Only a crowd of Irish journalists and a television crew yesterday suggested anything unusual had happened at the Gevers apartment building overlooking the beach amusement arcade and pier at the respectable seaside resort of Scheveningen. A few of the residents were aware of the murders, but knew nothing of significance, or were not prepared to talk about the macabre events of last Saturday morning in the fifth-floor apartment rented by an Irishman.
The building is, by any residential property standard, "up-market", with rents of about £600 per month for a two-bedroom apartment. It is a modern nine-storey complex with shops on the ground floor and part of the lower floors given over to offices. The entrance to the Irishman's apartment is between a delicatessen and the tourist office.
Scheveningen itself is a popular Dutch North Sea coastal resort. Thousands of Germans come here at weekends and during the summer to enjoy the sea breezes, which yesterday could be described as bracing.
Some of the residents near the fifth-floor flat where the murders took place, which was destroyed in a fire started by the men's murderers, spoke of scruffy young men coming and going from the flat, mostly at night. Ms Marie Feltzer-de-Jong, an 83-year-old neighbour, spoke of young men with bad manners coming and going from the flat. One had once slammed a corridor door in her face.
Other residents who did not wish to be named spoke of seeing a foreign-looking man, possibly a Romanian, accompanying the Irishman and his friends. None of the nearby shop-owners seemed aware of the existence of the young Irishman who had sub-let the apartment for two years, or of his friends.
Some neighbours told Dutch journalists that there was often a strong smell of cannabis from the balcony of the apartment. But there is extraordinary tolerance of drug-taking in this otherwise staid town. Just around the corner from the entrance to the flat is the Ja Ja shop, which sells drug paraphernalia and small packets of herbal cannabis. A youth behind the counter of the shop, Mr Remco Dammers, who grew up in the resort, said he had never heard of such a vicious murder in Scheveningen. "There is no real heavy scene here because the people have a lot of money and because the apartments cost a lot of money.
"The people that live here live a quiet life. Maybe in Amsterdam or in Ter Hagen (The Hague) there is some shootings. But in Scheveningen, it is new."
The technical and forensic officers arrived discreetly yesterday to analyse the interior of the apartment where the bodies of three men were discovered last Saturday morning, while hundreds of teenagers and young families travelled the four or five miles out from The Hague in trams to Scheveningen. As the neat, punctual trams disgorged their cargoes of bright and happy promenaders, there was not the slightest hint of anything amiss.
According to local people, there has been very little police activity around the burned apartment since Saturday, when the bodies were removed for a post-mortem which showed they had been tortured and mutilated before being shot.
The Dutch police and the public prosecutor's office, which is leading the investigation, had little new information to reveal yesterday. According to local sources, there is a policy of virtual non-co-operation with even the local media, especially in relation to murders of foreigners, where drug involvement is suspected.
Though newspapers occasionally run small reports about vicious killings like those in Scheveningen, there are no easily available statistics about drug-related murders.
But the Netherlands - particularly the hinterland around Rotterdam, the world's busiest port - is one of the main supply and transshipment centres for all types of drugs and the chemicals used in their manufacture.
Virtually all the ecstasy, cannabis and amphetamine which arrives in Ireland comes through the Netherlands.
As one Irish expatriate put it last evening: "If there were Dutch killing Dutch that would be big news. This is foreigners killing foreigners. This is no big deal."