The Unlucky Lottery (23 page)

She fell silent and looked thoughtful.

‘Wasn’t what?’ Münster wondered.

‘It wasn’t that they weren’t good neighbours and good people, but they tended to keep their distance. They were like that, especially him.’

‘Waldemar Leverkuhn?’

‘Herr Leverkuhn, yes. A reserved chap, not easy to talk to; but an honest worker, nobody could possibly suggest anything else . . . It’s awful. Do you think she really murdered him in that terrible way? I don’t know what to think any more. How was the coffee?’

‘Good,’ said Münster.

It looked for a moment as if fru de Grooit was going to start crying. Münster coughed to distract her while he thought of something apposite to say, but he couldn’t think of anything that might console her.

‘Did you know fru Leverkuhn a little better, then?’ was the best he could do. ‘Better than him, that is. Woman to woman, as it were.’

But fru de Grooit merely shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t the type to get pally with, and if you ever needed to borrow some sugar or flour, it was natural to go to one of the other neighbours – the Van Klusters or Bolmeks. On the other side and opposite. Has she really killed him?’

‘It looks like it,’ said Münster. ‘What were the children like?’

Fru de Grooit fiddled with her coffee cup and didn’t reply immediately.

‘They were also reserved,’ she said after a while. ‘They didn’t have any real friends, none of them. Mauritz was exactly the same age as our Bertrand, we had him late on, but they never became good friends. We tried ten, twenty times, but he always preferred to be at home on his own, playing with his electric train set, Mauritz did – and don’t think that Bertrand was allowed to join in. There was something . . . something mean, something off-putting about the boy. I think he had a rough time at school as well. And with girls – no, it wasn’t exactly a home with open doors, certainly not.’

‘Have you had any contact with them in recent years?’ Münster asked. ‘Since they left here?’

‘None at all,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘They moved out and disappeared. From one day to the next. The children had already flown the nest, of course, so it was easier for them with a flat – they were never very interested in the garden. They didn’t even leave an address. We heard later that things had gone badly for Irene . . .’

‘Really?’ said Münster, pretending to be surprised.

‘Nerves,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘She just couldn’t cope, that’s all there was to it. Some people just can’t cope, that’s the way it’s always been. They put her in a home, I don’t know if she’s come out again. They were introverted as well, the sisters – you never saw them with boys. Always kept themselves to themselves. No, it wasn’t a happy family, if you can put it like that. But one knows so little about it.’

She fell silent again, sighed and stirred her coffee. Münster wondered what he had hoped to get out of this conversation, but realized that it was just a matter of blind chance. Yet again.

Maybe something will crop up, maybe not.

That’s not a bad motto for police work overall, he thought. A vain and arbitrary search for a needle in a haystack, that’s exactly what it always seemed to be like.

Or, as Reinhart preferred to put it: a copper is a blind tortoise looking for a snowball in the desert.

There were plenty of appropriate images.

‘I remember one incident,’ said fru de Grooit after a few moments of silence. ‘That Mauritz didn’t have an easy time of it at school, as I said. He was in the same class as our Bertrand, and on one occasion he’d been beaten up by some older boys. I don’t know how serious it was, or what lay behind it, but in any case, he didn’t dare go back to school . . . And he didn’t dare to stay at home either, scared of what his parents would say or do – fru Leverkuhn was out of work when it happened. So he would pretend to go off to school in the morning, but instead of being in school he was hiding away in the shed at the back of their house all day. He can’t have been more than about eleven or twelve at the time: his sisters knew about it and looked after him . . . One of them was also without a job and so was at home all day and she used to smuggle sandwiches out to him. He sat there for day after day, for about a fortnight at least . . .’

‘Didn’t the school ask about where he was?’ Münster asked.

She shrugged. Brushed some imaginary crumbs off the tablecloth.

‘Eventually, yes. I think he got a good hiding from his dad then. For being such a coward.’

‘Not a very good way of making him any braver,’ said Münster.

‘No,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘But that’s the way he was, Waldemar.’

‘How was he?’ asked Münster.

‘Hard, sort of.’

‘You didn’t like him, I gather?’

Fru de Grooit looked a little embarrassed.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago. We didn’t have a lot to do with them, and you have to leave people in peace if that’s what they want. It takes all sorts . . . Everybody is happy in his own way.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Münster.

He went for a walk among the little detached houses in Pampas when he had taken his leave of fru de Grooit. He was pretty fed up of the little houses, but the weather was pleasant enough for walking.

This Pampas was a rather special part of the town, it couldn’t be denied. And he hadn’t been here for ages. The low-lying, almost swampy area next to the river had not been built on until shortly after the war, when all at once these rows of tiny houses sprang up, all of them with only three or four rooms, on plots barely large enough to accommodate them. A local council project to provide owner-occupied houses for hard-working labourers and junior office workers, if he understood it rightly. A sort of clumsy attempt to boost the lower classes in the direction of equality, and all of them – more than six hundred houses – were still standing in more or less unchanged condition after nearly fifty years. Repaired and modernized and extended here and there, of course, but nevertheless remarkably intact.

Post-war optimism, Münster thought. A monument to an age.

And to a generation that was disappearing into the grave.

Like fru de Grooit and the Leverkuhns.

I’ll never get any further with this damned case, he thought as he settled behind the wheel of his car. It’s going to stand as still as Pampas. Nothing more is going to happen.

But that is where Intendent Münster was wrong.

In spades.

28

If her boyfriend hadn’t given her the boot the previous evening – on 20 December – Vera Kretschke would presumably have slept a bit better.

If she had slept a bit better, she would obviously have been able to run all the way round her jogging route without any problems. She usually did.

If she had managed to run all the way, she certainly wouldn’t have stopped after fifteen hundred metres and started walking instead of running.

And if she hadn’t started walking as slowly as she did, well, she would never have noticed that yellow bit of plastic sticking up from the undergrowth in among the trees a few metres from the path.

Probably not, in any case.

And then . . . then that awful image would not be filling her head like a lump of hot goo, preventing her from having much in the way of rational thoughts.

That’s what she was thinking as she lay in bed that same evening in her old, secure, childhood room, waiting for Reuben to ring despite everything – if not to apologize and take back what he’d said, then at least so that she could tell him what had happened while she was out jogging that morning.

Jogging and walking.

What an ugly sight, she thought, and stopped. Why couldn’t people dispose of things in the right place instead of out here in the forest?

Weyler’s Woods nature park was not large, but it was popular and well looked-after. There were waste paper bins and rubbish bins alongside all the paths for walkers and joggers that criss-crossed the forest in all directions, and she didn’t usually need to stop and pick up rubbish that had been dumped like this.

Occasionally an ice-lolly stick or an empty cigarette packet, perhaps, but not a big plastic carrier bag.

Vera Kretschke was the chairman of her school’s environmental society – had been for the last three terms – and she felt a certain responsibility.

She stepped out resolutely into the undergrowth. Shook the raindrops off the young birch sapling before ducking down underneath it and pulling out the plastic carrier bag. Most of it had been hidden under leaves and twigs, and she had to pull quite hard to get it loose.

Dirty bastards, she thought. Filthy pigs.

Then she looked inside the bag.

It contained a head. A woman’s head.

She started vomiting without being able to stop it. It simply came spurting out of her, just as it had done that time a few years ago when she’d eaten something very dodgy at the Indian restaurant in the centre of town.

Some of it went into the bag as well. Which naturally didn’t make matters any better.

And Reuben didn’t phone, so there was another sleepless night in store for poor Vera Kretschke.

‘Fucking hell!’ roared Inspector Fuller. ‘This sort of thing simply shouldn’t happen.’

Warder Schmidt shook his large head and looked unhappy.

‘But it has happened . . .’

‘How the hell did she do it?’ said Fuller.

Schmidt sighed.

‘Ripped up the blanket to make a rope, I think. And then used that little bit of pipe high up in the corner – we’ve talked about that before.’

‘I take it you’ve cut her down?’

‘No . . .’ Schmidt shuffled and squirmed uneasily. ‘No, we thought you might like to take a look at her first.’

‘Hell’s bells,’ muttered Fuller, getting to his feet.

‘We only found her a couple of minutes ago,’ said Schmidt apologetically. ‘Wacker is there now, but she’s dead, there’s no doubt about that. And there’s a letter on the table as well.’

But Inspector Fuller had already elbowed his way past and was charging down the corridor towards cell number 12.

Damn and blast, thought Schmidt. And it’s my birthday today.

When Fuller had established that fru Leverkuhn really was in the state that had been reported, he arranged for a dozen photographs to be taken and had her cut down. Then he sent for a doctor, took a couple of tablets to calm his upset stomach, and phoned Intendent Münster.

Münster took the lift down and eyed the dead woman on the bed in her cell for ten seconds. Asked Fuller how the hell something like this could happen, then took the lift back up to his office.

When he had read the letter twice, he rang Moreno and explained the situation.

‘Quite unambiguous,’ said Moreno after reading Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s final message to the world.

‘Yes, very clear,’ said Münster. ‘She’s done her husband in, and now it was her turn. She was a woman of action, nobody can take that from her.’

He stood up and looked out at the rain.

‘But it’s a bugger that she’s committed suicide in her cell,’ he muttered. ‘They’ll have to revise their procedures. Hiller looked like a plum about to explode when he heard about it.’

‘I can well imagine,’ said Moreno. ‘But she did it well. Did you see the rope she’d made? Plaited four strands thick, it must have taken her several hours. A man would never have been able to do it.’

Münster said nothing. A few seconds of silence passed.

‘Why did she do it?’ asked Moreno. ‘I mean, you can understand that she didn’t particularly fancy spending the last years of her life in prison, but . . . Was it only that?’

‘What else could it be?’ said Münster. ‘I reckon that’s a good enough reason. If there’s anything to wonder about, it’s why she waited until now. It’s not exactly straightforward to commit suicide in a prison cell. Even if you are skilled, and the routines are bad. Or was it something else, d’you think? Why now?’

Moreno shrugged.

‘I don’t know. But there doesn’t seem much point in speculating now. We’ve got the key, after all.’

Münster sighed, and turned round.

‘What a pointless life,’ he said.

‘Marie-Louise Leverkuhn’s?’

‘Yes. Can you see any point in it? She had murdered her husband, then killed herself. One of her children is in a psychiatric hospital, and the other two are not exactly the life and soul of any party. No grandchildren. Well, you tell me if there’s some point that I’ve missed.’

Moreno glanced at the letter again. Folded it up and put it back in the envelope.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But that’s the way it is. It’s hardly likely to be a story with a happy end if we’re involved in it.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Münster. ‘But there ought to be limits nevertheless . . . The occasional little diamond among all the shit. What are you doing for Christmas?’

Moreno pulled a face.

‘The main thing is that I don’t have to see Claus,’ she said. ‘He’s due back tomorrow. At first I intended working over the holidays, but then I bumped into an old friend who had just been dumped. We’re taking six bottles of wine with us to her house by the sea.’

Münster smiled. Didn’t dare ask about details of the Claus situation. Or what state she was in now. There were certain things that were nothing to do with him, and the less he asked, the better. It was safer that way.

‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘Make sure you don’t swim out too far.’

‘I promise,’ she said.

‘I’m working tomorrow,’ said Münster as he shuffled the cards for Marieke. ‘Then I’m off for six days.’

‘About time,’ said Synn. ‘I don’t want this autumn back again. We need to find a strategy to overcome this, we really do.’

‘A strategy?’ asked Münster.

‘Star-tea-gee,’ said Marieke. ‘Jack of clubs.’

‘I’m serious,’ Synn continued. ‘It’s better to throttle the depression before it makes a mess of everything. We have to make time to live. Remember that my mother went to the wall at the age of forty-five. She lived to be seventy, but she didn’t smile once during the last twenty-five years.’

‘I know,’ said Münster. ‘But you’re only thirty-eight. And you look like twenty-two.’