The Weeping Girl

33

22 July 1999

It was Thursday before the Wanted notice for Arnold Maager — 44 years old, 176 centimetres tall, slimly built and ash-grey-haired; possibly depressed, possibly confused, probably both — reached the public at large. By that time he had been missing for almost five days. He was last seen in the Sidonis Foundation care home just outside Lejnice, where he had been living for the last fifteen years, last Saturday — and it was probable that he was dressed in a white T-shirt, blue or brown cotton trousers, a light-coloured wind-cheater and Panther trainers.

That same day, at dawn, a search party comprising fourteen officers from the police forces in Lejnice, Wallburg and Emsbaden began to comb the immediate vicinity of the Sidonis home — an operation that was completed at about five in the afternoon without any clues having been found to throw light on what had happened to the missing mentally ill patient.

Simultaneously with the publication by the media of details of Maager’s disappearance, the police also issued a renewed Wanted notice for his daughter, Mikaela Lijphart, this time country-wide. She had now been missing for eleven days, and anybody who had seen the girl at any time during that period — or who could provide any other information that could be of use to the investigation team — was urged to get in touch immediately with the Lejnice police. Or with their nearest police station.

The only person who responded to the latter request was the missing girl’s mother, Sigrid Lijphart, and that was not in order to pass on any new information but — as usual — to ask why the hell they hadn’t made any progress. Vrommel had no satisfactory answer to this question — as usual — and fru Lijphart threatened to report him to higher authorities if he and his colleagues failed to come up with something in the very near future. If for nothing else she would report them for negligence and a failure to fulfil a police officer’s duty to citizens. Vrommel asked politely if she would like him to send her forms she could fill in in order to make a complaint — a B112-5GE with regard to negligence, and a B112-6C for a failure to fulfil their duty — but she declined on both scores.

Fru Lijphart asked no questions and lodged no complaints with regard to the disappearance of her former husband.

Constable Vegesack lived with his Marlene in one of the newly built blocks of flats in Friederstraat, only a stone’s throw from the beach, and after a minimum of discussion — and an invitation from Vegesack — that is where their meeting was held. Discretion was essential, given the circumstances that had arisen: the police station was out of the question as a venue, and it would not be easy to hire a suitable alternative location at short notice.

Three rooms and a kitchen, Moreno noted as she was being welcomed by Vegesack. Large balcony with a splendid view of the sea and Gordon’s Lighthouse. Not bad at all. She recalled that he’d told her that Marlene was an architect, and she wondered if she was also an interior designer. It looked very much like it, but she wasn’t at home just now and so Moreno couldn’t very well look any further into that. But the rooms and furniture seemed to have a well-thought-out colour scheme, the walls were not cluttered with kitsch — just a few high-quality reproductions: Tiegermann, Chagall and a few of Cezanne’s self-portraits. Bookcases with quite a lot of books. Large green plants. A piano — she wondered if it was Vegesack or his girlfriend who played. Or perhaps both of them? Good, she thought. This gives me confidence in him.

But they weren’t gathered here to pass judgement on style and homeliness. The grim expressions on the faces of Intendent Kohler and Inspector Baasteuwel, who were each installed in a renovated 1950s armchair, gave no room for doubt on that score. On the contrary.

‘Fire away,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘What the hell is this all about?’

Vegesack went to fetch four beers, and Moreno sat down on the sofa.

‘I smell a rat in this accursed business,’ she said.

‘Is its name Vrommel, by any chance?’ wondered Kohler.

‘The chief of police is bound to be in its vicinity in any case,’ said Moreno. ‘It’s no doubt best to fill you in a bit. Would you like me to start in the present, or the past?’

‘The past,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘For Christ’s sake, when they picked out Kohler and me they told us it would be all over in two or three days. I was due to go on holiday today. But it’s not the first time. .’

‘It probably won’t be the last either,’ said Kohler drily. ‘Let’s get a bit of flesh on the bones.’

Moreno glanced at Vegesack, but he gestured to her and encouraged her to take command. She took her notebook out of her bag.

‘All right,’ she began. ‘Let’s take things in chronological order. Sixteen years ago — almost to the day, in fact — something happened here in Lejnice that. . well, I suppose you could say it left its mark. A teacher at the local school, Arnold Maager, had an affair with one of his pupils, a certain Winnie Maas. She became pregnant, and he killed her. That’s the official version, at least. They say he threw her down from a railway viaduct — it’s pretty high, she fell on to the rails down below and was killed. He was found sitting by the rails with the girl’s body in his lap. In the middle of the night. He went out of his mind as a result, and he’s been in a mental hospital ever since. The Sidonis care home, which isn’t far from here. He was found guilty, although he never confessed because he wasn’t of sound mind when the trial took place. Maager was married and had a little daughter when it happened; his wife distanced herself from him without further ado, and he hasn’t seen her or his daughter since then. They moved away from Lejnice that same autumn. Anyway, that’s the background. In outline. Any questions?’

She looked round the table.

‘What a nice story,’ said Baasteuwel, taking a swig of beer.

‘Very,’ said Moreno. ‘But let’s fast-forward to the present. When I came out to Lejnice, let’s see — ’ she worked it out in her head — ‘twelve days ago, I met a young girl on the train who turned out to be Maager’s daughter. We got talking. She’d just celebrated her eighteenth birthday, and was on her way to visit her father at the Sidonis care home for the first time. She hadn’t seen him since she was two years old, and didn’t even know he existed. Her mother had told her about him the previous day, and the girl was pretty nervous about meeting him.’

‘No wonder,’ said Kohler.

‘Yes indeed. Anyway, a few days later her mum turned up here in Lejnice — Maager’s ex-wife, that is — and announced that her daughter hadn’t returned home. She’d gone missing.’

‘Gone missing?’ said Baasteuwel. ‘What the hell. .?’

‘Exactly,’ said Moreno. ‘We know she visited her dad at the home on Saturday, and spent the night at the youth hostel out at Missenraade: but nobody’s seen her since Sunday. And now the strange goings-on begin.’

‘Begin?’ said Kohler. ‘The strange goings-on begin now?’

Moreno shrugged.

‘Well, continue, if you prefer. I’m only here in Lejnice on holiday, in fact, but I had a little job to sort out in the first few days. At the police station. Anyway, I’d met the girl on the train, and-’

‘What’s her name?’ interrupted Baasteuwel.

‘Mikaela. Mikaela Lijphart. As I said, I’d met her, and now I bumped into her mother as well. She was very worried, for obvious reasons. Eventually Chief of Police Vrommel agreed to issue a Wanted notice — but don’t let me hear anybody claiming that he prioritized it. The point, of course, was to ask if anybody had seen Mikaela last Sunday. Or later in the week. As far as we know only two people contacted the police as a result. One was a woman in Frigge who claimed to have seen the girl at the railway station up there, the other was a certain Vera Sauger — I spoke to her last night. It was after that conversation that Vegesack and I decided to arrange this meeting.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Baasteuwel, leaning forward over the table. ‘Go on.’

‘Vrommel spoke to both the women, and according to him nothing significant emerged. Nevertheless, Vera Sauger told me last night that she’d been visited by Mikaela that Sunday, and they’d had quite a long talk. The girl was trying to make contact with anybody who’d been involved in one way or another in the happenings of 1983. Anybody who’d known her father or the dead girl Winnie Maas. We don’t know why Mikaela wanted to do this, but it could be a result of something her dad told her when she visited him at the Sidonis home. That’s mere speculation, of course; but she must surely have had some reason for starting to root around. Unless it was mere curiosity. In any case, she went to see Winnie’s mother — I’ve spoken to her as well. But neither she nor Vera Sauger could be of much help to Mikaela — or so they say, at least. Fru Maas is more than a bit of a drunk, incidentally. We don’t know if the girl met anybody else apart from these two.’

She paused briefly.

‘I was under the impression that all this business was supposed to be linked with the case we’re working on, somehow or other,’ said Kohler.

Moreno cleared her throat.

‘That’s right. Vera Sauger gave Mikaela Lijphart two possible names. People she could contact if she wanted to pursue her queries further. And she gave the same names to Vrommel. One of them was Tim Van Rippe.’

‘The gent buried in the sand,’ said Kohler.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Baasteuwel.

Silence enveloped the table.

‘This isn’t the only complication,’ said Moreno after Vegesack had nipped out into the kitchen to fetch four more beers. ‘A week after Mikaela went to visit her father at the care home, he disappeared. Last Saturday afternoon, to be precise. Nobody knows where he is. Vegesack was there and spoke to him a few days earlier, but it was evidently impossible to get much out of him.’

‘Not a word,’ said Vegesack.

Baasteuwel ran his hands through his tousled hair and stared at Moreno; but it was Kohler who spoke.

‘This Tim Van Rippe,’ he said. ‘Our body on the beach. What role does he play in this old story?’

Moreno turned over a page in her notebook to check on the details.

‘According to Vera Sauger he knew the girl Winnie Maas pretty well. He might even have been in a relationship with her as well, before she jumped into bed with Arnold Maager. But that isn’t so important. The important thing is that there is a clear connection here. Mikaela Lijphart was given his name, plus another one that I haven’t had time to check up on yet, and it’s very possible that she might have been to meet him on the Sunday. A week later he’s found murdered and buried on the beach. It’s an amazing coincidence that the body was discovered, of course — but then you’d have thought that the murderer would have been a bit more careful and dug a bit deeper down. Or what do you think?’

Kohler nodded.

‘His head was very close to the surface, in fact. It would no doubt have been exposed sooner or later by the wind, or by the running around of holidaymakers.’

Baasteuwel stood up.

‘And so all this business of what Vera Sauger said and did has been hushed up by the chief of police, has it? What the hell’s going on? In addition to the fact that Vrommel’s a berk. I need a smoke. Is out there okay?’

Vegesack nodded and Baasteuwel went out through the balcony door.

‘Irrespective of what’s behind it all,’ said Moreno, ‘it’s obvious that Vrommel isn’t playing the game. He doesn’t want to root around in what happened sixteen years ago. He doesn’t want anybody to find a link between the Maager case and the body on the beach. I don’t know what, but it seems pretty clear that something wasn’t what it seemed all those years ago. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

‘Are there any more. . irregularities?’ Kohler wondered.

Moreno thought for a moment.

‘There’s bound to be,’ she said. ‘It’s just that we don’t know what they are. I spoke to the pathologist, the man who did the post-mortem on Winnie Maas, and I must say his reaction was astonishingly strong. He became terribly upset for some reason — as if I were somehow questioning his honour and credibility. Just because I wanted to put a few simple things to him. I didn’t have a chance to ask him a single question before he boiled over.’

‘It sounds like a damned conspiracy,’ said Kohler. ‘Or a cover-up at the very least. Has anybody taken a look at the trial records? Is there anything dodgy there?’

‘I haven’t got round to it, I’m afraid,’ said Moreno with a sigh. ‘Don’t forget I’m here on holiday.’

‘Hmm,’ said Kohler, with what could possibly have been interpreted as a melancholy smile.

Baasteuwel returned from his smoking break.

‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked, looking first at Moreno and then Vegesack. ‘Personally, I’ve only had the time it takes to smoke one miserable little cigarette to think things over, and I have to say I just don’t understand it. . For those of you who don’t know me, I should point out that this is very unusual.’

He pulled a face and flopped down into the armchair. Moreno hesitated for a few moments before responding.

‘I think,’ she said, hastily trying to keep her guard up and not say too much, ‘I think that what really happened in 1983 wasn’t quite as straightforward as they concluded then. And that Chief of Police Vrommel — and presumably others as well — had good reason to make sure that something was brushed under the carpet. I don’t know what and I don’t know why. I also think that there are people here in Lejnice who have known the truth but have kept quiet about it for sixteen years — and that Tim Van Rippe was one of them. And that somebody killed him to make sure that he didn’t give the game away. Yes, in broad outline that’s what I think.’

‘Hmm,’ muttered Baasteuwel. ‘And how the hell could this somebody know that this girl was going to visit Tim Van Rippe that particular day?’

Moreno shook her head.

‘I’ve no idea,’ she admitted. ‘But Mikaela stirred up quite a lot of things before she disappeared in a puff of smoke. She met both Winnie Maas’s mother and this Vera Sauger. Perhaps several other people as well, but since nobody seems to be bothering to look into the matter, we don’t yet know who. Vera gave me another name as well as Tim Van Rippe — one Claus Bitowski. I’ve rung his number several times this morning, but there’s been no reply.’

‘Are you suggesting. .?’ said Baasteuwel, but hesitated for a moment. ‘Are you suggesting that he’s also buried on the beach somewhere? This Bitowski? Is that your hypothesis between the lines?’

Moreno hesitated and looked round the table.

‘I don’t have a hypothesis,’ she said. ‘But it wouldn’t be all that difficult to check in any case. If he’s alive it must surely be possible to get hold of him. Somehow or other.’

Baasteuwel nodded.

‘Yes indeed,’ he said. ‘And what about Mikaela? What are we going to do about little froken Lijphart? That’s a harder nut to crack, I suspect. This damned Vrommel. . What the hell’s behind all this?’

Nobody seemed to have a good answer to that question, and silence reigned once more. Moreno thought she could almost see — or at any rate sense — the highly charged thoughts of each of them hovering like a cloud over the table. Good, she thought. It’s good to have more brains at work in this connection. At last. .

‘Ah well,’ said Baasteuwel in the end. ‘I can see by the cheerful expressions on your faces that we can assume she’s also lying there in the sand.’

‘There’s nothing to suggest that,’ Moreno hurried to point out; but even as she said that she became aware that it had more to do with wishful thinking than anything else.

Kohler sighed.

‘We’ll have to arrange for the whole beach to be dug up,’ he said. ‘It should be quite straightforward. A few hundred men and a few months. . Maybe we could get the army involved, they are usually keen on this kind of thing.’

‘When there isn’t a war on,’ said Baasteuwel.

‘I suggest we wait for a few days with that,’ said Moreno. ‘I mean, there are other angles of approach. How’s the investigation into Tim Van Rippe going, for instance?’

Baasteuwel made a noise reminiscent of a lawn mower that failed to start. Or a Trabant.

‘Sluggish,’ he said. ‘The Van Rippe investigation’s proceeding sluggishly. But perhaps that’s the intention.’

‘Let’s hear about it,’ said Moreno optimistically.

Constable Vegesack, who had been sitting there and listening in silence for most of the time, decided to do the talking.

‘No, not a lot has happened,’ he said. ‘The postmortem is over and done with, we got the paperwork yesterday. It’s not possible to be more precise about the time of death, it seems. He died at some point within a twenty-four-hour period — midday on Sunday the eleventh and Monday the twelfth at the same time. The cause of death is beyond dispute: a pointed instrument stabbed into the left eye that continued into the brain. No sign of any other injury, no sign of a struggle — no wounds or scratches, no scraps of skin and so on. But it’s odd that somebody could just come up and stab him in the eye: it’s possible that he was caught completely by surprise. Maybe he was lying asleep. . Or sunbathing.’

He waited for comments from Kohler or Baasteuwel, but neither of them seemed to have anything to say. Vegesack took a mouthful of beer, and continued.

‘We’ve spoken to several people who knew Van Rippe, but nobody had anything relevant to say. He’d planned to go away for a few days with a female friend of his — Damita Fuchsbein: she was the one who reported him missing, and she identified the body. The last person to see him alive, as far as we know at the moment at least, is a neighbour of his. He’s called Eskil Pudecka, and he claims to have spoken to Van Rippe shortly after one o’clock on Sunday — that means of course that the twenty-four-hour period shrinks slightly, but maybe that doesn’t matter much. We’ve also spoken to Van Rippe’s mother and his brother, they are his closest relations, but they know as little as everybody else.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘Who exactly has been talking to all these people? Kohler and I have spoken to four or five people at most, but who dealt with this girlfriend, for instance? And the relatives?’

Vegesack thought for a moment.

‘I interrogated Damita Fuchsbein,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t really say she was his girlfriend, by the way. Vrommel dealt with both his mother and his brother — the mother as recently as yesterday, I believe. She’s been away.’

Baasteuwel slammed his fist down on the table.

‘Bloody hell!’ he snorted. ‘Vrommel deals with the mother! Vrommel deals with the brother! Vrommel deals with every bastard who might have something to hide. . For Christ’s sake! He’s running this show just as he wants to, the swine! Have you seen any transcripts from the interrogations he’s conducted?’

Vegesack looked embarrassed.

‘No. .’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think he’s arranged for them to be typed out yet.’

‘Have you seen anything?’ said Baasteuwel, glaring at his colleague.

Kohler shook his head.

‘Calm down now,’ he urged. ‘Don’t get carried away again.’

Baasteuwel flung out his arms in frustration and sank back into his armchair. Moreno wondered if he often got carried away, and what might happen in that case. It seemed obvious that Kohler had some kind of point in any case, as Baasteuwel didn’t bother to protest.

‘We must look into this,’ Kohler said. ‘Obviously. But I suggest we do so with a modicum of discretion. Does anybody think we have anything to gain by putting Vrommel up against the wall straight away?’

Moreno thought about that. So did Vegesack and Baasteuwel: she could sense their minds working overtime. As far as she could judge neither of them would have anything at all against confronting Vrommel with a 500-watt lamp shining into his face and a whole arsenal of accusations.

She certainly didn’t either, but that naturally didn’t mean that Kohler’s line was not to be preferred. Vrommel is presumably no thickie, even if he is a shit heap. Or a skunk. But it would be better to have a little patience and give themselves a chance of ascertaining a few facts first.

It wasn’t at all clear what, but if there was anything they ought to be familiar with by now it was a lack of clarity.

Baasteuwel put her thoughts into words.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll give the bastard a few days to stew. It might be fun to see how he acts in the circumstances, if nothing else.’

Vegesack nodded. Moreno and Kohler nodded.

‘Let’s do that, then,’ said Kohler. ‘But what now? Perhaps we ought to share out the workload a bit?’

‘I agree,’ said Baasteuwel. ‘But what the hell should we do? All those who are on leave can go and buy themselves an ice cream if they’d prefer.’