The Unlucky Lottery (22 page)

Ruth phoned on Friday evening and Mauritz did the same quite early on Saturday morning, but it was Sunday afternoon before Ruth’s large body flopped down on the chair.

‘Mum,’ she said after the initial silence.

‘Yes, what do you want?’ said Marie-Louise Leverkuhn.

That was a question her daughter was unable to answer, and not much more was said. After twenty minutes she gave vent to a deep sigh, and left her mother to her own devices.

It felt almost like a sort of victory when the door was locked behind her, Marie-Louise thought. It was strange that she should think that, of course, but that’s the way it was.

Things had turned out the way they had, and that’s the way it was. Only a few minutes after Ruth had left her, she fell asleep and had a dream.

She was on a train. It was racing through flat, monotonous countryside, at such a high speed that it was almost impossible to make out anything that flashed past the dirty and rather scratched window.

Even so, she knew that what was out there was life. Her own life. Flashing past at high speed. She was sitting with her back to the engine, and it soon became obvious that she was getting younger, the further they travelled. The same applied to her fellow passengers. The young woman sitting opposite her was suddenly no more than a little girl, and the elderly man in the corner with the shaking hands and bewildered eyes was soon transformed into a smart blue-eyed young man in uniform.

A journey backwards through life. On and on it went until everyone was only a small child, and when anybody in the carriage became so small that he or she looked like a new-born baby, the train stopped at a station. A few people in long, white coats with stethoscopes round their necks came on board and picked up the pink little lumps from the dirty seats. Made them all belch and cry a little, collected the blue ticket that they were all holding in their tiny hands, and left the train with the little creatures over their shoulders.

When it was her turn – it was an unusually big and fat doctor with wings on his back who lifted her up – it turned out that she didn’t have a ticket.

‘Haven’t you got a ticket?’ asked the angel sternly – she could now see that it was an angel. ‘In that case you can’t be born.’

‘Thank you, oh, thank you!’ She smiled up into his florid face. ‘If I can’t be born, I suppose that means I don’t need to live?’

‘Ho ho,’ said the angel cryptically and put her back down on the seat.

And so she continued the train journey into eternity, through the night of the unborn.

And she was happy. When she woke up she had butterflies in her stomach.

I don’t need to live.

Moritz also came on Sunday. At about half past six, just after the warder had been in to collect the dinner tray.

He had spent five hours in the car driving there, and seemed stressed and irritated. Although perhaps it was just his customary insecurity that lay behind it. He rang for coffee, said that he wanted some, but when it was actually standing on the shaky plastic table, he never touched it.

He also had difficulty in finding anything to say, just as Ruth had done. All they talked about was such things as prison routines and the situation on the candle-ring front in the run-up to Christmas. Mainly red and green this year, it seemed. She wished he would leave, and after half an hour said as much.

Perhaps he had assumed there would be this kind of difficulty, because he had written a letter. He stood up and produced it from an inside pocket in his ugly blazer with the firm’s emblem on the breast pocket. He handed it over without a word, then rang the bell and was let out.

It was only one and a half pages long. She read it three times. Then she tore it up into tiny pieces and flushed it down the toilet in the scruffy little booth in the corner of the cell.

It took a while. The pieces kept floating back up to the surface, and as she stood there pressing the flush button over and over again, she made up her mind what to do next.

She called the warder again, asked for pencil and paper, and shortly afterwards sat down at the little table to search for the right words.

The only surprise she felt at her decision was how easy it had been to make. Half an hour later she drank tea and ate a couple of sandwiches with an eager appetite, as if life was still something relevant to her.

27

Moreno had got in touch with Krystyna Gravenstein via the secretary at Doggers grammar school, where she had worked until she retired three years ago.

Gravenstein welcomed the detective into her little two-roomed flat in Palitzerstraat, at the top of the building with a view over the river and Megsje Bois. When she entered the flat Moreno wondered if everybody had such splendid views from their homes nowadays, and recalled Ruth Leverkuhn’s picture window. It seemed to be the case, at least for home-owners on the distaff side. Fröken Gravenstein was a slim little woman with a haycock of chalk-white hair and owl-eyes behind thick spectacles. Tweed suit and crocheted shawl over her shoulders. She moved a pile of books from a tubular steel armchair and urged the inspector to sit down, sat down herself on a swivel chair in front of a desk, and spun round. Of the two rooms, one evidently served as a bedroom and the other as a study. Moreno guessed that nothing else was required. The desk, with a view of rooftops and open sky, was covered in papers, books, dictionaries and a computer. Bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and were chock-a-block with books.

‘I’ve started to do a bit of translating since I finished at the school,’ Gravenstein explained, with a faint suggestion of a smile. ‘You have to find something to do. Italian and French. It helps to make the pension go a bit further as well.’

Moreno nodded in agreement.

‘Literature, I assume?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gravenstein. ‘Mostly poetry, but I’ve done the occasional novel as well.’

‘So you used to teach at Doggers, right? Romance languages?’

‘For thirty-seven years . . . Thirty-seven . . .’

She shrugged and looked somewhat apologetic. Moreno gathered that she didn’t exactly long to be back in the classroom again. And that it was time to come to the point.

‘You were a colleague of Else Van Eck’s, I understand,’ she began. ‘That’s why I want to talk to you. Are you aware of what has happened?’

‘She’s vanished,’ said Gravenstein, adjusting her spectacles.

‘Exactly,’ said Moreno. ‘She’s been missing for nearly seven weeks now, and we still haven’t a clue where she is. There are good reasons for suspecting she is no longer with us. Were you close to her as a colleague?’

Her hostess shook her head and looked worried.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Certainly not. Nobody was – I’m sorry to have to say that, but it’s the way it was. We never met in our free time – apart from the odd occasion when the French Society had something interesting in its programme.’

‘How long did you work together?’

Gravenstein worked it out.

‘Nearly twenty years,’ she said. ‘Else Van Eck is a . . . a remarkable woman. Or was.’

‘In what way?’ wondered Moreno.

Fröken Gravenstein adjusted her shawl while she thought that over.

‘Unsociable,’ she said in the end. ‘She had no desire to associate with or even to talk to the rest of us teachers. She wasn’t unpleasant, but she didn’t bother about other people. She was self-sufficient, if you see what I mean.’

‘What was she like as a teacher?’

Gravenstein gave a hint of a smile.

‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘That might sound unlikely, but it’s a fact. Once the pupils had got to grips with her, they liked her. Maybe young people find it easier to get on with weirdos – I think so. And she loved French. She never taught any other subject, and – well, she was a walking dictionary. And grammar book as well, come to that. Obviously she would never have been able to stay on as a member of staff if she hadn’t had those qualities. Not in view of the way she was.’

Moreno thought for a moment.

‘And why was she the way she was?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I never got to know her, and know nothing about her private life.’

‘What about her professional life?’ Moreno asked. ‘Do you know why she became a French teacher?’

Gravenstein hesitated.

‘There is a story,’ she said.

‘A story?’ Moreno repeated.

Fröken Gravenstein bit her lip and contemplated her hands. Seemed to be discussing something with herself.

‘One of those myths,’ she said. ‘The kind that circulate among pupils about almost every teacher. Sometimes there’s a grain of truth in them, sometimes there isn’t. But you can’t put too much faith in them.’

‘And what was the mythology surrounding Else Van Eck?’ Moreno asked.

‘A love story.’

Moreno nodded encouragingly.

‘Young and unhappy love,’ explained Gravenstein. ‘A Frenchman. They were engaged and were going to get married, but then he left her for someone else.’

Moreno said nothing, waited for a while.

‘Not especially imaginative,’ she said eventually.

‘There’s more to come,’ said fröken Gravenstein. ‘According to legend, she started reading French for his sake, and she continued doing so for his sake. His name is said to be Albert, and after a while he regretted what he’d done. Tried to win her back. But Else refused to forgive him. When it finally got through to him what he’d done, he hurled himself in front of a train and died. Gare du Nord. Hmm . . .’

‘Hmm,’ Moreno agreed. ‘And when was this supposed to have happened?’

Gravenstein threw her arms out wide.

‘I don’t know. When she was young, of course. Shortly after the war, I assume.’

Moreno sighed. Krystyna Gravenstein suddenly smiled broadly.

‘Everybody must have a story,’ she said. ‘For those who don’t, we need to invent one.’

She glanced up at the rows of books as she said that, and Moreno realized that it was a quotation. And that the words had a certain relevance to Gravenstein’s life as well.

What’s my story? she thought in the lift on the way down. Claus? My police work? Or do I have to invent one?

She shuddered when she remembered that there were less than seven days to go to Christmas, and she had no idea how she was going to spend the holiday.

Perhaps I might as well volunteer to work over the whole time, she thought. If I could make things easier for a colleague, why not?

Then she thought for a while about Albert.

A Frenchman who had taken his own life fifty years ago or more? For the sake of Else Van Eck. Would it still be possible to identify him?

And could it have anything at all to do with this case that Intendent Münster insisted on persevering with and poking about in?

No, nothing at all, she decided. Could anything possibly be more far-fetched? Nevertheless she decided to report the matter. To tell the story. The myth. If nothing else it would be nice to sit and talk about it for a while with Münster. Surely she could grant herself that much?

That apart, Krystyna Gravenstein seemed to have sorted out quite a pleasant way of spending her old age, Moreno thought. Sitting up under the roof beams among lots of books high above the town, and doing nothing but read and write . . . Not a bad existence.

But before you got that far, of course, you had a life to find your way through.

She sighed and started walking back to the police station.

Münster checked his watch. Then counted the Christmas presents on the back seat.

Twelve in an hour and a half. Not bad. That gave him plenty of time for his visit to Pampas, and he gathered that the widowed fru de Grooit didn’t like being rushed. Peace and quiet, and there’s a time for everything – that’s what it had sounded like on the telephone.

He parked in the street outside the low, drab, brown house. Sat there for a minute, composing himself and wondering what exactly it was that prevented him from letting go of this business.

In his infinite wisdom, Chief of Police Hiller had declared that in the name of all that’s holy there was no rational reason for wasting any more resources on this case. Waldemar Leverkuhn had been murdered. His wife had confessed to doing it, and on Thursday she would be found guilty of either murder or manslaughter. He didn’t give a toss which. A certain Felix Bonger had gone missing and a certain Else Van Eck had gone missing.

‘So what?’ Hiller had asked, and Münster knew that he was right, in fact. The average number of people who went missing in their district was 15–18 per year, and the fact that two of them happened to disappear at about the same time as the Leverkuhn business was obviously pure coincidence.

Naturally the police continued to look for the two missing persons – just as they did for all the others who had gone up in smoke – but it wasn’t a job for highly paid (overpaid!) detective officers.

Bugger that for a lark. Full stop. Exit Hiller.

It’s a damned nuisance, having to work on the sly, Münster thought as he got out of the car.

But if you are an uncompromising seeker of the truth, you must grin and bear it.

‘Really, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read about it in the paper,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘Take a biscuit. They used to live over there, and we called on one another almost every day.’

She pointed out of the cluttered window at the house on the other side of the hedge.

‘Over there,’ she repeated. ‘Between 1952 and 1976. We moved in when the house was new in 1948, and since my husband died I’ve often thought I ought to move out, but I’ve never got round to it. Don’t be afraid to dunk if you want to. It’s terrible. We are normal people here in Pampas. Honest working people, not murderers. I talk too much, do interrupt me if you need to. My husband always used to say you have to interrupt me in order to shut me up.’

‘Did you know the Leverkuhns well?’ Münster asked.

‘Well . . . no, not really,’ said fru de Grooit, blinking a little nervously. ‘We always had more to do with the Van Klusters and the Bolmeks on the other side and opposite, not so much with the Leverkuhns, no . . . It wasn’t that . . .’