Or was it just him who was constructing this pattern, these links — against a background of some bizarre illness due to his profession? Why not? Books are the long route to wisdom and the short route to lunacy, as some bright spark once said.
It was hard to decide. Not to say impossible. It would make more sense to find a method of testing the validity of it all, he thought as he poured the boiling water over the coffee powder. Blake!
How?
How? What damned method could he hit upon?
Although he was only an old newly awakened antiquarian bookseller with highly doubtful mental abilities, it didn’t take him long to find the answer. Half a cup of coffee and a cigarette, more or less.
He picked up the telephone and rang Münster at the police station.
The intendent has just gone home, he was informed.
He dialled Münster’s home number.
‘He hasn’t come home yet,’ said Münster’s son Bart.
Blasted slowcoach, Van Veeteren thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead he instructed Bart to ask his father to ring Krantze’s antiquarian bookshop the moment he’d stuck his snitch inside the door.
‘Snitch?’ wondered Bart.
‘The moment he gets home,’ said Van Veeteren.
While he was waiting he checked the weather through the shop window. It was raining.
That’s odd, he thought. Wasn’t the sun shining when I fell asleep in the armchair?
It was half an hour before Münster rang, and his only excuse was that he had done some shopping on the way home. Van Veeteren snorted, but decided to err on the side of mercy.
‘Where are their household goods?’ he asked.
‘Whose what?’ said Münster.
‘The personal property from Moerckstraat, of course. Get a grip! The belongings left behind by the mother and daughter Kammerle.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Münster.
‘Don’t know? Call yourself an investigation leader?’
‘Thank you. . I expect they are in store somewhere. Why?’
‘Because we need to get hold of them.’
Silence at the other end of the line.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes. . Of course I’m still here,’ said Münster. ‘Why do we need to get hold of their personal belongings?’
‘Because they might contain vital proof there to nail a murderer.’
‘Really?’ said Münster non-committally.
‘A book,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘The girl had a book by William Blake on her shelves, and I have the feeling that the Strangler left his fingerprints all over it.’
Another brief silence.
‘How can. .? How can you possibly know that?’
‘It’s not a question of knowledge, Münster! I said I had a feeling. But that’s irrelevant, just make sure you find that book no matter where it is, and make sure the fingerprint boys do their job properly! You’ll get another set of prints to compare with them in a day or so. If they correspond, it’s game, set and match!’
Once again Münster was struck dumb for a few seconds. But Van Veeteren could hear him breathing: he sounded as if he had a cold. Or perhaps he was tense.
Or sceptical?
‘DeFraan’s?’ he asked eventually. ‘Are you talking about Professor deFraan’s fingerprints?’
‘Right first time,’ said Van Veeteren and hung up.
He waited for a few minutes.
Then he rang Winnifred Lynch — who had got back home from both work and the hospital some considerable time ago — and gave her some new instructions and orders.
No, not orders. You don’t give orders to women of Winnifred’s calibre, he thought. You ask for help. And urge her to be careful.
After all that intricate bloodhound work he finished off his cold coffee, locked the shop, and walked home through the rain.
47
Time stood still on Saturday and Sunday.
At least, that’s how it seemed to him. The rain came and went, daylight was sucked down into the wet earth, and he realized how deeply involved he had become in the hunt for this murderer. Whether his name was Maarten deFraan or something else.
Yet again. Yet again a criminal would shortly be captured. It was easy to imagine that such goings-on would never end.
On Saturday evening he played chess with Mahler at the Society, and lost both matches due entirely to a lack of concentration. Despite the fact that Mahler had just undergone an operation on his leg. Despite a spirited Nimzo-Indian defence.
On Sunday they looked after Andrea in the afternoon, as usuaclass="underline" but not even during that time could he prevent himself from thinking about Maarten deFraan. Ulrike wondered how he was, and in the end he gave up and tried to explain what the matter was.
The hunt. The scent of the criminal. The prey.
He said nothing about the moral imperative. Nothing about duty. Instead, she was the one who took up those aspects, and he was grateful to her for doing so. He had always found it difficult to attribute good motives to his own actions. Or to believe in them, at least, for whatever reason.
When they had finished dinner, and Marlene and Andrea had left, he picked up the telephone and dialled deFraan’s home number.
No reply.
Perhaps that was just as well, he thought. He wasn’t sure what he would have said if deFraan had answered.
After washing up and watching the television news, he wandered around the flat for a while like a lost soul. Then explained to Ulrike that he needed to go for a walk to clear his head, took his raincoat and went out. It’s better for her to be rid of me for a while, he thought.
He started with a tour of the cemetery and lit a candle on Erich’s grave; and since it was quite close by — and it was quite a mild evening — he walked to the professor’s address in Kloisterstraat.
Without any real purpose and without any expectations. It was a few minutes past eight when he entered the enclosed courtyard of the big Art Nouveau complex. He couldn’t remember ever having set foot in it before. Not a single time in all the years he had lived in Maardam — a fact that surprised him somewhat, although perhaps it shouldn’t have done. There were plenty of addresses in the town that he had never had any reason to visit. Naturally, criminality was not rife, despite everything. Not really.
The courtyard was surrounded by dark buildings on all four sides. A bare chestnut tree on a small raised rotunda with two benches. A cycle shed with a corrugated iron roof. A low wooden shed for rubbish and refuse.
He counted five entrances with locked doors and entry-phones. Five storeys high on two sides, four on the other two. Steeply sloping black tin roofs and tall, old-fashioned windows, about a third of them lit up, and a third with blue flickering lights indicating that people were watching the television. Nobody out of doors. He sat down on one of the benches and lit a cigarette.
Is there a murderer lying low somewhere up there? he wondered. A brilliant and over-talented university professor with five lives on his conscience?
Do you know that I’m down here, waiting for you?
If so, what are you thinking of doing about it? Surely you’re not simply going to sit there with your arms folded, waiting for me to come and fetch you?
It was that last thought that was the cause of his unease, he knew that. The deepest cause, in any case. Time certainly had sat still since Friday afternoon, but that only applied to his own time. The private hours. Just because he — the bookseller and former chief inspector and farcical bloodhound — was in a quandary and hadn’t a single damned chess move to fall back on didn’t mean that his intelligent prey was also sitting at home, biding his time. Like an injured bird or an ordinary blockhead.
Or had he not caught on, despite everything? Did he not suspect anything?
Or — a horrible thought — was he in fact completely innocent? Had he fenced in the wrong person?