The Return

by Håkan Nesser

  “No doubt he had some friends?” said Moreno.

  Mrs. Gellnacht thought that over.

  “No, I don’t think he did. Well, in the first year or two, perhaps. He used to go around a little with Pieter Wolenz, if I’m not mistaken, but then they moved. To Linzhuisen. I don’t think there was anybody after that.”

  “Was he teased at all?” asked Moreno. “Bullied, as they say nowadays.”

  She thought again.

  “No,” she said eventually. “Not really. We had a sort of respect for him, despite everything, all of us. You tried not to fall out with him, in any case. He could get very angry, I recall. He had a fiery temperament underneath that silent and sullen surface.”

  “How did it make itself felt?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This fiery temperament. What did he do?”

  “Oh, I don’t really know,” she said hesitantly. “Some pupils were a bit afraid of him, there were a few fights, and he was strong, really strong, even though he certainly wasn’t especially big or powerful.”

  “Can you remember any particular occasion?”

  “No…Wait a moment, yes, in fact. I remember he once threw a boy out a window when he lost his temper.”

  “Out a window?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds. It was the ground floor, so it turned out all right.”

  “I see.”

  “Mind you, there was a bicycle rack outside, so he did injure himself slightly even so….”

  DeBries nodded.

  “What was the boy’s name?” asked Moreno.

  “I can’t remember,” said Irmgaard Gellnacht. “Maybe it was one of the Leisse brothers. Or Kollerin, he’s the local butcher now. Yes, I think it was him.”

  DeBries changed tack.

  “Beatrice Holden, do you remember her?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Gellnacht, sitting bolt upright in the easy chair.

  “And how would you describe her?”

  “I’d rather not. Don’t speak ill of the dead, as they say.”

  “But if we were to lean on you a little?”

  She gave a quick smile.

  “Well, in that case,” she said. “Beatrice Holden was a slut. I think that description fits her rather well.”

  “Was she a slut even when she was at school?” wondered Moreno.

  “From the very start. Don’t think I’m an old prude just because I’m saying this. Beatrice was a terribly vulgar person. The cheapest kind. She had the looks, and she used them to wrap men round her little finger. Or boys, in those days.”

  “They were in love with her?”

  “The whole lot. Teachers as well, I think. She was young and unmarried. It was really awful, in fact.”

  “She moved away from here later, didn’t she?”

  Mrs. Gellnacht nodded.

  “Ran off with a man when she was barely seventeen. Lived in two or three different places, I think. Came back with a child a few years later.”

  “A baby?”

  “Yes. A girl. Her mother looked after it. Beatrice’s mother, that is.”

  “When? Was that a long time before she was mixed up with Verhaven?”

  “No, not all that long. I’d say it was round about 1960, that was roughly the same time as he moved back here. She and the girl moved in with her mother, in any case, only for about six months, or thereabouts. The father had gone to sea, people said, but nobody has ever seen him. Not then, not later. Well, after a few months she moved in with Verhaven, up at The Big Shadow.”

  “The Big Shadow?”

  “Yes, that’s what it’s usually called. The Big Shadow. Don’t ask me why.”

  DeBries made a note.

  “What about the daughter?” asked Moreno. “Did she take the girl with her?”

  “Oh no,” replied Mrs. Gellnacht firmly. “Certainly not. The girl stayed with Grandma. Perhaps that was best, in view of what happened. She turned out all right.”

  “What was the relationship like?” asked deBries. “Verhaven and Beatrice, I mean.”

  Mrs. Gellnacht hesitated before answering.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “There was an awful lot of gossip about it afterward, of course. Some people reckoned it was inevitable from the start that it would end up like it did. Or that it would go wrong, at least; but I don’t know. It’s always so easy for people to understand everything when they have the key in their hands and know what actually happened. Don’t you think?”

  “No doubt about it,” said deBries.

  “Quite a few things happened, in fact, before he killed her. I think they drank pretty heavily, but there again he was a good worker. Worked hard, and no doubt earned quite a bit from his chickens. But they certainly used to fight. Nobody can deny that.”

  “Yes, so we understand,” said Moreno.

  There was a pause while Mrs. Gellnacht served more coffee. Then deBries leaned forward and asked the most important question of all.

  “What was it like during the time before Verhaven was arrested? After they’d found Beatrice’s body, that is. Those ten days, or however long it was? Can you remember anything about that?”

  “Well…,” Mrs. Gellnacht began. “I’m not sure I quite understand what you are getting at.”

  “What did people think,” explained Moreno. “Who did people suspect when they talked about it here in the village? Before they knew.”

  She sat silently for a moment, her cup half-raised to her lips.

  “Well,” she said. “I suppose that’s the way people were talking.”

  “What way?” asked deBries.

  “That it was Verhaven himself who’d done it, of course. I don’t think anybody here in Kaustin was especially surprised when he was arrested. Nor when he was found guilty either.”

  DeBries wrote something in his notebook again.

  “And what about now?” he asked. “Is everybody still sure that he was the one who did it?”

  “Absolutely,” she replied. “No doubt about it. Who else could it have been?”

  Something to consider in a little more detail perhaps, he thought when they were back in the car.

  As it couldn’t very well have been anybody else, it must have been Verhaven!

  One could only hope that Mrs. Gellnacht’s reasoning hadn’t been copied to too great an extent by the police and the prosecuting authorities. No doubt it would be a good idea to look into that question. What about the forensic evidence, by the way? What exactly was it that had got him convicted, if he really had denied everything so vehemently right to the very end?

  DeBries had no idea.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Seems to be an open-and-shut case,” said Ewa Moreno. “Possibly too open and shut. Shall we take Moltke now?”

  19

  “Verhaven Arrested! Sensational Development in Beatrice Case!”

  The headline ran across the whole of Neuwe Blatt’s front page on April 30, 1962. Van Veeteren drank half a mug of water and started reading.

  Was it Leopold Verhaven who murdered his own fiancée, Beatrice Holden?

  In any case the police officer in charge of the notorious Kaustin murder, Detective Chief Inspector Mort, and also the public prosecutor, Mr. Hagendeck, have good reason to think so. Such good reason that the former international athlete was taken into custody yesterday. At the press conference Hagendeck was very careful not to reveal the grounds for the arrest, but thought that charges would be made within the twelve-day period stipulated by law.

  Precisely how new evidence or proof that would throw light on this sinister business had emerged was something neither the police nor the prosecutor were prepared to discuss at the press conference in the Maardam police station. Nor does it seem that Leopold Verhaven has made a confession. His lawyer, Pierre Quenterran, was adamant that his client had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder, and claimed that the arrest was a consequence of, and a reaction to, all that had
been written about the case.

  “The police are desperate,” Quenterran insisted to assembled reporters. “The general public with its ingrained sense of justice has demanded results, and rather than admit to their incompetence, those in charge of the case have conjured up a scapegoat….”

  Detective Chief Inspector Mort dismisses Mr. Quenterran’s statement as “utter rubbish.”

  Well, he would, wouldn’t he? Van Veeteren thought and turned to the next photocopy, which was from the same issue of Neuwe Blatt, but an inside page. It comprised a short summary of the background, a résumé of developments from the time when “this somber and depressing course of events first began,” as the reporter put it.

  April 6:

  A Saturday, sunny with a warm breeze. Early in the morning Leopold Verhaven sets off, as is his wont, for the towns of Linzhuisen and Maardam on business, and does not return home until late afternoon. Beatrice Holden has vanished by then, according to Verhaven’s own testimony, but he assumes that “she’s just gone off somewhere.” However, nobody has seen Beatrice Holden from that moment on. Some neighbors noticed her on her way home on Saturday morning, several hours after Verhaven had left. She spent the morning visiting her mother and daughter in the village. There is no evidence to suggest that she left home again on business of her own, and of her own free will.

  On business of her own, and of her own free will! Van Veeteren thought. What a wordsmith! He continued reading:

  April 16:

  Verhaven reports to the police that his fiancée has been missing for over a week. He declines to comment on why he left it so long before informing the police. He does not believe, however, that “anything serious can have happened to her.”

  April 22:

  Beatrice Holden’s dead body is found by an elderly couple in some woods only a mile or so away from Verhaven’s house. She is naked and has been strangled, probably not at the place where her body was found.

  April 22–29:

  A major police investigation examines the circumstances of the murder. Meticulous forensic procedures are followed, and a hundred or so people, most of them from the village of Kaustin, are interviewed.

  April 30:

  Leopold Verhaven is arrested on suspicion of having murdered his 23-year-old fiancée, or alternatively committed manslaughter.

  That was all. Van Veeteren put the photocopy at the bottom of the pile and checked the time. Half past eleven. Shouldn’t lunch be served about now? For the first time since he came to after the operation, he could feel a little pang of hunger. That must surely be a sign that he was on the mend?

  In any case, everything seemed to have gone according to plan. That is what the young surgeon with the cherubic cheeks had stressed enthusiastically that very morning, when he had called in to prod at Van Veeteren’s stomach with his pale, cocktail-sausage fingers. A mere six to eight days’ convalescence, then the chief inspector would be able to return to his usual routines, more energetic than ever.

  Energetic? Van Veeteren thought. How can he know that I have any particular desire to be energetic?

  He turned his head to look at the display of flowers. Three bouquets, no more, no less, were squeezed onto the bedside table. His colleagues’. Renate’s. Jess and Erich’s. And this afternoon Jess was due to visit him with the twins. What more could he ask for?

  Now he could hear the food trolley approaching down the corridor. Presumably he would only be allowed a few morsels of dietary fare, but perhaps that was just as well. Maybe he was not yet ready for rare steak.

  He yawned and turned his thoughts back to Verhaven. Tried to imagine that little village off the beaten track around the beginning of the 1960s.

  What components would have been there?

  The usual ones? Presumably.

  Narrowness of outlook. Suspicions. Envy. Wagging tongues.

  Yes, that was about it, generally speaking.

  Verhaven’s outsider status?

  He seems to have been an odd character, and an odd character was what was needed. The ideal murderer? Perhaps that is what it looked like.

  How about proof? He tried to recall the circumstances, but he couldn’t remember much more than a series of question marks that he hadn’t been able to sort out.

  Had they managed to resist all the half-truths that must have emerged? There had been a bit of a manhunt, he remembered. Quite a lot of insinuations in the media about the competence of the police and the courts. Or rather, incompetence. The police had been under pressure. If they didn’t find a murderer, they were condemning themselves…

  What about the forensic proof? It had been a case of circumstantial evidence, hadn’t it? He must get down to the court records that Münster had brought him, that was obvious. If only he could get something nutritious down himself first. Certainly there had been one or two shaky points. He had only talked about the case once with Mort after it was all over, and it had been obvious that his predecessor had not been too happy about discussing it.

  He was slightly better informed about the other business, the Marlene case. Hadn’t that investigation left quite a lot to be desired as well? Van Veeteren had actually been involved in it, but only on the periphery. He’d never been in the courtroom. Mort had been in charge on that occasion as well.

  Leopold Verhaven? Surely this was a chapter in legal history that would not stand up to meticulous rescrutiny?

  Or was he merely imagining things? Was it just a matter of him needing something more or less perverse to occupy his mind as he lay here flat on his back, waiting for his intestine to heal properly again? Screened off and isolated from the outside world, where the only thing demanded of him was to lie still and not get excited.

  Something really messy. An old legal scandal, like the one in that crime novel by Josephine Tey, whatever it was called.

  Why was it so difficult to let your mind lie fallow?

  What was it that Pascal had said? Something about all the evil in the world being caused by our inability to sit still in an empty room?

  Shit, what an existence, he thought. Hurry up and wheel in the food trolley, so that I can get my teeth into a good old spinach soup!

  20

  “Quite a few stories were circulating about him,” said Bernard Moltke, lighting another cigarette.

  “You don’t say,” said deBries. “What kind of stories?”

  “Various kinds. It’s hard to tell which ones dated from before Beatrice and which ones came afterward. Which ones are authentic, if you like. It was mainly during the trial that gossip was rife. We’d never met up so much in the village as we did during those months. Afterward, things quieted down, somehow. As if it were all over. Which it no doubt was.”

  “Can you give us an example of the kind of story you are talking about?” asked Moreno. “Preferably an authentic one.”

  Bernard Moltke thought for a moment.

  “The one about the cat,” he said. “I certainly heard that one much earlier, in any case. They say he strangled a cat with his bare hands.”

  DeBries could feel a shudder shooting down his spine, and he saw Constable Moreno give a start.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Moltke. “But anyway, he’s supposed to have wrung its neck. When he was ten or twelve years old.”

  “Ugh,” said Moreno.

  “Yes. Maybe somebody dared him to do it. I have an idea that was it.”

  “Was that supposed to be a sufficient reason?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Moltke. “Lots of people say that’s what he was like.”

  “What do you have to say about Beatrice Holden, then?”

  Moltke drew deeply on his cigarette, seemingly searching through his memory.

  “A damned good-looking woman,” he said. “A bit on the wild side, that’s true, but Good Lord…Ah well. Same color hair as you, miss.”

  He winked at Moreno, who remained stony faced, to deBries’s great satisfaction.

&
nbsp; “Why was she in with Verhaven, then?” she asked instead. “He can’t have been very attractive to women, surely?”

  “Don’t say that,” protested Moltke, poking his index finger into his double chins. “Don’t say that. You never know what’s going on inside a woman. Isn’t that right, Inspector?”

  “Absolutely,” said deBries.

  “What about Marlene?” asked Moreno, totally unmoved. “The same type of thoroughbred, I take it?”

  Moltke burst out laughing, but soon turned serious.

  “You bet your sweet life she was,” he said. “A bit older, that’s all. A goddamned scandal that he killed the pair of them.”

  “You saw Marlene Nietsch as well, then?” asked deBries.

  “Only the once. They hadn’t met all that much before…it was all over.”

  “I see,” said deBries. “I understand you were a witness at the first trial?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was your testimony about?”

  Moltke thought for a while.

  “I’m damned if I know,” he said. “I was up at Verhaven’s quite a bit around the time it happened, that’s all really. Helped him with the lighting inside the chicken sheds. He was experimenting with daily rhythms and there was some wiring job he wasn’t up to.”

  “So that’s it,” said deBries. “Were you there on the Saturday she disappeared? Well, if you believe what he said, that is.”

  Moltke nodded solemnly.

  “Yes, I put in a few hours that Saturday. Finished about one, roughly. I was the last person to see her alive, I suppose. Apart from the murderer, of course.”

  “The murderer?” said Moreno. “You mean Verhaven?”

  “Yes,” said Moltke. “I suppose I do.”

  “You don’t sound too convinced,” said deBries.

  A brief silence again.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve become convinced as the years have passed. After the Marlene murder, and then…”

  “But you were a witness for the defense at the trial, isn’t that right?”