Double-Barrel (15 page)

‘Now I'm not following.'

‘You could say you disliked progress because it attacks religion, basic political beliefs, the whole foundation of their ethics. The government is too Catholic for their taste.'

‘You're losing me altogether now.'

‘Their big political party here – it's called Anti-Revolutionary. Very odd-sounding to us today, but in the nineteenth century there was great strength behind it, and here there still is. Anti-liberal, anti-Catholic. The Papists are the Scarlet Woman, the schools spread false doctrine – they were opposed to all the principles of the Revolution. To them universal education and giving Catholics the vote was disastrous – practically the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Now a liberal minister would be seen as attacking them in the very sanctuary, and even the burgomaster, who is Anti-Rev himself, as well as orthodox Protestant, could be seen as the willing tool of the wicked politicians. Perhaps they see all this modernization as a corruption and a victory for the Great Beast of Rome.'

‘You're exaggerating.'

‘I've no idea whether I am or not.'

Arlette heaved a deep sigh and went over to the gramophone.

‘Back to the eighteenth century,' she muttered, getting out her album of
Figaro
.' This is too complicated for me.'

‘They think the same, maybe,' I said, lighting a cigar. ‘Before the Revolution and those horrible Frenchmen, life was much more their cup of tea.'

‘What, aristocratic government?'

‘Why not? Man knew his place in the world. Man and God worked together for salvation, and each man could attain grace through struggle. Whereas, with the Revolution, they lost their grip on God, and that worried them all dreadfully.' I relapsed into scribbling; Arlette heaved another deep sigh and started on the vegetables for her soup.

Between Act One and Act Two we had dinner – Hamburg steak, not really very eighteenth century, but nice. I fell into a sort of trance while Arlette did the washing-up. Halfway through Act Two – all the tremendous goings-on in Countess Almaviva's bedroom – I found myself just staring at the curtain of sound.

‘I'm falling too deep into my theories,' I said at the end of the record. ‘I'm going over to pick up that report – that, anyway, is my pretext. I don't think the report will tell me anything much, but I want a go at Madame Burgomaster. I probably won't be more than an hour or so.'

The maid opened the door; I put on the friendly open smile of men with genuine Persian rugs to sell, made just this last week in Middlesbrough-on-Tees.

‘Van der Valk is my name. Ask Madame to be so good as to spare me a moment.'

‘Oh, I have a packet she told me to give you if you came – I think she's busy.'

‘Ask her just the same.'

The girl went off obediently, but was back directly.

‘I'm afraid she can't spare the time,' in a saucy tone.

I beamed at her – I had already marched in three steps. ‘Ah. Luckily I have plenty of time. I'll just wait till she's less busy – nice and warm it is here.' She wouldn't keep me waiting, I thought. She must know – or at least have a strong notion who I was. However good my alias, however cautious my behaviour had hitherto been, I couldn't nose around indefinitely without being rumbled. Not in private houses.

Still, I thought, it was time to come out of the shell a bit. As I had told the burgomaster, I couldn't just sit observing
for an eternity. Neither the taxpayer nor the Procureur-Général would stand for that. Time for Van der Valk to show a little action.

Sure enough, there she came, rather white around the nose too. Full of indignation. Now what had she to get indignant about?

I had a feeling that it wasn't only indignation. Fear there too. I hadn't done anything to make her frightened.

‘My husband's at his office. He gave me a report or something at lunch-time – or so he called it – to be left in your hands if you called. I see you have it; I cannot imagine why you should think it necessary to bother me further.'

She was eyeing the manila envelope in my hand as though it were the famous packet that, in fiction, is deposited in the litter basket for the blackmailer – the big wad of used tens and twenties. I put the envelope in my inner pocket – she interested me greatly.

‘I think we'd better continue this conversation under four eyes only.' I motioned towards the living-room; she followed, stickily.

I had added several good examples to my collection of living-rooms since coming to Drente; I am bitten by them the way people are bitten by stamps or butterflies. This story, like many others, was a story of living-rooms, lived or unlived. Excellent example here of genus provincial grandeur; species higher functionary.

It was a big room, L-shaped, a pleasant room, bright and sparkling, and it illustrated well, I thought, the species. Coming in, formally, from the hall, it was dead and dry as the bones of Merovingian kings. Low coffee-table in front of the window, with a tall vase of desiccated pampas grass. In the place of honour on the wall, large tinted photograph: reigning monarch and consort, much bedizened with stars on the bosom, sashes and epaulettes, not a hair out of place, glazed stares and a general look of having eaten too much Christmas pudding. On the hearth, sawed birch logs that had
been carefully dusted, and on either side a neat little electric radiator. Pale pastel rugs; beige, pink and almond green. Large sofa and arm-chairs upholstered in a most expensive and grandiose stuff – cut velvet, I thought; leaf green where cut and bottle green where not cut – acanthus-leaf pattern. All decorated with silvery green satin cushions plumped out like a poulterer's turkeys. All the seams of sofas, chairs and cushions were bound with silver cord, with flourishes and cloverleaf hitches and, at the four corners of the sofa, ending in resplendent silver tassels. Must have cost a year of my income and I would not even have dared sit in it in the morning-coat I hired from Moss Bros for Ascot. On the coffee-table was a presentation silver tray with a cut-glass decanter and six cut-glass whatnots designed to make the grocer's port taste like the Cockburn twenty-seven.

I hurried past all this holding my breath, noting in passing a glassed bookcase with chaste blue curtains, undoubtedly holding bound company reports and the volumes of
Punch
between 1867 and 1882.

Getting round the corner was a pleasant surprise; here the chairs were sat in, the television set looked at, there were engravings on the wall of views of The Hague, and the burgomaster had pipes in a rack. Wifey had magazines and a Japanese lacquer-work sewing-table with nests of cunning little drawers. Over the arms of chairs were little bronze ash-trays on broad leather straps, more ash-trays on the table – the ones that mustn't be used, Limoges enamel – and a vase of early daffodils. There was still a strong feeling that dogs and policemen were not permitted, but it was at least human.

I wasn't asked to sit down.

‘And what, Mr van der Valk, can you have to say to me that is private – and what, I wonder, gives you the right to order me about in my house?'

‘A burgomaster, Madame, is an important state functionary.
No questionable interpretation can ever be put on his actions, or his family's; that is self-evident.'

‘I fail to see … this impertinence …'

‘If it were ever suggested – malicious tongues are never lacking – that there were some irregularity, misuse of municipal funds, anything you like – he can – he must – be able to disprove it openly and at once. Isn't it so? And of course he can; everything is on paper. His private life must also be above damaging insinuation. If anybody makes such remarks about an ordinary citizen he can be sued for slander, but suppose a whispering campaign were started, underhand, against a high functionary in public service, it would be difficult to combat. Disregard a whisper and that is seen as a tacit admission; deny it and you simply draw attention to there being, possibly, something that needs denying. A classic dilemma.'

‘All very interesting. I must ask you to excuse me now.'

‘His wife does all she can to help, of course. Superior functionaries sometimes get – one of the thorns on their rose-bush – anonymous, often vulgar, generally illiterate letters. Mostly abusive complaint from some rather simple person with a fancied grievance. You, now, have probably had similar experiences.'

‘Oh my God,' she said.

‘Luckily there are people whose job it is to help.'

I had been wondering why the woman was acting so strangely. I had even wondered for a moment whether I had accidentally stumbled on something even more interesting than another person who had had letters. She turned the tables on me rather neatly.

‘Is it you who wrote?' she asked in a terrified whisper.

I was floored. I had had to pick my way, using very pompous formal phrases, ready to cover up if I saw I was going wrong. And here I had hit a bull's-eye – and been hit a smartish crack in my own bull's-eye. Van der Valk bereft of speech – extremely comic, thinking himself so clever.

‘You mean you don't know who I am?'

‘No – I mean I've seen you making those secretive calls on my husband.'

‘You thought I was squeezing money out of him?'

‘I don't know what I thought.'

‘Didn't he tell you, then?'

‘He said it was confidential.'

‘I am an inspector of police, trying to sort out this rather nasty little affair. It is true that my identity was kept confidential, that I am supposed to be a civil servant making a survey. I have been working with your husband – that is the meaning of these private interviews that burned you. You thought I was blackmailing him …'

‘He's been very worried and silent.'

‘Ah. He's concerned about his administration, and his town – his folk. He's done a great deal for this place, and he cannot understand why some people, apparently, should take that amiss. You've shown him the letters?'

‘I threw them all down the lavatory and I've never shown them or mentioned them. I didn't know – I thought it best to behave as though I hadn't had them.'

‘What did they say?'

‘That my husband and I were threatened with a dreadful scandal, that he would lose his position, that – this person – would help, could stop it all, if I did what he told me.'

‘And what was it you had to do?'

‘It was never put clearly. But – uh – immorality. I – I knew he must be not – not normal.'

‘You know – or don't you? – that there have been other letters?'

‘Some of the suggestions – I have been at my wits' end with worry. My husband has never mentioned it, but I have heard rumours that there have been other letters of this kind. I have even heard it said that that was why Mrs Reinders killed herself – she was supposed to have taken an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.'

‘You knew her?'

‘Not personally. I've met her – oh, I'm terribly sorry; please do sit down – at various functions and parties. She was quite a pleasant woman, a little nervous and abrupt.'

‘Church functions?'

‘No, I don't think so; we didn't belong to the same church.'

‘You're a local woman, aren't you?'

‘Well, I come from Friesland – that hardly counts as local. From the north, at least. My husband comes from Utrecht.'

‘Why did you think I had written these letters?'

‘But how did you know I had had any?'

‘I didn't. I guessed something of the sort. Your behaviour arrested my attention.' Delightful police language. Arresting something, even if only attention. ‘You have to realize that I've been on the look-out for this kind of thing. I have to – you see, people have not admitted that they have had letters. You should have told the police.'

‘Yes. I do see,' shamefaced.

‘In what sort of way are the letters written?'

‘Newsprint cut out and stuck on paper.'

‘No, I mean the kind of language, the way of speaking.'

I didn't think she was acting. Her face was very pink still; her forehead puckered up with anxious concentration. She looked like a schoolgirl who has to answer a tricky question in front of the class. She had quite lost the glossy self-possession of the burgomaster's wife, and her countrified, innocent look was showing through.

‘They sound knowing in a horrible sneaky manner, and they kind of offer to protect me, in a beastly slimy way.' She had even slipped back into the schoolgirl vocabulary.

‘It's a pity you haven't kept them.'

‘I wouldn't have such filthy things in my house.'

‘They're sexy, are they?'

Terrific blush.

‘Well, in a certain way, yes, rather.'

‘What way do they sound knowing?'

‘Well, saying things about my husband that nobody would know – as a sort of proof that there were other things he knew.'

‘For instance?'

She looked mulish. She wasn't going to tell me.

‘Details – of a conversation – a private one, between my husband and myself.'

Now what did that mean? Was that a euphemism for some bedtime chat? Or did it mean that the listening apparatus was cropping up again? That thing was a pest; I didn't like it at all.

‘Did it say, “I am God; I see and hear everything.” Words to that effect?' I am especially fond of the phrase ‘words to that effect'. Never did so short a phrase contain so much.

‘Yes.'

‘I'll have to decide what I can do. I can protect both you and your husband, so don't worry. Do nothing. But keep any letters you may get. Don't tell your husband; I don't see any need to worry him. I'm here twice a week to keep him informed on my researches, so you can always get hold of me.'

‘I see now.' Her face had lit up as though she were allowed to go to the circus after all. ‘I thought you were somebody horrible.'