Black Widow by Isadora Bryan Page A

youthful predecessor. It really didn’t bother him, though, and even if it had, he would have kept his mouth shut. Tanja’s private life was none of his business.
    They rode in silence back to the station. Pieter was left to reflect that it had actually turned out to be an unsatisfactory interview. They hadn’t really learned anything new. Ruben had
probably
left with another woman, but they’d suspected that anyway.
    All in all he felt that he’d learned more about Tanja in the last few hours, than Mikael Ruben’s killer.
    *
    Harald Janssen had never really understood his sobriquet.
Lucky
? It was an insult, really. Professionally speaking, everything he’d achieved had been a product of hard work. And expertise. He was clued-up. He took his statutory two days’ study leave each year, and remembered almost everything he’d learned.
    And in a private sense, well, he’d had no luck at all. Three messy wives, and three messy divorces, and three messy kids who would rather stay with their grisly mothers than hop on a tram and visit him occasionally. And the alimony! He was getting poorer each year.
    He stretched, yawned, and decided that he would take a nap as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The murder had messed up his sleep patterns. He was supposed to have switched over to nights, yet seemed to have been awake for at least a day and a half.
    He was at Mikael Ruben’s apartment on Vossiusstraat, overlooking the pleasant expanse of the Vondelpark. This was Tanja’s case, of course, but she could not be everywhere at once, and he’d been happy to help out with the preliminary legwork. She would want to come here herself soon enough, but someone needed to check it out right away, just in case. Someone trustworthy, with an eye for detail.
    The apartment was impressively large, but Ruben clearly hadn’t been one for furnishings, either soft or hard. Tellingly, there was nothing in the way of cushions, nor candles, nor any of that other crap that women tended to like. If Maria (or whoever) had ever spent the night here, then she certainly hadn’t been allowed to linger. There were no extra toothbrushes in the bathroom, no hidden stash of tampons, no secret hordes of emergency shoes.
    Harald approved of the minimalist approach. The place must be a joy to clean, he considered as he pulled on a pair of sterile gloves. His own house was a mess. Too much clutter. Too much correspondence from his wives’ lawyers.
    So, there was very little sign of recent habitation. Just a pile of laundry, and a plate of pork chops resting by the cooker.
    Harald instinctively sniffed at the chops, his thoughts momentarily drifting towards dinner, or supper, or whichever was next on the agenda. God, he was disorientated! Breakfast felt like lunch; lunch felt like second supper. And Christ knows where mid-morning crepes fitted in.
    There was no sign of the proverbial black book. Nor, with the exception of a few bills, any written documents of any kind. Of course, Ruben had been an IT specialist; he’d doubtless kept all his contact details on his laptop, or maybe even his phone. Harald believed that you could do anything with a phone nowadays, if you had small enough fingers.
    His own fingers were meaty, and so inflexible that he sometimes wondered if he might be missing a joint or two. It was symptomatic of his body all over, really. He had no illusions as to his physical appeal; his first wife had said he was arranged like an ink-blot test.
    He looked in the few cupboards, and beneath the bed, all the usual places. Sure enough he found a laptop, a new Macbook. He didn’t try to turn it on himself; he would suggest to Tanja that she should have the IT bods take a look at it. Just in case. Maybe there was a thingy, a spreadsheet.
    Harald had embraced the technological age, though only in the sense that a child might embrace a senile old grandmother, with hairy warts, and a bladder problem. The last computer he’d owned – the