Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘That you penetrate me so easily shows that I can’t be a new kind.’

  ‘The first to be frank.’

  ‘Perhaps I have started work with a different assumption. You don’t fit my notions of this type of crime.’

  ‘What type of crime?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘I have never been told,’ simply, ‘what it was that I was suspected of doing or being.’

  ‘Oh dear. I suppose that’s typical. You were suspected of being the author of anonymous blackmailing letters.’

  I was watching closely; a very strange expression passed rapidly over the strong facial muscles. I could not quite put a name to it. Relief from apprehension?

  ‘How stupid I am not to have guessed, after all the questioning.’

  ‘I am surprised you didn’t.’ I was, too; the man was intelligent; more than that, he used his mind.

  ‘I am an innocent fellow; it simply never occurred to me. Now, of course, I realize that I am an obvious suspect. Eccentric, probably mentally deranged, slightly sinister to village eyes – aha, now I see.’

  ‘Why do you call yourself sinister?’

  ‘In a village … A Jew, living behind a wall, avoiding people. I had understood that I would be suspect.’

  ‘But it bothered you, to be suspected?’

  ‘No, not really. Only peasant superstition.’

  ‘Quite so. Yet you were worried.’

  ‘Worried at the unceasing pressure of suspicion from officials. That is not superstition; it is, alas, a hard fact. Relays of policemen, always increasing in importance. The last were State Recherche. What would those gentlemen have to do with anonymous letters?’

  ‘Two people have died – and the matter has still not been cleared up. The authorities have taken this seriously. It is vague; obscure.’

  ‘I see. And you do not suspect me of anything still?’

  I got up.

  ‘I try never to suspect anybody of anything. I try to wait until I know.’

  ‘I have grown over-sensitive.’

  ‘I can see that. But will it worry you if I come back?’

  ‘You do, then, suspect me of something.’

  ‘No. I just like talking.’

  ‘Come whenever you like. I am always here – but I am at a loss to see how that can profit you.’

  ‘Everything profits me. And I like unusual people. They force one to think about things.’ I picked up my hat. I could see well enough that he preferred to be left alone, but I knew that he would not show me hostility, now that he knew who I was. Using this man as a sparring partner would lighten my days, here in Zwinderen. Too bad if he didn’t like it.

  2

  The Mimosa Street, where I now lived, is a street exactly like ten thousand in Holland, and probably identical with a thousand Mimosa Streets. Tiny two-storied houses in two neat bricky rows, patterned into little parcels of six at a time. One saw through the huge windows to a further street, and through that again to infinity. Exactly like the Droste cocoa-tin. Painted on it is a nurse, holding another cocoa-tin, with a nurse on it …

  Miniature balconies with iron railings, over the front door; miniature gardens with a few bulbs and a strip of grass. A grass verge between path and roadway. When I got home there were already four Volkswagens standing neatly parked. All the houses are identical; I wondered which was mine. The Mimosa Street is Holland.

  I stopped for a gaze; Van der Valk’s brooding, piercing, aquiline look; Michelangelo contemplating Saint Peter’s. I probably looked struck with amnesia, paralysis of the motor nerves, or perhaps just as though I had a rick in the back.

  A child’s scooter was flung against the verge; two families had not yet taken in their dustbins. A little girl had tied a string to a fence, and was holding the free end very solemnly and seriously, watching another little girl jumping over it in a complicated, important procession of steps. A bigger girl, in tartan trousers she had grown out of, was roller-skating with the sudden ducking lurch and widespread fingers of the beginner, watched with admiration by two tiny ones in woolly tights. Very pink cheeks and naughty eyes peeping out of the hoods of their windcheaters; moisture forming on curls in front; bright Norwegian mittens; one was rather bow-legged.

  Others could gaze too; I felt the pressure of twenty pairs of unseen eyes going prickling over the skin on the back of my neck. I locked the car door, picked up the good briefcase and scampered for my door; crinkle glass badly set in flimsy softwood painted a depressing yellow.

  The muslin glass-curtains of the house across the street flickered as I turned to shut the door. Those eyes were able to count the stitches that darned my left sock last week.

  There was a good smell of pot-on-the-fire; celery, leeks, turnips, onions puttering gently. Arlette was gazing fascinated at German children’s television; the film had been dubbed, and one had the charming effect of an English copper, pot hat and all, out in the midday sun but talking forthright Kölner German. She had bought a plant; a feathery little coco-palm fluttered in the draught and I shut the room door hastily.

  ‘I’ve been writing to the boys, telling them all the frightful things that are happening to us. And I bought some smoked eel. We’re going to have a nice evening – Così Fan Tutte from the new theatre in Frankfurt.’

  Which pleased me very much. I wasn’t in a thinking mood. Tomorrow, anyway, was only a boring trek round pastures a lot of oxen had nibbled pretty bare.

  3

  The next morning was bright and sunny. Even in westerly weather it is often so in Holland. It is a false promise, for already before midday a grey pall of cloud will have blanketed the sky, a cold little wind will be searching the bones at street corners, stirring up dust, and presently rain will turn the dust again to mud. But while it lasts, the sunshine cheers everybody. It has the thin, bright texture of morning, and accompanies a whole happy orchestra of morning noises. Loud crash of dustbins being emptied into the creeping garbage lorry, a strange animal that digests suburban refuse by standing on its head and then yawns toothily for more. The clattering three-wheeler of the milkman, seeming far too burdened for its very tiny, incredibly noisy motor. The milkman sits upon this poor beast wearing an extraordinary sort of Australian bush hat against the elements, and scribbles busily in his little book as he bumps over the uneven brick; total mystery how it can be legible even to him. Presently he will jump off, bang lustily on a bell that came off the Inchcape Rock, and pretend to be a Caribbean Steel Band, exactly as though he had come creepy-creepy on slippers and now wanted to give the housewives a start.

  Building sites give whoops on their hooters, telling workmen who are already, probably, flat on their backs playing cards – strange how workmen seem the same all over the world; Tired Tim and Weary Willy – that they can have a coffee-break. There is an uproar from school playgrounds where the children – also the same everywhere – shriek in a thin, piercing tone that is also very much a morning noise.

  In the falsely genial shopping street, I felt, in the Volkswagen, like a Mexican on his donkey. Housewives riding bikes, pushing bikes, lugging tiny children off the backs of bikes – all in the middle of the road and paying not the least attention either to me in a tiny blackbeetle auto or to Albert Heijn’s lorry, which is ten feet tall and thirty long. They are busy with the shopping. They stand in the middle of the road, staring at the bargains-of-the-day, announced on bits of cardboard propped against a condensed-milk pyramid; shouting red, and mis-spelt. There are unheard-of, unrepeatable unique opportunities to get two pieces of soap and a toothbrush, all free if one just buys two of the new giant-pack boxes. Are housewives, I wondered, more naive than usual when the sun shines? There was a broad-beamed soul sticking well out into the road, a globular toddler with its eyes popping out clutched in her muscular armpit, forcing a cabbage into her bicycle-pannier. She glared rather, as though it were my fault that she couldn’t get it in. Perhaps she would now try clutching the cabbage and stuffing the toddl
er.

  This was Drente too, but I didn’t think it was the real Drente. It looked identical with everywhere else in Holland, and could just as easily have been the Jan van Galenstraat in Amsterdam-West. Housewives with anonymous pieces of meat, neatly squeezed into a plastic pillow-case that makes any ragged old strip of trek-ox look succulent and as though it deserved to be so expensive. A quarter of liver-sausage and a quarter of soapy cheese, both cut very thin on the bacon-slicer, and a packet of smelly biscuits for this afternoon with the tea.

  I got stuck behind another vast lorry, containing, to judge from huge curly letters written on it, nothing but several million jelly-babies. But at last I was at the top. I disregarded the one tree-shaded road in Zwinderen, where the houses of the managerial class are – interesting though this was – and went on past the railway station and the milk factory next door. Here a road, broad and bare, brand new, had been driven into the soggy countryside. It had no pavements, but a wide, bricked bicycle-path on each side. This was the ‘Industry Terrain’. No houses here, but neat factories on both sides, prim, quiet and abandoned-looking. More lorries standing like oxen with their trailers behind them. A goods truck on a spur line standing by a loading platform, and two overalled characters languidly stacking cardboard crates. Through the fields behind ran the canal, and a faint noise reached me from where a suction line was unloading sand and gravel barges for the Readymixed Konkrete Co. (Shouldn’t that be Ko.?)

  I reached the electronics factory and parked the auto where it said ‘Executives Only’, outside a towering wall of glass window through which nothing could be seen at all. There was a loud smell of packing materials from a loading bay; corrugated cardboard and gummed sealing strip and stencilling ink. A notice told me to State my Business at the Timekeeper’s Office, which adjoined a shed full of nonexecutive bikes.

  Three minutes later I was being ushered into the owner-director’s office. Not as lucky as it sounds; I had found out from Miss Burger that he had regular days.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Uh? From The Hague, I see. Ethnographic Survey, huh?’ – brightly and a little cunningly, as though he knew all about those surveys.

  ‘Yes. We are naturally anxious to follow all the uh, trends that may be situated by setting up industry here. Housing, transport, leisure activities of workers, uh, retail outlets.’ Splendid phrase; I was not quite sure what it meant.

  ‘Quite, quite. And how can I help you? You want to interview the personnel or something?’

  I leaned forward with a sharp disapproving nose. ‘This conversation is confidential and inviolable.’ He looked startled, as I had intended. He was one of these knowing businessmen with a hoarse chuckling voice.

  ‘Certainly, if you wish. We’re quite undisturbed here.’

  I passed one of my real cards across the desk and enjoyed the reaction.

  ‘Inspector … Central Recherche … what’s this about? I’ve made no complaint; we’ve had no troubles; as far as I know we’ve broken no laws.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, but I’m interested neither in peculation nor the maximum agreed wage – I’m interested in the death of your technical director’s wife.’

  ‘Oh my god … you mean this ethnographic hooha is …?’

  ‘In this town I am an official of the Ministry of the Interior; I mean to stay that way. There’ve been more than enough policemen already.’

  ‘How I agree. Poor Betty. But I fail to see –’

  ‘You aren’t under any suspicion. This is verbal, informal, confidential, just like my own identity. Whatever you may say is not stenographed.’

  ‘But I’ve told the police anything I knew – precious little, incidentally.’

  I believe in pushing, when possible, this kind of person off balance.

  ‘I should like you to tell me the things you’ve suppressed in previous meetings with the police,’ pleasantly.

  ‘I’ve suppressed nothing, damn it.’

  ‘Generally called forgetting – often truly, at that. I’m not calling you a liar, but this affair concerns the life of everyone in this town.’

  ‘But not mine, man.’

  ‘Everyone.’

  ‘Damn it, I don’t even live here. I come here two days, maybe three, a week. Reinders lives here. He’s the man you want.’

  ‘But I chose to start with you. You stay the night here, sometimes?’

  ‘Well, it has been known, when Will and I were working on a problem.’

  ‘And where, then? Not in a hotel?’

  ‘Well, no; they’re ghastly.’

  ‘At Will’s house, no? Normal, natural, understandable – and much more comfortable.’

  ‘I’m not trying to conceal it,’ defensively.

  ‘You called her Betty, equally naturally.’

  ‘You’ve no objection, I hope.’

  ‘Quite the contrary, I’m delighted. Ever sleep with her?’

  That got to him. Business man, flabbergasted.

  ‘Don’t give yourself the trouble of looking shocked.’

  He hoisted the expression off the floor and wrestled with it a moment. A small smile crept out.

  ‘Well … I was just thinking that the last set of policemen turned round that very question without quite daring to ask it, and you come plump straight out. The answer is no. And what’s more she was a very conscientious woman and I don’t believe the boy-friend did either.’

  ‘Why exactly did you give him the bullet, since as I understood there was no great gossip or scandal caused?’

  ‘In the first place, because he wasn’t a particularly good craftsman. Second, because Will didn’t.’

  ‘Will, I take it, thought it wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘Put it this way. Will wasn’t going to stand for the fellow hanging about Betty and to give him the push – it might be said he had acted out of personal motives, even spite. Whereas coming from me … I simply told the chap he wasn’t giving the ability to his work that justified my paying him that much. Betty, poor innocent, thought Will knew nothing about it.’

  ‘What amuses me is that neither you nor Will are above pinching a handy bottom on a trip, but at the mildest indiscretion of the wife you’re all remarkably drastic.’

  ‘We’re extremely careful to cause no trouble or gossip anywhere near our homes,’ curtly.

  I had got the background I wanted. The two husbands, gifted, energetic, often abroad and accustomed to a circle of others equally thrusting, had played the part expected of them. Whisky and call-girls in the hotelsuites of Düsseldorf or Milan. Half the fun was in kicking over the respectability to which they were constrained at home. The girls had meant no more than a stolen apple. Betty, a smalltown, strictly-reared girl, had had intoxicating tastes of these men’s conversation and jokes. She had got over her initial prudery and tried to keep up with them. Stuck at home, a bit neglected by a husband giving too much time to his career, having no children, she had done a few innocent, mildly silly things, but had had the bad luck to be spied out by a blackmailer who had enormously magnified it all. The tangle had grown involved, she had dreaded causing a scandal, dreaded compromising her husband’s position, and had not been able to ride the squall out. Neither the experience of life nor the firmness of character. Who knows: she had perhaps given in to the blackmailer’s demands. Finally, she had seen nothing for it but sleeping pills.

  ‘That was how it happened – you agree?’

  ‘Yes; I rather think so, seen like that. But if only she’d told Will – or me, come to that. We’d have backed her up, of course.’

  Prodding this character off balance had been a success; I decided to try a second barrel and a riskier shot.

  ‘One more small point. Your firm produces sensitive listening gadgets for various purposes. There’s a lot of mention in the police reports of one that might have been useful in a blackmailer’s hands. The thing that – what does it do?’

  ‘Listens to machinery, jet engines to take an example, under test. It can det
ect faint flutters with a high level of exterior noise. I know what you’re heading at; it’s nonsense.’

  ‘You maintained that no such apparatus could get into the wrong hands.’

  ‘I did and I do.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me lies, you know. Don’t interrupt. You, and Will, occasionally take things home. Prototypes or whatever you call them. You play with them at home, and you may think up a modification or experiment on an improvement. Right?’

  ‘Well, that’s so, within limits, but …’

  ‘Now it occurred to you – just as it occurred to me; I wasn’t born yesterday either – that it might be very comic to try one of these things out in a hotel, say? You did, and found it a good joke, and being a big broadminded business man you had a good laugh about this in Betty’s presence. Am I wrong?’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ in an unimpressed way. ‘You left a gadget – I don’t say this one, but some similar bit of apparatus – lying about in Will’s house. When it disappeared you didn’t even notice at first. When you did you were alarmed because the thing is classified as secret. After Betty’s death you were really scared, because it occurred to you that this thing might in some way be connected. And you stuck to a lie through thick and thin. This is all logical, natural, consequential. But you’ve just denied it with such false bravado, and you are looking so particularly guilty, that I know that this – ach, not necessarily in detail – is so.’

  ‘But my god … how do you know?’

  ‘I guessed. Look, the writer of these letters boasts of being the ear of God. That is a figurative remark; the fact is, however, that this person knows a remarkable number of things that an ordinary person would not know. The conclusion is that he got something of this sort, and presumably from or through Betty. I’m not accusing you. Now tell me about the thing – what it looks like; how it’s used.’

  ‘It’s in a cigar-box,’ much squashed, even shaken. ‘We chose that to act as a model for the size of unit we wanted. We’ve managed to reduce the size since, but in essentials it’s unchanged. It’s like a transistor set – with special valves of course. It has two loop aerials that act as direction finders, give a cross bearing, and can pinpoint a sound. It’s powered by ordinary transistor batteries. It has ear-phones with baffles that shut out exterior sound. They weren’t perfected, but at night, or anywhere with no more than an ordinary volume of sound … you only have to focus it on a wall or something, and choose the right distance and angle. If you get too close you might get overriding sounds on the same bearing – I mean from further off the angle’s more acute and the bearing more precise. At about thirty feet you’d get a conversation like ours.’