The Unlucky Lottery

Hardly had he left through the front door than he was accosted by a bearded man aged about thirty-five with a notebook and pen in his hand.

‘Bejman, Neuwe Blatt,’ he explained. ‘Have you got a moment?’

‘No,’ said Rooth.

‘Just a couple of questions?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’ve already told you all we know.’

‘But you must know something else by now, surely?’

‘Hmm,’ said Rooth, looking round furtively. ‘Not officially.’

Bejman leaned forward to hear better.

‘We’re looking for a red-headed dwarf.’

‘A red-headed . . .?’

‘Yes, but don’t write anything about that, for God’s sake. We’re not really sure yet.’

He observed the reporter’s furrowed brow for two seconds, then hurried over the street and jumped into his car.

I shouldn’t have said that, he thought.

10

The Rote Moor was characterized by stucco work, uninspiring cut-glass chandeliers and self-assured women. Münster sat down behind an oak-panelled screen and hoped the pianist didn’t work mornings. As he sat there waiting, gazing out of the crackled windowpane overlooking Salutorget and the bustling shoppers, he began to feel for the first time that he was able to concentrate on the case.

As usual. It always took some time before the initial feeling of distaste faded away, a day or two before he managed to shake off his immediate reactions – protesting about and distancing himself from the violent killing that was always the starting point, the starting gun, the opening move in every new case. Every new task.

And the disgust. The disgust that was always there. At the start of his career – when he spent nearly all his working time in freezing cold cars keeping watch during the night, or thanklessly shadowing suspects, or making door-to-door enquiries – he had believed the disgust would go away once he had learned how to face up to all the unpleasantness, but as the years passed he realized that this was not the case. On the contrary, the older he became the more important it seemed to be to protect himself and to keep things at arm’s length. It was only when the initial waves of disgust had begun to ebb away that it made any sense to start digging deeper into the case. To establish and try to become closely acquainted with the nature of the crime. Its probable background. Causes and motives.

The very essence, as Van Veeteren used to put it.

The pattern.

No doubt the chief inspector had taught him some of these strategies, but by no means all. During the last few years – the last few cases – Van Veeteren’s disgust had been even greater than his own, he was quite certain of that. But perhaps that was a right that came with increased age, Münster thought. Age and wisdom.

Hard to say. There was a sort of pattern in the chief inspector’s last years as well. And in his current environment among all those books. That unfathomable concept known as the determinant, in fact, that Münster had never really got to grips with. Never understood what it actually meant. But perhaps it would dawn on him one of these days: time and inertia were not only the province of oblivion, but sometimes also of gradual realization. In fact.

But Waldemar Leverkuhn. Forget everything else! Münster rested his head on his hands.

A seventy-two-year-old pensioner killed in his sleep. Brutally murdered by a hair-raisingly large number of stab wounds – excessive violence, as it was called. A dodgy term, of course, but perhaps it was appropriate in this case.

Why?

For Christ’s sake, why so many stab wounds?

A waitress in a white hat coughed discreetly, but Münster asked her to wait until his companion arrived, and she withdrew. He turned his back on the premises and instead watched two pigeons strutting back and forth on the broad window ledge while he tried to conjure up an image of Leverkuhn’s mutilated body in his mind’s eye.

Twenty-eight stabs. What did that suggest?

It was hardly an insoluble puzzle. Fury, of course. Raging fury. The person who had put an end to this old man had been totally out of self-control. There had been no reason to continue after four or five stabs if the aim had been simply to kill the victim. Meusse had been crystal clear on that point. The last thirty seconds – the last fifteen or twenty stabs – were an expression of something other than the urge to kill.

Frenzy? Insanity? Revenge and retribution, perhaps? An implacable and long-standing hatred that now finally erupted and resolved itself?

The latter possibility was mere speculation; but it was logical, and there was nothing to rule it out.

The possibility that there might be a deep-seated motive, in other words.

Münster tapped on the window pane and the pigeons flew off, their wings numb with cold.

But of course there was nothing to rule out Rooth’s theory either – a crazy drug addict. Nothing at all.

You pays your money and makes your choice, Münster thought.

Still, even if Chief of Police Hiller cuts our resources to the bone, I’m going to have a stab at resolving this case.