“I wouldn’t have thought so. We were still on vacation when he came back here last August. We’ve only heard people talking about him. What’s happened?”
“He’s dead,” said deBries. “Mysterious circumstances. But don’t call the newspapers tonight, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh dear,” said Czermak. “No, you have my word on
that.”
“Thank you for your efforts today,” said deBries as he pulled up outside Constable Moreno’s apartment in Keymer Plejn. “A pity you don’t have time for a glass of something. It’s often productive to sit down in peace and quiet for a while and chew over the impressions we’ve had.”
“Sorry about that,” said Moreno. “I promise to plan things a bit better next time. Aren’t you married, by the way?”
“A little bit,” deBries admitted.
“I thought so. Goodnight!”
She scrambled out of the car. Slammed the door and
waved to him from the sidewalk. DeBries sat there for a while, watching her. It’s Saturday tomorrow, he thought. A day off.
Damn!
21
Van Veeteren snorted as he finished reading C. P. Jacoby’s summary and analysis of the Beatrice case in the issue of Allge-mejne dated Sunday, June 22, 1962. He stabbed angrily at the white button on his bedside table, and after half a minute the night nurse appeared in the doorway.
“I want a beer,” said Van Veeteren.
“This isn’t a restaurant,” said the woman wearily, brushing a strand of hair from her face.
“So I’ve noticed,” said Van Veeteren. “But the fact is that Dr. Boegenmutter, or whatever the hell his name is, has told me to drink a beer or two. It assists the healing process. Stop being awkward and fetch me a bottle.”
“It’s turned midnight. Shouldn’t you go to sleep instead?”
“Sleep? I’m busy with a criminal investigation. You should be damned grateful. I’m after somebody who murdered women. And right now you are obstructing the investigation. Well?”
She sighed and went off, returning after a couple of minutes with a bottle and a glass.
“There’s a good girl,” said Van Veeteren.
She yawned.
“Do you think you can manage to pour it out yourself?”
“I’ll do my best,” Van Veeteren promised. “I’ll ring if I spill anything.”
The cold beer trickling down his throat was most invigorat-ing. He had lain in bed thinking about this moment, trying to imagine the taste and indeed the whole experience while reading through the last four or five newspaper cuttings, and now that it had come, there was no doubt that the actual enjoy-ment lived up to expectations.
He belched contentedly. Divine nectar, he thought. Let’s see now, what do I know?
Not a lot. A fair amount from the quantative point of view.
The newspaper coverage of the first trial had been comprehensive, to say the least. He had only read a small portion, but Munster’s selection seemed to have been well chosen and rep-resentative: a wide range of speculation and guesses regarding Verhaven’s character coupled with fairly detailed accounts of court proceedings. And the longer it went on, the more specific the conclusions drawn about the impending verdict.
Guilty. Verhaven must be guilty.
There were not many facts available. Just as he had suspected, the technical proof was rudimentary. Nonexistent, to put it bluntly. The case ought to have depended mainly on circumstantial evidence, but there wasn’t much of that either.
Strictly speaking, there was a gaping void in both those areas.
No concrete proof.
Not much in the way of circumstantial evidence pointing toward Verhaven.
Nothing.
But he had been found guilty even so.
After discreet legal proceedings behind the scenes, no doubt, Van Veeteren thought, raising the bottle to his lips. I’d give a lot to have taken part in those.
But what the hell was it that got him convicted? Obviously, the media and vociferous public opinion had created a certain amount of pressure, but surely the machinery didn’t usually succumb so readily to that?
No, there must have been some other reason.
His character.
The kind of man that Leopold Verhaven was. His past. His behavior in court. The overall impression he had made on the jury and the legal bigwigs. That’s what it was all about.
That’s what got him convicted.
Verhaven was an eccentric. Having scrutinized him through the eyes and magnifying glasses of all these journalists, Van Veeteren could hardly come to any other conclusion.
He was very much a loner, a man from whom it was the easi-est thing in the world to disassociate oneself.
An odd man out.
A murderer? It was not difficult to take the short step from the former judgment to the latter, that was something Van Veeteren had learned over many long years; and once you had taken that step, it was not easy to retract it.
And the role?
Was that the key? The strange circumstance that practically every journalist had homed in on. The fact that Verhaven didn’t seem uncomfortable with the role of accused. On the contrary. He seemed to enjoy sitting in the dock with all that attention focused on him. Not that he had strutted or swag-gered, but nevertheless: There was something about the way he conducted himself, a solitary and forceful actor playing the role of the tragic hero. That was how he was perceived, and that was how he had wanted to be perceived.
Something of that sort, in any case.
Was that the reason he was convicted?
If only I’d been there and seen him, I would have had no doubt, Van Veeteren thought as he emptied the bottle.
What actually happened was apparently simple and beyond argument.
Verhaven had returned home that Saturday, at about five o’clock, according to what he and others said. Beatrice had gone off somewhere, and that’s all there was to it. But that was his version. Nobody else had set eyes on either of them later that day. The electrician, Moltke, had left Beatrice at about one o’clock in the afternoon, and Verhaven had been seen in the village the next day, shortly after six on Sunday evening. That was all. The period between those two sightings was a blank.
He would have had plenty of time. For all sorts of things.
One of the medical examiners had been in no doubt that Beatrice had confronted her killer at some point on Saturday or Sunday. She had been strangled and raped. Or the other way around, presumably? Raped and strangled. She was naked; intercourse had taken place, but there was no trace of sperm.
But, thought Van Veeteren, if the killer had been somebody else, that meant it was definite that the murder had taken place on Saturday afternoon-between one o’clock and five o’clock, or thereabouts. Between the moment Moltke had set off for home and Verhaven’s return.
Or at least that she had been abducted during that time.
Irrefutable?
Certainly, he decided. He glared mournfully at the empty bottle, then turned to the transcript from the court proceedings. Day two of the trial. The prosecutor, Hagendeck, cross-questioned the accused, Leopold Verhaven.
May twenty-fourth. Half past ten in the morning.
H: You have pleaded not guilty to killing your fiancee, Beatrice Holden. Is that correct?
V: Yes.
H: Can you tell us a little about your relationship?
V: What do you want to know?
H: How you met, for instance.
V: We bumped into each other in Linzhuisen. We were at school together. She came home with me.
H: That first time? You started a relationship right away?
V: We knew each other previously. She needed a man.
H: When did she move in with you?
V: A week later.
H: So that would be. .
V: November 1960.
H: And she has been living with you ever since?
V: Yes, of course.
H: All the time?