Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  The new standing showed itself in subtle ways. It was a shortish walk to his office – five minutes even for him. He accomplished this four times a day, not dressed in the tweed jackets and shapeless trousers of Amsterdam, but in a well cut, countrified – almost horsy – suit of West of England wool, very small black-and-white dogtooth. With the stick, and a hat (Arlette, giggling, insisted on his always – always – wearing the hat), he looked like a colonel in the cavalry, convalescing, perhaps, from a fall at polo. And if he detested horses she more than made up for it – she loved horses, always had. She was forty now, needing exercise if she was going to keep her figure, and twice or even three times a week she put on breeches and boots, and – carrying her little whip – went to have riding lessons at a snobbish manège out in the country near Lisse, in her little 2 CV Citroen, the ugly duckling as it is called in Holland. She had turned into quite a good horsewoman, with a firm seat, and strong hands; a bit clumsy, but a creditable jumper. And Francis, the peppery owner of the riding-school, who played the part of cavalry colonel so much better than Van der Valk ever could, approved of her too, and hardly ever shouted ‘Keep your belly in, cow that you are’.

  Francis looked like General Weygand, knew it, enjoyed it, played up to it. His boots had to be perfect and his breeches shabby; he combined disreputable Harris jackets with Lanvin scarves and pullovers: his monocle and his gold cigarette-case, his clipped sharp voice and his tremendous oaths were essential parts of his ‘Saumur’ art, which was most successful and known throughout horsy Europe. ‘That bottom of yours, dear Countess, would give even a carthorse a sore back,’ he shouted in public at his wealthiest, most snobbish client, and she loved it …

  Francis would light another Egyptian cigarette with an irritable snap of his lumpy old aluminium storm-lighter, hit his boots frenziedly with his switch, and say ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch’ on a rising scale of assumed indignation that was a joy to listen to. He had certain surefire jokes that were repeated all over Holland, such as the remark (in the hearing of at least ten wealthy bourgeois women) at the sight of the elegant Military Attaché of an Arab country: ‘Don’t give that damned Wog any mares – the moment he’s out of my sight they’ll start making love.’ Such remarks, shattering, surest death to any reputation in ordinary Dutch circles, were tolerated and secretly enjoyed among the horses. Francis’ reputation as licensed iconoclast came perhaps from a peculiar bourgeois notion that there was something fast and raffish about a manège, and that all sorts of things were permissible there that would have caused lifted eyebrows and glacial coughing in any other Dutch circles …

  As for Arlette, she enjoyed Francis, enjoyed the horse, enjoyed even the interminable horsy talk, as well as the fresh air and the violent exercise that were so good for her waistline.

  Van der Valk, laying the stick with its chased silver band across his polished desk, tried to make the act as good as Francis but he failed. He had, though, cultivated a slow, quiet voice and an air of weary wisdom that was not without effect on subordinates and on the commissaire, his colleague, head of the municipal police, a baldish personage given to self-important dyspepsia about his administration. Had Van der Valk known it, he had brought with him a glamorous reputation; he did guess, though, that the unaccustomed respect in which he warmed himself was that accorded to Major Held, coming home on crutches from Stalingrad with the Knight’s Cross pinned to his bosom and making the girls go weak at the knees, and he enjoyed this.

  The new job was, too, very pleasant. Regular hours; no goddam weekend duty. He could pack up and go home – and did – upright and distinguished with his stick, raising his hat to people, rather ahead of closing time. No beastly evening chores, no reports to be typed, free from Friday evening till Monday morning.… There was, to be sure, responsibility. If he got a crime wave – ha, then he would have to sit up all night and like it. So far no such thing had happened. Except for an attempted voluntary homicide (two loutish youths who had been supplanted with girlfriends and had tipped the supplanters’ Volkswagen into the canal coming home from a dance at one in the morning, materially aided by a big fourth-hand Chevrolet) he had had little work. Puff-puff – petty puff-puff – of a provincial town: burglaries, embezzlements and frauds; juveniles robbing the till in sweet-shops, terrorizing old women with air pistols, putting obstacles on railway lines (vandalism in public parks and breaking up the furniture at pop concerts was the affair of the municipal police) – there was always plenty to do, but it wasn’t the kind of thing one sat up at night for.

  When, therefore, he heard that Bernhard Fischer, owner of the White Horse Inn out in Warmond, had died suddenly in confused circumstances, he was at first pleased, then irritated. Something had happened at last to give him a headache over the weekend, not to speak of losing golf, a ridiculous game he had taken to for exercise and which he was getting to enjoy.

  A Saturday. Day for a ritual he enjoyed and looked forward to: English afternoon tea. Since this mania for fresh air and bumping on a horse had possessed Arlette, she seemed to eat more than ever and still stay thin, which he grudged. He was not on a diet, but he had to be frugal, watch his drinking carefully, and not smoke before five in the afternoon, and then only cigars. Weekends, apart from suburban joys like golf or gardening, brought the pleasure of naughty, illegitimate cigarettes. There was a suburban ritual too, and passwords given while he washed the soil off his hands. ‘Why is it that the servants always eat the cucumber sandwiches?’

  Buttered toast, and cherry cake, as well as Marmite. Goody, goody gumdrops. Arlette poured out tea, the Copenhagen porcelain that had been her promotion present. Darjeeling tea, no lemon at teatime, very austere (China tea with lemon, in a tall German beerglass, was made for him by the typist at ten-thirty on office mornings, while everybody else was gorging milky coffee).

  ‘Have a good bump?’

  ‘Jumped over hurdles with Janine. I made fastest time. That horse of hers cost a fortune but she’s not really up to it.’ He had heard quite a bit about Janine in the last months – Arlette had got quite friendly with her. She sounded an absurd woman. Her real name was Jannie, pronounced Yanny. She came from the South and had the local accent, which she had replaced by French spoken with a strong Belgian accent of which she was absurdly proud, and the name Janine went with this. You could not really blame her. Her husband, Rob, was the best bicycle champion Holland had produced in more than twenty years. World road champion, an excellent six-day rider in winter, a devil in one-day classics, he had become a rich man. Now, just retired at thirty-six, he had bought a seaside hotel and was making a good thing out of that. Janine had not only an expensive horse and two mink coats, related Arlette, but a very classy BMW two thousand coupé. She was a vulgar, noisy girl, greatly snubbed by the haute bourgeoisie of the riding-school for having made her money out of bicycle racing. Van der Valk agreed that this was pathetic as well as amusing. The girl herself, it seemed, was funny and Arlette liked her, laughing unmaliciously at her horrible French.

  ‘Any news?’ not very interested in Janine or her horse.

  ‘Well, yes – that is to say perhaps. Might not be news to you, but that’s not my business.’ Peculiar remark.

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘You’ve heard of big Bernhard – Im Weissn Rössl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘So? No, I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘He was too fat, and it seems the doctor told him half jokingly to ride a horse. Everybody laughed, but less when he took it seriously. Francis had twenty fits – “I don’t keep oxen for overweight Germans” – you know, no need to repeat it. The wife, Marguerite, was angry because she felt humiliated and that he’d made a fool of her.’

  ‘Yes but what happened?’

  ‘Nobody quite knows. He was in a field and got off to look at something and upset the horse in some way and apparently it kicked him, and he got it in the temple – he must have been bending down, they thought.’

 
‘I suppose that can’t be unheard of, or even uncommon, in a beginner who loses his head.’

  ‘I don’t know. Everyone seems to have been satisfied with that interpretation, but I heard some whispering out there that the doctor wasn’t satisfied – I know, I’m repeating gossip, but there, you did ask.’ He was so busy listening to this tale that he failed to notice that Arlette had eaten all the toast. With a slight sense of shame he realized that perhaps he did wish that someone was ‘not satisfied’ about a sudden death. He hitched himself along the sofa till he could reach the telephone, and dialled the central ‘police’ number.

  ‘Commissaris Van der Valk. Who’s that on the switchboard? Ah, you, De Nijs. Heard anything of a death out at Warmond – man kicked by a horse? You haven’t? – good, get on to the gendarmerie barracks out there and put them through. Yes, I’ll hold on here.… More tea, please.… Warmond? Commissaris, criminal brigade. What’s this about Bernhard Fischer? … Nothing much, nothing much, read your standing orders.… I don’t care if it is Saturday, get your thumb out of your behind.… I quite see that.… Now ring this doctor and tell him – ask him to be so kind – as to ring me at this number. Right.’

  ‘Stupes?’

  ‘No more than usual. Doctor thought the thing peculiar: he mentioned it to them but he wouldn’t commit himself before he’d made a full examination, so they did nothing. They’ve done the usual things, measurements and photographs and so on, but there’s been no action – say they were afraid of my blowing them up for wasting my time before they got a medical report. Usual shillyshally.’ The phone burred again discreetly.

  ‘Van der Valk.… Yes.… Quite.… Quite.… Yes.… Very well.… Yes, I would.… Many thanks.… I’ll have a talk with you then if I may.’ He banged the hook and dialled the police number again. ‘De Nijs, I want a car and a driver, here in front of my house, in ten minutes, right? Good lad.’

  ‘You’re going out there? Straight away?’ asked Arlette, alarmed at having conjured up this bustle.

  ‘Can’t expect weekend peace to last for ever.’

  ‘You don’t really have ideas that something is not above board? Aren’t you just agitated because you feel guilty at being lazy and having a comfortable life?’

  ‘Rather like that,’ he agreed, grinning at himself and the cleverness of women. ‘Fusspot is short of activity. Feels the need to be officious, punctilious, generally get good marks for being switched on. If I should be held up, keep supper for me.’

  ‘Quite like old times,’ resignedly.

  He sat in a Volkswagen and examined the countryside, switching himself on, noting the degree to which new leaves had unfolded, how far the budding stalks of tulips had pushed, mapping the cloud formations. Many many times he had sat in Volkswagens from the police car-pool and driven out towards some little problem along narrow countrified roads with straggly trees bordering them, and deep drainage ditches, crossed every now and then by rickety planks to messy little farmhouses beyond. He never thought about what he would find when he arrived; he had his mind on the road – you had to, for the drainage ditch waits.… It’s not so much that the Dutch driver is careless and undisciplined, more that the driver’s seat of the car is the one place where the Dutchman throws off his terror of government and becomes a devil of a chap, all aggressive to show what a brave tough fellow he is underneath.

  What an extraordinary self-confidence I possessed, thought Van der Valk, easing his stiff hip, pushing the stick parallel to the leg he had stretched as far as he could (never far enough in small cars, but no matter). The amateur psychiatrist. The silent understander of the human heart. Dear Lord what a clown. But what a lot he had learned, this last year.

  He had learned that he was a far less good policeman than he had thought, which was very good for his vanity. He had thought himself clever when he had just been eccentric. What made him look clever was simply the spur of frustration awaiting anything of originality in our century, our generation of polite mediocrity, where everything is organized – Holland! – and nobody can improvise because it is not allowed. Most people’s standards of thought and conduct he had found ignoble, and the revolt against the pressure-to-conform had produced a flint-and-steel analogy. Sparks of intuition that he had mistaken for big talent. He hadn’t any big talent: he had a small talent. And it wasn’t enough.

  He found himself thinking of the last case he had had in Amsterdam. A woman, married peaceably for twenty-three years to a steady plodding fellow, a marriage seeming a model of stability. Their life was comfortable if not spectacular, they had two nice average children with no problems. A good husband, who went out once a week to play cards, once a week to his ‘club’, once a week with her to the pictures. What could have gone wrong? The husband had decided, sensibly, not impulsively, that he was getting nowhere with the firm where he had been for seventeen years, and decided to move to Germany, where he had found a house, a better job, and twice the salary. That was not enough, was it, for her to go out, buy quite a large sharp kitchen knife (bad that, in law, where it is called premeditation) and stick him with it, dead dead, before going, calmly and reasonably, to the police to tell them?

  A homicide; the station called Van der Valk. He had found her sitting quiet, undishevelled, unhysterical, in a police waiting-room (metal furniture, upholstered in sponge rubber, covered with grey plastic, circular perspex table with ashtray thoughtfully provided, four climbing plants on the wall and a geranium on the table in a white pot); she was drinking tea. He sat down to read the report of her quite coherent tale.

  ‘What made you do that?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, putting down her teacup.

  They never got any further. Not that there was no answer; there were too many. As a distinguished sociologist had recently remarked, ‘Anything, on any page, of the New York Times is sociology.’ Ha. The world was so full of phony ‘behavioural sciences’ that everything was important, and nothing mattered any more. Officers of Justice, who in Holland combine the functions of examining magistrate and courtroom prosecutor, send for three or four head-shrinkers nowadays at the first drop of the pencil, but they got no further than Van der Valk had. What, a harmless, unagitated, untense woman had knifed her husband? And she had brooded, to the stage of going out for something more lethal than the little knife she peeled potatoes with?

  They had produced page upon page of clotted nonsense disguised in jargon. Van der Valk had seen it, and seen it to be nonsense. Dutch assize courts were generally good; six months later when the case came up the president had tried hard. He had been quiet and kind. But by then there was too much paper, and the poor woman had been dulled into total apathy. They couldn’t swallow the premeditation, and she got three years’ ‘re-education’ and what the good of it all was nobody would ever know, and from that moment Van der Valk had told himself that he was a clown. He should resign from the police and hang out a charlatan’s plate. ‘Neuro-sociologist’ in polished brass.

  The Volkswagen stopped with a jolt in the little village and Van der Valk got out stiffly with his stick. The neuro-sociologist would now begin diagnosis. His driver went off thankfully to drink coffee with the local boys-in-blue, and he went in search of his doctor.

  Doctor Maartens was, he was glad to see, a man who seemed both sensible and competent. So many doctors are neither that this was a welcome rock to stand on. Youngish, a round face, grey flannel trousers, a navy-blue blazer. The white chalky hands of all doctors – it comes from washing too often in hard water. He smoked cheap Dutch ‘brown’ cigarettes with a healthy air, not at all worried about his lungs, and had a hard no-nonsense handshake.

  ‘Come on into the torture chamber. I hope you’re not furious – I dropped a monstrous clanger, letting anybody see I wasn’t happy, but’ – obstinate look – ‘I’m still not happy. I saw nothing disquieting up there – they called me, and I came of course, had a waiting-room full of sniffles and miseries, all most indignant though it�
�s not good form to show it. All I could do there was agree officially that the chap was dead – I had him brought down here.’ Doctor Maartens was talking too much, and plainly had guilty wishes to explain, to justify: Van der Valk went on saying nothing.

  ‘I felt a bit disturbed, uh, because the head injury wasn’t quite what I’d been led to expect. I don’t want to be technical, but it didn’t seem the right shape. Well – I didn’t want to make a fool of myself – I rang our local vet, who handles these horses when they cough or whatnot. Asked him about characteristics of kicks and so on. He agreed with me, and it was then I told the local police I wasn’t ready to sign the certificate without more thought, or evidence, or both, and that they’d better take him – means town, I suppose, since naturally we’ve no mortuary here. I don’t know whether that will automatically mean an official autopsy – doesn’t lie within my experience – be glad to have your thoughts on the subject and that’s why I’m pleased you saw fit to come.’

  ‘I can arrange all that’s necessary, but will you give me a brief untechnical outline of your not-quite-happiness?’

  ‘Certainly. It’s the kick. Nothing fundamentally improbable about the kick. The first thought was a momentary vertigo, a dizzy spell – Bernhard was overweight, blood pressure and so on. It’s possible, though I doubt it, for reasons I’ll give you. But he could easily have been standing stooped or bent behind the horse, I suppose, and made it nervous or irritable in some way. I would accept that, I imagine, if I was told that had happened. But a horse kicks upwards, hm, or horizontally as it were, at knee level – Patty, the vet, my esteemed colleague, I should be saying,’ – he had an engaging grin – ‘can explain much better than I can. Now this bump on Bernhard’s head has characteristic of a downward slant, hm? I was stupid – you’ll find me indiscreet – but I went to the smith, and he found me a shoe, and I messed about for quite some time hitting a plank of soft wood from every angle … look, I’ll show you – in my garage, we can go out this way – if you don’t mind.’