The Return

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.

If we leave these incontestable facts to one side for the moment and instead turn our attention to a number of psychological questions…

A very neatly constructed jigsaw puzzle, Van Veeteren thought as he put the papers down. Damned neat. Ominously neat, in fact? What was required for Verhaven to have been found not guilty?

He stuck a toothpick into the front teeth in his lower jaw and folded his hands behind his neck.

In the first place: Marlene Nietsch must have met her real murderer during that short period around ten o’clock. It had to be assumed that Verhaven had never taken her in his van, although there was of course a slight chance that he could have done so and still be innocent…. That, just as prosecuting counsel Kiesling had pointed out, he’d known he was finished if he’d admitted that he did give her a lift.

Although it would become clear that he was finished, in any case, no matter what he said or did.

Second: The murderer must somehow have persuaded Marlene Nietsch not to turn up for her meeting at the café.

Would it have been enough, perhaps, for a prospective customer simply to have handed over a bundle of cash and invited her to perform for him? Van Veeteren wondered. That couldn’t be excluded as a possibility. Marlene Nietsch was hardly one of God’s blameless children, after all.

Third: At least three witnesses must have been mistaken. Or lied. The woman who saw them standing by the van. The man and the woman who saw Miss Nietsch in the cab of the van. Plus the one who didn’t want to swear under oath.

Three or four witnesses all in agreement? Wasn’t that damning enough? Conclusive, in fact?

No, thought Van Veeteren in annoyance and bit off the end of the toothpick. During the morning, he had plowed through more than fifty pages of interrogation minutes, only to discover that they made unusually deplorable reading. The male witness in particular had given the strongest impression of partaking in a parody. And left a very unpleasant taste in the mouth, if one happened to be even vaguely interested in the fairness of the judicial system. By all accounts, Necker had turned up four weeks after Verhaven had been charged, gone to the police of his own accord and claimed suddenly to have remembered noticing a fair-haired woman in the accused’s well-known Trotta. In court he had got days wrong, places wrong, people wrong, and it wasn’t until Kiesling had put all the right words into his mouth that he had managed to produce a reasonably coherent story.

And that Denbourke was certainly not the ideal lawyer to conduct your defense; but that wasn’t exactly news.

Moreover—and at this point Van Veeteren had been forced to grab hold of the bed frame in order not to hit the roof—there had been no less than three other witnesses who claimed to have seen Verhaven’s van on its way from the Covered Market, but none of them had seen a woman inside it. What had happened to these witnesses in the final summing up was a mystery.

Deplorable! muttered Van Veeteren, and spat out the rest of the toothpick onto the quilt. Had Mort really been involved in this? And Heidelbluum?

He knew from bitter experience that the others, the laymen, the semi-educated servants of the law, could turn a blind eye to practically anything; but that the judge and the chief inspector could allow something like this to happen, that was a rude awakening. Difficult to digest, to say the least. It was true of course that it was no longer Mort’s responsibility once the case reached the courtroom—but even so?

Then again, Mort hadn’t been his old self during his last years in harness. Perhaps that was it; perhaps he ought to make some allowances.

And Heidelbluum had been nearly seventy at the time.

I hope they get rid of me before I lose as much sting as that, he thought. But maybe I’ll die before I get that gaga? A blessing devoutly to be wished, I suppose.

But what could one say about this case as a whole? The bottom line was that he’d sat there in the dock and acted like the guiltiest of the guilty, that damned Verhaven.

Apart from denying that he’d done it, of course.

Incomprehensible, decided Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. And there’s nothing I hate as much as things I don’t understand!

He swung one leg over the side of the bed and sat up. After a moment of dizziness he found himself standing on the cold floor. It felt good to be able to move under one’s own steam again. No denying that.

Even if his frailty and tendency to grow dizzy still scared him a bit. No denying that either.

Still, I’m going home tomorrow, no matter what, he thought as he closed the bathroom door. Then sure as hell I’ll soon sort out this mess!

But when he had flopped down onto the cold seat, it dawned on him that it might not be all that easy.

The fact was, he already had all the known facts with him here in hospital. Bundle after bundle of newspaper reports. Trial transcripts. Tape recordings of the investigation updates, and detailed reports from Münster.

Surely things couldn’t look all that different out there in the real world?

Another good question.