In any case, he hoped that his esteemed colleague would keep a door open… if this business drags on and on, that is…
Instead he took a room at The See Warf. Fourth floor with a balcony and sun in the evening. View over the harbor, quays and the bay with the open sea beyond. This wasn’t too bad a place either, he had to admit. Bausen pointed out to sea.
“Straight ahead you can see Lange Piirs, the lighthouse, but only when the mornings are clear. Last year that meant four days. On top of the cliffs over there is The Fisherman’s Friend, a gourmet restaurant. Maybe we can treat ourselves to an evening there, if we can’t think of anything better to do.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“Perhaps it’s time to do a bit of work?”
Bausen shrugged.
“If you insist, Chief Inspector.” He checked his watch. “Oh, damn! They’ll have been waiting for us for half an hour, I reckon!”
The police station in Kaalbringen was a two-story affair at the
Grande Place. A front office, canteen, changing rooms and a few cells in the basement; a conference room and four offices on the upper floor. Because of his status as chief of police,
Bausen had the biggest office, of course, with a desk and book cases in dark oak, a worn leather sofa and a view over the square. Inspectors Moerk and Kropke each had a smaller office overlooking the courtyard, and the fourth was occupied by
Constables Bang and Mooser.
“Allow me to introduce Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who’s come here to solve the case for us,” said Bausen.
Moerk and Kropke stood up.
“Bausen’s the man in charge,” said Van Veeteren. “I’m only here to help out… if and when needed.”
“You’ll be needed all right,” said Bausen. “This is the whole
Kaalbringen force. Plus the lesser ranks, of course, although I wouldn’t expect too much of them if I were you.”
“Inspector Kropke,” said Kropke, standing to attention.
Idiot, thought Beate Moerk, and introduced herself.
“Inspector Moerk is responsible for all the charm and intu ition we have to offer,” said Bausen. “I would advise you not to underestimate her.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Van Veeteren.
“Right, shall we get going?” Bausen started to roll up his shirtsleeves. “Is there any coffee?”
Beate Moerk indicated a tray on a table in the corner.
Kropke ran a hand through his fair, close-cropped hair and fumbled with the top button of his shirt behind the knot in his tie. He was obviously the one charged with holding forth.
Rookie’s up first, presumably, Van Veeteren thought. Per haps Bausen is teaching him the ropes.
Seemed to be necessary, if he was to be honest.
5
“I thought I’d take the Eggers case first,” said Kropke, and switched on the overhead projector. “In order to brief Chief
Inspector Van Veeteren, and also to summarize the situation for the rest of us. I’ve made a few transparencies to make it easier…”
He looked first at Bausen, then Van Veeteren in the hope of registering an approving reaction.
“Excellent,” said Beate Moerk.
Kropke coughed.
“On June twenty-eight, early in the morning, a man by the name of Heinz Eggers was found dead in a courtyard behind the railway station. He had been killed by a blow to the back of the head from an ax of some kind. The blade had gone through the vertebrae, the artery, everything. The body was found by a newspaper delivery boy shortly after six o’clock, and he had been dead between four and five hours.”
“What kind of a man was Eggers?” wondered Van Veeteren aloud.
Kropke put on a new transparency, and Van Veeteren could read for himself that the victim had reached the age of thirty four when his life was suddenly brought to a close. He was born and permanently resident in Selstadt a few miles inland, but he had been living in Kaalbringen since April of this year.
He had no regular work, not in Kaalbringen, or in Selstadt, or in any other location. He had a lengthy criminal record: drug crimes, assault and battery, burglary, sexual offenses, fraud. In all, he had served about ten years in various prisons and institu tions, starting when he was sixteen. The local authorities were not aware that he was in Kaalbringen; Eggers had been living in a two-room apartment in Andrejstraat belonging to a good friend of his who was currently serving a comparatively short sentence for rape and threatening behavior. He’d had plans to settle down and go straight in Kaalbringen, get a steady job and so on, but he had not had much success on that score.
“Where does the information come from?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Several sources,” said Beate Moerk. “Mostly from a girl friend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Yes, that’s what she called herself,” said Bausen. “She lived in the apartment with him. But she didn’t kill him, even if she didn’t seem particularly put out by his death.”
“Nobody was,” said Moerk.
“She had an alibi, in any case,” explained Bausen. “Water tight.”
“How have you gone about the investigation?” asked Van
Veeteren, reinserting the toothpick the other way around.
Kropke turned to Bausen for assistance, but received noth ing but an encouraging nod.
“We’ve interviewed around fifty people,” he said, “most of them the same sort of dregs of society as Eggers himself. His friends and acquaintances are mostly petty thieves, drug ad dicts, that sort of thing. His circle of friends in Kaalbringen wasn’t all that large since he’d only been here for a few months.
A dozen people, perhaps, all of them well known to us. The usual riffraff, you might say, the sort who spend the day on park benches drinking beer. Getting high in one another’s apart ments and selling their womenfolk in Hamnesplanaden and Fisherman’s Square. And then of course we’ve interviewed masses of people following anonymous tips, all of whom have turned out to have nothing to do with the case.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“What’s the population of Kaalbringen?”
“Forty-five thousand, give or take,” said Beate Moerk. “A few thousand more in the summer months.”
“What about crime levels?”
“Not high,” said Bausen. “The odd case of domestic vio lence now and then, four or five boats stolen in the summer.
An occasional brawl and a bit of drug dealing. I take it you’re not interested in financial crime?”
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Not yet, in any case. Anyway, what theories have you got about this Eggers character? You don’t have to give me all the details today. I’d prefer to read up on it and ask if I have any questions.”
Beate Moerk took it upon herself to respond.
“None,” she said. “We don’t know a damn thing. I suppose we had started to think-before the Simmel business, that is that it must be some kind of inside job. A junkie killing another junkie for some reason or other. A bad trip, or money owing or something of that sort-”
“You don’t kill somebody who owes you money,” said
Kropke. “If you do, you’ll never get it back.”
“On the contrary, Inspector,” sighed Moerk. Kropke frowned.
Oh, dear, thought Van Veeteren.
“Coffee?” Bausen’s question was rhetorical, and he was already passing around mugs.
“If it’s true,” said Van Veeteren, “what Inspector Moerk says, then it’s highly probable that you’ve already interrogated the murderer. If you’ve sifted through the… the dregs, that is?”
“Presumably,” said Bausen. “But now Simmel has turned up. I think that changes the situation quite a bit.”
“Definitely,” said Moerk.
Kropke put on a new transparency. It was obviously a pic ture of where Eggers was found-dumped behind some garbage cans in the rear courtyard of an apartment block wait ing to be demolished, by the look of it.
“Was he murdered on the spot?” asked Van Veeteren.
“More or less,” said Kropke. “Only moved a few yards at most.”