The G File (44 page)

Van Veeteren made a vague movement of his head and picked a loose thread off the sleeve of his jacket. Three seconds passed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s him all right.’

There was a deathly silence in the room for several more seconds, then deKlerk exhaled in a long, whistling stream.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘You’re quoting,’ said Van Veeteren.

‘Eh?’

‘Bloody hell! . . . that’s what Verlangen wrote before he came here in April.’

‘Oh dear!’ said the chief of police, looking surprised. ‘Maybe that’s a bad omen?’

‘Bollocks to omens,’ said Rooth. ‘So we’re dealing with Jaan G. Hennan, are we?’

‘It looks like it,’ said Van Veeteren.

He lit a cigarette, blew out the match, then realized that the rest of them were waiting for him to say something.

‘It looks like it,’ he said again, slowly. ‘But I think how this case is dealt with from now on needs a great deal of thought. Is there . . . is there anything to prevent Bausen and myself sitting in on future discussions for a while?’

DeKlerk rapidly sought the support of his colleagues, and received it.

‘Of course we would like you to continue working with us,’ he said. ‘Naturally. We have a long way to go yet. Anyway . . . we now know that it really was Hennan that Verlangen was interested in here in Kaalbringen, and we’ve found him. But what else we know . . .’

‘. . . is far from easy to understand,’ said Beate Moerk, completing the sentence for him. ‘He didn’t recognize you, I take it?’

Van Veeteren said nothing for a moment or two. Then shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. I didn’t see the slightest trace of anything to suggest that he did. Glasses and a moustache are pretty effective, in fact, as long as you don’t go on too long. No, I think we can take it that he didn’t recognize me.’

‘But he won’t forget me so easily,’ said Bausen.

‘Nobody ever does,’ said Moerk with a quick smile. ‘Anyway, we can assume that for now at least, Hennan doesn’t suspect anything. Is that right?’

Van Veeteren nodded.

‘Let’s hope not,’ said deKlerk. ‘But if he is in fact behind the murder of Verlangen, as we are assuming, he must have raised his awareness levels since we found the body. Or at least since they wrote in the newspapers that we had found the body. And let’s face it, we haven’t come up with much in the way of proof so far. Am I right? Even if we know that he’s the one, we haven’t exactly managed to pin the crime onto him.’

‘No, not exactly,’ said Rooth. ‘In other words, what do we do now? Personally, I have to say that I get goose pimples as a result of pussyfooting around all the time. Don’t you agree that it would be good to have a straightforward, honest house raid, and a hundred-watt lamp shining into the bastard’s face? . . . I know that we couldn’t put the wind up him last time, but maybe he’s grown softer as the years have passed?’

‘Do you think so?’ said Münster.

‘Not really,’ said Rooth. ‘I’m just sitting here daydreaming, as you doubtless realize.’

‘Anyway,’ said deKlerk, turning to Bausen and Van Veeteren at the narrow end of the table. ‘Perhaps our somewhat more experienced colleagues have a few points of view?’

‘Of course,’ said Bausen. ‘Rooth is right, naturally, and sooner or later we have to put our cards on the table . . . Tell him we know who he is, in other words, and that he’s under suspicion. But perhaps it would make sense to lie low and make a few investigations before we go that far – what do you reckon?’

‘That seems to me a correct summary of the situation,’ said Moerk.

‘What investigations?’ wondered Stiller.

‘That is precisely the question that needs answering,’ said Bausen, starting to scratch the back of his neck. ‘Perhaps we could approach him via his wife, but that’s just a thought that occurred to me and . . . well, I don’t know . . .’

He paused, but Münster took up the thought.

‘I’ve also thought about her,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we try to extract a bit of information from England as well? If they’ve been living here for ten years, Hennan must have found her pretty soon after he disappeared from Maardam . . . Within three or four years, in any case. It could be interesting to tell her a bit about his background and see how she reacts. In view of what happened to his previous wives we could congratulate her on still being alive.’

‘That sounds fair enough,’ said deKlerk. ‘The suggestion about extracting information from England, at least. Approaching the wife would be a bit more dodgy, of course.’

‘If it’s not possible to frighten him, maybe we could frighten her?’ suggested Rooth.

‘Excuse me,’ put in Stiller. ‘Are we assuming that fru Nolan doesn’t know anything about this Verlangen business?’

Rooth waved his hand, but he had just stuffed two biscuits into his mouth and it was Münster who responded.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But if that isn’t the case, there’s all the more reason to have a chat with her . . . Quite simply to find out just how much she knows. Yes, I agree with Bausen. Our next move ought to be to talk to her, on her own. But God only knows how we can set that up.’

‘There’s one more thing I’m wondering about,’ said Stiller. ‘Wasn’t there going to be a search of Verlangen’s flat in Maardam? Have we had any information about that?’

DeKlerk nodded and produced a sheet of paper.

‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘I forgot about this in all the rush. We had a fax this morning. Negative, unfortunately. Signed by an Inspector Moreno – I assume he is familiar to you?’

‘She,’ said Rooth. ‘The inspector is a she. But she is familiar to us.’

‘Really? Anyway, they haven’t found anything. And they were very thorough, she writes.’

‘That was only to be expected,’ said Münster. ‘He didn’t keep a diary, that’s all there is to it. Which is hardly surprising.’

‘Thank you,’ said Stiller. ‘I just wondered.’

‘No problem,’ said the chief of police, checking his watch. ‘Might I suggest that we make a pause now. There are seven of us involved in this business, but I don’t think it would do any harm if each one of us spent an hour or two thinking our own thoughts. Stiller and I will get in touch with England, and we’ll see if we can get anything of interest from there. I suggest we meet again at four o’clock, is that okay?’

‘That’s okay,’ said Rooth.

‘As far as Bausen and Van Veeteren are concerned –’

‘– they’ll do whatever they want, of course,’ said Bausen, rising to his feet.

‘You didn’t have much to say,’ he said when they were seated in the car again.

‘I just sat there thinking,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘And I’m a bit tired. And I didn’t sleep very well last night, I’m afraid . . . And there were so many bright sparks involved.’

‘That isn’t always an advantage.’

‘No,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Not always.’

‘You’re sitting there brooding about something.’

‘In a way.’

‘About what?’

‘That suggestion about a hundred-watt lamp. Would he really cope with another session?’

‘Hennan?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you reckon we ought to get tough with him?’

Van Veeteren produced a toothpick from his breast pocket and stared at it in disbelief.

‘Where the hell has this come from? I gave them up five years ago.’

‘It seems that a lot of things from the past are turning up just now,’ said Bausen. ‘Should we get tough?’ he repeated.

Van Veeteren snapped the toothpick in two and threw the bits out through the window.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I simply can’t pass judgement on that.’

‘Really? said Bausen. ‘As far as I’m concerned there’s something else I just can’t understand.’

‘Hmm?’ muttered Van Veeteren. ‘What’s that?’

‘Why the hell did I need to take those damned paintings to the gallery? You could have identified Nolan–Hennan anyhow.’

Van Veeteren eyed him from the side for a few seconds.

‘It was your idea to start with,’ he said. ‘I thought you played your part brilliantly, incidentally. Have you had ambitions to become an actor? I don’t think you’ve mentioned—’

‘Shut your gob!’ said Bausen, then burst out laughing.

It was Münster, deKlerk and Rooth who laid down the guidelines for the conversation with Elizabeth Nolan – and afterwards, of course, one could wonder if it might have been possible to come up with something better. They worked at it on Friday morning, and quite early on Münster had the feeling that something was going wrong. But it would be some time before he realized just how wrong.

It would take far too long.

Intendent Münster was also one of the two police officers who entered the Galleri Winderhuus at half past five on Friday evening and introduced themselves to fru Nolan.

The other was Inspector Moerk – it had been considered appropriate for one of them to be a woman, for some unstated reason. As far as Münster was concerned, he regarded Beate Moerk as suitable because she was a good police officer, not because she was a woman. But that view was also unstated.

‘Fru Nolan,’ said Münster. ‘We are from the police and would like to discuss with you a very delicate matter. My name is Intendent Münster, and this is Inspector Moerk.’

Elizabeth Nolan looked up from the thick art book she had been reading.

‘I beg your pardon? I don’t think I quite gathered . . . ?’

She looked at them in turn, slightly unsteadily. Stroked to one side a strand of her dark hair.

‘The police,’ said Moerk. ‘We’d like to talk to you.’

‘I don’t understand . . . Why?’

She had a slight, almost unnoticeable Anglo-Saxon accent. Moerk recalled Bausen and Van Veeteren saying that they hadn’t noticed any such thing as far as her husband was concerned.

‘Inspector Moerk,’ she said, holding out her hand. Nolan shook it hesitantly. Put a bookmark in her book and closed it.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk without being disturbed?’ Moerk looked around. As far as she could see there were no visitors in the exhibition area; moreover they had been sitting in the car park for ten minutes without seeing anybody enter or leave the building. It seemed that the appeal of the tenth-rate local artists had waned considerably since the exhibition opened a week ago.

Fru Nolan stood up from her chair.

‘I’m afraid I don’t really understand. What exactly do you want?’

She seemed genuinely surprised, and Münster gestured towards the entrance door.

‘Could you perhaps close for the day, so that we won’t be disturbed?’

She hesitated. Then she took a couple of steps towards the door before pausing.

‘Have you . . . Could I see your ID?’

They handed over their ID cards and she studied them for a few seconds.

‘I . . . we’re open until six.’

‘We know that,’ said Münster. ‘But perhaps it wouldn’t matter much if you were to close half an hour early today. You don’t seem to have any customers anyway.’

Nolan shrugged and made some sort of half-hearted gesture with her hands.

‘No, the number of visitors to the exhibition has tailed off. But I don’t understand why you want to talk to me. Has something happened?’

‘If you close the door, we can explain everything in peace and quiet,’ said Moerk, resting her hand briefly on Nolan’s upper arm. ‘You don’t need to worry.’

She hesitated briefly again, then nodded and went to lock the door. Münster and Moerk sat down on the two mustard-yellow plastic visitor chairs in front of the desk.

‘Fru Nolan,’ said Moerk when she had returned and sat down opposite them, ‘we’re sorry to have to come and disturb you like this, but the way things look we simply don’t have any choice.’

‘Please tell me what on earth has happened.’

Münster could see that she was expecting to hear about a death, or something equally significant, and perhaps that was understandable.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘The reason we want to talk to you is a bit special, no doubt, but if you answer our questions honestly and frankly, you have nothing to fear.’

‘Fear?’ exclaimed Nolan. ‘Why should I have anything to fear? What do you mean?’

‘Let me explain,’ said Moerk. ‘The fact is, we need some information about your husband. I’m afraid we can’t say exactly what lies behind it all, but let me just explain that we are looking for somebody who committed a few serious crimes quite a long time ago . . . Very serious crimes. Your husband is one of a group of eight men, and we know with a hundred per cent certainty that one of the eight is guilty. The one we are looking for. The other seven are totally innocent and have nothing at all to do with it . . .’

‘With what?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t tell you what happened – as I’m sure you understand. And it all took place quite a long time ago, as I said. What we have to do is to find out as much as we can about each one of the group of eight – as discreetly as possible, so that they don’t suspect anything. So we shall clear seven candidates – obviously we hope your husband will be one of them, fru Nolan – but this is unfortunately the only method at our disposal. If you knew all the details you would understand our position, but I’m afraid we can’t say any more than I’ve just said. We sometimes need to work with great care and discretion . . . Do you understand the outline of the situation now?’

Elizabeth Nolan stared at them sceptically for a few seconds, then shook her head and dug out a cigarette packet from her handbag, which was lying on the table.

‘I need a cigarette.’

‘Of course,’ said Münster.

‘My husband? So it’s about my husband, is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You want to . . . to clear him?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s absurd. He would never . . . no. If I answer your questions, will you be able to exclude him? Is that all?’

‘That’s all,’ said Moerk. ‘It might well feel like an intrusion into your privacy, of course, but we promise that nothing you say will be repeated outside this room – assuming that your husband isn’t the man we’re looking for, of course.’

‘We also recommend that you don’t mention this conversation to him,’ said Münster. ‘But we’ll come back to that.’

Nolan lit her cigarette, inhaled and stretched a little.