He nearly turned into Colonel Stok again next morning; it was colder than ever, the wind had risen, and was dashing the now much heavier rain against the panes in a rhythm like automatic-rifle fire. He put on his leather coat and a hat with a wide brim, but forgot his cigars – he had to take Ruth to the hospital and was preoccupied.
‘Those shoes are too thin – put on your gumboots.’ Luckily he had packed them last night. He watched Arlette biting her thread; she was sewing a button on Ruth’s raincoat.
‘Her birth certificate says “Father Unknown”. Our sergeant offered to give her his name – she was born three months after they married.’
She seemed not to be listening; she had pulled Ruth’s red woolly beret out of the raincoat pocket and was regarding it, twiddling it about in an absent way. ‘Arlette.’
‘What? – sorry.’
‘If Zomerlust is not really keen to concern himself about this child – and I wouldn’t blame him …’
‘Bring her back to me,’ with unexpected vehemence.
‘So you would be in favour – you want me to ask him whether he’d agree?’ But it was cut short by Ruth coming back.
‘Better,’ said Arlette, buttoning her up. ‘Rain won’t get into you.’ She pulled the beret on the child’s hair, laughed suddenly and tweaked it forward on her forehead, tilting it to one side. ‘Now you’re a paratrooper.’ To her consternation Ruth broke into violent sobbing.
‘I was being silly,’ said Arlette, cuddling her. Van der Valk could see the child making efforts to be docile and reasonable, not to throw herself about and howl. Be courageous before strangers.
‘I know,’ hiccuping and snuffling. ‘You were making a joke.’
‘Mamma used to do the same.’ Van der Valk took her hand. Sure enough, she had a metal badge on the beret, military insignia, something of Zomerlust’s.
‘Come on, we have to go to the hospital and see what these doctors are getting up to.’ He had a car waiting.
‘Will Mamma be long in the hospital?’ Ruth had been silent for some time, staring out of the window – rush hour, and they were held up at all the traffic lights.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. She was badly hurt. We’d better be prepared to be told she’s pretty ill.’ He had stage-managed a little scene at the hospital, asking them to put Esther’s body in a bed in a private room. He was wondering why Ruth had never asked what it was exactly that had happened. Did the child know? Or had she decided she didn’t want to know?
‘Wait here a moment, Ruth, while I ask which way we have to go … Commissaire Van der Valk. I have the child here; I have to break it to her. Where have you got the woman who was brought in yesterday?’
The woman leaned over with odious complicity to whisper: ‘You understand, Commissaire – it’s in the paper – we didn’t want people asking questions. Corridor B, and you go right along and turn to the left, and it’s IIA. I’ll ring up and tell Sister you’re coming.’
‘Has the autopsy report been sent me?’
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say.’
He walked heavily back to where the child – how good she was – sat waiting. His leather raincoat squeaked as he sat down heavily beside her. Nobody else around, God be thanked.
‘The news is bad, Ruth, I’m afraid. She was too badly hurt. But she didn’t have any pain.’ The child looked at him with a face that told him nothing.
‘I knew.’
‘Ah.’
‘She was shot. Like on the television.’
‘People do get shot. Not as often as on the television, perhaps.’
‘Mevrouw Paap said such silly things. She thought she was hiding a secret, and all the time she was giving it away.’ Van der Valk knew that this calm would not last. Luckily a child had very little idea about ‘being shot’. Thanks to the television! One fell down – it was probably a lot better than ‘being ill’. So quick, so clean an ending, in a child’s eye.
‘Now I’ve no one.’
‘Yes, you have. One always has. You don’t know the story of Cosette and Monsieur Madeleine?’ said Van der Valk, realizing with a lucky stroke of humour that Colonel Stok had turned into Jean Valjean.
‘No.’
‘Cosette was a little girl who had nobody – and who was very ill-treated. Dreadfully ill-treated. I’ll tell you about her. Do you want to see your mother?’
‘No,’ said Ruth firmly. ‘I’ve said goodbye.’
‘Would you like the car to take you home to Arlette? I have to go to work.’
‘Yes, please.’ How perfect she was.
As he stood up a voice blared at him from fifty centimetres away: ‘Going to go on keeping secrets, Commissaire?’
Van der Valk brought his heel very hastily across this clown’s instep, said ‘Oh I am sorry’ and took the child’s hand. She had started to cry, which was the best thing she could do. He sat her next to the driver, and said, ‘Take her back to my wife, Joe, and pick me up here.’ Ruth did not want to say goodbye to Esther, but he did. It was time that Jean Valjean changed back into Colonel Stok.
The pressman in the hall was holding his foot and looking both physically and morally pained.
‘You,’ said Van der Valk. ‘You interrupt me when I’m working just once again and I’ll unfit you for fatherhood. Six o’clock at the bureau is when I have time for you.’
Esther was in a sort of anteroom to the mortuary where they put relatives; they had screened a corner off. There was nobody there. They had arranged her quite nicely, with a pillow and a hospital nightdress; her hands lay quiet along her body. He didn’t want to look at her body; there would not be much left of it. He picked up her hand. A nurse’s hand, competent and muscular, with two or three fine white lines from old cuts, but well cared for, a little roughened by housework, very clean, one nail slightly misshapen from being crushed at some time, no sign of her habitually wearing other rings. The forearm was strong and tanned; she had been out in the fresh air.
The face was an empty shell, like all dead faces, but the marks of her character were there upon the smooth surface, a clear skin still youthful but with the lines of an older woman around the eyes and mouth. One could read resolution and courage – he wished he had seen her alive. She had not been a conventionally pretty woman but her looks had been striking, with a well modelled forehead, a wide and beautiful mouth, a long supple neck. Her hair was brown and straight, cut short, that of a woman caring nothing for fashion and knowing well what suits her. He looked at her with respect; Esther had known how to keep her secrets. He walked slowly back to his car.
‘She just kept crying,’ said his driver. ‘She made no fuss. Went eagerly to your wife. Rough for a little girl. The father not want her? What will you do with her?’
‘Keep her,’ said Van der Valk, surprising himself at sounding so natural.
The office was very spry and brisk; with the national Press paying such close attention his staff appeared unnaturally bright and as though fresh from their New Year resolutions. He found it all slightly absurd – poor Esther. Had she had a talent for getting into theatrical situations? It didn’t look like it, but what could one read on that dead face with closed pages?
His desk was full of paper; he glanced over it while picking up the telephone.
‘Commissaire van der Valk – morning, Burgomaster. Yes, decidedly. No, certainly not. Likeliest, but it’s quite hypothetical. A job for the archaeologists – no, I mean we go digging in the past. Yes, naturally we’re checking all that but it’s all very quiet and decent and frankly I doubt it. Naturally, Burgomaster, you can rely on that. Right, sir, yes. I’ll do that, of course. Yes – ’bye.’
They would not be too worried. Congratulating themselves on his experience, on his knowing how to handle the Press even if it turned nasty. He would get criticized on every side, and there was a large and vocal group just dying to make trouble for him, but he was lucky in his burgomaster and did not worry.
Little in the police reports he did not know by now. Zomerlust’s time was accounted for to the minute. All agreed that he was conscientious and loyal. No women in his life, no queer behaviour, no debts or eccentricities – almost depressingly virtuous, this man. Liked a beer and a joke and a session with the boys. Sociable and popular, a bit over-familiar with subordinates. But sound, dependable – and an excellent craftsman.
Zero from the Van Lennepweg. Neighbours, shops, bars – nobody had much to say about Esther Zomerlust. Calling her ‘Mevrouw Marx’ was a faintly spiteful way of underlining Ruth’s name. Polite, but never forthcoming. Never noisy. No gossip. Rarely smiled. Low, fatigued-sounding, hoarse voice. Smoked a lot, drank a good deal, but never showed it. Several people had wondered whether she were Jewish, but she didn’t look it, and certainly didn’t say it. No stranger or intruder even hinted at. And no one believed that Sergeant Zomerlust had anything to do with her death. A quiet model couple. What everybody did say was ‘Of course, she was a foreigner’.
At Ruth’s school they said much the same. Quiet well-behaved little girl. Solitary – ‘a foreigner’. Low-spoken, unaggressive. Average pupil, quite bright, sometimes careless and lacking in concentration. No close friendships. A ‘poor mixer’ but an easy docile child enough. Van der Valk resolved to change her school, if the decision got left to him. He had not known Esther Marx, and this made him the more resolved to know Ruth Marx.
Last on the list was the hospital autopsy, which had taken the whole evening and the report of which had only just arrived. He knew it would be thorough and unpedestrian – he knew the doctor, and had been wondering whether Esther’s mutilated torn body would prove talkative. But like every other line of inquiry it was disappointing.
Robust health. Muscles firm and well-developed. All organs present and in good condition. Small scar of healed tuberculosis on one lung. No recent sexual intercourse, no sign of assault or struggle. No broken bones, no surgical interventions, no apparent lesions. Death due, predictably, to grouped perforated wounds in vital organs including pericardium, spleen and liver: decease irremediable and virtually instantaneous. Teeth all her own and nearly all present. Blah blah – Haversma had written into the typescript above his signature – ‘Never saw a healthier physical specimen in my life.’
‘Tell Joe that I won’t be needing the car, but I’d like him to go out to the camp and ask Zomerlust to come in for a talk. No obligation of course, but I should think the military will be agreeable about co-operation.’
And now for half an hour he had to think about his administration; murder or no murder, the little trot of police business went on.
‘Where are you getting on the hit-and-run?’
‘All we know is the car had an American look. Opel maybe? Not a real American he says, not a Great Big Long one. We’re showing him photos – he thinks he’d know it if he saw it.’
‘Thought of that thing Renault make for the Americans?’
‘A Rambler? – an idea that. Garages all negative to any suspect paint or panel jobs, so far.’
‘And the pay-packet fiddle?’
‘Bart got it – she was cooking the books, she said, to pay her doctor whom the social security refuse to reimburse.’
‘Good … Van der Valk … right, shoot him up … Right, that’s Zomerlust – I want you to take what steps you see fit about that factory where the pilfering’s going on … Come in: sit down and make yourself at home … Bear in mind, Jack, I may take off suddenly and leave you landed with current affairs, mm? Handle that last thing on your own … Well, Sergeant. I can’t keep calling you Sergeant; I’ll feel happier calling you Bill. To get it clear – everyone’s happy that you have no connection with your wife’s death.’
Everyone but me, Zomerlust appeared to think; his fresh face was glum and drawn.
‘We’d have preferred it to be you – we’re quite upset it isn’t you. Would have meant a sight less trouble.’ Van der Valk, hamming away, saw this sink in; he was given to crude remarks in downright bad taste and every now and again they helped. He went back to the offhand tone.
‘More trouble for me means less for you, but some, none the less. Somebody killed your wife, somebody whose identity I don’t begin to guess at, about whom I know strictly nothing. I have to know a great deal more about Esther’s life. Yes – sort of familiar, calling her Esther, and it irritates you. But understand that I have to become familiar with her: as familiar as I can get. I have to ask you questions that will embarrass as well as irritate you, and you’ll just have to keep reminding yourself that I have one purpose only – to find the man who killed her. Better for you than its being thought that you’d killed your wife – in which case you’d be asked these questions anyway,’ dryly.
‘Like what kind of questions?’ Honest and a bit puzzled.
‘Like for instance why did Esther not give you a child?’
The fair skin flushed at once, but he answered readily, woodenly: ‘We were against it.’
‘We or she?’
‘She – but I agreed. Too many – here – everywhere. What sort of world are they born into anywhere? – hunger, napalm, you name it and we’ve got it.’
‘A man’s instinct is to found a family.’
‘Less, when he’s seen something of the world.’
‘Esther had seen a lot of the world?’
‘My idea as much as hers,’ stubbornly.
‘What made a bond between you, in the first place?’
‘She nursed me when I got some grenade splinters and was in dock.’
‘In France, yes. And you found her attractive and took her out – that’s straightforward.’
‘She was lonely. She’d been played a dirty trick by some man.’
‘Ruth’s father?’
‘Maybe. I suppose so.’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No,’ simply. ‘She never told me.’
‘He’d deserted her? She was bitter?’
‘I don’t know. She told me she was pregnant. I told her that made no difference to me. It didn’t and it hasn’t.’ Life had crept into his voice. ‘She was a good wife. If she was killed it wasn’t on account of anything she’d done and that’s something you’d better get clear.’
‘A good wife,’ repeated Van der Valk ponderously. ‘How?’
‘How, how?’
‘Put it in military language – she was a passionate woman?’
‘You mind your mouth.’
‘I told you it wouldn’t be pleasant.’
‘She was a good wife every way and that’s all I’ll tell you. She never cheated, never lied. She was a fine girl.’ The simple phrase had a dignity Van der Valk hated to attack.
‘Did she drink when you knew her first?’
‘She liked a drink. I never saw her drunk.’
‘One couldn’t ask for a more loyal person than you.’ The man looked steadily, turning it over. A slow mind, but firm. He would take his time about making it up, and once he had there would be no budging him.
‘Not more than she was, Mister.’
‘She stuck to her loyalties?’
‘Someone cheated her once, badly. I told you I don’t know who. Maybe it was that man. But I never heard her say an unjust word to the child.’
‘I’d like nothing better than to leave things the way you did, and not even ask, believe me.’
‘Esther’s dead. I can’t change that and no more can you. Leave her in peace. That’s what she would have wanted – and asked.’
‘As a man I agree. As a servant under oath – like you, I’m a servant of the state and I do what I’m told – can’t be done. I do my best; I’ll show you. What have you decided about Ruth? You’ve spoken to your family?’
Zomerlust flushed again; he seemed to be begging Van der Valk not to humiliate him.
‘They wouldn’t have her,’ painfully. ‘I’ll have to see what I can do.’
‘You could marry again.’
‘No,’ slowly. ‘I couldn’t ask another woman to accept – the situation,’ he ended lamely.
‘Do you’ – it was Van der Valk’s turn to speak hesitantly – ‘want me to make you an offer? If you were to allow me, I’d like to adopt Ruth.’ He hadn’t thought of coming out with it so roundly. It had only been a vague notion. He was a good deal astonished, and so was poor old Zomerlust.
‘How do you … How would you?’
‘My wife is French. I have two boys – they’re more or less grown up. Away from home. It could be done.’
‘Mister – you don’t know what you might be letting yourself in for. You don’t know …’
‘Neither did you.’
‘I did it for Esther.’
‘Put it that I am too.’
‘You’re not what I thought, altogether.’
‘Meaning a bastard? Little do you know.’
‘No – you’re a good man.’
‘Can’t have that. In this job you see that there are very few good men. And perhaps even fewer bad ones.’
‘I’ll have to think about this.’
‘Yes. Back to Esther. Born in France, up in the coal-fields somewhere – of Jugoslav origin – you know anything about that? Whether she had a family?’
‘I don’t know – she never talked about it. Never mentioned any family. She thought of herself as French. I’ve asked these things – it’s no good. You have to take her as you find her. Take me as I am, she’d say. Just a camp follower.’
‘What did she mean by that?’
‘I suppose that she’d always worked among the soldiers. She was a special kind of military nurse – airborne ambulance, ipsa or something they called them. She’d done parachute training. I served in Korea – you know? Well, she’d served in Indochina. You asked what was the bond between us; well that was, sort of. She had a uniform, had some kind of military insignia – French: I wouldn’t know what.’
‘This camp – there were French troops there?’
‘The camp was on loan to Nato – everyone used it. But there were lots of units of all kinds, engineers, paratroops, a cavalry squadron – it’s a place the size of Holland, kind of desert. Not farming country. Good for nothing much but manoeuvre terrain and such – rocky.’
‘You liked the French – got on with them?’
‘No, couldn’t stand the sods.’ Van der Valk grinned inwardly. The Dutch never could stomach the French.
‘Not good soldiers?’ blandly.
‘Oh they’re tough enough – I’ve talked to a few, who’d served in Algeria, Indochina. They’re all a bit cracked. I just don’t like them.’
‘And Esther?’
‘Well, she was used to them,’ defensively.
‘Esther spoke French to Ruth. You think her father was French?’
‘I prefer not to think about it. What good does it do? I respected her wishes. She’d had a hard life. What good would it do me to know? Or her? Ruth, I mean.’
‘So it boils down to this. You know little or nothing about Ruth – or about Esther – because you deliberately made it a policy not to ask. You stick to that? You’d tell the judge that?’
‘Sure. It’s the truth, whatever you think.’
‘Oh, I accept it,’ said Van der Valk. ‘I guess that’s all. I’ll get my driver to take you back.’
Zomerlust got up slowly.
‘Speaking of that matter? You mean it? Really? You see, I’m thinking of what would be best. For her. She owes me nothing. It would be best – for her, maybe – if she never saw me again. She’d soon forget me,’ without bitterness. ‘Course, I could only agree if I knew for sure. Not that she’d be looked after, I mean more that she wouldn’t be let down. I don’t know how to say it.’
‘You’re her legal guardian. These things need lawyers. There are formalities.’
‘Damn the formalities,’ muttered Zomerlust. ‘If I trust you I trust you. Go ahead.’
‘This inquiry will take some time,’ said Van der Valk, well aware that this was something of an understatement. ‘We’ll have the opportunity to see something of each other. It can be worked out.’
‘I’d better get back. My section commander …’
‘You want to meet my wife?’
‘You won’t want me sitting drinking tea in your house,’ said Zomerlust with a ghost of a smile, ‘and neither would Ruth.’
The man picked up his beret; metal winked in the sun.
‘Ruth has a badge on her beret,’ said Van der Valk idly.
‘One of Esther’s. She had a lot. Ruth asked for it.’ Of course. Nurses collected such things, souvenirs of boys they had nursed, been out with, slept with, very likely. There might well have been many, but it was a fruitless thought.