Death of a Dutchman

by Magdalen Nabb

  'Would he have noticed how nasty it tasted, not then perhaps, but the first time?'

  'Have you ever tasted Viennese coffee, so called? I can't believe the Viennese would drink it; it's flavoured strongly with figs.'

  The Marshal grimaced.

  'Quite. And this was a very thick, strong brew, lightly sugared in the pot, not in the cup—he added more sugar in the cup. Remember he was already upset, even the first time, and not very likely to take much notice—but I bet he didn't care for it, all the same.'

  'Then why should he . . .'

  'Why does anybody eat or drink something they find unpleasant, rather than spit the stuff out?'

  'I suppose —' the Marshal pondered a while—'out of politeness.'

  'Correct. Do you think he had somebody with him?'

  'Why do you ask?'

  'Well, I know only one person ate and drank, but it's odd that no further trace of that coffee was found, not even a container for it, and the police lab found a hair on his lapel. Woman's. Been tinted and waved.'

  'You don't think it could have been his wife's?'

  'I know it wasn't. I've seen her photograph. She's a natural blonde, almost white. Doesn't mean much, of course; he's just as likely to have picked it up in the train. I just thought that if there was a woman involved . ...'

  "There may have been,' the Marshal said cautiously, in case any of this should get back. 'The old lady next door thought she heard a quarrel and a woman leaving, but she didn't see anything... and she's ninety-one . .. it's all very vague and nobody wants to cause his wife any more grief if it's not absolutely necessary.'

  'You needn't worry about that—at least, I shouldn't have thought so. I said that the hair was tinted and waved, but these vanities apart, it was a grey hair.'

  'It was?'

  'Certainly. I don't know if it's any help.'

  'It may be.'

  'Of course, your own lab can give you more details, if you go round to them.'

  A look of puzzlement was beginning to form on the Professor's face. The Marshal quickly distracted him.

  'Perhaps, if this woman exists, she was responsible for the strange coffee . . .'

  'And for the barbiturate in it—well, it's only a hypothesis, but fascinating, all the same, fascinating.'

  'A hypothesis? You mean you personally don't think... ?'

  'Exactly, my dear Marshal, I don't think, I only look, and look hard! It's up to you people to do the interpreting. The fact is that people do behave oddly, and it isn't always possible to follow their train of thought when they're under stress. Our Dutchman was under stress, remember that—all those cigarettes. He was apprehensive; maybe something went very wrong with him. I can only tell you what happened, not why, or even how. For all you or I know he may well have taken the stuff deliberately, got in a panic when the vomiting brought him to, fallen asleep, and then got up the courage to take another dose in the morning.'

  'He would dissolve it himself?'

  The Professor shrugged. 'Some people hate taking tablets.'

  'And where would he get it, if he didn't normally . . . ?'

  'Has anybody checked?'

  'I don't know . . .'

  'I should have thought somebody ought to, but that's your department. Even if you .don't find out, though, what does that prove?'

  'Nothing.'

  'You don't think it was suicide, I gather?'

  'No, I don't.'

  'Well, to tell you the truth, neither do I. But we can only go on the facts, and the trouble is, Marshal, that, strictly speaking, we only have two facts: one, the rather dubious one of a hair that could have come from anywhere, unless you find a suspect; the other, the rather more intriguing one of the two aspirins—like sprinkling yourself with a glass of water before throwing yourself in the river, what?'

  They were nearing the exit again. The Professor stopped talking suddenly and flushed.

  'Pardon me. I've just realized how long I've kept you talking, and you were saying you had to go round to the police labs . . . I'm afraid they'll have gone home.'

  'Wasn't urgent,' mumbled the Marshal.

  'I do beg your pardon. I tend to go on a bit once I get going. The clockwork Professor, my daughter calls me. Well, I'll let you get on.'

  After this unwonted confidence, the Professor turned and started off down the corridor. The Marshal was too embarrassed to stop him but the porter, without even looking over his newspaper, called out, as if automatically:

  'Professor!'

  'Yes, what is it?'

  'You were going home.'

  The Marshal got out first and slipped into his car, pretending not to notice.

  'Cause of death, heart failure,' he muttered to himself as he drove back towards the city centre. In the dusky streets, lamps were lit outside restaurants where tables were set out among potted shrubs. Waiters were squeezing between them with plates held high above their heads, and woodsmoke drifted on the warm air, carrying the smell of grilled steak. Lamps were lit, too, along the river, where sky and water were fused in the same midnight blue and turquoise, and bats wheeled about under the shadow of the Santa Trinita bridge.

  'Cause of death, heart failure . . .'

  The Santa Trinita bridge is one way, but the Marshal drove along to it and stopped.

  'I'll just have a word with that young lady on the corner ..."

  He didn't get out of the car, just opened the door and called:

  'Franca! Oh!'

  She came towards him, blowing clouds of smoke like a peroxided dragon. Her fixed smile faded when she saw who it was.

  'What's up?'

  'Nothing's up. I want some information.'

  'Now then, what do I know . . . ?'

  The Marshal was sitting in the kitchen in his old slacks and vest. It had been after ten when he got home and now it was almost midnight. He had cleared the formica table after eating bread and cheese, fetched in a sheet of foolscap and a pencil from the office, and sat down, frowning. He hadn't written anything on the paper in over an hour.

  It reminded him of summer nights when he was a schoolboy. It must have been June he was thinking of because there were so many fireflies and because he was doing homework, which meant school hadn't finished. His mother used to clear the big kitchen table for him after his sister had gone to bed. He could remember very clearly the rough patch on the straw-bottomed chair that always left a red pattern on the backs of his legs, and the voice of his father and the other men coming from beyond the small, barred window, still unshuttered though it was already dark and the green fireflies winking. He would sit with his stockinged feet on the lower bar of the chair, always keeping his head down a little to look as though he were concentrating on the long piece of poetry he had been set to learn by heart. His mother would punctuate her brisk tidying and shoe-cleaning, saying 'That's right, you study; you get nowhere these days without studying. Your cousin Carmelo always studied.' Carmelo had been accepted into a seminary, his future was secure. 'You keep on studying, you don't want to spend your life slaving on the land like your father.'

  Little did she know that all the time his big eyes were following her every movement between the stove, the sink and the storeroom, while his ears strained to catch every word of the conversation of the men who sat on the wall outside, gossiping and smoking under the stars. They were too far from the village to go to the café.

  And each time his mother opened the storeroom door, he waited for the faint whiff of greek hay, mixed with the musty smell of the rabbits huddled in their cages.

  Looking back on it now, he saw his father as having been perfectly contented until the day they moved to the village after his retirement. After that he was disorientated and he soon fell, sick and died. Now it was his mother, after having agitated so long for the move, who couldn't remember where she was, and whined like a small child to be taken home.

  The fact remained that in those long-ago days he had never got much homework done, and he wasn't get
ting much done now. The lined paper was still empty.

  The rhythmic sawing of the cicadas in the Boboli Gardens behind the palace was probably contributing to his fit of nostalgia for the country. But there was nobody out there gossiping under the stars. The garden gates were locked at sunset; this was Florence. The Marshal got up to close the inner shutters and then sat down determinedly.

  'What do I know?' he asked himself again. 'I know that the Dutchman came down from Holland on the train—the Professor let that slip, so I suppose they must have found his ticket on him. He bought some food... did he go anywhere else before the flat? I need a train timetable ... I need to see that ticket. If I'd any concrete evidence to offer I could ring the Lieutenant and he'd tell me . . . but I haven't.

  'Anyway, if by any chance he picked a woman up on his way from the station, Franca will let me know tomorrow. Myself, I doubt it. So, he goes to the flat and eats alone. There was only one plate, I remember that. Then he has coffee. The woman must have been with him then... about eight, according to Signora Giusti. Did she make the coffee while he was still eating, I wonder? It wasn't her • . . Well, what if he was mistaken, or didn't want to believe it? That's not the same as lying. The woman goes away after a quarrel—what about? Don't know. Maybe he falls asleep. At any rate, before too long he starts vomiting, loses consciousness and then wakes up choking, scrabbles through the medicine cabinet—no, I forgot, he took some aspirin . . . with the coffee, I suppose, and he'd been smoking all the time . . . and yet, he did eat, after all, so even if he was anxious he couldn't have been exactly panic-stricken, or expecting to meet a dangerous enemy. Expecting someone, though . . .

  'After cutting himself and trying to stop the bleeding, he goes to the kitchen and messes with coffee, can't cope, falls asleep . . . Next day he wakes, makes for the sink, maybe to vomit, finds the remains of the other coffee and drinks it . . . flavoured with figs, what an idea! Then where does he go? To the bedroom . . . the other rooms seemed untouched, and he was bleeding, would have bled on all those white dustsheets ... to the bedroom, then. Why? To go to bed? No, he was trying to keep awake. Why, then? He had keys in his hand, but I heard one of the Lieutenant's men saying they weren't the keys of that flat. They could have been the keys of his house in Amsterdam, but what would he want with those?

  'There must have been a third set then . . . He always left me his keys so that . . .

  'The keys to Signora Giusti's flat! She has his keys, so why not? It was the obvious place to go for help but he probably had no clear idea of what time it was and he knew that unless the social worker had been, she wouldn't be able to get out of bed and let him in. If they turned out to be Signora Giusti's keys and he had been going for help, surely that proved that he didn't want to die?'

  It didn't, of course, prove that he hadn't wanted to die the night before. People who commit suicide with sleeping pills expect to die quietly in their sleep, not to go through what he'd gone through.

  Even so, the Marshal wrote something on the sheet of foolscap: the word 'keys'. He drew a circle round it and looked at it.

  My dear Marshal. . . the fact is that people do behave oddly-and it isn't always possible . . .

  It didn't prove anything, anything at all. Even though he was alone in his own kitchen, the Marshal blushed with shame and embarrassment. If a man like the Professor, an educated man, practically a genius, who could reconstruct a man's life from a few marks, was unwilling to commit himself about whether it was suicide, who was he to insist . . .

  A whole army of competent, educated people rose up in the Marshal's imagination . . . the Lieutenant, young, yes, but he had studied at the Liceo, had done his officer training and knew foreign languages, he could telephone to Amsterdam if he needed to; he had men at his disposal for checking every detail, not to mention computers. He could talk to the Substitute Prosecutor or Professor Forli as one educated man to another. He didn't sit at the kitchen table with a bit of paper and a pencil, after bumbling around the city all day in a Fiat so small you could hardly get in it and a door that shut only if you banged it three or four times.

  The word 'keys' stared up at him mockingly. Surely, the first thing you were supposed to find was a motive, or something like that? And how could he find out whether anyone benefited from the Dutchman's death? He couldn't. He had no right to. The Lieutenant was an officer, while he ... he was just a guard, he had no business . . .

  Why had the Dutchman come to Florence in the first place? A business trip ... to see whom?

  There he went again! And it was none of his business. He wasn't competent . . .

  A fly lit on the formica table and started to feed on a crumb that the Marshal's hurried wiping had left behind. Squalid. His glass and plate were still in the sink, dirty. Slapping heavily but uselessly at the fly in his distress, he got up and began rinsing his crockery. Then he wiped the table again, excessively. If his wife were here at least there wouldn't be this to upset him on top of everything else . . . he hated squalor; it stopped him from thinking in peace.

  If you could call it thinking . . .

  The sheet of paper lay there with 'keys' and the pointless ring round it that tried to give the word more importance than it had.

  'You're ignorant, that's what. Ignorant . . .'

  He tossed the paper into the rubbish bin, switched out the light and went through the living-room and out to the office to switch the phone through to his bedroom. Automatically, he flicked on the close-circuit television for a moment to check the entrance. A laurel hedge and a stretch of gravel, pale in the moonlight . . . the back fenders of his little car, the van and the jeep. He switched off. There was no sound from upstairs; Gino's radio had been switched off an hour ago. They must all be asleep. Before turning out the light he noticed a little stack of matchboxes and a pile of loose change next to the telephone. It took him a few moments to register what they meant, then he picked them up and switched out the light.

  'Ignorant,' he repeated on his way to the bedroom, thinking of the humble Gino who took pleasure in doing small things for other people, readily admitting that he had no brains. He did nothing but good in the world whereas somebody as presumptuous as . . .

  You know, murderers don't go round attacking people with sleeping pills . . .

  The Lieutenant could have given him a rocket for his cheek, and yet he didn't. He had been quite kind. Self-controlled. An officer and an educated man.

  'She was right, was my mother,' he told himself as he cleaned his teeth, scowling at himself. 'She was absolutely right . . .'

  In bed, he lay a moment looking at the photograph of two plump little boys that stood on the chest of drawers opposite, before switching out the light.

  'The thing is,' he remarked to his absent wife as he turned over and sank into the pillows, 'I feel as if I would have liked him. He was well off and yet he still worked with his hands ... a craftsman . . . that's what I would have liked to be if I'd had any talent for it . . . and he didn't forget the old lady who'd looked after him when his mother died. There aren't many like that, these days. And yet, I really don't know anything about him, at all . . .'

  CHAPTER 5

  'So you thought you'd ask me—the same as your friend who came yesterday. You thought I was the one who knew him better than anyone, and it's true that I do. He was born in this building, and for a few years after his mother died I was the only mother he had, his mammina.'

  'Somebody . . . somebody was here yesterday?'

  'You know as well as I do. The officer you sent for that day. He came back here yesterday, asking questions. Just before lunch it was . . .'

  So the Marshal had made some impression on. the young Lieutenant, after all. Though perhaps he had been of the same opinion all along, and had only wanted encouragement. Signora Giusti was chuckling wickedly among her cushions.

  'I don't mind saying there are things I'd tell you that I wouldn't tell a young whippersnapper like that — I don't mean him any ill, but fancy c
oming to see an old lady like me empty-handed.'

  The Marshal's offering, a little cardboard tray of profiteroles with three colours of icing, lay open on the occasional table between them, its gold and white paper wrapping and yellow ribbons strewn over the telephone.

  'I've always had a sweet tooth, I'll admit . . .'

  The tiny, soft-boned hand reached out to the tray. 'And these days I can manage to eat so few things—look! Look at that! It's the same every morning.'

  A rug was being shaken from the window below. Signora Giusti leaned forward until her forehead was touching the glass, and counted the billows of dust that floated out over the gloomy courtyard.

  'Three, four, five, six! And she calls that clean! I'd have fired her the first day but that old witch downstairs has money to burn. She's only seventy, you know, but she claims to have a bad leg that stops her ever coming up here to see me. Does she think I don't see her from my bedroom window, hobbling up Via Romana? And do you know where she's going? The cinema, that's where! But her leg's too bad for her to come up two flights of stairs and spend an hour with me—so how is it she can manage to go up and down the six flights to her own flat? Who does she think she is, that's what I'd like to know! Does she think that when my husband was alive I'd have even thought of inviting a woman like her into my home? I've told her so, too. Oh, if you'd seen my drawing-room then J . . and now it's empty . . . even the carpets have gone, and they were Persian and good ones, too. Who does she think she is, just because she can afford a cleaner for two hours a day—and one who doesn't even clean properly—not that those rugs are worth anything, you can see that from here. Well, she needn't think I want her. I was doing her a favour, asking her up here, but people don't realize, they don't realize . . .'