The Weeping Girl

28

‘Van Rippe?’ said Intendent Kohler. ‘And what do we know about him?’

Vrommel brushed aside a fly that seemed to have taken an incomprehensible liking (as far as Constable Vegesack was concerned, at least) to his sweaty bald pate. (Presumably it thought it was just another dung heap, Vegesack thought, and made a mental note to enter this analysis into his black book.)

‘We know what we know,’ asserted the chief of police, and began reading from the sheet of paper he was holding in his hand. ‘Thirty-four years old. Lived out at Klimmerstoft. Born and bred there, in fact. Bachelor. Worked at Klingsmann’s, the furniture manufacturer, had done so for the last four years. There’s not a lot to say about him. Lived with a woman for a few years, but they split up. No children. Played football for a few years, but stopped after a knee injury. No criminal record, never involved in anything dodgy. . No enemies as far as we know.’

‘Churchgoer, Friends of the Earth and the Red Cross?’ wondered the other detective officer from Wallburg. His name was Baasteuwel, and was a small, somewhat unkempt detective inspector in his forties. With a reputation for being shrewd, if Vegesack had understood the situation rightly. In any case, he was the direct opposite of Vrommel, and it was a pleasure to observe their mutual antipathy. To crown it all, Baasteuwel smoked evil-smelling cigarettes more or less all the time, totally oblivious to the chief of police’s objections, stated and unstated. This place wasn’t a day nursery, for Christ’s sake.

‘Not as far as we know,’ muttered Vrommel. ‘Not yet, at least. We only identified him this morning, and so far we’ve only talked to a few of his friends. He has a brother and a mother still living: we’ve made contact with the brother and he’s on his way here. His mother is on a motoring holiday in France, but will probably be back home tomorrow. The day after at the latest.’

‘Mobile phone?’ asked Kohler.

‘Negative,’ said Vrommel. ‘We’ll know more about Van Rippe when we’ve talked to a few more people. He seems to have been missing since last Sunday in any case. Can we move on to the technical details?’

‘Why not?’ said Baasteuwel. He stubbed out his cigarette and lit a new one.

Vrommel gathered together his papers, then nodded to Constable Vegesack who took a sip of mineral water and began speaking.

It took almost ten minutes. Tim Van Rippe had died at some point on Sunday or Monday last week. The murder weapon was a pointed but not necessarily sharp instrument, as yet unidentified and unspecified, probably made of metal, which penetrated his left eye, continued into the cerebrum and wiped out so many vital functions that Van Rippe was probably clinically dead within three to six seconds after the penetration. It was not impossible that he might have delivered the fatal blow himself, but in that case some other person, as yet unidentified and unspecified, must have taken away the weapon and buried Van Rippe on the beach.

He had been lying there buried in the place where he was found by Henning Keeswarden and Fingal Wielki, aged six and four respectively, for about a week. It was not possible to establish how long had passed between the moment of death and the burial, according to the pathologist, Dr Goormann, but there was no reason to suspect that it would have been very long.

So much for the medical science. As for the results of the efforts of the scene-of-crime officers, most of them were not yet available. Roughly sixty more or less sandy objects had been sent to the Forensic Laboratory in Maardam for analysis. All that could be said for certain at this point in time was that no possible murder weapon had been found — nor anything that could throw light on what it might have looked like.

Nor who had been holding it.

The fact that the victim had been wearing a blue short-sleeved cotton shirt, jeans and underpants, but was without shoes or socks, was not a matter that the technicians needed to comment upon, as it was obvious to everybody who had been at the scene of the crime.

Vegesack — who hadn’t been present at the scene of the crime — completed his run-through, and looked around the table.

‘Drunk?’ asked Baasteuwel.

‘No,’ said Vegesack. ‘We’ll get details of his stomach contents tomorrow.’

‘Who was the last person to see him alive?’

‘He was out fishing with a friend on Sunday morning. It could have been him.’

‘Has he been interrogated?’

‘On the telephone,’ said Vrommel. ‘I shall talk to him this evening.’

Baasteuwel didn’t seem too satisfied, but desisted from asking any more questions.

‘It must have happened during the night, I assume,’ said Kohler after a few seconds of silence. ‘The beach is presumably anything but deserted during the day, or. .’

‘Anything but,’ said Vegesack. ‘No, nobody’s going to go there and murder somebody in broad daylight.’

‘So, there we have it,’ said Vrommel, brushing aside the fly again. ‘I think that’s enough. Have our friends from Wallburg any ideas to bestow upon us? If not, I’ll declare the meeting closed for today. We have a few minor interviews to see to, as I said earlier, but Vegesack and I can deal with those without any need for assistance.’

Intendent Kohler closed his notebook and put it away in his brown briefcase which looked as if it had survived at least two world wars. Baasteuwel knocked the ash off his cigarette into his coffee cup, and scratched at his blue-grey stubble.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. But make sure you’ve got somewhere by then. This is a murder investigation, not a bloody children’s party.’

Vegesack could hear the grating of the chief of police’s teeth, but no words managed to force their way out — which was probably just as well. Nobody else had anything to add, so after some thirty seconds, he and Vrommel were alone in the room.

‘Clear up in here,’ said Vrommel. ‘And for God’s sake make sure that the room is properly aired. Don’t leave until it’s done.’

Vegesack glanced furtively at the clock. Twenty minutes to five.

‘What about the interrogations?’ he asked. ‘What shall we do about them?’

‘I’ll see to that,’ said Vrommel, standing up. ‘Your job is to clear up and lock up. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Good evening, Constable. And remember, don’t say a word to any damned reporters.’

‘Good evening, sir,’ said Vegesack.

Moreno was sitting waiting with a half-empty glass of beer when he came to Strandterrassen.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. It lasted longer than expected.’

‘Murder investigations generally take time.’

Vegesack didn’t bother to explain that it had more to do with his clearing-up duties. He gestured to a waiter and ordered another beer instead, and sat down.

‘Did you have a restful day off?’

Moreno shrugged.

‘You could say that. I met the girl’s mother.’

‘Whose mother?’

‘Winnie Maas’s.’

‘I see. A nice lady.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘Most people do.’

‘I get you. Anyway, she was visited by Mikaela Lijphart last Sunday.’

Vegesack raised an eyebrow.

‘Good God! Well, what did fru Maas have to tell you?’

‘Not a lot. She says she spoke to the girl, and then passed her on to somebody else. Vera Sauger — is that a name that means anything to you?’

Vegesack thought about that as the waiter came with his beer.

‘I don’t think so. Who’s she when she’s at home?’

‘A friend of Winnie’s. Or so her mother claimed. If Mikaela wanted to know anything about Winnie, Vera was the person she should go and talk to, she reckoned. So maybe that’s what she did.’

Vegesack took a deep swig, and closed his eyes with satisfaction.

‘Tastes good,’ he said. ‘But I knew that already. Well, I take it you’ve tracked her down by now?’

Moreno sighed.

‘Yes, of course. But unfortunately I only got as far as a neighbour who’s looking after her canary and potted plants. She’s touring the archipelago, and is due back home tomorrow evening. I think it’s called a holiday.’

‘Not many people are at home at this time of year,’ said Vegesack.

‘Too true,’ said Moreno. ‘How about you? Have you got anywhere? The Wanted notice, for instance?’

Vegesack shook his head.

‘Nix, I’m afraid. She came to see us, that woman from Frigge, but she was so unsure about the person she’d seen that she didn’t dare to say anything for certain. It might have been Mikaela she saw at the railway station, but it might just as well have been somebody else.’

‘And nobody else has reported anything?’

‘Not a living soul,’ said Vegesack. ‘But I spent some time at Sidonis, in fact. If anything useful came out of it is questionable, but I promised to have a go, and so I did.’

He paused, and massaged his temples for a while before continuing. Moreno waited.

‘I spoke to a few people up there. Nobody can remember Maager having received any telephone calls before he went missing. They reckon that it’s out of the question than anybody could have visited him without their being aware of it — although if anybody wanted to take him away from the care home, for whatever reason, there are apparently other ways of doing it.’

‘Such as?’ asked Moreno.

‘The park,’ said Vegesack. ‘The grounds surrounding the buildings — you’ve been there, you know what it’s like. Maager used to wander around there for a few hours every day. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to hide away among the trees and wait for him to come along at a distance sufficiently far away from the home itself. There’s no boundary wall nor anything similar — nothing that runs all the way round in any case. We’ll send a few officers out to search the area around the home: he could be lying somewhere in the woods.’

Moreno didn’t respond. She sat in silence for half a minute, gazing out over the same beach and the same sea as Constable Vegesack.

The same people, the same dogs running after sticks, the same clusters of holidaymakers. But nevertheless, it somehow seemed that the passage of time, albeit only a few days, had cast a sort of membrane over it all. As if it didn’t concern her any more, that kind of life.

‘But why would anybody want to attack Arnold Maager?’ she asked.

Vegesack shrugged.

‘Don’t ask me. But he’s gone missing, and there must be something behind it.’

‘What about his wife?’ Moreno asked. ‘Sigrid Lijphart. What do we know about her?’

‘She rings every day, wondering why we haven’t done anything.’

‘How did she react to the fact that Maager had also disappeared?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ said Vegesack, frowning. ‘It’s the daughter she’s interested in. To be honest, I don’t think she cares all that much if her ex-husband is dead or alive. But nevertheless, we’ll be issuing new Wanted notices tomorrow. In newspapers, magazines and so on.’

Moreno thought that over for a while. Tried to conjure up an image of Arnold Maager the man, but the only images of him she had were from a few old photographs, and it was hard to produce a clear picture. The story attached to him became all the more vivid — what he had been guilty of doing sixteen years ago. It seemed as if actions could somehow overshadow the people who had carried them out, make them incomprehensible, irresponsible: it wasn’t an implausible way of looking at things, and perhaps there were resonances with that membrane she seemed to have sensed, covering the beach. He must be an absolute wreck of a human being, she thought. Must have been even then.

‘What a fascinating story,’ she said in the end. ‘The girl’s missing and her father’s missing. Can you tell me what the hell is going on?’

‘Hmm,’ said Vegesack. ‘I haven’t really got round to thinking about it all that much. I’ve been too busy trying to sort out that business of the bloke buried in the sand. Tim Van Rippe.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Moreno. ‘Where have you got to with him?’

‘The only thing we’re sure about is that we aren’t sure about anything,’ said Vegesack, draining his glass of beer.

‘Hmm,’ muttered Moreno. ‘As far as I remember, that is the basis of all knowledge.’