The Return Page 13

  The last words were laden with exhaustion, but even so, Münster dared to ask one more question.

  “You are assuming that no matter what else, both murders were committed by the same person?”

  “Yes,” said Heidelbluum. “I’m quite certain of that.”

  “In that case,” said Münster, “I would suggest that we are in fact dealing with a triple murderer, not just a double one.”

  But Heidelbluum no longer appeared to be interested, and Münster realized that it was time to leave him in peace.

  When the children were in bed at last, and Münster and his wife were drinking tea in the kitchen, he took out two photographs of Verhaven—one taken at some athletics meeting before the drugs scandal, the other taken a few years later, the afternoon at the end of April 1962 when he was arrested by two plainclothes police officers.

  In both pictures the sun was shining into Verhaven’s face from the side, and in both he looked guileless, squinting straight at the camera. And there was a slight trace of a smile on his lips. An air of mischievous seriousness.

  “What’s your impression of this man?” he asked his wife. “You’re usually good at reading faces.”

  Synn put the two pictures side by side on the table and pondered them for a moment.

  “Who is it?” she asked. “He seems familiar, somehow. He’s an actor, isn’t he?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Münster. “But there again, yes, I think you’re right. Maybe that’s exactly what he was—an actor.”

  V

  August 24, 1993

  23

  It took some time to get the stove going, but once he’d shifted a few large chunks of soot from the flue, it took hold. Some smoke belched into the room to start with, but it soon cleared. He tried the faucets, but no water appeared: he had to fetch some buckets from the spring in the woods instead. He put a large cauldron on the burner, and a smaller pot next to it, for the coffee. The refrigerator merely needed switching on. The electricity was on, as he had requested. She had taken care of that.

  When the water was sufficiently hot, he filled a bowl, carried it out to the rickety table at the gable end and had a good wash. The sun hadn’t yet sunk below the trees, and it made him feel pleasantly warm as he stood there in nothing but his underpants. Late-summer bumblebees buzzed around in the mignonette standing three feet tall against the house wall; there was a smell of ripe apples, which had already started falling, and he had the feeling that everything was beginning again.

  Life. The world.

  Once he’d done what he had to do, he would be able to start living up here again; he’d had his doubts, but this afternoon and evening filled with gentle movement and a spirit of welcome could hardly be mere coincidence.

  It was a sign. One of those signs.

  He poured the last of the water over his head. Didn’t bother about his underpants getting wet, took them off and went back into the house naked.

  He put on a completely new set of clothes. The stuff he’d left in his study and in the wardrobe were pristine; maybe they smelled a little bit odd—a trace of jute or horsehair, perhaps—but what the hell? They’d been untouched for twelve years, after all.

  Just like him. The same period of waiting, of being shut in.

  He made his evening meal at about seven. Sausage and egg, bread, onion and beer. He ate it on the steps outside the front door, with the plate on his knee and the bottle on the rail, just like he always did. He washed up, lit a fire in the living room and tried to make the television work. There was a loud buzzing noise to accompany silent pictures from some foreign channel. He switched it off and tried the radio instead. That was better. He sat in the basket chair in front of the fire and listened to the eight o’clock news while drinking another beer and smoking a cigarette. He found it difficult to grasp that so much time had passed since he last sat here; it felt like just a few weeks, a couple of months at most, but he knew of course that this was how life stuttered along. No regular progression, nothing continuous. Ups and downs, to-ing and froing. But all the same, the passage of time was inscribed in one’s body: in the weariness one felt, all those increasingly sluggish movements.

  And the anger in the soul. The flame refusing to die down. He understood that he needed to do what he had to do as quickly as possible. Within the next few days, preferably. He knew what he needed to know, after all. There was no reason to put it off any longer.

  He waited until there was only the faintest of glows from the fire. Darkness had set in. It was time for bed, but he needed to pay a visit to the henhouse before going to sleep, just to see what it looked like. He had no intention of starting it all up again, certainly not, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink if he didn’t take a quick look at least.

  He took the lantern and went outside. He shivered a little when the cold evening air crept up on him, wondered whether to fetch a pullover, but couldn’t be bothered. It was only forty yards at most and he’d soon be back by the warm fire again.

  He was only halfway there when it struck him that he wasn’t alone in the darkness.

  VI

  May 11–15, 1994

  24

  “What’s this thing for?” asked deBries, pointing at the tape recorder.

  “It’s the chief inspector,” sighed Münster.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he claims he’s leading the investigation and he doesn’t want to miss a word of this run-through. I tried to stop him, but you know what he’s like….”

  “How is he?” asked Moreno.

  “He’s on the mend, much better,” said Münster. “But he’ll have to stay in hospital for another three or four days at least. According to the doctors, that is. I expect the nurses on the ward would throw him out today if it was up to them.”

  “Oh dear,” said Rooth, scratching at his beard. “He ought to keep his thoughts to himself, is that it?”

  “Probably,” said Münster, switching on the tape recorder. “General update, Wednesday, May eleventh. Present: Münster, Rooth, deBries, Jung and Moreno…”

  There was a knock and Reinhart stuck his head round the door.

  “Is there room for one more?”

  “…and Reinhart,” said Münster.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Rooth. “Have all the racists gone away?”

  Reinhart shook his head.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “It’s just that I’m a bit interested in Leopold Verhaven. I’ve read a bit about him. So if you don’t mind…?”

  “No problem,” said deBries. “Sit next to the chief inspector.”

  “The chief inspector?” wondered Rooth.

  “That’s him, whirring round and round.”

  “I see,” said Reinhart, sitting down. “Absent but with us all the same.”

  “Let’s start with the identification,” said Münster. “I’ll leave that to Rooth.”

  Rooth cleared his throat.

  “OK,” he said. “It’s all centered on the testicle business. Verhaven had an accident when he was about ten. He cycled into a stone wall and got the handlebar between his legs.”

  “Ouch,” said deBries.

  “One testicle was injured and eventually had to be removed. Meusse established that the body we found in the carpet was missing a testicle, and that fact together with all the other circumstances means that we can be pretty sure it’s him. Verhaven, that is.”

  “A circumstantial identification?” said Reinhart.

  “You could call it that, yes,” said Rooth, “if you can get your tongue round it. His sister couldn’t say for sure if it was him—probably nobody could. But everything fits. All known factors point to him—being released from jail, witnesses in the village, traces in the house, the fact that nobody’s seen him since then. But, of course, there is a slight possibility that it could be somebody else. The question is who, and where Verhaven has disappeared to, in that case.”

  There was silence
for a few seconds.

  “If Verhaven isn’t the victim,” said Jung, “presumably he must be the one who did it.”

  Münster nodded.

  “That has to be right,” he said. “But what are the odds of him finding some other poor bastard with only one testicle and then bumping him off? And why? No, I think we can forget that possibility. It’s Leopold Verhaven who’s dead, let’s agree on that. So somebody murdered him, on August twenty-fourth last year, the day he got back home after twelve years in prison. Or shortly after, in any case.”

  “Were there any signs of violence in the house?” asked Reinhart.

  “No,” said Rooth. “Nothing at all. We know nothing about how it was done, either. He could have been killed there, then taken somewhere else. The clothes he wore to come home in are still in the house. He could have changed, of course, but it looks as if he’d gone to bed.”

  “The murderer could have arrived during the night carrying a blunt instrument,” said Münster. “That’s pretty plausible.”

  “Mind you, the neighbors on the other side of the woods didn’t see anything,” said Rooth. “There again, even Mrs. Wilkerson must presumably be off guard occasionally.”

  “Unless she and her husband take it in turns at the kitchen window,” said Münster. “That’s also plausible.”

  “Motive,” said Münster, when everybody had served themselves from the coffee trolley. “That’s the big question mark, needless to say. As far as the technical evidence is concerned, we don’t even know what questions to ask. It might help if we found a few more body parts, but as things stand we have no alternative to a spot of speculation. So what do you think? Rooth?”

  Rooth quickly swallowed half a KitKat.

  “I think we have to assume that somebody was waiting for him to be released,” he said. “Somebody who was in a hurry as well, and had a pretty good reason for doing it pretty damn quick.”

  “Hmm,” said Reinhart. “What kind of reason might that be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rooth. “But let me develop this a bit further. There are two things that suggest it’s like I said. One is the obvious fact that Verhaven was murdered so quickly. The same day that he got home, presumably. The other is that somebody phoned the prison in Ulmentahl last winter and asked when he was going to be let out. Rang again in July to check. The sleepwalkers running the jail only unearthed those facts yesterday. When I went to talk to them some time ago, they didn’t even mention it.”

  “The same person?” asked Reinhart.

  “They’re not sure, and we can’t really expect them to be. Still, it was a man both times. He claimed to be a journalist.”

  Nobody spoke for a few seconds.

  “And why should this man want to get Verhaven out of the way?” asked Moreno.

  “Hmm,” said Rooth. “I’ve no idea. The most spectacular reason would be that it was something to do with the Beatrice and Marlene cases in some way. But that needn’t be the reason, of course.”

  “Crap,” said Reinhart.

  “What do you mean, crap?” asked Rooth indignantly, scratching at his beard.

  “It’s plain as a pikestaff that it’s to do with the other business,” said Reinhart. “The only question is, how?”

  Münster looked at the officers assembled around the oval table. There was no doubt it would make a difference if Reinhart decided to join the investigation.

  DeBries lit a cigarette.

  “Can’t we press on a bit faster?” he said. “I mean, there are only two alternatives, as far as I can see. I thought we all agreed on that.”

  “OK,” said Rooth. “Forgive my scientific scruples. Whoever killed Leopold Verhaven must have done it either because he couldn’t stand the man, hated him, wanted to punish him even more. Somebody who thought that twenty-four years weren’t long enough. The final solution, as it were…Or somebody who had something to hide.”

  “What?” asked Reinhart.

  “Something that Verhaven knew about,” said Rooth, “and intended to do something about the moment he was released from prison. Or, at least, the murderer thought he was intending to do something about it.”

  “What?” asked Reinhart again.

  Rooth shrugged.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “But in any case, it must have been pretty vital for the murderer that it didn’t come out.”

  “If we assume that it was connected with the two earlier cases, there’s really only one possibility,” said Münster.

  “You mean…?” said Reinhart.

  “Yes,” said Rooth. “We do. If all we’ve said is in fact true, it could well mean that Verhaven was not guilty of the murders he was sentenced and punished for. And that somehow he managed to find out who really did it. That’s what we mean. But it’s a damn fine thread, of course.”

  Nobody spoke. The only sounds to be heard were the whirring of the tape recorder and the crackling in Reinhart’s pipe.

  “How?” said Münster after half a minute. “How could Verhaven have found out who really did it?”

  There was a strong feeling of reluctance, in himself and the others, to accept this reasoning. And thank God for that. 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, Münster 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.”

  Münster 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 Münster. “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 Münster. “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-fiancé, spends half his life as an alcoholic, 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 an
yway,” 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.”

  Münster 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 Münster.

  25

  “This village, then?” said Münster. “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. “Bossenwühle, 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 Münster. “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?”