The question stayed in his mind as the car made its way carefully through the southern part of the old city. Grijpstra and Cardozo were on the back seat, both sunk into apathy, and de Gier was steering, trying to see something through the waves of water that the nervous little wipers couldn’t deal with. After a few minutes the rain suddenly stopped, and the commissaris saw die torn and broken trunk of a weeping willow that had graced a small square for as long as he could remember. Large puddles of inky water were almost brought to foam by a sweep of the gale. He still saw Elaine Camet’s head, the bedraggled clown’s mask of a middle-aged woman. Who cares? he thought. The dead are dumped and we tear into the living flesh of the killer if we can find him and frazzle the nerves of a number of suspects in the process. His gloom, cold edged with razor-blade cuts of the pain in his legs, increased and he braced himself in defense. He had to find refuge in the calm that he knew to be in his mind as well. This was a murder case like any other and it would have to be approached by normal methods. He would go into die mess tomorrow, for a mess it was. He only hoped that it was a simple mess that could be cleared quickly. Like de Gier and Grijpstra, he felt sure mat there had been a crime, although he wouldn’t forget the easier explanation of a combination of accidental causes.
Gales are known to unsettle people’s minds. Mrs. Carnet had probably been a nervous woman, lonely and fearful. Her favorite spot was the porch with die ugly chairs and the TV set and a gramophone and old records mat reminded her of her glamorous past. She also drank. The doctor would be able to tell him how much she drank, once he had done his tests. She had been drinking that evening. She might have fallen down her garden stairs, why not? The broken wineglass in the garbage container, the cigar butts with plastic mouthpieces, the wedding ring on the floor… clues that might lead to nothing.
But he didn’t think so. The meeting with Gabrielle had only deepened his suspicions. De Gier was probably right, she had been acting too well. Grijpstra, as usual, wouldn’t commit himself. Cardozo was too young and inexperienced, he would only say what he had heard, seen, smelted, felt, tasted, as a young detective should. But Cardozo’s assistance would be important, for he had met Gabrielle before her mother died.
The commissaris was organizing his attack on the knot of lies, schemes, hidden emotions, suppressed fears, mat had already shown itself in part, but he got caught up again in the gale and in what the gale was doing to the city that had been his hunting ground for over forty years. He knew Amsterdam was warm, friendly, comforting as a mother. He was used to riding through her streets, recognizing odd corners, feeling the spreading protection of old trees, the cool of waterways nibbling at quays built centuries ago out of cobblestones, each individually faced, each with its own growth of minute, fuzzy plants forming a green border to the small, blue-gray, lapping laves. Now the canals were hellish sewers, covered in yellow spray where they were lit up by swinging streetlights.
The sign of a drugstore came flying, and de Gier turned the wheel so that it sailed past and hit the street and broke, exploding into a cloud of plastic particles. He could hear Grijpstra grunt behind him. Two fire engines hurtled toward the Volkswagen and de Gier drove onto the sidewalk. The engine stalled, and they could hear the sirens of the red trucks, howling emptily.
“Must be on their way to a collapsed house.”
The commissaris didn’t acknowledge the sergeant’s remark but struggled on with his thoughts.
They came to the avenue where the commissaris lived. The sergeant had guided the car onto the sidewalk again to avoid the fallen trees and to minimize the commissaris’s exposure to the weather. When de Gier switched the engine off he looked at the commissaris’s face and smiled. His chief seemed his usual calm self, slightly amused, neat, gentle. The discipline of a long life of continuous effort had reasserted itself, the commissaris’s fear had been forced back into its lair, where it sat, cramped and uncomfortable, wrapped into itself, a black shapeless monstrosity, powerless and pathetic.
“I’ll see you three gentlemen tomorrow at nine,” the commissaris said cheerfully. “Don’t think about the case tonight, we’ll tackle it in the morning, it’ll still be fresh.”
“Sir,” the three men said. The sergeant wanted to get out of the car to open the commissaris’s door, but the little old man was in the street already, stumbling to the front door that was being held open by his wife, whose house-coat was being blown to the side. They saw her reach out and pull him in.
\\\\\ 4 /////
The large room on the third floor of Amsterdam police headquarters breathed a quiet atmosphere of comfortable respectability. The room had been neutral when the commissaris moved into it, many years back. The service had supplied him with furniture-a desk, some chairs, some tables-a carpet, all noncommittal, gray and brown, well made but without any appreciable style. The commissaris had left the furniture where it had been put down but had built his own feeling around them. There was a profusion of plants on the windowsills now, and on the walls hung magnificent seventeenth-century portraits wangled from the stores of the Rijksmuseum, showing bright-eyed gentlemen dressed in velvet, with hooked noses and flam-boyant beards, men of past authority who had helped to form the city and contributed to its splendor of canals reflecting a few thousand ornamental but still simple gables. The faces on the portraits showed an unusual degree of intelligence and insight and a glint of humor, and it was difficult, at first glance, to relate the direct lineage that linked them to the commissaris, the mousy old man who now faced his three assistants. The commissaris’s shape could sink away into any crowd, and it would be possible to pass him several times in an hour without retaining the slightest recollection. And yet, by studying his face and the way he carried his sparse frame, much could be seen. The three detectives were seeing more of it now. They were also listening.
“A mess,” the commissaris had said. “This case is a mess, and I wish we could leave it alone. We could, easily. The lady had a little too much to drink, she was upset because of the gale, she slipped, she fell, she broke her neck. A report, that’s all we have to write. I could catch the whole event in half a page and everybody here would accept my version. What do you think?”
There were some mumbles that evolved into one audible word pronounced by Grijpstra: “No.”
“No?”
“No, sir.” Grijpstra’s bulky body filled the commissaris’s chair of honor, a heavy piece of furniture capped by wooden lions’ heads snarling on each side of his wide shoulders. Grijpstra felt fine. He had got up early and had been able to shave and have breakfast in peace, and he had found a clean suit and his favorite shirt, light blue with a detachable white collar, bought at half-price at the last sale of Amsterdam’s best clothing store.
“Why not?” the commissaris asked. “Do you think we have anything to go on? The clues point at a family fight culminating in manslaughter. We don’t have to presuppose ill will or planning. I am reasonably sure that we’ll come up with the reconstruction of a situation where tempers ran high because of irritation aggravated by the unusual weather. The lady was shoved and fell. There was no wish to kill. The case may sizzle out in court after a few hundred hours of work on our part, and we may have made some blunders on the way that may increase the suffering of some of our fellow beings we haven’t even met so far. You think we should go ahead?”