The Return (16 page)

VII

April 24, 1962

27

She wakes up yet again.

She can feel the darkness and his heavy presence like pressure on her chest. She cautiously heaves herself up on an elbow and tries to make out the faint phosphorescent glow of the alarm clock’s hands.

Half past three. Very nearly. As far as she can see. The air in the bedroom is compact and stuffy, despite the window standing ajar. She raises herself into a sitting position and gropes around with her feet on the uneven floor until she finds her slippers.

She stands up and tiptoes cautiously out of the room, picking up her thin and worn terry-cloth robe on the way. She closes the door and puts her ear against the cool wood. She can hear his heavy, occasionally rattling breathing even at this distance.

She shivers and puts on her robe, then slowly makes her way down the stairs.

Down. That’s the worst. The pain in her hips sends red-hot needles up and down through her body. Along her spine and up into the back of her head, down to the arch of her foot and into her toes. It’s remarkable how mobile this pain can be.

It gets worse with every step she takes.

With every day. More and more acute. It becomes more and more difficult not to turn her feet inward and hunch her back.

It becomes harder and harder to walk.

She slumps down at the kitchen table, rests her head in her hands and feels the throbbing pain slowly receding. Waits until it has faded away completely before turning her thoughts to that other business.

That other matter.

Three times tonight she has been jettisoned by that dream. Three times.

The same ghastly idea. The same unbearable image.

Whenever he’s come upstairs and plummeted down beside her, she’s pretended to be asleep. He hasn’t touched her. Not even placed a hand on her hip or shoulder. She’s got him as far as that. He never touches her now, and she knows this is a victory she has achieved, despite everything. She has come this far thanks to her own efforts.

Beyond reach. Her body is beyond reach. Now and forevermore.

She need never be taken advantage of again.

The unspoken agreement is a sort of murky bond between them, but it is only now that she has begun to appreciate the price. The counterbalance. The incomprehensible horror on the other side of the scales.

Everything has its price, but she has not had any choice. There can be no question of guilt regarding her decision and her action—she knows all too well what would be the outcome of giving herself again to this man, even though he is her husband and the father of her child. There is medical advice as well; it’s not just her. It would have a detrimental effect on her physical and mental health, and what ability to move around she still retains. If she were to become pregnant, that is. She must not give birth again. Must never give herself to him again. The hub of her life is in her pelvis. Ever since that terrible night when she gave birth, it has to be protected and made as inaccessible as a hallowed room.

A hallowed room?

This really is the way her thoughts are tending. Can anybody understand why?

God or her mother or any other woman?

No, nobody. She is on her own in this matter. A barren woman with a husband and a child. At long last she has learned how to accept the inevitable. He must never again be allowed inside her, and now his hands and the whole of his body have given up their vain attempts to plead and grope around. At long last he has resigned himself to the inevitable.

But the price?

Perhaps she did realize early on that there would be a price to pay. But now? Did she realize this would be the price?

The thought is horrific. Not even a thought; no more than the fragment of a dream. An image that has raced through her consciousness at such a dizzy speed and with such incomprehensible clarity that she has been unable to understand it.

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 firmly. “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.