Borkmann's Point (3 page)

On the drive, watching her pull away, stood Mrs. Simmel, a
black, depressed colossus who had suddenly been saddled with
a house worth a million, a sailing boat and a real estate company.

And God only knows what else.
The visit had made several things clearer, in any case.
It wasn’t Grete Simmel who had been lying in wait with the

ax in the woods; Beate Moerk was 100 percent certain of that.

She was almost equally sure that the victim’s wife hadn’t
hired anybody else to carry out the attack, and that she wasn’t
involved in any other way. Needless to say, there was no solid
evidence to support any of these conclusions; but why not
bow to your good judgment and intuition when you’ve been
blessed with an abundance of both qualities?

Why not indeed?

She checked her watch. There was time to go home and
take a shower before meeting that big shot, she decided.
Van Veeteren parked outside the overgrown garden. He
checked that the number on the flaking mailbox by the gate
really did correspond with the address he’d noted down on the
scrap of paper in his breast pocket.

Yes. No doubt about it.
“You’ll find it all right,” Chief of Police Bausen had said.
“There’s nothing else like it anywhere in town!”

That was certainly no exaggeration. He got out of his car
and tried to peer over the tangled spirea hedge. It looked dark
inside there. Heavy, sagging branches of unpruned fruit trees
coalesced at about chest height with the undergrowth—grass
three feet high, untamed rosebushes and an assortment of
prickly tendrils of obscure origin—to form a more or less
impenetrable jungle. There was no sign of a house from the
pavement, but a well-worn path suggested that one might possibly be in there somewhere. A machete would have been useful, thought Van Veeteren. The guy must be crazy.

He opened the gate, crouched down and ventured in. After
only ten yards or so he found a house wall ahead of him, and a
thickset man came to meet him. His face was rugged, wrinkled
and heavily tanned—it had been a hot summer. His hair was
sparse, almost white, and Van Veeteren thought he looked as if
he’d already been retired for some time. Nearer seventy than
sixty, if he’d had to guess. But still pretty fit and strong, obviously. His clothes indicated that he was on home territory—
slippers, worn corduroy trousers and a checked flannel shirt,
with the sleeves rolled up.

“Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, I presume?”

He held out a muscular hand. Van Veeteren shook it and
admitted his identity.
“Forgive the garden! I started growing roses and a few
other things a couple of years ago, but then I got fed up.
Bloody amazing how fast everything grows! I haven’t a clue
how to sort it out.”
He flung out his arms and smiled apologetically.
“No problem,” said Van Veeteren.
“Anyway, welcome! Come this way; I have a few easy chairs
around back. I take it you drink beer?”
“Masses,” said Van Veeteren.

Bausen contemplated him over the edge of his glass and raised
an eyebrow.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said. “I felt I had to check out
what sort of bastard I’d been stuck with. Before we meet the
rest of them, that is. Cheers!”

“Cheers,” said Van Veeteren.

He lounged back in the wicker chair and emptied half the
bottle in one gulp. The sun had been blazing down all the way
there; only an hour, it was true, but he could feel his shirt clinging to his back.

“I think the heat wave’s going to last.”

The chief of police leaned forward and tried to find a patch
of sky through the network of branches.
“Yes,” said Van Veeteren. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“It’s not bad,” said Bausen. “Once you get out into the

jungle, you’re usually left in peace.”

That seemed to be the case. A well-camouflaged little nest,
no doubt about it. The dirty yellow awning; straggly clumps of
bushes and roses climbing up the trellis; the thick, tall grass; a
heavy scent of late summer, the buzzing of bees... And the
patio itself: nine or ten square yards, stone flags and a frayed
cord mat, two battered wicker chairs, a table with newspapers
and books, a pipe and tobacco. Next to the house wall was a
lopsided bookcase full of tins of paint, brushes, plant pots, several magazines and other bric-a-brac...a chessboard protruded from behind a few crates of empty bottles. Oh yes,
there was something special about this place. Van Veeteren
produced a toothpick and stuck it between his front teeth.

“Sandwich?” asked Bausen.

“If I can have something to wash it down with. This is
empty, I’m afraid.”
He put the bottle on the table. Bausen knocked out his pipe
and rose to his feet.
“Let’s see if we can do something about that.”
He disappeared into the house, and Van Veeteren could
hear him pottering about in the kitchen and singing something
that sounded reminiscent of the bass aria from
The Pearl Fishers.
Well, he thought, clasping his hands behind his head. This
could have got off to a worse start. There’s life in the old boy yet!
Then it struck him that there could hardly be more then
eight or ten years between them.

He declined Bausen’s offer of accommodation most reluctantly, indicating that he might well change his mind later on.
In any case, he hoped that his esteemed colleague would keep
a door open...if this business drags on and on, that is...

Instead he took a room at The See Warf. Fourth floor
with a balcony and sun in the evening. View over the harbor,
quays and the bay with the open sea beyond. This wasn’t
too bad a place either, he had to admit. Bausen pointed out
to sea.

“Straight ahead you can see Lange Piirs, the lighthouse, but
only when the mornings are clear. Last year that meant four
days. On top of the cliffs over there is The Fisherman’s Friend,
a gourmet restaurant. Maybe we can treat ourselves to an
evening there, if we can’t think of anything better to do.”

Van Veeteren nodded.
“Perhaps it’s time to do a bit of work?”
Bausen shrugged.
“If you insist, Chief Inspector.” He checked his watch. “Oh,

damn! They’ll have been waiting for us for half an hour, I
reckon!”

The police station in Kaalbringen was a two-story affair at the
Grande Place. A front office, canteen, changing rooms and a
few cells in the basement; a conference room and four offices
on the upper floor. Because of his status as chief of police,
Bausen had the biggest office, of course, with a desk and bookcases in dark oak, a worn leather sofa and a view over the
square. Inspectors Moerk and Kropke each had a smaller office
overlooking the courtyard, and the fourth was occupied by
Constables Bang and Mooser.

“Allow me to introduce Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who’s
come here to solve the case for us,” said Bausen.
Moerk and Kropke stood up.
“Bausen’s the man in charge,” said Van Veeteren. “I’m only
here to help out...if and when needed.”
“You’ll be needed all right,” said Bausen. “This is the whole
Kaalbringen force. Plus the lesser ranks, of course, although I
wouldn’t expect too much of them if I were you.”
“Inspector Kropke,” said Kropke, standing to attention.
Idiot, thought Beate Moerk, and introduced herself.
“Inspector Moerk is responsible for all the charm and intuition we have to offer,” said Bausen. “I would advise you not to
underestimate her.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Van Veeteren.
“Right, shall we get going?” Bausen started to roll up his
shirtsleeves. “Is there any coffee?”
Beate Moerk indicated a tray on a table in the corner.
Kropke ran a hand through his fair, close-cropped hair and
fumbled with the top button of his shirt behind the knot in his
tie. He was obviously the one charged with holding forth.
Rookie’s up first, presumably, Van Veeteren thought. Perhaps Bausen is teaching him the ropes.
Seemed to be necessary, if he was to be honest.
“I thought I’d take the Eggers case first,” said Kropke, and
switched on the overhead projector. “In order to brief Chief
Inspector Van Veeteren, and also to summarize the situation
for the rest of us. I’ve made a few transparencies to make it
easier...”
He looked first at Bausen, then Van Veeteren in the hope of
registering an approving reaction.
“Excellent,” said Beate Moerk.
Kropke coughed.
“On June twenty-eight, early in the morning, a man by the
name of Heinz Eggers was found dead in a courtyard behind
the railway station. He had been killed by a blow to the back
of the head from an ax of some kind. The blade had gone
through the vertebrae, the artery, everything. The body was
found by a newspaper delivery boy shortly after six o’clock,
and he had been dead between four and five hours.”
“What kind of a man was Eggers?” wondered Van Veeteren
aloud.
Kropke put on a new transparency, and Van Veeteren could
read for himself that the victim had reached the age of thirtyfour when his life was suddenly brought to a close. He was
born and permanently resident in Selstadt a few miles inland,
but he had been living in Kaalbringen since April of this year.
He had no regular work, not in Kaalbringen, or in Selstadt, or
in any other location. He had a lengthy criminal record: drug
crimes, assault and battery, burglary, sexual offenses, fraud. In
all, he had served about ten years in various prisons and institutions, starting when he was sixteen. The local authorities were
not aware that he was in Kaalbringen; Eggers had been living
in a two-room apartment in Andrejstraat belonging to a good
friend of his who was currently serving a comparatively short
sentence for rape and threatening behavior. He’d had plans to
settle down and go straight in Kaalbringen, get a steady job
and so on, but he had not had much success on that score.
“Where does the information come from?” asked Van
Veeteren.
“Several sources,” said Beate Moerk. “Mostly from a girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Yes, that’s what she called herself,” said Bausen. “She lived
in the apartment with him. But she didn’t kill him, even if she
didn’t seem particularly put out by his death.”
“Nobody was,” said Moerk.
“She had an alibi, in any case,” explained Bausen. “Watertight.”
“How have you gone about the investigation?” asked Van
Veeteren, reinserting the toothpick the other way around.
Kropke turned to Bausen for assistance, but received nothing but an encouraging nod.
“We’ve interviewed around fifty people,” he said, “most of
them the same sort of dregs of society as Eggers himself. His
friends and acquaintances are mostly petty thieves, drug addicts, that sort of thing. His circle of friends in Kaalbringen
wasn’t all that large since he’d only been here for a few months.
A dozen people, perhaps, all of them well known to us. The
usual riffraff, you might say, the sort who spend the day on park
benches drinking beer. Getting high in one another’s apartments and selling their womenfolk in Hamnesplanaden and
Fisherman’s Square. And then of course we’ve interviewed
masses of people following anonymous tips, all of whom have
turned out to have nothing to do with the case.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“What’s the population of Kaalbringen?”
“Forty-five thousand, give or take,” said Beate Moerk. “A
few thousand more in the summer months.”
“What about crime levels?”
“Not high,” said Bausen. “The odd case of domestic violence now and then, four or five boats stolen in the summer.
An occasional brawl and a bit of drug dealing. I take it you’re
not interested in financial crime?”
“No,” said Van Veeteren. “Not yet, in any case. Anyway,
what theories have you got about this Eggers character? You
don’t have to give me all the details today. I’d prefer to read up
on it and ask if I have any questions.”
Beate Moerk took it upon herself to respond.
“None,” she said. “We don’t know a damn thing. I suppose
we had started to think—before the Simmel business, that is—
that it must be some kind of inside job. A junkie killing
another junkie for some reason or other. A bad trip, or money
owing or something of that sort—”
“You don’t kill somebody who owes you money,” said
Kropke. “If you do, you’ll never get it back.”
“On the contrary, Inspector,” sighed Moerk. Kropke frowned.
Oh, dear, thought Van Veeteren.
“Coffee?” Bausen’s question was rhetorical, and he was
already passing around mugs.
“If it’s true,” said Van Veeteren, “what Inspector Moerk
says, then it’s highly probable that you’ve already interrogated
the murderer. If you’ve sifted through the...the dregs, that is?”
“Presumably,” said Bausen. “But now Simmel has turned
up. I think that changes the situation quite a bit.”
“Definitely,” said Moerk.
Kropke put on a new transparency. It was obviously a picture of where Eggers was found—dumped behind some
garbage cans in the rear courtyard of an apartment block waiting to be demolished, by the look of it.
“Was he murdered on the spot?” asked Van Veeteren.
“More or less,” said Kropke. “Only moved a few yards at
most.”
“What was he doing there?”
“No idea,” said Bausen. “Drug dealing, I suppose.”
“What time was it?”
“One, two in the morning, something like that.”
“Was he high?”
“Not especially.”
“Why do they have garbage cans outside an apartment
block that’s due to be demolished?”
Bausen pondered for a while.
“Dunno...I’ve no idea, in fact.”
Van Veeteren nodded. Kropke poured out some coffee and
Beate Moerk opened a carton from the bakery, brimful of Danish pastries.
“Excellent,” said Van Veeteren.
“From Sylvie’s, a top-notch bakery and café,” said Bausen.
“I recommend a visit. You’ll get a twenty percent discount if
you tell them you’re a copper. It’s just around the corner from
here.”
Van Veeteren removed his toothpick and helped himself to
a pastry.
“Anyway,” said Kropke, “as far as Eggers is concerned, we’re
rowing against the tide, you might say.”
“What about the weapon?” asked Van Veeteren, speaking
with his mouth full. “What does the doctor have to say?”
“Just a moment.”
Kropke produced a new transparency—a sketch of how the
ax blade, or whatever it was, had cut its way through the back
of Eggers’s neck, passing straight through the vertebrae,
artery, gullet—the lot.
“A massive blow?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Not necessarily,” said Beate Moerk. “It depends on what
the blade looks like, and it seems to have been extremely
sharp—and thin.”
“Which means that not so much force was needed,” added
Kropke.
“You can also see,” said Beate Moerk, “that it came at quite
an angle, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything special. It
could indicate that the murderer was quite short, or rather tall.
It all depends on how he held the weapon. And what it looks
like, of course.”
“Just think how many different ways there are of hitting a
tennis ball,” said Kropke.
Van Veeteren took another Danish pastry.
“And it’s likely that the weapon was an ax?” he asked.
“Of some kind,” said Bausen. “I think we’ll move on to
Simmel now. Maybe Inspector Moerk would like to fill us in?”
Beate Moerk cleared her throat and leafed through her
notebook.
“Well, we haven’t got very far yet. It was only the day
before yesterday, at eight in the morning, that a jogger found
him in the municipal woods. He first noticed blood on the
path; and when he stopped to investigate, he saw the body just
a few yards away. The murderer doesn’t seem to have made
much of an effort to hide it. He—the jogger, that is—called
the police right away. Chief Inspector Bausen and I went to the
spot together, and we were able to establish that, well, that we
seemed to be dealing with the same killer as last time.”
“Cut down from behind,” said Bausen. “A bit harder and
the head would have been severed altogether. It looked like
one hell of a mess.”
“The same weapon?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Ninety percent certain,” said Kropke.
“A hundred would be better,” said Van Veeteren.
“Presumably,” said Bausen, “we’re not talking about an
ordinary ax. The blade appears to be wider than it’s deep.
Maybe six or even eight inches. No sign of either end of the
blade in Eggers or Simmel, according to the pathologist, at
least. And Simmel especially had a real bull neck.”
“A machete, perhaps?” suggested Van Veeteren.
“I’ve looked into that,” said Bausen. “I wondered if it might
be some kind of knife or sword with a very strong blade, but
the cutting edge is straight, not curved like a machete.”
“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “Maybe that’s not the most
important thing at this stage. What’s the link between Eggers
and Simmel?”
Nobody spoke.
“That’s a good question,” said Bausen.
“We haven’t found one yet,” said Kropke. “But we’re looking, of course—”
“Scoundrels, the pair of them,” said Bausen. “But in different leagues, you might say. I reckon Simmel’s business affairs
wouldn’t stand all that much broad daylight shining on them,
but that’s something for the tax lawyers rather than ordinary
mortals like us. He’s never been involved in anything specifically criminal. Not like Eggers, I mean.”
“Or at least, he’s not been caught,” said Moerk.
“Drugs?” said Van Veeteren. “They usually unite princes
and paupers.”
“We have no indications of any such involvement,” said
Kropke.
It would be no bad thing if we solved this business before a
new chief of police takes over, thought Van Veeteren.
“What was he doing in the woods?”
“On his way home,” said Beate Moerk.
“Where from?”
“The Blue Ship restaurant. He’d been there from half past
eight until eleven, roughly. There are several witnesses. Went
for a stroll through the town, it seems. The last people to see
him alive were a couple of women in Fisherman’s Square—at
about twenty past eleven, give or take a minute or so.”
“What does the pathologist’s report say about the time of
death?”
“The final version is due tomorrow,” said Bausen. “As
things look at the moment, between eleven and one. Well, half
past eleven and one, I suppose.”
Van Veeteren leaned back and looked up at the ceiling.
“That means there are two possibilities,” he said, and waited
for a reaction.
“Precisely,” said Beate Moerk. “Either the murderer was
lying in wait by the path, ready to have a go at whoever came
past, or he followed Simmel from the restaurant.”
“He might have just bumped into him,” said Kropke. “By
accident, in other words—”
“And he had an ax with him—by accident?” said Moerk.
Good, thought Van Veeteren. I wonder if Bausen has entertained the idea of having a female successor? Although it’s not
up to him, of course.
Four reporters were lying in wait by the front desk, but Bausen
was clearly used to sending them packing.
“Press conference tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock
sharp. Not a word out of us until then!”
Van Veeteren declined Bausen’s offer of a modest meal and
a lift back to the hotel.
“I need some fresh air. Thought I’d buy some newspapers
as well.”
Bausen nodded.
“Here’s my phone number in case you change your mind. I
expect I’ll be in all evening.”
He handed a business card to Van Veeteren, who put it in
his breast pocket. The chief of police clambered into his somewhat battered Toyota and drove away. Van Veeteren watched
him go.
Nice fellow, he thought. I wonder if he plays chess as well.
He looked at his watch. Half past five. A couple of hours’
work in his room, and then dinner. That sounded like a good
way of passing the time. That was just about the only skill he’d
managed to acquire over the years: the ability to kill time.
Well, plus a certain aptitude for finding violent lawbreakers, of course.
He picked up his briefcase and set off in the direction of the
harbor.