Hakan Nesser - The Return

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?”

“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 fiancee, 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 resume 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 fiancee 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 Ver-

haven’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 circum -

stances 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 fiancee, 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’ conva-lescence, 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.