A Long Silence

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Man,’ wearily, ‘don’t torment me further.’

  *

  The roses were shooting with a force undaunted by any rules. A cramped situation, a polluted atmosphere, a heavy layer of dark grey cloud, a cold north-westerly wind coming down from Scapa Flow where it was still winter at the very end of April – some of the roses were already showing buds. Mr Bosboom had met her with an aggressive roughness that startled her. Why should he be hostile? He was just a man who had sold her husband a watch.

  ‘I can see no way in which I can be of service to you.’

  ‘Will you at least listen? Politely or anyway patiently?’

  ‘I should hope so at least. I wouldn’t wish you to think me lacking in common courtesy. But as regards your husband’s most untimely and unhappy death – it is as though you appear to believe, if you will pardon me, that I had withheld information from the police.’

  ‘I have nothing whatever to do with the police. They know nothing about this. I have nothing to say to them. This is purely personal. I have no reproach or even remark to make to you which you could possibly find offensive.’

  ‘I am bound to believe you, Mevrouw, and to listen, naturally, with proper courtesy, to anything you may wish to say. I cannot believe that I can help you.’

  ‘Will you at least ask me in off the doorstep?’

  ‘I beg your pardon … Won’t you please sit down?’

  ‘I am not trying to enlist your sympathy,’ she said slowly. ‘Nor seeking to commit you in anything. I’ve no reason whatever to believe there’s anything you can tell me that you wouldn’t have told the police, that is assuming you had anything to tell them.’

  ‘Which I did not.’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘So if I may ask what your purpose is in doing me the honour of a visit?’

  ‘Don’t be too formal,’ said Arlette sadly. ‘Try to believe me – I’ve no axe to grind.’ He bowed his head, and said nothing. ‘You sold my husband a watch.’

  ‘I do not contest it. An innocent transaction, I should imagine.’

  ‘I’ve no reason to believe anything else.’

  The bow was sarcastic.

  ‘You see, he wrote something down in a notebook. Something about a boy who worked in a jewellers’, who was suspected or thought himself suspected of stealing. Very vague, and one would say quite unimportant.’

  ‘I have no doubt of that.’

  ‘But he thought it important enough, I don’t know, it seemed worth asking that’s all, to come and see you.’

  ‘He asked me,’ said Bosboom carefully, ‘and my memory serves me well upon the subject, whether there was any likelihood in a tale told him of a watch unaccounted for in a jewellers’ inventory, a jewellers’ where as he had learned I had worked for numerous years. I gave him my opinion, which was that I thought the story exceedingly unlikely, and that the young man in question, who remained unnamed, and whom I may say I do not know, was telling fairy stories. That is all. I still see no relevance to any subsequent happening. I have no means of saying, of course, whether he gave my simple opinion on a matter of conjecture any credence.’

  ‘Mr Bosboom – please, I’m not trying to make any more of this than you tell me there was.’

  ‘I am grateful to you.’

  ‘Do you know a man called Saint?’

  Bosboom’s large gardener’s hand, which was rubbing his jaw, gave a nervous jerk.

  ‘Now why do you ask me that?’

  ‘Just because in the note my husband wrote, which was in a pile of notes he wrote concerning his work, your name and this one are mentioned in the same context. These notes were part of a pile of manuscript – they just got stuck in a file. Nobody read them, you see, till after. The police thought them of no importance.’

  ‘In what context?’ asked Bosboom slowly.

  She wasn’t being very good at this, she thought, and stopped to think. The long pause, and her concentration, seemed to have a reassuring effect upon Bosboom, who became less still and stony, and arranged his features into a less forbidding pattern.

  ‘In the context of a rhetorical question,’ she said at last, ‘asking himself what conclusions to draw from a situation which wasn’t clear to him, and which is that much more obscure to anyone trying to piece things together.’

  ‘As you are – that is the obvious inference.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because – this is your inference – this diary or memorandum or whatever it is contains the germ of explanations – why he was killed, to put it bluntly. And you are trying to make this outline, call it, of an idea into something evidential. Now be quite honest with yourself. You are most anxious, and I can understand that and sympathize, to find something with which to go to the police and say to them, “Here is matter for enquiry, which you have hitherto neglected.” Now isn’t that an accurate summing-up of your thoughts?’

  ‘Except that I have no intention whatever of going to the police with any suggestion or complaint or argument at all, it is accurate as far as it goes.’

  He knitted his big bristly eyebrows together.

  ‘If you are not trying to stir up the police – I would understand it if you were – I don’t grasp your purpose.’

  ‘I wish to find out. I feel strongly that there are things to find out, that it can be done, and that I have the right to do it. It is personal to me. Police and courts and judges don’t enter into it at all.’

  He looked at her, studying her, taking his time about answering.

  ‘Forgive me, but have you really thought this out? I don’t wish to appear insulting. You certainly aren’t behaving – shall I say over-excitably. May I, in a friendly way, because I wish you nothing but good, beg you to ask yourself what it is you hope to gain?’

  ‘You believe that I have a suppressed hysteria, don’t you?’

  He puffed a bit, taken aback and unwilling to say either yes or no.

  ‘I couldn’t have answered you a day or so ago. All I could see then was that my husband had been assassinated. I was determined to use any means to identify the assassin. I’ve learned a good deal since. This for a start, that my husband was a policeman, but he wasn’t working on an investigation, so it can’t have been anything criminal. He kept it quite private; that seems clear. He did not apply to any official instrument for help or cooperation, he did not use any official machinery. The notes we’ve found are fragmentary and confusing, but go to show that whatever this was, he had made some kind of bargain with himself, that he hadn’t grounds for an official enquiry. He was working something out – we don’t know what – in his spare time. I intend to find out what and why. If it led to his death, then that might be a matter for legal justice, I don’t know, but it isn’t my affair. I don’t believe in private police forces. Bringing people to judgement isn’t my job – or my intention.’

  ‘Then what is your intention? I may ask that, mayn’t I? Since after all you have come to me for information.’

  ‘Just as my husband came to you – unless I am very much mistaken – for private information. It was a private affair between him and some person, or maybe some people. Now he is dead. So that now it is between me and this person. Whoever,’ she finished tranquilly, ‘killed him.’

  The level tone she was able to speak in had surprised herself as much as it had Bosboom.

  ‘Hm,’ he went slowly, and again, ‘Hm. You see, I’ve been a businessman all my life, and as far as I know an honest one. You won’t take it amiss that I should be hesitant in beginning anything, or contributing towards anything that I can’t see the end of, and whose consequences I can’t judge. You understand that I – like your husband if you wish – or like you if you prefer – have ethical hesitations as well. Your husband came to see me. That is true. But he certainly gave me no reason to suppose that he was pursuing anything in the nature of a criminal enquiry. Nor did I have the slightest base for a supposition that there could be any connection at all with his subsequent death.
After thought, I felt satisfied that this must be coincidence. I did ask myself whether I should go to the police. But what had I to tell them? – 1 didn’t feel it to be anything but confusion and irrelevance. All it had boiled down to was a question about jewellers’ stocktaking, a thing inside my experience and that was why he came to me. As a sidelight – he happened to have broken his watch. I happened to have one I had no real use for. I sold it him in a casual neighbourhood transaction. There was no matter in this for police enquiries.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ said Arlette. ‘I’m not trying to put any pressure on you. Perhaps you feel that if you now told me anything, and I were to use that to create some sort of scandal or uproar, you might be put in an uncomfortable situation. As though you had had some knowledge and suppressed it, which might come to appear discreditable – is that it, perhaps, a bit?’

  ‘Possibly … partially …’

  ‘Or that you have no definite knowledge, and that something you could perhaps tell me could come to appear mischievous, or even libellous because of what I might repeat or insinuate?’

  ‘There might be something in that too.’

  ‘Would it help you if I gave you my word that I will not make anything you tell me public?’

  ‘It would help… yes.’

  ‘Then I’ve only one thing left – a remark, not an argument. My husband was killed. Will you not do what you can to help me? For nothing, for no motive, but only as an act of generosity or, if you prefer, pity towards a woman who has lost her husband.’

  Bosboom was silent while the antique pendulum clock in the comfortable, chintzy little living-room ticked quietly and the traffic outside boomed suddenly loud at the corner and decrescendo as it passed by. A far-off airliner circling above Schiphol added its distant screech. Then he said abruptly, ‘My wife is out. May I offer you something? She will be back very soon. I should like to put this to her, and hear what she has to say. Would you agree to my doing that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arlette.

  *

  That evening about rush-hour she was standing in the Spui, while the pedestrian traffic, swelled by the mounting tide of tourists, eddied past her. She gazed at the windows and the door for a long time, but did not go into the shop.

  A little while later, after the shops had closed, she was in the Leliegracht. She had followed a ‘young man’. Was that Saint? He seemed too young. Was it perhaps ‘Richard’, ‘the boy’? He semed too old, or perhaps too sophisticated, a poised languid figure who had strolled negligently through the ten minutes of bridge and waterside between the two points, sniffing pleasantly at the freshness of a spring evening which has ‘turned out nice after the rain’.

  Arlette found herself outside a sex shop. She glanced with a scrap of distaste, for she had really no desire to catch herself loitering outside a sex shop, and crossed the road. From there she glanced up at the windows above, and suddenly down at the shop again, for something had caught her eye. These places – in her limited experience – were generally given a name combining prudery and prurience; ‘Eros’ or suchlike, culled from the superficial popularizations of Freud and Frazer with which they gave themselves an air of respectability. She grinned a little – these people and their classical myths! Really – the golden apples of the Hesperides: now that was affectation.

  Suddenly the grin froze around her mouth: she turned abruptly and walked with a quick, stiff action out of the street.

  She had just discovered the stripped tree of the false apples.

  She knew.

  I know, she told herself, over and over, as she walked back towards the Ruysdaelskade. I know. What am I going to do?

  *

  She did not wish to tell her confederates at all. They had helped her, undoubtedly, immensely. They had comforted and quieted her, found out the material points and pointers without which she would not have known what to look for, crystallized her shapeless thoughts and canalized her turmoil of unbalanced emotion and uncontrolled wishes. They had surrounded her with an affectionate understanding and solidarity in a way that Ruth for instance, who was too close to her, could not do. They had shown her that the police work, however concentrated and carefully directed, could strike nothing but empty air, and that this was nobody’s fault. Least of all that of the police. Why else had Van der Valk been so careful not to involve any police mechanisms in his ‘private experiment’?

  She had, too, promised Bosboom to respect his confidence. Nobody should find out from her the things he had told her. She could use the things she had learned, but she must respect their source. Still, she could not let her confederates down. They had promised her true alliance, and given it. Dear old Bates, who had made her understand herself. Dan, who had understood and linked up all the scraps of writing and got it all right, before she had been given the thread, by Bosboom, that pulled everything together. And the extraordinary force of Willy and Trix, with their blind loyalty to ‘one of themselves’ – it was that which had given the whole thing, a pretty tangled metaphysical argument in the mind of, say, Hilary, a direction and a dynamic.

  ‘Y’can’t just let a thing like that go,’ Willy had said, trying to understand his own instincts. ‘ ’S like the time of the occupation. Mean t’say, no names no packdrill now, but I knew plenty who made their pile then and never looked back since. Played their cards clever, y’know? I was only a lad, but I can say, could have had my own business, had all I got now, near enough fifteen years ago. Or Jews – I mean, we didn’t like Jews all that well. Used to make jokes, harmless like, but meaning it a bit too, about moneylenders an’ pawnbrokers an’ stuff – you know … And well, I mean, I was a butcher and Jews don’t eat our stuff, pork and all, and they got their own slaughterhouse, I mean, what was it to me? The Moffen started rounding up all the Jews and there’s nothing but grief for the likes of us to think about it, let alone interfere. Why, we didn’t even have hardly any here in the quarter, those days. But it stuck in my gullet somehow. I dunno, in the occupiers’ time, I can’t say I thought much about patriotism or the Queen or the government. Queen never did anything for me, y’know what I mean, and bloody government, bloodsuckers – anyway they all run away to England, it was us that had to live with the occupation. So why not go with it, not necessarily collaborating, get me – but just ride it out, close your eyes, look after number one? I never did get to work out why I done some things – Willy – Charlie, that’s what I should’ve been called because that’s what I was. But I got nothing to regret, never had. Sod it, I just feel that way. If I can do something now about Piet, that’s what I’m going to do and hell with the consequences, don’t care if they put me in jail f’r it.’

  Exhausted, he reached for beer, drank the whole bottle, breathed out heavily, and suddenly said, ‘I felt like a Jew myself, sometimes. Times I was a Jew, come to that.’

  No, Arlette had responsibilities both ways. Not just to Bosboom. He had had a wrestle with his conscience, no doubt, but so had Trix, who was accustomed to adding up her comforts and her cash-desk, and arriving at a perfectly satisfactory existence. And she had made up her mind a good deal quicker!

  ‘D’ja find this Bosboom?’ asked the committee.

  ‘Yes – wasn’t much use. Just a confirmation that there was something about the jewellers’ – he used to be the manager there. The watch just came up by the way – he happened to have one. He knows nothing about the boy.’

  ‘Or Saint?’

  ‘Just knows he exists – he’s a nephew of sorts, of old Spire. But I’ve got better. I went there myself, I found out what the poem means – the thing about the false apples that puzzled us.’

  ‘No!’ said Dan, vastly excited.

  *

  The house of Louis Prins was lucky in its cleaning women. There were three of them, noisy and muscular Amsterdamse housewives, with tongues that went as fast as their hands; indefatigable climbers upon ladders, whackers of carpets, clat-terers of buckets. Louis had had them for many years, and was
as proud of them as of anything in the shop. He was fond of telling long comic stories about their terrifying energy, their appalling zeal, their shattering tactlessness, the years it had taken him to prevent them taking the cat o’ nine tails to his carpets, scrubbing all the patina off faience, or slapping great wads of polish on to eighteenth-century marquetry. The day Jopie tripped over an easel and spilt a bucket of hot soapy water over a Saenredam canvas, one of his church interiors – ‘she thought she was scrubbing the pavement – I think she was deceived by the perspective’. The day Rinie fell off the ladder clutching an Empire chandelier to her amazing pneumatic bosom. The black Monday when Willie found a piece of Boulle and decided to polish the brass inlays …

  Dick stood in the centre of his kingdom, his fingers relishing the surface of a fifteenth-century piece of oak found by Louis in a country presbytery in Belgian Limbourg, a bit wormy, but very nice. A grin crept out on his face; he had done the same thing, his first month, with another piece, covered his fingers in dust, and bawled out Jopie – youngest, noisiest and quickest-tempered of the three. She had piled roaring in upon Louis, along the lines of ‘If that snot-nose is going to start teaching me my job …’ The old man had been upset. ‘You’re a good boy, Dickie, a very good boy, but if I had to choose between losing you and losing my Jopie …’ But Dick had learned quickly – he had learned everything quickly. Intelligent and sensitive, naturally attracted to objects of worth and beauty, he had attacked his own ignorance and inexperience with a heat of enthusiasm which had made him … well, he thought grinning, pretty near as indispensable as Jopie anyhow. He could handle more now than just tourists. True, the older customers insisted on ‘seeing Louis’ just like the businessmen who insisted on seeing Larry. And while he had picked up a great deal, he still knew nothing when it came to the buying, linch-pin as he had understood of an antique business, and that was one thing which couldn’t be learned in a hurry.

  ‘Takes years; years; there’s no short cut,’ as Louis said with his heavy, chesty sigh, ‘and who’s to do that after I’m done with I can’t tell. Larry’s no good – he’s not even interested.’