This happened in April ’91, six months after Rooie’s murder—one year after Harry Hoekstra had almost taken Dolores de Ruiter to Paris. That night in Zurich, Harry wished he had taken Rooie to Paris. He didn’t have to spend the night in Zurich; he could have flown back to Amsterdam at the end of that same day, but for once he wanted to do something that he’d only read about in a travel book.
He declined Ernst Hecht’s invitation to dinner. Harry wanted to be alone. Thinking of Rooie, he was not entirely alone. He’d even chosen a hotel that he thought Rooie would have liked. Although it was not the most expensive hotel in Zurich, it was too expensive for a cop. But Harry had traveled so little that he’d saved a fair amount of money. He didn’t expect the 2nd District to pay for his room at the Hotel Zum Storchen, not even for one night, yet that was where he wanted to stay. It was a charmingly romantic hotel on the banks of the Limmat, and Harry chose a room that looked across the river at the floodlit Rathaus.
Harry took himself to dinner at the Kronenhalle, across the Limmat. Thomas Mann had eaten there—and James Joyce. There were two dining rooms with original paintings by Klee, Chagall, Matisse, Miró, Picasso. Rooie wouldn’t have cared, but she would have liked the B¸ndnerfleisch and the shredded calf ’s liver with Rösti .
Harry usually drank nothing stronger than beer, but that night at the Kronenhalle he had four beers and a whole bottle of red wine by himself. He was drunk when he returned to his hotel room. He fell asleep with his shoes on, and only the phone call from Nico Jansen forced him to wake up and properly undress for bed.
“Tell me about it,” Jansen said. “It’s finished, right?”
“I’m drunk, Nico,” Harry replied. “I was asleep.”
“Tell me about it, anyway,” Nico Jansen said. “The bastard killed eight hookers—each one in a different city, right?”
“That’s right. He’ll be dead in a couple of weeks—his doctor told me,” Harry said. “He has a lung infection. He’s had emphysema for fifteen years. It sounds like asthma, I guess.”
“You seem cheerful,” Jansen said.
“I’m drunk,” Harry repeated.
“You should be a happy drunk, Harry,” Nico told him. “It’s finished, right?”
“All but the witness,” Harry Hoekstra said.
“You and your witness,” Jansen said. “Let her go. We don’t need her anymore.”
“But I saw her,” Harry said. He didn’t realize until he said it, but it was because he’d seen her that he couldn’t get her out of his head. What had she been doing ? She’d been a better witness than she probably knew, Harry thought. But all he said to Nico Jansen was: “I just want to congratulate her.”
“Jesus, you are drunk!” Jansen told him.
Harry tried to read in bed, but he was too drunk to comprehend what he was reading. The novel, which had been halfway-decent airplane reading, was too challenging to read when he’d been drinking. It was the new novel by Alice Somerset, her fourth. It would be the last of her Margaret McDermid detective novels—the title was McDermid, Retired .
Notwithstanding his usual disdain for crime fiction, Harry Hoekstra was a big fan of the elderly Canadian author. (While Eddie O’Hare would never have thought of seventy-two as “elderly,” that’s how old Alice Somerset, alias Marion Cole, was in April ’91.)
Harry liked the so-called Margaret McDermid mysteries because he thought that the Missing Persons detective possessed a convincingly accurate amount of melancholy for a cop. Also, Alice Somerset’s novels weren’t really “mysteries”; they were psychological investigations into the mind of a lonely policewoman. For Harry, the novels believably demonstrated the effect of those missing persons on Sergeant McDermid—meaning, of course, those missing persons whom the detective could never find.
Although, at the time, Harry was at least four and a half years away from retiring, it didn’t help him to read about a policewoman who had retired—especially since the point of the novel was that, even after she’d retired, Sergeant McDermid went on thinking like a cop.
She becomes a prisoner of those photographs of the forever-missing American boys. She can’t bring herself to destroy the photos, even though she knows the boys will never be found. “One day she would find the courage to destroy them, she hoped.” (That was the end of the novel.)
She hoped ? Harry thought. That’s it ? She just hoped ? Shit! What kind of an ending was that? Thoroughly depressed and still awake, Harry looked at the author photo. He was irritated that you could never get a good idea of what Alice Somerset looked like. There was the matter of her face, turned away; and she always wore a hat. The hat really pissed Harry off. A nom de plume was one thing, but what was she—a criminal?
And because Harry couldn’t get a good look at Alice Somerset’s face, her hidden face reminded him of his missing witness. He’d not got a good look at her face, either. Naturally he’d noticed her breasts, and there’d been an attitude of alertness to her whole body; but what had also impressed him was the way she’d seemed to study everything. That was part of the reason he’d been drawn to study her . Harry realized that it wasn’t only because she was the witness that he wanted to see her again; whoever she was, she was a woman he wanted to meet.
That April ’91, when the newspapers in Amsterdam carried the story of the capture of the prostitute-killer, there was something anticlimactic about the murderer being deathly ill. Urs Messerli would never leave the Universit‰tsspital—he would die that same month. A serial killer of as many as eight prostitutes should have generated more of a sensation, but the story was headline news for less than a week; by the end of May, it was gone from the news altogether.
Maarten Schouten, Ruth Cole’s Dutch publisher, was attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy when the story broke. (It was not news in Italy because none of the murdered prostitutes had been Italian.) And from Bologna, every year, Maarten traveled to New York; now that their boys were grown up, Sylvia went with him to both places. And because Maarten and Sylvia missed the news about finding Rooie’s killer, Ruth missed hearing about it, too. She would go on thinking that the moleman had got away with it—that he was still out there .
It was
four and a half years later, in the fall of 1995, when Harry Hoekstra, who was pushing fifty-eight and almost retired, saw the new Ruth Cole novel in the window of that bookshop on the Spui, the Athenaeum. He immediately bought it.
“It’s about time she wrote another novel,” Sergeant Hoekstra said to the salesgirl.
All the booksellers in the Athenaeum knew Harry. His fondness for Ruth Cole’s novels was nearly as familiar to them as the gossip that Sergeant Hoekstra had met more of his girlfriends in the Athenaeum, while browsing for books, than anywhere else. The booksellers at the Athenaeum liked to tease him. While they didn’t doubt his fondness for reading travel books and novels, they also enjoyed telling the sergeant that they suspected he came to their bookshop not only to read .
My Last Bad Boyfriend, which Harry bought in English, had a godawful title in Dutch— Mijn laatste slechte vriend. The salesgirl who waited on Harry, and who was quite a knowledgeable young bookseller, explained to him the possible reasons why Ruth Cole had needed five years to write what didn’t appear to be a very long book. “It’s her first novel in the first-person voice,” the young bookseller began. “And I understand she had a baby a few years ago.”
“I didn’t know she was married,” Harry said, looking more closely at Ruth’s jacket photo. She didn’t look married, Harry thought.