The Stranglers Honeymoon

31

When Inspector Moreno stepped in through the dark, heavy door of Booms, Booms amp; Kristev’s solicitors’ offices in Zuyderstraat, she felt the stab of an inferiority complex.

She felt no better after being ushered by a discreet secretary in tweeds into Anna Kristeva’s room (with three windows overlooking the street, and furnished with solid, old Wanderlinck items, each of which no doubt cost about as much as Moreno earned in a year) and sat down in a leather armchair about the size of a small car.

And matters were not helped by the fact that when Anna Kristeva arrived ten minutes late, she turned out to be a woman more or less the same age as Moreno. She made no attempt to estimate the cost of the lawyer’s clothes, that wasn’t necessary. The situation was crystal clear already.

She heaved herself out of the armchair and shook hands.

‘Ewa Moreno, detective inspector.’

‘Anna. I know. Sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope it’s okay to use first names?’

The temperature rose slightly.

‘Would you like a sherry? I think I could do with one.’

Sherry? thought Moreno, and the temperature fell again.

‘Yes please,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you want to talk to a male officer?’

Kristeva didn’t reply immediately, but instead opened a corner cupboard made of rosewood with intarsia marquetry. Took out a large carafe of sherry and filled two bluish glasses. Sat down in the other armchair and sighed deeply.

‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘What a bloody mess! I’m worried by what has happened. . Dead worried, to be honest.’

Moreno took a sip of wine, Kristeva emptied her glass in one gulp.

‘Anyway, that business of my not wanting to speak to a male officer,’ she said. ‘You’ll understand. It wouldn’t be much fun for me sitting here and trying to explain matters to a man with what you might call traditional views on sex roles.’

‘Really?’ said Moreno. ‘As you know, I’ve come to talk about your friend Ester Peerenkaas. . And what might have happened to her. I think it would help if you explained in more detail what you mean.’

Kristeva explained in more detail.

It took quite a while. Half an hour and another glass of sherry, to be precise, and Moreno had to admit that it was one of the most interesting conversations she had had for quite a long time.

To start with, at least. It had never occurred to her that there could be ways like this of looking at and solving sexual problems. Anna Kristeva described in detail how she and Ester Peerenkaas had developed their advertising adventure since embarking on it four years ago. About their selection procedures. About the excitement in advance of the meetings. About the outcomes (or the results, to put it another way), and about all these men they acquired a sort of control over in this way. Perhaps it was only an illusory control — but so what? Kristeva maintained: perhaps the whole of life was merely an illusion.

And about the negative sides, of course. How nothing seemed ever to be really serious. And about how one could create genuine hurt.

And about the fact that going in for this kind of activity implied that one had made up one’s mind to lead a solitary life. Once and for all.

‘Although you can never be really sure about nothing ever being serious,’ said Kristeva, lighting a cigarillo.

‘Are you thinking about your pilot?’ Moreno asked, but received only a non-committal smile in response.

Anyway, now that all the cards were on the table, Moreno could understand perfectly why the young lawyer had preferred not to talk to one of her male colleagues.

Rooth wouldn’t have had any sympathy at all with this approach, she thought. Probably not Münster or Reinhart either.

It wasn’t even clear that she did: but she had to admit that it was interesting. The first twenty minutes, at least.

After that, it became increasingly unpleasant. When they started discussing the latest development in the hunt for these men. The innovation since the middle of December or thereabouts.

‘A wild card?’ said Moreno. ‘You mean you actually selected a wild card? A man you knew absolutely nothing about? Not even his name?’

‘That’s right,’ said Kristeva sombrely. ‘But when I was due to meet him, I fell ill — so Ester took him instead.’

‘Against your will?’

‘Yes. She stole him from me, that’s all there was to it.’

‘And how did you react?’

‘I was absolutely furious. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. Ester and I haven’t really met since it happened either, we’ve only spoken on the phone once or twice. That’s why all I know is that she met him last Tuesday — the tenth, it must have been.’

‘Where? Do you know where they were going to meet?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘What do you know about this man?’

Kristeva inhaled deeply.

‘Nothing at all, really. I don’t think they could have met very often yet — that was probably the second time. She said something about him being otherwise engaged over the Christmas period, and she was in the Canary Islands for a couple of weeks.’

‘By herself?’

‘No, she was with a colleague from work. You should probably be interviewing her — she’s bound to know more about it than I do.’

Moreno turned back a few pages in her notebook.

‘Is it Karen deBuijck you’re referring to?’

Kristeva thought for a moment.

‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I don’t know her, but I think she’s called Karen.’

‘A colleague of mine is due to speak to her later this afternoon,’ said Moreno.

Kristeva put her hand over her mouth.

‘My God!’ she exclaimed. ‘You really are taking this seriously. Does that mean you believe something has happened to her?’

‘We don’t know anything for certain yet,’ said Moreno. ‘But it’s obviously not good that she’s been missing for a whole week.’

‘No,’ said Kristeva. ‘Of course not.’

Moreno cleared her throat and put down the sherry glass she had been swirling around for the last few minutes.

‘In any case, we obviously need to try to identify this man,’ she said. ‘All you can tell us about him is that Ester met him for the first time at Keefer’s restaurant. . That’s in Molnarstraat, isn’t it?’

Kristeva nodded.

‘And that was the eighth of December, a Friday?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did she describe him?’

‘Hardly at all. He seems to have been nice. I think he made a really good impression on her, but that’s about all I know. . I know no details, she said virtually nothing at all after that first meeting. Nothing later, either — but it could well be that the date last Tuesday was only their second meeting — or the first real one, as it were.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yes. Assuming it’s true what she said about him being busy before and over Christmas. But I suppose she could have been lying to me.’

‘Why should she do that?’

‘So as not to make me jealous. I was very annoyed about the way she carried on — she was breaking the rules.’

‘What rules?’

‘Nothing written, of course. But there’s always a network of invisible rules. That’s something you learn in my trade, if nothing else.’

She stretched out her arms, and smiled apologetically.

‘I understand,’ said Moreno. ‘But you don’t have a name?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Absolutely certain. I would have remembered it if she’d mentioned one. The only details I know is that business about the tie and the book, but I knew about that before she met him anyway. . A red tie and a red T. S. Eliot book, that was how I was going to be able to recognize him.’

Moreno nodded. They’d already spoken about that.

‘Nothing about his job?’

‘No.’

‘Or his clothes?’

‘No.’

‘His age or his appearance?’

‘Nothing. But you can take it for granted that he’s pretty good-looking. Ester is very choosy.’

‘And that meeting last week, you don’t know anything about that? Apart from the fact that it was due to happen.’

Kristeva thought for a moment as she contemplated her well-manicured nails.

‘No. All she said was that she was going to meet him, and she was looking forward to it.’

‘Why did she mention it at all, if she thought you were going to be jealous?’

Kristeva shrugged.

‘I told her I was quite pleased with Gordon — the pilot, that is — and I suppose she felt she ought to say something. I wasn’t annoyed with her any longer — and that was why I rang her, in fact. I thought that. .’

‘Thought what?’ wondered Moreno when nothing else was said.

‘I suppose I thought I’d over-reacted a bit. I wanted to smooth things over and improve our relationship, that’s all.’

‘And did you manage that?’

Kristeva smiled wryly.

‘I think so. We talked about meeting at the weekend — last weekend, that is. We didn’t fix anything definite, we were going to get in touch. I thought it was her turn to ring, and I. . Well, I was busy with Gordon, I suppose. .’

‘When did you last speak to her? What day?’

‘Sunday last week. In the evening. She’d just got back home from Fuerteventura that afternoon.’

Moreno made a note, and wondered if there was anything else to ask about.

She couldn’t think of anything, thanked Anna Kristeva for taking the time to meet her, and left the offices.

She did so with somewhat different feelings than when she had arrived. She wasn’t at all sure what she thought about Anna Kristeva — as a woman and a human being — but at least the feeling of inferiority she had felt when she first arrived had been blown away completely.

Is the bottom line that I feel sorry for her? she wondered as she emerged into the street. Or for both of them? Both Anna Kristeva and Ester Peerenkaas and their artificial love lives?

Yes, possibly.

Perhaps there was all the more reason to feel sorry for fröken Peerenkaas.

If her analysis of all the disturbing implications was correct, that is.

On Thursday, 19 January, nine days after Ester Peerenkaas had last been seen alive, the Maardam police entered her flat in Meijkstraat. In charge of the operation — appointed very hastily — was Inspector Rooth, as Inspector Moreno — very hastily — had been given other duties by no less than Chief of Police Hiller himself.

Rooth was accompanied by Inspector Sammelmerk and the two friends of fröken Peerenkaas the police had been in touch with the previous day: Anna Kristeva and Karen deBuijk.

Before he instructed the caretaker to open the green-painted door with his master key, Rooth bent down and shouted in through the letterbox. As he did so he noticed there was quite a large pile of mail on the floor in the hall, and concluded that in all probability the tenant had not been home for several days.

He stood up and gave the caretaker — a tall, fair-haired man with sleepy eyes and a burnt-out cigarette end in his mouth — the signal to unlock the door.

‘Take it easy now!’ he said when the door was open and the blond caretaker had left. ‘Let’s take our shoes off and leave them outside here on the landing, and creep inside like naked Indians.’

Naked? Sammelmerk wondered. Why naked Indians?

But she said nothing. Chief Inspector Reinhart had warned her that Rooth was a little odd.

‘We don’t know what to expect inside there,’ said Rooth, ‘but we must be prepared for the worst. The important thing is that we must not touch anything.’

‘Huh,’ said deBuijk. ‘I don’t want to be involved in this.’

‘You are involved in this,’ said Kristeva. ‘You’d better accept that.’

Rooth entered the hall and beckoned the other three to follow him. At least there’s no smell of a dead body, Sammelmerk noted optimistically.

‘Stay here while I have a preliminary look round,’ said Rooth. ‘Then I’d like you two’ — he nodded at the two friends — ‘to go round the whole flat and see if you can discover anything unusual.’

‘Unusual?’ wondered deBuijk. ‘What do you mean by “unusual”?’

‘Anything that doesn’t look like it usually does, that’s all. Anything you haven’t seen here before, or things that aren’t where they usually are. . You’ve both been here several times before. But don’t touch anything, okay?’

‘Of course we shan’t touch anything,’ said deBuijk. ‘We’re not complete idiots.’

Kristeva nodded, Inspector Sammelmerk sighed, and Rooth started to inspect the flat.

The first thought about a possible connection cropped up in Moreno’s mind shortly after she had left the chief of police’s office. She had sat in his greenhouse for an hour and a half, going through the documentation of the Surhonen affair with Hiller: comments had been made, both on the television and in the press, about the way in which the police had handled this delicate business which also involved a delegation of foreign police officers, and as usual Hiller had given several undertakings.

It struck her just after she had completed that distressing task. It was hardly a thought, in fact: more of a faint suspicion that flitted through her consciousness for a split second; but it left an impression even so.

And that impression suddenly became visible again not long afterwards when she sat down at a table in the canteen to eat her salad lunch. God only knows why, she thought, but all of a sudden, there it was. The suspicion.

That there might be a connection. Between the Strangler and that missing woman.

That he might have been the person Ester Peerenkaas had come up against.

Needless to say there was nothing specific to support this gratuitous hypothesis. Not a thing. And in all probability the chances were no more than one in a thousand. She started eating, and wondered why the thought had occurred to her. Presumably it was simply because the two tasks had collided by accident, merely because they both happened to be inside her head at the same time.

In more or less the same way that she used to connect true love with funeral parlours, because her first serious lover (she was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time, if she remembered rightly) happened to have a father who owned one.

Her suspicion was probably no stronger than that link, and when Reinhart came to join her she decided it would be silly to mention it.

Especially as Reinhart seemed to be more gloomy than usual. She couldn’t help but wonder how he was. At first she managed to refrain from asking him straight out, but when he spilled coffee over his shirt and swore so loudly that his voice echoed all round the room, she put the question.

‘I’m okay,’ said Reinhart. ‘It’s just this damned case that is gnawing away at my soul all the time.’

‘I didn’t know you had a soul,’ said Moreno: but the thought fell on stony ground. He simply ignored it.

‘And then there’s that other case as well,’ he muttered instead. ‘That missing woman. Have you spoken to Inspector Sammelmerk since yesterday?’

‘No,’ said Moreno. ‘Why?’

Reinhart took a bite of his sandwich and thought for a while before answering.

‘She spoke to one of the woman’s friends, just like you did. I bumped into her briefly this morning, and she’d been given this name.’

‘What name?’

‘I can’t get it out of my head. Fröken Peerenkaas had mentioned the name of the man she was about to start a relationship with, and it’s a name I can’t get out of my head. . I’ve been thinking about it for over two hours now. Damn and blast!’

‘What was his name?’ asked Moreno, and felt her heart beating faster.

‘Brugger,’ said Reinhart.

‘Brugger?’

‘Yes, Amos Brugger. I’ve looked it up in the telephone directory, but there’s nobody of that name in Maardam and district. . It rings a bell, but I can’t think why. Amos Brugger. . Is there the sound of a bell ringing in your pretty head when you hear that name?’

Moreno ignored the compliment, and listened out for bells. Five seconds passed, Reinhart was staring hard at her all the time, as if he were doing all he could to assist her.

‘No,’ she said in the end. ‘I can’t hear a single tinkle.’

‘Damn and blast!’ said Reinhart again. ‘This smells of duck shit, as my mother used to say.’

He slid the sandwich to one side and lit his pipe instead.