The Unlucky Lottery

‘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 . . .’

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.