‘Not for me either,’ said Inspector Krause, looking for a moment as if he’d just been informed that he’d failed an exam. ‘Amos Brugger, did you say?’
‘Yes,’ said Reinhart with a sigh. ‘That’s apparently what he was called. And there’s nobody by that name in the whole of this area, as far as we can tell. I suppose it’s possible he came from further afield, but talk about Blind Date! Anyway, if you could chase the name up in other parts of the country, we can see if there’s anything worth following up.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Krause, and left the room.
Münster waited until he’d closed the door.
‘Why are you putting so much effort into this missing person case?’ he asked. ‘I thought we had other priorities.’
Reinhart snorted and shuffled all the piles of documents on his desk around.
‘Priorities? Do you mean Surhonen? Or are you suggesting that we turn over every bloody stone in the Kammerle- Gassel case one more time? Or what are you getting at?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Münster, rising to his feet. ‘In any case, I think it’s probably best to leave you in peace. ‘You seem to be a bit premenstrual, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Reinhart, looking round for something to hit him with — but Münster was already in the corridor.
The distance from Café Renckmann to Keefer’s restaurant in Molnarstraat was no more than three hundred metres, but as it had started raining they took the car. Even so they had to walk quite a long way through the downpour — it was lunchtime, after all, and the shortage of parking spaces was as severe as usual.
Rooth thought it best to sort out the food first before turning their attention to the staff. Sammelmerk voiced no objections, and as it was quite early they managed to get a window table with a view over the canal.
‘It’s a bit much to hope that they will remember details about customers they had a month ago,’ said Sammelmerk. ‘Unless they’ve been here again since then, of course.’
‘I would avoid that,’ said Rooth. ‘If I found a woman I wanted to kill, I hardly think I’d take her out to a restaurant several times before bumping her off. Certainly not the same one.’
‘We don’t know that he did kill her,’ Sammelmerk pointed out. ‘We don’t even know that she’s dead.’
‘There’s quite a lot we don’t know,’ said Rooth. ‘On the other hand, we do know rather a lot about this particular aspect of this particular case. So I suppose that’s why we keep making guesses. What was it like working up in Aarlach?’
Sammelmerk shrugged.
‘I quite enjoyed it. But even there we had to guess our way forward at times, I must admit.’
‘It goes with the territory,’ said Rooth, looking around the half-empty premises. ‘Anyway, this is what we’ll do. When we get our food, I’ll give the photograph to the waitress, and she can hawk it around her colleagues while we’re eating. If we do that, it will take care of itself as it were, and we shan’t have to do anything.’
‘A good idea,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ said Rooth, with a routine smile.
Even if the method had a touch of genius, it didn’t produce any results.
When Rooth and Sammelmerk left Keefer’s nearly two hours later, the whole of the staff on lunch duty — ten in all — had examined the picture of Ester Peerenkaas.
None of them could recall seeing her as a customer in the restaurant, neither on 8 December nor on any other occasion. Nor anywhere else, come to that. Of the nine staff, only four had been on duty on the evening in question, but none of those recalled having seen a gentleman wearing a red tie sitting at a table together with T. S. Eliot. Red ties did turn up occasionally, they said, especially around Christmas time, but books were very rarely observed. Irrespective of colour.
Then again, of course, nobody could swear to not having seen a couple answering to that description. On a routine evening there were some sixty or seventy customers to look after, and on a Friday there could easily be over a hundred.
‘We understand,’ said Rooth. ‘In any case, many thanks. The beef wasn’t too bad. Even if it was on the expensive side. How many more staff would there have been working on that particular evening? And how can we get in touch with them?’
A woman in her fifties with dyed blonde hair and wearing spectacles that must have weighed half a kilo, looking as if she were some kind of manager, explained that there would normally be a dozen or so members of staff working the evening shift, plus one or two extra on Fridays and Saturdays. Naturally she had no idea who had been taking orders and serving food on 8 December, but she gave Rooth a scrap of paper with a telephone number he could ring. If he called he would get through to the chief financial officer, one Zaida Mergens: she had access to all the staff and wages details.
‘Excellent,’ said Rooth, folding the paper and putting it away in an inside pocket. ‘We’ll no doubt be in touch again.’
‘Perhaps you might like to come for dinner,’ suggested the woman. ‘If you do, I recommend that you book a table in advance. What’s happened? Or maybe you’re not allowed to tell us that?’
‘We’d love to tell you,’ said Rooth. ‘The problem is, we have no idea.’
Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno had been clear for a long time what a perfect morning would look like.
After making passionate and deeply satisfying love to the man of her life, she would wake up well rested. Stretch like a cat for a while, and eat a substantial breakfast in bed while glancing through the morning paper. Sleep for another quarter of an hour, then take a long, satisfying shower.
Then she would be ready to go to work.
At the moment — in January 2001, shortly before her thirty-fourth birthday — there were two serious obstacles in the way of her experiencing one of those ideal mornings.
In the first place, she was not sure that she had yet found the man of her life — although it was becoming more and more likely that Mikael Bau would take on that role. If he still wanted to, that is. But there was nothing to suggest that was not the case, and something told her that the crucial moment was rapidly approaching.
In the second place, she would have to get up at about four o’clock in order to fulfil all the requirements.
As she raced down the stairs that morning after no more than half a cup of tea and two minutes in the shower, she wondered how it would be possible to make passionate and deeply satisfying love, and then wake up well rested at four o’clock?
Impossible. So those perfect mornings had nothing to do with the meaning of life, despite everything.
Besides, she had slept badly. She had been dreaming about the Kammerle girl and her classmates caked with black makeup — the two young ladies she had talked to in that cafe a few months ago. In the dream they had been on a beach — a large and deserted sandy beach, with Monica Kammerle crying her eyes out and crawling around, looking for her missing legs while her so-called friends mocked her and wound her up. Moreno herself was lying on a beach towel some way away, trying to read a book, but unable to do so thanks to the girls.
What gave her food for thought was her own role in the dream: she couldn’t shake off the feeling of shame. She hadn’t bothered at all about the crippled girl, in fact, and just hoped she would crawl off in another direction so that Moreno could read her book in peace and quiet.
As she stood waiting for the tram, she found herself thinking once again about the link that had occurred to her the previous evening. The thought that there could be a connection between the Kammerle case and the disappearance of Ester Peerenkaas.
Always believe in passing whims! she recalled the Chief Inspector saying on one occasion. Give them a chance, at least, it doesn’t cost you anything.