The Weeping Girl (29 page)

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 fröken 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.’