The Corpse on the Dike

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  “Grijpstra,” de Gier said again.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “He was shot from the garden,” de Gier said, “through the open window.”

  “I know.”

  “Look at all those empty beer cans.”

  “I have seen them.”

  “This is an antique shop,” de Gier said. “Where did he get all this stuff? It’s valuable too. If the whole house is filled with this type of furniture, he must have owned a hundred thousand guilders’ worth of antiques. So why didn’t he get someone to clean up for him? And why didn’t he polish his shoes? Or get a new color TV instead of that croaky old thing? Or buy a shirt?”

  “Yes,” Grijpstra said.

  “Crazy,” de Gier said. “A crazy man. And why kill him?”

  “And why be neat in the garden and sloppy in the house?” Grijpstra asked.

  “I don’t know,” de Gier said. “I’m sloppy on the balcony and neat in the house. Other way around. But not as sloppy as this bird.”

  “He looks like a rabbit,” Grijpstra said, “not a bird.”

  “A rabbit?” de Gier asked and stood up so that he could see the face of the dead man. He sat down again. “Yes. Harmless sort of face. So what do we do now?”

  “Wait,” Grijpstra said, “and remember to keep people from tramping about in the garden. There should be some prints out mere. I would think that he stood over there, right in front of the open windows, and that the killer stood in the garden. The killer must have called him and fired as soon as he showed himself.”

  “It has begun to rain,” de Gier said gloomily, “and it rained yesterday. This corpse may be a few days old.” He sniffed, and got white in the face again.

  Grijpstra sniffed too. “A bit of a smell, not much. The windows were open of course.”

  “There may still be prints,” de Gier said, “somewhere where the rain couldn’t get at them to wipe them out.”

  “There’ll be something,” Grijpstra said in a soothing voice, as if he wanted to reassure not only de Gier but himself as well. He felt tired and stupid and he didn’t want a difficult case to work on. The summer had been hot so far and the small house on the Lijnbaansgracht, where he lived with his fat wife and three noisy children, had exhausted him. The endless variety show that his TV poured out evening after evening had worn his nerves down to thin infected threads. There had been a lot of loud fights with his wife. Whenever he switched the set off she switched it on again. There had been no escape. The voices of the comics, the bad men and the good men of the crime films, the quiz masters and the newscasters had followed him to the small bedroom. His wife liked to put the volume up. She was getting deaf. I’ll be deaf too; soon I’ll be deaf, Grijpstra thought hopelessly. He had a vision of a quiet room somewhere else, a room without TV, and with a view of the river. He could sit in that room and watch the boats coming past. Lovely. No wife. He saw the plastic curlers in her hair and shuddered. No more women in his life. He would read the paper and paint in his free time. And de Gier could come visit him sometimes and they might play music together, and then de Gier would go and he would have the room all to himself again. No wife. No TV. But there would still be the children. He would take them for walks during the weekends, especially the two little ones, and his wife would screech at him from the open house door. She might come to Police Headquarters and screech at him there. She had done it before, after he had been away for a few days once. He had been working at the time but she thought that he had left her. He felt his face go red with shame. It had been the most horrible scene of his life. The commissaris had saved him that time. He had talked to the hysterical woman and got her out of Grijpstra’s room into the corridor and eventually out of the building. De Gier had been embarrassed, de Gier and the other detectives who had been forced witnesses to the scene. Grijpstra jumped. Someone had rung the bell.

  “I’ll go,” de Gier said. “About time too.”

  “Evening,” the commissaris said to Grijpstra. “What have we found now?”

  “He’s over there, sir,” Grijpstra said. The corpse was hidden from the commissaris by a table, covered with a thick oriental rug that hung down to the floor.

  “Ah,” the commissaris said and bent down. He studied the appearance and the position of the dead man, and glanced up at the open windows.

  The bell rang again and de Gier opened the door to two policemen in uniform. There were a lot of people running about on the dike now and some of them began to talk to de Gier, asking him what had happened.

  “Whoever lives here is dead,” de Gier said to the crowd. “Does anyone know the man?”

  There was no answer. The faces stared at the tall handsome detective wearing a blue denim suit. They were studying the stranger who had projected himself into their routine. They noted the curly hair, the blue eyes and the delicate hawk’s nose. De Gier looked back at them and was reminded of a painting by Brueghel. The faces he saw seemed to belong to nitwits, idiots. The man closest to him was wearing torn black corduroy trousers and a dirty shirt, open and showing the gray hairs on his thin chest. There were no hairs on the shining skull, gleaming in the electric light of the dike; and the toothless mouth was a dark hole below the bulbous nose, puffed and violet by a million glasses of raw jenever that had oozed through its veins. The man inspired little confidence but he was, de Gier thought, perhaps the best of the small crowd facing him.

  “You,” de Gier said, touching the man on the shoulder, “do you know the man who lived here?”

  “I know his name,” the man said, “Tom Wernekink is his name.”

  “Lived here long?” de Gier asked.

  “A year maybe, or longer. Not much longer. He bought the house when the fellow who lived in it before was taken away.”

  “Jail?”

  “No. The madhouse. Old granddad who did a bit of drinking.” The toothless mouth tittered. “Ambulance took him away and he never came back. His children sold the house. Too cheap. I heard the price later. Should have bought it myself. Houses are worth a lot of money nowadays.”

  “Was he working?” de Gier asked. “This Tom Wernekink? Did he ever have a job?”

  The little fellow was shaking his head. “No. He was always here, in his garden. Maybe he was collecting unemployment benefits. He went away in his car sometimes but he was always right back again.”

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “No. He didn’t talk. Said good morning and good afternoon, that was all he said.”

  “OK,” de Gier said, wondering why he was wasting his time. He could always ask the girl with the nice breasts who lived next door.

  “If anyone has any information that may help us, please leave your name and address with the constables here,” he said in a loud voice, addressing the crowd. He turned to the two uniformed policemen. “You’d better stay here and guard the door. There’ll be more cars coming in a minute. There is a dead man inside. Perhaps somebody knows something. You can call me if you think you should; I’ll be inside or in the house next door.”

  “Did he cop a bullet?” one of the constables asked.

  “Yes, right between the eyes.”

  “Look for his wife or his girlfriend, sergeant,” the constable said. “I have a collection of newspaper articles at home; whenever there is a crime in the paper I clip it out. I was reading through all the manslaughter stuff I have the other day and every time it seems to be the husband or the wife or the lover, especially in Amsterdam. Strange, isn’t it?”

  “My wife wouldn’t kill me,” the other constable said.

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I work for her, don’t I?”

  “You also irritate her,” the constable said, “and you are always around. Every evening, the weekends, the holidays.”

  De Gier laughed.

  “You don’t agree, sergeant?” the constable asked.

  “Sure,” de Gier said, “but I was thinking that I haven’t got a wife.”

  “Girlfriend
s do it too,” the constable said.

  “I haven’t got a girlfriend right now,” de Gier said, “but I think I irritate my cat. Look.” He showed a deep scratch on his wrist.

  “Exactly,” the constable said. “Proves my theory. Your cat gets frustrated, or depressed, or just a little crazy, and who does he attack? You. You are the first thing in his way so he goes for you.”

  “Good reasoning, constable,” de Gier said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Probably read it somewhere,” the other constable said, and posted himself at the door, legs astride and clasped hands on his back. He straightened himself and looked at the crowd from under his cap.

  “All right, get going, get going,” the other constable shouted. “Don’t obstruct the road. Nothing to see here now.”

  The police cars finally arrived and the investigation followed its normal course with special attention paid to the garden where two men wandered around holding powerful torches. Some footprints were found and soon the men were kneeling in the wet earth, building boxes out of metal foil, sprinkling gypsum powder into a bucket and stirring the mixture carefully, muttering at the photographers who were also interested in the prints.

  De Gier looked for Grijpstra and found him upstairs in the loft where the commissaris was sitting on an unmade bed. “I agree, Grijpstra,” the commissaris was saying. “Our friend didn’t look after himself much. Dirty sheets, unswept floor, full ashtrays, beer cans everywhere. Did you find a bathroom or a shower anywhere?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So he must have washed and shaved in the kitchen sink. But he was rich, undoubtedly. I was looking at that antique rosewood desk downstairs, a collector’s piece. I’m sure it’s worth a small fortune. And the china collection in the cupboard is worth a fortune too. Yet he didn’t seem to care for the stuff. He didn’t even bother to place the furniture properly. It looks as if the movers plunked it down and that’s where it stayed. Let’s look for his papers; maybe they’ll tell us something.”

  Grijpstra and de Gier began to open drawers and cupboard doors. They found clothes, dirty clothes mostly. “The doctor is probably finished with the body now,” Grijpstra said. “He should have a wallet in his jacket.” The commissaris negotiated the narrow staircase carefully. Grijpstra clomped down and de Gier, after a last look around the loft, followed him.

  “Evening,” the commissaris said to the doctor and shook hands. “Any idea how long he has been dead?”

  “Some time,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to do my tests but I would think that the bullet got him at least two days ago. It’ll be difficult to determine the exact time; the longer the body lies around the harder the case becomes. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “Can I go through his pockets?” de Gier asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Let me do it,” Grijpstra said. “You’ll faint and we don’t want more work for the doctor.”

  “Thanks,” de Gier said.

  The commissaris smiled. De Gier had fainted before— twice in fact—and both times when confronted by a corpse, but fainting is not unusual in the police. And de Gier wouldn’t faint when he had to be active in some way—run, or shoot, or think.

  “Here,” Grijpstra said, and gave the wallet to the commissaris.

  The commissaris looked through its contents. He studied the passport, which showed rubber stamps indicating three trips to England, each trip lasting exactly two weeks. Holidays, the commissaris thought. There was also an address in Kralingen, a suburb of Rotterdam. The address was crossed out and a new address given as 131, Landsburger dike, Amsterdam North. The change of address had been countersigned by a clerk of the mayor’s office. “Office employee,” the commissaris said aloud; “so he does have a job, or he did have a job anyway. And he is thirty-one years old. Thomas Wernekink. Well, well. We still know nothing.” There was a driver’s license in the wallet, four hundred guilders and a slip from the bank showing that he had 28,000 guilders in his current account.

  “A lot of money,” Grijpstra said.

  “There may be even more,” the commissaris said. “This is his current account; he may have a savings account as well. We’ll check with the bank tomorrow. Banks usually know something about their clients and he is banking with a small branch office. The Rotterdam police should be very helpful, they always are. We have his old address in Kralingen; isn’t that a very expensive suburb?”

  “Yes, sir,” Grijpstra said, “lots of villas and a big park and some exclusive blocks of flats facing the park. There’s a lake, a nice lake—people go sailing there.”

  “Some information anyway,” the commissaris said. “We’ll go into it tomorrow. Anything else we should do here?”

  “We could go talk to the girl next door,” de Gier said, “the girl who asked us to take a look here. She seemed to be in love with Wernekink but he never even asked her in, so she won’t know much. Still…”

  “All right.” The commissaris tried to look brisk and businesslike but all he really wanted to do was to go home and have a very hot bath. His legs were bothering him and the hot water would soak the pain out of his bones. “All right, let’s go next door.”

  The door opened the minute de Gier put his finger on the bell. “Good evening,” the commissaris said to the short fat woman who had introduced herself earlier to de Gier as Mary van Krompen. “We would like to ask a few questions to a young lady who lives here, I believe. Do you mind if we come in?”

  The woman stared at the commissaris. “Well…” she said, “it’s pretty late. Can’t you come back tomorrow? We would like to go to bed.”

  “Please, madam,” the commissaris said gently, “we are police officers and there has been a crime next door. A man has been shot dead; we would like to apprehend the killer and perhaps the young lady and yourself can help us.”

  Mary van Krompen weakened. The commissaris looked very harmless and kind. “Come in,” she said gruffly. They were led into a sitting room and the woman stamped off to find the girl.

  Their surroundings were very different now. The room was light and clean and the general appearance of the house was pleasant enough. Some effort had been made to restore the old building but the beams supporting the ceiling had been left as they had been for several hundred years, their dark color setting off the white walls. There were fresh flowers on the table and potted plants on the windowsills. A row of silver trophies were displayed on a corner table, some eight silver cups, varying in size. Grijpstra got up to admire them. “I say,” Grijpstra said, “you know what these are?” The commissaris and de Gier joined him. De Gier picked up one of the cups and studied it. The cup was decorated with two crossed revolvers.

  “Shooting trophies,” the commissaris said.

  They were still looking at the trophies when Mary van Krompen came back, bringing the girl with her.

  “Evelien Dapper,” the girl said to the three men, “that’s my name. You want to see me?”

  “Yes, dear,” the commissaris said, “please sit down. We know you are very upset but you discovered the body and you knew the man, so you can be very helpful to our investigation.”

  The girl sniffed.

  “Please tell us what you know,” the commissaris said gently.

  “I’ve already told the other men,” the girl said and crumpled her handkerchief into a hard little ball. “I was worried about Tom so I went into his house and there he was, on the floor.”

  “Yes. You had never been in his house before?”

  “No,” Mary said suddenly and glared at the commissaris. “They used to whisper to each other over the fence and she gave him cups of tea.”

  “We didn’t whisper,” the girl said indignantly. “We just talked and he was always very nice. We were neighbors, weren’t we, and he never did anything for himself except digging about in his garden; so why shouldn’t I make him a cup of tea sometimes?”

  “Quite, quite,” the commissaris said, smiling at Mary. “Why shouldn’t she? B
ut he never asked you in?”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “But that’s strange, isn’t it? You are an attractive girl and he was a young man, and you got to know each other. How long did you know him?”

  “As long as I’ve lived here,” the girl said. “Three months now, I think.”

  Mary laughed and the commissaris gave her a puzzled look. “Sorry,” Mary said. “I don’t want to be unpleasant but I have been wondering myself. Here they were, every afternoon, chatting away and sipping their tea and he never even thought of asking her in.”

  “A very shy young man perhaps,” the commissaris said.

  The girl began to cry again and de Gier felt guilty. He remembered how he had ignored her tears and stuttered questions when earlier they left the house for Wernekink’s. He had been mumbling at her instead of saying something helpful.

  He remembered the lessons in police philosophy at school. It is the task of the police to actively maintain order and to assist those who are in need of help. The girl had been in need of help but he hadn’t even listened to her; he had been too busy trying to suppress his own fear and nausea. And he shuddered when he remembered coming back from the café telephone. The dike had been filled with small groups of people, clustered together in the eerie reflection of streetlights swinging in a storm that had chosen that moment to swoop down from the great inland lake. An old man had stopped him to ask what was going on in Tom Wernekink’s house. He hadn’t answered and the old man had leered at him. “A bit of work for you today, hey, state pimp? Finally have to do something in return for all that lovely tax money?” The words “state pimp” had made de Gier stop but he had forced himself to go on.

  “It’s no use asking her anything, commissaris,” Mary said, “or me for that matter. We didn’t know the boy really.”