The Return

32

“I know,” said Synn. “You don’t need to apologize.”

“He’s been in the hospital and read every single word about these damned cases,” Münster said. “He feels he simply has to go and take a look for himself, and he’s not allowed to drive yet.”

“I know,” said Synn again. She turned the pages of her newspaper and blew at her coffee. It was barely half past seven, but the children had been awake since long before seven, totally oblivious to that fact that it was a summer Sunday…. A morning with a warm breeze and cherry blossom and a deafening chorus of birdsong that floated in through the half-open balcony door and mixed with Marieke’s giggles from the nursery and Bart’s endless monologue about dragons and monsters and soccer players.

He stood up and positioned himself behind his wife. Caressed the back of her head. Placed his hand inside her robe and gently squeezed her breast—and he suddenly felt pain creeping up upon him: a chilling fear, but also a realization, that this moment must pass. This second of absolute and perfect happiness—one of the ten to twelve that comprised a whole life, and was possibly even the meaning of it…

Or so he understood it. If you have twelve treasured memories, his Uncle Arndt had once said as Münster sat on his knee, you will have led a happy life. But twelve is a high number. You’ll have to wait for quite a while yet before you can start collecting them.

Perhaps Synn could sense his unrest, for she placed her hand over his and pressed it harder against her breast.

“I like it,” she said. “I like your hands. Maybe we’ll manage an afternoon outing? Lauerndamm or somewhere like that. It would be good to make love in the open air; it’s been a long time…. Or what do you say, darling?”

He swallowed the lump of ecstasy that welled up inside him.

“Of course, my darling,” he said. “I’ll be back before one. Just get yourself ready.”

“Ready?” she smiled. “I’m ready now, if you want to.”

“Oh, hell!” said Münster. “If it weren’t for the kids and Van Veeteren, then…”

She let go of his hand.

“Maybe we should ask him to babysit?”

“Huh,” said Münster. “I’m not convinced that is the best idea you’ve ever had.”

“All right,” said Synn. “We’ll stick to this afternoon, then.”

Van Veeteren was waiting on the sidewalk when Münster pulled up outside 4 Klagenburg. There was no concealing his suppressed eagerness, and when he had settled into the passenger seat, he immediately fished out two toothpicks that he proceeded to roll from one side of his mouth to the other. It was clear to Münster that this was one of those frequent occasions when any kind of conversation was, if not prohibited, at the very least pointless.

Instead he switched on the radio, and as they drove through the deserted streets that Sunday morning, they were able to listen to the eight o’clock news, which was mainly about developments in the Balkans and yet more neo-Nazi disturbances in eastern Germany.

Then came the weather forecast, promising glorious weather with cloudless skies and temperatures approaching sixty degrees.

He sighed discreetly, and it struck him that if it had been his wife in the passenger seat beside him, instead of a newly operated on fifty-seven-year-old detective chief inspector, he would probably have placed his hand on her sun-warmed thigh at about this point.

Ah well, one o’clock would arrive sooner or later, even today.

They parked outside the overgrown opening in the lilac hedge. Münster switched off the engine and unfastened his safety belt.

“No, you stay here,” insisted Van Veeteren, shaking his head. “I don’t want you breathing down my neck. This calls for solitary reflection. Leave me in peace and wait for an hour down by the church.”

He started to wriggle his way out of the car. He was obviously hampered by his surgical wound; he was forced to cling on to the roof of the car and pull himself up by the strength of his arms, rather than straining his stomach muscles. Münster rushed round to assist him, but the chief inspector was adamant in rejecting any attempt to help.

“One hour,” he repeated, checking his watch. “I’ll walk down to the church under my own steam. The slope is in the right direction, so there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Wouldn’t it be best if…,” began Münster, but Van Veeteren interrupted him.

“Stop nannying me, damn you! I’ve had enough of that. If I haven’t turned up at the church by half past ten, you can drive up and see where I’ve got to!”

“All right,” said Münster. “But be careful.”

“Clear off,” said Van Veeteren. “Is the door open, by the way?”

“The key’s hanging from a nail under the gutter,” said Münster. “On the right.”

“Thanks,” said Van Veeteren.

Münster got back into the car, managed to turn around in the narrow road and set off through the trees toward the village.

It’s amazing, he thought. We must have spent a hundred hours sniffing around this place. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he found something we’d missed.

Not surprised in the least.

Van Veeteren stayed by the roadside until Münster’s white Audi had vanished among the trees. Then he forced his way though the hedge and took possession of The Big Shadow.

The garden was overgrown, no two ways about that. He stuck a toothpick in his mouth and looked around. He began walking around the house but was forced to give up about halfway when he found himself up to the armpits in nettles. No matter, he thought. It wasn’t too difficult to get an impression of what it must have looked like once upon a time. A plot of land taken over by man around the middle of the last century, tamed by plow and harrow, a lot of hard work and tender loving care. But now well on the way back into the arms of Mother Nature. Aspen and birch saplings had eaten into large chunks of the orchard; paved areas, the cellar and outhouses were lost in undergrowth and covered in moss; and the big barn, which had presumably been the famous poultry farm, would surely not survive many more winters. It was very clear that a border had been crossed—the limit beyond which it was no longer possible to reclaim what nature had taken hold of.

Not for an old lag living on his own, at least.

The Big Shadow?

With hindsight it was obvious that the house name was prophetic. He found the key, and after considerable effort succeeded in opening the door. He had to bend down so as not to hit his head on the door frame, and inside there was only just sufficient headroom for him to stand upright. He recalled having read in the newspapers about a month ago that the average height of people had shot up remarkably over the past hundred years. His own six feet two inches would presumably have been considered abnormal when the first settlers moved into this house.

Two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor. A narrow, creaking staircase led up from a three-foot-square hall to a loft full of old newspapers, broken furniture and other junk. A faint smell of soot and sun-warmed dust clung to the rafters. He sneezed several times, then went back down to the kitchen. He felt the big iron stove, as if expecting to find it hot. Examined the bad reproduction of an almost equally bad original landscape painting hanging over the sofa, then entered the living room. The cracked windowpanes. A sideboard. Table and four ill-matched chairs. A sofa and a typically 1950s television set. A sagging bookshelf with getting on for a hundred books, most of them cheap crime novels or adventure stories. On the wall to the right of the stove was a mirror and a framed black-and-white photograph of a runner breaking the finishing tape. His face seemed tormented, almost tortured. At first he thought it was Verhaven himself, but when he went up to it and examined it more closely, he saw the caption and recognized the man: Emil Zatopek. The Czech locomotive, as he was called. The self-torturer. The man who overcame the pain barrier.

Had he been Verhaven’s ideal?

Or was it just typical of the time? Zatopek had been the king of the track in the early fifties, if his memory served him rightly. Or one of them, at least.

He left the living room for the bedroom and stood gazing at the double bed that, despite its modest size, took up almost all the floor space.

But a double bed? Yes, of course, Verhaven had lived with a lot of women. Not all of them had been murdered. At least, he assumed not.

“Was this your bedroom, then?” muttered Van Veeteren, fumbling for a new toothpick. “Did you get one night’s sleep as a free man, or didn’t he even allow you that?”

He left the bedroom.

What the hell am I doing here? he thought suddenly. What am I kidding myself that I can sort out by strutting around here? Even if I begin to form an impression of what Verhaven was really like, that’s not going to get me one inch closer to the answer.

The answer to the question of who murdered him, that is.

He was overcome with exhaustion and sat down at the kitchen table. Closed his eyes and watched the flickering yellow light that floated past from right to left. Always from right to left: He wondered what that might be due to. They had warned him that he would have moments of weakness, but he hadn’t fully realized that they would be as treacherous as this, practically making his legs give way under him.

He rested his head in his hands. Reinhart always said you should never try to think about anything important when your head’s not right. It’s better to shut down altogether, otherwise you’ll only fill it with a lot of garbage.

An unusually ugly tablecloth, he thought therefore, when he had opened his eyes again. But it seems somehow familiar. Didn’t Aunt K. have one like it when I visited her in summer about the beginning of the fifties? In that boathouse heated by the summer sun, where you could hear the water lapping under the floorboards. It felt a long way away from The Big Shadow in both time and space, but it must have been around the time when Verhaven left his father here in Kaustin to lead his own independent life.

Forty years ago, or thereabouts.

And then things turned out the way they did….

That’s life, Van Veeteren thought. One big goddamn lottery!

Or wasn’t it like that, in fact? Were there directions and patterns?

A determinant?

Münster leaned against the old gravestone and looked at the clock.

Ten minutes past ten. There were voices inside his head stubbornly urging him to go to the car and immediately drive back to The Big Shadow. The chief inspector had been on his own for more than an hour at this point—recently operated on, weak and sickly; it could be regarded as irresponsible not to keep an eye on him.

But there were other voices as well. Van Veeteren hadn’t actually insisted on any more than one hour of solitary majesty, although he had set the limit at half past ten. Münster had to choose between arriving too soon and arriving too late. An awkward choice, certainly; but if he stuck to the later time, at least he would escape being told off for disturbing the chief inspector’s holy thought processes. If Van Veeteren turned out to be unconscious somewhere among all the junk, that would be a serious matter, to be sure. But he’d rather turn up as an angel of mercy than as an unwelcome and premature intruder.

Münster closed his eyes. From inside the church came the muted, monotonous chanting of today’s sermon. He had watched the whole flock—about twenty pious souls—come wandering at regular intervals along the newly raked gravel path to the church door, where the shepherd had greeted each one with a handshake and a watery smile. Münster had tried to remain discreetly in the background, but the prelate had naturally got wind of him and fixed him with his beckoning gaze. Who was this person remaining willfully outside the temple gates?

But Münster had resisted. The other sheep had trotted slowly and patiently inside. The shepherd followed them in. The bells binged and bonged ten o’clock, a flock of temporarily homeless pigeons fled the steeple, and the service got under way.

The average age was unusually high, Münster noted as the doors closed behind them. It was clear to him that all the faithful would doubtless have deepened and sealed their relationship with the church within ten to fifteen years at most. By lying down to rest in the churchyard, that is.

Or being laid to rest, rather.

On a day like today he was almost inclined to envy them, just a little bit. Or at the very least to detect something serene and transfigured in this well-tended graveyard surrounding the ancient stone-built church with its recently repaired and profane red-tiled roof and black lacquered weathercock. Here, obviously, there was no cruel and avenging God. No trumpets sounding on the day of judgment. No eternal and inevitable damnation.

Only tenderness, reconciliation and the forgiveness of sins.

Mercy?

And then Synn intervened and interrupted (or joined in) his pious thoughts. The image of her naked body, curled up on her side in a summer-warm bed, her knees raised and her dark hair fanned out over the pillow and her shoulders: This image filled him with another kind of tenderness, the same uncomplicated happiness he had felt at the kitchen table a few hours ago, perhaps. And before long, he was recalling the talk about making love in the sight of God in the Garden of Eden He had created. If they could work out how to keep the children out of the way for a while, that ought not to be impossible. They had managed it before; soon he was busy recalling various moments of passion…. Making love in the rowboat on Lake Weimar last summer. In the middle of the lake with only the sky and the gulls as witnesses. And another occasion, early one morning high up on a Greek mountain with a panoramic view over the deep blue Mediterranean Sea. Not to mention the beach at Laguna Monda—that was before Bart was born, one of the very first times…. They had lain there in the warm, dense darkness with the breeze from the mountains caressing her body, her incredibly smooth skin and her…

A chord from the organ brought him back to his senses. Presumably it was intended to wake up a few other sheep dozing off in the flock inside the church. He opened his eyes and shook his head. The hymn singing gathered strength. With the vicar’s baritone, magnified by the microphone around his neck, leading the way, it floated out of the open windows and rose unshackled through the leaves of the trees, up into the heavens, where it was received and enjoyed, one can assume, by those already in residence to whom it was doubtless and unreservedly addressed.

Hallelujah, Münster thought, and yawned.

He sat up and checked his watch.

Twenty-seven minutes past. Time to act. He stood up, made his way through the graves and jumped over the wall next to where his car was parked. He had just opened the door and was about to get in when he clapped eyes on the chief inspector. He was strolling toward the churchyard, an unpleasant sight with his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel and a garishly colored handkerchief knotted over his head. There were sweat stains under his arms, and his face was worryingly red; but amid all the wretchedness was a certain expression of satisfaction. A sort of restrained, contented grimace that could hardly be overlooked. Certainly not by somebody who had been around for as long as Münster had.

“There you are,” he said. “I was just going to get you. How’s it gone?”

“OK, thanks,” said the chief inspector, removing the handkerchief from his head. “Damned hot, though.”

“You took your time, I reckon,” Münster ventured. “Was there really all that much to scratch around in up there?”

Van Veeteren shrugged.

“There was a bit,” he said. “I had a chat with the neighbors on the way down as well. Had a beer with the Czermaks. It was all go.”

He wiped his forehead. Münster waited, but the chief inspector said nothing more.

“Did you get anywhere?” Münster asked eventually.

“Hmm,” said Van Veeteren. “I think so. Let’s be off, then.”

As usual, Münster thought, slumping down behind the wheel. Just the same as ever.

“Where exactly did you get, then?” he asked once they had got under way, and the wind coming in through the windows had begun to restore the chief inspector’s usual facial color.

“I have an idea about who might have done it,” said Van Veeteren. “An idea, remember that, Inspector! I’m not claiming that I know anything.”

“Who?” asked Münster, but he knew that he was wasting his time.

Instead of answering, the chief inspector leaned back in his seat, stuck his elbow out the window and started to whistle Carmen.

Münster stepped on the gas and switched on the radio.