‘I’m sorry,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘It’s not my intention to be mysterious, it’s just that it would be damned stupid to enlighten all and sundry with regard to what I have in mind. But I need your help.’
‘So I’ve gathered,’ said Winnifred.
‘The fact is that I’m trying to cut corners, to take a short cut to what I’m after. If it turns out that I’m barking up the wrong tree, it’s better that as few people as possible know about my stupidity.’
‘I’m with you,’ said Winnifred. ‘I’m worn out, but my brain’s wide awake, don’t worry.’
‘You must agree to say nothing to anybody about this.’
‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’
‘Good. I shall worry you no end.’
‘I’m worried stiff already.’
‘And I shall cast aspersions on the reputation of your colleagues.’
She smiled.
‘I’ve already had a certain amount of information from the hospital, don’t forget that. You don’t need to run through the preliminaries.’
‘Okay,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I just want to make sure that we’re both singing from the same hymn sheet, and in the same key.’
She didn’t respond. He took out the sheet of paper with the names. He said nothing for a while, but Winnifred looked just as calm and relaxed as a goddess after a bath.
Or after making love.
And this despite the fact that she had seemed to be so tired only a few minutes ago: it was remarkable how quickly she had acquired a new aura. There’s something special about certain women, he thought, and realized he was losing the plot. He cleared his throat and leaned forward, pushed the folded-over sheet of paper across the table, but kept two fingers on it.
‘Here are the names of four of your colleagues in the English Department,’ he said slowly. ‘I want you to study those names, and concentrate on the persons behind them. Visualize them as best you can, you mustn’t rush it — we can sit here in silence for half an hour if that’s what it takes. What I want to know is which of them is capable of killing five people.’
She didn’t respond. Just nodded rather vaguely. He realized that she must have been expecting something of this sort. Despite everything.
She had spoken to Reinhart, and they had reached their conclusions together. It would have been odd if they hadn’t.
‘If you can’t intuitively decide on one of them, then let it drop. This has nothing to do with normal police work, but you can rely on my judgement. If it isn’t one of these four, or if you pick out the wrong one, that will remain a matter between you and me. It will have no significance in any circumstances. But. .’
‘But if I pick the right one?’
‘That will make the whole process easier, and enable us to nail a murderer.’
‘Really?’
‘I hope so, at least. The responsibility is entirely mine. Are you prepared to accept these conditions?’
She looked at him for a few seconds with something about her mouth that suggested amusement, before answering.
‘Yes. I’ll go along with all that.’
Van Veeteren removed his fingers from the folded sheet of paper and leaned back.
‘Okay. Off you go, then.’
Inspector Sammelmerk had lots of good sides, but only one mania.
She loved taking a shower.
It had nothing to do with an exaggerated desire to be clean. Not at all. It had more to do with her soul than with her body in general, even if the physical pleasure was of course the direct link with her soul.
When the hot jets — so hot that they were barely tolerable — came into contact with the area around her seventh cervical vertebra and her first thoracic vertebra, a sort of electric well being spread out over the whole of her body; and she sometimes asked herself whether the Good Lord was guilty of a careless error when he placed her G-spot in a different part of her anatomy.
Mind you, it didn’t work that way when she was touched, only when she was subjected to a jet of hot water: so perhaps she wasn’t all that abnormal after all.
Whatever, she liked nothing better than to take a long shower — the longer the better. Sometimes she could almost lapse into a trance in the bathroom, to the rest of the family’s increasingly perplexed surprise. A twenty-or thirty-minute soak was nothing unusual, but eventually both the IT genius and their offspring came to terms with it. Every human being has a right to have their fundamental needs satisfied, she used to maintain, and if she were to try to overcome this harmless perversion, no doubt something much worse would turn up to replace it. The sum of one’s vices is constant.
Besides, it wasn’t always a case of sinking into a trance. Not every time. While in the shower she could also experience an enhanced feeling of insight and clarity of thought, and very often she was able to make important decisions and solve complicated problems while in this meditative mode. Confused thinking was ironed out and irritations rinsed away. If she ever tried to work out why such remarkable things happened while she was in the shower, she usually found that the most congenial solution was that she was born under the sign of Pisces.
The rest of her family were born under earth and air signs, and could hardly be expected to fully appreciate the significance of water.
That evening she was in the shower a mere twenty minutes after arriving back home, and there was only one problem that occupied her thoughts as she wallowed in the hot jets of water. Only one.
The conversation with Clara Peerenkaas.
Without a second thought Intendent Münster had accepted her suggestion that they should renew contact with the worried parents out at Willby — which happened to be his home town, he informed her. She had rung and given notice of her arrival time, and at four o’clock she had been received in a neat, yellow-painted house on the bank of a canal in the idyllic little town on the River Gimser.
The husband had been otherwise engaged. Inspector Sammelmerk had drunk tea and eaten biscuits while sitting on a somewhat slippery plush sofa, trying to work out what it was about fru Peerenkaas’s behaviour that disturbed her.
Or ‘disturbed’ was too strong a word: surprised her.
There was certainly something odd about it.
Elusive and hard to pin down, but odd even so.
Her worry about what might have happened to her daughter seemed to be genuine enough, there were no two ways about that. When Sammelmerk asked bluntly why the Peerenkaases had stopped telephoning the police, the reply was that they had lost heart when no progress was made. They had discussed the possibility of employing a private detective, but still hadn’t made up their minds. Instead they had been concentrating on their efforts to contain their worries and fears.
This seemed quite a plausible explanation, Sammelmerk thought. They were religious and had received stalwart support from their parish, fru Peerenkaas maintained. Prayers were said for Ester several times a week, for instance: when one was unable to do anything concrete to solve a problem, it was a person’s duty to put his or her trust in God. Calmly and without hesitation.
It had all sounded very convincing, and it was not until she was in the car on the way back to Maardam that Sammelmerk began to doubt the evidence of her senses. When she could contemplate what had happened from a distance, as it were.
And now, as she stood there in the shower, it soon dawned on her what the problem was.
She was lying.
Somehow or other fru Peerenkaas was not telling the truth.
God only knows about what, exactly, she thought. That could be literally true, in view of what had been said about prayers and the other world.
But there was something wrong in any case. Fru Peerenkaas was holding something back, and had not quite been able to conceal the fact that she was doing so.
That was the top and bottom of it.
But what?
What exactly had she been keeping to herself? Sammelmerk wondered, and raised the temperature of the water by half a degree.