Mind's Eye Read Online Free Page A

and felt no obligation to force himself upon them again before the New Year.
    He also had a son. Erich.
    Erich lived much closer. In the state prison in Linden, to be precise, where he was serving a two-year sentence for drug-smuggling. He was being well looked after, in other words. If Van Veeteren felt like it, he could visit him every day—it was just a matter of getting into the car and driving the fifteen miles or so alongside the canals, showing the warder his ID card, and marching in. Erich was inside there; he had no possibility of avoiding his father, and as long as Van Veeteren took along some cigarettes and newspapers, he generally seemed to be not entirely unwelcome.
    But he sometimes wondered what the point was of sitting and staring at his long-haired crook of a son.
             
    He wound down the window to let in a little fresh air. A shower of raindrops fell onto his thigh.
    What else?
    His right foot, of course.
    He’d sprained it during the previous day’s badminton match with Münster: 6–15, 3–15, abandoned due to injury with the score 0–6 in the third set…. The figures told their own story, of course. This morning he’d had difficulty in getting a shoe onto that foot, and every step was agony. Oh, what joy to be alive.
    He wiggled his toes tentatively, and wondered if he ought really to have gone to the X-ray department; but it was not a genuine thought, as he was well aware. He only needed to recall his father, that stoic who refused to go to the hospital with double pneumonia, on the grounds that it was unmanly.
    He died two days later in his own bed, proud of the fact that he had not cost the health service a single penny and never allowed a drop of medicine to cross his lips.
    He was fifty-two years old.
    Didn’t quite make his son’s eighteenth birthday.

    And now this high school teacher.
    Reluctantly, he turned his mind toward work. To be honest, it wasn’t just another humdrum case. On the contrary. If it hadn’t been for all the rest of it, and the damned rain that never seemed to stop, he might have been forced to admit that there was a spark of excitement in it.
    The fact is, he wasn’t sure.
    Nine times out of ten, he was. Well, even more often, if the truth be told. Van Veeteren was generally able to decide if he was looking the culprit in the eye in nineteen cases out of twenty, if not more.
    No point in hiding his light under a bushel. There was always a mass of tiny little signs pointing in one direction or another, and over the years he had learned to identify and interpret these signs. Not that he was able to detect all of them, but that didn’t matter. The important thing was that he could see the overall picture. The pattern.
    He didn’t find this difficult, and didn’t need to overstretch himself.
    Then, finding proof, and building up a case that might hold water in court—that was another matter. But the knowledge, the certainty, always crept up on him.
    Whether he liked it or not. He interpreted the signals emitted by the suspect; sometimes he found it as easy to do as reading a book, like a musician can pick out a tune from a mass of notes in a score, or a mathematics teacher can spot an inaccurate calculation. It was nothing special; but of course, it was an art. Not something you could learn in the normal way, and not something it was possible to teach; just an ability that he had acquired after so many years on the force.
    For Christ’s sake, it was a gift, and in no way something that could be regarded as just deserts for work done.
    He didn’t even have the good sense to be duly grateful.
    Of course he knew that he was the best interrogating officer in the district, possibly in the country; but he would have been delighted to abandon any such claim in return for being able to give Münster a sound thrashing at badminton.
    Just once would be enough.
    And needless to say, it was this ability of his that had motivated his promotion to detective chief