The King of the Rainy Country (16 page)

‘I've got to ring this Canisius again anyway,' said Van der Valk, ‘I'll see whether he can shed any light. I imagine the death will complicate things in some way, because it must be the reason they were so anxious to have Marschal traced in a hurry. Might have some bearing on the administration of the business. My boss back in Amsterdam must have been given a pretty strong reason to send me off after the man the way he did. Naturally he didn't tell me – I'm only a bum inspector of police. Mine not to reason why.'

Wollek smiled slowly.

‘Prefects enjoy sending the police on that kind of damfool errand – with a few hints that the Ministry of the Interior will notice how smartly action is taken.'

Van der Valk made a sour face.

‘I've always been good and sure there was more to all this than anyone saw fit to tell me,' with disgust. ‘I suppose I might as well make this phone call – they'll be here from Germany in another hour. Can I use your phone again?'

The secretary in Amsterdam was abominably suave.

‘Ah, Mr Van der Valk. Thank you so much for ringing. We have been in touch with Mr Canisius since you called. Unfortunately – most unfortunately – he is tied at present to some quite pressing business commitments. He asks me to convey to you his gratitude, and to assure you again – of course he realizes that it is quite unnecessary – of his confidence in your discretion and ability. He will be back in Amsterdam on Monday. Perhaps you could be so good as to make personal contact with him then.'

Van der Valk was irritated by all this creaminess.

‘Where is he, exactly? This is a situation that needs his immediate attention.'

‘Oh he realizes that: please reassure yourself. He particularly impressed upon me to be sure to make it clear that he quite understood how things stood, shall I say?' The suavity now had an unpleasant knowingness about it. Van der Valk took the receiver away from his ear and shook it angrily.

‘Where is he? – just tell me that. Is he is Paris?'

‘Mr Canisius has business in Spain,' said the secretary very
primly. Van der Valk felt veins in his forehead swelling. He forgot to speak French, and lapsed into an earthy Amsterdam Dutch.

‘Look, Mr Buy-and-Sell, you tell me where I can get hold of Canisius if I need him or I can promise you faithfully that next week you'll be signing on at the Labour Exchange. Police business – you hear?'

‘Mr Canisius generally stays on these occasions at the Prince de Galles in Biarritz,' very stiff now, and filled with distaste for badly-brought-up policemen. Mr Wollek, arms folded, had a faint smile.

‘Pen-pusher,' said Van der Valk, putting the receiver back. ‘By God I'd rather pick up empty ice-cream cartons with a pointed stick.' He made a small face of apology towards the Frenchman. ‘One has to shout at them, you know – like in Germany.'

‘We've got too polite,' gently. ‘People take us for the man from the Inland Revenue. Sometimes I have to put this on my door.' He picked up a little plastic plaque that lay on his desk, with black letters engraved on it.
'Cave canem.'

Van der Valk took it in his hand and laughed. It said simply
‘Chien Méchant'.

The telephone rang on the desk.

‘Yes? …Send them up.' Wollek wiped the amusement off his face. ‘Germany,' he said quietly.

Heinz Stössel spoke slow, quite good French with a clawky accent that did not make his pale impassive face any the less formidable.

‘This is Commissaire Wollek of the Strasbourg police,' said Van der Valk formally.

‘My sincerely-felt sympathies,' said Mr Wollek to Herr Sch-wiewelbein with equal formality, in the sing-song German of Alsace.

Mr Schwiewelbein was a man of fifty. His hair was brown and white in patches, both discoloured, his clothes and hat were clerical and neutral, and he had a carefully neutral face, but there was even now a military look about him. The outward signs were shoulders that he had never let stoop nor become rounded, and the heavy scar of a machine-gun bullet that had ploughed up one side of his
jaw and mutilated his ear, which had healed roughly and never been prettified. It showed too, less obviously, in a face that Van der Valk found strangely striking. There was a great deal of fortitude in that face, not that of a quick or particularly intelligent man, but like the centurion in the Bible, a man that could both take orders and give them, a man that could endure under fire, a man that would never lose a certain patient sweetness no matter how he was battered. He had sat down without any fuss on the nearest chair, his hat on his knees, waiting for three senior police officers from three different countries to find time to smash his world up for him.

They were waiting for Anne-Marie. She was in street clothes, a suit that Van der Valk could see had cost a great deal without quite knowing why he was sure. She noticed him studying it.

‘Nina Ricci,' she said, with a touch of familiar sarcasm. She sat down in her chair again (she had got up to hang her coat next to Mr Wollek's sober dark-blue loden), put her hands in her lap, got a violent fit of shivering, controlled herself abruptly, and stayed quite still. There were no chairs for Van der Valk or Heinz Stössel, but neither of them cared.

‘I am very pleased,' began Wollek gently in his funny German, ‘to have the help of Herr Stössel and Mr Van der Valk, who both know much more about these circumstances than I do. You will understand, Madame und Herr, that these formalities are demanded by the law and I am here to fulfil them. The facts are very simple. Mr Marschal was staying in a house he owned not far from here in the company of a young woman, and for reasons we do not know put an end to both their lives. They were found by Mr Van der Valk, who was looking for Mr Marschal on behalf of his family as I understand, and he reported the facts to the local authorities. Both bodies have been brought to the city, and both will have to be formally identified, which is why your presence here was necessary. It is now quite late but it is good, as I judge, to get that done with. I don't doubt then but that the Procureur will give the authorization to make whatever arrangements you wish, tomorrow morning. I have seen to the necessary paper work. Shall we go?'

There was a black ID Citroën in the cobbled courtyard with a police driver. Mr Wollek signed to Anne-Marie and to Van der Valk, and got in himself. The two Germans got into Stössel's black Mercedes.

‘Medico-Legal Institute,' said Wollek.

It would have been like a vile rehearsal for a funeral cortège but that the police driver, with the streets of Strasbourg emptying and darkening, wasted no time. Stössel, to keep up, had to make the tyres of the Mercedes squeal at the corners.

The nasty part was conducted in an equally brisk way. The attendant had a slight brassy smell of white wine about him, but dropped no stitches under Mr Wollek's eye.

‘Will you formally identify the two persons found by you at the address named here?' in the precise metallic French of the Republic's judicial forms.

‘I recognize them both and I do so formally identify,' said Van der Valk.

‘Can you, Madame, identify this man as Jean-Claude Marschal and as your husband?'

‘I do identify him – as both,' Anne-Marie's voice was as metallic as Wollek's, and much louder. It grated in the stillness.

‘And can you, sir, identify the young woman as Fräulein Dagmar Schwiewelbein?'

‘It is my daughter,' said the man simply, very quietly.

‘May I have your signatures, please?'

*

They were back in the office. Wollek brought several papers together on his desk, turned them on end, and tapped them to get the edges level.

‘Copies of these documents that you will need for your administration, Herr Stössel, will be made when we have the Procureur's signature of release. That should be done tomorrow morning. You know how clerks are – they go home at night.' Heinz Stössel, who had not said a word since coming, nodded with a very faint smile.

‘One more formality. Herr Schwiewelbein, the scene of this tragedy has been carefully examined by the lieutenant of gendarmerie and has been inspected by the Substitute for the Parquet as French law requires. Some tests have been made by technicians under my control. Both observation by skilled officers and the laboratory tests confirm the appearances. Your daughter did not kill herself. She was shot and died instantly and painlessly at a moment when she was happy and peaceful. She may have been asleep. Immediately after, as far as can be judged, the man with her ended his own life.' Wollek paused for a fraction, flicked his eyes at Anne-Marie, and went on smoothly.

‘This kind of suicide is in our experience not altogether an act of despair. I would myself, speaking as a man as well as a police officer, call it an act of love. Even an act of hope. I hope in my turn that this will lighten, if only a very little, your sorrow.'

That is a very clever man, thought Van der Valk. He too was looking at Anne-Marie, but she gave no sign, made no movement, said nothing.

‘Thank you,' said the German. There was the same dignity in his voice as in his face. He hesitated for a short second and then went on.

‘If I understood rightly, Herr Wollek, they were in bed together when they were found?'

Nod.

‘They were making love then – when he shot her?'

‘Yes,' said Wollek with no hesitation.

‘You think he loved her?' Wollek glanced up at Van der Valk.

‘There's no doubt of that.'

‘I don't think there's any doubt either that she loved him,' said the German with an odd tranquillity. ‘I can feel, at the least, that it was not altogether a waste.'

Anne-Marie still did not budge. She had taken a cigarette out of her bag: Heinz Stössel lit it for her.

‘I was struck by your kindness, Herr Wollek. It confirms everything I had heard from Herr Stössel, who I had feared for a while was inventing a romance to try and relieve my pain and – what was
very natural – to relieve his own painful embarrassment. You see, we spent four hours together in his car, coming here upon an errand of despair. Herr Stössel spent much of that time explaining to me that he was certain my daughter had been happy.'

Nobody could stop himself looking at Stössel, who did not move a muscle. Looking at that pale ham of a face, one would have said that the summit of feeling for the man would be a double helping of pork chop and fried potatoes with pickled cucumber. Van der Valk, who knew that Heinz had a child who was slightly mongoloid, rubbed his nose with a good deal more embarrassment than Stössel was showing.

‘She had a week's happiness,' muttered the man – and he had looked like the kind whose highest pitch of emotion comes in finding that the quarterly accounts balance. ‘A wonderful holiday in the mountains, all kinds of clothes, the pleasure of ski-ing that she loved, a shower of generous pleasures and presents – expensive autos … even the dodging about and running away must have seemed to her like a very exciting adventure. A romantic slice of life – and a romantic death. What more could a girl of that age desire?'

None of them said anything. Wollek picked up his sheaf of papers and slid them gently into a manila envelope, busying himself unnecessarily with fastening it. Herr Schwiewelbein got up.

‘I will remember – my wife and myself – the consideration shown me by the police of three countries.' He walked out of the room slowly.

‘I'll see to all that,' said Stössel. He punched Van der Valk lightly on the arm. ‘Bad luck, that.' He shook hands gravely with Mr Wollek. ‘Perhaps I see you tomorrow, Herr Kommissar. The formalities of bringing her home, you know.'

‘Just come to me. Can I be of any service? – hotel or anything?'

‘I fix all that.'

‘Goodnight to you.'

It was indeed a romantic death, Van der Valk was thinking; it is a very good thing to find beauty in that. A piece of German lyric poetry. There is just one thing: it was just a scrap too well
timed. The stove was still warm when I got there, and the two of them had not been dead four hours. When I got to Strasbourg, Jean-Claude and his tanzmariechen were still alive.

*

He turned his attention back to Anne-Marie. Death levelled everybody – the millionaire's wife, the sophisticated hostess of Amsterdam, had vanished; so had the gay siren of Innsbruck, the unaccountable downhill girl full of contradictions. One reached bedrock on these occasions: what sort of rock was at the base of Anne-Marie?

Wollek had changed his manner. A man who has lost his only daughter … but this was business.

‘You have heard what I said, Madame. On a purely material plane, there is no reason for me to doubt the conclusions reached. Mr Marschal shot the girl, and himself. The Substitute is satisfied, and so am I. We have further the experienced observation of Mr Van der Valk. You have of course the right to query my findings, to see the doctor's report, anything you wish. Do you wish to make any statement or pose any question, before these papers go, as they will first thing tomorrow, to the Procureur for his signature?'

‘No,' she said briefly. ‘I would like to see the house. I would like Mr Van der Valk to show it me.'

Mr Wollek considered this, not afraid to be seen thinking it over and taking his time answering.

‘That is quite fair. The Procureur would have no objection, and I can allow that without reference to him. It is certainly good that Mr Van der Valk accompanies you, since he knows a lot more about the attendant circumstances than I do. The house is of course under the jurisdiction of the Procureur. Yes. I will give the gendarmerie a ring, out there.'

‘I have my car,' she said indifferently.

‘Then I'll be with you in a moment or two,' said Van der Valk.

‘You wish to conspire together,' she said with a sneer, putting on the coat he was holding for her. ‘Afraid I'll kill myself as well? I'll be in that courtyard place: I want to stretch my legs anyhow.'