Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  Simple as that. In another week, I would be installed, with Arlette and several suitcases, in the Mimosastraat in Zwinderen, province of Drente. Access to everything. I had already arranged for the children to be boarded out, in the house of Inspector and Mrs Suykerland of the Amsterdamse Police. They would get frightful food, but they were delighted with the notion. It all sounded like a holiday. All I had to do was clear up an affair that had not only baffled a lot of people just as intelligent as me, but that had also been trodden on by so many big boots full of flat feet as to be nearly illegible.

  5

  I had already been relieved of all ordinary duties – Mr Tak was cross but floored by a minatory letter from the Prinsengracht. By the time we moved, I had spent six days studying – but on paper, only on paper – the life of Zwinderen, which when I went to school had been an ossified tiny market town away in the wilds, a stone’s throw from Protestant North Germany; but now was become the frontier of the big push at decentralization, decongestion, full employment and Prosperity for All. Boom town. Light industry and housing. Practically Dodge City.

  I was Wyatt Earp, getting sent there as United States Marshal. I had better start polishing my forty-five and practising quick draws.

  The keyword in this north-eastern corner of Holland is ‘Veen’. It occurs as a suffix in place-names. Over to the west are Hoogeveen and Heerenveen – larger towns these, around the twenty thousand mark. To the south, Klazina-veen, Vriezeveen – smaller, hardly more than villages. Second word is ‘Kanaal’ – which means, mostly, a ditch. Stadskanaal, Musselkanaal. ‘Veen’ means turf: the boggy peaty moorland that was cut for fuel in the depression days, before the oil pipelines and the natural gas. The canals drain it – a network of tiny waterways. There are a great many; this country takes a lot of draining. But there is no watershed, and green scummy water dribbles vaguely in all directions – towards the Ems estuary, and down south towards rivers. The biggest of these canals have some mercantile use, and there is quite a lot of plodding barge traffic even now.

  The funny thing is that the country is on the verge of a big upheaval. They found a ‘bubble’ of natural gas up here. To see what is about to happen one need only look at Lacq, in France – and this bubble is ten times the size of Lacq’s. Traditionally, though, it has always been a very poor and barren land. Very little use for agriculture, and none at all for anything else. Penniless. But the government has already altered all that.

  Railways and roads; factories processing milk, scrap metal, paper. Big trucks with trailers boomed along broad autoways; new diesel railcars linked Groningen and Win-schoten at one end of the province with Emmen and Coevorden at the other; there was a branch line to Assen, with connexions to the main line south.

  More sophisticated industry had been tempted into following. A small but enterprising firm built coach and even aircraft bodies; another directed by a brilliant engineer, was internationally known for electronic equipment – ‘second Philips’ was the local boast. A daughter-firm of a huge combine was making wire and cable; and another, forty-five per cent of the total Dutch output of heat-resisting glassware.

  The sleepy little place hardly knew itself now. For untold generations it had looked like an ingrowing toenail, with much the same way of thinking.

  Tiny shops, dark and smelly – corsets and cough mixture; wooden shoes and flat caps of gaudy cheap tweed; weedkiller and sheepdip; lumps of wet salt pork and margarine-all airy and glassy now, with black and chromium fronts. Outside tumbledown farms with sagging thatched roofs now stood tinny, brightly-painted, brand-new autos. Behind soared concrete cowsheds and haybarns, and fire-engine-colour tractors hauled the swedes and the sugar beets in increasing masses at greater speeds towards ever greedier consumers.

  Smelly canal backwaters, scummy green or inky black, were filled in, and the worn-out wood of collapsing wharves cleared up. Concrete came pouring out of huge striped urns that revolved everywhere like merry-go-rounds; bright pink brick streets ate up the rutted cart-tracks. The workhouse-ward schools were gone and there was an annexe to the hospital and even a swimming bath. True, the county insane asylum still stood gaunt in the sour fields; the prunus and flowering-cherry trees were tiny and the grass verges sickly; the few old stunted oaks looked sad and lonely despite cheerful additions with golden cypress and Montana pine.

  But the bustle of the burgomaster – and generous state funds – had infected the whole withered place with new seeds and spores. Rebirth.

  The local people, and with them a swelling tide of strangers from congested metropolitan Holland, took with enthusiasm to easy work in sunny, canteen-and-canned-music factories. Pleasant change from trying to dig a living out of wet, black, stinking ground. Population had doubled and redoubled in ten years, and now blocks of flats and streets of tiny balconied brick houses – very Dutch, with extraordinarily large windows – surrounded and hid the surviving nineteenth-century cottages. But a few were still lived in, tiny, sad, depressing; witness still to the meanness, the bitterness and the pathos of life here for over a thousand years.

  I saw quite a lot of this the first visit. Not the hour with the burgomaster – I spent the day strolling. Coffee in one café, a beer in another, and a greasy pork-chop lunch in the town’s biggest, between a billiardtable and six commercial travellers, all with green Opel station wagons stuffed with samples and catalogues, all bolting their filthy chops with enthusiastic expense-account appetites.

  It was wonderful winter weather, that first day. Windless, bright sun, and the canals frozen. The children stormed out whooping at four, and there instantly was the classic Dutch painting: a sun sinking redly behind the stepped gable and tiny spire of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and a thousand four-year-olds buttoned up to the eyes shrieking and tumbling on the old-fashioned, long wooden skates. My eyes were all on the houses, where the oblique beam of sun streamed in through a thousand enormous over-polished windows and lit up the interiors.

  They looked like all the other Dutch interiors. Here a lumpy old coal stove, polished brilliant black, and ‘gothic’ wooden furniture upholstered in olive-green plush. There the streamlined grey oilburner, and ‘contemporary’ mushrooms of chairs with knitting-needle legs and pink or mauve ‘moquette’. Either the old walnut veneer dresser, with a tiny diamond-pane window showing souvenir German wine glasses (bulbous green, with Loreleis painted on them) and turned chess-queen legs, or the flat slab of imitation teak. All proudly oiled and spotlessly dusted. Everywhere, of course, crammed with climbing plants, far too many lamps and at least three too many tables. Since Pieter de Hooch, Dutch interiors have gone downhill.

  None of this told me much about the people who lived there. Were they too just like the ones in metroland? Had a thousand years in the ‘Veen’ ground produced a local type? There were local names – I saw several ‘Van Veen’ and ‘Van der Veen’ nameplates on doors.

  I found a local weekly paper to take home, and seized on it with joy. And once at home again, I nearly wore it out. The cheap grey newsprint with its smudgy blunt press frayed at the folds and then disintegrated under the well-known heavy police hand and burning police eye of our brilliant officer. It told me a lot. Just for a start, births, deaths and marriages. And a real invention of ‘the little province’ – a careful column telling one who has arrived in our midst, with full details. Address he’s come to, and come from. His name and his profession. All compiled from the careful indexing and filing of our industriously nosy functionaries in that damned town hall.

  Here, in these columns, one could recognize the local people easily. If Piet Jansen the bricklayer from Zaandam had settled in the Dahlia Street, and Ria Bakker the secretary from Maassluis was now filling the Widow Pump’s back room in the Vondel Street, it was doubtless fascinating to the locals, but not to me. Luckily, one could always tell.

  The locals had ludicrous names. Ook and Goop and Unk. Surnames as bad, and clans of course – generations of intermarriage no doubt.

&nbs
p; ‘Cold Comfort Farm,’ said Arlette amusedly. ‘Seth and Reuben, Dooms and Starkadders. No doubt there’ll be sukebind and watervoles.’

  Quite right; no exaggeration whatever.

  ‘And a lot of heavy-handed rural fornication in summer. Rose Bernd all over again.’

  I wasn’t quite so sure about that one. The list of Sunday services in the paper was formidable. I counted carefully; there were seventeen different kinds of churches.

  Obvious ones first, of course. Netherlands Renewed Protestants. Even more – Netherlands Reformed. A march of well-known ‘chapel’ sects: Baptists and Methodists, Unitarians and Congregationalists. The rather queer ones, not quite certain of acceptance outside a well-tried little clique – Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Roman Catholics (oh yes, definitely queer, here).

  But what was one to say to the wilder Irvingite and Campbellite aberrations that flourished here in holy righteousness? Remonstrant Early Lutherans, Purged Presbyterians, Rigid Plymouth Brethren? Sects that didn’t have churches – churches were neither rigid enough, nor purged enough. They had Meeting Places of God’s Elect. All that was lacking was Aimée Semple McPherson. It was a list to make Elmer Gantry lick his lips in holy joy and clap his great pious meaty hands together and uplift his voice in vociferous sanctity.

  ‘No Jews or Quakers,’ remarked Arlette with interest.

  ‘Plenty of by-Our-Lady horny-handed early Christians though – very early. Deacon Urk, Gravedigger Bloop, and Sexton Moogie, gathered round Dominie Prophecies-of-Malachi Thunk; she-that-commits-it-shall-be-cut-off.’

  ‘Have a look,’ said Arlette. ‘Klaas Kip married Wilhel-mina Dina Regina Vos.’

  ‘You’ve seen nothing yet – you haven’t read the report of the monthly meeting and tea-drinking of the Christian Rural Women. Carrie Nation presided at the bunfight. Takes one back a hundred years. Small towns in Iowa and South Dakota were like this in Elmer Gantry’s extreme youth.’

  The happenings in this remote, comic place, where a sham modernism hid but did not alter knotted, rooted survivals, were as ludicrous as the names.

  I was reminded of two things when I first read the dossier and they never quite left me throughout the time I was there.

  First was easy, an obvious one: the Staphorst affair. The international press had picked it up as an example of primitive survivals in a modern world. Staphorst is a village in Drente too, albeit the other end of the province. It has a closed little community and a sort of rural Calvinism unequalled for hellfire savagery. They go to church in procession on Sundays, with downcast eyes and clasped Bibles, and the men have been known to break the cameras of gawping tourists. A pair here had been caught in adultery, had been – by report – among other things drawn through the village in a cart and pelted with tomatoes or something.

  The other memory was of a French film based on the classic case of the ‘Witches of Salem’. Reading the dossier, I had thought that twentieth-century Zwinderen had a good deal in common with seventeenth-century Massachusetts. Not only the pillory and the stocks, but the stake and the noose were not very far away here.

  Not so very much had happened, factually, and yet one could understand why the Procureur-Général in Leeuwarden, and his colleague in Amsterdam, had taken this so seriously. Two women had committed suicide, and a third had had to be led gently away by men in white coats. There had been an outbreak of anonymous letters – a blackmailing poison-pen – and nobody knew quite how many of these had not come to light.

  That was not so very much. But there was more, intangible but perceptible. Like Salem, the whole place sounded hysterical, neurotic. Neighbourhood squabbles tended to be started by virtuous housewives, shrilly accusing other virtuous housewives of immorality. There were too many, and they were too much alike.

  There was a lot of immorality – a bit too much. I had the file on the past year’s police court cases behind-locked-doors. Incest, mm; never quite unknown in these ingrown inter-married districts. But rather too much rape, indecent exposure, dissemination of pornography, obscene dancing in cafés, underhand prostitution – underneath all the drum-beating and bell-ringing on Sundays, there was a sort of sexy itch. One could not get at it properly. Not only were the reports in a language so stilted, so proper and so bureaucratic that I could hardly understand them myself, practised as I am, but the witnesses were excessively hangdog and evasive, not to speak of wholesale perjury, obvious if quite unprovable.

  One knows what ‘he then attempted to commit an offence’ means, but one cannot cross-examine a nine-year-old girl in court, after a respectable fifty-eight-year-old farmer had been caught by his wife pulling her pants off in a hayloft. He said things. What? Child couldn’t say and wife wouldn’t.

  This letter writing. Something was common knowledge, more had been debated, in secret but subject to leakage. Some was dead secret – they said.

  Neither the municipal police – always stilted in language – nor the State Recherche – unembarrassed, flowery, practised, but empty – were much help. There were facts, but so scarce and vague, and by now so thumbed and hammered, as to be unrecognizable. And this letter-writing was undiminished, but how much was there? How long had it been going on? How many letters were burned, thrown down the lavatory? And how many were kept, re-read, pored over? Even enjoyed? The whole thing had been frightened underground by three-times-repeated banging and poking by heavy-handed police.

  What facts there were were boring. For instance, the letters were composed in the classic way of letters and words clipped from the local paper – the one I had bought. Helpful! But nobody seemed to have thought much about the style, though it interested me. The language was quite practised, that of somebody, one would say, accustomed to putting words on paper. Yet it was stiff and cramped – not a normal feature of personal letters. Not an unschooled person: no spelling mistakes, and carefully accurate punctuation – too careful; it was painful. The letters were formal, selfconscious, grammatically careful but with no eye for a simple everyday word. The style of someone who thinks that a television announcer is the perfect model.

  There was no real obscenity, either, in the verbal sense. A dirty-minded bourgeois. The majority of the letters that had been found were to women, but some were to men. Hm, youngish married women. Were they simply quicker to bring such things into the open? Apart from the three ‘victims’ there was little known about these women. They were not suspected of anything.

  This chasing after suspects is always a bore. I am always more interested in victims. I was now.

  A fat lot of good it had done here looking for suspects. That part of the inquiry had been to my mind the most thoroughly botched up. They had found one really juicy, promising suspect, and had ended up with a fist full of gravel. They’d gone on the classical supposition that someone who writes sexy letters to women is most likely to be an elderly bachelor. When they found, on the doorstep, an elderly bachelor, with eccentric habits, a peculiar past, and a secretive nature, they stuck to him with a stupid obstinacy… Mark, he was certainly interesting.

  The idea of a woman writer had never been taken seriously. Yes, perhaps poison-pen letters are traditionally an elderly spinster’s work, but all the elderly spinsters around there seemed irreproachable. And though there was jealousy in the letters, it was directed at the men, not at the women. A lesbian in Drente? Pooh pooh.

  There had been a hunt for psychopaths of course, and anyone who had ever been caught in a moral scandal, however slight. The State Recherche – very very thorough indeed – had even unearthed the fact that the burgomaster, earlier in his career, had once been thought rather too fond of sitting little girls on his lap. Charming; Burgomaster Humbert N. Petit of Larousse, Ill. But nothing had ever been seriously proved, and there was certainly no evidence, not a scrap, to link him with any of this.

  After motive, they had, with relish, attacked opportunity. They had reached vast numbers of conclusions, and nothing whatever proved one way or the other. />
  I let out a sort of moan. This might all be intensely funny, but I wasn’t at all sure I was greatly amused.

  Arlette was busily packing her precious gramophone records.

  6

  The first working days in Zwinderen were spent observing the manners and customs of Drente; Van der Valk feeling like an anthropologist among the Papuans. Ethnological studies indeed. I felt a bit like the schoolboy who wrote on his examination paper, ‘Customs beastly … manners none’, and left it at that.

  But I had a suitcase filled with books, newspaper clippings, and perfectly genuine files from the Ministry of the Interior, which I was agreeably surprised to find passionately interesting.

  What, in Zwinderen, did they buy, wear, eat, drink, approve of? It wasn’t right from the start, at all, what Arlette bought, wore, ate, drank or approved of. For information about all sorts of eccentric things, often simply because I had noticed something and been puzzled, I went to the burgomaster’s secretary; she was the greatest help. She knew everybody and everything; seemed to be never at a loss, and was quite willing to instruct a responsible functionary; perhaps it flattered her sense of importance. It needed no flattering; she was important. Of course as confidential secretary she had access to all but the most important decisions, and that meant virtually everything that concerned the little town. She knew, too, all the local politics.

  From her I learned of the long-standing quarrel between the Head of Parks and Gardens and the Municipal Gas Works. She knew the whole history of the throat-cutting between the contractors for the new Garden Suburb, and the figures of the loss taken by the subcontractor in electrical equipment for the sake of prestige – it had been she who had seen that he had tried to make the loss up by skimping the workmanship. She was illuminating about the solitary Communist member of the council, about the row over the new hospital equipment that all the doctors claimed was inadequate, about too much having been spent on the swimming bath, and got back by cheese-paring on the new dustbin lorries. She seemed to wave a sceptre over everybody. The burgomaster swore by her tact and ability – Miss Burger could always get it done. I found her myself a pleasant woman – no great beauty, but nice brown eyes and attractive feuille-morte hair – shiny, healthy-looking – and a good clear skin.