One Damn Thing After Another (2 page)

“Sequel?” sounding surprised. “Not unless you count that particular cop living in hopes ever since of catching that particular skipper with a sidelight obscured. It's a highly-skilled affair, navigating on the Rhine. Speed limit, too, strictly enforced – too much wash and you damage the banks, moored vessels, all sorts of things. The Royal Navy got pegged for that the other day, engagingly enough.”

“What could it possibly be doing – defending us from the Russians?”

“Oh, courtesy visit. Coastal launch – Air-Sea Rescue or something. Lieutenant was cross; got his head washed when he reached home. But it's quite a serious offence, you see. Bit of wash unexpectedly sets a boat rolling, and somebody might fall overboard. Something of the kind has probably happened here.”

They entered a dingy building with a dirty flag and a large number of brass nameplates in need of polish: the usual musty smell and great numbers of files gone brown at the edges, peopled by the sort of official who has nothing whatever to do, and looks at you with indignation should you be unlucky enough to need a rubber stamp on a piece of paper. These were all now fussing slightly, for fear of some court that might be called upon to pronounce about civil damages, or whatever.

Arlette was the subject of curious glances and pinched lips, but nothing was said: she was with a commissaire, and that is a personage.

There was no corpse, to her relief, and the police were not perturbed either. There very often was no corpse. Might turn up several days later and a long way downstream – in Germany.

There was, instead, lots of paper. The Police Judiciaire dealt with this deftly, with authority. Tug pulled in to carry out
obligations, quite. Cause of death, accident; quite. Place and time; quite. Tug has now proceeded on its way. To be sure: immobilizing a Rhine convoy costs a thousand marks a minute. Crews have no watch on shore: they are replaced, briskly, the moment their shift ends. A reserve crewman would be driven out and picked up on the hop at Mainz.

Good, let's have these declarations by the crew members. There are four, since a river tug carries five. There were three, since the engineer was below and witnessed nothing. Skipper, helmsman, deckhand.

Cookie came up to empty bucket of potato-peel. Slight drizzle at the time: the deckplates would be greasy. Visibility was reduced. It is a busy stretch, traffic was heavy, there are a lot of building works, dredging and general frigging about. Everyone had their eyes skinned, but frankly, with more to do than stare at the cookie. There was no untoward movement or disturbance of the boat. The man had been his normal self. He was certainly not drunk, and nowise appearing perturbed or depressed. A quiet personality: a competent and experienced crewman. Suffered, as far as was known (can be verified from company medical records), from no illness or incapacitating condition.

Conclusion by skipper, a highly responsible person, whose declaration no one would query: negligence. Carrying out a routine chore, performed thousands of times – a momentary carelessness. No cry had been heard. It might be possible to stun oneself in falling.

Certificate produced for recent routine technical inspection of boat. Nothing defective in guard-rails or safety mechanisms.

Right, let's have the personal papers and belongings. Dutch citizen; Dutch company – Rijnscheepsvaart-something-unpronounceable to a French mouth. Clothing, and a few oddments. Like a book of crossword puzzles, and a few pornographic magazines. Nothing untoward.

Very well. A death in unexplained circumstances is reported to the PJ – routine. If violence is involved – say, an altercation – equally routine report is made to the Procureur, who can if he sees fit launch a judicial enquiry, an ‘instruction'. In conditions
that are obscure, the matter comes under the discretion of an officer of judicial police. Every country gendarme is ex-officio a PJ officer. The deceased was known, as the saying goes, to the criminal brigade, and the Commissaire had come to see for himself. But there's nothing here outside the usual administrative enquiry. We'll just countersign these. Copies of your reports to the German and Dutch consular authorities. In the – unlikely – event of any backlash from the Federal Republic or the Kingdom of the Netherlands, advise and inform. There we are then: I'll drive you home, Madame, shall I?

“No comment or criticism?” he asked mildly after five minutes' silence.

“The glance at his belongings – might that have been a bit superficial?”

“I knew him you see. Careful chap. Kept things in his head. Self-censorship you might call it.”

“Then with his head gone – the man from nowhere goes somewhere. But wherever; it's out of sight.”

“And out of my jurisdiction. The enquiry will leave it open. Suicide or accident – they say accident, for the sake of the next of kin.”

“If there are any.”

“If, as you say, there are any. Rotterdam will know. And take charge of his possessions. Either he had his gun on him, or the skipper, sensibly, suppressed it.”

“You don't want any loose ends.”

“It's the trouble with your type of interest; there are always too many loose ends, first, last and foremost. To me, there's a body. When the Germans find it, they have a disposal problem. You find me, I dare say, infernally callous.”

“Only,” said Arlette, “if you had him pushed.”

“There's that,” smiling very slightly. “No, chère Madame, reassure yourself. I think, if you wish me to indulge in a thoroughly uncharacteristic indiscretion, that it's not totally to be ruled out that someone jiggled him. But of that there's no evidence.”

“Nor ever will be. Well, I've had my lesson: I hope I've learned it.”

“If there's a lesson. I suppose there might be. That it's ill meddling with the dead, or with the living, come to that. One thinks carefully, before judging.”

“I must thank you, too, for a nice lunch.”

Towards the end of the day they turned off the main road, and were rewarded by the sun setting across Quiberon Bay, the inland sea, melancholy and curlew-haunted. They sat on a sand-dune above the tidemark, propped against an overturned pram dinghy, and looked at the golden burning water; whose hydrocarbon content, said Arthur, one would not wish to analyse. Arlette, all van der Valk personages firmly occulted until return to Strasbourg, a thousand kilometres away on the eastern marches of France, wiggled her toes and said nothing.

They had been for nearly a month on the Atlantic coast. September, with hardly any tourists left, around the pleasant town of La Rochelle and the islands. She had got nicely tanned; the fair and the grey in her hair had bleached to something like blonde. Arthur did not tan: went pink and wore strange hats. A restless soul, he had wished to turn north, across the Loire estuary into Brittany. She did not much like Brittany: too sad. We must, he said, because one more oil spill and it won't be there any more, so that this will be the last time. The old peninsula appealed to his Englishness. The opinion of a hard-headed southern woman was that this was a pack of Celtic twilight and that La Baule was the farthest-flung outpost of civilization.

But she was enjoying herself. Seagulls sat upon decrepit wooden posts and looked at her attentively. More seagulls lolled upon the flat water, looking contemptuous. There was
no one to be seen anywhere, and a lovely silence. Until Arthur, who never could leave well alone, began declaiming to the seagulls:

“Ah, what is woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth fire, and the home acre,

To go with the old grey widow-maker?”

Arlette, sufficiently accustomed to these performances, was unmoved.

“Very fine; what is it?”

“The Harp Song of the Dane Women, and plainly wasted on you.”

“Yes, well, that'll do for now. There are going to be flies, other nasty beasts, living in all that rotting weed.” The nip of chill that at the end of the most perfect day tells you it is late in the year, was beginning: she unwound her body.

Women, thought Arthur, can never leave well alone: they aren't content to sit and look, but must Get their Cardigan.

Dear old Arthur, cross now at my being deflating, and at being English! Well, I loathe being French. Nationalism makes me sick. The nineteenth-century Darwinism, making wars and sending children to be killed in them. Indulging, now, in economic bragging and commercial rivalry.

“Don't appreciate much, either, all these references to Old Grey Widows.”

“The prettier you become, the more moronically you behave. It's nearly over: we may as well make a move. Once it goes all red I must have cliffs, and lighthouses, and Tristan's ship black with tattered sails, riding in to Penmarch.” They were proposing to spend their last week on the Cornouailles coast, around Concarneau. Suddenly supper was uppermost in Arthur's mind, and there was still that nasty autoroute to follow up past Vannes and Auray. “I want shellfish, and to go to bed looking out on the lights of Belle-Isle.”

He had eaten enough shellfish already to give even the Great White Shark an allergy. This, he said, was to vaccinate him against a year in Strasbourg, where there is no fish. He could bend her to his will: a woman born in Toulon is not frightened
of fishy things even with huge glaring eyes and a great many red spikes.

She'd do anything to forget Strasbourg a while still. And the Widow, and the Help Bureau, that odd sociological invention of Arthur's. Help indeed – there was so little one could give. Blind leading the lame, most of the time.

A year ago now: in October she'd begun, very frightened and knowing nothing. She'd learned something, and a lot about the ways of bureaucracy, a lot about the trouble one runs into the moment one does not fit the conventional and above all passive role exacted by government, whose great slogan is We'll Do the Thinking.

Individualists, the French? Oh yes, in petty selfishness, in refusal of all self-discipline, in hedonistic indulgence. But since the General went, we get nothing to eat but premasticated babypap. Oh, for a fish again, with bones in it, and a flavour.

She had felt so discouraged towards the end of the year, and weary of the heavy heat of Strasbourg in July and August. Arthur liked the long summer vacation. Gave him time to write his latest book. To which, it was true, her year's work contributed a paragraph or so.

And if it were only the job! Getting remarried aged fifty wasn't a smoothly run-in, easy-riding affair either. No problems with children or pills, no material anxieties, worries about the career or the mortgage. That's what they say. Mature understanding, dear. Two balanced and well-integrated personalities.

Arlette snorted suddenly with laughter. Her children all considered her a profoundly perturbed personality, if not actually a mental case, and after ten years of saying Menopause in tolerant tones, had greeted Arthur with enthusiasm: Interesting and Amusing new Therapy. Emotional Basket case Himself – in short, just the job for Mum.

In fact, we are excellently matched. We love each other very much, need one another very badly, and fight all day. The maturity and experience goes up like smoke. I think that Arthur's intellectual grasp of a problem, his academic approach, is bound to be sterile. To him, naturally, my instinctive moves
make as much sense as a dog turning round and round before lying down (Arthur's simile …).

They'd had a row on the way up, in one of the yacht-harbour villages. The pub where they were staying was buzzing with gossip. Nothing better than a local scandal to promote good fellowship and stimulate another round of drinks. The verb regale, conjugated in English often in the passive – we were regaled with the tale – and transitive, is in French active and intransitive. We regaled: meaning we lapped it up. Given death as well as sex, a good man behind the bar can double his turnover.

The facts that nobody thought to dispute were in essence as follows: a rich man from the city, who had a cottage in the district and a boat in the harbour, came down for a weekend's sailing, with his pretty – and by all account beloved – young wife crewing for him. It had been a bad weekend; lot of wind, nasty sea. Nobody had gone out, but him. Ex-cel-lent seaman; this emphasized by all. Been sailing here since childhood and nobody knew the water better. Boat – very good sea boat, tiptop order, spic-span condition throughout. Designed for these waters and in perfect harmony with them. If there was anything he loved more than that wife, it was that boat.

He'd come back with neither wife nor boat. Given the volume of gossip, the local gendarmerie had made an enquiry. Had to, mate, couldn't get out of it. But it wasn't saying anything to anybody, mate. Not just tight-lipped: they got very, very irritable indeed if the subject was mentioned. Nix prosecutor, nix judge of instruction. No judicial follow-up: hence no crime, huh?

Arthur, who had indulged in white wine somewhat, nudged her with a greasy elbow.

“The widow would be in her element here, haw haw haw.”

She felt her eyes injecting with blood: the expression ‘to see red'.

“Rebecca?” guffawing odiously on, “ – I
hated
Rebecca!” She managed not to speak in front of the assembled company, but stormed out giving the door an unmerciful slam.

The tide was out and she strode angrily along the beach.
And if the man had indeed murdered his wife – then he had also murdered his boat. These legalistic clichés about attenuating circumstances! Didn't it show the pitch to which he had been screwed? In all men, as in all things, there is a breaking point. If the police kept their mouth shut, then in that, at least, they showed wisdom.

This quack about murder – these antique attitudes. As though there weren't a thousand graver crimes. They say murder is grave because irrevocable, because you can't bring life back. Are the crimes not graver when, and because, life goes on? When the consequences continue to ripple stealthily outward, carrying their venom, distorting and destroying for a hundred years. Any crime, my lords, against a child.