The second of the victims of the sect murderer – as several newspapers would call the person concerned – was discovered at about six on Sunday morning by a sixteen-year-old boy scout and a fifteen-year-old girl guide who were part of a biggish group on a hike in the forests north-west of Sorbinowo. At the pair’s urgent request, no attempt was made to find out what they were doing some three kilometres away from their tents at that time in the morning, but Chief of Police Kluuge – who was once again the first on the scene – naturally had his suspicions.
The body of the young girl was under a pile of brushwood and dry twigs about twenty metres from the narrow road from Waldingen to Limbuis and Sorbinowo, and the distance to the nearest of the summer camp buildings was no more than a hundred and sixty metres or so. The distance between where the two bodies had been discovered was measured later and found to be about three times that, and perhaps one could reasonably have expected that the police team that had spent two days searching the area after the first murder would have found the body; and perhaps also – Kluuge thought a propos of nothing in particular – the unusually pale colour of the girl guide’s face might have had to do with the fact that she found it hard to forget what she had been doing next to, and even hidden behind, the pile of twigs in question.
In any case, that was the conclusion he drew as the three of them sat on a stack of logs watching the sun rise over the trees to usher in a new day, waiting for the medical team and the crime scene officers to arrive – and he was also aware that these irrelevant speculations only came into his head as a way of keeping his thoughts under control.
When he compared the Katarina Schwartz who had spent almost two weeks in the form of a dead body, reduced to a mass of chemical processes, with the photograph of a smiling young girl with blonde plaits he had in his wallet, there was no doubt that his thoughts needed all the distractions they could possibly get.
I’ve grown old, he thought. Even though it’s no more than a week since I grew up.
The first report from more or less all the experts at the scene was ready by shortly after one p.m. and confirmed that the dead child was Katarina Emilie Schwartz, thirteen years old, resident in Stamberg. She had been raped (no trace of sperm) and strangled, suffered pretty much the same type of injuries as the other victim, Clarissa Heerenmacht, and had probably met her killer somewhere between twelve and sixteen days earlier. No clothes – nor indeed any trace of clothes – had been found at or in the vicinity of the place where the body was discovered, and it was considered to be highly likely that the girl had been killed at some other location. The press communique issued later in the afternoon contained all known details of the tragic discovery – apart from the fact that the police had known about the girl’s disappearance for quite a while.
At the same time the police issued two Wanted notices.
One was a repeat of the appeal for information about Oscar Yellinek.
The other was new and aimed at tracing the girl’s parents.
By coincidence, a little later that same afternoon a fax arrived from the French police: Mr and Mrs Schwartz had been traced to a so-called gite on a farm in Brittany. Before the sun had set over Sorbinowo that long Sunday, the unfortunate couple had set off on the journey home in order to be confronted as soon as possible by the earthly remains of their daughter.
And when old Mrs Grimm – the hotel’s owner who was at bottom indifferent to anything not connected with royalty or Bohemian porcelain – checked through the hotel ledger even later that evening, she found that not only was every room taken, but that the number of guests who had given their occupation as ‘journalist’ or something similar was strikingly large.
As for Mr Van Veeteren (watchmaker and horologist), who had been staying in room number 22 for the last ten days, by midnight he still hadn’t returned from the excursion he had set out on that morning.
But as he seemed to have left most of his belongings in his room, she was not particularly worried that he might have run off with no intention of returning to pay his bill.
After all, he had given the impression of being an honest man, on the whole.