He tells her nobody must know of their encounter. A few days later, Schrott hides his car in the woods and in his long black coat entices Annemarie with a glove puppet. Matthäi finds out his home number, where his wife says that her two sons are out in the world. He invites mother and daughter to live in the filling station and encourages the child to play beside the road.ĭriving from Chur to Zürich in his large black car, a businessman named Schrott sees Annemarie playing and stops at the filling station, though his tank is nearly full. Seeing a lonely little girl in the village, he befriends her, learning that her name is Annemarie and that her mother is alone and unmarried.
He rents a filling station on the road, where he takes the numbers of cars from Chur, traces their owners, and under various pretexts rings up to find out if they have children. The heraldic animal of Chur is the horned chamois, which appears on its vehicle number plates. Plotting the three murder sites on the map, Matthäi sees that they were all beside the main highway from Zürich to Chur. Such a killer is intimidated by grown women, and gets his revenge by murdering little girls. Deciding to solve the case on his own, a psychiatrist friend suggests that the drawing is true.
Realising that the killer may have befriended the little girl with chocolates, he leaps off the plane, but his successor is uninterested. As he takes his seat in the airliner, the man next to him is eating chocolate truffles which look just like the hedgehogs in the drawing. Matthäi, however, believes the peddler was innocent and that the culprit is a serial killer who has murdered two other little girls and may strike again. That night the peddler hangs himself in his cell.
The villagers think the peddler was the murderer, as does Matthäi's successor who, after a long hard interrogation, gets a confession.
It shows a tall man in a long black coat, a large black car, a little girl, a horned creature, and some black hedgehogs. He goes to the little girls' school, where another child points out a picture the dead girl had drawn. Distraught, the mother asks him to swear that he will find the killer. With the peddler he inspects the site and, when none of the other police volunteer, says he will tell the parents. Matthäi, a senior detective with the Zürich police, is about to take up a post in the Middle East when a call comes in that a peddler has found the body of a little girl in the woods.
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