Strike Out Where Not Applicable (14 page)

‘Murders,' dreamily, ‘often remain undiscovered, largely because they're never even suspected. A doctor signs a certificate without questioning it or thinking to. You didn't.'

‘I would have accepted an accident – but I would want to know what caused it and how,' unhappily.

He was plainly being evasive. Van der Valk tried to balance the ballpoint on his finger – beastly thing, it wouldn't. He decided in the end not to press Maartens too hard – not, at any rate, for the moment. A magistrate might decide differently, but that was not for him to decide …

‘A question is raised.' The ballpoint fell on the floor. ‘Damn. I take a rough look at the group of people seeming nearest to the
dead man – you helping me. Any of them could have killed him: what's more there's motivation sticking out all over the shop. Very discouraging.'

Maartens was looking shocked.

‘You make it sound like a story, where one is led to believe in all the characters' guilt, one after another. Fiction!' with contempt. ‘Few people are capable of killing.'

‘Anybody is – given a favourable climate. People kill others all the time, often in atrocious ways, without feeling in the least bothered. In wartime one generalizes the climate by astute use of propaganda that you'd think would deceive nobody – but it does. Other things can produce the climate temporarily – things appearing, often, pretty insignificant. You might have them in your file there. Recognizing them is another matter.'

Maartens looked unhappy.

‘I'll leave you to a few less professional occupations.'

‘Delighted to be of any use,' politely, accompanying him to the door.

Dickie had put on his freshly darned pullover, and a raincoat. It was an English raincoat he had got second-hand from Francis, who had taken a dislike to it for some unaccountable reason although it was almost new. Dickie was taller than Francis, but it had been cut to come low on the La Touche leg, and it covered his own knees adequately. He wasn't proud: besides, he liked it. A snob thing; it amused him to disguise himself as a snob.

He felt competent in it, and comfortable.… A trenchcoat model with a big high collar, a sort of umbrella that buttoned down over the shoulders, enormous pockets, great leather buttons like a half walnut-shell – that was a raincoat. Not like these modern rags that came to the middle of your thigh, and wouldn't keep out a damp sponge. He liked everything about it: the stiff canvassy texture, the brass eyelets for ventilation, the rubbery smell inside the fleece-cotton lining; the corseted feeling, belted well in; the sheltered, bullet-proof idea, like Humphrey Bogart, you got when you turned the collar up.

He got the seven o'clock bus into the town. He nearly always did – a relaxation. There was no more to do or to see in the town at night than there was in the village – Dutch provincial towns! – but for that very reason it was rich in cinemas, and he enjoyed the
cinema. Because of the students there was even an art/experiment place in a basement, where one saw the younger French and Italian directors' work – the ones of his generation, the ones he felt at home with, who talked his language.… In these cinemas, Dickie felt almost that he was engaging in a conversation, that he was taking part. And someone he could talk with was what he felt the lack of most here.

Waiting at the bus stop, amid the horseplay of half a dozen young yokels pretending to disregard the other little cluster of local girls, their huge piggy-catchers' calves bulging above absurdly high heels, Dickie in the raincoat felt like a judge at a jumping competition. All he needed was a bowler hat. Ah, and an English accent, and that he hadn't. Every time he talked he gave himself away. He spoke French when he could – people found that natural enough in an artist … half-French … who had lived in France. He sounded better than Janine! She was pally with that bloody policeman's wife, a woman he avoided. Stupid not to have guessed at once that it might be that French cow's husband: still, the moment he had seen that deux-chevaux the bell had rung all right.

How he had hated that policeman! People like that were always the same – fellow probably came out of a back street in Amsterdam no better than the dock quarter he had been born in himself. Because he was a stinking commissaire he had to go dressing up, arsing round the manège as though he had been born in a country house, sucking up to the riding crowd – like the wife, one of these French women that looked all right in a black leather jacket with their feet up on the bar of a Solex, since that was where they belonged, but just looked ludicrous in breeches on a horse.

Snobs were all the same. Francis was a hypocrite – he pretended to despise bourgeois women but he was married to one, liked it, and lost no opportunity of kissing their big toes. Dickie smiled and climbed on the bus secure in his raincoat and the knowledge that he would not do such things. Consenting to paint their stupid portraits for money was not the same.

He had a tremendous advantage over them, with their cars and their houses with big green lawns, their cocktail parties and their clothes from London. He had eyes and they didn't. He could see through the lot as though they were glass – how long had it taken
him to rumble that Bernhard? Not that he was going to let on: let that fool of a policeman work at it. He enjoyed painting their portraits really because he felt such metres faster than they would ever be. He knew how to paint them – just as they liked to see themselves, gay, daring, adventurous. Pick their pockets and set them down on a hillside in Turkey and they would just lie down and sob!

He didn't need any gold money-clip; he'd come up himself and was proud as hell of it. He hadn't even been to an art school, but he'd known how to get himself apprenticed to a printer at the very start. He'd learned litho and copper plate technique, and at night he'd learned some draughtsmanship, and he'd gone to museums and looked and looked and looked. He had remarkable eyes. And now he was really beginning to get somewhere and he resented it, having some cheesy police inspector have the power to question him, drag out into the light that he'd been born in a slum in Rotterdam and had never learned to talk English properly. He knew dirty words in English!

He used them all on the innocent Van der Valk and felt better. It was raining, and the bus windows got those blurry reflections from the light that gave him pleasure – there were ways of looking at them: you had to learn how to look at light.

The snobs did not care about Bernhard. They did not understand. Neither would that fool of an inspector. They pretended to be shocked and be sure they would all turn out for the funeral with grave expressions of assumed regret. Not him! Or perhaps yes, just to watch them all wriggle.

Would Marguerite wriggle? He had been so wrong about that. There were a lot of things he still had to learn. Plenty of things were eating him, not least his love life, but he understood discipline. It could wait … Dickie knew how to be patient.

It wasn't late when Van der Valk got home: half past eight, just right. He was very tired, but those messy days … His supper stood ready on a tray, the dirty dishes were washed, the house was quiet and felt contented. His wife was waiting for him, reading Proust and eating peanuts – what a combination! One of the boys was out with a girl, gone to the cinema they had said.… The other was doing homework upstairs, doubtless with a transistor radio on, maths combined with jazz by people with names like Leadbelly
and Coffinlips. He put his stick next to Arlette's umbrella and yawned.

‘Leg hurting?'

‘Rather.'

‘Have a shower. By the time you're down I'll have the soup hot.'

‘Yes.' He was not too discontented with this scarred, half crippled body. It had been like a car accident; changed your ideas for you so radically you almost ended up grateful for it. He looked at the body without enthusiasm, but it was flat – he had done so many exercises to re-educate it.… The tremendous suntan had faded, he noticed sadly. But now he was the Commissaire he could arrange his own holidays. Suntan would come again.

He had had time to think too, flat on his back for weeks on end. Yes.

He came down in his silk dressing-gown. That was really something. Van der Valk in a – lovely it was being, no, not of course rich, but damn it, less poor. At his age one enjoyed one's little comforts, what. He hoped it wasn't softening his brain, but perhaps he had a chance to test that. Meanwhile the soup was hot and the salad mixed.

‘Well,' said Arlette, wallowing comfortably in cushions: at last she had a room big enough for the old-fashioned big sofa she had clung to since finding it cheap in a junkshop, the year they were married – ‘tell about your day.'

‘Oh, potter potter, peering and sniffing, nice chat with all concerned – Marguerite, that Groenveld woman – I'm rather curious about them. Marion – I liked her, I'm bound to say, but it might be because I got a large whisky from her just as I was feeling daunted. I even had a word with your little pal Janine – she was asking after you, couldn't understand why the car was there but you weren't.'

‘She's pretty, isn't she? Rather pathetic.'

‘I don't know her that well. And that painter boyo; a screwball, that one.'

‘I don't know him at all. I've seen him hovering about; he's always around. But he avoids me – anybody would think my breath smelt or something. He talks to Janine. He talks French, I know.

‘French like these tomatoes. He comes from Rotterdam and has an accent thicker' than the harbour water. Speaks a bit phony-pidgin, like Maurice Chevalier.'

‘I don't see that it's any worse than all those women,' said Arlette, ‘all pretending they were at school at Roedean.'

He got out of bed next morning in a bad humour, a symptom she recognized as coming from anger with himself, translated into discontent with everything and generally expressed first as tetchiness about food.

‘This egg is stale.'

‘Not as fresh as it might be, I agree.'

‘Governments! Everything must be weighed, measured, peered at, x-rayed, vaccinated, rubber stamped and entered on a form in triplicate. By the time it has looked to see that all the eggs are fresh it is obvious to the meanest intelligence – but not, of course, to them – that the egg is no longer fresh.' Poor Arlette, who had given him an egg as a treat, after a hard day yesterday.

‘Now I get a thing that looks like an abstract painting, and is about as eatable.'

‘Oh give it to me then and I'll eat it.' Why did he have to go on and on? Sighing, she knew that he would go on and on. If it hadn't been the egg it would have been coffee …

‘Surely I've asked often enough for eggs to be bought on the black market.' It was not as scandalous as it sounded in the mouth of a respectable government servant, for it was one of her expressions. Dairy produce in Holland is all subject to a tangle of regulation that reduces it to the same mean and villainous mediocrity, but it is possible, if one knows an intelligent farmer, to get fresh eggs and even milk with cream on – if he is unusually courageous: leaving cream on the milk is rank poujadism, sabotage, treasonable.

‘There's only one thing worse,' knocking about crossly looking for a notebook that was already in his pocket, ‘and that's cheese wrapped in plastic.' Damn it, now he was telling her! Long-suffering women …

In the office the bad mood continued. A plodding report with a spelling mistake in it was pushed pettishly to the other side of the desk and everybody in his jurisdiction decided quickly that he had the plague and must be put in quarantine. The telephone girl was instructed to be tactful with her switchboard, and a shopkeeper who came with a tale about a smooth gentleman with no money
and a phony Diners Club card was told abruptly that it served him right.

Van der Valk got up crossly to turn the central heating off. Damned April – yesterday it had been freezing and today it was warm, but not with a nice sunny warmth: a moist, grey fuggy warmth that did nobody any good. He opened the window, went back to get his chair knocking his stick to the floor on the way, left it lying and sat by the window where he could put his elbows on the nasty metal sill and gaze at a soggy cornflakes carton floating in the canal – pigs!

He didn't have to make a written report to the Officer of Justice, but he had to put order in his mind. It was no good going to the Palais and making an impassioned speech about cheese wrapped in plastic. He knew by now exactly what was written in his notebook; that no longer helped. Sighing self-pityingly he went and got another fresh sheet of paper – four or five had gone into the basket already.

‘Bernhard was expendable. Everybody says what a nice fellow he was and nobody means it.

‘Strong characters dominate their husbands. The effect upon Francis is there to be seen, but the effect on Bernhard isn't.

‘Marion goes to pains to tell me how Francis copes with her, even the ways that are humiliating to herself. Is she telling me that Bernhard too had ways of asserting himself against that peculiar alliance – is it lesbian? – of the women in his house?

‘The atmosphere of snobbery, the determined social climbing that everybody goes in for – that all creates tension. Marion is from upper-class milieu. Marguerite, as the good doctor was at pains to tell me, isn't.

‘Should I recommend the Officer of Justice to send for Maartens and overrule this professional-secret lark? Since the fellow plainly knows something but what it is he's not going to say. He drew our attention to a happening he knew quite well was a criminal act. That, in his eyes, is quite enough to fulfil his responsibilities.

‘What do all these people see in a riding-school? Marguerite, afflicted with a vulgar husband and a rather middle-class enterprise like a restaurant, sees it as an occupation to put her standing beyond doubt. It is also good publicity for the business – a kernel of regular customers is held this way.