‘I’ll sort your car out as well,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Hire a car and spend time on the beach until you get it back!’
Why don’t I even feel sorry for him? she thought when she had turned the corner. Is it because I’m becoming a bitch?
‘Yes, I’d heard about that,’ said Constable Vegesack, looking sombre. ‘It’s a damned nuisance that they’ve left it for so long before
reporting it. Not that I know what we can do about it, but things are not made any easier when you’re two days behind even before you’ve started.’
‘The most important thing is not what we can do about it,’ said Moreno, ‘but what has happened.’
Vegesack frowned and felt for the knot of his tie which, for once, wasn’t there. He was wearing a marine blue tennis shirt and thin cotton trousers in a slightly lighter shade –
absolutely right for the weather and the time of year, and Moreno wondered in passing if the return of his girlfriend had anything to do with his outfit. She hoped so – and hoped that the
bags under his eyes were also connected with her presence. In the way he had indicated a few days previously.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What do you think’s happened, then?’
Moreno cast a glance at the half-open door before replying.
‘Where’s the chief of police?’
‘He’s on the beach,’ said Vegesack. ‘Something has happened. We’ll come to that later.’
Moreno nodded.
‘I hope you don’t mind my poking my nose into this business?’
‘Why should I do that? Everybody has a right to decide how to spend their own holidays.’
She decided not to investigate how large a dose of irony there was in that remark. Not just now, at least.
‘Either Maager has run away,’ she said, ‘or something has happened to him. What do you reckon is most likely?’
Vegesack rubbed both his temples with the tips of his fingers and seemed to be thinking for all he was worth.
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said eventually. ‘How the hell should I know? But what I understand least of all is why anybody should want him out of the way – I assume
that’s what you’re fishing for?’
Moreno shrugged.
‘Why should he do a runner? Is that any more likely?’
Vegesack sighed.
‘Would you like a drop of mineral water?’
‘Yes please,’ said Moreno.
He went into the kitchenette and returned with a plastic bottle and two glasses.
‘Dehydration,’ he said. ‘I suffer from it. And lack of sleep.’
But not lack of love, Moreno thought as he was filling her glass. Nor would I if I weren’t so damned snooty.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘If we assume – hypothetically – that he’s run off of his own free will, where does that get us?’
‘He must have some reason or other,’ said Vegesack.
‘Precisely. Give me a reason.’
‘He hasn’t left the care home for all of sixteen years.’
‘That’s true.’
‘So it must . . . It must be connected with his daughter’s visit.’
‘Really? What makes you think that?’
‘Surely it’s pretty obvious . . . But just how it’s linked, God only knows.’
‘She visited him a week last Saturday. Why wait for a whole week?’
Vegesack started rubbing his temples again. Moreno wondered if he’d been on some kind of yoga course and learned to stimulate the flow of blood to his brain by doing that. In any case it
looked more intentional than absent-minded; but she didn’t ask about that either.
‘Maybe it doesn’t have so much to do with her visit,’ he said in the end, ‘but more with her disappearance.’
‘That’s what I think as well,’ said Moreno. ‘And how come that Maager knows about Mikaela’s disappearance?’
Vegesack stopped massaging his temples.
‘Oh hell,’ he said. ‘Through me, of course. I told him when I was there and tried to talk to him.’
‘When was that?’
Vegesack worked it out in his head without any further assistance.
‘Last Wednesday, I think. Yes, Wednesday.’
‘That fits. It would be useful if you could recall exactly what you said to him,’ said Moreno. ‘And how he reacted.’
Vegesack flung out his hands and almost overturned the bottle of water.
‘He didn’t react at all. Not to anything. He said hello when I arrived, and goodbye when I left. But that’s about all . . . But he did listen to what I said, yes, he did that.
I told him how things stood, and that it looked as if Mikaela Lijphart had disappeared. That we knew she was his daughter, and that she’d been to see him, and that her mother had come to
Lejnice in order to look for her. Naturally, I tried to find out what he’d said to her, about that business sixteen years ago and so on. If she’d been upset, or how she’d reacted.
They’d evidently spent a few hours in the grounds, talking.’
‘But he didn’t give you any answers?’
‘No.’
‘Did you get any impressions? Did he seem worried about her disappearance?’
Vegesack gazed out of the window for a while.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he said. ‘I think that news might even have prevented him from saying anything. He might have said something if I hadn’t told him about Mikaela right
away. But then again . . . For God’s sake, I don’t know. I was only with him for twenty minutes. Are you suggesting that he might have gone looking for her? Is that the conclusion
you’ve reached?’
Moreno took a sip of water.
‘I haven’t come to any conclusions at all,’ she said. ‘It could just as well be that something has happened to him. You spoke to him last Wednesday, but he didn’t
disappear from the care home until Saturday. Why did he wait? Something else might have happened – on Thursday or Friday – to influence events. I ought to have asked more questions when
I was out there, but that didn’t occur to me until I was on the way back.’
‘It’s Monday today,’ said Vegesack. ‘That means he’s already been missing for several days. He’s not used to being out there. Mixing with people. Isn’t
it a bit odd that nobody seems to have noticed him?’
Moreno shrugged.
‘How do you know that nobody’s noticed him?’
Vegesack didn’t answer.
‘There’s so much about this business that seems a bit odd,’ said Moreno. ‘That’s why I just can’t go off and enjoy my holiday. I’ve dreamt about that
girl two nights running. I’ve just told my boyfriend to go to hell because of this business . . . I don’t know if that can be classified as occupational injury – what do you
think?’
Why am I telling this to Vegesack? she asked herself, when she noted his blush and raised eyebrows, and realized that this was intimate information that he didn’t know how to handle.
‘Oh dear,’ he said diplomatically.
‘You can say that again,’ said Moreno. ‘I’ve been poking my nose much too far into this business, but at least I’ve now received confirmation of a few things. I now
know I haven’t been imagining things that are too wide of the mark. I take it you didn’t notice any indications that Maager was intending to run away when you were together with
him?’
Vegesack shook his head.
‘And heaven only knows how he took the news about his daughter’s disappearance, you reckon?’
‘I wonder if even the heavens know,’ said Vegesack. ‘But it’s all so damned awful – for Maager, I mean. Even if you take into account that he’s a murderer and
all the rest of it. First she turns up out of the blue after sixteen years, and then she’s more missing than she’s ever been. It must be hard for him, whichever way you look at
it.’
‘Hard indeed,’ agreed Moreno. ‘Could you please help me with one other thing?’
‘Of course,’ said Vegesack, suddenly looking wide awake and raring to go. ‘What?’
‘Find out if Maager had any other visits or telephone calls between Wednesday and Saturday last week.’
‘Okay,’ said Vegesack. ‘I’ll give them a ring. How shall we get in touch – will you be calling in?’
‘I’ll be in touch in any case,’ said Moreno with a sigh. ‘Have there been any more responses to the Wanted notice regarding Mikaela?’
Vegesack rooted around in the pile of papers on his desk.
‘Two,’ he said. ‘We can forget about one of them – a certain herr Podager who always gives advice to the police on occasions like this. He’s over eighty-five and
sees all kinds of things, despite the fact that he’s been almost blind for the last twenty years.’
‘I see,’ said Moreno. ‘What about the other one?’
‘A woman up in Frigge,’ said Vegesack, reading from a piece of paper. ‘Fru Gossenmühle. It seems she phoned the local police last night and claimed she had seen a girl
looking like the photograph of Mikaela Lijphart. At the railway station. They were going to talk to her this morning, and then they’ll no doubt be in touch with us.’
Moreno thought for a while.
‘How far is it to Frigge?’ she asked
‘About a hundred and fifty kilometres.’
Moreno nodded.
‘So we just need to wait, then. By the way, to change the subject, can you recommend a decent garage in Lejnice?’
‘Garage?’
‘Yes. A repair workshop. Not too expensive. It’s about mending a Trabant.’
‘A Trabant? Surely you don’t drive around in a Trabant?’
‘Did,’ said Moreno. ‘Well?’
‘Er . . . Let’s see . . . Yes, Kluiverts, they are reliable.’
She made a note of the number, and another one of a guest house that Vegesack thought charged reasonable rates. He pointed out that he had never actually stayed in a B&B establishment in
Lejnice, and that of course it was the summer season now.
Naturally, Moreno could have used the police station telephone to make the two calls, but something told her that it was high time she started restoring that old dividing line between work and
her private life.
Start sketching it in at least, she thought with grim self-irony as she shook Vegesack’s hand and thanked him for his help.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ she said as she stood in the doorway. ‘What had happened down on the beach? You said that Vrommel had been called out.’
Vegesack frowned again.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘But they’ve evidently found a body.’
‘A body?’
‘Yes. Some little kids were playing around in the sand and dug it up, I think.’
‘And?’
‘That’s all I know,’ said Vegesack apologetically, looking at the clock. ‘We heard about it just over an hour ago. Vrommel took charge of it. Apparently there are
officers there from Wallburg as well – scene-of-crime boys and technicians: we don’t have resources like that, and . . .’
He fell silent. Stood there with his hands half raised, as if he had been going to start massaging his temples again, but didn’t need to as a thought had struck him.
‘Good Lord! Surely you don’t think . . . ?’
‘I don’t think anything at all,’ said Moreno. ‘Man or woman?’
‘No idea. He just said a body, that’s all the Skunk said. A dead body.’
The Skunk? Moreno thought and hesitated for a moment with her hand on the door handle.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said eventually, and went out into the sunshine.
She came to Florian’s Taverna – a somewhat shabby-looking establishment that according to Mikael had looked exactly the same ever since the fifties, and presumably
made a point of maintaining that profile – at five minutes past two, and suddenly realized that she had eaten nothing at all since that morning’s wretched cheese sandwich. She had drunk
quite a lot, of course – juice and water and coffee and more water – but her stomach was rumbling and it dawned on her that it was time she started using her teeth for something other
than grinding and gritting. Especially as she had thirty-two of them. Or was it only twenty-eight?
She didn’t get round to counting them, but sat down at a table on the terrace under a parasol instead. She ordered some garlic bread, a shellfish salad and a telephone directory. The
latter was to enable her check that all the local garages were not shut due to holidays and the local guest houses were not full up, thanks to the lovely weather.
They were not, thank goodness. Neither type of establishment. A gruff-voiced woman at Dombrowski’s guest house promised to hold a room for her until nine o’clock – for three
nights: they didn’t let rooms for a shorter time than that during the holiday season. No balcony and not much of a view, but the price was not unreasonable. By no means. So there was no
reason not to thank the woman and confirm the booking.
She thanked the woman and confirmed the booking. Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, she thought. I’ll go back home on Thursday. That suited her down to the ground: by then no
doubt things would have become sufficiently clear for Vrommel (the Skunk?) and Vegesack to handle everything without assistance.
Egon Kluivert, of Kluivert, Kluivert and Sons, claimed he was up to his ears in work; but after a bit of bargaining (despite the fact that he couldn’t understand for the life of him why a
sweet girl like Moreno – yes, you could tell that from her voice if you had ears to hear and were a man of the world – why such a sweet girl should be driving around in a bloody sardine
tin like a Trabant) he promised both to fix the ignition and arrange for the sardine tin to be transported to Tschandala in Port Hagen. No problem, he knew where the house was situated. If not this
evening, then tomorrow morning at the latest – where should he send the bill to?
She explained that she would call in and pay it before Wednesday.
He wondered if she needed a new car. It so happened that he had a few peaches standing in his forecourt. Ridiculously cheap prices, and just nicely run in.
No, she didn’t need a new car at the moment, she told him. But she promised to be in touch as soon as she did.
The food arrived, and she ate with the vague feeling that things were going to turn out okay, despite the fact that she had no right to believe that they would. Never mind to demand that they
should.
She ordered a small calvados with her coffee, to remind herself that she was still on holiday, and then she made another call. This time to her old friend and confidante Clara Mietens.
She got through to an answering machine. In thirty-five seconds Moreno gave her a summary of the situation, explained that she would probably be returning to Maardam towards the end of the week,
and asked if the planned project of a several-day bicycle tour around the Sorbinowo region was still on the cards. Next week, perhaps?