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.
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 Munster 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 his-tory 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.
“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?”
