The King of the Rainy Country

by Nicolas Freeling

  a bit too intense, a bit too emotional, a bit too Spanish. You’re anyway damn complicated. I don’t know you well enough, myself.

  ‘I think that he came to KöIn, perhaps out of sheer coincidence, though he seems to have been reminded that there was a carnival going on. I think he saw and fell into conversation with a young girl, herself with very simple, honest, unsophisticated standards, and suddenly decided that this was what he wanted. I don’t know what kind of wild idea he had. He must certainly have realized that she would be hunted for, and eventually traced. I imagine that he just didn’t think because he didn’t want to think. He was sick of planning and weighing consequences. He wanted to be free. His money could give him illusions of freedom, and this girl would supply him with more. He had seen every pleasure there was in life, and found them all pretty thin. He was like the king of the rainy country.’

  ‘The what?’ Anne-Marie had not understood: how should she?

  Van der Valk picked up the volume of Baudelaire poems he had found, and that was still lying on the table – Mr Wollek’s criminal brigade hadn’t seen anything particularly incriminating in a volume of Baudelaire.

  ‘Sure. Here. A poem. He read it, he knew it, he liked Baudelaire: they had a lot in common. Great gifts, great sensitivity, and a kind of tormented conscience. Baudelaire was always moaning about his bad luck, but he liked it really. He enjoyed his bad conscience and the feeling he was a doomed and tormented person. Jean-Claude understood that and sympathized with it. Here – read the poem. The hounds and the falcons – that’s the sports cars and the skis and all the other things he did so well. The ladies-in-waiting with their lewd costumes – that’s you, my dear, I rather think, striking sexy poses naked around that wonderful bathroom of yours. The subjects come to die under his balcony, the alchemist making the corrupt gold – he saw parallels there all right. And the green water of Lethe instead of blood. I think really that’s why he ran off with his tanzmariechen. He wanted to prove that he still had blood inside him.’

  She was no longer giving him the deer-eyed look. The eyes had narrowed and were watching attentively: she was missing nothing.

  ‘I don’t believe a word of all that tale of slaloms and SLs and plane trees. It has a slick fabricated sound. I think you’ve just made it up to convince me that Canisius is the sinister villain in this piece. You’d even like probably to convince yourself that it is so, and that he has caused your husband’s death. Because I’m pretty sure that was provoked by nobody but you.’

  He pulled himself up abruptly; he had said too much, and wanted to kick himself. He had just broken one of the cardinal rules of police procedure, which is to avoid any personal involvement in anything or anybody one comes across professionally. Stung by his own clumsiness and stupidity, he was now trying to demonstrate that he was really a clever fellow after all, he told himself sadly. The knight’s move was wrong; there was too much of a bold sortie into unknown country about it. Anyway, this wasn’t a game for knights; he should have moved a pawn, very cautiously and gradually.

  She still wasn’t saying anything, but she was looking at him with an oddly bright expectant look, her lips slightly parted. He picked up another of the stones, surprised at its weight. The cold smoothness was consoling to his moist hot hand.

  It was not even as though there were any point in it. Even if he were certain that she had known about this house and had been in it, he could not prove it, and whatever she had done, it was nothing criminal – any more than Jean-Claude had done anything criminal. Both were victims of a peculiar fatality that they shared, that belonged to both of them.

  ‘My husband is dead,’ she said suddenly with something like hatred in the cold quiet voice, ‘and you sit there, doubtless very pleased with yourself, telling me that I caused his death. To try and hide your own stupidity and ignorance from yourself. You understand nothing. There is the same miserable meanness and narrowness in your thinking as all the others show.’ Others? What others, he wondered.

  ‘When I saw you first in Amsterdam I thought that there might be some intelligence in you, that you had some scrap of sensitivity and understanding. Now I see that you are just like any other policeman. Dutch, dim, obstinate, with your mean literal little mind. Get out of my sight. Find your own way back to Strasbourg. I don’t have to listen to a fool like you trying to justify himself.’

  He sat quiet and looked at her smilingly. Froth, my dear, by all means, if it makes you feel better, he thought. She stood looking at him a moment with contempt, then turned abruptly and left the room, shutting the door with a bang. He listened to her climb the stairs; over his head she stood still a moment in the room of the two pistol shots. He was sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do; there was nothing he could do at all, but get a carefully written report plotted out in his head. He would be asked for all the details, in Amsterdam. It would hardly be read, but that was unimportant: all that mattered really was to get it accepted. Heinz Stössel, in Köln, had a far more important and exacting piece of work. Since the sad thing was that nobody really cared about the Marschals; it was the little German shopgirl who had happily put on the carnival costume in which she looked so fine that would, rightly, be mourned. Marschal had had nothing left to do in this world: it was why he had shot himself, surely? He had realized that, perhaps, dimly. She had wanted to go with him, she had offered, she had even insisted: Marschal had yielded to that. It had been something to him, that she, at least, had not wished to leave him.

  As for Anne-Marie … He could hear her now coming down the stairs, in the room next door, looking round, taking leave of the pathetic remnant of Jean-Claude’s deceptions. Then he heard the other door slam, and the click of the gate on to the street. Well well. There wasn’t much he could do about that!

  The speculations were quite fruitless, after all; exactly how the links had been laid that made up the chain of reactions culminating in this death was not important now. He himself was among those links, in actions he had made or provoked. He hadn’t understood, but there was little enough point in tormenting himself with that. He should have understood, in Innsbruck, but the glitter of the snow on the mountains, the intoxication of the air, the speed and beauty of the girls ski-ing – everything had bemused him, confused his thoughts and stupefied his mind.

  I am just a plodding Dutch plainsman, he told himself; I was quite straightforwardly out of my depth. He felt the contour of the stone in his hand with his mouth and tongue, as though he were blind and was trying to reach something with other senses, that he used clumsily through lack of practice. The stone was just a stone; none of its beauty and richness could be reached that way. He put it down with a sigh and reached in his inside pocket for his notebook and a ballpoint.

  Canisius had been manoeuvring to get the last of the Marschals into a position of impotence. That was not difficult, but to find a way to lay hands on all that money was more difficult. When Marschal had bolted he had seen an opening at once. Marschal was an irresponsible, wild, reckless character, and might do or be led to do something unbalanced, and that might give him a valuable handle. Naturally, Canisius had been delighted to hear that Marschal had run off with a teenage girl in Germany; nothing could have suited him better. And to confuse the situation still further, he had maliciously told Anne-Marie – her high-voltage emotions injected into the situation would doubtless tangle things still further. Astute.

  Jean-Claude was not really the last of the Marschals. Anne-Marie was an obstacle as well. One would never find out how much she knew or guessed, or what Canisius suspected she might know or guess, but the man, who she had said once, contemptuously, had the mind of a grocer, and yet a clear insight into her character. Canisius had seen the contradictions of her nature.

  Her ‘espagnolisme’ – the ‘Spanishness’ that was one of her salient features, for instance. She would be maddened by Jean-Claude’s stupidity and heedlessness in picking up the tanz-mariechen, and she would also be crudely and furiously
jealous of this meaningless chit that meant somehow more to her husband than she had herself.

  She had followed the turns of Canisius’ mind without being able to realize that she was herself hopelessly enmeshed.

  She might not ever have realized that in coming to this house – she had certainly come, Van der Valk was quite convinced of that – she would precipitate a climax. And he himself had pointed it out to her. He shook his head; she had been quite right: stupid, blind, mean and narrow of mind and sight… there was a kind of fatality in that too. He should have kept more of an eye upon her, instead of running so frenziedly off to Chamonix. He was involved in these people; from the moment Canisius had stepped so delicately in his fur coat and beautifully-polished shoes into the office in Amsterdam he had been bound to them and he had never got any proper detachment, had never extricated himself. He had been half-seduced by Anne-Marie without realizing it, and had never managed the grip on the situation he must have to keep in control of it. He had been in a sort of trance, seduced and hypnotized.

  He had better get out of this. That house was adding to his persistent sense of impotence. He put the stone – he still had it in his palm – back on the wide windowsill, snapped the light out and shut the door behind him. He supposed that Anne-Marie would inherit all Jean-Claude Marschal’s worldly goods, but that huge quantity of money settled on him by his father … the old man was still alive. Could one revoke that kind of bequest? Canisius, doubtless, could have the best of legal advice on the question.

  There was something wrong about the hall. It struck him at once, but it took some minutes to find what was changed or missing. Then he noticed; as usual, it was the kind of thing that is so obvious one cannot understand why one had not seen it instantly.

  The rifle that had been hanging above that deer-antler hat-stand affair – a French monstrosity with a shield-shaped looking-glass in the middle of it, and little hooks for one’s clothesbrush and shoehorn – was no longer there. Was it possible that the gendarmerie had taken that away?

  *

  Even then he had still been in his trance. With a kind of stiff slowness he had gone back to the bureau of the gendarmerie to return the keys; they had rung a taxi for him to take him back to Strasbourg. By the time he was there he felt ready to believe he was making a fool of himself. Wollek’s technical squad, finding a firearm death, had taken the rifle for examination. He knew of course that this was ridiculous; anybody with the scrappiest training in firearms could see that both deaths had been caused by the pistol found on the bed. Why should Anne-Marie have taken it, though? What on earth would she do with such a thing? It certainly was not to commit suicide. First, suicide was not in her nature; second, women do not take a hunting rifle to kill themselves with: they would not know how to handle so awkward a weapon.

  He had better warn them that Anne-Marie was loose somewhere with a hunting rifle – rather a naughty weapon too; he had not looked closely at it, but it had been a heavier calibre than an ordinary twenty-two. One didn’t even know whether there was any ammunition for it; surely Marschal had not been fool enough to leave the thing hanging up there loaded?

  He would get no thanks from the French police. If he told them that he was certain Anne-Marie had been in that house before, had even provoked the double death, they would look at him in a stony way, silent: he had no evidence of any such thing. If he made a fuss, the only thing that could happen would be the sending of a call to all police to have Anne-Marie picked up, and in the meanwhile, the Procureur would refuse to sign the papers releasing the deaths from further inquiry. His signature meant that the judicial authorities were satisfied, that the body of the tanzmariechen could be taken home and buried and prayed over, that the press, scenting no further excitements, would leave Herr Schwiewelbein in peace.

  He rang the unpretentious hotel where the two Germans were staying. Anne-Marie had not registered there. No, that was natural enough; she would choose the most palatial hotel in the town.

  She had; she had also booked out again an hour ago, and had paid the forfeit without even looking at the bill. The porter had carried her expensive dressing-case. He had fetched her car round to the front for her – Yes, that was right, a grey Opel: quite unmistakable – there was a bundle of skis on the rack, in one of those sort of rainproof canvas sacks.

  Van der Valk, who did not wish to identify himself as a police man or anything like it, gave this porter a ten-franc note. Had she said or asked anything? Yes, she had asked for a main road towards the south-west; he had pointed her out the Schirmeck road.

  Van der Valk went off to think this over with a road map. Schirmeck – St Dié – yes, it went over the Vosges in a southwesterly direction towards Epinal: now what could be the point of that?

  She couldn’t be heading for Chamonix, could she, having known that was where he had got his information from? And what would she do there anyway? And if she were, why take that road? If she were headed for the mountains she would surely take the logical way south through Colmar and Mulhouse and the Belfort gap. He let his finger waver along the network of roads heading vaguely south-west; his finger reached Dijon, hesitated, wavered on. Moulins … Montluçon, or Clermont-Ferrand – it made little odds; the roads ran on, either Brive or Limoges, but they both came out at the end at Bordeaux. What along all these routes with their possible turnings could interest Anne-Marie? She couldn’t be heading for Paris: she would have taken the Nancy road. He made casts up and down, zigzagging with his finger like a dog on a scent. He was back at Bordeaux without a flicker of light illuminating his mind, and let his finger wander vaguely along the coast. La Rochelle? Down – he stopped suddenly. In the extreme south-western corner, tucked in the angle formed by the French and Spanish coasts, his finger was resting on Biarritz. It was suddenly clear to Van der Valk what Anne-Marie was doing with a hunting rifle slid in between the skis on her auto roof.

  Of course he could get Wollek out of bed. The more he thought about this the less he liked it.

  He had a rented car too, didn’t he? And she had only an hour’s start.

  *

  What was it Anne-Marie had called him? Slow and obstinate, mean and narrow, stupidly literal-minded, very Dutch. He sighed heavily and opened the window beside him to let the smoke out of the auto and get a bit of oxygen into his bloodstream. That was quite true. He couldn’t help it either, he had been born that way, trained that way, and his daily life only settled him further into the grooves of official rigidity. He was a professional. It is only in books that one finds the brilliant amateur detective X; real policemen are obstinate and hardheaded, are slow and literal-minded, are frequently mean and nearly always narrow: they have to be. They are part of the administrative machine, a tool of government control, and in our days the government, in order to make head against the pressures and distortions, the tides of economic change and the winds of upheaval, must possess a machine so complex and so detailed that its tentacles can grip and manipulate every soul within its frontiers. That is a job for professional civil servants, not for amateurs. Holland, thought Van der Valk, with its inexhaustible supply of good administrative lance-corporals, possesses a wonderful machine, of which he was part. The trouble with Holland was indeed that the machine was far too good. It was so detailed, so perfected, so rigidly armoured against attack or pressure, that if it did break down it took a year to get it back on the rails. There is nobody that can improvise, nobody that can imagine, nobody capable of independent effort. All the wooden dollies, so perfectly co-ordinated, jerk about in agony mouthing and gesticulating, waiting for a super-professional that can pull the master string. Which is very hard to find. All the soldiers are lance-corporals, all the officers are colonels, they are all absolutely admirable, and there isn’t any general.

  People often said that England was the opposite, that it was a country run by amateurs on the old-boy network. Van der Valk did not know a great deal about it, but he rather doubted that. He had met some English civil serv
ants, and seen how carefully trained and selected they were. Of course there was the parliament and the government, full of public-school types getting together in clubs exchanging passwords about prep and hols, but he thought that they were pretty unimportant: they talked a great deal, but they did very little. The English might remain convinced that their famous parliament was the seat of might and decision, but they must secretly know that countries nowadays were not run by talkative old Etonians that had been brilliant in the debating society and had got a third in history at Oxford.