to individual pedestrians on a street where there was regular foot traffic. Whoever had killed Pieter de Groot, he hadn’t drawn attention to himself.
Marijke had spent the rest of the day supervising a search of de Groot’s home, to see if there was anything that might be construed as a clue to the bizarre scenario that had been played out in the upstairs room. But there was nothing. She wondered about what was missing, however. There was no sign of a diary, desk calendar or personal organizer in the office. She couldn’t believe a man like de Groot wouldn’t have some sort of aide memoire for his appointments in his home office. She’d even had one of the technicians check over his computer to see if he kept an electronic diary, but that had drawn a blank too.
But sometimes absences held their own clues. To Marijke, this lack said that whoever had killed Pieter de Groot was no casual caller. He’d been expected, and he’d taken care to remove all trace of that appointment. If she was right, there was a chance that there might be a duplicate note of the arrangement in de Groot’s diary at the university. She made a note to herself to make sure she was there when they entered his office, and set one of her officers the task of getting them admission first thing in the morning.
Eventually, she grudgingly accepted there was nothing more for her to do. Her team was busy with the tedious routine of sifting material and information that would probably prove useless. They didn’t need her. The best way she could serve the inquiry now was to go home and let her mind turn over what little they knew. Sleep, she always found, was the best possible state in which to uncover new angles of approach.
But sleep wasn’t going to come any time soon, Marijke knew. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled herself down in front of her computer. Some months previously, she’d become a subscriber to an on-line newsgroup for gay police officers. Not that there was any problem with being a lesbian and a Dutch police officer, nor did she have a ghetto mentality. But sometimes it was helpful to have what she thought of as a room of one’s own and, via the newsgroup, she’d developed close friendships with a handful of other officers whose take on the world chimed comfortingly with her own. More than that, she’d formed a bond of particular intimacy with a German colleague. Petra Becker was a criminal intelligence officer in Berlin and, like Marijke, senior enough not to be entirely comfortable with close confiding relationships with her colleagues. Like Marijke, Petra was also single, another damaged survivor of the attrition of their career on relationships. They’d been cautious with each other at first, escaping from the newsgroup into private live chat rooms where they could write more openly about thoughts and feelings. They were both aware that each had found some special connection to the other, but they were equally reluctant to push for a face-to-face encounter in case it shattered what they valued.
And so they had developed the habit of spending an hour or so in each other’s virtual company several nights a week. Tonight there was no prior arrangement in place, but Marijke knew that if Petra was at home and awake, she’d be in one of the public chat rooms on the gay police site, and that she’d be able to tempt her away from the crowd into private discussion.
She connected to the website and clicked on the <chat> icon. There was a list of public discussion areas, and she went straight to the Debating Forum, a room where people tended to talk about policy and its impact on their work. Half a dozen people were engaged in a heated argument about undercover operations, opinions flying as fast as fingers could type, but Petra wasn’t one of them. Marijke exited and entered the Lesbian Issues area. This time, she was lucky. Petra was one of three women rehashing a recent Danish case of alleged lesbian rape, but as soon as she saw Marijke’s name on her screen, she escaped and took her into a private area where they could exchange on-screen messages without anyone eavesdropping.
Petra: hello, love. how are you tonight?
Marijke: I just got in. We caught a murder today.
P: that’s never fun.
M: No. And this was a really nasty one.
P: domestic? street?
M: Neither. The worst kind. Ritualistic, organized, no obvious suspects. Clearly personal, but in an impersonal sort of way, if you see what I mean.
P: who’s the victim?
M: A professor at the university in Leiden. Pieter de Groot. His cleaner found the body. He was in his study at home, staked out naked on his desk. He’d been drowned by having a funnel or a pipe shoved down his throat, then water poured through it.
P: very nasty. was he one of those scientists who do animal experiments?
M: He was an experimental psychologist. I don’t know much detail about what he did. But I don’t think this is about animal rights. I think this was a one-on-one. There’s more, you see. Whoever did this, they didn’t stop at killing. There’s mutilation as well.
P: genital?
M: Yes and no. The killer left his prick and balls intact, but scalped his pubic hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was almost worse than if he’d been castrated. That would have made more sense, more typical of what the sexually motivated killer would do.
P: you know, this is ringing bells with me. some bulletin i glanced at. not one of ours, a cry for help from another force.
M: You mean there’s been a case like this in Germany?
P: can’t say for certain. but something’s niggling at the back of my mind. i’ll do a computer trawl in the office.
M: I don’t deserve you, do I?
P: no, you deserve much better. so, now we got the shop talk out of the way, you want to get personal?
Marijke smiled. Already, Petra had reminded her that there was more to life than murder. At last, she could see a route that might take her to sleep.
The Wilhelmina Rosen sat unusually high in the water. She’d discharged her cargo that morning, but someone at the shipping agency had screwed up, and the load that should have been stowed that afternoon had been delayed till the following day. He wasn’t unduly anxious. He could probably make up the day once they were under way, even if it meant bending the rules about how long their watches should be. And the crew were happy enough. They weren’t going to complain about a night ashore in Rotterdam, since it wasn’t a delay that would put a dent in their pay.
Alone in his cabin, he unlocked a small brass-bound chest that had belonged to his grandfather and contemplated its contents. The two jars had originally contained pickled gherkins, but what floated inside now was infinitely more grisly. Preserved in formalin he’d stolen from a funeral parlour, the skin had lost its flesh tints and assumed the colour of tinned tuna. Fragments of the small muscles were darker, standing out against the skin like a cross-section of tuna steak grilled rare. The hair remained curled, though now it had the harsh dullness of a bad wig. Still, there could be no doubting what he was looking at.
When he had first fantasized about this, he’d known he would need some souvenir to remind himself how well he’d done. He had read books about murderers who had excised breasts, removed genitalia, stripped the skin from their victims to clothe themselves. None of this seemed right. They were weirdos and perverts, whereas he was driven by a motive far more pure. But he wanted something, and he needed it to hold meaning for him alone.
He ranged over the indignities he’d been forced
