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.
The reason is that at the time her friend was sitting at the table they had agreed upon, waiting for her and beginning to wonder what was the matter, Marlene Nietsch was in the van with her murderer, driving out of Maardam. And this murderer, my Lord and honorable members of the jury, can in no circumstances be anybody other than the accused, Leopold Verhaven.