Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  The burgomaster himself, of course. His locum, the senior town councillor. The chief of the local police. The secretary to the town council. Miss Burger – not officially, but it was plain that she was in the know about everything. Not a very encouraging list. I had done my best with it for days, ever since I had come here in fact. Five civil servants, all efficient, all blameless, all forward in church activities and social works. Organizers of charities. All married, solidly, worthily, all with children of school age – except Burger, of course, who lived alone in a flat. Equally blameless – I had observed from a discreet distance, I had even rummaged a bit about the building and the inhabitants of the block. The flats were in a double row of three to the block – six to a common entrance, and in a block like that not many of the movements of any one are missed by the other five. Miss Burger was a devout church-goer, a pillar of the Rural Christian Woman’s League, the Consumers’ Bond, and the Association for Better Housing.

  The locum-burgomaster was keen on Scouting and Sport. Energetic about gymnastics for schoolchildren, about jamborees and educative trips abroad to ancient Greece or whatnot. If there were any mountains in Holland he would have climbed all of them. He was the moving spirit behind the local volleyball team and the projected skating rink, and had been the promoter of the rather grand swimming-bath. His wife was a good soul; model housewife and mother, whose children were impeccably sent every fortnight to get their hair cut. Man and wife were both given to the activities of the Good Neighbours’ Club, where twice a week they solemnly played bridge or listened to little lectures.

  As for the municipal secretary, he was the heart and soul of the Operetta Club. Besides being quite a good amateur violinist, he played draughts.

  All these people were Reformed and Anti-Revolutionary. Damn it, what could I do with people like that? Rotarians, Pickerbaughs. Philistines, yes, tedious Do-Gooders whom personally I found unsympathetic, but public-spirited, with social consciences, backbone of civic virtue.

  I thought again about the striking remark Besançon had made last night. That if a bureaucrat once moved into rebellion he would be a most dangerous person. It might be true. Probably in the Reich it had been true. This, however, wasn’t the Reich. This was Holland.

  Odd how all roads led back to Besançon.

  I was slipping into a lard-like weariness and discouragement. I wasn’t a step further. And yet I was so near. Why don’t I get a stroke of luck, just a tiny stroke of luck? I polar-beared up and down that box of a room. There is something still I have not seen, am too stupid to understand.

  I wanted to walk, but the weather was vile. The auto was in the garage with some obscure ailment and would not be ready before evening. I didn’t want a drink. Since coming here to Drente I had drunk double what I did at home. There – an aperitif if I happened to be at home – and if I happened to have the time once I did get home. The occasional bottle at night split with Arlette. At weekends, perhaps a cognac after dinner. Whereas here I was drinking two or three together at all hours. Have to stop that. Getting a bit tipsy to encourage Arlette getting tipsy, sexy, and thoroughly enjoying herself was one thing. Being on the way to becoming a sort of small-time bedroom drunk was quite another.

  I put my coat on muttering and stamped out irritably. It was every bit as disagreeable out as I had been led to believe. On the way I met Arlette, cross, coming back from shopping. Usually I fetched her heavy shopping with the auto; now, of course, the nastiest day of the year was the one on which I had no auto.

  Unhelpful situation. On the one hand, whole rows of worthy citizens possessing the information needed to write those letters. I couldn’t see them possessing the necessary malicious imagination, quite, let alone see them creeping about peering, listening.

  On the other hand, Besançon, capable of imagination, of unexpected ideas, even of actions, very likely. But even with twenty telephones and a portable X-ray how could he have known enough of all these people to write those things? If there were invention, it was cunningly interwoven with fact.

  It was ridiculous, I thought, to start suspecting Besançon of anything now. All the others had suspected him, so I deliberately hadn’t, out of vanity. But what was it about the old gentleman that so drew the policeman’s eye? I’ve told myself that my eye is drawn by anyone interesting and intelligent – that is complete nonsense. The more one sees of him the more one feels that there are questions there that need answering. A sulphurous smell; a sort of mephitic air.

  The State Recherche officer, a special duty man from the political police, accustomed to aliens and refugees, everything and anything peculiar, had been baffled. Had been driven to the unsatisfied, unhappy, helpless annotation on his report that had fascinated me right from the outset … With the best will in the world I could not see the old gentleman writing dotty letters.

  What old gentleman? He was not much over sixty. Still, his hardships, his past, his illness – it had put ten or fifteen years on him.

  The inspector from Assen had conducted a little experiment. He had asked Besançon, politely, to cut a page of newsprint into little lozenges such as were used for the letters. With a pair of nail-scissors, which the experts declared to be the instrument used. He had obeyed calmly, not asking questions, though he had had no idea what it was all about. Despite his shaky hands his morsels of paper had been neatly snipped, but though they looked good enough the microscope showed up a characteristic unevenness in keeping with his disease – that the original letters had not had. Analysis of these could be brought no further than a guarded hypothesis that the snipper had an orderly mind and meticulous habits. Characteristics, I thought crossly, that Besançon shares with two-thirds of Holland. The paper the letters were pasted to came from the Hema, the Dutch Woolworth, as did the paste – every family in Holland possesses a pot.

  The fresh air was beginning to wake me up; I strode along like my town councillor-scoutmaster on his way to some damned hillside where he could fill his lungs with the damned healthy fresh air. But I still felt like Mr Verloc, who, Conrad said, had the air of having wallowed all day fully dressed upon a disordered bed. Van der Verloc.

  The gardens of all the little houses, so trim and neat in summer, were untidy with frost-bitten leaves and messy stalks left over from autumn, with drifts and patches of frozen snow. All the housewives had religiously swept their paths and patches of pavement, and the dirty, trampled snow was piled messily in the gutters, but on the minute lawns it still lay virginally. Underneath, I thought, there will be tiny green shoots; snowdrops, crocuses. It is nearly the end of February after all; spring is on its way to Drente. The clematis and jasmine on the outside walls will be waking up; the stiff pointed buds of the rhododendrons swelling. Soon a faint tinge of green around the lilac twigs. Sap and life stirring everywhere in the barren-looking sour ground.

  ‘Except in my stupid head,’ I muttered loudly. Two teenage girls, clinging to the same bicycle, turned their untidy scarved heads, gawped and giggled in unison. The one in front pedalled heavily, flat-footed. The one behind had her knobbly feet stuck out clumsily in thick socks. Both wore cheap helanca trousers, quilted nylon jackets, and the hideous square spectacles with heavy black plastic frames considered modishly fetching by Dutch girls. Their hair looked as though it had been cut by the same nail-scissors as the newsprint. Their gay, uncouth, innocent faces had all the experience of life one gets from listening to pop singers and watching, with giggles, the bull climb up on the cow. They went on turning round and staring all the way up the road, wobbling wildly like Mr Polly.

  5

  I plodded obstinately on, the whole length of the village, all the way to the Industry Terrain. I wanted to see Reinders. I thought it might have been a mistake to have talked to Will at home.

  Generally it is a good idea. To me it seems obvious that if you talk to somebody – pretty nearly anybody – in his own living-room you stand a better chance of penetrating the things that are nearly always there to puzzle one. The
re are flaws in all this, of course, the biggest perhaps being that there aren’t any simple explanations for anything. Often there just aren’t any explanations. Another big flaw is that there are lots of people who aren’t at their most natural or even at their most confident in their own living-rooms.

  Willy, now – at home, had he felt himself hampered, uneasy? Yes, and not only on account of the girl there, her physical presence dusting in the next room. And not only on account of things Betty had bought and chosen, herself handled, polished, dusted. It was still Betty’s house, but there was even more than that. Will had been defensive and I had been clumsy. I had struck false notes, and he had been soured as well as harried. I had to try to do a bit better.

  The timekeeper at the barrier recognized me, told me in a gleeful way that the boss wasn’t there today. I looked pained and pensive.

  ‘Now who had I better see?’

  ‘Well there’s Mr Smit – he’s the Production Manager.’

  ‘No, Mr Reinders, I think; I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him already.’ I sounded fussily self-important; I was good at this role of the Man from the Ministry.

  ‘I’ll ring through for you.’

  I could hear Will himself on the wire; he had a vibrating, emphatic voice, and sounded jovial.

  ‘What gentleman? – oh, Mr van der Valk; yes, I know. Yes, by all means. Can he find his way, or shall I send a girl?’

  ‘I’ll find it,’ I said. There was a rigmarole of staircases and passages but I am, after all, a detective, which is helpful when it comes to finding Room Nine.

  Nine was a sort of drawing-office, not much different from an architect’s with those angled boards, and the lamps and rulers that have shoulder joints and elbow and wrist and finger joints, and make it all look so easy. Two effaced pipe-smokers were busy making dodecaphonic electronic musical notation. I hurried on scared into an office with a cross-eyed girl-typist and a bustling middle-aged efficient female who told me she was Assistant to the Director. She was cheery but not very pinchable.

  At last I got to Willy, right on the inside; a big office with a big metal desk, very untidy. There was a wall of bookshelves full of the kind of stuff Mr Besançon got asked to translate. There was a round table with a large model aeroplane standing on it, a sofa against the wall with a coffee-table in front of it, and the fourth wall was window, with climbing plants and a view of Drentse hinterland. By his desk Will didn’t have charts with statistics, but a blackboard, with more electronic music scribbled on it. This was freehand, without benefit of mechanical elbows, and the result reminded one of the maze puzzles in children’s annuals. How will Bobby Bear get out of the witches’ forest (remember there is only ONE way he can be safe)? I took a look, and decided that Bobby Bear had taken the first to the right three times too often already and was about to be bagged by an ogre.

  Will was wearing a loud tweed jacket, had glasses on, ink on his fingers, and chalk on his sleeve. He would have looked the maths master at the local grammar school but for a dead filtertip cigarette he was chewing on. He followed my look.

  ‘People enjoy reading music, I’m told – if they can read it well enough. This isn’t any different.’

  ‘And the aeroplane?’

  ‘Oh that. I built it. We’ve used it for various experiments; teleguiding and so on.’

  ‘Clay pigeon.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He seemed pleased. ‘Sit down if you want.’ I sat on the arm of the sofa. He leaned his backside against the desk and just looked amiable and not a bit worried.

  ‘You do computers and things, here?’

  Now he looked amused, too.

  ‘Good god no. That’s something you leave to the big boys. Only Bull does that, here in Europe, and even they look like getting swallowed by the Americans. I once built an electronic cooking stove but my wife didn’t like it. Preferred old-fashioned heat. Scared her; too uncanny.’ He grinned, and then stopped grinning. ‘I’m glad you came. I couldn’t talk about it at home. Not with Cat there. It must have looked to you as though I hadn’t cared for Bet at all. And I did, you know.’

  He was getting younger every minute. He was looking about nineteen now.

  ‘She wasn’t unhappy, you know. She liked it here, even. It meant a lot to her that I got this job. She got a fine new house; she was proud I had a job I enjoyed and was good at.’ He stared at his blackboard. ‘I know of course it wasn’t enough. This is a hell of a competitive world. But how would I have guessed it would go so far? Where did the catastrophe begin?’

  I said nothing. Did he think I knew, or something?

  ‘You know, electronics is not a simple thing either. If these toys were that simple everyone could have teleguided missiles. You wish, let’s say, to provide certain impulses, make an inanimate object obey various complicated rules. You cook up a system of circuits and on the board it looks foolproof. You put it together and build it into your machine on the test-bed; it works perfectly. You repeat it exactly in practice and for no reason at all that anyone can understand it goes haywire, just does illogical things. You may very well never find out why, even after months of patiently studying and checking and recalculating. It seems good, but it just doesn’t work. The only thing is to just scrap it, forget the whole thing, start building again from scratch. You haven’t even gained any real experience to profit from, to tell you what to avoid.’

  He was looking at me now with open appeal.

  ‘I did my best. I thought she had a good life. I didn’t neglect her really: I mean I thought about it; I thought she was occupied and contented and not sexually unsatisfied or anything. I suppose I just committed the mistake of thinking people are fairly simple, compared to electronic circuits.’

  ‘A neurologist told me once,’ I said vaguely, ‘that the human body makes electronics look in comparison like the first steam engine.’

  Will suddenly found the dead butt in his mouth, and tossed it angrily into the big grey metal waste-basket. ‘I wouldn’t know. We’re told that if something goes wrong it’s human error – must be human error – but you feel often enough that nothing you do makes any difference.’ He sat down abruptly at his desk.

  ‘I’m talking too much. Did you want to ask me something – or tell me something?’ He lit a fresh cigarette, realized he hadn’t offered me one, and held the packet out with an apologetic ‘sorry’.

  ‘No. I just wanted to see, here.’

  He seemed pleased.

  ‘But I couldn’t explain, not in years.’

  ‘I can’t explain anything either. There isn’t any explanation.’

  ‘For Betty? But I blame myself.’

  ‘So do I.’

  He looked mystified, but didn’t press it.

  ‘Can’t blame everything on pilot’s error,’ I told him. ‘If the little black box doesn’t function …’

  ‘One of these days,’ he said heavily, ‘the little black box won’t function, and their old bomb will poop off where they least expect it. Then we’re all in the soup.’

  I laughed at him, then. ‘You better start believing in God,’ I told him, naughtily.

  ‘I wish I did, sometimes. Like some coffee? I haven’t anything much to do this morning, to be honest.’

  ‘Sure.’ Despite my confiding character, I didn’t tell him I hadn’t anything to do either.

  I lit a cigarette too, to be pally. Of course he wasn’t responsible for her death. And of course he was, as well. But that wasn’t any of my business. All the fault of the little black box.

  I walked on. Perhaps semiconsciously I turned into the Koninginneweg. Here the housewives did not do menial chores like sweeping pavements, and the daily girls dodged it – wasn’t their pavement; my footsteps were muffled, and creaked sometimes on snow still untrodden. I had no idea at all what to do. I passed Will Reinders’ ugly little house and thought it had the same awkward innocence as the girls on the bike. I did not think there was any crime there. I reached the big house on the corner – a gran
d affair for this three-halfpenny town, flashing with polished brass and fresh paint. I didn’t think there was any crime there, either. My road was leading me towards Besançon, inevitably. What could I do about it? In some way, there lay the key to what I was searching for.

  The sagging little cottage behind its high wall and the ragged row of cypresses was older and wiser than the houses in the Queen’s Street, I thought, looking through the chink in the gate. I hadn’t any reason for doing so but I tinkled the bell. Placid Mrs Thing came out with her duster in her hand. She showed no curiosity at seeing me – the only one in the whole of Drente that hasn’t, I thought. Or perhaps Miss Burger? – no, that is more professional discretion. I thought of questioning her and decided not to. Her deposition was on the file – what more could she have to tell me?

  She smiled with friendly recognition.

  ‘Shall I bother him? – I realize it’s working hours.’

  ‘I think he’ll be glad to see you. He’s shaky these last few days; can’t settle to his work. He’s not getting any better you know,’ she added rather sadly, ‘but there’s nothing the doctors can do, they say.’ I could see that she was fond of him.

  ‘Is the road really going to be widened?’ she asked as she shut the gate carefully behind me. ‘It would be an awful pity. You can’t see it at present but he’s done wonders with the garden.’

  ‘I’m pleased to see you,’ said Besançon, getting up and holding out his hand. There was a spark of cordiality in the quiet controlled voice. ‘Sit down then, in your usual chair. Mrs Bakhuis will bring you coffee, I feel sure; she approves of you.’

  He was not at all surprised that I kept coming.

  ‘You can’t really be pleased to see me.’

  ‘Why not? You are agreeable company. What good would it do me to be displeased? I cannot stop you coming. You are a policeman, and despite a certain unwilling sympathy you have for me, you suspect me. You do not quite know why, but you do.’