Strike Out Where Not Applicable (3 page)

‘I suppose that can't be unheard of, or even uncommon, in a beginner who loses his head.'

‘I don't know. Everyone seems to have been satisfied with that interpretation, but I heard some whispering out there that the doctor wasn't satisfied – I know, I'm repeating gossip, but there, you did ask.' He was so busy listening to this tale that he failed to notice that Arlette had eaten all the toast. With a slight sense of shame he realized that perhaps he did wish that someone was ‘not satisfied' about a sudden death. He hitched himself along the sofa till he could reach the telephone, and dialled the central ‘police' number.

‘Commissaris Van der Valk. Who's that on the switchboard? Ah, you, De Nijs. Heard anything of a death out at Warmond – man kicked by a horse? You haven't? – good, get on to the gendarmerie barracks out there and put them through. Yes, I'll hold on here.… More tea, please.… Warmond? Commissaris, criminal brigade. What's this about Bernhard Fischer? … Nothing much, nothing much, read your standing orders.… I don't care
if it is Saturday, get your thumb out of your behind.… I quite see that.… Now ring this doctor and tell him – ask him to be so kind – as to ring me at this number. Right.'

‘Stupes?'

‘No more than usual. Doctor thought the thing peculiar: he mentioned it to them but he wouldn't commit himself before he'd made a full examination, so they did nothing. They've done the usual things, measurements and photographs and so on, but there's been no action – say they were afraid of my blowing them up for wasting my time before they got a medical report. Usual shillyshally.' The phone burred again discreetly.

‘Van der Valk.… Yes.… Quite.… Quite.… Yes.… Very well.… Yes, I would.… Many thanks.… I'll have a talk with you then if I may.' He banged the hook and dialled the police number again. ‘De Nijs, I want a car and a driver, here in front of my house, in ten minutes, right? Good lad.'

‘You're going out there? Straight away?' asked Arlette, alarmed at having conjured up this bustle.

‘Can't expect weekend peace to last for ever.'

‘You don't really have ideas that something is not above board? Aren't you just agitated because you feel guilty at being lazy and having a comfortable life?'

‘Rather like that,' he agreed, grinning at himself and the cleverness of women. ‘Fusspot is short of activity. Feels the need to be officious, punctilious, generally get good marks for being switched on. If I should be held up, keep supper for me.'

‘Quite like old times,' resignedly.

He sat in a Volkswagen and examined the countryside, switching himself on, noting the degree to which new leaves had unfolded, how far the budding stalks of tulips had pushed, mapping the cloud formations. Many many times he had sat in Volkswagens from the police car-pool and driven out towards some little problem along narrow countrified roads with straggly trees bordering them, and deep drainage ditches, crossed every now and then by rickety planks to messy little farmhouses beyond. He never thought about what he would find when he arrived; he had his mind on the road – you had to, for the drainage ditch waits.… It's not so much that the Dutch driver is careless and undisciplined, more that the driver's seat of the car is the one place where the
Dutchman throws off his terror of government and becomes a devil of a chap, all aggressive to show what a brave tough fellow he is underneath.

What an extraordinary self-confidence I possessed, thought Van der Valk, easing his stiff hip, pushing the stick parallel to the leg he had stretched as far as he could (never far enough in small cars, but no matter). The amateur psychiatrist. The silent understander of the human heart. Dear Lord what a clown. But what a lot he had learned, this last year.

He had learned that he was a far less good policeman than he had thought, which was very good for his vanity. He had thought himself clever when he had just been eccentric. What made him look clever was simply the spur of frustration awaiting anything of originality in our century, our generation of polite mediocrity, where everything is organized – Holland! – and nobody can improvise because it is not allowed. Most people's standards of thought and conduct he had found ignoble, and the revolt against the pressure-to-conform had produced a flint-and-steel analogy. Sparks of intuition that he had mistaken for big talent. He hadn't any big talent: he had a small talent. And it wasn't enough.

He found himself thinking of the last case he had had in Amsterdam. A woman, married peaceably for twenty-three years to a steady plodding fellow, a marriage seeming a model of stability. Their life was comfortable if not spectacular, they had two nice average children with no problems. A good husband, who went out once a week to play cards, once a week to his ‘club', once a week with her to the pictures. What could have gone wrong? The husband had decided, sensibly, not impulsively, that he was getting nowhere with the firm where he had been for seventeen years, and decided to move to Germany, where he had found a house, a better job, and twice the salary. That was not enough, was it, for her to go out, buy quite a large sharp kitchen knife (bad that, in law, where it is called premeditation) and stick him with it, dead dead, before going, calmly and reasonably, to the police to tell them?

A homicide; the station called Van der Valk. He had found her sitting quiet, undishevelled, unhysterical, in a police waiting-room (metal furniture, upholstered in sponge rubber, covered with grey plastic, circular perspex table with ashtray thoughtfully provided, four climbing plants on the wall and a geranium on the table in a
white pot); she was drinking tea. He sat down to read the report of her quite coherent tale.

‘What made you do that?' he asked quietly.

‘I don't know,' she answered, putting down her teacup.

They never got any further. Not that there was no answer; there were too many. As a distinguished sociologist had recently remarked, ‘Anything, on any page, of the
New York Times
is sociology.' Ha. The world was so full of phony ‘behavioural sciences' that everything was important, and nothing mattered any more. Officers of Justice, who in Holland combine the functions of examining magistrate and courtroom prosecutor, send for three or four head-shrinkers nowadays at the first drop of the pencil, but they got no further than Van der Valk had. What, a harmless, unagitated, untense woman had knifed her husband? And she had brooded, to the stage of going out for something more lethal than the little knife she peeled potatoes with?

They had produced page upon page of clotted nonsense disguised in jargon. Van der Valk had seen it, and seen it to be nonsense. Dutch assize courts were generally good; six months later when the case came up the president had tried hard. He had been quiet and kind. But by then there was too much paper, and the poor woman had been dulled into total apathy. They couldn't swallow the premeditation, and she got three years' ‘re-education' and what the good of it all was nobody would ever know, and from that moment Van der Valk had told himself that he was a clown. He should resign from the police and hang out a charlatan's plate. ‘Neuro-sociologist' in polished brass.

The Volkswagen stopped with a jolt in the little village and Van der Valk got out stiffly with his stick. The neuro-sociologist would now begin diagnosis. His driver went off thankfully to drink coffee with the local boys-in-blue, and he went in search of his doctor.

Doctor Maartens was, he was glad to see, a man who seemed both sensible and competent. So many doctors are neither that this was a welcome rock to stand on. Youngish, a round face, grey flannel trousers, a navy-blue blazer. The white chalky hands of all doctors – it comes from washing too often in hard water. He smoked cheap Dutch ‘brown' cigarettes with a healthy air, not at all worried about his lungs, and had a hard no-nonsense handshake.

‘Come on into the torture chamber. I hope you're not furious – I dropped a monstrous clanger, letting anybody see I wasn't happy, but' – obstinate look – ‘I'm still not happy. I saw nothing disquieting up there – they called me, and I came of course, had a waiting-room full of sniffles and miseries, all most indignant though it's not good form to show it. All I could do there was agree officially that the chap was dead – I had him brought down here.' Doctor Maartens was talking too much, and plainly had guilty wishes to explain, to justify: Van der Valk went on saying nothing.

‘I felt a bit disturbed, uh, because the head injury wasn't quite what I'd been led to expect. I don't want to be technical, but it didn't seem the right shape. Well – I didn't want to make a fool of myself – I rang our local vet, who handles these horses when they cough or whatnot. Asked him about characteristics of kicks and so on. He agreed with me, and it was then I told the local police I wasn't ready to sign the certificate without more thought, or evidence, or both, and that they'd better take him – means town, I suppose, since naturally we've no mortuary here. I don't know whether that will automatically mean an official autopsy – doesn't lie within my experience – be glad to have your thoughts on the subject and that's why I'm pleased you saw fit to come.'

‘I can arrange all that's necessary, but will you give me a brief untechnical outline of your not-quite-happiness?'

‘Certainly. It's the kick. Nothing fundamentally improbable about the kick. The first thought was a momentary vertigo, a dizzy spell – Bernhard was overweight, blood pressure and so on. It's possible, though I doubt it, for reasons I'll give you. But he could easily have been standing stooped or bent behind the horse, I suppose, and made it nervous or irritable in some way. I would accept that, I imagine, if I was told that had happened. But a horse kicks upwards, hm, or horizontally as it were, at knee level – Patty, the vet, my esteemed colleague, I should be saying,' – he had an engaging grin – ‘can explain much better than I can. Now this bump on Bernhard's head has characteristic of a downward slant, hm? I was stupid – you'll find me indiscreet – but I went to the smith, and he found me a shoe, and I messed about for quite some time hitting a plank of soft wood from every angle … look, I'll show you – in my garage, we can go out this way – if you don't mind.'

‘I don't mind a bit.'

‘What's wrong with your leg?'

‘Rifle bullet. Went in here and came out here.'

‘Ow. War?'

‘No – woman. Possibly round the bend, but nobody was called on to decide – she shot herself – probably thought she'd killed me.'

‘Most interesting. Like to look at that. Made a good job of getting you mobile again, what?'

‘Took a long time.'

‘One doesn't see things like that in this kind of practice,' with regretful enjoyment.

‘Happy to oblige you any time.' They both laughed. ‘Still, you do get horses' hoofs.'

‘Here, this is what I mean.'

‘Aha.'

‘You don't find me overmuch the enthusiastic undergraduate?'

‘I only wish we had more of them.'

‘Put it in the vice this way, vertically, and here is where we get an approximate result – I'm bound to say roughly approximate, but Patty bears me out – to what you'd expect from a horse, if you were stooping, crouching, even kneeling – here close by, there further off, at the limit, call it, of a horse's kicking range.' Van der Valk did not state his respect for the thoughtful way it had been done.

‘Now this drawing is what the actual injury looked like. You see, he'd need to have been sideways, even a bit upside down. The hoof, Patty says, moves in a plane like this.… I started making various suppositions; perhaps he fell but remained entangled, got dragged perhaps – or if there were a second horse – but Francis pooh-poohed all that. He's the expert after all, been a cavalry officer and so on. Naturally, he's concerned about it happening on his premises.'

‘You talked to him, did you?'

Maartens looked uncomfortable.

‘He questioned me closely – I took it that he was thinking of a possible suit for negligence or something of the sort. Since his responsibility could be brought in question, I did think he had a right to know that I was not quite …' Not very surprisingly, Van der Valk felt curiosity about Francis.

‘The news spread quickly, you know. But was it only to the vet that you hinted what you had in mind? The smith … Francis …'

‘They would not, perhaps, have found it difficult to conclude – from my attitude …'

‘He's a chatterbox, this Francis?'

Maartens looked at him as though astonished to hear a policeman ask so naïve a question. ‘He's not just a gossip – as the smith would be. But he's the type of person who tells people about things that are bothering him, to make him feel better. But discretion in a village is virtually nonexistent. I made a bad mistake, I realize.'

‘It forces me, virtually, to take some action towards deeper enquiry. You've set, without perhaps meaning to, a police apparatus in motion. Do you regret that? Do you want to qualify your certainty that you feel dissatisfied?'

‘I'm sorry,' sturdily, ‘but I am not satisfied.'

‘That's all right. I'm not blaming you. My reaction was sudden, perhaps, simply because my wife heard fragments of this gossip. I rang you, you invited me to come and see, and I am sufficiently impressed by what you show me. We'll arrange a medico-legal examination.'

‘And if it turns out to be a perfectly natural death I'll lose my practice.'

‘Does that prospect worry you very much?'

‘No.' Firmly.

‘It's always an occupational hazard. For me too. Now where is this manège exactly? My wife goes there, but I've never been with her.'

‘Just up the road. Ten minutes' walk.'

‘And the restaurant?'

‘Ah, for that you need the car. Five minutes along the road going back towards Lisse.'