The Weeping Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

noted that they were due to arrive in three minutes’ time.
    She said goodbye to Mikaela Lijphart in the forecourt outside the station building, where Mikaela boarded a yellow bus that would take her to the Sidonis Foundation, a care
home about a kilometre or so north, and a similar distance inland.
    Moreno took a taxi, as she wasn’t at all sure where the Lejnice police station was situated.
    It turned out to be in a square a couple of hundred yards from the station, and the young driver wondered if she’d like him to take her to the church and back as well, so that he could
have something to register on his taximeter.
    Moreno laughed and said she would be needing a cab to take her to Port Hagen in an hour or two’s time, and he gave her his card with a direct telephone number she could ring.
    Lejnice police station was a two-storey, rectangular building in dark pommer stone with small, square windows impossible to look in through. Evidently built shortly after the war, and flanked by
a butcher’s shop and a funeral parlour. Above the less than impressive entrance was a tiny balcony with iron railings and an even tinier flag, wafting in the breeze on something that could
well have been a broomstick. Moreno was reminded of a decadent nineteenth-century French colony – or at least a film about such a colony – and when she caught sight of Chief Inspector
Vrommel, she had the distinct impression that he preferred that century to the new one that was about to begin.
    He was standing in the entrance: tall and lanky, wearing a sort of loose-fitting khaki uniform that Moreno could also only recall having seen in a film. He was about sixty, she decided, possibly
closer to sixty-five. Reinhart’s guess that he was red-haired might well have been correct – but that would have been ten years or more ago. Now there wasn’t a lot of hair on
Vrommel’s head. In fact, one might say he was bald.
    Round spectacles, frameless, a large reddish-brown nose and a moustache that was so thin and skin-coloured that she didn’t notice it until they’d shaken hands.
    ‘Inspector Moreno, I presume. Pleased to meet you. Did you have a good journey?’
    He doesn’t like female police officers, she thought.
    ‘Excellent, thank you. A bit on the warm side, though.’
    He didn’t respond to the invitation to talk about the weather. Cleared his throat and stood up straight instead.
    ‘Welcome to Lejnice. This is where the powers that be hold sway round here.’ He made a gesture that might possibly – but only possibly – be interpreted as ironic.
‘Shall we go in? That Lampe-bastard is waiting for you.’
    He held the door open, and Moreno entered the relatively cool Lejnice police station.
    The interrogation room was about six feet square, and looked like an interrogation room ought to look.
    Like all interrogation rooms the world over ought to look. A table and two chairs. A ceiling light. No windows. On the table a tape recorder, a jug of water and two white plastic mugs. Bare
walls and an unpainted concrete floor. Two doors, each with a peephole. Franz Lampe-Leermann was already on his chair when Moreno entered through one of the doors. He’d probably been sitting
there for quite a while, she assumed: he looked fed up, and the smile he gave her seemed strained. Large damp patches of sweat had formed under the arms of his yellow shirt, and he had taken off
both his shoes and his socks. He was breathing heavily. The air-conditioning system that served the rest of the building evidently didn’t extend as far as this hellhole.
    Or perhaps Vrommel had switched it off.
    Thirty-five degrees, Moreno thought. At least. Good.
    ‘I need a rest and a fag,’ said Lampe-Leermann, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. ‘That heap of shit won’t even let me smoke.’
    ‘A rest?’ said Moreno. ‘We haven’t even started yet. You can have one half an hour from now at the earliest. Assuming you are cooperative. Is that