Janwillem De Wetering: Death of a Hawker

Grijpstra had put his handkerchief away and was fumbling with a black cigar which he had found in a box on the counter. "What do you want the commissaris to do?" he asked gruffly. "Order champagne?"

The commissaris smiled and scraped a match. "Here," he said mildly. "It isn't the right night for champagne."

Grijpstra inhaled and glared at de Gier. The smoke burned Grijpstra's throat and he began to cough, pushing himself away from the bar and upsetting a stool. The smoke was still in his lungs and he couldn't breathe and he was stamping on the floor, making the glasses and bottles, lined up on narrow shelves attached to a large mirror, touch and tinkle.

"Easy," the doctor said, and began to pound Grijpstra's solid back. "Easy, put that cigar away!"

"No. I'll be all right."

"Syrup," Nellie said. "I have some syrup, dear."

The thick liquid filled a liqueur glass and Grijpstra swallowed obediently.

"All of it," Nellie said.

Grijpstra emptied the glass and began to cough again, the cigar smoldering in his hand.

"Stop coughing," de Gier said. "You have had your syrup. Stop it, I say." Grijpstra hiccupped. "That's better."

They drank their second glass of jenever and Grijpstra quieted down.

"We'll have to talk business," the commissaris said to Nellie. "I hope you don't mind, dear."

"Do you want me to go away?"

"Not unless you want to. Now, what did you think, doctor? You had time to study the body, did you?"

The doctor rested his eyes on the lowest point of Nellie's cleavage. "Yes," he said slowly. "Yes, quite. I had enough time although we'll have to do some standard tests later, of course. I have never seen anything like it. He must have been killed this afternoon, at four o'clock perhaps, or four thirty. The blood was fresh. I would think he was hit by a round object, small and round, like an old-fashioned bullet fired by a musket. But it looks as if he was hit several times. There were marks all over the face, or over the remains of the face, I should say. Every bone is smashed, jaws, cheekbones, forehead, nose. The nose is the worst. It seems that the object, whatever it was, hit the nose first and then bounced about."

"A musket," the commissaris said. "Hmm. Somebody could have stood on the roof of that old houseboat opposite the house and shot him from there. But it's unlikely. The Straight Tree Ditch has been patrolled by riot police all afternoon. They would have noticed something, wouldn't they?"

"Your problem, it seems," the doctor said. "All I found was a corpse with a smashed face. Perhaps someone clobbered him with a hammer, jumped about like a madman and kept on hitting him. How about that?"

He looked at the fingerprint man. The fingerprint man was shaking his head.

"No?" the commissaris asked.

"Don't know," the fingerprint man said, "but I found funny prints. There was blood on the windowsill, not much, traces of blood really. But there was also blood on the wall above the window, small imprints of a round object, like the doctor said. Round. So the madman must have been banging away at the wall as well, and on the windowsill. With a hammer with a round head. There were imprints on the floorboards too."

"Sha," de Gier said.

"Pardon?" the commissaris asked.

"No," de Gier said, "not a hammer. But I don't know what else."

"A ball," Grijpstra said. "A little ball which bounced about. Elastic, a rubber ball."

"Studded with spikes," the fingerprint man said.

"That would explain the imprints. I photographed them and we'll have them enlarged tomorrow. There were marks, groups of red dots. Say you hammer a lot of spikes into a rubber ball, the heads of the spikes will protrude slightly. We can do a test. Leave some open places so that the rubber can still touch whatever it hits and bounce back."

"But there would have been a lot of balls, wouldn't there?" the commissaris asked. "One ball wouldn't do all that damage, so somebody would be pitching them from the roof of the houseboat, one after another, assuming Abe Rogge was standing in the window and taking them all full in the face. And we found nothing. Or did I miss anything?"

"No, sir," Grijpstra said. "There were no balls in the room."

"Silly," de Gier said. "I don't believe a word of it. Balls ha! Somebody was there, right in the room, and hit him and went on hitting him. The first blow knocked him down and the killer couldn't stop himself. Must have been in a rage. Some weapon with spikes. A good-day."

"Yes," the commissaris said thoughtfully, "a good-day. A medieval weapon, a metal ball on the end of a short stick and the ball is spiked. Sometimes the ball was attached to the handle with a short chain. Would explain the marks on the wall and the windowsill, a weapon like that covers a sizable area. The killer swung it and he hit the wall with the backward stroke. What do you say, doctor?"

The doctor nodded.

"So the killer left and took the weapon with him. Nobody saw him, nobody heard him. The riots on the Newmarket may have drowned the noise."

"His sister heard nothing," de Gier said. "She was upstairs part of the time and in the kitchen part of the time. And that young fellow was upstairs too."

"Could have been one of them," Grijpstra said.

"They both benefit by the death," the commissaris said. "His sister inherits and the young man might believe he could take over the business. And we may assume that it was murder as there seems to have been some planning. The riots may have been used as cover and the weapon is unusual."

"Not necessarily," Grijpstra said. "There may have been a good-day on the wall, as a decoration. Someone lost his temper, grabbed it and…"

"Yes, yes," the commissaris said. "We'll have to find out, but I don't want to go back now. Tomorrow. You or de Gier, or both of you. There are a lot of suspects* These hawkers lived outside the law. They don't pay much tax, sales tax or income tax. They always have more money than they can account for, put away in a tin or hidden in the mattress, or under a loose board. We may be dealing with armed robbery."

"Or a friend had a go at him," de Gier said. "His sister was telling me that he had a lot of arty friends. They would come for meals and drink and talk and he would play games with them, psychological games.

They had to admit they were fools."

"What?" the commissaris asked.

De Gier explained.

"I see, I see, I see," the commissaris said, then smiled at Nellie.

"Another glass?" Nellie asked.

"No, coffee perhaps, or would that be too much trouble?"

"Coffee," Nellie said, "yes. It would be the first cup I ever served here. I can make some upstairs and bring it down."

The commissaris looked hopeful. "Does everybody want coffee?"

The five men agreed they all wanted coffee, eagerly, like small children asking for a treat. Nellie changed with them. Her smile was motherly, she wanted to care for them. The feeling in the pink whore's hole changed; the soft-shaded lights, the chintzy chairs, the two low tables with their plastic tops decorated with frilly doilies, the sickening disharmony of pinks, mauves and bloody and fleshy reds no longer inspired the urgency of sex but softened down into an unexpected intimacy; five male disciples adoring the goddess and the goddess cares and gives and flows and oozes and goes upstairs to make coffee in a percolator. Grijpstra reached across the bar and grabbed the stone jar of jenever. The glasses were refilled.

The commissaris sipped. "Yes," he said, and looked over his glass. "Strange place this. So all we have is questions. That remark of yours interested me, de Gier."

De Gier looked up, his thoughts had been far away. "Sir?"

"About Abe Rogge trying to make fools out of his friends. A powerful personality no doubt, even the corpse looked powerful. So he humiliated his entourage. The king and his court. One of the courtiers killed the king."