Krause moved over to the short end of the table and switched on the overhead projector.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Thank you for having faith in me. I’ve prepared a short presentation of this case: I thought I might run through it, and then we could discuss what to do next. .’
‘Off you go, then,’ said Rooth. ‘We’re all agog.’
‘Perhaps I ought to explain,’ Reinhart felt it necessary to mention for the benefit of Inspector Sammelmerk, ‘that when Inspector Rooth isn’t stuffing his face, things sometimes come tumbling out of his mouth instead. He doesn’t know any better. Carry on, Krause!’
‘Hey ho,’ said Rooth. ‘I’m misunderstood and slandered — but never mind: let’s hear what you’ve got to say.’
Krause inserted his first slide, which spelled out the case in chronological shorthand.
‘The first thing that happened — before anything started to happen, as it were — was that a certain Pastor Gassel paid a visit to our former Chief Inspector at the antiquarian bookshop where he now works. It’s the fifteenth of September. The pastor has something he needs to get off his chest, but Van Veeteren hasn’t time to listen to him. Just over two weeks later, on Monday, the second of October, Gassel falls — or jumps or is pushed — under a train in Maardam Central Station, and dies on the spot. No witnesses. At about the same time — we don’t have exact data — two women are murdered: Martina Kammerle and her sixteen-year-old daughter Monica. Both of them are strangled. The mother was probably strangled in her flat: her body was found there a month later, eleven days before Monica’s corpse was dug up by a dog in the sand dunes out at Behrensee. As far as the daughter is concerned, we haven’t the slightest idea about the location of the actual murder. Nor do we know why the murderer sawed her legs off.’
‘Her legs?’ asked Sammelmerk.
‘From the knees down, yes,’ said Krause. ‘It’s totally incomprehensible: but nevertheless there are a few other things that we do understand.’
‘You reckon?’ said Rooth, but Krause ignored him.
‘Unfortunately there is no conclusive technical evidence in either of these cases — no fingerprints, for instance. . And nothing else: although after a few days we did find a link between this Pastor Gassel and the murdered women. . Or the daughter, at least. She had written down his name in a notebook she kept in her room, and this link led us to conclude that in all probability she had met him on one or more occasions in order to discuss something specific. He paid a visit to the Bunge Grammar School at the beginning of term, on church business — and that might well have been when she made contact with him. There is reason to believe that the reason for Gassel’s visit to Van Veeteren was to do with Monica Kammerle — that is not definite, of course, but we don’t have a better theory. Needless to say, this presumes that the priest’s visit and the deaths of the women are connected.’
‘I can add to that,’ said Reinhart. ‘An analysis of the pastor’s estate produced no further evidence whatsoever. Le Houde and Kellermann completed their investigation into that yesterday — it was by no means easy to gain access to the place where his belongings were stored, it seems. But in any case, there was evidently no reference to any Kammerle anywhere at all.’
‘No doubt he had it tucked away inside his head,’ said Rooth.
‘I’d have thought so,’ said Reinhart. ‘But it would be useful if we knew what it was. And what exactly was going on in Moerckstraat.’
Krause cleared his throat.
‘That is obviously the key to it all,’ he said. ‘Both the mother and the daughter led pretty solitary lives — we haven’t been able to find a single witness who could supply us with a bit more information about them. Martina Kammerle was a manic depressive, of course, and wasn’t fit and well by any stretch of the imagination. And the girl was a bit of a hermit as well. She didn’t seem to have any school friends. Neither of them apparently had any friends, no social life at all. The fact that nobody reported Monica Kammerle as a missing person seems to be connected with the fact that she changed schools — it’s pretty disgraceful that the authorities didn’t have a proper check on what was happening, but I suppose that’s life. In any case, it seems there was a man involved. Fru Paraskevi, a next-door neighbour in Moerckstraat, says she heard a man’s voice in the Kammerle flat several times in August, and a witness saw Martina Kammerle together with a man in Maardam. But we haven’t managed to obtain anything remotely close to a detailed description of him. Anyway, we’ve since established a possible link with a case in Wallburg some eighteen months ago — perhaps it would be best if Reinhart were to go into that?’
Reinhart produced a document out of a red folder.
‘By all means,’ he said. ‘It could well be relevant. And quite possibly is. On the fifteenth of June last year a woman by the name of Kristine Kortsmaa was strangled in Wallburg. Strangled in more or less the same way as our two victims. She met a bloke at a pub with music and dancing, and invited him back home. It seems pretty clear that he was the one who killed her. I’ve been through the case with Inspector Baasteuwel, who was in charge of it, but all we’ve concluded is that it. . shall we say probably?. . that it was probably the same murderer. The same bloody lunatic that we don’t know so much as a little fingernail about. No fingerprints, incidentally.’
‘A discreet type,’ said Rooth.
‘Extremely discreet,’ said Reinhart. ‘All we’ve managed to scrape together about him is that he must have very strong hands, that he’s probably somewhere between thirty and fifty — otherwise Kristine Kortsmaa would never have seduced him, according to her friends — and that he doesn’t have any unusual physical characteristics that would draw attention to him. Let’s face it, he spent an hour or more prancing around with his victim at that disco!’
‘Good luck,’ said Rooth. ‘He must have been incredibly lucky, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ muttered Reinhart. ‘Let’s ignore this stupid perpetrator profile — at least for now. The man we’re dealing with is as weird as it gets when it comes to sex — that’s what we must bear in mind. He hasn’t had sex with his victims before or after killing them. But both Kortsmaa and the Kammerle girl had their knickers removed. Hmm. If any of you happen to know a bloke like this, I’d be most grateful for a tip-off.’
Nobody had any comment to make, and Krause fitted in a new slide. There were two names, and a question mark by each of them.
Benjamin Kerran?
Henry Moll?
‘Up to you now, Jung,’ said Reinhart. ‘Your turn.’
Jung nodded, and adjusted his posture so that he had eye contact with Inspector Sammelmerk.
‘Well, I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘What I have to say could be pure coincidence: and even if there’s more to it than that, it’s hard to see what the implications could be in the long run.’
‘Well said,’ said Rooth.
‘Shut up, Rooth,’ said Reinhart.
‘Thank you, Chief Inspector,’ said Jung. ‘Anyway, we discovered this name, Benjamin Kerran, when we were combing through the flat where the murder took place, Rooth and I. . It was the only one of the forty-six names in all that we couldn’t pin on a real person, if you see what I mean. So I did a simple search on the Internet, and discovered that this Kerran is a character in an English crime novel. The author’s name is Henry Moll, and Kerran is the murderer in the book. It’s pretty obscure, written in the thirties, but I managed to get hold of a copy from the university library and I’ve read it. I didn’t think much of it, I have to say, but it was fun reading a crime novel in working hours.’
Reinhart started filling his pipe.