“Keep your fingers off our rösti!”

Huldi apologized to the sergeant. With all the fuss, she hadn’t got round to tidying up.

Studer stood in the middle of the room, stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, looked around and said he was glad nothing had been touched. The bed looked as if there had been a fight in it. The sheets and blankets were on the floor. The windows were closed. In the middle of the floor was a suitcase with labels of hotels from all over the world stuck on it. It was empty.

There was nothing on the table. Studer searched the wardrobe, the bedside table, under the mattress – the exercise books he remembered so well had disappeared.

Why had they been stolen? What did they say that was so important?

“Huldi,” the sergeant said gently, “you remember the exercise books Farny used to write in? Did you ever happen to read one? Do you know what was in them?”

The girl nodded, kept on nodding. Then she said, like someone reciting a lesson they’d learned by heart: “After we left Hong Kong in 1912 we were caught in a typhoon. We had loaded rice for Bangkok and coolies for Sumatra. I ordered the first mate to lock the coolies in a room below deck . . .”

“That’ll do fine,” said Studer. “You don’t remember anything else?”

“He never left the last one he was writing in lying around open, he always locked it away in his suitcase. I did once get the chance to have a quick look at it. The bit I saw said, ‘If God wants to punish a man, He sends him relatives.’”

“Were those the precise words?” Studer asked. The barmaid nodded.

And while she was nodding, a windowpane shattered.

“What on earth’s that?” Studer asked. Huldi went to the window, flung it open and looked out into the misty afternoon air. She could see nothing, she said. Furious, the sergeant grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. Someone had fired a shot into the room, he told her angrily and pushed her onto a chair. She sat there, her elbows on the table, her face buried in her hands.

“A shot?” she asked. “A shot!”

“Yes, a shot,” Studer told her impatiently. He was striding up and down the room, his eyes fixed on the floor, looking – but he could see nothing. He bent down and found a lead ball under the bed. He picked it up. It was round, like a globe, but instead of the equator, someone had cut a groove into the lead and wedged a strip of paper in it. The sergeant carefully pulled it out and read the words that were typed on it:

Keep your fingers off our rösti!

Studer frowned, shook his head and muttered one word: “Chabis!”

But “a load of rubbish” did not seem to be the sergeant’s only response to the incident. He kept the strip of paper in his hand, growling several times, “Keep your fingers off our rösti!”

It was obvious that the lead ball had not been shot into the room with a rifle or even an airgun. Too much spoke against it.

Above all, the strip of paper wedged into the “equator” would have made it impossible to fire the ball. What kind of weapon could have been used?

The only possibility was a catapult, the kind of thing he’d used to shoot sparrows when he was a lad. A forked piece of wood or metal with lengths of rubber, square in cross-section, attached to each of the ends and joined together by a piece of leather. You put the ball-bearing, the stone – in brief, the missile – into the leather, which you held fast with the finger and thumb of your right hand, while you held the stem of the catapult in your left. Pull back the rubber, aim through the opening between the two prongs, let go, and the missile flies off and hits the sparrow or the window. Today it had been a windowpane, and the missile contained a typed warning.

Who felt called upon to send Sergeant Studer a warning? In the first place: was it meant seriously? Probably not, otherwise the “marksman” would presumably not have used a dialect word like rösti. You’d scarcely write, “Keep your fingers off our fried potatoes” to someone you intended to shoot. On the other hand, perhaps the form was intended to lull the recipient into a false sense of security . . .? Note to self: better keep a good lookout.