“What’s your impression of this man?” he asked his wife.
“You’re usually good at reading faces.”
Synn put the two pictures side by side on the table and pondered them for a moment.
“Who is it?” she asked. “He seems familiar, somehow. He’s an actor, isn’t he?”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Munster. “But there again, yes, I think you’re right. Maybe that’s exactly what he was-an actor.”
V
23
It took some time to get the stove going, but once he’d shifted a few large chunks of soot from the flue, it took hold. Some smoke belched into the room to start with, but it soon cleared.
He tried the faucets, but no water appeared: he had to fetch some buckets from the spring in the woods instead. He put a large cauldron on the burner, and a smaller pot next to it, for the coffee. The refrigerator merely needed switching on. The electricity was on, as he had requested. She had taken care of that.
When the water was sufficiently hot, he filled a bowl, carried it out to the rickety table at the gable end and had a good wash. The sun hadn’t yet sunk below the trees, and it made him feel pleasantly warm as he stood there in nothing but his underpants. Late-summer bumblebees buzzed around in the mignonette standing three feet tall against the house wall; there was a smell of ripe apples, which had already started falling, and he had the feeling that everything was beginning again.
Life. The world.
Once he’d done what he had to do, he would be able to start living up here again; he’d had his doubts, but this afternoon and evening filled with gentle movement and a spirit of welcome could hardly be mere coincidence.
It was a sign. One of those signs.
He poured the last of the water over his head. Didn’t bother about his underpants getting wet, took them off and went back into the house naked.
He put on a completely new set of clothes. The stuff he’d left in his study and in the wardrobe were pristine; maybe they smelled a little bit odd-a trace of jute or horsehair, perhaps-
but what the hell? They’d been untouched for twelve years, after all.
Just like him. The same period of waiting, of being shut in.
He made his evening meal at about seven. Sausage and egg, bread, onion and beer. He ate it on the steps outside the front door, with the plate on his knee and the bottle on the rail, just like he always did. He washed up, lit a fire in the living room and tried to make the television work. There was a loud buzzing noise to accompany silent pictures from some foreign channel. He switched it off and tried the radio instead. That was better. He sat in the basket chair in front of the fire and listened to the eight o’clock news while drinking another beer and smoking a cigarette. He found it difficult to grasp that so much time had passed since he last sat here; it felt like just a few weeks, a couple of months at most, but he knew of course that this was how life stuttered along. No regular progression, nothing continuous. Ups and downs, to-ing and fro-ing. But all the same, the passage of time was inscribed in one’s body: in the weariness one felt, all those increasingly sluggish movements.
And the anger in the soul. The flame refusing to die down.
He understood that he needed to do what he had to do as quickly as possible. Within the next few days, preferably. He knew what he needed to know, after all. There was no reason to put it off any longer.
He waited until there was only the faintest of glows from the fire. Darkness had set in. It was time for bed, but he needed to pay a visit to the henhouse before going to sleep, just to see what it looked like. He had no intention of starting it all up again, certainly not, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink if he didn’t take a quick look at least.
He took the lantern and went outside. He shivered a little when the cold evening air crept up on him, wondered whether to fetch a pullover, but couldn’t be bothered. It was only forty yards at most and he’d soon be back by the warm fire again.
He was only halfway there when it struck him that he
wasn’t alone in the darkness.
VI
24
“What’s this thing for?” asked deBries, pointing at the tape recorder.
“It’s the chief inspector,” sighed Munster.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he claims he’s leading the investigation and he doesn’t want to miss a word of this run-through. I tried to stop him, but you know what he’s like. . ”
“How is he?” asked Moreno.
“He’s on the mend, much better,” said Munster. “But he’ll have to stay in hospital for another three or four days at least.
According to the doctors, that is. I expect the nurses on the ward would throw him out today if it was up to them.”
“Oh dear,” said Rooth, scratching at his beard. “He ought to keep his thoughts to himself, is that it?”
“Probably,” said Munster, switching on the tape recorder.
“General update, Wednesday, May eleventh. Present: Munster, Rooth, deBries, Jung and Moreno. .”
There was a knock and Reinhart stuck his head round the door.
“Is there room for one more?”
“. . and Reinhart,” said Munster.
“What are you doing here?” asked Rooth. “Have all the racists gone away?”
Reinhart shook his head.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “It’s just that I’m a bit interested in Leopold Verhaven. I’ve read a bit about him. So if you don’t mind. .?”
“No problem,” said deBries. “Sit next to the chief
inspector.”
“The chief inspector?” wondered Rooth.
“That’s him, whirring round and round.”
“I see,” said Reinhart, sitting down. “Absent but with us all the same.”
“Let’s start with the identification,” said Munster. “I’ll leave that to Rooth.”
Rooth cleared his throat.
“OK,” he said. “It’s all centered on the testicle business.
Verhaven had an accident when he was about ten. He cycled into a stone wall and got the handlebar between his legs.”
“Ouch,” said deBries.
“One testicle was injured and eventually had to be
removed. Meusse established that the body we found in the carpet was missing a testicle, and that fact together with all the other circumstances means that we can be pretty sure it’s him.
Verhaven, that is.”
“A circumstantial identification?” said Reinhart.
“You could call it that, yes,” said Rooth, “if you can get your tongue round it. His sister couldn’t say for sure if it was him-probably nobody could. But everything fits. All known factors point to him-being released from jail, witnesses in the village, traces in the house, the fact that nobody’s seen him since then. But, of course, there is a slight possibility that it could be somebody else. The question is who, and where Verhaven has disappeared to, in that case.”
There was silence for a few seconds.
“If Verhaven isn’t the victim,” said Jung, “presumably he must be the one who did it.”
Munster nodded.
“That has to be right,” he said. “But what are the odds of him finding some other poor bastard with only one testicle and then bumping him off? And why? No, I think we can forget that possibility. It’s Leopold Verhaven who’s dead, let’s agree on that. So somebody murdered him, on August twenty-fourth last year, the day he got back home after twelve years in prison. Or shortly after, in any case.”
“Were there any signs of violence in the house?” asked Reinhart.
“No,” said Rooth. “Nothing at all. We know nothing about how it was done, either. He could have been killed there, then taken somewhere else. The clothes he wore to come home in are still in the house. He could have changed, of course, but it looks as if he’d gone to bed.”