The Return

by Håkan Nesser

  Perceive, yes. Comprehend, no.

  She has seen it, but not taken it in.

  She stands up and makes her way to the stove. Switches on the light over the sink and fills a pan with water.

  As it comes to a boil and she stands watching the bubbles break loose and rise to the surface, she thinks about Andrea.

  Andrea, who is lying in bed on the other side of the wall behind the stove, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Two years old—two years and two months, to be precise, and she wants to be precise tonight—and lying there underneath Grandma’s crocheted quilt, sucking away at two fingers. She doesn’t need to see in order to know. The image of her daughter is everywhere; she can summon it up in her mind’s eye whenever she needs to, without any effort at all.

  Andrea. The only child she will ever have. It is a miracle that she is alive, and all other considerations are as nothing, compared with that.

  All others? she asks herself: But she already knows the answer.

  Yes, all others. She takes the pan off the stove.

  She sips her tea and opens the cotton curtains slightly. All she can see is the reflection of her own face and a strip of the interior of the kitchen. She closes them again.

  I dare not think, she admits to herself. I dare not think clearly. I must keep it at a distance. When the images crop up inside my head, I must learn to close the eyes of my soul.

  Must.

  They’ve found her now. That’s what she said in the shop, Mrs. Malinska, and there was both controlled and hysterical triumph in her deep voice.

  They’ve found her over at Goldemaars swamp.

  Dead.

  Strangled.

  Naked.

  And suddenly, in this lonely kitchen, at this lonely hour, she shudders so violently that she spills her cup of tea over the table. The hot tea runs over the checked oilcloth cover and drips onto her right thigh, but several seconds pass before she is able to stop the flow.

  It was that Saturday. Eighteen days ago, or however long it was. There’s been no sign of her since then, the slut; that’s when it must have happened.

  That Saturday, in the afternoon. She can see so clearly in her mind’s eye as well. I’ll go and clear some brushwood, he’d said, and there was something in his voice and his obstinate look that she recognized and might well have been able to understand, if only she’d tried hard enough.

  But why should she? Andrea was the important thing, and it’s Andrea that’s important now. Why should she have to understand what she doesn’t want to understand?

  It was late when he came back home, and she knew something had happened. Not what, but something.

  She could see it in his big hands as he wrung them, not knowing what to do with himself. In the blood throbbing guiltily through the veins in his temples. In his eyes, crying for help and a reduction in the pain.

  In the horror that filled his body.

  She had seen it, but not grasped what.

  But now she is sitting here, and she knows. Dries her thigh with her hand and feels the pain come creeping back. She knows the girl must not be allowed to know.

  Nobody must know. Least of all her. The image of Andrea floats back into her mind and covers all the burning and black knowledge she possesses with a protective balm.

  The comforting angel.

  The child of oblivion.

  Nothing has happened. She has no suspicions.

  Only that one.

  She stands up once more and pads over to the cupboard; she shakes out two pills from the brown glass jar. Washes them down with a mouthful of water direct from her cupped hand.

  For the pain.

  For the sleeplessness.

  For the dreams and suspicions and knowledge.

  Why? she asks herself as she makes her way slowly back up the stairs.

  I am so young. My life is close to its beginning, but already I’m bound hand and foot.

  To this husband.

  To this daughter.

  To this aching body.

  To this resolve to be forever silent?

  VIII

  May 16–22, 1994

  28

  From a distance, Münster estimated Leonore Conchis’s age to be somewhere between thirty and thirty-five.

  When he came nearer and they shook hands over the smoked-glass counter, it was clear that he would have to add at least twenty years in order to get a little closer to the truth.

  Perhaps it was this illusory circumstance that led her to submit to Münster’s questions in the rather dimly lit office; they sat back at opposite ends of a sofa that was so long, they had to raise their voices in order to converse.

  So much for youth, Münster thought. A shadowy concept.

  It had taken some considerable time to find her. She had changed her address more than ten times since living with Leopold Verhaven for a few months at the end of the seventies. And she had also changed her name.

  But only once. She was now called di Goacchi, and for the last eighteen months she and her ancient Corsican husband had been running a boutique selling garish ladies’ clothing in the center of Groenstadt.

  “Leopold Verhaven?” she said, crossing one black-nylon clad leg over the other. “Why do you want to interrogate me about Leopold Verhaven?”

  “This isn’t an interrogation,” Münster explained. “I’d simply like to ask you a few questions.”

  She lit a cigarette and adjusted her blood-red leather skirt.

  “Fire away, then,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  I’ve no idea, Münster thought. It’s just that Van Veeteren instructed me to find you.

  “Tell me about your relationship with him,” he said.

  She exhaled smoke through her nostrils and looked bored to tears. Evidently she was not excessively positive toward the police in general, and it was clear to Münster that there was no point in trying to change that attitude.

  “I don’t think it’s much fun either, having to root about in this kind of business,” he said. “Can we get it out of the way pretty quickly, so that I can leave you in peace again?”

  That did the trick, it seemed. She nodded and wet her lips with an exaggerated and well-practiced movement of the tongue.

  “All right. You want to know if he qualifies as a murderer of women. I’ve been asked that before.”

  Münster nodded.

  “So I gather.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We were only together for a few months. I bumped into him by accident just as my second marriage hit the rocks. I was shattered and needed a man to look after me. To bring me back to life, you might say.”

  “Could he do that, then?”

  She shrugged.

  “Are you married, Inspector?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I don’t need to mince words?”

  “Not in the least,” Münster assured her.

  “OK.” She pulled a face that might have been a smile. “He was a brutal lover. I enjoyed that at first, it was more or less what I needed, I suppose; but it became wearing in the long run. All that frantic fucking is only good for the first few times, and then you want to take things a bit more calmly, a bit more sensitively and more sophisticated—you know what I mean. Obviously, a really rough screw can ginger up an aging relationship; but having that all the time isn’t much good, no thank you.”

  “Exactly,” said Münster, with a gulp. “But he went at it like a bull all the time, did he?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It became too much like hard work. I left him after a few months. It was a hell of a dump to live in as well, in the middle of the woods and all that. But maybe that’s also what I needed just then…. Trees and nature and so on.”

  I find it a bit hard to imagine you in his henhouse, Münster thought, and found that he was having trouble keeping his face straight.

  “So he was a bit rough, but he didn’t display any serious violence, did he?”

  “No,” she said firml
y. “He was an introverted and uncultured person, but I never felt frightened of him, or anything like that.”

  “You knew he’d been found guilty of murder?”

  She nodded.

  “He told me after our first night. And explained that he didn’t do it.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  She hesitated, but only for a second.

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t believe Leopold Verhaven would kill a woman like that. He was an oddball, that’s for sure, but he wasn’t a murderer. I explained that during the second trial as well, but nobody paid any attention, of course. He was condemned in advance.”

  Münster nodded.

  “You haven’t been in contact with him since your relationship came to an end?”

  “No,” she said. “Who killed him? That’s what you’re trying to find out, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Münster, “that’s exactly it. Have you any idea?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not the slightest,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “Will that be all, Inspector? I have a business to attend to.”

  “Yes, I think that’s all,” said Münster, handing her his card. “Give me a call if you remember anything that could be of significance.”

  “What might that be?” she asked.

  I’ve no idea, thought Münster as he dragged himself up off the sofa.

  It had started raining by the time he emerged into the square. A thin and warm early summer drizzle that felt like a cleansing bath, almost. And a rather pleasant contrast to Leonore di Goacchi. He stood for a moment and let the gentle drops rinse his face, before unlocking the car and clambering in.

  A two-hour drive back.

  Not an especially productive afternoon, it had to be admitted. But that was how things usually went. In every single case, more or less. Questions, questions and more questions. A never-ending procession of conversations and interviews and interrogations, every one of them at first glance just as pointless and unproductive as the last, until that important detail emerged. Most often when one least expected it. That link, that little unexpected reply…That sudden but faintly glowing sign in the darkness that one couldn’t afford to overlook. It was important not to rush past it in this overgrown thicket of irrelevant and tiresome details.

  He yawned and drove out of the square.

  But surely what he had just been through couldn’t have contained anything important?

  Apart from another little support for the theory that Verhaven was innocent, that is. And we’d come to that conclusion already, in any case. Or had we?

  He concentrated on the future instead.

  Two days ahead, to be precise. That was when Van Veeteren would be released from hospital, if the predictions were to be believed; and even if Münster and Rooth had hoped to clear up this case on their own, by this stage they had waved good-bye to any such aspirations. More or less, at least.

  We might as well let time take its course and leave it to the chief inspector to take the case by the scruff of the neck, Münster thought. From Friday onward, that is. It was hard to predict precisely what that would involve, although there had been a few hints. Certain observations he hadn’t been able to avoid making during that last visit.

  Only little things, it was true, but clear nevertheless. Also, a sort of glow in the darkness, come to think of it…The silly and annoying air of mystery Van Veeteren always adopted, for instance. The irritation and touchiness. The humming and hawing and muttering.

  The usual signals, in fact.

  Only faint indications, but clearly audible and visible to anybody who’d been associated with him for a while.

  The chief inspector was at the incubation stage, as Reinhart had put it on one occasion, quite independently of Verhaven and his chicken shed and all that.

  Perhaps they should place him under a light? Münster couldn’t help smiling to himself as he drove.

  To speed things up. Wasn’t that what Verhaven had done with his hens, after all?

  Or was it simply that being cooped up in the ward was driving him round the bend? Münster wondered. In any case, the staff at the hospital deserved a medal—for putting up with him. For not having thrown him out or dumped him in the dirty-linen basket. He must remember to give them a bunch of flowers when he collected Van Veeteren on Friday. No harm in improving the image of the forces of law and order…

  But then he abandoned all thought about work. Thought about Synn and the evening off that lay in store. That was a much more pleasant topic.

  A visit to the theater and a candlelit dinner at Le Canaille. Grandma and Grandad doing the babysitting. Their little flat in the town center afterward. Oh, life had its golden moments now and again.

  29

  Kiesling’s case for the prosecution at the Marlene Nietsch trial occupied eighteen closely typed photocopied sheets. Van Veeteren read through them all, sighed deeply and then returned to the reconstruction—the attempt to convince the judge, the members of the jury and anybody else who might be interested in what had happened that fatal afternoon in September 1981.

  …and so let me instead move on to describe what happened that Friday almost three months ago, September 11.

  At about 7:30 in the morning Leopold Verhaven leaves his home in Kaustin, driving his van, a green Trotta, 1960 vintage, and sets off on his usual round delivering eggs to his customers—a total of ten stores in Linzhuisen and Maardam. His last delivery this morning, also as usual, is the Covered Market in Kreuger Plejn here in Maardam.

  As we have heard, Verhaven is very well known to everybody who works at or is otherwise connected with the Covered Market. According to him and several other witnesses, he leaves the market a few minutes after half past nine, when he has seen to everything he needs to do. His van is parked at the back of the hall, in Kreugerlaan, where he had earlier unloaded today’s delivery of eggs, but he doesn’t go straight back to his van, which is his usual practice: Instead he leaves through the main entrance, emerging into the square. He goes to the newsstand outside Goldmann’s, buys a newspaper and starts walking back toward Zwille. When he gets to the fountain, he meets a business acquaintance, Aaron Katz, and they exchange a few words. He then continues across the square, and at the corner of Kreuger Plejn and Zwille he bumps into Marlene Nietsch. They have been conducting a sexual relationship for some six weeks; they have met and spent the night together, both at Verhaven’s house in Kaustin and in Miss Nietsch’s apartment in central Maardam.

  They stand talking for several minutes, according to Verhaven himself and also several other witnesses, including Aaron Katz. Eventually they set off in a southerly direction along Zwille, then turn into Kreugerlaan where Verhaven’s van is parked. The witness, Elena Klimenska, attests that they were standing beside the van, talking, at some point between ten and five minutes to ten. This is denied by the accused, who also denies that Marlene Nietsch got into the van with him. However, no less than three other witnesses—independently of one another—have noticed Verhaven’s unmistakable van passing through Maardam. Two of them have stated under oath that there was a woman in the passenger seat beside Verhaven, a woman whose description is very similar to that of the murdered Miss Nietsch. The third witness, Mrs. Bossens from Karnach, has declined to swear under oath that she saw them together, for deeply felt religious reasons, but has nevertheless indicated that she is 95 percent certain that Verhaven was not alone in the van, as he claims.

  We have no witnesses of what happened next on that tragic Friday, but it is not difficult to reconstruct the probable course of events. We cannot know, of course, what Leopold Verhaven and Marlene Nietsch talked about in Maardam, or what they say to each other in the van, but we can be quite sure that it is something of a sexual nature. Perhaps the accused tries to persuade Miss Nietsch to agree to some activity she has no desire to indulge in, that she doesn’t feel in the mood for. But that is mere speculation and is in no way relevant to the question of guilt as such.


  As usual Verhaven takes the route home via Bossingen and Löhr. That is unquestionably the obvious route to take from Maardam to Kaustin, but instead of actually driving home, on this day of all days, Verhaven decides to travel south toward Wurms, presumably by taking a right at the crossroads in the village of Korrim. About halfway between Korrim and Wurms, he then turns onto a narrow and rarely used road that leads into the trees and peters out after only a hundred yards or so. This is the same stretch of woodland, ladies and gentlemen, in which the body of Beatrice Holden was discovered in 1962, the woman of whom Leopold Verhaven was found guilty of murdering, and for which crime he served twelve years in prison.

  Verhaven parks his van beside a stack of logs, and a cyclist passing by on the main road glimpses the vehicle through the trees at half past ten or shortly afterward. Verhaven forces Marlene Nietsch to have sexual intercourse and strangles her, either during or after the sexual act. He hides the body under a pile of twigs and branches, where it is discovered four days later by the owner of the woods, Mr. Nimmerlet.

  After killing her, Verhaven drives straight back home. He is seen in his van by a neighbor shortly after eleven o’clock. The accused has been unable to give a satisfactory explanation for why on this particular morning, unlike all other days, it has taken him more than half an hour longer to get from the Covered Market in Maardam to his home in Kaustin. As far as Miss Nietsch is concerned, the only witnesses to have seen her alive after Elena Klimenska saw her talking to Verhaven behind the market are the ones who saw her in the green van. It must therefore be considered beyond a shadow of a doubt that she really did accompany her murderer in the van. The accused maintains that he and Miss Nietsch parted company in Zwille, which only goes to show that in the depths of his depraved, criminal mind [Sic! wrote Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren in the margin and underscored it twice] he is well aware that this is his only chance of being found not guilty as charged. As we have heard, Marlene Nietsch had arranged to meet a friend, Renate Koblenz, at the Rote Moor café in Kreuger Plejn at 10:15 this Friday. She never appeared.