The Volkswagen was parked on the wide sidewalk of the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, opposite number 5, and it was parked the way it shouldn't be parked.

The adjutant* had switched the engine off.

The adjutant hesitated.

He had arrived at his destination, Haarlemmer Houttuinen, number 5, and the high narrow gable house was waiting for him. He studied the gable house and frowned. The house had a body in it, a dead body, suspended. The body was bound to be turning slowly. Bodies, suspended by the neck, are never quite still.

The adjutant didn't feel like doing anything. He didn't feel like getting out of the car, running through the rain, watching a corpse move slowly, dangling, turning.

"Hey," said sergeant de Gier, who sat next to adjutant Grijpstra.

"Hey what?" asked Grijpstra.

De Gier made a helpless gesture. Grijpstra could explain the gesture, the waving arm with its connected stretched-out hand, as he wanted.

But he still didn't move and adjutant and sergeant listened, peacefully and unanimously, to the fat raindrops that pattered from the heavy juicy spring sky onto the tin roof of the Volkswagen.

"Yes," the adjutant said, and got out of the car. De Gier had parked the car on the edge of the sidewalk and Grijpstra was forced to step into the street, a main thoroughfare, busy at all times of the day and the night. He didn't pay attention and a large American limousine approaching at speed had to turn suddenly to avoid the door of the car. The limousine, suddenly indignant, honked its powerful horn.

De Gier laughed and shook his head. He got out of the car as well, on the safe side, and locked the door carefully while the rain hit him in the neck. In Amsterdam nothing is safe, not even a police car, and mis Volkswagen didn't look like a police car.