The G File (38 page)

‘I agree,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘You’re as bright as a button, young lady. Incidentally, did you think I acted in the cafe as if I were a member of the police force? I even accepted the key.’

‘That thought did occur to me,’ admitted Moreno.

‘That was a hell of a pretty inspector,’ said Rooth. ‘Do you know if she’s married?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Münster.

‘No idea? Wasn’t she around when you were last up here?’

‘That was nine years ago,’ said Münster in annoyance. ‘As far as I recall she wasn’t married then.’

‘Good,’ said Rooth. ‘So it’s about time she settled down now.’

Münster eyed him incredulously.

‘You are outrageous, Rooth. Absolutely outrageous. Don’t you think we should concentrate on what we’ve come here to do rather than go on about your putative love life?’

‘By all means,’ said Rooth. ‘Just this once. What have we come here to do, in fact?’

Münster could see that it was in a way a justified question.

‘The same old story, I assume,’ he said, holding the lift door open for his colleague. ‘We’ve come to solve a murder case . . . to march uninvited over as many thresholds as we can find, nosey around as much as we can in people’s private lives, find a killer and make him confess using every method we have at our disposal. Why do you ask?’

Rooth strode out through the hotel entrance and found the afternoon sun in his eyes.

‘It’s good weather at least,’ he said. ‘But there’s a bit more to it this time than all that marching and noseying around – come on, admit it. Would you recognize Hennan if you were to bump into him, for instance?’

Münster hesitated.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Especially if I had the opportunity to spend a bit of time with him. But it’s hard to say.’

‘I suppose that’s why you’ve been picked out to come here,’ said Rooth. ‘Because you were quite active fifteen years ago.’

‘Presumably,’ said Münster. ‘Where the hell did we leave the car?’

‘Over there,’ said Rooth, pointing. ‘But I wonder why they picked me . . . I was very much in the background, hardly visible at all.’

‘You are my slave, hasn’t that dawned on you yet?’ said Münster. ‘I devise the strategies and you do all the rough work.’

Rooth put half a bar of chocolate into his mouth and chewed it slowly as they crossed over the square.

‘I don’t believe that,’ he said when he had swallowed enough for him to be able to speak. ‘I reckon they decided this case needed a gifted theoretician with a bit of perspicacity. Tell me when you get stuck – you don’t need to be ashamed.’

‘Good God,’ said Münster as he unlocked the car. ‘Have you got the address with you at least?’

‘Sure,’ said Rooth, taking a slip of paper out of his breast pocket. ‘Horst Zilpen, Donners Allé 15. If you drive, I’ll read the map.’

On the way out to Geraldine’s Caravan Club Beate Moerk told Probationer Stiller what she knew about the owner. It was as well to warn him what to expect, she thought. He was new to Kaalbringen, after all, and if one could prevent him from putting his foot in it, that would be an advantage, of course.

Geraldine Szczok, or Van der Hahn as she was called before her marriage, belonged to the so-called beat generation. Read too many novels by Kerouac at an early age and ran away from her well-to-do parents (dealers in shoes and leather goods) to California at the end of the fifties. She was away for a year or so, and came back to Kaalbringen with a little son, who she maintained was fathered by no less than Eddie Cochran during a night of passionate love-making in Salinas. But she had no luck in her efforts to inherit part of the fortune of the dead rock singer, and when she eventually turned up at her parents’ mansion in Walmaarstraat, carrying Eddie junior, one rainy day in February, she announced that she wanted no more to do with all that beat crap, and had every intention of settling down for good in Kaalbringen and writing a novel.

Their other child, Geraldine’s two-year-younger brother Maximilian – yes, they really were called Geraldine and Maximilian, Moerk assured him: no doubt indicative of their parents’ aspirations – had died of congenital leukaemia while she was away, and so her parents (or her mother at least) welcomed their runaway daughter and their grandson with open arms. Geraldine settled down in a wing of the mansion and began writing her novel; and when the older generation died (one after the other with a gap of only eight months) some twenty years later, she was still busy with that project.

When Geraldine reached the age of fifty she discovered that she had no money left, sold the family home, married an adventurous plumber by the name of Andrej Szczok and started the caravan site on the top of the hill a few kilometres east of Kaalbringen. After a few years Andrej disappeared in romantic circumstances with a gypsy woman, and to help her recover from that blow Geraldine invested in an unusually well-appointed caravan and settled down to live permanently on the camping site. If Beate Moerk understood it rightly, this must have been round about the beginning of the nineties.

‘She sounds like a remarkable woman,’ said Probationer Stiller. ‘How did the novel go?’

‘She hasn’t finished it yet,’ said Moerk. ‘We’d better treat her with kid gloves. They say she can be a bit temperamental.’

‘I can well imagine that,’ said Stiller, looking somewhat bemused.

Geraldine Szczok lived up to her reputation.

She was a large, well-built woman wearing goodness knows how many layers of brightly-coloured garments, well-fitting sandals, a lilac beret, and with a twenty-centimetre-long gold-coloured cigarette-holder. If Moerk’s information was correct, she must be about sixty-five by now – and it was difficult to imagine her in a care home or some similar institution ten or twenty years from now. Very difficult.

The camping site itself seemed to be neat and tidy. About ten caravans of various makes and appearance were scattered over a gently sloping field bordering on a strip of mixed deciduous woodland that stretched down the hill as far as the beach and the sea. Most of the caravans seemed to be occupied. People wearing tracksuits were playing volleyball and badminton, or washing up to the accompaniment of music from transistor radios, or simply lounging around and enjoying the midday sun with their newspapers, beer, or mugs of coffee. A few dogs were chasing one another, and some children aged about five or six were busy trying to dismantle a bicycle. At the edge of the woods a dark-skinned man was practising tai chi movements. It all looks very peaceful, Moerk thought. This is what you might call the embodiment of the quality of life.

The site owner’s own caravan was blue and canary-yellow in colour, twice the size of the next-largest, with a television aerial and satellite dish, and a plaque with the word
Reception
in neon green.

Sitting in a deckchair in front of it was the one and only Geraldine Szczok – with a glass of beer on the table beside her, and a ten-kilo cat on her knee.

‘Welcome!’ she said without standing up or making any other movement requiring energy. ‘I gather you are the people from the gendarmerie. Sit yourselves down!’

She took the cigarette holder out of her mouth and pointed it at two much simpler chairs. Moerk and Stiller sat down.

‘That’s right,’ said Moerk. ‘A nice place you’ve got up here.’

‘Nice?’ said Szczok. ‘You have come to the Freedom Republic, make no mistake about that.’

‘Interesting,’ said Stiller, looking around warily.

‘We need a fair amount of information, as I explained earlier,’ said Moerk. ‘It’s to do with a murder – perhaps you’ve read about it in today’s paper?’

‘I don’t read newspapers,’ said Szczok, screwing another cigarette into the holder. ‘But fire away.’

Moerk took out the photograph of Verlangen.

‘We’re told this person stayed at this camping site some time in April. Do you recognize him?’

Szczok looked at the picture for two seconds.

‘Of course I bloody recognize him,’ she said. ‘But it’s a crappy photo.’

‘I’m afraid it’s the only one we have,’ said Moerk. ‘Can you tell us anything about him?’

‘Tell and tell,’ said Szczok. ‘What do you want to know? He stayed here for just over a week, then disappeared. A shady type.’

‘He’s been murdered,’ said Moerk. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

‘So I’ve gathered,’ said Szczok.

‘It would be very useful if you could tell us anything about what he was doing while he was here,’ said Stiller. ‘Did you chat to him at all?’

Szczok looked him up and down with a deep furrow between her made-up eyebrows. As if she were surprised that he could talk.

‘He didn’t have much to say for himself,’ she said. ‘And I leave people in peace if they want to be in peace.’

‘But I expect you have his name at least,’ said Moerk. ‘Date of arrival and suchlike.’

‘Of course. It’s in the book.’

‘The book?’

‘In there.’

She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.

‘If you’d like to have a look at it, maybe the constable could nip in and fetch it? It’s on the shelf over the fridge. Black.’

Stiller nodded and disappeared into the caravan. Szczok lit her cigarette and adjusted her beret. Stiller returned after ten seconds with a thick, black notebook, A4 size.

‘
Vamos a ver
,’ said Szczok, shooing away the cat and taking hold of the book. She leafed through the pages for a while. Stiller sat down again, Moerk produced her own notebook and waited.

‘Here we are! Henry Sommers, yes, that’s him. Arrived on the ninth of April, and left about ten days later. He paid in advance for a week, but if he’s dead now that’s nothing to get upset about . . .’

‘Sommers?’ said Stiller. ‘So he didn’t use his real name, then.’

‘In the Freedom Republic you can use any name you like,’ declared Szczok, taking a swig of beer. ‘Would my gendarme friends like a beer?’

Moerk and Stiller shook their heads.

‘No, thank you,’ said Moerk. ‘Which of the caravans did he live in?’

‘The one that burned down.’

‘Burned down?’ said Stiller.

‘Burned down, yes.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that the bloody caravan burned down, of course.’

Stiller looked at Moerk. Moerk looked at Stiller. Then she cleared her throat.

‘Are you saying that the caravan in which Maarten Verlangen . . . or Henry Sommers if you prefer . . . lived – that it burned down?’

‘Exactly. You’ve hit the nail on the head, Constable. Congratulations.’

‘When did it happen?’ asked Stiller.

Szczok shrugged.

‘A few days after he’d disappeared. Round about the twentieth of April, I would think.’

‘Why?’

‘Why did it burn down?’

‘Yes.’

‘How the devil should I know? Presumably there was some cock-up with the electricity. Or the Calor gas. Or maybe somebody set fire to it.’

‘I assume you reported it?’

She shook her head.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t want to. I don’t like busybody fire authorities coming here and nosey-parkering about.’

‘What about the insurance people?’ wondered Stiller.

‘It wasn’t insured. It was the worst caravan on the whole site – he wanted it because it was cheapest. I’m glad to be rid of it.’

‘How did you discover the fire?’ Moerk asked.

‘I woke up, of course,’ said Szczok, annoyed. ‘It was the middle of the night, and it was burning so fiercely that there was a roaring noise. The whole caravan was in flames, I got up and ran out with the extinguisher . . . It didn’t help much, and I didn’t have a single guest. But then it started raining, and it was all over by dawn.’

‘Was . . . was there anything at all left of it?’ asked Stiller.

‘Nothing at all. A black mark on the ground and a pile of ashes that fitted into two wheelbarrows. Humboldt helped me to clear up.’

‘Who’s Humboldt?’

‘A neighbour. The farmer from over there – he occasionally comes round to help.’

She pointed with her thumb again.

‘Damn and blast!’ said Moerk.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said damn and blast, if you don’t mind. We’re only human, we police officers.’

‘Pretty subhuman, I’ve always thought,’ said Szczok. Leaned her head back and poured the rest of the beer down her throat. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled.

Or looked pleased, at least. Goodness knows why.

‘We had hoped we might find something he’d left behind,’ said Moerk after a short pause. ‘But you say everything has gone. Presumably all his belongings were still in the caravan when it burnt down?’

‘As far as I know. I didn’t set foot inside it. I suppose I thought he might come back – he’d only been missing for a few days. And we didn’t rummage around in all the ash and soot, neither Humboldt nor I.’

Moerk sighed and turned over a page in her notebook.

‘Did you speak to him much while he was here?’

‘No, hardly a word.’

‘Did he say why he wanted to stay here?’

‘Yes: because it was cheap. He’d seen my advert down at the railway station.’

‘I understand. But what was he going to do here in Kaalbringen? Did he say anything about that?’

‘No. And I don’t poke my nose into other people’s business.’

‘So we’ve gathered. But he must surely have said something? . . . Or implied something?’

‘Yes, he said he needed a roof over his head for a week. When the week was up he said he needed the caravan for a few more days. We agreed that he could pay the balance of what he owed me when he left.’

‘And you didn’t get any indication of what he was doing here?’

‘No.’

‘Did he have any visitors?’

‘Not as far as I’m aware.’

‘Did he say where he’d come from?’

‘No.’

‘And he gave his name as Henry Sommers, did he?’

‘Yes. It’s written down here in the book.’

She tapped at the black cover with her knuckles.

‘How did he spend his days? Was he here at the site, or did he go off somewhere else?’

She thought for a moment.

‘I think it varied. But he was away quite a bit, I believe.’