Even if none of them had been directly involved and responsible, the twenty-four years Verhaven spent in prison were largely the fruit of work done by their predecessors and other older police officers. It was only natural.
Collective guilt? An inherited feeling of failure? Was it something like that making itself clearly felt in the smoke-filled conference room? In any case, Munster could sense the ingredients of resistance in the silence that had once again descended over them.
“Well,” said Rooth in the end, “we have that woman.”
“What woman?” asked Reinhart.
“He was visited by a woman. An old woman who walked
with sticks, it seems. It was a year or so before he came out, roughly speaking. They remember her because it was the only visitor he ever met with in all the time he was inside.”
“Twelve years,” said deBries.
“Who was it?” asked Moreno.
“We don’t know,” said Rooth. “We haven’t managed to find her. But she rang the jail, in any case, and made an appointment a few weeks in advance. In May 1992. She said her name was Anna Schmidt, but that seems to have been made up.
We’ve spoken to a dozen Anna Schmidts, and it seems pretty pointless, to tell you the truth.”
Munster nodded.
“That’s right,” he said. “But Verhaven seems to be the type who can sit brooding about what he knows for as long as you like. It’s not surprising in the least that he didn’t say anything to the prison governor or the police. He seems to have hardly spoken to anybody at all while he was inside.”
“Correct,” said Rooth. “An odd bastard, but we knew that already.”
“Relatives and friends?” said Munster. “The victims’, that is.”
Jung opened his notebook.
“There’s not much of interest, I’m afraid,” he began.
“Stauff and I have tracked down most of them. As far as Beatrice Holden is concerned, there’s really only the daughter left.
Apart from the shopkeeper, of course, but they are only half cousins anyway, or something like that, and they were barely in touch with each other. The daughter’s thirty-five now, with a husband and four children of her own. They don’t seem to have a clue who their grandmother was. I don’t think there’s any good reason for telling them, either.”
“What about the other one?” said Munster. “Marlene
Nietsch?”
“She has a brother and an ex who don’t seem to have much time for Verhaven. Dodgy types, both of them. Carlo Nietsch has been inside several times-receiving and a few burglaries.
Martin Kuntze, her ex-fiance, spends half his life as an alco-holic, and the other half in early retirement.”
Reinhart grunted.
“I know who he is,” he said. “I tried to use him as an informant in a drug case a few years ago. I can’t say I got very far.”
“They live here in Maardam anyway,” said Jung, “but I very much doubt if they’ve got anything to do with this. Marlene Nietsch had lots of affairs, but it was only Kuntze and one other guy that she actually lived with. The other one is called Pedlecki. He lives in Linzhuisen and doesn’t seem to care much about her. He wasn’t too worried when she was murdered, and the same applies now.”
He turned over a few pages.
“That seems to apply to most of the others we spoke to as well, come to that,” he added. “Marlene Nietsch had her weaknesses, obviously.”
“No other relatives?” asked Reinhart.
“Yes,” said Jung. “A sister in Odessa, of all places.”
Munster sighed.
“Does anybody fancy a dip in the Black Sea?” he asked.
“Shall we have a break now and stretch our legs a bit? I need to change cassettes, in any case.”
“Only a short one, if you don’t mind,” said Reinhart. “I have to see Hiller and get some authorizations from him before he goes home.”
“Five minutes,” said Munster.
25
“This village, then?” said Munster. “What do you think about it?”
“Introverted,” said deBries. “Constable Moreno and I have spent two whole days there now, and we both agree that it’s your archetypal rural backwater.”
“I was born in a place very similar to it,” said Moreno.
“Bossenwuhle, just outside Rheinau. I have to say that I recognize the atmosphere. Everybody knows everybody else.
Everybody knows what everybody else is up to. No integrity.
You are who you are; it’s best to be on your guard and lie low, never step out of line, as it were. It’s hard to put your finger on it, but no doubt you recognize the syndrome?”
“Of course,” said Munster. “I was also born out in the sticks. It’s OK while you’re a kid, but when you’re grown up, the social network sometimes feels like barbed wire. Are you saying there’s nothing extra as far as Kaustin’s concerned?
Something that would distinguish it from other similar places in some way?”
Moreno hesitated.
“Hmm,” she said, biting her lower lip. “I don’t know.
The shadow of Verhaven is lurking over them all, but that’s scarcely surprising. I gather a delegation of locals actually wanted to change the place’s name after the second murder.”
“Change its name?” said Rooth.
“Yes. They wanted to get rid of the name Kaustin. Presumably they thought everybody associated it with Verhaven and the trials. They felt they were living in a village known only for the murders. There was a petition you could sign in the village shop, but it all petered out in the end.”
“I suppose you can understand them,” said Munster. “Anyway, can you be a bit more specific? What have you managed to find out?”
“Well,” said deBries, “we’ve spoken to about twenty people, most of them old, who’ve lived there all their lives and remembered both cases very clearly. There’s not much in the way of movement in and out of the village, and the popula-tion is only some six hundred inhabitants in all. The setting is very pretty, no arguing with that. A lake and some woodland and some open countryside, that kind of thing.”
“Many people were unwilling to talk about Verhaven,” said Moreno. “They seemed to want to forget all about it, as if it were something shameful for everybody who lives there.
Maybe it is, in a way.”
“Isn’t there more than that?” interrupted Reinhart.
“Meaning what?” said deBries.
Reinhart was poking around with a match in the bowl of his pipe.
“Did you get the feeling that they were. . hiding something, so to speak? Damn it all, surely I don’t need to spell it out? It’s a matter of mood, pure and simple, that’s all. A woman ought to notice it anyway.”
“Thank you,” said deBries.
For God’s sake, don’t start fighting now, Munster thought.
I don’t want to have to spend ages editing the tape.
“Maybe,” said Moreno after a little pause. “But it’s only a very faint suspicion at most. Perhaps they all have a skeleton or two in their cupboard-metaphorically speaking, naturally-and they’re a bit scared of one another. That’s
