The Stranglers Honeymoon

33

‘So it’s one hundred per cent clear,’ growled Reinhart. ‘Hands up all those who’ve read Musil.’

He stared at his colleagues and allowed five seconds of silence to flow past before slowly raising his right hand, then lowering it again.

‘One,’ he ascertained. ‘What a bloody scandal! In this brains trust there is just one worn-out chief inspector who has ploughed his way through The Man Without Qualities, and he didn’t have the nous to see the connection. What a shower, what a useless shower!’

‘We’ll let you off this once,’ said Rooth. ‘Is it any good?’

‘A brilliant book,’ Reinhart maintained. ‘Absolutely brilliant. But it’s a quarter of a century since I worked my way through it, so I’m also prepared to go easy on myself. Anyway, Van Veeteren’s explanation means we know where we stand now. I’ll offer odds of ten to one on fröken Peerenkaas having come up against the same lunatic as our victims last autumn. Does anybody disagree?’

‘Maybe we should be careful of being too hasty,’ said Münster cautiously. ‘But I agree that it’s a major breakthrough. . Amos Brugger must be a reference to Moosbrugger. We seem to be dealing with a pretty unusual character.’

‘Unusual?’ said Jung. ‘You can say that again. What’s his point, using these strange names? If he really feels he must introduce himself to his victims, why couldn’t he just use any name that came into his head? Rooth, for instance.’

‘What?’ said Rooth.

‘You could think that,’ said Reinhart. ‘But this name fixation must tell us quite a bit about him, surely?’

He looked around again, with a question mark engraved on his forehead.

‘I volunteer to take a week’s leave and read Musil’s book,’ said Jung. ‘It must be pretty thick?’

‘My edition has about twelve hundred pages,’ said Reinhart. ‘No, I reckon it was enough that you were already allowed to read a crime novel in working hours. But what can we say about our contemporary Moosbrugger? What do we know about him?’

Nobody spoke for a few seconds.

‘He has strong hands,’ said Moreno. ‘But we’ve said that before.’

‘He likes playing games,’ said Sammelmerk.

Reinhart nodded.

‘Yes, it seems so. We can take it for granted that he’s mad — but there’s method in his madness, to quote another great writer.’

‘Hamlet,’ said Rooth. ‘Even I know that. Shall I tell you who wrote it as well?’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Reinhart with a smile. ‘You can have a brownie point even so. Tell us something more about our strangler instead.’

‘He’s well educated,’ said Krause.

‘He reads books, at least,’ said Moreno.

‘He’s bold,’ said Münster. ‘If he did in fact kill Ester Peerenkaas, it was pretty cold-blooded of him to take her to a restaurant first. A place where anybody at all could have seen them together.’

‘He might have chosen a table hidden away in a corner,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Rooth and I checked up on that when we were at Keefer’s: there are several tables that are more or less out of sight. But of course, he couldn’t have been totally invisible — not to the staff, at least.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jung. ‘Hadn’t he ordered a table, using a name? In which case he might have called himself Amos Brugger when he did that as well. That might tell us a bit more about how he-’

‘Unfortunately not,’ said Reinhart. ‘Isn’t that so, Rooth?’

‘Yes,’ said Rooth. ‘We checked at Keefer’s this morning. They still had the lists of table orders, but there was nobody by that name that evening. . Or the evening before, come to that. But they had quite a lot of bookings for two customers round about eight o’clock on the eighth of December: that’s the time we should be aiming at, so it must presumably have been one of those couples.’

‘I assume that we might eventually discover what name he used then,’ said Münster. ‘Assuming we can trace all the others. But I don’t quite see what good that would do us.’

‘Probably no good at all,’ said Reinhart. ‘He probably won’t have used his real name in any case. But are there any conclusions we can draw about herr Kerran-Brugger? Even if we’re only repeating what we’ve concluded already.’

‘Handsome and well-built,’ said Moreno. ‘Ester Peerenkaas fell for him, and she wasn’t in the habit of falling for anybody who happened to come along, according to what her friend said about her.’

‘Between thirty-five and forty-five, presumably,’ said Sammelmerk.

‘He doesn’t kill them straight away,’ said Jung. ‘He starts a relationship first — that’s rather unusual in this line of business, as I understand it.’

‘Line of business?’ said Krause.

‘Like a cat that plays with its prey before devouring it,’ suggested Rooth.

‘Ugh,’ said Moreno.

Reinhart pointed at Krause with the stem of his pipe.

‘Krause,’ he said. ‘Would you mind noting down all these points. I’m not exactly a fan of perpetrator profiling, but this particular bastard seems to lend himself to the practice unusually well.’

Krause looked up.

‘I’ve done that already,’ he said, tapping at his notebook with his pen.

‘Well done,’ said Reinhart. ‘I should have realized that. Anyway, our main line of attack now is that Ester Peerenkaas has been murdered, and we shall devote all our resources into following that up. But officially, she’s just a missing person — don’t forget that. We’ll soft-pedal the link with Musil as far as the press is concerned — those halfwitted berks won’t have a clue who Musil is anyway. Go easy on the link with previous cases as well, even if we need all the help we can get from the media. It’s the same unholy alliance as usual, no special tricks. Anything else?’

There was nothing else, it seemed.

Not as far as the murderer was concerned, that is. But there was plenty of speculation with regard to what might have happened to Ester Peerenkaas. Rather grim speculation: even if they tried to bear in mind Intendent Münster’s warning about jumping over-hastily to conclusions, it was difficult to imagine any optimistic possibilities.

It was also possible to speculate about the timing, and they duly did.

If it could be assumed that Kerran-alias-Brugger was behind the murder of Kristine Kortsmaa in Wallburg as well, and that Ester Peerenkaas had suffered the same fate, the number of victims was now five. The number of known victims, that is. Spread over about eighteen months, more or less. One-and-a-half years.

The first one in Wallburg in June 1999.

Numbers two, three and four in Maardam in September 2000.

Number five in the same town in January 2001.

Inspector Krause noted down these facts as well, and read them out.

A period of silence followed.

Then Reinhart leaned forward over the table and pointed his index finger in the air as a sort of warning.

‘Let’s avoid using the term “serial murderer’’,’ he said. ‘In theory we could be looking for five different murderers — even if I myself wouldn’t bet so much as a matchstick on that possibility. And in theory, we don’t know if number five really is a victim. She might just have run off with that Brugger bastard, and they could be lounging back lapping up sun and champagne on some picturesque little island in the South Pacific at this very moment. It’s not impossible to grow tired of the charms of Maardam in January, perhaps I don’t need to remind you of that — and for as long as we don’t find her, she remains officially a missing person.’

‘Well said,’ commented Rooth. ‘Even if we do have our thoughts. I must say I don’t like the way she has disappeared. . I’m not exactly enthusiastic about murder either, come to that: but if you have been murdered, you surely don’t need to disappear as well. It’s difficult to make sense of anything until the dead body is found. What the hell are we going to do? What are we going to do right now, I mean?’

Reinhart checked his watch.

‘I assume that’s a roundabout way of proposing a coffee break before we start allocating specific duties?’

‘Such a thought had never occurred to me,’ said Rooth. ‘But if you’re desperate for a cup of coffee, don’t let me stand in your way.’

The allocation of duties lasted over two hours, and eventually took the form — at least in Inspector Krause’s spiral notebook — of a five-point programme.

In the first place there should be an immediate and wide-ranging search for the missing thirty-five-year-old Maardam woman Ester Peerenkaas. Or at least, as immediate as was possible in practice. The chief inspector promised to remain at his desk smoking and preparing statements after the others had gone home to feed the chickens. Or whatever they usually did when they left work.

Secondly, and following on from the Wanted notices, there should be a comprehensive appeal to everybody who had visited Keefer’s restaurant in Molnarstraat on 8 December the previous year to get in touch with the police in Maardam. For obvious reasons, this also landed on Reinhart’s desk.

Thirdly, everybody who was acquainted with, or in one capacity or another was regularly in some kind of contact with the missing fröken Peerenkaas — friends, relatives, colleagues — should be interviewed. For obvious reasons it was difficult to forecast how many people might be concerned in such a complicated operation, but for the time being Jung and Krause were put in charge of it.

In the fourth place, it was decided that renewed contact should be established with Inspector Baasteuwel in Wallburg, more specifically to look once again at the Kristine Kortsmaa case in an attempt to find possible links with the September and January cases in Maardam. Inspector Moreno volunteered for this task.

And finally, it was decided to continue to uphold productive contacts with the bookseller at Krantze’s Antiquarian Bookshop in Kupinskis gränd, one herr Van Veeteren.

‘So, that’s that then,’ said Chief Inspector Reinhart after Krause had read out the programme once more. He wondered if anybody had anything to add.

But it was already twenty minutes to seven in the evening, and nobody could think of anything to say.

Ewa Moreno had just finished vacuuming the living room, taking a shower and opening a bottle of wine, when there was a ring at the door.

Irene Sammelmerk had a bouquet of red and yellow gerbera daisies in one hand, and a carrier bag of Chinese food in the other.

‘A hell of a good idea, this,’ she said. ‘We need to be almost lying down to eat it — I don’t have the strength to sit upright.’

‘Same here,’ said Moreno, ushering her in.

They had finally got round to arranging a meeting on their own. It was about time, too. Plan A had been a visit to a restaurant, of course, but when they happened to meet in the canteen at lunchtime, they had only needed to look at each other for a second to know that neither of them felt like sitting around in a public place.

Not in mid-January, when they were feeling exhausted and washed out.

Not with masses of other people hanging around and disturbing them.

What was needed was a comfy sofa.

And no cooking, God forbid.

So a Chinese takeaway and a bottle of wine in Moreno’s cosy two-room flat in Falckstraat was just what the doctor ordered. An ideal solution.

‘Excellent,’ said Sammelmerk an hour later. ‘I don’t understand why we insist on cooking food seven days a week in our family.’

‘Seven?’ wondered Moreno.

‘Well, five to seven,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Sometimes the computer genius takes the brood out to a hamburger bar, and sometimes we settle for a pizza. I had a friend up in Aarlach who wouldn’t hear of her children having less than two healthy home-cooked meals per day. She had her first heart attack when she was forty-six. Her two children are nervous wrecks. So much for that. .’

‘Yes, everybody’s short of time nowadays,’ said Moreno.

‘Or they divide it up badly,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Some people work their arses off, and others have nothing better to do than sit around scratching them.’

Moreno laughed.

‘Yes, there’s no denying that the balance could often be better than it is. But you have got your family sorted out now, I take it?’

‘Oh yes indeed,’ said Sammelmerk, taking a sip of wine. ‘I can’t complain. What about you? When are you going to take the momentous step? It would be stupid to wait until the menopause.’

Moreno hesitated, but only for a second.

‘He lives here in the same building,’ she said. ‘On the next floor down. I’m the one with my foot on the brakes.’

‘Why’s that? Have you been burnt?’

Moreno thought that over. It was a good question. Had she been burnt?

Not really, if truth were told. You had to reckon with the occasional scratch and the odd dent in your soul as you tramped along the path of thorns that was life. She had birthmarks, of course, but she hadn’t suffered any more than anybody else.

She didn’t have much to complain about. In fact.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not burnt. Just a bit scorched at the edges. I suppose I’m just a bit sluggish. . And hard to please, perhaps.’

‘Like our missing woman?’

‘Not really. I shall never turn up at a restaurant on a blind date in any case, I promise you that. Do you think you could find yourself a man like that?’

Sammelmerk shrugged.

‘I’ve no idea, to tell you the truth,’ she said. ‘I met my Janos when we were twenty-one. We have three kids and we’ve both been unfaithful. . I simply don’t know how to find my way through the labyrinth of love. I’m not sure I want to know either.’

Moreno smiled.

‘What about your lover?’

‘He was a copper,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘That’s the way it goes, I suppose. Cheers.’

‘I understand,’ said Moreno. ‘Cheers. . It’s great to see you outside the police station at last.’

‘This Kerran. . Or Brugger. .’ said Sammelmerk.

‘What about him?’

‘What do you think about him?’

‘Think? What exactly do you mean?’

‘Well, what sort of a person do you think he is?’

Moreno swirled the wine around in her glass.

‘I’ve no idea. Or rather, I do have an idea of course, but I haven’t constructed a detailed psychological portrait of him. But it’s obvious he’s yet another of those perverted, frustrated stallions. . There are a lot of them around.’

‘There certainly are,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Most crimes of violence are committed by aggressive males between twenty and forty, of course, blokes who didn’t get their end away although they badly wanted to — but of course, deep down they are kind and gentle.’

‘Bang on,’ said Moreno.

‘That’s the way it is, unfortunately,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘But the bloke we’re after doesn’t have sex with his victims, neither before nor after, it seems. For Christ’s sake, he just kills them. Why does he do it? That’s what I can’t understand.’

‘He’s sick.’

‘Of course he’s sick. But perhaps it’s possible to diagnose his illness?’

‘It could be. Huh, I suppose the problem is that we are so badly constructed in the biological sense, if we try looking into the crystal ball, as it were.’

‘Eh?’ said Sammelmerk. ‘I think you need to explain yourself a bit better than that.’

Moreno clasped her hands behind her head and decided to spell things out.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what I mean is that men — if they just follow their instincts and basic needs — are programmed to achieve sexual satisfaction within about twenty seconds. . So the Good Lord can hardly have expected that we women would get any pleasure out of that, surely? Don’t you think?’

‘I understand that God is a bachelor,’ said Sammelmerk with a wry smile. ‘But they usually learn what to do, the ones — or rather the one — that I know.’

‘In time, yes,’ said Moreno. ‘That’s right. But you must agree surely that it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, this difference in tempo.’

Sammelmerk leaned back in her corner of the sofa and burst out laughing.

‘This difference in tempo!’ she snorted. ‘My God, yes! You certainly have a point. But what about our friend Kerran-Brugger? Why do you think he does it? From his point of view. If we try to penetrate his perverted mind.’

Moreno took a deep drink of wine and thought about that. Blew out a candle whose flame was coming dangerously close to her cuff.

‘Power,’ she said eventually. ‘If you want a one-word answer. If you can’t get love from the person you desire, you can at least get submission. . You can control the object of your desire. It’s a motive that’s as old as the hills, but it’s probably a variation on that which drives our strangler. That’s what I think, at least.’

‘Very likely,’ agreed Sammelmerk with a frown. ‘I remember reading something once: “When a man says no to a woman, she wants to die. When a woman says no to a man, he wants to kill.” — That seems to sum it up rather neatly, don’t you think?’

‘In a nutshell,’ said Moreno. ‘We’re on pretty good form this evening, aren’t we?’

‘It must be the wine,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘And the company. Anyway, I’ll be blowed if it isn’t time for me to go and see to my flock.’

Moreno looked at the clock.

‘Half past eleven. Ah well, another working day tomorrow, I suppose.’

‘The first of many,’ said Sammelmerk with a sigh. ‘I think I’ll have to ask you to ring for a taxi. I’ve no great desire to come up against unknown men in the dark.’

‘“When a woman says no to a man. .”’ said Moreno, standing up. ‘Yes there’s a lot of truth in that. Ugh.’

‘Ugh indeed,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘I hope we find him soon.’

‘It’s a matter of time,’ said Moreno, picking up the telephone. ‘Only a matter of time.’