The facts were straightforward. Detective Inspector Moreno had been in love with Detective Intendent Mün-ster, and they had very nearly had an affair.
Well, no: not in love, she decided. That word was too strong. Something else similar, but . . . but not quite as significant. Much less, in fact. In any case, the thought that she might have
been able – if circumstances had been somewhat different – to start a relationship with a man of paedophile tendencies was so absurd, so utterly out of the question, a definite
non-starter. Even the mere thought. She swept it to one side with her big biology broom. It was impossible to think of Münster in that role. Absolutely unthinkable.
It was true, needless to say, that it was extremely difficult to imagine any of her colleagues as a child molester, but she hadn’t been in love with them (not even in the least significant
sense of the phrase). So there wasn’t really any contradiction per se. As she seemed to recall having read in her philosophy textbook at grammar school.
So, Münster it was. A rock-solid card to play.
Luckily, he didn’t ask her why she had turned to him rather than anybody else. But he did ask several other questions.
Was she out of her mind? for example.
What the hell did she mean?
How could she put any trust in anything said by an arsehole like Franz Lampe-Leermann?
Moreno explained in measured tones that she didn’t believe Lampe-Leermann any more than she would believe a horoscope in a girl’s magazine, but that she wanted to pass on the
allegation as a pure formality since she was now on holiday.
Münster accepted this, but continued commenting for quite some time and she could hear that he was beginning to retreat from his original stance of outraged rejection.
Just as she had done herself. Just as that bastard Lampe-Leermann had no doubt assumed they would do.
‘He must have something up his sleeve, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Moreno.
‘But he must surely have good cause to come out with an allegation like this.’
‘You’d have thought so, yes.’
‘What conclusion have you drawn yourself?’
‘I haven’t drawn any conclusion at all,’ said Moreno. ‘But I haven’t been sleeping very well.’
‘I can well believe that,’ said Münster. ‘What the hell is one supposed to do in a case like this?’
‘Don’t go to Hiller with it, whatever else you do.’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Münster. ‘Do you have any more?’
‘I suppose there’s only one possibility.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Go and talk to Scumbag.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’m sorry. Talk to Franz Lampe-Leermann.’
‘Hmm,’ said Münster. ‘Where is he now?’
‘In Emsbaden,’ said Moreno. ‘He’s sitting there, waiting for you. I suggest you take care of this yourself, and be extremely discreet.’
Münster said nothing for a few seconds.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said eventually. ‘Thank you for ringing. Have lots of enjoyable, lazy days, so that you’re a good cop again when you come back to work in
August.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Inspector Moreno.
That afternoon they took the ferry out to the islands. They spent an hour at low tide strolling along the beaches on Werkeney, then took a smaller boat to Doczum, the site of a
bird sanctuary, where they had dinner at an inn in the square surrounded by pot-bellied and well-coiffured tourists of a certain age, showing off their tans.
Mikael explained to Moreno, who was eyeing their fellow-diners with some scepticism, that it was the custom for him and his family to tour the islands every summer. They had done that every year
for as long as he could remember, with the exception of 1988 when he had spent a year as an exchange student in Boston.
‘You mean you’ve spent every single summer in Lejnice – or Port Hagen – for the whole of your life?’ Moreno asked.
‘Yes, apart from that one. As I said. Why do you ask?’
Moreno didn’t answer.
No, she thought. I’ve already decided that it’s none of my business.
Nothing to do with me and certainly not with Mikael.
It was not until they were on the evening ferry back to Lejnice that the topic cropped up. And it was not her fault.
‘You haven’t said a single word about Scumbag all day,’ said Mikael.
‘True,’ said Moreno. ‘Case closed.’
Mikael raised an eyebrow.
‘Really? How did you manage that?’
‘I’ve delegated it. I’m on holiday.’
His eyebrow remained high up on his forehead. It suddenly struck her that he looked like an actor – a third-rate actor in a turkey of a B-film. Was the veil about to fall off at last? she
wondered.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked. ‘You look odd.’
‘There’s nothing the matter with me,’ he said, and his face began to take on a sort of pedagogical expression. ‘It’s you there’s something the matter with. If
the Lampe-Leermann business is over and done with now, I’d like to know what the hell you’re brooding over instead.’
‘Brooding? Me? What the devil do you mean?’
She felt what must be a mixture of resignation and irritation beginning to rise up inside her. And perhaps anger. At his would-be-wise posture – who did he think he was talking to?
He seemed to register her reactions and remained silent for a while. Stared out to sea while tapping his knee with his index and middle fingers. It was a bad habit of his; she’d noticed it
long ago, but it was only now that she had recognized it for what it was: a bad habit.
‘Brooding,’ he said again. ‘Don’t be silly. Either you’re beginning to grow tired of me, or there’s something else the matter. I prefer to think it’s
the latter. I’m not an idiot.’
Her immediate reaction was to agree with him. Mikael Bau was not an idiot. Claus Badher, who she had dumped five years ago, had been an idiot, so she had some experience of the type. She could
make comparisons, and knew what was involved.
One needed to know when one had completed the first chapter of a relationship and was on the way into chapter two – she had read that somewhere, and committed it to memory. Oh, bugger, she
thought. Is it never possible to leave your job behind? Does it always have to be there in the background, imposing itself on everything else?
She immediately received an answer from another voice inside her.
It’s not a question of your job, it said. It’s a question of being considerate and sympathetic towards other human beings. A missing girl and a desperate mother.
Mikael continued drumming his fingers. The evening sun broke through a cloud: she closed her eyes to shut out the almost horizontal beams and thought for a while.
‘Something odd happened at the police station,’ she said in the end.
He stopped drumming with his fingers. Then burst out laughing.
‘
King of the Royal Mounted
,’ he said.
‘What the hell has
King of the Royal Mounted
to do with this?’
He flung out his arms.
‘Never rests. Never sleeps. Why do women so seldom have a real literary education?’
It took her five minutes to tell the story.
That’s all there was to it. A girl crying on a train. An unknown father in a home. A worried mother in a police station.
Something that had happened rather a long time ago.
When she had finished, the ferry had just begun to dock and she noticed that Mikael had acquired a vertical furrow on his forehead that wasn’t usually there. It suited him, in a way; but
she didn’t know what it signified.
He had no comment to make before they had gone ashore; and once they had left behind all the pot-bellied and well-coiffured, most of his concentration needed to be directed at remembering where
they had parked the car. It had been bright and sunny in the morning, but now the car park was enveloped by a damp mist that seemed to distort the perspective and change the circumstances in some
strange way.
‘Over there,’ said Moreno, pointing. ‘I recognize that seagull on the shed roof.’
Mikael nodded, and twirled the car keys round his index finger. Then it all began to come back to him. Slowly, like a patient suffering from dementia on a rainy Monday.
‘It must be . . .’ he said. ‘Yes, as far as I can remember, that must be it. What else could it be?’
Moreno waited.
‘What the hell was she called? Take it easy now, it’ll come . . . Winnie something? Yes, Winnie Maas, that was her name. It must be . . . er, what did you say? How long
ago?’
‘Sixteen years,’ said Moreno. ‘Are you saying you know about it?’
‘Hmm,’ said Mikael. ‘I think so. I’ve lived out here every summer, as I said . . . 1983, then? Yes, that must be it.’
‘She was two years old when her father vanished,’ said Moreno. ‘And she was eighteen last Friday. Or so she said,’
‘Winnie Maas,’ said Mikael again, nodding. ‘Yes, it was a pretty distasteful story. I was about the same age as she was. But I didn’t know her, we never really made close
contact with the natives – that’s what we used to call them. With the occasional exception, of course. There were half a dozen of us cousins, quite enough company to keep us going, and
more besides. If you wanted some time to yourself you had to lock yourself into the outside loo, or dig yourself down into the dunes.’
‘But who was Winnie Maas?’ asked Moreno impatiently. ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t care less about your cousins.’
They found Mikael’s old Trabant between a glistening silver-coloured Mercedes and a glistening red BMW. Like an old jackdaw between two eagles, Moreno thought. But not quite dead yet. They
clambered into the jackdaw. Mikael started the engine, producing a considerable cloud of smoke, and they started manoeuvring their way out of the car park. It seemed that he was trying to create
some kind of dramatic pause before he answered.
‘Winnie Maas was a girl who was murdered that summer,’ he explained eventually as he switched on the headlights. ‘She was found dead on the railway line under the viaduct. We
shall be passing over it in two minutes from now, so you can get an idea of what it’s like, Inspector.’
He laughed, but seemed to notice that it sounded hollow.
‘Sorry about that. Anyway, she was lying dead down there on the railway line, and the murderer was sitting beside her. At least, that’s the official version.’
‘The official version? Do you mean there are other versions?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? I recall that there was a lot of chatter about this, that and the other, but I suppose that’s only to be expected. I think it was the only murder
there’s been out here for the last thirty or forty years . . . I seem to remember that there was a blacksmith who killed his wife with a crowbar at the end of the fifties. So it’s no
wonder that there was a lot of speculation. And there was something else as well . . . Something scandalous. The whole town was going on about it . . . You know what it’s like.’
Moreno nodded. ‘And who was the murderer?’
‘I can’t remember his name. But it could well have been Maager. In any case, he was a teacher at the local school, which didn’t make things any better of course. He’d had
the girl as a pupil of his and . . . Well, it seems they had an affair as well.’
‘Really?’ said Moreno, watching the paedophile cloud welling up so quickly and strangely in her mind’s eye. But sixteen years of age? It must have been just inside the limits
of the law, thought the police officer inside her. At that time.
But not the laws of morality, objected the woman and the human being Ewa Moreno. At any time. Teacher and pupil, that was outrageous, even if it wasn’t exactly anything new.
‘I think she was pregnant as well. Oh, it was a pretty juicy story, when you come to think about it. And this is where it happened.’
They followed a long bend and came up to the viaduct that ran over the railway line. A good twenty metres above it, Moreno reckoned. Unusually high, but no doubt there must be a reason for that.
Mikael slowed down and pointed.
‘Down there, if I remember rightly. They say he pushed her over the edge from up here – the railing wasn’t as high then as it is now. I think they built this new railing as a
direct consequence of what happened then, in fact.’
He pulled up close to the railing, and came to a halt.
‘Mind you, she could have jumped over the railing of her own accord,’ he added.
Moreno wound down the window and looked out. Tried to make a sober and factual analysis. The way it looked today it wouldn’t have been easy to heave a body over the railing and down on to
the track below. Not, at least, if the body had been more or less alive and able to resist. The railing was now almost two metres high.
‘There’s no memorial plaque at least,’ said Mikael. ‘Thank God for that.’
He released the clutch pedal and they started moving forward again. Moreno wound up the window, and noticed that she had goose pimples on her forearms.
‘I don’t remember what happened next – the outcome of the trial and so on. It must have been held in the autumn, after we’d moved back to Groenhejm.’
‘But he was the one who did it, was he?’ Moreno wondered. ‘That teacher. Did he confess?’
Mikael drummed on the wheel with his fingers before answering.
‘Yes, it must have been him. What happened sent him round the bend. He was sitting beside the body when they found it, as I said. Didn’t try to run away. But they couldn’t get
much sense out of him. But what does this business of the girl and her mother have to do with all this? Can you enlighten me? You’re not suggesting that there’s a link, are
you?’
Moreno didn’t answer immediately. She tried to run through everything inside her head one more time first, but it was difficult to draw any conclusion different from the one she’d
drawn already.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But in a way I think it probably is. Mikaela Lijphart was going to visit her father, who for some reason she hadn’t seen since she was
two. Something had happened then, that’s how she put it:
something had happened
. Her father was evidently in a care home just outside Lejnice. Everything seems to suggest it has to
do with this Winnie Maas business. Do you know if he had any children, this teacher? A little daughter, for instance . . . Aged about two or thereabouts.’