A Long Silence (23 page)

‘Having endorsed and cashed a cheque – don't be so damned ridiculous,' said his wife. ‘It would lead straight to him. It led us straight to him.'

‘Not yet it hasn't. It's a common name.'

‘The woods are full of them,' said Danny. Arlette got a nervous giggle which she was unable to stop – Bosboom in Dutch means ‘forest tree'.

‘Arlette could check that.'

‘There's a risk.'

‘Stop telling me there's a risk,' yapped Arlette furiously. ‘What about the risk for you?'

‘There isn't any risk,' said Dan. ‘It's true; if we go with silly stories – I got recommended to you by my friend the commissaire – he'd not be able to sit thinking up ways of assassinating people – he'd quite literally be far too scared.'

‘Scared – quite literally – out of his wits,' remarked Hilary.

‘That's settled, then – we'll all go for him,' said Willy in a vengeful voice. ‘I want to see the bastard sweat. Nonsense, Treas, there's no risk.'

‘Except perhaps for the last one who goes,' said Trix unhappily. ‘Because by that time he'll be a very badly frightened man.'

‘The last to go will be me,' said Bates.

All of them looked at the others. There was some embarrassed coughing, but nobody contested this honourable position. It was just as though she had said, ‘I will be the last to leave the sunken submarine.' Who would have thought it,
wondered Arlette, of old mother Counterpoint? The fact is that she has more character than the other four put together.

*

It was true that the Amsterdamse wood was full of trees. The phonebook was full of Bosbooms. Arlette went to the branch of the Netherlands Credit Bank in the Plantage Middenlaan and was received with chill formality.

‘We regard the addresses of our customers as confidential information.'

Tell that to the Marines, Van der Valk would have said coarsely. Arlette adopted a feminine, emotional approach.

‘May I have a word with you in private?'

‘I see little use in that, Mevrouw.' He was the stiffest, most wooden, most proper kind of Dutchman.

‘It costs you nothing to listen.' I see her, her big Phoenician nose sticking out arrogantly, her splendidly straight body tense with the reined-in desire to slap this proper little man spinning and throw his polite little plaque saying ‘Chief Cashier' at a nearby clerk eyeing her with a nasty mixture of lechery and disapproval.

‘If you insist, though I'm bound to say …'

‘Just hear me out. I am the widow of Commissaire van der Valk, a policeman who was assassinated in the streets of The Hague while going for an evening stroll.'

‘Er – my respectful sympathies, Mevrouw.'

‘Your respectful sympathies are, I'm afraid, no good to me. I am asking you for nothing but the address of a man to whom my husband paid some money.'

It might have been the key-word ‘money'.

‘Naturally, Mevrouw, you have our sympathetic consideration.'

‘I'm asking you nothing but an address.'

‘Our rules of confidentiality, Mevrouw …'

‘I'm asking you, will you or won't you give me this piece of simple harmless information?' Awful woman was showing signs of screaming.

‘Mevrouw, I beg you, there is no need of …'

‘There is great need. If your wife had been killed by an armed robber, would
you
be satisfied with people's rules and regulations?'

‘Mevrouw, really …'

‘I'm not asking you for the front-door key.‘

‘Hush, Mevrouw, please. In the circumstances I will make an exception. But you do understand…'

‘Man,' wearily, ‘don't torment me further.'

*

The roses were shooting with a force undaunted by any rules. A cramped situation, a polluted atmosphere, a heavy layer of dark grey cloud, a cold north-westerly wind coming down from Scapa Flow where it was still winter at the very end of April – some of the roses were already showing buds. Mr Bosboom had met her with an aggressive roughness that startled her. Why should he be hostile? He was just a man who had sold her husband a watch.

‘I can see no way in which I can be of service to you.'

‘Will you at least listen? Politely or anyway patiently?'

‘I should hope so at least. I wouldn't wish you to think me lacking in common courtesy. But as regards your husband's most untimely and unhappy death – it is as though you appear to believe, if you will pardon me, that I had withheld information from the police.'

‘I have nothing whatever to do with the police. They know nothing about this. I have nothing to say to them. This is purely personal. I have no reproach or even remark to make to you which you could possibly find offensive.'

‘I am bound to believe you, Mevrouw, and to listen, naturally, with proper courtesy, to anything you may wish to say. I cannot believe that I can help you.'

‘Will you at least ask me in off the doorstep?'

‘I beg your pardon … Won't you please sit down?'

‘I am not trying to enlist your sympathy,' she said slowly. ‘Nor seeking to commit you in anything. I've no reason whatever
to believe there's anything you can tell me that you wouldn't have told the police, that is assuming you had anything to tell them.'

‘Which I did not.'

‘Just so.'

‘So if I may ask what your purpose is in doing me the honour of a visit?'

‘Don't be too formal,' said Arlette sadly. ‘Try to believe me – I've no axe to grind.' He bowed his head, and said nothing. ‘You sold my husband a watch.'

‘I do not contest it. An innocent transaction, I should imagine.'

‘I've no reason to believe anything else.'

The bow was sarcastic.

‘You see, he wrote something down in a notebook. Something about a boy who worked in a jewellers', who was suspected or thought himself suspected of stealing. Very vague, and one would say quite unimportant.'

‘I have no doubt of that.'

‘But he thought it important enough, I don't know, it seemed worth asking that's all, to come and see you.'

‘He asked me,' said Bosboom carefully, ‘and my memory serves me well upon the subject, whether there was any likelihood in a tale told him of a watch unaccounted for in a jewellers' inventory, a jewellers' where as he had learned I had worked for numerous years. I gave him my opinion, which was that I thought the story exceedingly unlikely, and that the young man in question, who remained unnamed, and whom I may say I do not know, was telling fairy stories. That is all. I still see no relevance to any subsequent happening. I have no means of saying, of course, whether he gave my simple opinion on a matter of conjecture any credence.'

‘Mr Bosboom – please, I'm not trying to make any more of this than you tell me there was.'

‘I am grateful to you.'

‘Do you know a man called Saint?'

Bosboom's large gardener's hand, which was rubbing his jaw, gave a nervous jerk.

‘Now why do you ask me that?'

‘Just because in the note my husband wrote, which was in a pile of notes he wrote concerning his work, your name and this one are mentioned in the same context. These notes were part of a pile of manuscript – they just got stuck in a file. Nobody read them, you see, till after. The police thought them of no importance.'

‘In what context?' asked Bosboom slowly.

She wasn't being very good at this, she thought, and stopped to think. The long pause, and her concentration, seemed to have a reassuring effect upon Bosboom, who became less still and stony, and arranged his features into a less forbidding pattern.

‘In the context of a rhetorical question,' she said at last, ‘asking himself what conclusions to draw from a situation which wasn't clear to him, and which is that much more obscure to anyone trying to piece things together.'

‘As you are – that is the obvious inference.'

‘Yes.'

‘Because – this is your inference – this diary or memorandum or whatever it is contains the germ of explanations – why he was killed, to put it bluntly. And you are trying to make this outline, call it, of an idea into something evidential. Now be quite honest with yourself. You are most anxious, and I can understand that and sympathize, to find something with which to go to the police and say to them, “Here is matter for enquiry, which you have hitherto neglected.” Now isn't that an accurate summing-up of your thoughts?'

‘Except that I have no intention whatever of going to the police with any suggestion or complaint or argument at all, it is accurate as far as it goes.'

He knitted his big bristly eyebrows together.

‘If you are not trying to stir up the police – I would understand it if you were – I don't grasp your purpose.'

‘I wish to find out. I feel strongly that there are things to find out, that it can be done, and that I have the right to do it. It is personal to me. Police and courts and judges don't enter into it at all.'

He looked at her, studying her, taking his time about answering.

‘Forgive me, but have you really thought this out? I don't wish to appear insulting. You certainly aren't behaving – shall I say over-excitably. May I, in a friendly way, because I wish you nothing but good, beg you to ask yourself what it is you hope to gain?'

‘You believe that I have a suppressed hysteria, don't you?'

He puffed a bit, taken aback and unwilling to say either yes or no.

‘I couldn't have answered you a day or so ago. All I could see then was that my husband had been assassinated. I was determined to use any means to identify the assassin. I've learned a good deal since. This for a start, that my husband was a policeman, but he wasn't working on an investigation, so it can't have been anything criminal. He kept it quite private; that seems clear. He did not apply to any official instrument for help or cooperation, he did not use any official machinery. The notes we've found are fragmentary and confusing, but go to show that whatever this was, he had made some kind of bargain with himself, that he hadn't grounds for an official enquiry. He was working something out – we don't know what – in his spare time. I intend to find out what and why. If it led to his death, then that might be a matter for legal justice, I don't know, but it isn't my affair. I don't believe in private police forces. Bringing people to judgement isn't my job – or my intention.'

‘Then what is your intention? I may ask that, mayn't I? Since after all you have come to me for information.'

‘Just as my husband came to you – unless I am very much mistaken – for private information. It was a private affair between him and some person, or maybe some people. Now he is dead. So that now it is between me and this person. Whoever,' she finished tranquilly, ‘killed him.'

The level tone she was able to speak in had surprised herself as much as it had Bosboom.

‘Hm,' he went slowly, and again, ‘Hm. You see, I've been a businessman all my life, and as far as I know an honest one.
You won't take it amiss that I should be hesitant in beginning anything, or contributing towards anything that I can't see the end of, and whose consequences I can't judge. You understand that I – like your husband if you wish – or like you if you prefer – have ethical hesitations as well. Your husband came to see me. That is true. But he certainly gave me no reason to suppose that he was pursuing anything in the nature of a criminal enquiry. Nor did I have the slightest base for a supposition that there could be any connection at all with his subsequent death. After thought, I felt satisfied that this must be coincidence. I did ask myself whether I should go to the police. But what had I to tell them? – 1 didn't feel it to be anything but confusion and irrelevance. All it had boiled down to was a question about jewellers' stocktaking, a thing inside my experience and that was why he came to me. As a sidelight – he happened to have broken his watch. I happened to have one I had no real use for. I sold it him in a casual neighbourhood transaction. There was no matter in this for police enquiries.'

‘I think I understand,' said Arlette. ‘I'm not trying to put any pressure on you. Perhaps you feel that if you now told me anything, and I were to use that to create some sort of scandal or uproar, you might be put in an uncomfortable situation. As though you had had some knowledge and suppressed it, which might come to appear discreditable – is that it, perhaps, a bit?'

‘Possibly … partially …'

‘Or that you have no definite knowledge, and that something you could perhaps tell me could come to appear mischievous, or even libellous because of what I might repeat or insinuate?'

‘There might be something in that too.'

‘Would it help you if I gave you my word that I will not make anything you tell me public?'

‘It would help… yes.'

‘Then I've only one thing left – a remark, not an argument. My husband was killed. Will you not do what you can to help me? For nothing, for no motive, but only as an act of
generosity or, if you prefer, pity towards a woman who has lost her husband.'

Bosboom was silent while the antique pendulum clock in the comfortable, chintzy little living-room ticked quietly and the traffic outside boomed suddenly loud at the corner and decrescendo as it passed by. A far-off airliner circling above Schiphol added its distant screech. Then he said abruptly, ‘My wife is out. May I offer you something? She will be back very soon. I should like to put this to her, and hear what she has to say. Would you agree to my doing that?'

‘Yes,' said Arlette.

*

That evening about rush-hour she was standing in the Spui, while the pedestrian traffic, swelled by the mounting tide of tourists, eddied past her. She gazed at the windows and the door for a long time, but did not go into the shop.