Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘That was very sensible; one never knows who might answer.’

  ‘I was most distressed to hear …’

  ‘Oh, Ian, you don’t know the half of it. We’ve had the police prowling about – they held a post-mortem and everything.’

  ‘My poor girl, how perfectly horrible for you – I am so sorry. Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Take me out and cheer me up, if you will.’

  ‘Is that altogether wise – so soon …?’

  ‘It seems to have died down – they must surely be satisfied. One can’t tell. There was a rumour about a bang made by a plane, but they wouldn’t either confirm or deny it. The man in charge seems to be still hanging about the manège rather a lot.’

  ‘Has he worried you?’

  ‘No-o. Whenever I’ve seen him he’s been polite, in a soapy sort of way. I’d like to tell you all about it really – it would be such a weight off my mind. You could advise me.’

  ‘I don’t know that my advice would be worth much in the circumstances … but if I can be of any service to you …’

  ‘Oh yes, Ian, please.’

  ‘Well, I’m most joyful to hear you … I had thought you might not wish to see any more of me.’

  ‘Oh, Ian, don’t be silly.’

  ‘Shall we perhaps meet for dinner in the little place? Seven-thirty suit you?’

  ‘It would be perfect. Saskia will be in the restaurant.’

  ‘I look forward immensely to seeing you. Till then, shall we say?’

  ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘I’ve rather a nice jade figure from the Manchu Dynasty I’m looking forward to showing you.’

  ‘How wonderful. Good-bye for now, then.’

  More amusing to the police than all the shopping was Marguerite’s need not only to be admired, but by a cavalier more romantic than Miss Groenveld. All unbeknown to this lady the young woman went out about twice a week, all the way to The Hague, where she met an admirer, a middle-aged gentleman to do with a British Cultural and Commercial Mission (fortunately he had private means as well). He came to their meetings gallantly bare-headed, with a carnation in his buttonhole and more in his hand for the lady. They would have dinner in a small restaurant and go dancing in a hotel. If there was a courtship it was restrained and leisurely: there was no adultery. The friendship seemed to date from some months at least before Bernhard’s death – had there been, then, these discreet but not hidden gallivantings? The admirer had occasional fleshly hankerings, but was most correct about expressing them. Once or twice there were tender kisses left upon a wrist, and once on an upper arm – but that was late at night, and he had drunk quite a lot of cognac after dinner. Marguerite always behaved quite naturally. The friendship was a sentimental one, but not aggressively flirtatious, and when one got near enough to overhear the conversations were mostly about antiques – the gentleman was an amateur of porcelain plates.

  Miss Groenveld stayed home and ran the restaurant efficiently on these occasions. If she made scenes when Marguerite came home they were not noisy.

  There was something mildly lesbian in the relationship between them, to be sure. A bit of prowling around and peeping showed that Saskia washed and ironed all Marguerite’s clothes, that they wandered in and out of bathrooms when the other was inside; they seemed to stick to separate bedrooms judging by light, and if they were a bit kissy and cuddly together, what then? All very even; all very normal and, on paper, very unexciting.

  The extreme normality and evenness of people’s lives, illustrated in these reports, was underlined by Rob and Janine. They too generally had friends in at night, mostly after a party of six or seven in the restaurant. The bicycle boys: a Belgian team manager; a fizzy-lemonade king, who invested in the riders and made excellent business out of their wearing his label on their shirts and ostentatiously drinking the obnoxious product at the end of the stages (they didn’t drink it – what they drank was Perrier water, but they filled their mouths and spat it out generously over anyone unlucky enough to be in range). Riders too – it was the season of the Belgian classics that come in a bunch before the Four Days of Dunkerque announce the major business of the summer season: the ‘Dauphiné’, the ‘Midi Libre’, the Giro and the Tour. Riders were picked and dropped, for the teams, politicking went on, tactics were discussed, quite a lot of this over Rob’s dinner-tables and coffee-table.

  Janine enjoyed these meetings; in her element, one would say, with the jargon she knew amid accents even thicker than hers was. But she seemed not to have friends of her own, and seemed often solitary in this throng. The group often had wives with them but Janine, restrained with the men and not given to backslapping, had nothing much to say to the women. Still, the group did not split into cock party and hen party, and, since the riders were in training, drank little but beer and went to bed early. Janine went to Dunkerque for the Four Days, but Rob didn’t. He got offered money to comment on races for papers and radio programmes, but he was too busy with the restaurant, and turned them all down. About once every three weeks he took a weekend off, according to a formula of his own.

  ‘I’m feeling the need – my legs are rusty.’

  ‘What about Germany – that nice woodland the other side of Oldenburg or is it Paderborn – you know.’

  ‘I mentioned it to Jean last night and he said they’d be down in the Ardennes for the Liège-Bastogne and why didn’t I come.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘Not worried about this police nonsense still, are you, darling?’

  ‘Why should I – nothing to do with us, after all.’

  ‘No, of course – just that it might have upset you, I thought – not very pleasant, that cloud of gossip after the fellow died.’

  ‘Oh I was just nervous and silly – a bit jaded after the winter. I’ve come round to your way of thinking – it was just curiosity brought him here, I guess. I was out with Arlette yesterday afternoon – well, she wouldn’t be so friendly if there was anything – he’s her husband, after all.’

  ‘He might not tell her all his business. Nor what he was thinking.’

  ‘If he thought that anyone had really killed Thingummy he wouldn’t be letting his own wife …’

  ‘I’m not bothering about it – just glad to see you aren’t. All right then – Ardennes? I’ll get Joey to put the bike in shape.’

  All the watchers were caught bending by Rob getting up at an unearthly hour – a weekend, too … They were puzzled at his having left the Ferrari behind, concluded irrefutably that he was with Janine in the BMW, found this, with some trouble, two hundred kilometres away that afternoon in Limburg, and were upset to find her alone. It took some time before it sank in that Rob had done two hundred kilometres on the bike, just for the pleasure of it, for fresh air, to stop his legs rusting away.

  He and Janine spent the night in a country hotel that was no more than a pub really, and went on the next day into Belgium, finishing up in Marche, where there was a hotel full of oak panelling, stuffed wild boars, and some very grandiose Burgundy, which both Rob and the police enjoyed greatly. He spent the next day asleep in Janine’s car, with her driving, and one of the ‘follow-up’ station wagons that carry riders’ spare bikes on the roof brought his back to the coast, the following week …

  That week too there was a minuscule incident involving Janine. The bicycle circus had all gone to Brest for circuit riding against the clock, nobody was left in Holland, and the watcher had been ready to slope off, seeing them installed for a domestic evening in the flat. It must have been eleven when Janine, in trousers and a short jacket, appeared suddenly, and jumped into her car which went off with a roar, so that he had to rush for the little Simca, a thing with determined but noisy acceleration: he managed to keep within striking distance till she turned on to a main road and began driving. The road had traffic on it still, was not lit at all between towns – and there is nothing that looks so like the rear lights of a car as the rear lights of another car
. He followed what turned out to be a Mercedes 230 coupé, and wished he had been given another Simca to follow – the lamps are arranged in large distinctive circles.

  ‘I don’t think it of much consequence,’ said Van der Valk. ‘She’s the type that does take the car out for a flip at night, simply because they’re restless and nervous and don’t feel like sleep.’

  There were no significant meetings between any of the three households, everything that passed on telephone lines was of an almost painful rectitude, and the watchers were beginning to put notes of apology into their voices when they spoke to Van der Valk. The Officer of Justice seemed to have forgotten all about it, since he never mentioned it.

  Van der Valk had not even known that Mr Stomach, as the painter called his landlord in Warmond, possessed a motorbike. A placid individual, who spent his evenings in the most conventional style of a village café, dawdling about the bar, adjusting the television when it didn’t need adjusting, playing billiards with his customers, drinking four or maybe five beers, fixing up the odd traveller (delayed on his way back to the city) with a meal, polishing glasses, rubbing up the chrome on the coffee-machine. When the painter, who hadn’t gone to town that evening, appeared wheeling the motorbike across the pavement Van der Valk thought it must be an illusion – he was getting more than tired of his vigils, and had more than once had to eat codeines to stop his leg nagging at him. He woke up instantly.

  The Volkswagen had no trouble keeping close but not too close: the motorbike was a lightweight affair, one-twenty-five c.c., with a distinctive loud noise. They headed towards the coast; for the first time in ten days Van der Valk got rid of the feeling that he had to grip his patience very tightly with both hands. The way he was doing – without realizing – to the steering-wheel.

  The sand dunes behind the coast of Holland are like Chile on a map of South America, a narrow belt down from Den Helder at the northern tip to the Hook of Holland, the southern jut where the delta begins and the New Waterway runs up to Rotterdam. All along this line they are pierced at only one major point, the canalized waterway that takes ocean-going ships through from Ijmuiden to Amsterdam. Through them lead only a handful of roads, giving access to the beach resorts. A main road, lined with large villas, runs out from The Hague to Scheveningen, and another from Haarlem to Zandvoort. But most of the roads wind for solitary stretches.

  The dunes are nothing exciting – a miniature Andes of fine cold silvery sand, anchored by wiry dunegrass and planted with little stands of fir. There are plenty of brambles, coarse ferns, heaths, and a few small, pretty wild flowers. Buried now in sand are the bunkers and pillboxes of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, filled with drifts where they have not been deliberately buried by the Dutch military authorities. What exactly is left is not easy to judge, for access is strictly forbidden. Indeed as a park the dunes are poor fun, barricaded against the public by a lot of barbed wire.

  If you take off your hat and pay money, there are places where you can buy a ticket allowing you to follow certain paths. You discover surprises, like the little canal and the waterworks which once, wistfully long ago, supplied Amsterdam with clean sand-filtered drinking water.

  You can stray off the paths into the bracken – you can even sit down and light a cigarette, but it will not be long before you are detected and expelled by one of a swarm of terrible official ogres lurking everywhere for this purpose: rude of mouth, heavy of hand, and loving to lick pencils and write everything down to your bloodgroup in a tiny vile notebook.

  Of course at night one can get in, without paying, and without being caught, either. There are weak spots in the wire.… In all the seaside villages there are young men to whom a pious government forbids smuggling and wrecking and such normal seaside pursuits, who are forced to seek amusement from moving silently in the dunes, and setting a wire for the occasional rabbit.

  The motorbike stopped suddenly, warily, and Van der Valk had to go sailing innocently past for over half a kilometre, well round the next curve, before he could stop and turn the Volkswagen round with lights doused. He got out rubbing his nose – a kilometre back they had passed, stranded vaguely on a patch of rough grass between the bicycle track and the barbed wire, the stubby silhouette of a little Simca, but there are many such in Holland. He performed the feat of shutting a small car’s door without slamming it, and then had to open it all over again to get a pair of twelve-fifty night-binoculars.

  Cars parked on the road would arouse little comment for some time at least; it was only ten, not late even here. Sooner or later a patrolling policeman would want to know what they were doing there. His leg no longer hurt, now that it had work to do, but he hoped he would not have much tramping in the dunes to do, above all with no stick. Walking, he had time to realize that in the soft sand a stick would be useless – more trouble than the stupid leg was.

  He found the motorbike easily enough, though it was hidden in a patch of fern. Getting through the wire was less easy; mustn’t tear his breeches, for that would make Arlette cross.

  There wasn’t any question of flitting from leaf to leaf like an elf, either. He had to find patches of cover that gave a view, crouch down, and use the glasses to sweep the shadows. Somewhere was a moon, that had given wan light earlier after the twilight faded, but was now drowned in the cloud that flowed overhead in dark ragged masses. The sand was damnably cold, the fern damnably damp, the wind damnably chilly, and his leg was a pest. He was forty-five: to enjoy this performance one had to be young, active, and if possible in love. There was nothing, he supposed, incompatible between that and having an expensive sports car, a horse, and two mink coats.

  He saw them before he found his inspector. Janine’s hair had a glimmer, a paler shadow than that of the head beside her. He circled around, covered by wind and night sounds, making not much more noise than a large lame rabbit that had to walk with a stick. Verbiest, the youngest of his staff, was well laid up in a tussock of dune-grass, nearer than he himself would have tried to get, but not near enough to overhear whispers. Verbiest was not startled, since he saw and heard Van der Valk over the last half-dozen metres, but he was surprised.

  ‘How did you know, sir?’

  ‘I’ve been sitting on that fellow’s tail for the last fortnight,’ getting his leg out from under him. ‘Where’s her car?’

  ‘She came by bike.’

  ‘You’d better get back – I don’t want a lot of police busybodies wondering who the cars belong to – mine’s about half a kilometre up towards the coast. Did you hear his bike?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘See where he left it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was an excuse. The most nosyparker of policemen would do no more than hover by a felonious car till its damned fornicating owner got back. But he felt embarrasment at Verbiest being there. One person lying there squinting through binoculars was business – two together was intolerable. He guessed that Verbiest was as glad to go as he was to see him go.

  Not that they were making love or anything – they were arguing – but he had an ignominious feeling, and he wasn’t going to sit shivering here waiting for it to paralyze him. As things were, it was not as wide as a barn door, but it would serve. He stood up, his leg painful, and walked forward. There was a startled movement and he stopped.

  ‘Very sorry,’ in a normal voice, ‘but some explanations are owing here.’

  They had got up at once, Janine standing stock-still, head hanging, caught with her hand in the jampot and much as though she had never expected anything better. The boy stood loose and in gear, like a boxer. It must have been recognition of Van der Valk – the chap with the gammy leg! – that made him lose his head and run. What use did he think that was? Not that the startled fawn lark would make Van der Valk blow any whistles – he hadn’t any whistle, and didn’t feel the least like yelling. He just hoped the boy would be panicked enough to run for his motorbike.

  Poor Janine – she was quite numb. He took her arm gently. />
  ‘Come. I’ll give you a lift – we’ll go and find Rob.’

  Back on the road two figures were waiting, both breathing fast.

  ‘You take this character back to town, Verbiest. If he’s obstreperous tie him up with a piece of string or something.’

  ‘I’ve a pair of cuffs in the car.’ The things these young policemen carried about with them!

  ‘Very well. Lock him up; I’ll see him in the morning.’

  He walked down the road with Janine. She evidently expected to be handcuffed too, flung in a cell and shouted at, treated – not with brutality – certainly with callousness. She was even more scared by his quiet manner than she would have been by the handcuffs. She would have understood that – she deserved to be punished, and she was waiting for the punishments to start.

  ‘Does Rob know you’re out?’ opening the car door.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wasn’t curious?’

  ‘I often got out at night, walking, or on the bike. I’ve been in the dunes often at night.’

  ‘Yes, it’s nice. When there are no people.’ She hung her head.

  A night porter in the hotel looked with no more than faint curiosity.

  ‘Rob will have gone to bed,’ she said timidly.

  ‘That is what you call trust,’ without sarcasm, but she winced. He thumped on the bedroom door like a fireman.

  ‘Rob? Come on out. Janine’s here, nothing wrong with her, but a crisis has blown up. Van der Valk here.’

  The man was startled out of deep sleep, but lost no time. He appeared almost at once, having taken just enough time to put his face under the cold tap. Not tousled, and with his mind collected. He looked from his wife to the policeman.

  ‘I can see this isn’t a joke. Sit down; tell me quietly.’

  ‘I have to take her in, I’m afraid. I don’t know how long for. My report will go tomorrow to the Officer of Justice, and the day after he’ll want to see her himself. It depends on him what will happen to her – he might decide she has to be kept.’