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left. She has been operated for ulcers and I suppose most of the stuff goes straight down. If Piet had taken a pill he would have had to sit down and he probably would have gone to sleep. I have never seen him like that. He did drink a bit lately, he would come down to the bar and have a few whiskies. Three glasses would make him drunk enough to be able to laugh and talk to people. I take it you are suggesting that he took a pill today and that the pill knocked him over and caused the bruise on his temple?”
    “Yes,” said de Gier.
    “Perhaps,” van Meteren said, “but it would have been the first time that he took a pill. In my opinion anyway.”
    “Why do you call her Miesje?” Grijpstra asked.
    “Ach,” van Meteren said. “It’s just a trick. Whenever she is hysterical she screams. I thought I might make her calm down if I treated her as if she was a child. She was called Miesje once, when she was a child and wore laced boots and played hopscotch. When she behaves normally I call her Mrs. Verboom and when I think she will start one of her tantrums I call her Miesje. I take her on my lap and she’ll talk quietly and sometimes I cuddle her a bit.”
    “Brr,” said de Gier.
    Van Meteren grinned. “Yes. It’s quite ridiculous. Piet would do it too. I always laughed when I saw that tall skeleton sitting on his lap, he was such a small man. Perhaps it looks even funnier when she sits on my lap. But I have done other crazy things. I used to walk for miles with an Indonesian commandoon a string. It was knotted in such a way that he would throttle himself if he tried to run away. I would hold the string with one hand and the carbine with the other. And now I have an old crazy lady on my lap and call her Miesje.”
    There was another knock on the door and a thin young man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt came in. De Gier looked at the long unwashed hair and remembered the barman.
    “This is Johan,” van Meteren said, and the detectives said, “Good evening.” De Gier asked Johan to sit down and made room on the settee.
    Grijpstra asked the usual questions but Johan could only shake his head. He hadn’t seen Piet after he had given him the takings of the shop at four o’clock. Three hundred and fifty-six guilders and some cents. Piet had phoned him later on the house phone to tell him that there was a difference of some thirty guilders but Johan hadn’t gone upstairs; he had been too busy getting the bar in order for the evening’s customers.
    “What do you think has happened?” de Gier asked.
    Johan shrugged his shoulders and didn’t reply.
    Grijpstra grunted. He had been thinking that he had met the boy hundreds of times already. The inner city was full of duplicates of this boy. Well-meaning, unintelligent and knocked loose from their surroundings, full of protests and questions and wandering in a thin, almost two-dimensional thought-world where they could find no answers. “Maybe they don’t really want to find anything,” Grijpstra thought. “Maybe they wait for death, or a strong woman who will take them in hand so that they will find a daily routine again and start watching football on TV.” He thought of his oldest son and studied Johan without much sympathy. Grijpstra’s son wouldn’t watch football either. He preferred to lie on his bed, dressed in a striped shirt and an embroidered pair of trousers and watch the cracks in the ceiling.
    “Suicide, I suppose,” Johan said after a few minutes of silence, which hung heavily in the room. “Who would want to murder Piet? He was a bit of a bore but he didn’t hurt anyone. He couldn’t if he tried.”
    Grijpstra changed his opinion. The answer had been cleverer than he had expected.
    “You don’t seem to be very upset,” de Gier said.
    “No,” Johan said. “I am sorry. Perhaps I should be upset, but I can’t generate any feeling. Annetje and I were going to leave next week anyway. This is a commercial enterprise where the goal is money.