Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering

on a tree in my garden that was bumping against the roof. Elaine didn’t come to the office yesterday, but then she hardly ever does these days. She is really semiretired and leaves the running of the business to me. We used to have a lot of contact in the old days, when we were making the firm grow, but mat’s all over now and has been for several years.”
    “Mother didn’t have much of a routine,” Gabrielle said. “She liked to get up late and then she would have breakfast in a restaurant somewhere and do some shopping and go to the hairdresser and she sometimes went to the movies. She only had her evening meal at home.”
    “I see.” The commissaris got up, looked about, and sat down again.
    “More coffee?” Gabrielle asked.
    “No, erhm, no. I wonder if you would mind very much, Miss Carnet, if I asked you to let us talk to Mr. Bergen alone for a little while. I would like to ask some questions that, well, may embarrass you.”
    Gabrielle laughed and got up, taking the empty cups from the table. “Of course, but I don’t get embarrassed easily. I am a modern girl, you know.”
    “Yes, yes,” the commissaris said, still ill at ease. De Gier’s eyes narrowed. He had seen it all before. The situation was shaping up nicely, manipulated detail by detail.
    “Now,” the commissaris said when Gabrielle had left the room, “I am sure you know why I asked Miss Carnet to leave us alone for a minute. If Mrs. Carnet was killed last night and didn’t just slip and fall down her stairs—she had drunk a fair amount of wine, you know, Beaujolais, a strong wine, we found an empty bottle—she may have been killed by someone she was on intimate terms with. Would you know of such a person, sir?”
    Bergen was thinking again. Evidently he wanted to be helpful but he was weighing his words. “Yes. I see what you mean. Well, Elaine did have a lover for several years, an employee of this firm, a man called Vleuten. He left us two years ago, rather suddenly.”
    “Because of any unpleasantness?”
    “Yes.” Bergen was scraping his throat industriously. “Yes, you might call it that. A nasty business. You see, Elaine fell in love with the baboon—that’s his nickname, he rather looks like an ape, he didn’t mind being called baboon. Elaine really fell for him, and he does have a nice personality, I’ll say that for him. That was some time ago. Elaine was still in her forties men and rather attractive, she went to pieces later. The wine helped, but that’s another matter.”
    “Related perhaps?” the commissaris suggested.
    “Yes, related possibly. But there were other reasons, I think. The firm has grown so much that its mechanics became impossible for her to grasp. She could never understand the computerized bookkeeping and store records for instance; she liked to keep the records herself according to some old-fashioned system that she had mastered. She was hurt, I think, when we modernized our administration and most of her work became superfluous, and she began to withdraw. Her desk is over there. There’s nothing on it anymore, not even a telephone. She doesn’t really like to come in now. She doesn’t know what is happening and she doesn’t like to try and deal with anything anymore for fear that it may explode in her face.”
    “Yes.” The commissaris’s voice sounded thoughtful. “Yes, quite. A lost lonely woman, that’s the impression I got from seeing her corpse.”
    “The word “corpse” made Bergen wince and his hand moved quickly over his left cheek. He had made the gesture before, and de Gier noticed the nervous clasping of the hand after the movement was completed. He looked closely at Bergen’s face. The left side seemed affected in some way, the eye looked larger than the right and the comer of the mouth drooped a little. Perhaps the man had survived a stroke. When Bergen spoke again some letters appeared slightly transformed. The p’s and ft’s popped. De Gier shrugged. He was