Tsing-Boum (3 page)

‘Yes. Keep at it – neighbourhood, shops, you know.'

A funny death. The assassination had been so smooth – over-smooth. When the neighbour rang after hearing the shots, the man had opened the door, hidden in the lavatory next to it, waited till the good soul got as far as the living-room, and quietly slipped out. Easy? Yes, but needing someone used to moving quietly and thinking quickly in the circumstances. Not like an emotional killing. And the husband was a soldier … Rather sadly, Van der Valk asked the switchboard for the commandant of the army camp.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Bakker,' said a deep stern voice suddenly in his ear.

‘Town police, Commissaire Van der Valk, Criminal Brigad.'

‘What can I do for you?'

‘You have a soldier there – not a conscript, a regular soldier, sergeant of some sort, name Zomerlust. You probably know him.'

‘Correct. Weapons instructor.' Weapons instructor – it only needed that!

‘On duty at the present?'

‘I'd have to check – but you'd better tell me.'

‘His wife has died, by violence. I want to be the first with the news. That kind of word travels fast. I should like to ask you to find out where he is and keep him there an hour.'

‘Can do. I'll ring you back.' Mm, he would have to be a bit tactful. The military authorities liked to look after their own laundry, and were not always terribly enthusiastic when the civil police arrived with the kind of news that got into the evening paper. But it took less than five minutes.

‘Commissaire? He's here. I've asked him to be at my office in half an hour. If you care, you can be here in twenty minutes or less. I would like you to speak to me first – fair enough?'

‘I'll be with you then – don't have any sentries asking me for the password.'

‘Very good,' said the deep voice curtly, and rang off. Van der Valk buzzed his intercom.

‘Car and driver straight away. I'll be away an hour to hour 'n' half. All reports and messages on my desk.'

The usual wire fences and bricky blocks of a parsimonious military administration. Rows of lorries and half-tracks parked meticulously in line to white paint. Inside, old-maid fussiness, all cream-glossy and shiny red linoleum, corridors full of notices, over-polished boots and badges. Usual administrative sergeant-major with moustache and medals. Knock-knock. Bullshit came to a merciful end in a blindingly highly-frictioned office with an unexpectedly sympathetic-seeming officer of fifty or so, stomach kept down by much hard exercise. He lost no time in getting to the point.

‘Commissaire – good afternoon. Sad errand.' Van der Valk, unsure of the difference between a lieutenant-colonel and a full colonel, wasn't taking any chances.

‘Afternoon, Colonel – I'm afraid so.'

‘Our man won't be here for ten minutes. You said violence?'

‘She was shot with an automatic weapon, this lunchtime.'

‘Shocking. You aren't thinking …?'

‘No. But I have to be good and sure. It would be a relief to me if his movements were thoroughly accounted for.'

‘Then be relieved. He's been here all day, and a dozen men can vouch for that. I may tell you at once, he's a good man. Private life's his own, no doubt, but a good man – I hope I can say it with pride: know what I'm talking about. A – how's it put? – hypothesis of criminal designs, since his being here doesn't or mightn't prove anything particular one way or the other, meets, uh, or would meet a pretty rigid barrier of incredulity.' He paused, decided he was not very good at wrapping it up, smiled with good even teeth, and said, ‘I'm trying to tell you, Commissaire, in a clumsy way, that if you entertain suspicions of this man they'd better be good, and it is certainly my duty to protect and defend his interests. You'll forgive me, I hope, for putting my thoughts so badly.'

‘That's quite fair. I'm glad you did. You'll be glad if I speak
as plainly? Good. I've no presumption whatever against your man – that he did it, or had it done. I've got to question him, which I'll gladly do in your presence.'

He had decided to be very relaxed, and was slouching in a military wooden chair, his legs crossed, playing with a cigarette he didn't want, of a kind he didn't like, being winning.

‘It's a bit traditional, Colonel, that the army gets touchy at the thought of a man of theirs being involved in any way with the civil arm. Someone killed this man's wife. Why was she shot with an automatic weapon that could be of military origin? – I haven't had the ballistics report yet.'

‘Certainly I won't oppose your questioning him. I don't recall,' the colonel sounded a thought pained, ‘that the civil authorities have ever had reason to think we here have failed to cooperate – when it was called for.'

‘I'd like to look at his personal record – I don't think that would be an infraction of Nato security, would it?'

The colonel frowned, as though he thought it would.

‘As you know, an officer of police is under oath and has to observe professional secrecy, exactly like a doctor.'

‘But once you've interrogated him, and satisfied yourself that he cannot have had a hand in this dreadful crime …'

‘The Officer of Justice, you know, would call for all papers before seeing the man. I prefer to see the man first, that's all.'

The colonel picked up his phone.

‘Sarntmajor, Zomerlust's file, please.' The voice must have said ‘He's here now, sir' because he added ‘Send him in' in an artificially jovial way. Van der Valk got up, not wanting to sit there being delphic and shrouded in importance as though he were the FBI.

A man was ushered in and stood at attention with professionally incurious respect. Van der Valk, looking at him, felt quite sure that he did not know his wife was dead. Either way, it was a beastly moment to go through. Such an honest face. Eyes level, face muscles relaxed. It was a rounded, chubby face, very Dutch, with a shiny bumpy nose and a high knobbed forehead under fair curly hair. The man might not be conspicuous for intelligence but he would be good at his job and he would be a good friend. The colonel cleared his throat.

‘Zomerlust, this is an officer of the civil police, who has come with an urgent message. I have to add that it is not a piece of news I like to bring to any soldier.' The man's eyes stayed steady on his officer. There was a nasty pause.

‘My wife?' he said at last. The tone was as level and disciplined as the face, but even in those two words, thought Van der Valk, who had brought news of this kind to quite a few people, there was a sort of resignation rather than disbelief or even anxiety. It was as though the man had expected all along that sooner or later … But don't go reading meanings now.

‘There's been a serious accident,' said the colonel with horrid banality.

‘She's dead?' Hardly any note of query.

‘I'm speaking to a soldier – she is.'

The eyes came slowly round to Van der Valk and stayed there as though committing his features to memory. A muscle showed in the jaw.

‘What happened?'

‘She got shot.'

‘Yes … I see.' The face slid a little, and he concentrated on getting control of himself. ‘I see,' he said again, in the voice one has when one doesn't see, but wants to test if one's voice is steady.

‘We have to have a talk,' said Van der Valk. ‘Nothing formal, no provost-marshals or anything.'

The colonel hadn't liked his man sounding so unsurprised: he got up in a jagged, worried way.

‘I've no objection to your presence, Colonel.'

‘Yes. But I think it as well to leave the two of you alone for just a while. You can use this office.' But loyalty came forward again. He held his hand out. ‘My very deepest sympathy and sorrow, Zomerlust. And I know well that you had nothing to do with this unhappy event. Don't worry. We'll see to everything.' He looked back at Van der Valk without either sympathy or hostility. ‘I'll be just outside.' It sounded appealing; it was almost a capitulation. Going to check up on the man again, thought Van der Valk.

‘Sergeant Zomerlust, your wife has been killed, by someone who shot her at your home. She was killed instantly, and I
would say totally unexpectedly. She did not suffer at all. There was no struggle, and no argument as far as we can judge. This is homicide. You can help me very much, and I intend to get the fishbone out of the throat straight away. Can you establish past question where you were – all today?'

‘Why here – working.'

‘People see you all that time? I'm not talking about five minutes for a cigarette?'

‘My whole section.'

‘So you could prove, you feel sure, forwards backwards and sideways where you were, the whole day?'

The man did not protest at all. ‘Yes,' he said, very calmly, and Van der Valk heaved an uninhibited sigh of content.

‘Nobody's thinking of wholesale perjury in your section,' he said dryly. ‘You aren't under suspicion. But it's very important to me to have you clear. I have a lot of questions, you know, that it will give you no joy to answer.'

‘That's your job, after all,' said Zomerlust with sad patience. Something was worrying Van der Valk, though; he knew what it was.

‘Your little girl's all right, you'll be glad to know. I'm looking after her for the present. She's at home, with my wife.'

The man flushed; his open Dutch face was the kind that flushes easily.

‘You hadn't mentioned anything happening to her. I didn't think she could have been there.'

‘It happened in the lunch break – but I hadn't told you that.'

Zomerlust did not protest that he hadn't known it. ‘I'm very fond of her,' he said awkwardly. ‘She's my sort of step-child, you know.'

‘There wasn't any secret about that, I think. She carried your wife's name.'

Had he said it too smoothly? The man's face flared up with resentment and suspicion.

‘No, I've never made any secret of it. Why should I? I've never – I offered to give her my name. I'm her guardian.'

‘Your wife was married before?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so. Sounds daft, I know. But I
never asked. It was a sort of pact – I never asked. Christ what a mess,' he said miserably.

‘Ruth's all right where she is for a while. She knows her mother is in hospital. Would you be content to leave her that way – till we know more?'

‘I suppose so. What else can I say?'

‘I have to ask you what your wishes are. She won't be questioned or worried – you can rely on me.'

Zomerlust was now looking harried and flustered. ‘I don't know – I have to think.'

‘Have you no family who could look after her?'

‘Yes – but they wouldn't want to,' he said at last unwillingly.

‘I see. Well, she's all right for as long as you want.'

‘I don't know who her father is,' said Zomerlust again. ‘I don't – I didn't want to know. We – my wife and I understood each other. Questions weren't asked. It's better that way.'

‘Were you happy with her?'

‘Yes. She was a good wife.'

‘Was she happy?' And the answer came without hesitation, or aggression:

‘Yes.'

‘I have to ask these things.'

‘You mean I could have shot her. That I didn't because I couldn't, but that I could have got it done somehow? That's what you mean, isn't it?'

‘One of several very remote possibilities, but I'm not thinking of it that way.'

‘What way?' suspicious again.

‘Was your wife friendly with many people here at the camp?'

‘She wasn't friendly with any of them. She hated those army-wife cliques. Why d'you ask?'

‘She was shot, probably by someone who knew her and whom she knew, since she let him into the flat. She was shot by a peculiar kind of gun – several shots and shells looked military calibre. We don't know yet – could be some kind of sub-machine-gun.'

Zomerlust looked flabbergasted.

‘You mean we have such things here?'

‘I don't know. I've been told you're a weapons instructor,' delicately. But Zomerlust appeared bemused. Perhaps he was bemused – shock took odd forms. Van der Valk tried again.

‘We look first for what is likeliest. Something idiotic – not really a crime at all. Act of passion, say. But who in Holland has a weapon like that or access to one?'

‘You don't think soldiers do?' He was utterly incredulous, as though this were some sadistic fairy-tale.

‘Both ideas look equally silly, don't they? That you killed your wife in unpremeditated passion, not caring that the choice of weapon might seem to point to you – or that someone killed her in cold blood, choosing a weapon that might be thought to point to you.'

His voice, light, unemotional, seemed to bring the man's feet to the ground.

‘A machine-gun – of course we have them here – but you'd never got it off the camp. Controlled – counted, checked, signed for – every time.'

‘That's right – go ahead and eliminate the whole silly notion.'

‘Nobody here even knew my wife.' Harshly. ‘She never came here – had nothing to do with it – didn't like it.'

‘She didn't like your being a regular soldier?'

Zomerlust rocked his head from side to side like a man bothered by flies.

‘She didn't mind that, but she wanted nothing to do with camps or soldiers or my life here. Our life was – was a private life.' Lamely, a little desperately.

‘Well, that's all,' said Van der Valk. ‘I'll be seeing you again of course. I'll keep you in touch. And I'll hang on to Ruth for a while, shall I? – till you get things straight.'

‘Yes,' dully. He still hadn't assimilated it altogether.