[The murderer dropped this.]
2. Hij is kaal, met een glad gezicht, een eivormig hoofd en een onopvallend lichaam—niet erg groot .
[He is a bald, smooth-faced man with an egg-shaped head and a nondescript body—not very big.]
3. Hij spreekt Engels met, denk ik, een Duits accent .
[He speaks English with, I think, a German accent.]
4. Hij heeft geen seks. Hij neemt één foto van het lichaam nadat hij het lichaam heeft neergelegd.
[He doesn’t have sex. He takes one photograph of the body after he has posed the body.]
5. Hij loenst, zijn ogen bijna helemaal dichtgeknepen . Hij ziet eruit als een mol. Hij piept als hij ademhaalt. Astma misschien . . .
[He has squinty eyes, almost totally closed. He looks like a mole. He wheezes. Asthma, maybe . . .]
6. Hij werkt voor SAS . De Scandinavische luchtvaartmaatschappij? Hij heeft iets te maken met beveiliging .
[He works for SAS. The Scandinavian airline? He has something to do with security.]
That, together with the Polaroid print coater, was Ruth’s complete eyewitness account. It might have worried her, a week or so later, to hear Harry Hoekstra’s comment to a colleague in the Warmoesstraat police station.
Harry was not a detective; more than a half-dozen detectives were already looking for Rooie’s murderer. Harry Hoekstra was just a street cop, but the red-light district and the area of the Bergstraat had been Harry’s beat for more than thirty years. No one in de Wallen knew the prostitutes and their world better than he did. Besides, the eyewitness account had been addressed to Harry. It had at first seemed safe to assume that the witness was someone who knew Harry—most likely a prostitute.
Harry Hoekstra, however, never assumed . Harry had his own way of doing things. The detectives had made the murderer their job; they’d left the lesser matter of the witness to Harry. When asked if he was making any progress with his investigations concerning the prostitute’s murder—was he any closer to finding the killer?—almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra replied: “The killer isn’t my job. I’m looking for the witness .”
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
If you’re a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can’t shut it off.
Thus Ruth Cole sat on the plane from Amsterdam to New York, composing opening sentences in spite of herself. “I suppose I owe at least a word of thanks to my last bad boyfriend.” Or: “His awfulness notwithstanding, I am grateful to my last bad boyfriend.” And so on, as the pilot made some mention of the Irish coast.
She would have liked to linger over the land a little longer. With nothing but the Atlantic beneath her, Ruth discovered that if she stopped thinking about her new book, even for a minute, her imagination plunged her into more inhospitable territory—namely, what would happen to Rooie’s daughter? The now-motherless girl might be as young as seven or eight, or as old as Wim, or older—but not if Rooie had still been picking her up after school!
Who would take care of her now? The prostitute’s daughter . . . the very idea occupied the novelist’s imagination like the title of a novel she wished she’d written.
To stop herself from obsessing any further, Ruth looked through her carry-on bag for something to read. She’d forgotten about the books that had traveled with her from New York to Sagaponack, and then to Europe. She’d read enough (for the time being) of The Life of Graham Greene —and, under the circumstances, she couldn’t bear to reread Eddie O’Hare’s Sixty Times . (The masturbation scenes alone would have pushed her over the edge.) Instead, Ruth again began the Canadian crime novel that Eddie had given her. After all, hadn’t Eddie told her that the book was “good airplane reading”?
Ruth resigned herself to the irony of reading a murder mystery; but, at the moment, Ruth would have read anything to escape her own imagination.
Once more Ruth was irritated by the purposeful obscurity of the author photo; that the unknown author’s name was a nom de plume also irked her. The author’s pen name was Alice Somerset, which meant nothing to Ruth. However, if Ted Cole had seen that name on a book jacket, he would have looked at the book—and especially at the author photo, as obscure as it was—very closely.
Marion’s maiden name was Somerset, and Alice was Marion’s mother’s name. Mrs. Somerset had opposed the marriage of her daughter to Ted Cole. Marion had always regretted her estrangement from her mother, but there had been no way to put an end to it. And then, before the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, her mother had died; Marion’s father died shortly thereafter, also before the deaths of Marion’s beloved boys.
On the back flap of the book jacket, all it said about the author was that she’d emigrated to Canada from the United States in the late fifties; and that, during the time of the Vietnam War, she’d served as a counselor to young American men who were coming to Canada to evade the draft. “While she would hardly claim it as her first book,” the back flap said about the author, “Ms. Somerset is rumored to have made her own contribution to the invaluable Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada .”
The whole thing put Ruth off: the coy back flap, the sneaky author photo, the precious nom de plume—not to mention the title. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus sounded to Ruth like the title of a country-western song she would never want to hear.
She couldn’t have known that the Flying Food Circus had been a popular restaurant in Toronto in the late seventies, or that her mother had worked as a waitress there; in fact, it had been something of a triumph for Marion, who was then a woman in her late fifties, to be the only waitress in the restaurant who wasn’t a young woman. (Marion’s figure had still been that good.)
Nor could Ruth have known that her mother’s first novel, which had not been published in the United States, had been modestly successful in Canada. Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus had been published in England, too; it, and two subsequent novels by Alice Somerset, had also enjoyed several very successful publications in foreign languages. (The German and the French translations, especially—Marion had sold many more copies of her novels in German and in French than she’d sold in English.)
But Ruth would need to read to the end of Chapter One of Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus before she realized that Alice Somerset was the nom de plume for Marion Cole, her modestly successful mother.
Chapter One
A salesgirl who was also a waitress had been found dead in her apartment on Jarvis, south of Gerrard. It was an apartment within her means, but only because she had shared it with two other salesgirls. The three of them sold bras at Eaton’s.