Chapter 36

Marijke put the phone down, struggling with mixed feelings. When Tony hadn’t called her back, she hadn’t known whether to be worried or pissed off. Either way, it left her hanging in mid-air, not knowing what was happening to her one semi-solid lead after weeks of chasing dead ends on the de Groot case. She also found, to her surprise, that she was feeling guilty about keeping her ideas from her colleagues. Reluctantly, she had to admit to herself that she was neither ruthless nor self-confident enough to put her own ambition ahead of the need to put a stop to these killings.

She’d pushed her paperwork to one side and drawn up a brief report of her reasons for suspecting Wilhelm Albert Mann. Of course, without being able to attach Tony’s name to the theory, it didn’t have the advantage of the weight of expertise, but she considered she’d done a good job of making it sound convincing. She’d concluded with the suggestion that, in the absence of any hard evidence, Mann should be put under surveillance.

Then she’d gone in search of Maartens, eventually tracking him down in the bar across the street where he’d stopped for a quick beer on his way home. ‘I want to send this to the cops in Köln,’ she’d said, thrusting it under his nose.

He’d read it carefully, sipping at his Oranjeboom with an expression of vague distrust. ‘Nice work, Marijke,’ he said when he got to the end of it. ‘I’m impressed with your knowledge of nautical knots.’

‘The internet,’ she said. ‘Great research tool. What do you think? Should I send it to them, or is it going to make me look like a crazy woman running on intuition rather than evidence?’

Maartens spluttered a mouthful of beer over his hand. ‘Marijke, if the guys in Köln are looking at as little as we are, they’re going to give you the keys to the city. If nothing else, it gives them something to do that feels like action. Sure, it might just be coincidence, but what you’re saying looks a lot like sense to me. It’s not as if this guy has any legitimate professional reason for being here in Leiden, since we don’t have commercial traffic on our canals. If this landed on my desk tonight, I’d have a team on the bugger by midnight. And I’d keep them on him till either he made a move or somebody else got killed at the other end of the country. Come on, let me buy you a drink to celebrate the first bit of forward movement we’ve had since de Groot got killed.’