The Weeping Girl by Håkan Nesser

think there was any other explanation? I couldn’t risk sitting face to face
with him . . . With that very policeman. Or with somebody who might possibly feel a sense of solidarity with him . . . A good word, that – solidarity. Even if it has fallen out of regular use
nowadays. Hmm.’
    All this was just a dream, thought Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno. But I feel a bit sick for some reason.
    Five minutes later she had put both Franz Lampe-Leermann and Lejnice police station behind her.
    For today.
    Constable Vegesack made the sign of the cross, then knocked on the door.
    It wasn’t that he was religious – certainly not, and especially not in the Roman Catholic sense: but on one occasion the sign of the cross had turned out to be useful for him. He had
fallen asleep in his car while keeping watch on a suspect (and as a result the said suspect, an intermediary in a cocaine-smuggling gang, had sneaked out of the building and disappeared). The
following day he had been summoned to Chief Inspector Vrommel’s office for a dressing-down. For want of any better line of defence, he had made the sign of the cross as he stood waiting
outside the door (just as he had seen the Italian goalkeeper do before he saved a penalty in the previous week’s Champion’s League match on the telly), and to his amazement, it seemed
to work. Vrommel had treated him almost like a human being.
    Vegesack didn’t bother about the fact that Vrommel’s attitude was presumably due mainly to the arrest of the escapee later on in the night. From that day on, he always made the sign
of the cross whenever he found himself standing outside his boss’s door.
    It couldn’t do any harm, in any case, he thought.
    Vrommel was standing between two filing cabinets, doing trunk-bending exercises. He did this for at least ten minutes every day in order to keep fit, and it wasn’t something that
necessarily intruded upon his work. Things got done even so, no problem.
    ‘Sit down,’ he said when Constable Vegesack had closed the door behind him.
    Vegesack sat down on the visitor’s chair.
    ‘Write this down,’ said Vrommel.
    The chief of police was known for his parsimony in the use of words, and his bodily contortions made it all the more necessary for him to be even less loquacious than usual.
    ‘Firstly,’ he said.
    ‘Firstly?’ said Vegesack.
    ‘That bastard Lampe-Leermann must be transported to the jail in Emsbaden either this evening or tomorrow. Ring and fix it.’
    Vegesack noted this down.
    ‘Secondly. Inspector Moreno’s recorded interrogation must be typed out so that she can sign it. Do that.’
    Vegesack noted it down.
    ‘Ready by noon tomorrow. There are the cassettes.’
    He nodded towards the desk. Vegesack picked up both cassettes and put them in his jacket pocket. The chief of police paused before contorting himself in the opposite direction.
    ‘Anything else?’ Vegesack asked.
    ‘I’d have said if there was,’ said Vrommel.
    When Vegesack got back to his own office – which he shared with Constables Mojavic and Helme – he wondered if he ought to write down the exchange he’d just had with Vrommel in
his black book. The one he’d started on six months ago, and which would eventually be his revenge, his way of getting his own back on Chief Inspector Victor Vrommel. The only thing that
enabled him to cope.
    The true story of the chief of police in Lejnice.
    He had already written over fifty pages, and the title he was currently thinking of giving it was:
The Skunk in Uniform
.
    Although he had not entirely eliminated the possibility of
The Long Arm of the Bore
, or
A Nero of Our Time
.
    Constable Vegesack checked his diary, and established that there were eighteen days still to go to his leave. Then he telephoned Emsbaden and arranged transport for Franz Lampe-Leermann. That
took half an hour. He looked at the clock. A quarter to four. He took out a notepad and a pen, and slotted the first cassette into the