Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ said Van der Valk soothingly. ‘Delightful place you have here – I’ve heard a lot about it from my wife of course. Curiosity, really, that made me snatch at an excuse to come and see for myself.’

  ‘Come again. Delighted to see you any time. Charmin’ woman, your wife. Ride at all?’

  ‘No, alas,’ tapping his stick.

  ‘That? That’s no obstacle – I knew a French colonel – left leg tin from knee down and one of the best jumpers in the country. Had it here in the thighs, that’s where it counts.’

  I don’t have it here in the thighs, thought Van der Valk, strolling back towards a police station, a police driver, a police Volkswagen. Was it Twelfth Night? Higher, sir, higher. Taurus, that is heart – no, sir, it is legs and thighs. Something like that. He was a Bull, but he disagreed. Power, in his book, sprang from the nape of the neck.

  He had another look at photographs. The ground was soft from rain, but there were dozens of foot and hoof prints. Nothing for Philo Vance to get hold of.

  He went home to supper, which was pizza (‘The trouble with Dutch tomatoes,’ said Arlette reflectively, ‘is that they look beautiful but they’ve got no taste’), watercress salad, and Camembert with an apple, and feeling comfortable with a cigar he picked up the phone to ring the hospital.

  ‘Switchboard? Give me whoever’s on night duty at the desk. Hallo. Commissaris here, criminal brigade. I asked for an autopsy this afternoon; has it been done? No no no, the report can wait – I want to know who did it? Haversma? Will he be at home at this time? Put me through? – that’s kind of you but there’s no need, thanks.’ He knew those switchboard operators. He knew Doctor Haversma, too, and quite well. He and the Head of Pathology at the University Hospital played golf together – though they were the only ones that called it golf.

  ‘Hallo, old son? The subject you worked on for me today – of course I couldn’t care less about the report, keep the rubbish for the file – but I’d like a little shop chat, and not on any phones. How about golf tomorrow? Tell me one thing now – is that young chap in Warmond talking through his hat?’

  No, the young fellow was not talking through his hat. If it had been a circus pony and a contortionist – but not the staid and venerable Hanoverian bought by Francis La Touche to carry two hundred pounds of restaurant owner. Van der Valk went to bed and slept peacefully.

  Francis La Touche was having breakfast in bed. The bed was a large and lavish affair, with a buttoned padded satin headboard and embroidered percale sheets. Francis was being fussed over, and he enjoyed being fussed over. The morning was a time for luxury, and on Sundays particularly so, because of the immense trouble and expense of getting English Sunday papers that early. He lay now in a wonderful litter. By his feet was a huge tray with the ravaged remnants of an Edwardian meal – he liked things like devilled kidneys, kedgeree, soft herring roes, and he would have had lamb cutlets were these not so difficult to get in Holland. Strong Indian tea in large Worcester cups with little roses on them, and the smell of kippers and airmail newsprint. Added to his Egyptian cigarettes the Ardeny scent of expensive perfumery that Marion had left in the room an hour earlier was almost gone, and to emphasize this air of masculine conquest Francis was now shaving with a busy sound that was also defensive, for Marion had said nothing yet, either last night or this morning. She was sitting on the bed reading theatre notices; Francis did not only read about The Horse, but went in for intellectual food, this kind of Sunday paper being quite a pleasant sugar-coated substitute for thinking. He had to turn the razor off at last.

  ‘I don’t feel at all well.’

  ‘There doesn’t seem much wrong with your appetite.’

  ‘Find me my pills.’

  Obediently Marion walked across the carpet to where his breeches, jacket and pullover were flung in a heap; he never omitted this ritual of on-the-floor, just as he never forgot to put his shirt and underclothes into the bathroom basket.

  ‘Not at all well.’

  ‘I’d better phone Maartens then, had I?’

  ‘No. I’m not at all certain I haven’t lost confidence in Maartens – he let us down badly there yesterday.’

  ‘It wasn’t Maartens who was indiscreet. It was you.’

  Francis unscrewed his pill-bottle and kicked fretfully at the breakfast tray.

  ‘Take this damn thing away, Marion, I can’t move without that blasted clinking noise.’

  ‘I know; you mean I’m making the blasted clinking noise. I’m not going on and on – you were indiscreet and there’s an end of it. Just remember that if Mr Van der Valk starts becoming an habitué around here you’ve nobody – nobody to blame but yourself, so please think it over and make the best of it. He’s not a stupid man.’

  ‘Marion, if you don’t mind, I’m feeling very tired and I haven’t slept at all well.’

  ‘Here, have some sugar.’ She threw the literary section of the Sunday whatever-it-was back to him, picked up the tray expertly, and swished off, her taffeta morning-coat making a more attractive sound than the blockhouse of newsprint Francis was busy building.

  Sunday is the day of the dark suit and the white shirt, of early Mass and the sermon to which Commissaire Van der Valk does not listen, of the lavish breakfast – a Boiled Egg and Toast, instead of just coffee and bread. Holland has a peculiar tabu that runs No-Fresh-Bread-May-Be-Sold-Before-Ten which Arlette combats, now that she is Bourgeoise, by making her own, but not on Sundays.

  After breakfast there is a great panic to get out to the golf course, for several reasons. The morning sun is often replaced by afternoon rain, and anyway the place is emptier, for most golf-playing dignitaries go to ten o’clock church services more ponderous and worthy, the sermons longer and even more crushing. Also it gives one an appetite for Arlette’s roast beef. Even at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning it is often icy cold and a blustering north-wester is driving sheets of rain at one, but today everything works and at twenty past the Commissaire, a perfect figure of fun, is driving Arlette’s milky deux-chevaux out to the sand dunes. The figure wears a black tracksuit now gone greenish, with khaki rainproof trousers and an English suède windcheater. On his head he has a green beret: the whole get-up makes him look, says Arlette, like a very old and ratty white mercenary from the Congo. But Doctor Haversma as well has violent reactions from the primnesses of his week and has a tweed deerstalker with the brim turned down all round, and German plus-fours in the Campbell tartan, as though hoping to be mistaken for the Duke of Argyll bawling the factor out about salmon poaching.

  They share seven golf clubs with a warped look, and at least seven balls, for Van der Valk, being a detective, is quite good at finding other people’s in trackless jungle. They do not know whose ball is whose, but this matters little, for they know none of the Strict Rules either. They take no helpers; it would not do for anyone in Holland to hear the language used by two high civic functionaries, which is elementary-school with a faint smack of Chatterley charm. There is, too, a tradition of elementary-school humour in fake foreign languages (‘Pivot, divot’ and ‘I haf kein schwung in my schwing’). Today, though, Van der Valk had eaten breakfast absentmindedly, and had as little idea how-many-after-Pentecost it was – it was the Third Sunday after Easter – as any mother-in-law in a Mauriac novel.

  ‘What about this blood pressure and the other things I’ve been hearing about? Couldn’t he have had vertigo or something and been kicked while lying on the ground, or perhaps sitting?’

  ‘He could, and again he could have been struck by a mini-meteorite while in orbit.’

  ‘Any sudden crisis would show up in the bloodvessels or wherever, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t have had a cardiac or cerebral attack?’

  ‘Correct. Does this young chap say he was subject to vertigo?’

  ‘No. He said he didn’t believe in it, for reasons he’d tell me but he didn’t.’

  ‘I can. Constitution is remarkable, going by these lurid tales o
f overeating and drinking you tell me.’

  ‘Hearsay.’

  ‘Because you can take it from me he died from being hit on the head by an object forming a depressed fracture; cranial trauma and nothing else. Damn, I’m in that piddle of a pond again.’

  ‘He might have been hit by a golf ball. Picking it up afterwards for me to find in his pocket.’

  ‘Was there anything interesting in his pockets?’

  ‘A box of cigars, three dirty handkerchiefs, a large assortment of keys and a bottle of laxative pills.’

  ‘You’re not satisfied, then?’

  ‘Not the least bit. I say – a brand new Dunlop.’

  After the roast beef was the equally classic apple tart with cream.

  ‘Sit down. I want to talk.’

  Arlette, who had overeaten slightly – also rather classic – poured herself a small glass of kummel.

  ‘Tell me about these people. You’ve often made remarks about one or the other. Could you make a potted biography? Like Stendhal.’

  ‘Bigillion, a good heart, an economical and honest man, chief greffier to the Tribunal of the First Instance, killed himself around 1827, fed up I believe with being cocufied, but with no real bad feeling towards his wife’ – it was one of his favourite passages from a favourite bedtime book, The Life of Henry Brulard.

  Arlette lit a cigarette slowly, remembering an occasion in the north of Holland when she had been told to study the habits of a suburban street. She had been horrified – younger then. She was no longer alarmed that people she habitually met and talked to were criminals.

  ‘I began by being disgusted with the atmosphere. Later I found it amusing, but I was sorry for Janine, who is more sensitive to snubs, and I remember what that was like – you know the way they have here of being anti-French and how it hurt my feelings once upon a time. Recall that cretinous woman who said she couldn’t understand anyone ever going to France – what was there in France? – nothing! These sisters have something the same act, and one reminded me the other day – she said, “Paris is finished of course – you can’t get anything there!” They go into ecstasies about Mary Quant! They talk pidgin English and tell each other about London; they buy copies of the Observer and leave them lying about. Lot of namedropping – they gas on about Harrods. I’m isolated, which doesn’t bother me, but is rougher on Janine, who sticks to me for support and talks French – she’s Dutch of course, but out of a bread-and-cheese family, and talks French to hide her accent, which is like them, but rather sweet. She’s shy, really. Do I go on?’

  ‘Marion.’

  ‘Can’t make my mind up. Times I think she’s a bitch, others I like her. She has a good act of letting Francis rule the roost, but on the quiet I think she makes the decisions. That might be why he blusters – that act of shouting at stable-girls. She surprises one sometimes – nobody’s nasty all the time, are they?’

  ‘Make a pretty convincing effort sometimes. Go on.’

  ‘Francis forces things sometimes by simply shouting her down – even making scenes in public – but she knows how to give in graciously. Where money is concerned I’m sure she has the last word – they achieve quite a good balance.’

  ‘Marguerite?’

  ‘She’s the kind of person everyone likes. Immense charm. Lots of vitality. Dresses oddly – she’s stocky, solid, with a lot of bum and those great massive breasts that strike you down – but she has a lot of good looks. Healthy-looking, like an eat-more-fruit advertisement, marvellous eyes and teeth, looks fine in breeches and on a horse, always very tanned. And people like her – not only the men but the women too.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ without irony.

  ‘Very. She’s shrewd too – has I’d say a cold calculating eye for things on occasion. She has an extravagant generosity though – gives big tips, gave Marion an antique porcelain tea service for her birthday that must have cost a fortune. They are friendly – she’s one of the inner ring there at the manège, along with people like Stefan – he does international show-jumping – and the big oils, like Kampen’s coffee and Miersma the dry-cleaners – shops you see in every village in Holland. That crowd have yachts and private planes. I’m the lowest of the low, I can tell you, and Janine, who thought her fur coat pretty grand when she started, soon discovered she was small fry. They go over to England every week, some of that lot – the husbands have conferences with Shell or Unilever, and the wives go shopping and hairdressing, and the theatre in the evenings, and whichever nightclub is in the wind.’

  She was no longer intimidated by his making notes. She knew that he was not writing her down word for word. On the contrary, he was looking for the gaps in her sketches. People with dry-cleaning empires had cracks, pasted over but deep, in their glittering image, and she was not expected to know about them.

  ‘And Bernhard?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him that often. He’s only been a regular at the manège in the last couple of weeks, but I’ve seen him a few times at the restaurant when the horses rendezvous’d there. Like a bear, wore a cook’s jacket but no hat or apron to show he was the boss. Used to get up and act mine host and then go back to natter with pals. I thought him rather nasty – simply because he was servile to people he knew had money, and inclined to look over the top of your head if he thought you hadn’t.’

  ‘How was Marguerite with him?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, really – a bit offhanded: affectionate phrases but sounding a bit crisp – you know. They seemed to know well enough how to get on with each other.’

  ‘Have you seen those paintings they have there in the living-room?’ irrelevantly.

  ‘Francis, you mean? I’ve only been in the living-room once, when it was her birthday. I brought her a bunch of flowers and she thanked me as though they were diamonds – you couldn’t get in the door for flowers! We were invited upstairs for drinks – sweet vermouth, ugh – and I remember seeing them. Rather good, I thought. I’ve seen the painter – he’s often pottering about; seems to specialize in horses. Maybe they think a lot of him on account of that – rather a tatty chappy by their standards. Supposed to be French – doesn’t look it. I’ve no idea – never as much as exchanged the bonjour.’

  ‘Isn’t that odd? He must know you’re French.’

  ‘Oh I dare say he’s not even aware I exist. More coffee?’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Oh young, thin, quite goodlooking in a sallow way. Wears those terylene suits that go shiny and look so cheap, so he has a kind of slummy smartness. Doesn’t look like an artist.’

  ‘What do artists look like?’ laughing.

  ‘Oh, I only mean he’s conventional-looking – hair cut short, wears a collar and tie. I say, there’s a concert in the big amphi at the university tomorrow night, an American soprano doing a Schumann group; we might go, don’t you think?’ He hadn’t quite finished fishing.

  ‘You know a thin woman with brown hair and skin, lot of diamond rings, got two little girls with ponytail hair?’

  ‘Maggie Sebregt,’ promptly. ‘They turn their names into something sounding English. She’s the daughter of some big oil in Utrecht that makes gearwheels or cogwheels or something, and she’s married to Robert who is tall, thin and sententious, something quite haughty in the civil service. I can’t stand her – she’s one of those women with an infallible nose for the misfortunes of others, who take the keenest pleasure in discussing them.’

  ‘Lovely. Does me a lot of good, all this. I feel filled with useful activities.’

  ‘Yes, well, don’t forget there’s the washing-up still to do.’

  Although the riding-school seems lost in a sleepy village atmosphere, Holland – and especially metropolitan Holland – is very small. Lisse is roughly half way between Amsterdam and The Hague, and no more than an hour in the car from either. From Lisse to the seacoast is only a few kilometres, and the strip of bulb fields lies between. The sand dunes, which have been made into a sort of nature-reserve, fo
rm a barrier through which one cannot cut direct, but it is not far from Lisse to the seaside town of Noordwijk, especially for the fast sports coupé that Janine got for her last birthday.

  Janine and Rob were spending Sunday afternoon in the flat on the top floor of the hotel-café-restaurant Rob owned on the sea boulevard. It was a messy, ugly building of discoloured concrete that had several times had bits added by various owners in expansionist moments, and had climbed beyond modest seaside-café beginnings. It was on three levels – the café, with a big glassed terrace several steps above the sandy bricks of the boulevard; the restaurant, at the back and several steps lower, reached from the carpark on the landward side; and the hotel, an irregular cube perched above both, with balconies looking out to sea, an expensive but small hotel of twenty-four rooms or so.

  Well run, all this would be a moneyspinner, and Rob did run it well. He was not, of course, on the level of the gang that goes to London every week – besides being socially inferior, a hotel is too easy-come-and-easy-go: one is overdependent on Holland’s capricious summer weather, and the staff problem is always acute. But he was a lot richer than he seemed. Even staff was not too great a worry – he had friends in Italy, who kept him supplied with chambermaids from Calabria, and he even had a smattering of their dialect – he had always been popular in Italy. He taught them enough Dutch and German to understand the customers, and both restaurant and hotel ran smoothly.

  Rob had bought it a year ago, when it was, on the outside at least, much as now, though far more run down and slipshod. There is now little debt, though this is due more to Rob’s work than to Rob’s money. He has worked like a tiger and has got the place nearly up to the standard he knows he wants, and it has just begun to make real money again. It has lost the evil reputation for bad food, sloppy service and exaggerated prices for cut drinks, and next year, the German couples from the Rhineland tell Rob, they will be back for a second season. Throughout the summer he will have to go on working like fury, but in October this year, he hopes, he will be at last free for a long lazy trip round Southern Europe, and take Janine with him, which she so longs for.