The King of the Rainy Country (20 page)

Did Anne-Marie know Biarritz well? Did she know where Canisius would be staying? What his movements were, what his
habits were? What sort of plan was she making, there somewhere ahead of him in the rented Opel?

*

He got in around one in the morning, and felt fairly safe. He had hoped originally to be there by ten the previous night but before he was past Dijon he had known this would be impossible. He parked the auto in a quiet spot, found to his relief that the early-morning temperature in Biarritz was some six degrees higher than it had been in the mountains, and tapped his forehead four times. He would be awake at four.

Coffee in the Station Buffet – it was like Innsbruck all over again, or Chamonix. This was a story of coffee in the early mornings in station buffets; Van der Valk, who had been a policeman for nearly twenty years, had known many more of those stories. He felt horribly middle-aged, but there were points in being professional. He had reached forty without getting shot, and that was more than James Bond had succeeded in doing!

Still, the station buffet was like a leitmotiv in Wagner – it meant, he rather thought, drama boiling up not far away.

He struck up a variety of casual acquaintances in the station, among others a Customs man, who told him about the Spanish frontier – the river Bidassoa! One didn't get away from the Marshals; if he had ever heard of the Bidassoa, it was because of Soult in Spain in 1813! He found the bookstall woman too, and though her stall was not yet open she had got some parcels to unpack, and some Paris papers off the night train to Irun, and she let him have a Michelin which he studied carefully. He did a good deal of driving around in the pale early sunlight, and decided that Biarritz was a nice place. Arlette would like it, here. Be a fine place for a holiday, though the prices, even out of season, would make her shudder. Still, they weren't – much – higher than in her precious Department of the Var.

He had a wash, a comfortable shave, drenched himself in eau-de-cologne, changed his slept-in suit, and felt almost human,
human enough to risk the early morning snootiness of the Prince de Galles's reception desk.

‘I'm afraid that Mr Canisius is not yet awake.'

‘When's he have his breakfast sent up?' The pale creature consulted the Spirit of Tact, balanced the results against the cherished principle of being as Rude as you Dare to Unknown Persons, and reached languidly for one of his telephones.

‘Eight o'clock.'

‘Five to now. Give him just a teeny buzz and tell him my name.'

With reluctance, this was done, in a hushed tone of noiseless respect.

‘Mr Canisius asks you to be good enough to wait ten minutes. A page will take you.'

‘Thank you, young man,' said Van der Valk in the tones of the Dowager Duchess.

A thin elegant floor-waiter – like all floor-waiters he looked a great deal more distinguished than the guests did – was wheeling out a trolley. There was a tinkle of silver and porcelain going on, a smell of hot chocolate – Madame de Sévigné – a whiff of aftershave – Yardley lavender – and overall that indefinable hotel smell of old carpets. Mr Canisius, cosseted and comfortable, was breaking bread on his little balcony, in a nervous-looking way, as though a paper snake on a spring might suddenly come whizzing out. Van der Valk, who had noticed that all foreigners in France do this, probably frightened of getting crumbs on the carpet, thought of Raymond Chandler, who described himself as being yes, extremely tough, even known to have broken a Vienna roll with his bare hands.

Like all business men, Mr Canisius looked utterly indecent in pyjamas, though they were a restrained maroon colour, with edgings of thin silver cord, quite correct. He was also considerably too grand to stand up or shake hands with policemen at breakfast, but he nodded amicably, patted his lip with a fringed napkin, and said ‘Quite a surprise. How are you?' in his soft milky voice.

‘Tired.'

‘Sit down. Have you had breakfast?' Van der Valk sat in a
rococo cane rocker with buttoned cushions and looked out at the expensive view across the Avenue de I'Impératrice to the lighthouse.

‘Yes thanks.'

‘But how did you know I was here?'

‘Your secretary told me.' A slight frown disturbed the milky surface.

‘However, don't be hard on him; I had to twist his arm.'

‘Yes – there is some property of the company's in Spain, and this is quite an old haunt of mine. So I combine a little necessary supervision with a little fresh air and exercise. Golf, you know.'

‘Ah yes. He mentioned that you had business in Spain, but no more.' Canisius nodded approval of this discretion.

‘We have certain investments in housing along the coast. As you probably know, flats and bungalows there have had a spectacular success with the European public. I like to keep an eye on the building projects. In fact I will have to ask you to excuse me very shortly, since I have arranged with one or two of my associates to pay a little visit this morning.'

‘Oh, it can wait till you get back,' said Van der Valk. ‘Unless you happen to be late coming back.'

‘By no means. It is about a hundred kilometres and we shall be lunching there, but I will be back at around three this afternoon. You wish to give me all the details?'

‘Yes. It is a fairly complex business and I thought it right to come and see you personally, straight away.'

‘Excellent, excellent. I am most appreciative, believe me, of the zeal you have showed throughout this unhappy business. Pity that you weren't in time to prevent that very sad death.' There was something about these words, mouthed by a business man in maroon pyjamas drinking cocoa, that irritated Van der Valk.

‘The truth about the very sad death will not appear in the written report I will make to my superiors.'

‘You're being rather enigmatic. I'm afraid that I know nothing but the bare fact of the death, and that I only learned in quite a roundabout way from the police in Paris.'

‘Oh there's nothing at all doubtful about the death itself. That's perfectly plain sailing from the administrative angle. Indeed the authorities there in Strasbourg cut the formalities to a minimum in order to spare unnecessary pain to the girl's parents.'

‘Ah, of course – I recall your telling me about this girl – a German girl?'

‘Quite right. For similar reasons, I left a variety of things unsaid in my dealings with the police, and I will do the same in my own report at home. That is why I thought it better to have a conversation with you before going back to Amsterdam.'

‘Now I begin to follow.' Mr Canisius had finished breakfast. He was in less of a hurry now to get rid of Van der Valk. He took a Super Maden from a square yellow box and lit it with an elegant waft of delicate Egyptian tobacco that went well with the hotel smell.

‘I am very pleased,' he went on carefully, ‘that you have shown the very qualities of discretion that were needed. If the press had chosen to make a drama of this affair it might have been most unfortunate.'

‘I'm only a policeman, and I have not very much experience of millionaires. I've seen quite a bit of Mrs Marschal.'

‘Very sensitive, highly-strung woman,' said Canisius gravely. ‘You had to break the news to her, of course – a most disagreeable duty, I'm afraid. She took it badly?'

‘She was quite calm. But she behaved oddly.'

‘I see it all,' Canisius broke into a warm, friendly smile. ‘She feels that her husband's death should be blamed on someone, isn't that it?' He had got up and was walking about with a kind of jerky animation. ‘Quite possibly she has made meaning hints as to some malign influence I had upon her husband, who I'm afraid had rather a weak character. Something like that, hey?' He waved his cigarette at Van der Valk in quite a roguish way.

‘Yes, various remarks have been made. Nothing substantial.'

‘Well well, that's all quite easily explained. An explanation is certainly due you after all the pains you have taken, and one must certainly be given you. I shall have to let you into a few confidences.

However, unfortunately – most unfortunately – that will have to wait a little. Perhaps this evening. Yes, this evening, since you cannot be kept hanging round here, can you, though Biarritz is quite an agreeable spot, what? Now why don't you pass a quiet day here – all your expenses continue to fall to my charge, naturally, and may I suggest then that you come to dinner with me here tonight – would eight o'clock suit you? – and I'll straighten all this out, and then you can go back to Amsterdam and write your report, because I'll tell you quite frankly that your superior officer has no more information than you had yourself at the start of this. Dear dear, I had no reason to believe that it would have a tragic end, though of course I was alive to the possibility of something unbalanced. That was why I chose a responsible police officer, and not one of these private agents, persons with little sense of responsibility. Interested in nothing but the amount of money they can succeed in making for themselves. I'm delighted, simply delighted, at your acumen and tact. But yes, we'll discuss all that this evening, shall we?' He had gone milky again.

‘Sure.' I hope we can both of us count on this evening appointment, thought Van der Valk.

‘Now I'm afraid I must interrupt this, interesting though it is, since my car will be waiting for me in just half an hour. This evening then? Perhaps seven thirty, in the bar here? Splendid, splendid.'

Van der Valk, who hated lifts, walked down two broad flights of ambassadorial stairway contentedly. He wasn't sure that splendid was the right word. But Mr Canisius had talked too much. From viewing Van der Valk's sudden appearance in Biarritz with a lack of enthusiasm he had suddenly become that gentleman's very closest friend. Endearing of him.

*

He walked about the public rooms with nonchalance, staring a good deal out of the windows, amusedly aware that an underporter was keeping an eye on him just in case he was planning a raid on some old biddy's jewels. There was no sign of Anne-Marie, nor of
a grey Opel. Was he imagining the whole thing? Had he been strung up by fatigue and the dramatic performances of the Marschal family into imagining a romantic curtain to the third act? That was quite an easy conclusion to reach, but he did not think it was the right one. Tired as he was he had still two sides to his head, he hoped.

Jean-Claude Marschal was the northern type he had thought about that night and morning walking round Innsbruck, the theatrical type, who commits crimes, such as suicide, theft-of-a-government-helicopter, or abduction-of-a-minor-of-the-female-sex with a flourish and a bow to the audience. Anne-Marie was not like that at all; lying in wait for somebody with a gun was no stranger to her than it was to a Corsican farmer whose sister-in-law has an assignation with the farmer-over-the-hill's Lothario of a son. There was nothing, he had thought and still thought, intrinsically improbable about this at all, though it was not an idea that would occur to a Dutch policeman.

There was no need for her to hang about a hotel entrance waiting for Canisius to show himself. She almost certainly knew Biarritz well, and might also know all about Canisius' business there: presumably there was no secret about the little towers of beach apartments. (They were very big, but looked little, he thought, because they looked so flimsy – they were invariably the kind of architecture you get when you build a tower of matches laid across each other at right angles.) Quite the contrary, those things were a sure-fire moneyspinner for the Sopexique; they sold like icecreams on a hot day at the zoo. It was possible that once knowing that Canisius was in Biarritz she would know perfectly well he would travel along the road leading to the border and Irun.

Knowledge like that made this one of the easiest kinds of assassination going, as everybody in the world knows since the day Mr Kennedy took a ride in an open auto through Dallas. Nor was there anything odd about a woman getting the idea. A rifle, one tends to think, is essentially a man's weapon, but any woman can learn to shoot, once she is not afraid of the gun. It is simply a question of the right position, uncramped and comfortable, and
then looking along the sights: lying down, a woman can shoot as well as a man can. A highpowered rifle has a big kick-up from the recoil – but that is after the shot. At a range of say one hundred metres, and with a slow-moving target, one shot would be all that was needed, with a bullet that size. It would be similar enough to shooting with the old Lee-Enfield of Van der Valk's army days; at three hundred metres the rawest recruit learned in a day to bang down a target four foot square. Which meant a man at one hundred.

Anne-Marie, an ex ski-champion, was not going to be either scared of the bang or disconcerted at any technical difficulty – loading the thing, adjusting the sight, getting the safety off. He tried to remember whether the rifle had had a telescopic sight.

Canisius coming out of a hotel door would make an ideal target. But there was no square or anything with handy windows; opposite the Prince de Galles was nothing except the pompous boulevard and the still silky Atlantic: no perspective and no cover.

Somewhere along the road, where there were little hills, patches of greenery and shrubbery, clumps of trees …? But the auto would be running at fifty kilometres an hour. Unless one was dead in line, the sights nearly parallel to the road, the shot was impossible: it would be like trying to shoot a partridge with a twenty-two. Where then would the auto slow down? At the frontier, obviously, to show the papers, but he had understood, from his acquaintance in the customs with whom he had gossiped at the station that morning, that the frontier was in Hendaye, where the National Ten ran straight out of the little town across the bridge over the Bidassoa slap into Spain. It would be tricky to find cover there, too, but he would see; he intended to be close by when Canisius went sailing over that bridge. If Anne-Marie saw him, and realized he had guessed her move, she would, at least, be disconcerted. She might not be put off, but the bare fact of seeing him would be grit in the wheels: it might, for instance, easily spoil her aim.