A Long Silence (20 page)

‘Well, that at least is clear as daylight,' said Danny without hesitation. ‘Somebody came to him, right? with a tale about a stolen watch, which might not have been stolen or why would he write supposed, but might have been planted. He was interested because something was funny and didn't hang together. Else why write “why come to me?” and indeed why write a note at all about something so trivial?'

‘Yes, that struck me. It seemed so trivial and that's why I thought the watch must have some significance. But the two are unconnected. I mean the stolen watch and the broken watch.'

‘We don't know. Anything else about watches?'

‘Yes, but not much help. It is isolated, in another book, and says just, “Richard Lindengracht watch fiddle what's in it?'”

‘Well that's something, but why another book?'

‘Oh that doesn't mean anything, or not necessarily, because he had several of these notebooks, they're just exercise-books really, and often he had the wrong one or just a different one and wrote things down just the same.'

‘Mm – nothing else about watches? Well what about Richard, since we know there's a Richard linked with the watch. Or about the Lindengracht?'

‘No Lindengracht. One Richard, since I followed that up of course: “Richard Oddinga age 22 student,” as though he'd checked an identity card, and after “pa dead in Friesland suddenly offered job thought fishy”, which is part of the same note.'

‘Well one looks in the Lindengracht and tries to find Richard
- easy with a description as detailed as that. Ask Richard whether he knows anything about it and bob's your uncle.'

‘Doesn't it strike you that if it were that easy she'd have done it?' put in Hilary tartly. ‘Nor does it strike you that somebody shot her husband, and possibly because of something concerning a watch. So you'll go asking too. Seems to me,' sarcastically, ‘a thought risky.'

‘There's that' admitted Dan, taken aback at the possibility of Lord Peter Wimsey getting shot at. ‘Nothing else that could be Richard – I mean students, or Friesland, or aged twenty-two or…?'

‘The only thing I could possibly find is a longish note about pictures, which goes on about a fiddle, and an illegal deal, and somebody called B. and another called Louis, and an addition, “What can he need the boy for?” but that's awfully tenuous.'

‘It is,' wrinkling and looking more like Gandhi than usual. ‘Nothing else on pictures or B. or Louis to give a link?'

‘No. Or at least – pictures of pictures.'

‘Huh?'

‘Drawings. Doodles. Several pictures all over a page, in baroque frames, just sketched in, but it means nothing to me.'

‘No,' agreed Dan unwillingly, ‘one might say he'd been looking at pictures, but going on like that we'd end up finding he'd been assassinated by a painter for saying his pictures were no good and I'd find myself pleading extenuation. No, I do agree, that doesn't get us very far.'

‘One has to admit, too, that the police have had these notebooks and must also have checked up anything that would look like a lead or even a link.'

‘Well, we just have to use more imagination than they did, that's all.'

‘About the watch,' said Hilary suddenly, ‘you said “a pretty one, sort of antique”, but was it an antique?'

‘No it was new, that's to say he said it was second-hand and that it had been a bargain. It was made in imitation of an antique model, more – it must have been expensive. I mean originally.'

‘It wasn't bought in an antique shop? I was thinking about pictures.'

‘I think he'd have said – he told me he'd picked it up by accident, by coincidence I mean, from a man who he'd been talking to.'

‘Anyway it wasn't antique,' said Dan with an air of logic, ‘so he didn't get it,' sarcastically, ‘from an antique shop; it'd be slightly more likely he got it from a jeweller.'

‘Or if it was second-hand from a watch-repairer, if we're going to be so devastatingly logical,' said Hilary, refusing to be snubbed.

‘That's a thing, though – any note about either of those, or a watchmaker or anything?'

‘No, I looked.'

‘So all we've got is that Richard was involved in a supposed watch fiddle, age twenty-two, student, pa dead, suddenly offered job—'

‘A job,' rapped out Hilary suddenly, ‘in a jewellers'.'

‘She's right, you know,' said Dan in the pause that followed this.

‘I mean where else, a stolen watch or possibly planted, it would be a jewellers'.'

‘So we look for a jewellers' in the Lindengracht. And if there isn't any we're back to square one.'

‘I'll go over the notebooks again. But I don't think there can be anything else. I've marked all the bits with pieces of paper.'

‘Have a look,' said Dan, reading the scribble laboriously, ‘it goes “this boy Odd, odd-ball” yes, a play on words just, but he does say “this boy” so the other boy could be the same boy.'

*

‘There isn't a jewellers' in the Lindengracht' Trixie was saying in a tone of voice which was conclusive, which might not have meant much by itself, because people very often do speak conclusively, most of all when they have no earthly idea what they are talking about. But as she was explaining – at a good deal of length – she had been brought up ‘round the corner' and still
had a married sister in the quarter whom she visited once a week.

Arlette had come for the promised coffee-drinking, a Dutch rite which takes place at any hour of the day that guests happen to drop in and is ‘de rigueur': Arlette might not much enjoy sweet pale milky coffee at half past seven in the evening, but she knew what was expected of her, and was lavish in admiration of all the domestic arrangements. In fact she was not at all ill at ease or unhappy. Once away from the cash desk and the abattoir they became simple, truthful, thoughtful and affectionate. When younger, Arlette would have thought that their taste in interior decoration, which was atrocious, made such folk permanently uneatable and unspeakable, but with experience she had learned better manners. Simply bursting with innocent vanity, Trix had started with the ‘salon', dwelt none too briefly on objects of art brought back from holidays in Majorca, Bavaria and an area apparently bounded by St Ives, Stratford-on-Avon and Buckingham Palace, and gone on to an exhaustive coverage of every room in the house, with special emphasis on every detail of the ruby-tiled bathroom and the turquoise-tiled kitchen. During this tour, which ended with the fur coat in the bedroom cupboard, Willy sat upon cushions in the living-room with a tolerantly uxorious expression and a bottle of beer. I suppose nothing could be more vulgar, ostentatious and ridiculous, thought Arlette: I wonder why I'm not nauseated. She had refused the offer of more coffee, and was being given a choice between crème de cacao, crème de banane and a mauve concoction known to Holland as Parfait Amour.

‘You're trying to work it all out, aren't you?' asked Willy with a shrewd directness which would have upset her ordinarily: she detested nothing more than the Dutch taste for personal questions.

‘If I can.'

‘Track it down, like. Not wanting anything more to do with the police neither, are you?'

‘How do you know?'

‘I'd be the same. I reckon it could be done too.' He stopped
talking abruptly, as though afraid he'd said too much, and opened another beer.

‘We were talking about it,' admitted Trix. ‘Working it out like. There must be something to find out. People don't just come up and shoot you with no explanation. Not like that. If they were chased, or sort of pushed into a corner, then maybe. But not like that. Oh I know the paper said it could happen.'

‘Paper'll say anything,' muttered Willy. ‘Sneaking up in a car like that? – never on your nelly. Somebody who knew him and had a grievance – and that means he's there somewhere and could be found.'

‘But the police have tried everything.'

‘Hm,' said Willy darkly, withholding the average Amster-dammer's opinion of the police, the built-in readiness to accept all sorts of nonsense which Van der Valk had never found a really good answer for. ‘Remember that book there was after the war? –
The Commissaire Tells –
fella's life story, what?'

Arlette did; also Van der Valk's opinion of it.

‘Know what we said? We said yeh, and the Commissaire could tell a lot more, too.' An explosive grunt, partly beer and partly indignation. ‘What I was thinking was …' he trailed away into silence.

‘Well, stop turning around the pot, then,' said Trixie coarsely. ‘Y'made up y'mind t'say it, say it.'

‘We'd like to help you,' said Willy, covering his confusion in beer.

Arlette was surprised and touched, but nowhere near as much as before she had gone to eat curry with Dan and Hilary. People did want to help, and they weren't bad at it, either. And plenty of people were less shrewd and less sensible than these, as well as less simple.

‘So you can,' she said.

‘You bet,' said Trixie with emphasis, ‘but you know, duck, we didn't want you to think we were sticking our nose in.'

‘Anything we can do, you just say. I mean, I'm just a butcher, but there's not many knows the quarter better than Treas and me.'

‘Who says it was anything to do with this quarter?' asked Trix.

‘Nobody knows,' said Arlette, ‘but the funny thing is, some other friends said the same. We're trying to work it out.'

‘We ought to put our heads together,” said Willy. ‘Many hands make the work light.'

‘One can't have too many friends,' said Trix sententiously, ‘but hereabouts is where you'll find ‘em. Not in The Hague,' with deep distrust.

‘You don't really think it was anything in The Hague do you?' asked Willy. ‘Here was where we've always thought it must belong.'

An Amsterdammer's chauvinism, thought Arlette, tickled. In those other, provincial towns they're even too stupid to commit crimes.

‘I must say I think myself it was something here. But it's terribly vague, and we've got nothing to go on, really, just a few vague shadows. Like an idea that it's something to do with a jewellers', which we think must be in the Lindengracht.'

‘Isn't any jewellers' in the Lindengracht,' said Trix.

*

‘Well,' said Bates, ‘I call that very sensible as well as very decent of them, and I'm very pleased myself to be given a better opinion of these people, one just can't tell dear, the piggishness just goes with the meat.'

‘But isn't it awfully silly and childish?' said Arlette uncertainly. ‘I mean just like children.
Emil and the Detectives?
' And at the same second she could hear her husband's voice.

‘Emil was probably the best detective ever,' Van der Valk had said more than once. ‘Children do, you know. They're marvellously observant, and nobody notices them. They're rapid, flexible, and marvellously inventive. They'd make perfect criminals if it wasn't for the chatter.' Well, here we are, Arlette told herself, but where's Emil?

‘That's great rubbish, dear, if you don't mind my saying so. It's a pity to have a lot of people trying to do something because they do talk so, but what strikes me, dear, is that it could
be very handy. People will talk to me for instance quite without suspicion where they'd never utter a word to you, no fault of yours just that they'd be wondering what you were getting at.'

‘You mean you want to help too?' asked Arlette stupidly.

‘I'm going to be Emily,' said Bates, giggling. ‘But to be serious, my pet, just ask these people in for a drink, and then we'll see what forming a gang can do to help.'

*

‘Not the Four Just Men,' remarked Danny de Vries, ‘but Swallows and Amazons.'

‘Please shut up,' said his wife crushingly. ‘I don't think we ought to chat or make jokes. This is a very serious thing, and we shouldn't talk without something essential to say.'

‘Sorry,' said Danny humbly. ‘I was only being frivolous from a sense of embarrassment.'

‘No use being embarrassed,' said Bates briskly. She had ‘taken the chair' because they were in her workroom. It was the revolving stool really, on which she sat next to debutant piano-players. Everybody was looking sheepish, like a child that has neglected its practising this week. Feeling this, Arlette had produced whisky. ‘There's nothing even to be formal about,' Bates went on. ‘We were all the Commissaire's friends and we're all Arlette's friends, and that goes for you two even if you never knew him, and we are simply resolved to find out who killed him and why.' She said it in a firm matter-of-fact tone, brooking no contradiction and admitting no drama. She might have been saying, ‘Now then, key of E flat, keep a nice steady tempo and don't emotionalize.'

‘It's a committee,' said Willy, who sat on several, looking round severely but there was no sniggering. And Willy it was who produced the first constructive idea. ‘This watch now, Mrs, er, Arlette, that he brought back and that was secondhand, I mean we don't know if he bought it in a jewellers' or what, but I mean, we can find out surely if he gave a cheque. Course if it was cash …'

‘No, he paid a cheque. I've seen the counterfoil but it just said “watch”.'

‘Not the payee?'

‘I know the police looked at all his cheques to find if there was anything unusual – but of course this wasn't. I mean a payment for a watch and so what? I never thought of it before.'

‘If it was crossed we could trace it back.' It had been so obvious, thought Arlette, no wonder we never thought of it. At the same time …

‘When it's as easy as that,' said Dan soberly, ‘it might give us the famous Richard but it's not very likely to give us a murderer.'