Arlette found herself slowly loosening and untying, able to say something about the character of her husband, the way he had thought about things, the way he went about a problem.
‘He didn’t believe in regretting things,’ she said, ‘but I wonder whether he felt rather sad. At dying, I mean. He used to say he’d wasted incredible amounts of time and energy on things he’d never properly understood, and towards the end he remarked quite often that he thought he was beginning to understand but didn’t feel at all sure of it.’
Dan nodded.
‘All artists like that if any good. Sit there wondering about the form of something and being hopeful that next time they really will get it right at last – ask what and they don’t know. Not a thing one Knows. In the wrong job, your man.’
‘I wouldn’t know that I’d agree,’ said Hilary. ‘Why should there be a rule saying the police is a reserved occupation for people who’d never be any use at anything else? Who was it anyway that said the ruler of the ideal state would be an artist?’
‘Wouldn’t a good artist have too much humility?’ said Arlette. ‘Didn’t Renoir die muttering something about he was beginning to get the hang of it?’
‘Auto-satisfaction enemy of art,’ said Dan. ‘First truism and soonest forgotten. Arlette quite right, police investigation work of art. Attempt to impose form upon material. Chap died in the middle of it, like as not. Why shot after all? Came too close perhaps to understanding something, we might be allowed to guess. Right. Official police mechanisms turning on computers, whirring away there, vastly astonished when no work of art disgorged at end, only vast quantities of irrelevant rubbish. You want to find out what happened,’ to Arlette, ‘but you don’t really have any interest in who did it?’
‘Not really – only like oh you know, what’s the end of Edwin Drood.’
‘Exactly. You’re not feeling revengeful are you? – want to see the fellow hanged or something?’
‘I don’t mind thinking about it – which isn’t to say I could do it or allow of it’s being done.’
‘Ha,’ said Hilary.
‘I think,’ said Dan, ‘you feel you have to make the effort to understand because you think that, hell, that’s the least you can do.’
‘I can’t feel able to go tracking anybody down, being an instrument of punishment or redress or something.’
‘I think perhaps you damn well should,’ said Hilary.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Dan. ‘What is she, the Four Just Men? – easy for you, you’re not involved.’
‘Well,’ asked Hilary, ‘why shouldn’t I be involved? If Arlette allowed me to or asked me to I’d try my best to pin the bastard down, not hang about revelling in the tenderness of my conscience.’
‘Perhaps she will allow you to,’ crossly, ‘and then you can put it to the proof.’
‘I don’t know what I want,’ said Arlette dolorously, ‘but perhaps I’ll know better after I’ve made a start.’
‘Very well,’ almost both together, ‘then let’s make a start.’
‘I’ve nothing to go on at all, except some old notebooks.’
‘Right,’ firmly, ‘then go and get them. No, on second thoughts, let’s eat first. I’ll go and do the rice.’
‘The women,’ said Hilary, ‘will hang about being decorative while the Deity does the rice and gets beer. Do you want to pee or anything?’
‘I’m like the royal family,’ said Arlette. ‘I never miss an opportunity.’
‘Do one for me while you’re at it. I’ll tidy a bit. Men do the cooking but the sink’s left crammed with dirty dishes.’
Arlette was not a Janeite, and when describing ‘Old Mother Counterpoint’ it was accidentally that she let slip the fact, which I had never known, that Piet used to call her ‘Bates’. Rather typical, though I do not think he can have been a true Janeite either, but it helped me to get behind Arlette’s descriptions. Similarly, it was ‘Bates’s’ phrase about Mr Gandhi which allowed me to discover something about Danny de Vries. Arlette described him eating curry, lavishly, in corduroy trousers – not in the least like Mr Gandhi, and not very like Mr Kipling either! – and I was puzzled until I learned that both he and Hilary had lived in England, and that Hilary was in fact half English, which perhaps explains her name. It became at once much easier to see them, as well as to understand what happened. For Arlette, you must understand, was tiresomely vague about how things came to happen. Who was it for instance that began making jokes about the Four Just Men? I had thought perhaps it was Piet, presumably an Edgar Wallace fan as well as a Janeite, but no, it was of course Danny de Vries, and it was, I am inclined to think, Hilary that turned it from being a joke into a reality. The ‘moral question’ was probably introduced by Arlette herself, who being French loves discussions about ethics, but it was Hilary, with her share of ‘British bloodymindedness’ who began the weird idea, amusing me later with its undeniably comic overtones of ‘the committee’. One recalls the man (he must surely too have had English blood?) who waged, and won, single-handed warfare against General Motors and whose ‘committee’ became known as Nader’s Raiders. Very like the Four Just Men! Only the English, one feels certain, have the stubborn awkwardness, and the courage, as well as the lunatic poetic vision, to do such things. Though perhaps it took Arlette to include Bates as well as Willy the butcher in her schemes. Setting out like that to execute private justice – yes, it must have been Hilary who was at the bottom of that. Very English with her badly bobbed hair and dressed in sackcloth, very English in her artistic ‘hammering at things’ – barbaric kinds of silver and copper jewellery no doubt – and most English of all in her tenacious pursuit of the object.
The curry was very good, Arlette told me, but the coffee bloody awful. Perhaps that is English too.
‘We must find out,’ said Danny firmly. ‘You’re obviously the only person who can interpret these notebooks, as well as read your husband’s writing, and translate this sort of shorthand, but perhaps an objective mind – after all we never knew him and that’s sometimes an advantage – can place a construction on the interpretations that you could not arrive at in solitude. Like a crossword puzzle – you know, you sit gazing at something like, “Warmed-up rum issue in an African kraal?” utterly flummoxed, and Hilary for instance just glances over your shoulder and says straight out “Hottentot”.’ Arlette looked blank as well she might.
‘There may be disconnected remarks in these notes,’ explained Dan patiently, ‘which juxtaposed make up a clue to something. You said yourself that there were references to the watch which you felt sure meant something.’
‘Yes,’ said Arlette, ‘I’m convinced that’s at the bottom of it somehow. He broke his watch and there’s a note on it. It was ridiculous because he said it was an extraordinary accident which could only happen to him. He was winding it or something and dropped it because his fingers were cold – it all hung together somehow he said, he’d lost his gloves or left them somewhere…’
‘Left them Where? Winding it or What? Hung together How?’ Dan rapped it out in a really impatient, inquisitorial voice, and she realized she was blithering.
‘I’m sorry; I’ll try and be as precise as I can. Left them on the train. Waiting for a tram, dropped the watch, it got wedged somehow in the tramline, got run over before he could stoop to pick it up, and he wrote in his book, “Odd how a stupid catastrophe can give one a notion”, and I wondered what notion, because he came home with a new watch and was mysterious about it. Very pretty watch it was, sort of antique. I gave it to Ruth, our daughter, as a souvenir.’
‘Where did that happen? By the station?’
‘Where he bought it? I don’t know. He dropped it by the Koningsplein that’s all I know.’
‘We write it all down,’ said Dan, fetching a sketching-block and a felt pen, ‘and we look later for things which might fit together.’
‘I looked for any note to do with a watch. I found an odd thing about some private experimen
t or theory of his, to do with his criminology work, which said, “Tale about supposed watch stolen conceivably planted – what has it to do with me?” but I don’t know what it means.’
‘Well, that at least is clear as daylight,’ said Danny without hesitation. ‘Somebody came to him, right? with a tale about a stolen watch, which might not have been stolen or why would he write supposed, but might have been planted. He was interested because something was funny and didn’t hang together. Else why write “why come to me?” and indeed why write a note at all about something so trivial?’
‘Yes, that struck me. It seemed so trivial and that’s why I thought the watch must have some significance. But the two are unconnected. I mean the stolen watch and the broken watch.’
‘We don’t know. Anything else about watches?’
‘Yes, but not much help. It is isolated, in another book, and says just, “Richard Lindengracht watch fiddle what’s in it?’”
‘Well that’s something, but why another book?’
‘Oh that doesn’t mean anything, or not necessarily, because he had several of these notebooks, they’re just exercise-books really, and often he had the wrong one or just a different one and wrote things down just the same.’
‘Mm – nothing else about watches? Well what about Richard, since we know there’s a Richard linked with the watch. Or about the Lindengracht?’
‘No Lindengracht. One Richard, since I followed that up of course: “Richard Oddinga age 22 student,” as though he’d checked an identity card, and after “pa dead in Friesland suddenly offered job thought fishy”, which is part of the same note.’
‘Well one looks in the Lindengracht and tries to find Richard - easy with a description as detailed as that. Ask Richard whether he knows anything about it and bob’s your uncle.’
‘Doesn’t it strike you that if it were that easy she’d have done it?’ put in Hilary tartly. ‘Nor does it strike you that somebody shot her husband, and possibly because of something concerning a watch. So you’ll go asking too. Seems to me,’ sarcastically, ‘a thought risky.’
‘There’s that’ admitted Dan, taken aback at the possibility of Lord Peter Wimsey getting shot at. ‘Nothing else that could be Richard – I mean students, or Friesland, or aged twenty-two or…?’
‘The only thing I could possibly find is a longish note about pictures, which goes on about a fiddle, and an illegal deal, and somebody called B. and another called Louis, and an addition, “What can he need the boy for?” but that’s awfully tenuous.’
‘It is,’ wrinkling and looking more like Gandhi than usual. ‘Nothing else on pictures or B. or Louis to give a link?’
‘No. Or at least – pictures of pictures.’
‘Huh?’
‘Drawings. Doodles. Several pictures all over a page, in baroque frames, just sketched in, but it means nothing to me.’
‘No,’ agreed Dan unwillingly, ‘one might say he’d been looking at pictures, but going on like that we’d end up finding he’d been assassinated by a painter for saying his pictures were no good and I’d find myself pleading extenuation. No, I do agree, that doesn’t get us very far.’
‘One has to admit, too, that the police have had these notebooks and must also have checked up anything that would look like a lead or even a link.’
‘Well, we just have to use more imagination than they did, that’s all.’
‘About the watch,’ said Hilary suddenly, ‘you said “a pretty one, sort of antique”, but was it an antique?’
‘No it was new, that’s to say he said it was second-hand and that it had been a bargain. It was made in imitation of an antique model, more – it must have been expensive. I mean originally.’
‘It wasn’t bought in an antique shop? I was thinking about pictures.’
‘I think he’d have said – he told me he’d picked it up by accident, by coincidence I mean, from a man who he’d been talking to.’
‘Anyway it wasn’t antique,’ said Dan with an air of logic, ‘so he didn’t get it,’ sarcastically, ‘from an antique shop; it’d be slightly more likely he got it from a jeweller.’
‘Or if it was second-hand from a watch-repairer, if we’re going to be so devastatingly logical,’ said Hilary, refusing to be snubbed.
‘That’s a thing, though – any note about either of those, or a watchmaker or anything?’
‘No, I looked.’
‘So all we’ve got is that Richard was involved in a supposed watch fiddle, age twenty-two, student, pa dead, suddenly offered job—’
‘A job,’ rapped out Hilary suddenly, ‘in a jewellers’.’
‘She’s right, you know,’ said Dan in the pause that followed this.
‘I mean where else, a stolen watch or possibly planted, it would be a jewellers’.’
‘So we look for a jewellers’ in the Lindengracht. And if there isn’t any we’re back to square one.’
‘I’ll go over the notebooks again. But I don’t think there can be anything else. I’ve marked all the bits with pieces of paper.’
‘Have a look,’ said Dan, reading the scribble laboriously, ‘it goes “this boy Odd, odd-ball” yes, a play on words just, but he does say “this boy” so the other boy could be the same boy.’
*
‘There isn’t a jewellers’ in the Lindengracht’ Trixie was saying in a tone of voice which was conclusive, which might not have meant much by itself, because people very often do speak conclusively, most of all when they have no earthly idea what they are talking about. But as she was explaining – at a good deal of length – she had been brought up ‘round the corner’ and still had a married sister in the quarter whom she visited once a week.
Arlette had come for the promised coffee-drinking, a Dutch rite which takes place at any hour of the day that guests happen to drop in and is ‘de rigueur’: Arlette might not much enjoy sweet pale milky coffee at half past seven in the evening, but she knew what was expected of her, and was lavish in admiration of all the domestic arrangements. In fact she was not at all ill at ease or unhappy. Once away from the cash desk and the abattoir they became simple, truthful, thoughtful and affectionate. When younger, Arlette would have thought that their taste in interior decoration, which was atrocious, made such folk permanently uneatable and unspeakable, but with experience she had learned better manners. Simply bursting with innocent vanity, Trix had started with the ‘salon’, dwelt none too briefly on objects of art brought back from holidays in Majorca, Bavaria and an area apparently bounded by St Ives, Stratford-on-Avon and Buckingham Palace, and gone on to an exhaustive coverage of every room in the house, with special emphasis on every detail of the ruby-tiled bathroom and the turquoise-tiled kitchen. During this tour, which ended with the fur coat in the bedroom cupboard, Willy sat upon cushions in the living-room with a tolerantly uxorious expression and a bottle of beer. I suppose nothing could be more vulgar, ostentatious and ridiculous, thought Arlette: I wonder why I’m not nauseated. She had refused the offer of more coffee, and was being given a choice between crème de cacao, crème de banane and a mauve concoction known to Holland as Parfait Amour.
‘You’re trying to work it all out, aren’t you?’ asked Willy with a shrewd directness which would have upset her ordinarily: she detested nothing more than the Dutch taste for personal questions.
‘If I can.’
‘Track it down, like. Not wanting anything more to do with the police neither, are you?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’d be the same. I reckon it could be done too.’ He stopped talking abruptly, as though afraid he’d said too much, and opened another beer.
‘We were talking about it,’ admitted Trix. ‘Working it out like. There must be something to find out. People don’t just come up and shoot you with no explanation. Not like that. If they were chased, or sort of pushed into a corner, then maybe. But not like that. Oh I know the paper said it could happen.’
‘Paper’ll say anything,’ muttered
Willy. ‘Sneaking up in a car like that? – never on your nelly. Somebody who knew him and had a grievance – and that means he’s there somewhere and could be found.’
‘But the police have tried everything.’
‘Hm,’ said Willy darkly, withholding the average Amster-dammer’s opinion of the police, the built-in readiness to accept all sorts of nonsense which Van der Valk had never found a really good answer for. ‘Remember that book there was after the war? – The Commissaire Tells – fella’s life story, what?’
Arlette did; also Van der Valk’s opinion of it.
‘Know what we said? We said yeh, and the Commissaire could tell a lot more, too.’ An explosive grunt, partly beer and partly indignation. ‘What I was thinking was …’ he trailed away into silence.
‘Well, stop turning around the pot, then,’ said Trixie coarsely. ‘Y’made up y’mind t’say it, say it.’
‘We’d like to help you,’ said Willy, covering his confusion in beer.
Arlette was surprised and touched, but nowhere near as much as before she had gone to eat curry with Dan and Hilary. People did want to help, and they weren’t bad at it, either. And plenty of people were less shrewd and less sensible than these, as well as less simple.
‘So you can,’ she said.
‘You bet,’ said Trixie with emphasis, ‘but you know, duck, we didn’t want you to think we were sticking our nose in.’
‘Anything we can do, you just say. I mean, I’m just a butcher, but there’s not many knows the quarter better than Treas and me.’
A Long Silence Page 15