Again.
The only thing that could prevent it was for him to say no, but needless to say, there was nothing to suggest such a development on this occasion either.
He turned in to Kloisterlaan and fished up a toothpick from his breast pocket. The rain was pounding down and the wind-shield misting over again. As usual. He wiped it with the sleeve of his jacket, but for a few moments he could see nothing at all.
Death, here I come, he thought. But nothing happened.
He jabbed at the air-conditioning buttons and adjusted the controls. The flow of hot air over his feet became more intense.
I ought to get a better car, he thought.
Not for the first time.
Bismarck was also ill.
Ever since his daughter Jess’s twelfth birthday he had been saddled with the slow-witted Newfoundland bitch, but now all she did was to lie in front of the refrigerator, sicking up foul-smelling yellowish-green lumps, and he was forced to drive home several times a day in order to clean them up.
The dog, that is. Not his daughter.
He hoped that Jess was in much better shape. She was twenty-four now, or possibly twenty-three; lived a long way away in Borges with new dogs, a husband who repaired teeth, and a pair of twins who were busy learning to walk and to swear in a foreign language. He had last seen them at the beginning of the summer holidays, and felt no obligation to force himself upon them again before the New Year.
He also had a son. Erich.
Erich lived much closer. In the state prison in Linden, to be precise, where he was serving a two-year sentence for drug-smuggling. He was being well looked after, in other words. If m i n d ’ s e y e
Van Veeteren felt like it, he could visit him every day-it was just a matter of getting into the car and driving the fifteen miles or so alongside the canals, showing the warder his ID
card, and marching in. Erich was inside there; he had no possibility of avoiding his father, and as long as Van Veeteren took along some cigarettes and newspapers, he generally seemed to be not entirely unwelcome.
But he sometimes wondered what the point was of sitting and staring at his long-haired crook of a son.
He wound down the window to let in a little fresh air. A shower of raindrops fell onto his thigh.
What else?
His right foot, of course.
He’d sprained it during the previous day’s badminton match with Munster: 6-15, 3-15, abandoned due to injury with the score 0–6 in the third set. . The figures told their own story, of course. This morning he’d had difficulty in getting a shoe onto that foot, and every step was agony. Oh, what joy to be alive.
He wiggled his toes tentatively, and wondered if he ought really to have gone to the X-ray department; but it was not a genuine thought, as he was well aware. He only needed to recall his father, that stoic who refused to go to the hospital with double pneumonia, on the grounds that it was unmanly.
He died two days later in his own bed, proud of the fact that he had not cost the health service a single penny and never allowed a drop of medicine to cross his lips.
He was fifty-two years old.
Didn’t quite make his son’s eighteenth birthday.
And now this high school teacher.
Reluctantly, he turned his mind toward work. To be honest, it wasn’t just another humdrum case. On the contrary. If it hadn’t been for all the rest of it, and the damned rain that never seemed to stop, he might have been forced to admit that there was a spark of excitement in it.
The fact is, he wasn’t sure.
Nine times out of ten, he was. Well, even more often, if the truth be told. Van Veeteren was generally able to decide if he was looking the culprit in the eye in nineteen cases out of twenty, if not more.
No point in hiding his light under a bushel. There was always a mass of tiny little signs pointing in one direction or another, and over the years he had learned to identify and interpret these signs. Not that he was able to detect all of them, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that he could see the overall picture. The pattern.
He didn’t find this difficult, and didn’t need to overstretch himself.
Then, finding proof, and building up a case that might hold water in court-that was another matter. But the knowledge, the certainty, always crept up on him.
Whether he liked it or not. He interpreted the signals emitted by the suspect; sometimes he found it as easy to do as reading a book, like a musician can pick out a tune from a mass of notes in a score, or a mathematics teacher can spot an inaccurate calculation. It was nothing special; but of course, it was an art. Not something you could learn in the normal way, and not something it was possible to teach; just an ability that he had acquired after so many years on the force.
For Christ’s sake, it was a gift, and in no way something that could be regarded as just deserts for work done.
He didn’t even have the good sense to be duly grateful.
Of course he knew that he was the best interrogating officer in the district, possibly in the country; but he would have been delighted to abandon any such claim in return for being able to give Munster a sound thrashing at badminton.
Just once would be enough.
And needless to say, it was this ability of his that had motivated his promotion to detective chief inspector, despite the fact that there had been others much more interested in the post than he was, when old Mort retired.
And needless to say, that was why the chief of police kept tearing up his resignation letters and throwing them into the trash can.
Van Veeteren needed to be at his post.
He had eventually reconciled himself to his fate. Perhaps that was just as welclass="underline" as the years passed he found it more and more difficult to imagine doing any other job in which he wouldn’t immediately make himself impossible to work with.
Why be a depressed master gardener or bus driver when you can be a depressed detective chief inspector, as Reinhart had said in one of his more enlightened moments.
But how were things now?
In nineteen cases out of twenty he was certain.
It was the twentieth where the doubts surfaced.
What about the twenty-first?
An old rhyme came into his head.
Nineteen sweet young ladies. .
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and tried to dig out the continuation from the dark recesses of his memory.
. . aspired to be his wife?
That sounded a bit odd, but never mind. What next, then?
Nineteen sweet young ladies aspired to be his wife, Number twenty spurned him. .
Spurned? Van Veeteren thought. Why not?
Number twenty spurned him,
The next one took his life!
What a lot of rubbish! He spat out the toothpick and pulled up outside the police station. As usual he was forced to steel himself before getting out of the car-there was no doubt that this building was one of the three ugliest in town.
The other two were Bunge High School, from which
establishment of learning he had once graduated and where Mitter was employed, and Klagenburg 4, the tenement building where Van Veeteren had been living for the past six years.
He opened the door and groped in the backseat for his umbrella, but then remembered that he’d left it to dry on the landing at home.
6
“Good afternoon.”
The door closed behind the chief inspector. Mitter looked away. If he excluded his former father-in-law and his colleague who taught chemistry and physics, Jean-Christophe Colmar, Van Veeteren must be the most unsympathetic person he had ever come across.
When the man sat down at the table and started chewing his ever-present toothpick, it struck Mitter that it might be an idea to admit to everything. Just to get rid of him.