was a very old and frequently asked question. Still unanswered.

Over a hundred kilometres away were an investigation team and a hundred reporters waiting for the outline of a double murderer to become clearer.

Or perhaps they were waiting for him – the notorious Chief Inspector Van Veeteren with only one unsolved case to his name – to winkle him out.

Or her?

He moved a couple of metres to one side, leaned against a beech trunk and suddenly remembered one of Mahler’s favourite quotations: To live your life is not as simple as to cross afield.

Probably Russian, he thought. It had that sort of ring about it.

Then he lit a cigarette and tried to sort out his thoughts.

Two girls.

Aged twelve and thirteen. Raped and murdered.

About a week between them. First Katarina Schwartz. Then Clarissa Heerenmacht. But found in reverse order.

Both residents of Stamberg. Both members of the obscure sect the Pure Life and attending the sect’s summer camp at Sorbinowo.

Pretty, slightly wild Sorbinowo.

And then the priest.

Shortly before the discovery of the younger girl’s dead body the alleged man of God, the church’s spiritual leader, Oscar Yellinek, goes up in smoke. The rest of those involved, the sect that is, seal their lips. The younger generation – about a dozen girls around the age of puberty – slowly start to thaw out, but what they have to say is not of much relevance to the murder mysteries.

Or is it? Van Veeteren wondered, watching one of the cows that had just turned its back on him and demonstrated how remarkably efficiently its digestive processes were functioning.

And she probably hasn’t even had figs in cognac for lunch, the chief inspector assumed before returning to his train of thought.

Had they missed something crucial in the tearful outpourings of the girls? Was there something more – something more deeply hidden – in all these testimonies about purity and self-deprivation and nudity? Apart from their dubious nature per se, that is?

He didn’t know. The images of the girls’ stylized behaviour as they bathed at the water’s edge that first day came back to his mind’s eye, and he wondered if there were images like that in the murderer’s baggage as well.

In the actual motive. In so far as it was meaningful to talk about a motive in a case like this. Perhaps, perhaps not; in any case, it was hardly something that could be developed usefully.

What about the women? The priestesses who kept an eye on everything, and presumably had a lot of information they could share but had chosen to remain silent. Was it possible that one of them was the killer? It was a possibility he had been keeping in reserve from the very beginning. Oh yes. A blank card hidden up his sleeve. A woman murderess?

Could one assume that it was one of them who had contacted the police and tipped them off?

Perhaps.

But in any case, surely to God it was obvious that they shared in the guilt?

Most probably, he decided.

The only question was: what? Guilty of what?

‘Oh hell!’ muttered Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. ‘I’m getting nowhere!’

For one bitter self-critical moment he realized that the cows on the other side of the river were probably not only a symbol of inaccessible wisdom – demiurges and all that sort of thing – but also a symbol of his own unrelieved inertia.

He lit a cigarette and changed track.

What about Figuera? he wondered.

Ewa Figuera? Hmm, he would have to track her down and find out why she was with the other three women in Przebuda’s photograph. What had she been doing in Waldingen the previous summer?

In view of the fact that he had solved the problem caused by the misspelling of her name – and the fact that he had obeyed his celebrated intuition and come to Stamberg – his efforts so far certainly hadn’t come to much.

Or was there a grain of gold dust hidden away inside the last couple of days’ conversations as well? Had these confused members of the congregation contributed something after all that he wasn’t in a position to notice?

Oh hell, Van Veeteren thought again. What a brilliant analyst I am! First I say A, then I say A can’t be right. All the time.

He sighed. For the moment he was unable to think about anything other than this dialectic, and the dark river that separated him from the cows.

Ergo? he thought gloomily. Could there be a clearer indication of the fact that it was time to hand in his police ID? Hardly.

He stood up and decided to go for a half-hour drive accompanied by Faure rather than this fruitless vegetating.

Then he would have to search through the telephone directory.

Okay. All in good time.

The half-hour became a whole one, and Faure received some assistance from Pergolesi. When the chief inspector parked behind Glossman’s it was seven o’clock already and the worst of the day’s heat was over. There was a fax waiting for him in reception, from Reinhart, but it only contained a bad joke along the lines that members of the investigation team who didn’t have a wooden leg seemed to have a wooden head instead. Van Veeteren threw it into the waste bin and asked for a telephone directory he could take up to his room. Plus the two obligatory beers.

‘You’ll find a directory in the desk drawer,’ explained the receptionist, who was as sleepy as ever. ‘In every room. Light or dark?’

‘The usual,’ said Van Veeteren, and was given one of each.

When he got to his room he lay down on the bed with the first bottle, the light one, and the local telephone directory – sure enough, he had found it in the desk drawer, underneath the Bible and some sheets of writing paper with the hotel’s logo.

He took a swig and started searching. It was not a thick directory. Stamberg probably had a population of about – what? Fifty thousand inhabitants? – and he found what he was looking for almost immediately. Evidently he still knew the alphabet.

As he scanned the rows of names, it came to him.

Nothing more than a tiny nudge, in fact. A brief little twitch in some lugubrious corner of his old, tired brain: but enough to tell him that something was falling into place at last.

Or rather, being set in motion.

And about time, for Christ’s sake, he thought.

He stared at the information for a few seconds. Then closed his eyes and leaned back against the pillows, trying to clear the junk and rubbish from his brain. Cows, priests and things like that. Lay there for quite a while without thinking a single thought.

And then they emerged from the slough of forgetfulness – two random comments he had heard one afternoon getting on for two weeks earlier.

Or was it in fact two different afternoons?

He couldn’t remember, and of course, it didn’t matter.

He allowed another few minutes to pass, but nothing else happened. Just the information given in the telephone directory and those two comments – and when he opened his eyes again, he was aware that it was barely more than a mere suspicion.

He drank the remains of both bottles of beer. Then started ringing round and arranging meetings for the next day.

When he had finished, he read two more chapters of Klimke, took a shower and went to bed.

The telephone rang at two minutes past seven the next morning.

It was Reinhart, but before the chief inspector had time to tell him to go to hell he had taken command.

‘Have you a television set in your room?’

‘Yes…’

‘Switch it on then! Channel 4.’

Then he hung up. Van Veeteren fumbled for the remote control, and managed to press the right button. Three seconds later he was wide awake.

As far as he could judge it was the routine morning news bulletin. An excited newscaster. Flickering pictures of a building on fire. Firefighters and sirens. Very realistic interviews with soot-covered senior officers.

He recognized it immediately. The camera even paused for a few seconds on the abusive graffiti he had seen with his own eyes only the other day.

Murdering bastards and so on.

Practically everything was in flames, and the chief officer of the fire brigade thought there was little chance of saving anything of the building. So they were concentrating on stopping the blaze from spreading to adjacent buildings. There was quite a strong wind blowing. It was finito as far as the church was concerned, he reckoned.

But apart from that, everything was under control.

Arson?

Of course it was arson. The alarm had been raised at four in the morning, the fire brigade had arrived twenty minutes later, and by then the whole building was ablaze.

No doubt at all that it was arson. Perhaps that was understandable, in the circumstances…

Van Veeteren switched off. Remained in bed for half a minute more, thinking. Then put on a shirt and some trousers, took the elevator down to reception and sent a fax to Wicker’s Travel Agency in Maardam.

Cancelled his package holiday due to begin on the first of August.

Then he went back up to his room and took the longest shower of his life.