Double-Barrel (13 page)

The Koninginneweg was a poor substitute. The houses were small, mean and gimcrack: stuccoed bungalows and little two-storied villas trying to look grand and only succeeding in looking expensive. Shoddy little balconies, ridiculous names in pastrycook's French, in wrought-iron script all over the front, fake-antique carriage lamps as porch lights; unnecessary pieces of teak boarding or Tyrolean fretwork to set off the assembly-line steel windows. A lot of glass, a French window at the side, a large American auto in front for the ‘standing'. One only has to glance at them to know what the inside is like – a wall of rough stones set in mortar, a parquet floor – coveted status symbol in
Holland – central heating and Dufy prints of yachts on the stairs. Mauve tiles in the bathroom with a matching pink wash-basin and lavatory.

Will Reinders lived in one of the newest, a square ugly little two-storied house standing in the few odd square metres that is a whacking big garden in Holland, with a miniature rock-garden, goldfish-pond and plaster-dwarf-with-a-wheel-barrow. The house stood sideways-on to the road, but a picture window gawped out of the blank side wall at me; I was standing finishing a cigarette on the pavement. I could see a youngish woman tidying the living-room, and wondered how Will had organized his housekeeping. Betty had been a very houseproud woman.

I walked along a crazy-paving path and resisted the temptation to throw the cigarette-end at the dwarf. Good humour was restored by a tremendous wrought-iron scrawl saying, ‘Notre sillon'

Will himself answered the bell, a tallish, thinnish, horse-faced man with ugly irregular teeth and a nose as bumpy as a country road. He was dressed to go out – camel auto-coat, one of those sporty ones with a violent Stewart tartan lining, soft hat in
pied-de-poule
check, and a rather obnoxious scarf. A well-polished Opel Kapitan, self-consciously this-year's-model, waited for him.

I gave him the business; the card that has the polite menace in it, which he barely glanced at.

‘Yes?' with a slight frown. ‘I'm sorry but I'm due at the factory in five minutes.'

‘It'll get on all right without you for an hour, Mr Reinders.'

‘That sounds a bit peremptory; what have I to do with – I haven't been in Amsterdam in two months.'

‘I will explain everything, but indoors.'

‘Have you the right to insist on that?'

‘I'm afraid I have.'

Reinders checked his impatience, and put on his polite
face. ‘Naturally, in that case, I'll help you any way I really can.'

A scientific executive's living-room – they tend to be dull, I thought. An active, intelligent man, but with little feeling for his home. Who has deliberately put off having children, because they are a drag on the career; who gives too much energy and enthusiasm to his little radio sets and not enough to what happens after he gets home and puts his slippers on.

This room was that of a nice chap, with pleasant brown eyes and an alert face. But a room with not enough flavour, not enough identity. Not false, not pretentious – just slightly boring.

Modern expensive furniture, fairly well designed and very comfortable. Warm oiled wood and tobacco-brown upholstery. Greenish Turkey carpet, with brown, beige and ivory patterning; nice one. Very attractive standard lamp, a slim curving trunk of natural wood with four arched branches, but clashing most heartily with the table lamp, which looked like the worst sort of wedding present. Empire reproduction; one of those slinky, vaguely Egyptian women wrapped in tight overlapping palm-leaves and clutching a torch. Plain oblong coffee-table set with tesserae, and above it on the wall a flashing splashing Karel Appel in outrageous shades of scarlet. Highly entertaining but not belonging to the arrangement opposite: a wholly bluey-greeny Monet riverscape over a little writing table.

Writing table crowned with an abominable piece of porcelain that must be a tiger – painted like a tiger – but really looked more like a dachshund.

I got the idea that Betty had read in
Marie-Claire
that the really smart woman achieves a happy blend in her home of the modern and the antique.

There were plenty of books, but they had a smirk, as though the pages had never been cut. Books of someone who doesn't mind spending money, who reads reviews and
buys the ones that get rave notices. He is modern and progressive, and is all for bright biography, piquant goosed history and new-wave fiction. He has them in the house and will get around to reading them just as soon as he finds a minute.

Reinders jerked a hand abruptly at a chair, sat down himself gauchely – his legs were too long – and looked about to bite his nails. He suddenly got sick of my admiring his furniture.

‘What am I supposed to have done?' irritably.

‘You aren't supposed to have done anything. I am inquiring into the circumstances of a series of events, one of which is your wife's death.'

‘Oh no, not again.'

‘I quite agree and I would have much preferred not to bother you at all. This time it's for keeps. It has been decided, in everyone's interest, to work as far as possible incognito. Means you may know who I am but you form a small select group. Happy family, like the Bluebell girls. Not even the local police know who I am; I want this to sink in. To you and everybody else I am a busybody official from some ministry or other doing sociological reconnaissance. This conversation is in complete confidence.'

‘Who gets whose confidence?'

‘I mean that if you tell the truth in answering possibly embarrassing questions it doesn't have to go any further, but if you tell stories I'll know. The franker you are, the less finagling you give me, the quicker it's all over.'

‘I've been frank with all the other policemen and it hasn't been the faintest help to anybody.'

I gave him my faint, subtle diplomatic smile.

‘I'll help you. A piece of listening apparatus, secret, very sensitive, disappeared from this house. Your boss told me that. Despite the agreement to keep an uncomfortable fact dark. You may have other little secrets – mm?'

‘Well, if you know that,' rather engaging rueful grin, ‘I
don't suppose I have anything left to hide. Ask your questions and I'll do my best. I can't say I welcome you, but at the same time it would, I admit, be a relief to me to see this business cleared up once and for all. It was never tackled head-on. In my experience as an engineer that is a mistake.'

‘We're understanding each other – I am the original Head-On King. It's paradoxical, but the only way I can beat the hush-hush that gets handed out to me is by suddenly emerging from dark corners and being abrupt.'

‘All right. Bang away.'

‘Who's doing the housekeeping for you now?'

‘My sister-in-law. She's a fashion photographer, but she very kindly threw a job up to come here and help me out.'

‘You might even end up by marrying her,' I said with helpful kindness.

‘Why?' stiff.

‘Why not? It's perfectly possible.'

‘I suppose you can call it that. Remotely.' He sounded uncomfortable.

‘Your wife's family, then, has had no thought of blaming you for her death?'

‘Certainly not,' with a snap. ‘Why should they? Some thoroughly unpleasant person – I'm glad to see you're really determined to get whoever this is – wrote filthy letters to my wife and she suffered a nervous collapse. If only she'd told me … I was terribly busy at the time with an extremely tricky problem … Of course they didn't blame me. Betty was always a nervous girl – well, I won't say unbalanced, but excitable. I mean that she always tended to get overwound up about things that were really of slight importance.'

‘Like, for instance you playing with the girls in the big naughty city?'

‘I'm not hypocritical about it. I haven't any mistresses or anything. Betty wasn't small-minded.'

‘Her family live near here?'

‘No. Groningen.'

‘That where she comes from, originally?'

‘Thereabouts.'

‘Your sister-in-law has to stay here then? She can't go home every night. She sleeps in the house?'

‘Well, yes. Natural, uh? I mean it wouldn't be logical to do anything else.'

I enjoyed these protests; I had a lever to use on Willy, if ever I needed one.

‘Sleep with her yet?'

Reinders' pale skin got red as fire; easy blusher.

‘Why should you think any such thing?'

‘Natural, uh? I mean it wouldn't be logical to do anything else.' I couldn't get his tone quite, that real engineer's devotion to a logical consequence, but I did my best.

‘Look, you're insinuating –'

‘You're a nice fellow, not good-looking but the girls find you attractive. And you find them attractive. You work hard, you're an intense, concentrated kind of person, and when you want to unwind you like to have a woman around. You couldn't help making a pass at anyone handy if Betty wasn't there. But when she was there you gave her plenty of activity.'

He squirmed rather.

‘You may as well be frank; it isn't in the least disgraceful. To use your words once again, it's natural – logical. You've often thought up games to play with Betty – making love in queer places, having her dress up in funny clothes, having her walk about with nothing on, tumbling her on the bathroom floor – on this sofa – in the kitchen …'

Poor Will, he squirmed some more, but I had him. He was one of the progressive boys, believing in honesty. He had to say yes.

‘Damn it, she was my wife.'

‘I find it perfectly reasonable. But did it occur to you that you might have been seen on one or another occasion?'

‘It has, yes.'

‘You get on well with the sister-in-law?'

‘Look – for heaven's sake – her family's very old-fashioned and rigid about that sort of thing.'

‘You're safe from me. But you take some awful risks. They're a very God-fearing crowd around here.'

‘Yes. Tripe I think it.'

‘You aren't religious?'

‘No, I'm a humanist. Of course I respect other people's points of view. And I don't exactly publicize my views, in this locality. Betty was religious – I've never held it against her.'

Quite.

‘Sister moved out of the guest-room into yours?'

‘No. I have a daily woman who does the rough work. Sees everything. Has the tongue of a rattlesnake – I don't dare get rid of her. We're very very careful.'

‘Yet the person who writes letters gets to know things.'

‘I've thought of that too.'

‘I dare say you needn't worry over much. Your wife's suicide wasn't intended, and would have the effect of scaring our friend off your private life.'

‘I've thought about it,' viciously. ‘Some bastard, jealous, wanting to sleep with her himself. I know you're right and I'm a bit too fond of girls; I blame myself too for not keeping more of an eye on her. One of these sanctimonious, frightened, holy characters you get around here – frustrated as hell and without the guts to kiss a typist. Huh?'

‘Maybe. Leave that to me; that's my job. If I get this sorted out fairly soon you'll be left in peace to marry your sister-in-law, without there being too much gossip locally.'

‘I don't care a damn about the local gossip,' furiously.

‘I'll leave you in peace now,' I said.

Gave him an uncomfortable quarter of an hour, I thought grinning, getting back into the Volkswagen. The trim, very modern white Opel flew up the road back towards the
industry terrain like a chased cat. Mr Reinders in a good deal of a hurry to get back to the peaceful teasing intricacies of electronics and his recurrent temptation to pat his typist's behind.

I sat in my little auto and stared round me. There was nothing to stop me beginning Phase Two straight away, but it was nice out there. The sky had darkened to the bilious yellowish grey of a typical snow sky, and the snow itself was drifting peacefully earthwards in huge irregular lumps. I put a hand out and caught one; size of a marble, light and feathery as eiderdown, perfectly dry but with a slightly sticky, clinging feel like a cobweb. When I drew my hand in it just vanished, leaving no trace of moisture. Miraculous, lovely snow, making Drente beautiful.

I looked at the trees of the Koninginneweg, studying them in their new, stylized shapes. There was an old ragged plane, leaning out into the road at what looked a perilous angle. No – a plane was a summer tree, and no good in Drente anyway; they belonged in a hotter, drier, dustier landscape. But that yew there, stiff and upright. Menacing like all yews – wonderful those bony branches under the dollops of icing sugar. And that tiny Atlantic cedar in Will's ridiculous garden – pure, delicate, superb.

I got out of the car again and went back up the path, leaving footprints that looked as immortal as though this were Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I rang the bell, and paid close attention to the thermometer hanging in the dinky little porch. Zero exactly. Neither thawing nor freezing. Point of balance.

The woman opened, the woman seen through the window, now identified as Betty's sister and a lovely brand-new virgin untouched witness that no other policemen had had their great calloused, hairy, nicotine-stained paws on.

The type of blonde that used to be called fluffy. Not really pretty enough to be a barn-burner, but pleasant. Sweet. Kind. Teeny weeny bit silly. (Betty, in photographs,
had not looked fluffy, but might well have been. She had been taller, thinner, and with more bone in the face.) Smile. Splendid teeth. Rather a beamy waist, but plenty of hip and bosom to make up. Solid well-shaped legs with too much foot and ankle. Simply bursting with health and energy. Eyes too tiny for a big forehead, and a huge puff of honey-blonde hair. I approved of all this, secretly thinking she'd be rather a bore in bed. Will's lookout not mine. All I meant was that surely you remember as a student playing the game of sitting on opposite sides of the bus and counting the number of beddable women who passed.