‘I find it a bit difficult to believe this,’ she said. ‘You have been married to your husband for over forty years. You have shared the same home and bed and endured the same hardships during a long life, but now you suddenly lose your head without any real reason. You said you were used to, er, exchanges of opinion like that, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Leverkuhn, looking down at the table. ‘It’s just that this was something extra…’
‘This wasn’t something you’d considered doing earlier?’
‘No.’
‘You’d never even given it a thought?’
‘No.’
‘Not earlier that evening, for instance?’
‘No.’
‘Are you suggesting that you didn’t know what you were doing when you murdered your husband?’
‘Objection!’ shouted Bachmann. ‘It has not been established that she murdered her husband.’
‘Sustained,’ muttered the judge without moving his mouth. The prosecutor shrugged, and her heavy bosom bobbed up and down.
‘Did you know what you were doing when you stabbed your husband?’ she said.
‘Yes, of course.’
A faint murmur ran through the gallery, and Judge Hart called for silence by raising his gaze half an inch.
‘What did you intend to do by stabbing him?’
‘To kill him, of course. To shut him up.’
The prosecutor nodded again, several times, and looked pleased.
‘Then what did you do?’
‘I rinsed the knife under the tap in the kitchen. Then I wrapped it up in a newspaper and went out.’
‘Why?’
Leverkuhn hesitated.
‘I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to make it look as if somebody else had done it.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Towards Entwick Plejn. I threw the knife and the newspaper into a rubbish bin.’
‘Where?’
‘I can’t remember. Maybe in Entwickstraat, but I’m not sure. I was a bit confused.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I went back home and phoned the police. I pretended that I’d found my husband dead, but that wasn’t the case…’
‘Didn’t you get a lot of blood on you when you killed your husband?’
‘Only a bit. I washed it off at the same time as I rinsed the knife.’
The prosecutor seemed to be thinking for a few seconds. Then she slowly turned her back on the accused. Pushed up her spectacles again and let her gaze wander over the members of the jury.
‘Thank you, fru Leverkuhn,’ she said, in a voice lowered by half an octave. ‘I don’t think we need to doubt that you acted with great presence of mind and purposefulness all the time. And I no longer think there is a single one of us who doubts that you murdered your husband with malice aforethought. Thank you, no more questions.’
Bachmann had stood up, but didn’t bother to protest. He had bags under his eyes, she noticed. Looked tired and somewhat resigned. She had the impression that his fee depended in some way on whether he won or lost the case, but she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t easy to know the ways of this strange world.
Not easy at all.
Nor did she know how common it was for the judge himself to ask questions, but when Bachmann had finished his rather pointless interrogation – all the time she found it difficult to understand what he was after and what he wanted her to say, and when he sat down he looked even more dispirited – the great man cleared his throat emphatically and announced that certain things needed clarifying.
But first he asked if she would like a little rest before he started questioning her.
No, she said that was not necessary.
‘Certain things need clarifying,’ Judge Hart said again, clasping his hairy hands on the Bible in front of him. A murmur ran through the public gallery and Prosecutor Grootner suddenly began scribbling away on her notepad. Bachmann stroked his hair and looked like a morose question mark.
‘What made you confess?’
He looked down on her from his slightly raised position with a sceptical frown between his bushy eyebrows.
‘My conscience,’ she said.
‘Your conscience?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what made your conscience stir after more than a week?’
Marie-Louise Leverkuhn was certainly ten years older than Judge Hart, but nevertheless there was suddenly an element of teacher and schoolgirl in the situation. A teenager caught smoking in the toilets and now summoned to the headmaster for a telling-off.
‘I don’t know,’ she said after a short pause for thought. ‘I thought about it for a few days and then decided it was wrong to carry on lying.’
‘What made you lie in the first place?’
‘Fear,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Of the consequences… court and prison and so on.’
‘Do you regret what you did?’
She examined her hands for a while.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course I regret it. It’s terrible, killing another human being. You have to take your punishment.’
Judge Hart leaned back.
‘Why didn’t you throw the knife into a canal instead of a dustbin?’
‘I didn’t think.’
‘Have you been asked that question before?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why bother to get rid of the knife in the first place? Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to rinse the blood off it and put it back in its place in the kitchen?’
Leverkuhn frowned briefly before answering.
‘I don’t remember what I was thinking,’ she said, ‘but I supposed people would realize that was the knife I’d used if they found it. I wasn’t thinking clearly.’
The judge nodded and looked mildly reproachful.
‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ he said. ‘But don’t you think it was rather odd that you immediately told the police that the knife was missing?’
She did not answer. Judge Hart pulled a hair out of his nostril and examined it for a moment before flicking it over his shoulder and continuing.
‘Did you meet fru Van Eck at all during the days before she disappeared?’
Bachmann started gesturing, but seemed to realize that it wasn’t appropriate to protest when it was the judge himself asking the questions. He moved his chair noisily and leaned back nonchalantly instead. Looked up at the ceiling. As if what was happening had nothing to do with him.
‘I had coffee with her and her husband one afternoon. They invited me.’
‘That was on the Tuesday, wasn’t it?’
She thought about it.
‘Yes, it must have been.’
‘And then she disappeared on the Wednesday?’
‘As far as I know, yes. Why are you asking about that?’
The judge made a vague gesture with his hands, as if to say that they might just as well chat about these events, seeing as they were all gathered together here.
‘Just one more little question,’ he said eventually. ‘It doesn’t happen to be the case that you needed this time – these seven days or however long it was – for some special purpose?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Leverkuhn.
Judge Hart took out a large red handkerchief and blew his nose.
‘I think you do,’ he muttered. ‘But you may leave the dock now.’
Marie-Louise Leverkuhn thanked him and did as she had been told.
Judge Hart, Van Veeteren thought as he came out into the street and opened up his umbrella. What a terrific police officer the old distorter of the law would have made!
25
Moreno knocked and entered. Münster looked up from the reports he was reading.
‘Have a pew,’ he said. ‘How did it go?’
She flopped down on the chair without even unbuttoning her brown suede jacket. Shook her head a few times, and he noticed that she was on the verge of tears.
‘Not all that well,’ she said.
Münster put his pen in his breast pocket and slid the stack of files to one side. He waited for the continuation, but there wasn’t one.
‘I see,’ he said in the end. ‘Feel free to tell me about it.’