The Unlucky Lottery

‘I remember one incident,’ said fru de Grooit after a few moments of silence. ‘That Mauritz didn’t have an easy time of it at school, as I said. He was in the same class as our Bertrand, and on one occasion he’d been beaten up by some older boys. I don’t know how serious it was, or what lay behind it, but in any case, he didn’t dare go back to school . . . And he didn’t dare to stay at home either, scared of what his parents would say or do – fru Leverkuhn was out of work when it happened. So he would pretend to go off to school in the morning, but instead of being in school he was hiding away in the shed at the back of their house all day. He can’t have been more than about eleven or twelve at the time: his sisters knew about it and looked after him . . . One of them was also without a job and so was at home all day and she used to smuggle sandwiches out to him. He sat there for day after day, for about a fortnight at least . . .’

‘Didn’t the school ask about where he was?’ Münster asked.

She shrugged. Brushed some imaginary crumbs off the tablecloth.

‘Eventually, yes. I think he got a good hiding from his dad then. For being such a coward.’

‘Not a very good way of making him any braver,’ said Münster.

‘No,’ said fru de Grooit. ‘But that’s the way he was, Waldemar.’

‘How was he?’ asked Münster.

‘Hard, sort of.’

‘You didn’t like him, I gather?’

Fru de Grooit looked a little embarrassed.

‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘It was a long time ago. We didn’t have a lot to do with them, and you have to leave people in peace if that’s what they want. It takes all sorts . . . Everybody is happy in his own way.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Münster.

He went for a walk among the little detached houses in Pampas when he had taken his leave of fru de Grooit. He was pretty fed up of the little houses, but the weather was pleasant enough for walking.

This Pampas was a rather special part of the town, it couldn’t be denied. And he hadn’t been here for ages. The low-lying, almost swampy area next to the river had not been built on until shortly after the war, when all at once these rows of tiny houses sprang up, all of them with only three or four rooms, on plots barely large enough to accommodate them. A local council project to provide owner-occupied houses for hard-working labourers and junior office workers, if he understood it rightly. A sort of clumsy attempt to boost the lower classes in the direction of equality, and all of them – more than six hundred houses – were still standing in more or less unchanged condition after nearly fifty years. Repaired and modernized and extended here and there, of course, but nevertheless remarkably intact.

Post-war optimism, Münster thought. A monument to an age.

And to a generation that was disappearing into the grave.

Like fru de Grooit and the Leverkuhns.

I’ll never get any further with this damned case, he thought as he settled behind the wheel of his car. It’s going to stand as still as Pampas. Nothing more is going to happen.

But that is where Intendent Münster was wrong.

In spades.

28

If her boyfriend hadn’t given her the boot the previous evening – on 20 December – Vera Kretschke would presumably have slept a bit better.

If she had slept a bit better, she would obviously have been able to run all the way round her jogging route without any problems. She usually did.

If she had managed to run all the way, she certainly wouldn’t have stopped after fifteen hundred metres and started walking instead of running.

And if she hadn’t started walking as slowly as she did, well, she would never have noticed that yellow bit of plastic sticking up from the undergrowth in among the trees a few metres from the path.

Probably not, in any case.

And then . . . then that awful image would not be filling her head like a lump of hot goo, preventing her from having much in the way of rational thoughts.

That’s what she was thinking as she lay in bed that same evening in her old, secure, childhood room, waiting for Reuben to ring despite everything – if not to apologize and take back what he’d said, then at least so that she could tell him what had happened while she was out jogging that morning.

Jogging and walking.

What an ugly sight, she thought, and stopped. Why couldn’t people dispose of things in the right place instead of out here in the forest?

Weyler’s Woods nature park was not large, but it was popular and well looked-after. There were waste paper bins and rubbish bins alongside all the paths for walkers and joggers that criss-crossed the forest in all directions, and she didn’t usually need to stop and pick up rubbish that had been dumped like this.

Occasionally an ice-lolly stick or an empty cigarette packet, perhaps, but not a big plastic carrier bag.

Vera Kretschke was the chairman of her school’s environmental society – had been for the last three terms – and she felt a certain responsibility.