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looked around.
    Still no sign of life. The place was dark and deserted. After a couple of seconds’ thought, he took hold of the man’s feet and dragged him into the thick undergrowth that surrounded the car park. There were clear marks left in the gravel, but he assumed that the rain would soon cover them up. He took a few steps backwards and established that nothing could be seen from a few metres away. At least, not for somebody who didn’t know what he was looking for. Or that there was anything to look for in the first place.
    He nodded in satisfaction and returned to his own car. It would do no harm if it was a few days before anybody came across the body. The more days, the better, in fact. He wrapped the pipe in a newspaper and put it into the carrier bag together with the money.
    Started the engine and drove off.
    He kept his bushy black hair, his beard and his blue-tinted spectacles on until he had passed that fateful concrete culvert on the main road to Boorkhejm, and half an hour later when he was pouring himself a tot of Glenalmond in a plain glass tumbler in his kitchen at home, he offered up thanks to those Sobran tablets – those little blue miracle pills that had kept him calm and in complete control of himself all afternoon. And the previous few days as well. It was not a disadvantage to have a certain degree of insight into one’s own mind and its need of psychopharmacological drugs, he thought. No disadvantage at all.
    He emptied his glass.
    Then took a long, relaxing bubble bath.
    Then he phoned Vera Miller.

TWO

6
    It was a certain Andreas Fische who found the body.
    It happened on the Thursday afternoon. Fische had been visiting his sister in Windemeerstraat out at Dikken (a pain in the neck if truth be told, but blood is thicker than water and she had managed to marry a pretty wealthy lawyer), and he had taken a shortcut over the car park at the Trattoria Commedia, stopped for a pee, and noticed that there was something lying in among the bushes.
    Fische finished peeing, and looked around. Then he bent aside some thorny branches and peered into the undergrowth. There was a man lying there. A body. A dead body.
    Fische had seen dead bodies before. On several occasions during his rather colourful life; and having overcome his first impulse – which was to get the hell out of there – he allowed his better and more practically inclined self to take command. He checked once again to make sure there was nobody around in the dimly lit car park, then bent down carefully and moved aside several more branches – making a point of not treading on the soft, damp soil and leaving a footprint – he was no wide-eyed innocent – and took a closer look at the corpse.
    Quite a young and rather tall man. Lying on his stomach with his arms stretched out peacefully over his head. Dark-green jacket and blue jeans. The side of his face turned upwards was covered in dark, dried-out stains, and Fische guessed that somebody had put an end to the man’s life by hitting him on the head with something hard and heavy. Just like that, without any fuss. He’d seen that sort of thing before, even if it was quite a few years ago now.
    Checking once again to make sure there was nobody about, he leaned down and started going through the man’s pockets.
    It only took a few seconds, and his booty was rather meagre. He established this fact after putting a couple of hundred metres between himself and the body. A battered wallet containing no credit cards and a small amount of cash in notes and coins. An almost empty packet of cigarettes and a lighter. A bunch of four keys and a business card from some pharmaceutical company or other. That was all. He threw it all into a litter-bin apart from the money and the cigarettes, made a rapid calculation of his current financial situation and decided that despite everything, he had a decent sum to get by on. Together with the hundred he’d wheedled out of his sister, he had more than