“Is there anything for us to sink our teeth into?” asked Rein-hart with a sigh.

“No,” said Moreno. “Not really. She also has a stable but rather boring marriage. Works part-time in an old folks' home. Her husband's a businessman. They both have alibis for the night of the murder, and it seems pretty unlikely that either of them could be involved-completely unthinkable, in fact.”

All was quiet for a while. Rooth produced a bar of chocolate from his jacket pocket and Heinemann tried to scrape a stain off the table with his thumbnail. Van Veeteren had closed his eyes, and it was more or less impossible to make out if he was awake or asleep.

“Okay,” said Reinhart eventually. “There's just one thing I want to know. Who the hell did it?”

“A madman,” said Rooth. “Somebody who wanted to test his Berenger and noticed that the lights were on in the house.”

“I reckon you've hit the nail on the head,” said Heinemann.

“No,” said Van Veeteren without opening his eyes.

“Oh, really?” said Reinhart. “How do you know that?”

“By the prickings of my thumb,” said Van Veeteren.

“Eh?” said Heinemann. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Shall we go and get some coffee?” suggested Rooth.

Van Veeteren opened his eyes.

“Preferably a hot toddy, as I said before.”

Reinhart checked the time.

“It's only eleven,” he said. “But I'm all for it. This case stinks like a shit heap.”

On the way home from the police station that gloomy Monday, Reinhart stopped off at the Merckx shopping center out at Bossingen. It was really against his principles to buy anything in such a temple of commerce, but he decided to turn a blind eye to the crassness of it all today. He simply didn't feel up to running around from one little shop to the next in the center of town, after rooting about in the unsavory details of Ryszard Malik's background.

Half an hour later he had acquired a lobster, two bottles of wine, and eleven roses. Plus a few other goodies. That would have to do. He left the inferno and a quarter of an hour later went through the front door of his apartment in Zuyderstraat. Put away his purchases in their appointed places, then made a phone call.

“Hi. I've got a lobster, some wine, and some roses. You can have them all if you get yourself here within the next hour.”

“But it's Monday today,” said the woman at the other end.

“If we don't do anything about it, it'll be Monday for the rest of our lives,” said Reinhart.

“Okay,” said the woman. “I'll be there.”

Winnifred Lynch was a quarter Aboriginal, born in Perth, Australia, but raised in England. After a degree in English language and literature in Cambridge and a failed and childless marriage, she'd landed a post as guest lecturer at Maardam University. When she met Reinhart at the Vox jazz club in the middle of November, she'd just celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday. Reinhart was forty-nine. He went home with her, and they made love (with the occasional pause) for the next four days and nights-but to the surprise of both of them, given their previous experiences, it didn't end there. They carried on meeting. All over the place: at concerts, restaurants, cinemas, and, above all, of course, in bed. As soon as the beginning of December it was clear to Reinhart that there was something special about this slightly brown-skinned, intelligent woman, and when she went back to England for the Christmas holidays he felt withdrawal symptoms, the like of which he hadn't experienced for nearly thirty years. A sudden reminder of what it was like to miss somebody. Of the fact that somebody actually meant something to him.

The feeling scared him stiff, no doubt about that; it was a warning, but when she came back after three weeks he couldn't help but go to meet her at the airport. Stood waiting with a bunch of roses and a warm embrace, and of course it started all over again.

This Monday was the fifth-or was it the sixth?-occasion since then, and when he thought about it he realized that it could hardly have been more than ten days since she'd returned from vacation.

So you could bet your life that he had something special going.

“Why did you become a policeman?” she asked as they lay back in bed afterward. “You promised you'd tell me one day.”

“It's a trauma,” he said after a moment's thought.

“I'm human, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

She didn't answer, but after a while he imagined that he understood.

“All right,” he said. “It was a woman. Or a girl. Twenty years old.”

“What happened?”

He hesitated, and inhaled deeply twice on his cigarette before answering.

“I was twenty-one. Reading philosophy and anthropology at the university, as you know. We'd been together for two years. We were going to get married. She was reading languages. One night she was going home after a lecture and was stabbed by a lunatic in Wollerim's Park. She died in the hospital before I got there. It took the police six months to find her killer. I was one of them by that time.”

If she has the good sense to say nothing, I want to spend the rest of my life with her, he thought out of the blue.

Winnifred Lynch put her hand on his chest. Stroked him gently for a few seconds, then got up and went to the bathroom.

That does it, then, Reinhart acknowledged in surprise.

Later on, when they'd made love again and then recovered, he couldn't resist asking her a question.

“What do you have to say about a murderer who fired two shots into the groin of a victim who's already lying dead?”

She thought for a moment.

“The victim's a man, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think the murderer is a woman.”

Well, I'll be damned, Reinhart thought.

9

The weekend spent by a stormy sea had had an invigorating effect on Police Chief Hiller, and when he returned to work on Monday morning he promptly ordered full steam ahead on the Malik case.

What that meant in practice was no fewer than six officers of the Criminal Investigation Department, with Van Veeteren in charge, plus whatever foot soldiers were around, all of them expected to work full-time on finding the murderer. Senior officers in addition to Van Veeteren were Reinhart, Münster, Rooth, Heinemann, and Moreno. Jung had succumbed to influenza after his succession of sleepless nights and was expected to be sidelined for several more days yet. DeBries was on vacation.

Van Veeteren had nothing in principle against having so many people working on the case. The only problem was that there wasn't very much for them to do that made sense. Trying to trace the murder weapon via narks and contacts in the so-called underworld was a hopeless, Sisyphean task, as he knew. In order to increase the chances of success to twenty-five percent, it would mean assigning a hundred police officers to that job for a hundred days-plus generous overtime money. That kind of staffing was resorted to only when a prime minister had been murdered. It was widely believed by the senior officers that Ryszard Malik had not been prime minister.

That left the wife. Van Veeteren charged Moreno and Heinemann with keeping an eye on Ilse Malik's gradual return to full consciousness and emergence from the shadows. It was decided that they might as well have somebody at the hospital around the clock, seeing as they had enough officers available for once. You could never tell, and if there was anybody who might be able to come up with something relevant to this business, she was the one.

The only other thing to do was to cast bread upon the waters. That was always a possibility. Call on anybody who had any kind of link with Malik-neighbors, business acquaintances, old and new friends-and ask them questions, in accordance with the proven method used with pigs searching for truffles; i.e., if you continue rooting around in the ground for long enough, sooner or later you'll come across something edible.