Before he instructed the caretaker to open the green-painted door with his master key, Rooth bent down and shouted in through the letterbox. As he did so he noticed there was quite a large pile of mail on the floor in the hall, and concluded that in all probability the tenant had not been home for several days.
He stood up and gave the caretaker — a tall, fair-haired man with sleepy eyes and a burnt-out cigarette end in his mouth — the signal to unlock the door.
‘Take it easy now!’ he said when the door was open and the blond caretaker had left. ‘Let’s take our shoes off and leave them outside here on the landing, and creep inside like naked Indians.’
Naked? Sammelmerk wondered. Why naked Indians?
But she said nothing. Chief Inspector Reinhart had warned her that Rooth was a little odd.
‘We don’t know what to expect inside there,’ said Rooth, ‘but we must be prepared for the worst. The important thing is that we must not touch anything.’
‘Huh,’ said deBuijk. ‘I don’t want to be involved in this.’
‘You are involved in this,’ said Kristeva. ‘You’d better accept that.’
Rooth entered the hall and beckoned the other three to follow him. At least there’s no smell of a dead body, Sammelmerk noted optimistically.
‘Stay here while I have a preliminary look round,’ said Rooth. ‘Then I’d like you two’ — he nodded at the two friends — ‘to go round the whole flat and see if you can discover anything unusual.’
‘Unusual?’ wondered deBuijk. ‘What do you mean by “unusual”?’
‘Anything that doesn’t look like it usually does, that’s all. Anything you haven’t seen here before, or things that aren’t where they usually are. . You’ve both been here several times before. But don’t touch anything, okay?’
‘Of course we shan’t touch anything,’ said deBuijk. ‘We’re not complete idiots.’
Kristeva nodded, Inspector Sammelmerk sighed, and Rooth started to inspect the flat.
The first thought about a possible connection cropped up in Moreno’s mind shortly after she had left the chief of police’s office. She had sat in his greenhouse for an hour and a half, going through the documentation of the Surhonen affair with Hiller: comments had been made, both on the television and in the press, about the way in which the police had handled this delicate business which also involved a delegation of foreign police officers, and as usual Hiller had given several undertakings.
It struck her just after she had completed that distressing task. It was hardly a thought, in fact: more of a faint suspicion that flitted through her consciousness for a split second; but it left an impression even so.
And that impression suddenly became visible again not long afterwards when she sat down at a table in the canteen to eat her salad lunch. God only knows why, she thought, but all of a sudden, there it was. The suspicion.
That there might be a connection. Between the Strangler and that missing woman.
That he might have been the person Ester Peerenkaas had come up against.
Needless to say there was nothing specific to support this gratuitous hypothesis. Not a thing. And in all probability the chances were no more than one in a thousand. She started eating, and wondered why the thought had occurred to her. Presumably it was simply because the two tasks had collided by accident, merely because they both happened to be inside her head at the same time.
In more or less the same way that she used to connect true love with funeral parlours, because her first serious lover (she was about ten-and-a-half years old at the time, if she remembered rightly) happened to have a father who owned one.
Her suspicion was probably no stronger than that link, and when Reinhart came to join her she decided it would be silly to mention it.
Especially as Reinhart seemed to be more gloomy than usual. She couldn’t help but wonder how he was. At first she managed to refrain from asking him straight out, but when he spilled coffee over his shirt and swore so loudly that his voice echoed all round the room, she put the question.
‘I’m okay,’ said Reinhart. ‘It’s just this damned case that is gnawing away at my soul all the time.’
‘I didn’t know you had a soul,’ said Moreno: but the thought fell on stony ground. He simply ignored it.
‘And then there’s that other case as well,’ he muttered instead. ‘That missing woman. Have you spoken to Inspector Sammelmerk since yesterday?’
‘No,’ said Moreno. ‘Why?’
Reinhart took a bite of his sandwich and thought for a while before answering.
‘She spoke to one of the woman’s friends, just like you did. I bumped into her briefly this morning, and she’d been given this name.’
‘What name?’
‘I can’t get it out of my head. Fröken Peerenkaas had mentioned the name of the man she was about to start a relationship with, and it’s a name I can’t get out of my head. . I’ve been thinking about it for over two hours now. Damn and blast!’
‘What was his name?’ asked Moreno, and felt her heart beating faster.
‘Brugger,’ said Reinhart.
‘Brugger?’
‘Yes, Amos Brugger. I’ve looked it up in the telephone directory, but there’s nobody of that name in Maardam and district. . It rings a bell, but I can’t think why. Amos Brugger. . Is there the sound of a bell ringing in your pretty head when you hear that name?’
Moreno ignored the compliment, and listened out for bells. Five seconds passed, Reinhart was staring hard at her all the time, as if he were doing all he could to assist her.
‘No,’ she said in the end. ‘I can’t hear a single tinkle.’
‘Damn and blast!’ said Reinhart again. ‘This smells of duck shit, as my mother used to say.’
He slid the sandwich to one side and lit his pipe instead.
32
After searching through Ester Peerenkaas’s flat in Meijkstraat, Rooth and Sammelmerk walked as far as Café Renckmann just round the corner of the street leading down to Willemsgraacht. Peerenkaas’s friends Kristeva and deBuijk had been thanked for their efforts and allowed to leave, and Rooth thought it was high time they had a bite to eat and an opportunity to summarize their impressions.
Sammelmerk had some difficulty in understanding what impressions he might be referring to, but she kept a straight face and played along.
‘Well,’ said Rooth as they sat down. ‘That wasn’t very productive.’
‘No,’ agreed Sammelmerk. ‘Still, what we do know is that nothing happened in her flat. It looked very neat and tidy, I thought.’
‘More or less like my own place,’ said Rooth. ‘But the fact that the two ladies couldn’t even find so much as a strand of hair out of place must indicate that she hadn’t had any strangers visiting her lately. Or what does your feminine intuition tell you?’
‘I think that’s right,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘But she hasn’t been at home either, for that matter. . Not since last Tuesday. The left side of my brain tells me that something odd is going on.’
Inspector Rooth was by now deeply involved with a Danish pastry, and didn’t respond.
‘We ought to pay a visit to that restaurant,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Keefer’s. Somebody might remember them, even though it was over a month ago. Or are there other things we ought to be doing?’
Rooth shook his head and carried on chewing.
‘It’s the only place we know for sure that she was together with this Brugger character. . But I don’t really know. You are more familiar with the details of the case, it’s up to you.’
Rooth swallowed and looked at the clock.
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘If we sit here for a bit longer, it will be time for lunch, and we can have it at Keefer’s. I’m told they do a beef stroganoff that’s up there with the best of them — and Reinhart likes us to take the initiative.’
So that was that.
‘Brugger?’ said Münster. ‘No, it doesn’t ring any bells. I’m afraid.’