Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Her?’

  ‘That’s a respectable housewife talking. Snub-nosed, corseted, popeyed, with thick wooden legs and a Sunday hat. She wears glasses and has arch supports inside her sensible laced shoes.’

  It was intended to make her laugh; I was glad to see it did.

  ‘No, seriously, this is a woman. The writer of these letters isn’t a man.’

  ‘A lesbian then? No wonder she didn’t take to me.’

  ‘I think maybe a suppressed lesbian.’

  ‘But according to the letters …’

  ‘Ach, I think that was just talk. She may have booked some unexpected successes. Lots of these women – any women – have tendencies they wouldn’t ordinarily dream of indulging or even formulating in conscious ideas. Men, after all, are pretty vile, mm? Here just as much as most places.’

  I drank my port with enjoyment.

  ‘Have a look. Bursts wide open. Notice “write to the ministry”. Nobody, bar one or two, knows which ministry I’m supposed to come from. The cards I’ve shown had no address – just a phony Institute of Studies.

  ‘On the other hand, people I’ve interviewed know I’m from the police. This person knows too much and not enough. But it’s not written with the head to try and mislead me; the sentiments come from the heart all right.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Somebody who has access to knowledge, who has known all along what the police were doing, who hasn’t thought of querying my identity. I came with official papers from the Ministry of the Interior. Nothing so compels a bureaucrat’s utter faith as an official piece of paper.’

  ‘A bureaucrat – somebody from the municipal offices?’

  ‘I’ve always thought that listening apparatus thing all my eye. I must admit I thought the peeking didn’t exist either – got caught there.’

  ‘But you said somebody who hated government interference. A bureaucrat – that is government interference.’

  ‘Two answers, I think. The government programme only started here with the new burgomaster; that’s only five years or thereabouts. The one before was a local fellow and a complete dud. One could understand that anybody left over from the old regime might easily think that the municipality had got on perfectly well before the new brooms came.’

  ‘I can see that might be a reason but it’s hardly a motive.’

  ‘Just what bothered me. But the other reason is something Besançon suggested. He remarked that a bureaucrat who turned against his cherished principles might become very dangerous. I thought of a judge in France some few years ago, who went round the bend and burned his own courthouse down.’

  I could see Arlette looking at me with a dubious eye. She was thinking, I guessed, that I too was a public servant – conscientious, even scrupulous sometimes, yet with revolutionary republican notions that have done me less than no good in the eyes of my superiors.

  ‘Remarkable how I cannot detach Besançon from this business. Step by step, he has been inseparable from all my thinking about it.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Arlette was not much interested in Besançon, whom she had never seen. Whereas this business touched her, now, personally. ‘I want to understand. What was it exactly he said that gave you this idea?’

  ‘I asked him about the Hitler entourage. He distinguished between the fanatic idealists, the gangsters with simple egotistical motives, and the civil servants, who devotedly thought they were really serving the state. He suggested that if one of them were to see through it all, he would become the most unscrupulous and frightful of the lot. I can readily believe that. The ordinary ones were bad enough. Think of Eichmann – the pure civil servant.’

  ‘You mean you thought something of the sort existed here? Far-fetched.’

  ‘All my ideas are far-fetched,’ I said ruefully. ‘I just thought of a bureaucrat who went round the bend attacking the very institutions he’s always worshipped. It doesn’t matter how I got the idea – if the psycho boys once start, they’ll make the reports, and everybody believes them no matter how far-fetched they choose to sound.’

  This was a Van der Valk grievance of long standing. I have seen it so often. A policeman of years’ experience comes out with something like this in court, he’d be shoved straight out to graze in the meadows, whereas some little cocksure know-all doctor-boy who’s read the books is listened to in religious silence. But I had learned – I would be cute enough to fill my report with bullshit about ‘Having narrowly observed the demeanour of the accused’.

  ‘I’m going to go out after supper. I still have to secure some scrap of evidence that’s tangible before I can ring the bell.’

  ‘But supper’s ready. Has been for over half an hour. That wretched letter upset me so …’

  ‘Well come on then; I’m hungry and I’ve a lot to do. One at a time, as the lion said when he ate the explorer’s wife too.’

  Part five: ‘Certainty’

  1

  Prowl – big word. In a sense I was going to prowl. It was perfectly true that it is a good idea to have some proof before blowing the whistle. I hadn’t any proof but I was pretty sure there would be plenty found under a search warrant. I didn’t have to prowl.

  Van der Valk has been told several times that he decorates things too much. True enough, I suppose. I am a creature of drama, and I like doing ridiculous dramatic things. It wouldn’t do any harm to prowl, though I felt quite sure now of my bird.

  I wanted to walk about and meditate too. I wanted open air and movement. This was a good excuse.

  The weather was not encouraging. The snow had not lain after all; it had started thawing this afternoon. Now it was freezing again, with a thin mist, a vicious sharp wind that had backed into the north, and half-melted snow and ice blackened and rotting. I wasn’t going out at night in that, not in my shiny-pants bureaucrat’s suit.

  I put on shapeless corduroy trousers, a high-necked sweater and a padded anorak. Heavy shoes. Also a hat I am fond of; the brim comes down all round – I look like an English politician out grouse-shooting. It is only at close quarters that I am detected and expelled from this august company; only a drunken gamekeeper after all. I hadn’t a shotgun but I took my binoculars. I thought that anybody who saw me would hardly identify this rural figure with the man from the Ministry; the student of ethnography, whatever that might be.

  I went out of the back door. The tiny back garden was neglected grass. Really the municipal lawn-mower would have to come and do it in summer while he was busy with the road verges.

  Windows glowed at me everywhere, oblong patches of brilliant light; hardly anybody had drawn their curtains even now. They were covered with condensation from the good old-fashioned fug that had been worked up within, but peeking was a simple affair to anybody who cared to make it their hobby. Television sets turned on, tea simmering on the lamp, stove going full blast. Father deep in the local paper, Mother finishing her darning while champing on a biscuit and waiting for the Play to begin on the sacred screen, children finishing their homework. This piece, the legend would be flashed on presently, is Not Suitable for Youthful Viewers. How true.

  Nobody was out at this time – it was after eight-thirty – but the juvenile delinquents. And they weren’t on the streets. They would be gathered in their café in the village, the motor-bikes in an untidy heap outside and the gramophone getting with it.

  I walked through the ‘suburbs’ of the little town. A patchwork straggle, trying to keep up with the housing shortage and never succeeding; the same picture one finds everywhere in all Dutch towns, all German and Italian and Czech and Polish and … Streets half-finished, the raw beginnings of a park; skeletons of flats; piles of bricks and roof-tiles lying around the muddy verges; warped wooden stringers and rusty scaffolding tubes lying about in between to be tripped over. Every now and then the reminder how much of a frontier town this still was struck sharply. Streets neat and trim and lived-in collapsed into rank moorland. There were fields of curly kale bet
ween the patches where foundations had been excavated and black square pits of earth lay half full of black water. A raw church of staring brick, no bells yet hanging in the gawky tower, was surrounded still on three sides by grazing cows.

  Sensibly, the bog had been drained and landscaped at the start with dragline excavators, creating little hillocks and artificial lakes. Once these were clothed with a little greenery, they would be attractive, doubtless, but the clamour for housing was such that the plan had been patchworked, without continuity. Builders had thrown up streets where roofs were already on while the pumps were still throwing dirty water out of the foundations, the workmen lurching stickily about in gumboots, the contractors struggling vainly to keep up with the five-year plan that was to raise the population of Zwinderen to twenty thousand.

  The streets were temporary affairs; zigzag courses of brick hammered in over a vaguely levelled belt of coarse rubble. Sketchily founded, half-drained, they were pitted and jagged like a moon landscape. Full, too, of greasy black puddles, sudden death to high heels and an unmerciful hammering to anything but a Land Rover or a Citroen. I was accustomed to all this by now, threading a way with automatic sidesteps where the blue or orange glare of a sparse street lamp warned one of the deepest, most treacherous pits.

  Everything was still and quiet; I passed one elderly man walking his dog, and was passed in turn by one ancient bicycle, its loose back mudguard rattling on the bumps, its uncertain front light wavering drunkenly. An erratic wind, wet and cold, gusted at me from all quarters, broken into a thousand draughts at every corner; the landscape was as eerie as the middle of a forest. I stopped suddenly, alert. What was that? Who was dodging about there? Nothing and nobody – a tarpaulin over a pile of builders’ material was flapping to the gusts. Frolic wind, I told myself sarcastically, Zephyr with Aurora playing; ha.

  The quotation suddenly clicked into place, giving me a reference I had been groping for – a book that had made some stir in the thirties. I remember it because I had picked it up off a second-hand stall in a little old-maidish Surrey town where we had been billeted in wartime; it had made an amusing change from the army. Frolic Wind…

  There had been a poet who had gone for a bath in the lily-pond during a thunder shower; lovely. And three dotty old sisters, one of whom lived in a tower which she kept locked because all the walls were covered with obscene pictures she had painted. Lady Athaliah, that was it.

  I leaned against a pile of bricks and fastened the binoculars on a block of flats a hundred metres off. Top corner flat; first and second windows at the northern angle. Lady Athaliah’s tower? I twisted the wheel delicately and a brightly lit interior sprang into focus. Ha. I could see a head, and wanted to see more. But I was too low; even at this distance I couldn’t see much of a second-floor room.

  I looked about. Everything was dark and deserted where I was; nothing here finished yet – this was the programme for next spring and summer. That second-floor window, with its patch of uncurtained lemon light, looked out upon a moon landscape. No passers-by. Except me, with my little peep-glass. I crossed the road and walked into a house that had a roof but no windows and no door. I hoped there would be floors. I smelt the acrid reek of wet cement, unseasoned wood and white-lead priming paint, and groped up a little steep staircase, coming out in a cell of bare unplastered brick with a metal window-frame stuck in the middle of it. Smell was the same, enriched by the builders who had been piddling in the corner; they would. But the four metres up from street level made all the difference to my sight line; Peeping Tom had now an admirable view of the tower.

  No satyrs or nymphs, alas, capering across the walls. Quite the contrary. The very ordinary, very conventional living-room of an unmarried woman living alone, who is fairly well off but frugal. No taste, plenty of neatness, tidiness, fussiness. A limp picture of sheep grazing on a moor, a few frilly ornaments, a neatly polished radio with a vase of flowers standing on a square crochet mat. The inevitable tray with painted coffee-cups and ornate biscuit-tin. A calvinist interior, bare, impersonal, dull. No books to be seen, no frivolities. She led, of course, an active life, her evenings occupied with pieties, committee-sitting, visiting newly-settled families, bringing them into the fold, enlisting them too in charitable social works.

  But no committee was sitting this evening.

  What on earth was Lady Athaliah wearing?

  There were streaks and blurs of condensation on the window; a whole panel of the view was obscured by the potted plants ranged on the sill, but when she moved I could see down to the waist – mm, reminiscent of one of the early films of Brigitte Bardot. I moved into the corner of the window-frame, stubbed my elbow, cursed, shifted the glasses carefully, and leaned out to get a better view, oblivious to everything but that extraordinary robe affair.

  Watching a person through binoculars – even if that person is simply cleaning his teeth under the kitchen tap – creates a strong emotion. You are ashamed and excited. You are afraid, too, for it is like being in the ring, watching the gloves that have hurt you and will hurt you again, watching the eyes that may or may not tell you the truth. And like looking over the sights of a rifle: look it lives and laughs, unconscious of my presence; it struts about, and one minute twitch of my finger will knock it ludicrously arse over tea-kettle into eternity and that dung-heap. With binoculars you are the submarine commander, the assassin, the preacher in the pulpit. God. As well as, always, the pornographer. A strong hot emotion.

  Looking at Miss Burger through binoculars was porno less perhaps because of that ridiculous filmy neglige thing, that reminded one of nothing so much as a brassiere advertisement in a women’s magazine, than because it was so sad, and anything porno is so hatefully sad.

  She was very painted – her mouth and especially her eyes, and that in itself was shocking. The clean scrubbed face of a Dutch woman – and only a very few years ago only whores, in Holland, were made up – has no affinity to paint, and she had done it badly, of course, over-dramatically in colours that were far too bright. After the painted face the naked body was less shocking.

  She was floating about, a cigarette in her mouth in a long holder. I wondered what she was doing. I could see no other person in the room, but her face was animated by speech; her lips moved. She looked arch and grotesquely coquette. Then I saw it was a seduction scene. A solitary seduction. I understood suddenly that in another five minutes she would be making love to herself. And I was watching her from a dark empty house with binoculars.

  Something very villainous happened to me at that moment. I wanted to see her. To see her below the waist I would have to climb on the roof. There would be a builders’ ladder lying about, no doubt; I was, suddenly, in a tearing hurry to hunt for it.

  To get to see her below the waist I was ready to hunt for a ladder and climb on the roof, was I? Now that was laughable.

  The temptation of Saint Anthony was removed suddenly by a voice. Pretty rough voice at that, and quite unsympathetic to the pornographic instincts.

  ‘Hey,’ it bellowed.

  Considerably startled, the pride of the police lowered the glasses and glanced downwards. With mixed feelings, I surveyed a uniformed policeman, standing burly and menacing beside his bike. He was surveying right back, not at all with mixed feelings. Stupid of me not to realize that of course they would patrol out here as well, where naughty people often come to pinch the builders’ materials.

  ‘Caught red-handed, by god,’ said the rough voice. ‘Just what we’ve been looking for these six months.’ There was a snort – as near as a country policeman will get, in Holland, to a chortle, whatever that is – of self-congratulation. I felt quite regretful that I would have to spoil the fun. I took stock of my present situation, and felt extremely foolish.

  ‘I’ll come down the stairs,’ I said reasonably.

  ‘No you don’t. Have you dodge out the back and make a run for it, eh? You stay there.’ To reinforce his argument he lugged his cannon into view. He didn’t ex
actly point it at me, but it was enough to make a fairly desperate criminal, like me, realize that he meant what he said.

  ‘Now throw the glasses, clever fellow – underhand, gently. Thanks. That’s evidence, see? And now you drop down to the ground. It’s not high; you won’t hurt yourself. Not that I’d care if you did.’

  There was no earthly use in talking. I gripped the sill meekly, swung my legs out, lowered, loosened, and did a parachutist’s jump on to sodden earth. The grimy black ground stuck disagreeably to my palms, and I wiped them on the corduroy trousers. That would irritate Arlette, who would doubtless otherwise think the whole thing extremely funny. To be pinched for a peeper by the municipal constabulary!

  ‘And now march. I’m right behind you. I need one hand to wheel my bike, but I won’t hesitate to fire if you break.’

  I marched. At the corner of the main road into the town a police Volkswagen van came touring past.

  ‘Hoi,’ went my guardian angel.

  The van stopped and a head poked out.

  ‘What you got there?’

  ‘Just guess.’

  ‘Not the one that set the builders’ hut on fire?’

  ‘Nix hut, nix fire. The sex maniac.’

  ‘Ho.’

  ‘Pinched him in the act, spying in an empty house.’ He waved the binoculars triumphantly.

  ‘Ho,’ impressed. ‘We’ll hear all about it when we get back.’

  ‘March,’ said the angel.

  I sniffed the familiar police-bureau smell with affection. This had its comic side; I was beginning to enjoy myself.

  ‘Now,’ said the duty brigadier pompously, settling a form between his elbows. ‘Name? … Christian names? … Address? … Profession?’

  ‘Inspector of Police.’

  ‘You’d better not try to be funny.’