"Everything he had in his pockets. I took the rest of the clothing straight to Dr. Eskes, at Forensic. I especially asked him to investigate the hair on the jacket."

Vledder picked up the crumpled piece of paper and smoothed it out with one hand, while he kept it against the desk with the other.

"Pilgrim Street," he read aloud, "number twenty-one." He frowned and looked at DeKok. "The handwriting seems familiar."

DeKok sighed.

"It's Flossie's handwriting," he said gloomily. "It's also her address." He rubbed his eyes in a tired gesture. "You know," he added, "Flossie, too, has a black tomcat."

"A tomcat?"

"Yes."

"That means that Thornbush could have picked up the hair at her place."

DeKok nodded.

"And Flossie has a clear motive," he said.

Vledder looked at him.

"Revenge?"

"Yes, she never made a secret of it. She was determined from the very beginning: She was going to punish the murderer of her fiance. If Flossie somehow found out that Thornbush was the most likely candidate to take the 'warning' call from Pete Geffel ... then ... that could have been enough for her."

"Enough for murder?"

"Yes, absolutely. Flossie wouldn't have asked for any additional proof. A slight impulse, a dose of female intuition and a desire for revenge ... and the verdict is rendered. After all, revenge is seldom the result of cool, clear thinking."

Vledder stared out of the window. He was oblivious to the noise around them. Typewriters rattled, phones rang, people were being interrogated, a door slammed and on the next desk another detective was trying to take a statement from a suspect that kept pulling on the handcuffs that secured him to his chair. But Vledder and DeKok were a little island of quiet in a sea of turmoil.

"She must have," said Vledder after a long silence, "must have enticed him to her apartment."

DeKok rubbed the bridge of his nose with his little finger. Then he stared at the finger as if he had seen it for the first time. He withdrew the finger and raised his index finger in a familiar gesture.

"What do you want? Flossie is an attractive woman, no doubt about that. And we suspect that Thornbush wasn't exactly immune to female temptations. I don't think he would have refused a direct invitation of the alluring Flossie."

Vledder smoothed the address out once more.

"And we know there was an invitation," he said pensively, "because of this note."

They both looked at the note. DeKok's face was serious and there was a strange gleam in Vledder's eyes. It was as if the small piece of paper had hypnotized them into a compelling train of thought. Vledder was the first to break the spell.

"We have to talk to her."

DeKok nodded silent agreement.

The door opened at that moment and Corporal Greanheather appeared in the doorway. He stared over the heads of the people in the room until he spotted Vledder and DeKok. Carefully he threaded his way through the crowds in the busy room. When he was next to DeKok he leaned over in a conspiratorial att.i.tude.

"Mrs. Thornbush," he whispered. "She wants to know if you have any news about her husband."

The face of the gray sleuth fell.

"Where is she?"

The corporal waved toward the door.

"She's on the bench, in the hall. She came to the desk downstairs and asked for you. I asked her who she was. You understand, I was going to give her the brush-off. You've got enough on your plate as it is."

"And?"

"Well, of course, when she told me who she was and when she told me that you and Vledder had promised to look for her husband, well, that changed things." He made a gesture with his head and changed his tone of voice. "Isn't her husband the guy you found in the provinces?"

As a native Amsterdammer, Greanheather considered everything outside Amsterdam as the "provinces" and there was the sort of tone in his voice that suggested that if you had to get killed, Amsterdam should be good enough for anybody. No need to go out of town for that.

"Yes," answered DeKok, aware of the undercurrents in Greanheather's voice.

"Poor woman," commented the corporal.

DeKok looked at him.

"Did you tell her?"

The corporal raised both hands in the air. A gesture that suggested both outrage and denial.

"No, no," he answered hastily, "not me. That's not for me. You do it."

Corporal Greanheather guided Mrs. Thornbush across the detective room floor. DeKok quickly surveyed his desk top to make sure that all the personal possessions of her husband had been shoved into a drawer. Then he met her halfway. His face was serious as he made a slight bow. Meanwhile he watched her face carefully. Mrs. Thornbush looked pale and tired but there was a jumpy alertness in her eyes.

"Do you have news about my husband?"

DeKok did not answer. He motioned for Greanheather to leave and took her by the arm. Gently he guided her to the chair next to his desk. He placed her on the chair with the courtly formality of old-world charm, while Vledder held the chair for her. DeKok wondered how much of her behavior was due to a tightly controlled act. Mrs. Thornbush showed all the symptoms of the "broken woman" in a melodrama. It seemed too pat, too obvious. But then, some people hid their grief behind theatrics.

"Have you any news of my husband?"

There was despair in her voice.

DeKok seated himself across from her and rubbed his face with a flat hand. From between his spread fingers he looked at her and tried to gauge her inner strength. DeKok could be guilty of theatrics as well, much to Vledder's annoyance at times. This particular gesture of peeking between his fingers was so transparent that it always surprised Vledder, that few, if any people ever saw through DeKok's pretense.

"Do you have a cat?" DeKok could not have explained why he asked the question.

Mrs. Thornbush became rigid. For a few seconds she stared at DeKok with eyes that saw nothing. Then she closed her eyes and slid gracefully off the chair.

17.

"And," asked DeKok with interest, "did you convey Mrs. Thornbush safely home?"

"Yes, I have."

"Did you call her physician and did you explain the situation to him?"

"Yes, yes. He would visit her immediately and he promised to keep an eye on her."

"Very well, then that's taken care of. Did she say anything in the car?"

Vledder shrugged his shoulders.

"She seemed to exhaust herself with excuses," he said cynically. "She kept harping on the trouble she had caused us. She had not meant to do it. She had never before lost consciousness, as she called it, but the emotions and tensions that had a.s.saulted her during the recent past, had completely broken her resistance to shock."

DeKok grinned.

"Well, well," he remarked mockingly.

Vledder made an abrupt gesture.

"But not a word about her dead husband. Not the slightest manifestation of sorrow." He shook his head. "There wasn't a tear in her beautiful eyes."

DeKok smiled.

"That's not uncommon. It happens a lot. Usually the reaction doesn't set in until the full realization of the catastrophe has. .h.i.t them,"

"I don't know," said Vledder pensively. "I find her att.i.tude strange, a bit weird. I would have expected her to ask all kinds of particulars. Fill her in on the details, so to speak. For instance, how her husband died and under what circ.u.mstances. I was more or less prepared for that. But nothing. Milady was too busy with herself, too full of herself. She practically wallowed in self-pity."

DeKok stood up and started to pace up and down the detective room. Whenever he pa.s.sed Vledder he would toss a question, a remark, or merely a glance.

"Was there a cat?" asked DeKok on his first pa.s.s.

The young Inspector shook his head.

"I didn't see a cat. Of course, I didn't do a formal search, either. After all, I had no warrant and Haarlem is, strictly speaking, outside our jurisdiction. I just poked around a little, while Mrs. Thornbush hunted for the insurance policy on her husband. No sign of a cat. I even changed chairs a couple of times to see if I could pick up any cat hairs."

"And?"

"Nothing, no hair of any kind."

DeKok ambled over to the window and stared outside. Diagonally below him a drunk staggered from the Corner Alley, barely missed the stall of Moshe the Herring Man and half walked, half fell into the next bar. It was just one of the familiar sights from the windows of the Warmoes Street Station. How often had he stood here like this? More often than he cared to remember. How many times had he stood like this and despaired of an eventual solution? Even more times than he cared to remember.

There was no question about it. The death of Thornbush, although more or less expected, had been a shock. Of course, he had realized that the Secretary was in danger, ever since their fruitless trip to Schiphol Airport. But he had hoped, had almost been certain, that he would solve the case before there would be additional victims. But his thoughts had strangled themselves in a thick, sticky fog. And the mist had not cleared. His theories had become entangled in an unexpected web of intrigue that seemed insoluble. It bothered him, it tortured him, mentally as well as physically. He had the terrible feeling of having failed and his feet hurt. Whenever an investigation lacked progress, DeKok's feet would hurt. For the moment he decided to ignore it.

He turned around.

"Was Thornbush's insurance worth much?"

Vledder grinned broadly.

"Not much ... not much at all. Certainly not enough to provide the beautiful widow with an acceptable motive."

The phone rang.

Vledder picked up the receiver and listened.

"It's for you," he said.

DeKok moved away from the window accepted the receiver from the younger man.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"That you, DeKok?"

"Yes."

"All hunky-dory again?"

DeKok recognized Handy Henkie's voice.

"What do you mean?"

"Hey, with you and Lowee, of course."

DeKok grinned.

"You worried about that?"

"A bit."

"That's why you called?"

For a while it remained silent at the other end of the line.

"N-no...," came the reluctant reply. "No ... no I, I just wants to tell you something. You see, I just heard on the TV about the stiff you found in the province." Henkie, too, was a native Amsterdammer.

"Yes." DeKok was noncommittal.

"Well, you knows, DeKok, since I don't work because of me game leg, you see, I sometimes don't rightly know what to do with meself. I gets so bored I go visit old friends." It sounded like an apology. "You know what I means, from before. Anyways, yesterday I was with Pistol Pete ... you knows him. Well, we're just having a few cold ones and this broad shows up. Nice looking thing, you know. Pete stashed me in another room."

"Go on."

"Well, I heard it all."

"What?"