Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘So I was,’ lazily. ‘It passed the time.’

  This, as he intended, did jolt her a little.

  ‘Pass the time?’

  ‘Hundreds of possible weapons. Hundreds of possible hands to hold them. Hundreds of possible reasons for clonking people with them.’

  ‘I see. An embarrassment of riches?’

  ‘Exactly. Tell me about your ideas.’ Oh, she had got the point all right, that he wasn’t sitting there listening to tale-bearing just on account of whisky …

  ‘No, I haven’t any ideas. Except that I agree that somebody sloshed him, if I may be allowed the word. In fact I thought so the moment I heard about it, on Saturday, before you or anybody else arrived on the scene.’

  ‘You didn’t voice any suspicions?’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been much point in making myself that unpopular,’ blandly. He laughed.

  ‘Francis would have been furious.’

  ‘He’s too polite to say so outright, but he thinks you’re making a perfect fool of yourself.’

  ‘He’s not the first.’

  She took little sips of her whisky, turning him round and studying him from different angles, not yet quite sure how he was reacting to her.

  ‘Men will never face unpleasant facts,’ she said at last. ‘Francis even less than most. If Bernhard had suddenly been filled with bullets he would have been quite unperturbed – he would have seen it as a cowboy from a television serial whose horse had somehow strayed on to our premises.’ This amused him.

  ‘You’re quite right to laugh but it’s true for all that – he’s a great television addict; often pretends headaches and stomach-aches and assorted fatigues to sneak away from the job and have a nice sit-down here all alone in front of the set. He hates reality, and he genuinely sees this occurrence, dreadful as it is, as not quite real, largely because it might turn out unpleasant. I’m telling you this only to help you make allowances if he’s abrupt or even rude one of these days. He’s capable of pretending not to see you when you walk right past him. The novelty tickled him at first, you see. A cowboy bites the dust – and lo, the sheriff arrives pronto.’

  ‘But you see things slightly differently.’

  ‘I have to, you see. Otherwise it would all be a game of toy soldiers around here, except of course when one of the horses has something wrong with it – then everybody has kittens. No, Mr Van der Valk, even when you say you’re here just to pass the time, I don’t treat your presence here as a joke.’

  ‘You’re perfectly right, it isn’t. Very well, Mevrouw La Touche, tell me why you thought straight away that fat Bernhard had been sloshed.’

  ‘He wasn’t a stupid man. I didn’t believe that he would do anything so silly.’

  ‘What was your opinion of his character?’

  ‘Most people, I believe, found him a delightful person – I’ll be perfectly frank and tell you I didn’t care for him at all. Nor have I really ever understood what Marguerite saw in him, but I assume that he showed her different sides of his personality.’

  ‘You like her?’

  ‘I’m fond of her, even – so is everybody else, I would say; she’s a likeable person. And he was a phony. He was good at his job, it appeared.’

  ‘It only appeared?’ he prodded – she seemed reluctant to say more.

  ‘I mean he never did any work – she did it all. I see what’s in your mind – that Francis is much the same; besides he’s fond of telling people I do everything, but in fact he’s the mainspring of this place. I do things he’s no good at, like getting out sets of figures for the accountant. Whereas fat Bernhard was absolutely dispensable.’

  Francis’ phrase. He might have got it from her. She might have got it from him. What mattered was that the tone was different. Francis La Touche did not care about fat Bernhard much one way or the other, but to Marion La Touche he was not an attractive memory, and she had not been over-displeased at his being sloshed.

  ‘You mentioned different sides of his personality.’

  ‘It worked all right with most people. Everybody sang his praises, how full of charm he was, how well he played the mine-host part. I can only say he struck me always as a sly nasty fellow, a bootlicker, always on the make, and a sharp eye for other people’s little weaknesses and failures – not above turning that to account, either.’

  ‘Was he a blackmailer, Mevrouw La Touche?’

  It did not disconcert her; neither the direct question, nor the tone of suave disbelief, nor the candid blue gaze that had led other people to think Van der Valk an oafish fellow. She clinked the remains of her ice-blocks round the tall cut-crystal glass and drank the watery results leisurely.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. Don’t conclude that he’s ever seen me as a likely prospect.’

  ‘Would you say that you noticed a lot of what went on around you?’

  ‘I distinguish between life and television, yes.’

  ‘And did Bernhard have affairs with other women?’

  She smiled a little loftily.

  ‘It’s not as easy as all that – we are a very respectable neighbourhood. I’d put it that he was a peeper up skirts. Big globular lecherous eyes. If that ever amounted to anything – I doubt it. Marguerite wouldn’t have stood for being humiliated – and he hadn’t the stuffing to risk a fight with her – he knew how indispensable she was, all right.’

  ‘While we’re on the subject,’ drawled Van der Valk, ‘is Francis inclined to play games with his steeplechase girls?’

  ‘Opportunity for blackmail, you mean?’ coolly. She laughed out loud, but not in an embarrassed way. ‘He gets rampageous every now and then. I – how to describe it? – channel his urges?’

  ‘Really? How d’you go about that?’ She got serious, at his tone, at once.

  ‘You aren’t the kind of policeman that runs about looking for hairs and special kinds of dust much, are you?’

  ‘I have respect for laboratory men – they solve the crosswords better than I do. I don’t disdain them by any means – myself I’m not very gifted in that direction.’

  ‘I think I understand,’ thoughtfully, taking another cigarette and lighting it without waiting coquettishly for him to do so. ‘You ask what seem such silly questions – like might Bernhard have blackmailed Francis? If he had, obviously I’d lie about it. You aren’t interested in these answers – but you’re trying to understand people – is that it? That’s very good I suppose, but however far you get there’s always more to understand. People are very complex.’

  ‘I don’t believe that all the world’s problems can be solved by psychoanalysis. And in every crime there’s a neat answer waiting somewhere to be dug up – no, I don’t believe that either. In every man there are several men – at least one unbalanced. You don’t have to be an authority about Bernhard. But you’re well placed to be an authority on Francis.’

  ‘He’s getting a bit middle-aged – he’s fifty-seven – and I’m forty-seven. He’s a bit crotchety sometimes, fusses about draughts and his bronchitis, goes about eating pills. And sometimes he can be quite bouncingly youthful.’

  ‘But don’t start being enigmatic now – a child could tell me that much.’

  She looked at him, put the cigarette down, sighed, and came abruptly to a decision.

  ‘This may startle you. I’m not in the habit of publicizing my private life. But you’re going to poke – well, perhaps you’ll give me credit for not having fenced with you.’

  She got up and walked jerkily to and fro for a minute, and suddenly said ‘Look’ with an effort that plainly cost her pain. She stopped, turned half away from him, and in an awkward, hurried gesture pulled one side of her skirt up. Between the top of her stocking and some poised-and-gracious sea-green underclothes was a red line about a centimetre across, fading but still bright red on her thin pale thigh.

  She was quite right, it did startle him; he tried not to let his voice show it.

  ‘I see. Thank you.’ She
dropped the skirt and turned to face him, a little hot and ruffled.

  ‘I act on the assumption that you’re a man who has seen something of the world. And now come with me a moment, please.’ She led him into a bedroom across the landing which he would have liked to observe a bit, but he had no time: she marched him straight across the room, went on her knees in a surprisingly graceful and easy movement, and opened a cupboard beside the bed. She came up with a handful of books and dumped them on the harlequin silk bed cover.

  ‘Take a look.’ While he was taking a look she walked back into the living-room, retrieved her cigarette, came back and stood looking out of the window. Faint horsy sounds drifted up from outside. Van der Valk sat comfortably on the bed, spread the literature around him, and was delighted. It was all quite conventional – Tales of Boccaccio, unexpurgated Arabian Nights, Restif de la Bretonne of course. Not pornography. Complicated fornications prefaced by tremendous beatings, with very good coloured illustrations: witty, rococo, full of verve, almost all funny. There was a Choderlos de Laclos that showed a more formal and eighteenth-century impudence, as well as more imagination than Vadim had managed …

  The last was Histoire d’O. He had it himself – so did everybody. Not with illustrations. It wasn’t pornographic, but he thought it a most unpleasant book. ‘Since she enjoys it,’ Arlette had said with disgust, ‘why doesn’t she go and do it instead of boring and revolting me writing about it?’ It was more succinct and therefore better than his own reaction. The visual imagination of the early scenes at Roissy was the best part, and so the illustrator had found.

  ‘And a woman is supposed to have written that!’ said Marion.

  He handed them back and she put them away.

  ‘Harmless,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I wanted to show you. My husband doesn’t reach over and paw women, you’ll notice. In fact you might now be less surprised to hear that he has a lot of old-fashioned respect for women. His upbringing – and his character. That act of saying crude things to customers – and hitting things with whips – it is an act, Mr Van der Valk, and that is all it is.’

  ‘You’ve helped me a lot,’ he said, meaning it. ‘I won’t wear out your hospitality any further.’ He picked up his stick, adjusted an imaginary tweed cap, twisted an imaginary moustache, and said, ‘Amusin’ idea, what, bein’ able to look under people’s clothes.’

  She smiled tolerantly, as though convinced of the essential childishness and small-boy nastiness – vicious you could not call it – of all men.

  ‘Better still if one could lift up the faces and see what was underneath.’

  ‘More of a problem, what?’ banging the stick on the floor with hearty cavalry good humour. They both laughed and he left her, still with the smile that was very nearly contemptuous round the edges of her mouth.

  The rest had done him good and so had the whisky. He wasn’t advancing: he wasn’t even marking time – he knew that well enough, or what did experience serve for? It was always the same. One went backwards inevitably in the first half, and one had to learn not to be discouraged by it. The more one got to know, the more one guessed at what one didn’t know and wasn’t likely to find out, neither. Oh mother, the grammar, thought Van der Valk, and cheered himself up with the gentleman who split infinitives, by god, so they would stay split …

  He parked outside the café and walked in, causing not perhaps a stir, but fixed stares and heavy breathing. Why? he wondered. Anyone can walk into a café – is not the admirable English name for the place a public house? Why is it a closed shop, containing a closed society, hostile, rigid?

  Four rustic youths were playing pool on the billiard table, two oul’wans were in a glassy gin-haze in the corner; a middle-aged man was treating his wife to blackcurrant and toying with a beer at the counter while he gossiped with the landlord. All looked at Van der Valk as though this wasn’t the place for him. No painter to be seen.

  ‘Mr Thing in? The painter: I don’t know his name.’ Francis had talked about Dickie – in Amsterdam he would have asked for Dickie – it was his own fault; he himself had created this barrier.

  ‘Mr Six,’ said the landlord in a chilly way, as though not knowing the name was what he had expected all along from people like that. He studied Van der Valk from head to foot with care. ‘You’re the commissaire of police, right?’

  There seemed little point in either denying it or admitting it …

  ‘I’m interested in paintings,’ blandly.

  ‘He’s upstairs – in his room. I suppose you can go up – no, I’ll show you the way.’ Not out of respect. Not, presumably, because he might pinch the spoons if left to himself. But he was an intruder, an irritant, the pepper in the cream cheese.

  ‘Very good of you.’

  A passage led two ways from the landing. One way was the living quarters of the landlord: a child’s playpen stood folded against the wall and on a kitchen chair was a bundle of clothes, just off the line, waiting to be ironed. Signs of life … The other half of the passage was bare, clean, cold. Five bedrooms and a bathroom – the doors stood ajar to stop them getting stuffy. The end room was the painter’s, the nicest because the biggest, the one next to the bathroom, the one with two windows. The landlord tapped; a voice inside said ‘Binnen’ without enthusiasm.

  ‘Somebody to see you, Mr Six.’

  He had expected a litter if not a smell of turpentine – he didn’t know why; the accumulation of casual debris one associated with artists. Nothing of the sort; certainly there was a sheet of cartridge paper pinned to a pearwood board, a few brushes in a jam-jar, a rag showing smears of watercolour, but the room was tidy, bare, almost prissy. The bed was neat, no clothes had been left to lie about, and indeed nothing said the room was occupied by a bird of more than one night’s passage except a few books in a row on top of the commode and an extra table in the best of the light, with a bottle of indian ink standing on it.

  The young man was sitting in the one cane armchair near the window, a needle in his hand, darning the worn elbow of a pullover, his other hand inside the sleeve, holding an old-fashioned wooden ‘mushroom’. He seemed to be doing it pretty well. He didn’t get up, and showed no excitement at his visitor.

  ‘Since you’re in there’s no point in saying come in. Sit down by all means – if you don’t mind the kitchen chair.’ Van der Valk smiled politely, reached out with his stick, hooked the kitchen chair, dragged it along the floor, making a horrible noise, at which the young man stuck a finger ostentatiously in his ear, and sat on it. Neither said anything for quite a long time, but Van der Valk was more accustomed to this conversational gambit, which is like the game children play, making faces at each other and betting who will be the first to laugh.

  ‘You’re the commissaire of police – I know about you. Saw you around this afternoon. Not surprised to see you – I thought you’d be running after me sooner or later.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, the fellow asks. I’m always round the manège, you’ll want to know whether I’ve seen anything, heard anything, that kind of crap. I’ve met police before. Did fat Fischer fall or was he pushed? The second reason is of course what the hell is an artist doing here, so under pretext of hush-hush panic about Fatty you come trotting here to satisfy your bloody disgusting curiosity.’

  The voice was flat, monotone. There was a trace of a rough accent in the Dutch that sounded like Rotterdam – one could not be sure, because there was another accent added, something foreign that did not quite ring true and puzzled Van der Valk. Now eighteen months ago, he thought, I would have kicked the chair out from underneath this pavement-chalker and told him to show his papers quick before he got his ears boxed.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘Oh I was amused at the thought of how lucky you are and how little notion you have of it but that’s quite unimportant,’ pleasantly. ‘Both your guesses are good.’

  ‘All right, go ahead and ask your halfwit questions – I don’t mind. As I
say, I was expecting it.’ He took up the darning again, putting the ‘mushroom’ carefully in place and continuing an elegant basketwork as neat as a housewife’s.

  Looked about twenty-five, but he might be older. Thin and pale – those first impressions were confirmed, but a handsome boy too; good features, classic nose, magnificent black eyebrows. The white shirt was open-necked, but the tie hung on the towel-rail by the wash-basin. The hands were thin and bony, with clean well-kept nails. Along with the intelligence and the aggressive tone went a careful, shabby respectability that was somehow disconcerting.

  ‘You don’t work here?’

  ‘Partly – why?’

  ‘I know nothing about the techniques you use, but isn’t the material big and awkward? Copper engraving, or litho – don’t you need tools, materials, chemicals?’

  ‘Can’t have that here. Mr Maag – the landlord – wouldn’t have that, so I keep it in a shed behind the stables which isn’t used – Francis lets me keep all my material there; makes me pay him for it though, even if he’s got no use for the space himself. Trust Marion to watch the pennies.’

  ‘You don’t like her?’

  ‘Sure I like her. She’s no different to anyone else – they all watch pennies: more they’ve got the better they watch them. You take a look at that private-yacht gang some time. I laugh my head off at the poor miserable little bastards – turn a quarter over three times before giving it to the stableboy – count the change from a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘Who said anything about wrong? – do the same myself if I were in their shoes, no doubt. Having money changes people, makes them frightened.’

  ‘You’ve lived in France, maybe?’

  ‘Sure. I’m half French.’ He sounded proud of it, too. ‘I’ve lived there – three years. Go back tomorrow if I could. What makes you ask?’

  ‘Something in your voice. I’ve lived there myself.’

  ‘What the hell you doing here, then?’

  ‘I like it here too. You don’t agree?’