Double-Barrel (20 page)

‘Two or three, I think. Letters get into my brief-case – people who think that by writing a personal letter to my home they will somehow get a more favourable reaction. Begging letters, mostly. Miss Burger deals with them. Occasionally a genuine personal letter has got mixed up with those, probably because it had a typewritten envelope or some such reason.'

‘Has anything of the sort ever happened that bothered you – I mean some item of news or information that was really no concern of anyone bar you. Of course I realize that it would only reach Miss Burger and go no further.'

‘On that account I would have no worry – she's discretion itself. I do recall once a letter that I'd picked up on my way to work and had stuffed in my pocket. It came inadvertently under her eye and caused me, I admit, some slight embarrassment. But directly she read the first lines and realized its
personal import she handed it straight back to me, apologizing profusely.'

‘Have you any objection to telling me what was in it?'

‘You're not suspecting Miss Burger, are you?'

‘No no, just a cross-check.'

‘Well,' he hemmed, ‘it was a letter from a doctor – a medical matter – concerning only myself – I'm afraid that's all I can tell you.'

‘No matter.'

‘If you're concerned whether Miss Burger could have discovered your identity, I can reassure you. I have a “for my eyes only” file – the correspondence relative to your purpose here went in that.'

‘That does indeed reassure me.'

‘Oh, I dare say Miss Burger has a certain curiosity about your doings. But she's not only well trained – she has a very strongly developed conscience.'

‘Conscience as a worker?'

‘Not only conscientious – that's not so rare after all in public servants – she has a tremendous sense of right and wrong; that's what makes my trust in her considerable.'

‘She's rather pretty.'

‘She's not unattractive. I suppose I'm so used to her I hardly notice.'

‘Odd that she hasn't married.'

‘She's devoted practically her whole life to public work.'

I concluded that it would be unfair to suspect the burgomaster of pinching Miss Burger's bottom.

On my way out I saw the wife hovering. She came out on to the step with me, leaving the porch light out and almost closing the front door.

‘He has no idea at all,' I said carefully. ‘Just behave normally with him.'

‘That's one relief, at least.'

‘The thing that our author knows about your husband – was it personal only to him, or did it concern you as well?'

Her voice in the dimness was uncomfortable.

‘Er – just him. Myself only indirectly – I can't tell you, I'm afraid.'

‘No matter. Just one query more and I'll ask no further. Was it anything that would concern a doctor?'

‘No.' That was that ruled out.

‘Good night, Madame.'

And now home.

Arlette was waiting for me. I have only once seen her so pinched and tense: an occasion when I was four hours late on a night when she knew I was carrying a gun; a thing I do maybe once a year. Contrary to belief, plain-clothes policemen have ordinarily no right to carry weapons.

‘But what's the matter? I'm not very late. The garage was very slow.'

She did not speak, but with a nervous shudder held out a plain white envelope.

I was delighted. Yes, delighted. Never have I been so pleased.

‘Is this what I think it is?'

‘Yes.'

‘When did it come? And how?'

‘Through the letter-box. But I don't know when. It's been dark an hour. People put things in the box all the time. Children with pamphlets from shops; bargains, advertisements; sometimes two or three together.'

‘Anything else come?'

‘Like I say, just pamphlets.'

‘Did you keep them?'

‘Why should I? I never do. You want them? In the bin in the kitchen.'

I scrabbled. Yes, the local supermarket, with a banner headline about cheap vermouth and tuppence off oatmeal, biscuits and condensed milk till Saturday. A printed postcard inviting us to write for free details of extraordinarily cheap sewing machines. A little mimeographed circular reminded us that a very superior doctor of divinity would address interested persons next Tuesday at seven p.m. Subject, ‘The Ecumenical Survival'.

Mm.

The envelope was quite good quality, plain, unaddressed, had been sealed. I wondered whether it was worth while to run chemical tests on it.

‘I half guessed,' said Arlette miserably. ‘When I read it …' A violent shudder.

‘It's aimed at you?' Curious, very curious – when all the other women had been local.

‘As far as I can see at both of us. Venomously indiscriminate.'

I sat down in the living-room and drew the paper out slowly.

‘Bring both of us a drink. Just make sure the curtains are shut properly.'

‘I thought of that too,' bitterly. Fright, shock, disgust. She wasn't over it by any means; she poured two glasses of port and spilt some. However, the policeman had to come in front of the husband. Sorry, Arlette.

It was all I had wished, had longed for. And more. ‘The one of you is no better than the other. Hypocrites. An official from the ministry – nosing in our affairs, looking down at us because we are plain honest people. How do you have the nerve to bring a woman with you? – I should like to see her marriage papers.

‘Foreign harlot – why don't you go back to whatever brothel in Paris you came out of? The women here are decent God-fearing people. They know that God watches
them. God was watching you. Seeing a woman behave like that in our town.

‘You call yourself a public servant. Pervert, abandoned, vicious. I have written to the ministry in The Hague to denounce you to your superiors. Holland is utterly sunk in sin. But we know here what it is we have to fight. Get out and take your prostitute with you.'

No spelling mistakes, and careful punctuation. Even a question mark had been carefully clipped and inserted. I wanted to jump about with enjoyment but I was sorry for Arlette. I gave her a broad smile.

‘Very tame after a few I've had. I'm unhappy that you had to see it first – but, you know, this was all I needed.'

She drank some port and tried to grin back. ‘Last night when I got silly and did idiotic tricks with my suspender belt. I got seen – my god, darling. Horrible.'

‘Listen to me. This is not the usual kind of letter, but it's clearly by the same writer. This is the ordinary three-a-penny abusive kind, and a complete give-away. She just couldn't resist the temptation to take a chance, wanting to show how clever she was. It'll hang her.'

‘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.'

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.