The Return

She drew a deep breath and straightened her back.

“Irrespective whether or not you are a believer,” she said,

“perhaps you can agree that many physical phenomena also have a psychological side. A spiritual dimension.”

She spoke very slowly, as if she had prepared the words in advance and wanted to be certain that none of them escaped his attention.

“Can you explain in a little more detail,” he said.

“Preferably not. It is a matter of trust as well. Not spelled out, but just as binding. I’m sure you understand what I mean.”

“You consider that you are bound by professional secrecy?”

“To some extent, yes.”

He nodded.

“But when the wounds in the soul had healed, her handi-cap also became less severe, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“How much better did she become? Could she move

around? With the aid of a rolling walker or walking sticks, for instance?”

“Yes.”

“Did she go out?”

“I took her out in a wheelchair every day.”

“But she never went out on her own?”

“Not as far as I know.”

He looked past her and out the window.

“Can you tell me what you were doing on June fifth, 1992?” he asked.

“No.”

“Do you know what Anna was doing that day?”

She didn’t reply. Looked at him with those calm, brown eyes of hers without an ounce of worry or embarrassment.

“How far is it from here to Ulmentahl?”

“Eighteen miles,” she said with no hesitation.

He drank the rest of his tea and allowed the silence to settle on the low table. It’s remarkable how information can be passed on via silence, he thought. He could have asked important questions now; that would have been the normal procedure, no doubt about that. He would have received no answers, but he was used to reading the nuances in unspoken words. But this was different. There was an infinitely wide gap between this almost stylized situation and the usual unspoken exchanges. For a moment he could feel a dizzy spell coming on again. Possibly not the kind of dizziness due to his operation, but nevertheless a feeling of weakness, a loss of strength and a feeling that he was losing his foothold. . Or that there was something about which he was the only person to have total knowledge. And hence the total and unavoidable responsibility.

“Those wounds in her soul. .,” he said eventually. “Have you any idea about what caused them?”

“She never told me about it.”

“I have gathered that. But I asked you if you had any idea about it.”

She smiled faintly once more.

“I can’t go into this, Chief Inspector. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.”

He paused for a few seconds.

“Do you believe in divine justice?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“And earthly justice?”

“That too. I am sorry that I am inhibited with regard to what I can tell you, but I think you already know what you need to know. It is not up to me to break my confidence and to speculate. If she had wanted me to have a complete knowledge of everything, she would have told me everything, of course. But she didn’t. If it had been the intention that I should take the matter further, I would have known. But that is not the case.”

“So Nemesis is my role?”

“Perhaps. A profession is also a calling, is that not the case?”

He sighed.

“May I ask you a personal question that has nothing to do with this?”

“Of course. Please do.”

“Do you believe in a God who intervenes?”

She clasped her hands over her knee.

“Certainly,” she said. “I believe that to the greatest possible degree.”

“How does He intervene?”

“In many ways. Through people.”

“And you believe that He is careful when He selects His agents?”

“Why should He not be?”

“It was just a thought,” said Van Veeteren.

Suspicions! he thought as he sat down in the first of his stopping places on the way home. Suspicions and thin air.

He sighed. Ferrati, the prosecutor, would kill himself laughing if Van Veeteren approached him with stuff like this.

Without really thinking what he was doing, he started to draw a series of circles in the margin of the evening paper on the table in front of him. He contemplated the pattern that was emerging and at the same time tried to summarize the situation:

If Verhaven really was innocent, it could be that the real murderer was the person he suspected. Furthermore, it was not impossible that the invalid Anna, who had died six months before the murder, suspected this. In any case, he had the feeling that Sister Marianne presumed that Anna was the one who had visited Verhaven in prison. . In which case, of course, it was possible that she had told him what she thought!

My God, Van Veeteren thought. What a deduction!

In schematic form, along the edge of the crumpled newspaper, the chain of thought looked even more dodgy, if that was possible. A series of clumsily drawn circles joined by fee-ble lines the size of a spider’s thread. Damn it all! Solid proof, Heller had gone on about. If he saw this, he would probably accept my resignation without further ado, Van Veeteren thought.

But even so, he knew that he was right. This is how it had happened. The murderer was surrounded. Van Veeteren had no doubt. It was obvious.

He could picture Leopold Verhaven as a young man-the

successful athlete. Fast, strong and vital; on his way to enter-ing the record books. . In the middle of the naive, optimistic 1950s. The decade of the Cold War, but also of optimism in many respects. Wasn’t that the case?

And then?

How had things turned out?

What a complete and permanent change of fortune!

Wasn’t the bottom line that Verhaven’s fate was symbolic?

What kind of a bizarre sequence of events was this, spread out over almost half a century, that had led to the man’s death, and that Van Veeteren was sitting here now trying to conjure up in his mind’s eye? What was the significance of his probing into forgotten deaths from the past? That had taken place during that failed, worn-out life?

Was this really just a straightforward part of Van Veeteren’s job?

As he sat there gazing out into the dusk that was descend-ing over the edge of the forest and the featureless section of freeway, it struck him that, in fact, everything had come to an end a long time ago. That he was the last,