The Weeping Girl

17

‘Coffee?’ said Vrommel.

‘No thank you,’ said Sigrid Lijphart. ‘I’ve just had some.’

Constable Vegesack was about to say that he wouldn’t mind a cup, but held himself in check.

‘Well?’ said Vrommel, sitting down at his desk. ‘Arnold Maager. What have you got to report?’

Vegesack cleared his throat and leafed quickly through his notebook.

‘There’s not a lot to say, really,’ he said. ‘He’s a pretty uncommunicative type, this herr Maager.’

‘Uncommunicative?’ said Vrommel.

‘Introverted if you prefer,’ said Vegesack ‘Still, he’s ill, of course. It wasn’t easy to squeeze anything out of him.’

‘Did you tell him that Mikaela had gone missing?’ asked fru Lijphart.

Her voice is reminiscent of a violin string, Vegesack thought.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘More or less straight away. Maybe I should have kept that back for a while. He was sort of struck dumb when I told him that.’

‘Struck dumb?’ said Vrommel.

‘Well, he was dead quiet in any case,’ said Vegesack. ‘I tried to find out what they’d talked about when she visited him on Saturday, but he just sat there shaking his head. In the end he started crying.’

‘Crying?’ said Vrommel.

Does that idiot have to sit there repeating a word out of every sentence I say? Vegesack wondered. But he managed to restrain himself. Looked at the woman sitting by his side instead. Fru Lijphart was sitting with her back as straight as a poker, her hands on her knees, and she seemed somehow distant. Almost as if she’d been drugged.

What a strange collection of people I find myself surrounded by, Vegesack thought. Arnold Maager. Chief of Police Vrommel. Sigrid Lijphart. They all seem to be a sort of caricature. Comic-strip characters.

Or was everybody like this, if you got to know them a little better? That could be a topic worth thinking about in connection with the book, perhaps. Psychological realism, as it was called. He turned over a page in his notebook.

‘I spoke to one of the carers and a doctor as well,’ he said. ‘They said it was quite typical behaviour on Maager’s part. Confrontation avoidance, they called it. That means that you avoid all uncomfortable situations and retreat into yourself instead of confronting things or people-’

‘Thank you,’ said Vrommel. ‘We understand what it means. Did you meet anybody who had talked to the girl while she was there?’

‘One person,’ said Vegesack. ‘A carer by the name of Proszka. He was simply the one who received her when she arrived, and took her to where she wanted to go. He didn’t see her leaving Sidonis, unfortunately. Anyway, I’m afraid all this isn’t going to help us very much — with regard to Mikaela’s disappearance, that is.’

Fru Lijphart sighed deeply and seemed to shrink somewhat.

‘Something has happened,’ she said. ‘I just know that something has happened to her. You must. . You must do something.’

Vrommel leaned back on his chair and tried to frown.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll issue a Wanted notice. I’m not as sure as you are that she isn’t just staying away of her own free will, but never mind. Radio, television, the press, all the usual outlets. Vegesack, look after that.’

‘Shouldn’t we check up with her acquaintances?’ Vegesack wondered.

‘Acquaintances?’ repeated Vrommel.

‘Yes, her friends. . Or boyfriends. I mean, it’s possible that she’s just lying low somewhere and has been in touch with somebody she knows. Somebody apart from her mother, that is.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said fru Lijphart.

Vegesack closed his notebook.

‘Maybe not, but surely we should check up even so?’

‘Of course,’ said Vrommel. ‘Fru Lijphart, you can sit down with Constable Vegesack and go through all the possible names. No stone must be left unturned from now on. One hundred per cent effort.’

Good God, Vegesack thought.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘When you have a complete list, phone all those who seem most likely. Any objections, fru Lijphart?’

He stroked his tiny moustache and glared at Sigrid Lijphart. She avoided his gaze. Looked down at her hands, which were still clasped in her lap. It was several seconds before she replied.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No objections at all. Why should I have any objections?’

As Moreno was walking the short distance from Grote Marckt, where she had been dropped off by Mikael, to Goopsweg, she asked herself why on earth she didn’t just walk away from all this.

Why she refused to drop the disappearance of Mikaela Lijphart.

Or assumed disappearance. After all, the probability that the girl had simply taken the opportunity of lying low for a few days (now that she had celebrated her eighteenth birthday) and as a result arousing guilt feelings in her parents (in Arnold Maager as well?). . well, despite everything it was surely quite strong?

Or wasn’t it?

Had something happened to Mikaela Lijphart? To use her mother’s euphemism, had something happened to her?

If so, what?

And what about this old story? Her father — the teacher Arnold Maager — who had an affair with one of his pupils. Made her pregnant. Killed her. Went mad as a result.

Was that really what had happened? Was it so straightforward?

It was a horrendous story, of course, but somehow or other Moreno thought it sounded too clinical. Clinical and neatly tied up. Shove the man into the loony bin, get rid of the girl. Put the lid on it for sixteen years, and then. .? Yes, what then?

But she was well aware that it wasn’t merely curiosity that drove her. There was something fascinating about the story, Moreno was the first to acknowledge that: but there were other motives too.

Other reasons why she didn’t want to drop the whole thing. Why she couldn’t simply turn her back on it all.

Ethical? Yes, in fact. It’s only when you’re on leave that you have time to be moral — somebody had said that, she couldn’t remember who. Reinhart or Van Veeteren, presumably — no, hardly the Chief Inspector: if there was anybody who never ignored the moral aspect of things, he was the one. Not even in the most trivial of circumstances. Was that why he’d retired early? she asked herself. Was that why he’d had enough?

Anyway, there was something in the thought. The one about morals and being on leave. When we’re pedalling away on the usual treadmill, Moreno thought, we slip hastily past goodness knows how many blind beggars (or terrified children or women beaten black and blue). But if we come across one of them while we’re strolling along a beach — well, that’s a totally different situation.

Morals need time.

And now she had time. Time to remember the weeping girl on the train. Time to think about her and her background and her worried mother.

And Maager, the teacher.

Time to make a diversion and take an extra hour on a sunny morning like this one — while Mikael had gone off to make arrangements with some workmen about something that needed doing on Tschandala: the gutters, if she remembered rightly.

She turned into Goopsweg and started looking for the right number. Twenty-six. There it was. A block of flats, three storeys high. Boring seventies design in grey brick and concrete speckled with damp patches. But such buildings no doubt had to exist even in a comfortable if slightly tarnished little idyll like this.

I’m a journalist, she reminded herself. I must remember to behave like a journalist. Be friendly and courteous, and make lots of notes. She hadn’t managed to think of a better cover to enable her to talk to a woman about her murdered daughter.

She certainly didn’t want some kind of accreditation from Chief of Police Vrommel. Not yet, anyway.

She crossed over the street, entered the courtyard and found the right entrance door without any difficulty. She walked up the stairs to the top floor. Stood for half a minute outside the door, composing herself, then rang the bell.

No reaction.

She waited for a while, then rang again. Pressed her ear cautiously against the door and listened.

Not a sound. As quiet as the grave.

Ah well, thought Detective Inspector Moreno. At least I’ve made an honest attempt.

But when she came out into the sunshine again, it felt as if she still had some way to go before she’d fulfilled her moral obligations. As if she didn’t have the right to wash her hands of the Lijphart girl. Not really the right, and certainly not yet.

If all citizens had the same sense of responsibility as I have, she thought as she very nearly stumbled over a black cat that came scuttling out of a hole in a fence, what a marvellous world we’d live in!

Then she burst out laughing, making the cat turn round and scamper back to where it had come from.

Sigrid Lijphart just managed to catch a train that left the station in Lejnice at 17.03. It set off as she was sitting down on a window seat in the half-empty coach, and she was almost immediately overcome by a feeling of having abandoned her daughter.

She lit a cigarette in an attempt to counteract the attack of conscience. And looked around meticulously before drinking the last drops in the hip flask she kept in her handbag.

It didn’t help much. Neither the nicotine nor the spirits. By the time the train had reached full speed, it was obvious to her that it had been a mistake to leave. To return home like this without Mikaela.

How could she leave her fate — and her daughter’s fate — in Chief of Police Vrommel’s hands? she asked herself. Was there anything at all to suggest that he would be able to solve the problem? Vrommel! She recalled how even sixteen years ago she had regarded him as an utterly useless berk, and there was nothing to suggest that he had improved since then. Nothing that she had noticed during the days she had spent in Lejnice, at least.

And now he was the one who was going to find out what had happened to Mikaela. Chief Inspector Vrommel! How could she — as a mother and a thinking woman — allow that to happen? How could she hand over responsibility to such an arch-cretin?

She stubbed out her cigarette and looked out of the window at the sun-drenched polder-landscape. Canals. Black-and-white cattle grazing. A cluster of low stone-built houses with a church steeple sticking up like an antenna or a tentative attempt to make contact with the endless sky.

What am I going on about? she suddenly thought. What am I sitting here gawping at? It doesn’t really matter if it’s Vrommel or somebody else. It’s all about Mikaela. Where on earth is she? What’s happened? Arnold. . Just think that Arnold might actually know something about it!

And once again this inexplicable feeling of guilt dug its claws into her. As inexplicable and irritating as a sore on her soul. Why? Why should she — Sigrid Lijphart, formerly Sigrid Maager — have anything to reproach herself for? In fact she had done more than anybody could have demanded of her. . Much more. She had told Mikaela about Arnold, despite the fact that it would have been much easier to say nothing. She could just as well have remained silent about the whole affair. Now and for ever. That was the line Helmut would have preferred to take — he hadn’t said that in so many words, of course: but then, Helmut was not one for saying anything in so many words.

Keep quiet and let the past be buried. That’s what she could have done. Nobody could have asked more of her than that, and nobody had done so either.

So why? Why hadn’t she taken the easy way out for once? Why always this unreasonable and inflexible demand for honesty?

But hardly had she formulated these questions than his voice rang out from the past.

Motives, it said. You are falsifying your motives.

She couldn’t remember the context in which he’d said it, but that was irrelevant. She didn’t understand what he’d meant even so.

Not then, and not now, perhaps twenty years later. Odd that she should remember that. Odd that it occurred to her now. Motives?

She sighed and lit another cigarette. Scrunched the packet up and chucked it into the litter bin, despite the fact that there were four or five cigarettes left in it.

Enough of that now, she thought. I don’t want to come back home to Helmut stinking of tobacco. I must observe the proprieties.

But nothing seemed to go right. That question that she didn’t even dare to formulate in silence, not even deep, deep down at the bottom of her consciousness — it continued to float around inside her without being expressed, forcing all other thoughts to flee.

That question.