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Two others were descending the steps, both in the uniform of the Dutch Community Police. The man with the gun was in civilian clothes, a sergeant in the Recherche.
“I wonder,” said Sam as they were marched into the police station on Tolbrug Straat, “whether there is a market for the definitive anthology of Dutch precinct houses?”
By chance the Den Bosch police station is right across the street from the Groot Zieken Gasthaus—literally the Big Sick Guesthouse—to whose hospital morgue the body of Jan Pretorius was taken to await autopsy.
Chief Inspector Dykstra had thought little of Papa De Groot’s warning call of the previous morning. An American trying to look up a South African did not necessarily spell trouble. He had dispatched one of his sergeants in the lunch hour. The man had found the Golden Lion bar closed and had reported back.
A local locksmith had secured them entry, but everything had seemed in order. No disturbance, no fight. If Pretorius wished to lock up and go away, he had the right to do so. The proprietor of the bar across and down the street said he thought the Golden Lion had been open until about midday. The weather being the way it was, the door would normally be closed. He had seen no customers enter or leave the Golden Lion, but that was not odd. Business was slack.
It was the sergeant who asked to stake out the bar a little longer, and Dykstra had agreed. It had paid dividends; the American arrived twenty-four hours later.
Dykstra sent a message to the Gerechtelijk Laboratorium in Voorburg, the country’s central pathology laboratory. Hearing it was a bullet wound, and a foreigner, they sent Dr. Veerman himself, and he was Holland’s leading forensic pathologist.
In the afternoon Chief Inspector Dykstra listened patiently to Quinn explaining that he had known Pretorius fourteen years ago in Paris and had hoped to look him up for old times’ sake while touring Holland. If Dykstra disbelieved the story, he kept a straight face. But he checked. His own country’s BVD confirmed that the South African had been in Paris at that time; Quinn’s former Hartford employers confirmed that, yes, Quinn had been heading their Paris office in that year.
The rented car was brought around from the Central Hotel and thoroughly searched. No gun. Their luggage was retrieved and searched. No gun. The sergeant admitted neither Quinn nor Sam had had a gun when he found them in the cellar. Dykstra believed Quinn had killed the South African the previous day, just before his sergeant mounted the stakeout, and had come back because he had forgotten something that might be in the man’s pockets. But if that were the case, why had the sergeant seen him trying to gain access via the front door? If he had locked the door after him following the killing of the South African, he could have let himself back in. It was puzzling. Of one thing Dykstra was certain: He did not think much of the Paris connection as a reason for the visit.
Professor Veerman arrived at six and was finished by midnight. He crossed the road and took a coffee with a very tired Chief Inspector Dykstra.
“Well, Professor?”
“You’ll have my full report in due course,” said the doctor.
“Just the outline, please.”
“All right. Death from massive laceration of the brain caused by a bullet, probably nine millimeter, fired at close range through the left temple, exiting through the right. I should look for a hole in the woodwork somewhere in that bar.”
Dykstra nodded. “Time of death?” he asked. “I am holding two Americans who discovered the body, supposedly on a friendly visit. Though they broke into the bar to find it.”
“Midday yesterday,” said the professor. “Give or take a couple of hours. I’ll know more later, when the tests have been analyzed.”
“But the Americans were in Arnhem police station at midday yesterday,” said Dykstra. “That’s unarguable. They crashed their car at ten and were released to spend the night at the Rijn Hotel at four. They could have left the hotel in the night, driven here, done it, and got back by dawn.”
“No chance,” said the professor, rising. “That man was dead no later than two P.M. yesterday. If they were in Arnhem, they’re innocent parties. Sorry. Facts.”
Dykstra swore. His sergeant must have mounted his stakeout within thirty minutes of the killer’s leaving the bar.
“My Arnhem colleagues tell me you were heading for the ferry at Vlissingen when you left yesterday,” he told Sam and Quinn as he released them in the small hours.
“That’s right,” said Quinn, collecting his much-examined luggage.
“I would be grateful if you would continue there,” said the Chief Inspector. “Mr. Quinn, my country likes to welcome foreign visitors, but wherever you go it seems the Dutch police are put to a lot of extra work.”
“I’m truly sorry,” said Quinn with feeling. “Seeing as how we’ve missed the last ferry, and are hungry and tired, could we finish the night at our hotel and go in the morning?”
“Very well,” said Dykstra. “I’ll have a couple of my men escort you out of town.”
“I’m beginning to feel like royalty,” said Sam as she went into the bathroom back at the Central Hotel. When she emerged, Quinn was gone. He returned at 5:00 A.M., stashed the Smith & Wesson back in the base of Sam’s vanity case, and caught two hours’ sleep before the morning coffee arrived.
The drive to Flushing was uneventful. Quinn was deep in thought. Someone was wasting the mercenaries one after the other, and now he really had run out of places to go. Except maybe ... back to the archives. There might be something more to drag from them, but it was unlikely, very unlikely. With Pretorius dead, the trail was cold as a week-dead cod, and stank as badly.
A Flushing police car was parked near the ramp of the ferry for England. The two officers in it noted the Opel Ascona driving slowly into the hull of the roll-on roll-off car-carrier, but waited till the doors closed shut and the ferry headed out into the estuary of the Westerschelde before informing their headquarters.
The trip passed quietly. Sam wrote up her notes, now becoming a travelogue of European police stations; Quinn read the first London newspapers he had seen in ten days. He missed the paragraph that began: “Major KGB Shake-up?” It was a Reuters report out of Moscow, alleging that the usual informed sources were hinting at forthcoming changes at the top of the Soviet secret police.
Quinn waited in the darkness of the small front garden in Carlyle Square, as he had for the previous two hours, immobile as a statue and unseen by anyone. A laburnum tree cast a shadow that shielded him from the light of the streetlamp; his black zip-up leather windbreaker and his immobility did the rest. People came past within a few feet but none saw the man in the shadows.
It was half past ten; the inhabitants of this elegant Chelsea square were returning from their dinners in the restaurants of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. David and Carina Frost went by in the back of their elderly Bentley toward their house farther up. At eleven the man Quinn waited for arrived.
