Håkan Nesser - The Unlucky Lottery

Rooth looked up from his coffee cup.

‘The only thing missing from the flat – according to the wife, at least – is a carving knife. Meusse says it could well have been that he used. The length seems to be about right, so that’s the assumption he’s making.’

‘Hm,’ said Münster. ‘What are you thinking of doing now, then?’

Rooth scratched his chin.

‘Going home and lying down for a bit. You are taking over as I understand it. I’ll be back on duty tomorrow if I’m still alive. There are a few people that need to be informed, by the way. I saved that for you. I hope you’ll forgive me, but you’re better at that kind of thing than I am. Besides, you can’t make phone calls like that at any old time in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ said Münster. ‘Who needs to be informed?’

Rooth took a scrap of paper from his inside pocket.

‘A son and a daughter,’ he replied. ‘Neither of them lives here in Maardam. There is another daughter, but she’s in a psychiatric hospital somewhere or other, so I suppose that can wait.’

‘All right,’ said Münster, accepting the addresses. ‘Go home and go to bed, I’ll solve this little problem.’

‘Good,’ said Rooth. ‘If you’ve cracked it by tomorrow morning you’ll get a bar of chocolate.’

‘What a stingy old bastard you are,’ said Münster, lifting the receiver.

There was no reply from either of the numbers, and he wondered if he ought to hand the job over to Krause or one of the others. In any case, it was obvious that old fru Leverkuhn did not feel she was in a fit state to ring her children. To ring and tell them that somebody had just killed their father, that is, by stabbing him twenty to thirty times with the knife they had given him as a Christmas present fifteen years ago.

He could appreciate her point of view. He folded the scrap of paper and decided that this was one of those tasks he couldn’t simply delegate to somebody else. Duties, as they used to be called.

Instead he rang Synn. Explained that he would probably have to work all day, and could hear the disappointment in her silence and the words she didn’t speak. His own disappointment was no less heartfelt, and they hung up after less than a minute.

There were few things Intendent Münster liked better than spending a day in a damp waiting room with Synn. And their children. An unplanned, rainy Sunday.

He closed his eyes and leaned back in his desk chair.

Why, he thought listlessly.

Why did somebody have to go and kill an old man in this bestial fashion?

And why did he have to have a job which so often required him to spend rainy Sundays digging out answers to questions like this one, instead of being with his beloved family?

Why?

He sighed and looked at the clock. The morning had barely started.

He walked to Freddy’s. A grey mist hung over the canals and the deserted Sunday streets, but at least it had stopped raining for the moment. The little restaurant was in Weiskerstraat, on the corner of Langgraacht, and the entrance doors were not yet open. Sundays 12-24 , it said on a yellowed piece of paper taped to the door, but he knocked on the wet glass and, after a long pause, he was allowed in. The door was opened by a powerfully built woman in her forties. She was almost as tall as he was, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, with a slightly grubby red shawl over her head. She was evidently busy transforming the premises into a reasonably presentable state.

Doing the cleaning, you could say.

‘Elizabeth Gautiers?’

She nodded and put a pile of plastic-laminated menus down on the bar counter. Münster looked around. The lighting was very low-key – he assumed this was connected with the level of cleanliness aimed at. Otherwise it looked much the same as any other similar establishment. Dark wooden panels, drab furnishings in brown, green and red. A cigarette machine and a television set. Another room at the back had tables with white cloths and was slightly more generously lit: evidently a somewhat posher dining area. Voices and the clattering of pots and pans could be heard from the kitchen: it was half past ten and they were starting to prepare for lunch.

‘Was it you who rang?’

Münster produced his ID and looked for a convenient place to sit down.

‘We can sit through there. Would you like anything?’

She pointed towards the white tablecloths and led the way through the saloon doors.

‘Coffee, please,’ said Münster, ignoring the fact that he had promised Synn to reduce his intake to four cups per day. This would be his third. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

It wasn’t. They sat down under the branches of a weeping fig made of cloth and plastic, and he took out his notebook.

‘As I said, it’s about that group of diners you had here last night…’ He checked the names. ‘Palinski, Bonger, Wauters and Leverkuhn. All of them regulars, I believe? It looks as if Leverkuhn has been murdered.’

This was evidently news to her, her jaw dropped so far that he could hear a slight clicking noise. Münster wondered if she could possibly have false teeth – she couldn’t be more than forty-five, surely? His own age, more or less.

‘Murdered?’

‘No doubt about it,’ said Münster, and paused.

‘Er… but why?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

She sat absolutely still for a few seconds. Then she removed the shawl and revealed a head of hair almost exactly the same shade of red. But not quite as grubby. A rather beautiful woman, Münster decided, somewhat to his surprise. Large, but beautiful. A good catch for the right man. She lit a cigarette.

‘Robbery, I expect?’

Münster made no reply.

‘Was he attacked on the way home?’

‘Not really. Can you tell me what time he left here?’

Elizabeth Gautiers thought for a moment.

‘Eleven, maybe a few minutes past,’ she said. ‘It had been a bit special,’ she added after a while.

‘Special?’

‘They got drunk. Leverkuhn fell under the table.’

‘Under the table?’

She laughed.

‘Yes, he really did. He dragged the tablecloth down with him, and there was a bit of a palaver. Still, we managed to stand them up and set them on their way… You mean he was killed on the way home?’

‘No,’ said Münster. ‘In his bed. Did they have an argument, these gentlemen, or anything of the sort?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘Did you see how they set off for home? Did you phone for a taxi, perhaps?’

‘That’s never necessary,’ said Gautiers, ‘there are always plenty of taxis just round the corner, in Megsje Plejn. Let me see, I think two of them took a taxi – I was watching through the window. But Leverkuhn and Bonger started walking.’

Münster nodded and made a note.

‘You know them pretty well, I take it?’

‘I certainly do. They sit here two evenings a week, at least. Bonger and Wauters more than that – four or five times. But they’re usually in the bar…’

‘How long have they been coming here?’

‘Ever since I’ve been working here, that’s eight years now.’

‘But yesterday they were in the restaurant?’

She stubbed out her cigarette and thought about that.

‘Yes, there was something special on last night, as I said. They seemed to be celebrating something. I think they had won some money.’

Münster wrote that down.

‘What makes you think that? How would they have won some money?’

‘I don’t know. Football pools or the lottery, I expect – they usually sit here filling in coupons on Wednesday nights. They try to keep it secret for some silly reason, they don’t speak aloud about it, but you catch on even so.’