The Corpse on the Dike Read Online Free Page B

way around. But not as sloppy as this bird.”
    “He looks like a rabbit,” Grijpstra said, “not a bird.”
    “A rabbit?” de Gier asked and stood up so that he could see the face of the dead man. He sat down again. “Yes. Harmless sort of face. So what do we do now?”
    “Wait,” Grijpstra said, “and remember to keep people from tramping about in the garden. There should be some prints out mere. I would think that he stood over there, right in front of the open windows, and that the killer stood in the garden. The killer must have called him and fired as soon as he showed himself.”
    “It has begun to rain,” de Gier said gloomily, “and it rained yesterday. This corpse may be a few days old.” He sniffed, and got white in the face again.
    Grijpstra sniffed too. “A bit of a smell, not much. The windows were open of course.”
    “There may still be prints,” de Gier said, “somewhere where the rain couldn’t get at them to wipe them out.”
    “There’ll be something,” Grijpstra said in a soothing voice, as if he wanted to reassure not only de Gier but himself as well. He felt tired and stupid and he didn’t want a difficult case to work on. The summer had been hot so far and the small house on the Lijnbaansgracht, where he lived with his fat wife and three noisy children, had exhausted him. The endless variety show that his TV poured out evening after evening had worn his nerves down to thin infected threads. There had been a lot of loud fights with his wife. Whenever he switched the set off she switched it on again. There had been no escape. The voices of the comics, the bad men and the good men of the crime films, the quiz masters and the newscasters had followed him to the small bedroom. His wife liked to put the volume up. She was getting deaf. I’ll be deaf too; soon I’ll be deaf, Grijpstra thought hopelessly. He had a vision of a quiet room somewhere else, a room without TV, and with a view of the river. He could sit in that room and watch the boats coming past. Lovely. No wife. He saw the plastic curlers in her hair and shuddered. No more women in his life. He would read the paper and paint in his free time. And de Gier could come visit him sometimes and they might play music together, and then de Gier would go and he would have the room all to himself again. No wife. No TV. But there would still be the children. He would take them for walks during the weekends, especially the two little ones, and his wife would screech at him from the open house door. She might come to Police Headquarters and screech at him there. She had done it before, after he had been away for a few days once. He had been working at the time but she thought that he had left her. He felt his face go red with shame. It had been the most horrible scene of his life. The commissaris had saved him that time. He had talked to the hysterical woman and got her out of Grijpstra’s room into the corridor and eventually out of the building. De Gier had been embarrassed, de Gier and the other detectives who had been forced witnesses to the scene. Grijpstra jumped. Someone had rung the bell.
    “I’ll go,” de Gier said. “About time too.”
    “Evening,” the commissaris said to Grijpstra. “What have we found now?”
    “He’s over there, sir,” Grijpstra said. The corpse was hidden from the commissaris by a table, covered with a thick oriental rug that hung down to the floor.
    “Ah,” the commissaris said and bent down. He studied the appearance and the position of the dead man, and glanced up at the open windows.
    The bell rang again and de Gier opened the door to two policemen in uniform. There were a lot of people running about on the dike now and some of them began to talk to de Gier, asking him what had happened.
    “Whoever lives here is dead,” de Gier said to the crowd. “Does anyone know the man?”
    There was no answer. The faces stared at the tall handsome detective wearing a blue denim suit. They were