Double-Barrel (7 page)

I reached the electronics factory and parked the auto where it said ‘Executives Only', outside a towering wall of glass window through which nothing could be seen at all. There was a loud smell of packing materials from a loading bay; corrugated cardboard and gummed sealing strip and stencilling ink. A notice told me to State my Business at the Timekeeper's Office, which adjoined a shed full of nonexecutive bikes.

Three minutes later I was being ushered into the owner-director's office. Not as lucky as it sounds; I had found out from Miss Burger that he had regular days.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Uh? From The Hague, I see. Ethnographic Survey, huh?' – brightly and a little cunningly, as though he knew all about those surveys.

‘Yes. We are naturally anxious to follow all the uh, trends that may be situated by setting up industry here. Housing, transport, leisure activities of workers, uh, retail outlets.' Splendid phrase; I was not quite sure what it meant.

‘Quite, quite. And how can I help you? You want to interview the personnel or something?'

I leaned forward with a sharp disapproving nose. ‘This conversation is confidential and inviolable.' He looked startled, as I had intended. He was one of these knowing businessmen with a hoarse chuckling voice.

‘Certainly, if you wish. We're quite undisturbed here.'

I passed one of my real cards across the desk and enjoyed the reaction.

‘Inspector … Central Recherche … what's this about? I've made no complaint; we've had no troubles; as far as I know we've broken no laws.'

‘Glad to hear it, but I'm interested neither in peculation nor the maximum agreed wage – I'm interested in the death of your technical director's wife.'

‘Oh my god … you mean this ethnographic hooha is …?'

‘In this town I am an official of the Ministry of the Interior; I mean to stay that way. There've been more than enough policemen already.'

‘How I agree. Poor Betty. But I fail to see –'

‘You aren't under any suspicion. This is verbal, informal, confidential, just like my own identity. Whatever you may say is not stenographed.'

‘But I've told the police anything I knew – precious little, incidentally.'

I believe in pushing, when possible, this kind of person off balance.

‘I should like you to tell me the things you've suppressed in previous meetings with the police,' pleasantly.

‘I've suppressed nothing, damn it.'

‘Generally called forgetting – often truly, at that. I'm not calling you a liar, but this affair concerns the life of everyone in this town.'

‘But not mine, man.'

‘Everyone.'

‘Damn it, I don't even live here. I come here two days, maybe three, a week. Reinders lives here. He's the man you want.'

‘But I chose to start with you. You stay the night here, sometimes?'

‘Well, it has been known, when Will and I were working on a problem.'

‘And where, then? Not in a hotel?'

‘Well, no; they're ghastly.'

‘At Will's house, no? Normal, natural, understandable – and much more comfortable.'

‘I'm not trying to conceal it,' defensively.

‘You called her Betty, equally naturally.'

‘You've no objection, I hope.'

‘Quite the contrary, I'm delighted. Ever sleep with her?'

That got to him. Business man, flabbergasted.

‘Don't give yourself the trouble of looking shocked.'

He hoisted the expression off the floor and wrestled with it a moment. A small smile crept out.

‘Well … I was just thinking that the last set of policemen turned round that very question without quite daring to ask it, and you come plump straight out. The answer is no. And what's more she was a very conscientious woman and I don't believe the boy-friend did either.'

‘Why exactly did you give him the bullet, since as I understood there was no great gossip or scandal caused?'

‘In the first place, because he wasn't a particularly good craftsman. Second, because Will didn't.'

‘Will, I take it, thought it wouldn't be fair.'

‘Put it this way. Will wasn't going to stand for the fellow hanging about Betty and to give him the push – it might be said he had acted out of personal motives, even spite. Whereas coming from me … I simply told the chap he wasn't giving the ability to his work that justified my paying him that much. Betty, poor innocent, thought Will knew nothing about it.'

‘What amuses me is that neither you nor Will are above pinching a handy bottom on a trip, but at the mildest indiscretion of the wife you're all remarkably drastic.'

‘We're extremely careful to cause no trouble or gossip anywhere near our homes,' curtly.

I had got the background I wanted. The two husbands, gifted, energetic, often abroad and accustomed to a circle of
others equally thrusting, had played the part expected of them. Whisky and call-girls in the hotelsuites of Düsseldorf or Milan. Half the fun was in kicking over the respectability to which they were constrained at home. The girls had meant no more than a stolen apple. Betty, a smalltown, strictly-reared girl, had had intoxicating tastes of these men's conversation and jokes. She had got over her initial prudery and tried to keep up with them. Stuck at home, a bit neglected by a husband giving too much time to his career, having no children, she had done a few innocent, mildly silly things, but had had the bad luck to be spied out by a blackmailer who had enormously magnified it all. The tangle had grown involved, she had dreaded causing a scandal, dreaded compromising her husband's position, and had not been able to ride the squall out. Neither the experience of life nor the firmness of character. Who knows: she had perhaps given in to the blackmailer's demands. Finally, she had seen nothing for it but sleeping pills.

‘That was how it happened – you agree?'

‘Yes; I rather think so, seen like that. But if only she'd told Will – or me, come to that. We'd have backed her up, of course.'

Prodding this character off balance had been a success; I decided to try a second barrel and a riskier shot.

‘One more small point. Your firm produces sensitive listening gadgets for various purposes. There's a lot of mention in the police reports of one that might have been useful in a blackmailer's hands. The thing that – what does it do?'

‘Listens to machinery, jet engines to take an example, under test. It can detect faint flutters with a high level of exterior noise. I know what you're heading at; it's nonsense.'

‘You maintained that no such apparatus could get into the wrong hands.'

‘I did and I do.'

‘You don't have to tell me lies, you know. Don't interrupt. You, and Will, occasionally take things home. Prototypes or whatever you call them. You play with them at home, and you may think up a modification or experiment on an improvement. Right?'

‘Well, that's so, within limits, but …'

‘Now it occurred to you – just as it occurred to me; I wasn't born yesterday either – that it might be very comic to try one of these things out in a hotel, say? You did, and found it a good joke, and being a big broadminded business man you had a good laugh about this in Betty's presence. Am I wrong?'

‘Completely.'

‘Nonsense,' in an unimpressed way. ‘You left a gadget – I don't say this one, but some similar bit of apparatus – lying about in Will's house. When it disappeared you didn't even notice at first. When you did you were alarmed because the thing is classified as secret. After Betty's death you were really scared, because it occurred to you that this thing might in some way be connected. And you stuck to a lie through thick and thin. This is all logical, natural, consequential. But you've just denied it with such false bravado, and you are looking so particularly guilty, that I know that this – ach, not necessarily in detail – is so.'

‘But my god … how do you know?'

‘I guessed. Look, the writer of these letters boasts of being the ear of God. That is a figurative remark; the fact is, however, that this person knows a remarkable number of things that an ordinary person would not know. The conclusion is that he got something of this sort, and presumably from or through Betty. I'm not accusing you. Now tell me about the thing – what it looks like; how it's used.'

‘It's in a cigar-box,' much squashed, even shaken. ‘We chose that to act as a model for the size of unit we wanted.
We've managed to reduce the size since, but in essentials it's unchanged. It's like a transistor set – with special valves of course. It has two loop aerials that act as direction finders, give a cross bearing, and can pinpoint a sound. It's powered by ordinary transistor batteries. It has ear-phones with baffles that shut out exterior sound. They weren't perfected, but at night, or anywhere with no more than an ordinary volume of sound … you only have to focus it on a wall or something, and choose the right distance and angle. If you get too close you might get overriding sounds on the same bearing – I mean from further off the angle's more acute and the bearing more precise. At about thirty feet you'd get a conversation like ours.'

‘So you were badly scared.'

‘We thought it might get used for espionage or something. Anybody could learn to use it with a little practice. Of course it's classified; we have a model for commercial use that works at much closer quarters only, can be built into inspection units. The Ministry would kick up a great stink … When Betty died, and then they found those letters we … some policeman got the idea but we were able to deny it.'

‘We'll get it back; it's not being used for espionage. But just as long as we understand each other. I can twist your arm. You say nothing, you hear? About this, or about me. And not even to Will. You breathe and I'll break your neck with this.'

I stopped on the way out, and gave him my lecherous grin.

The sun had vanished as I came out, and there was a raw north-westerly wind. I had still another call to make: the
manager of the milk co-operative. His office here was not private, but the house adjoining was his home and I decided to work on him there. He was quite a classic type for stiffness and conformity. I certainly did not suspect him of anything, but there were one or two things in the reports I had thought a little odd, and I had wondered whether I could use these to lever any interesting information out of him.

I had to wait five minutes; he had, it appeared, ‘some instructions he had to give'. The kitchen-maid put me in the good front room, and there I amused myself while waiting.

I was hunting for an elusive phrase in my mind, and caught the reference suddenly. Ernest Hemingway. Overrated writer, but he wrote one good book at least, and created some unforgettable characters. This man was like one of them … Hemingway, of course, had been talking about a Spaniard. What were the exact words? ‘Heavier than mercury; fuller of boredom than a steer drawing a cart on a country road.' Fernando, in
Bell
– peculiarly apt for this personage.

You saw it looking round the room. It was classic too; the provincial ‘good front room' of the Holland of forty years ago. Where no one ever came, bar the dominie twice a year, and the relations for the wedding anniversary, and the daughters for their protocolaire piano-practising. Sad rooms, hatefully clean, revoltingly arranged and undisturbed, full of unseen shutters, reeking of must and fust. Not one single tiny object that was either beautiful or useful; not a scrap of fringe or varnish that was necessary. No spontaneous, unpretentious breath had ever been drawn here.

Why had the woman who had lived in this house put her head in the gas-oven? Looking at this room, I could hardly believe that she had made even the trivial slip that put her in the hands of a blackmailer. Something, I thought, had threatened her ‘standing'. Her position of ease and assurance among the other wives on the good-works committee; most
precious thing in her life. Something had so undermined that solid prop that she had lost her footing and gone under. Provincial Holland.

The steer came into the room, fidgeted, and sat at last uneasily on a plush chair. This was the only room where one could be sure that the kitchen-maid would not be able to listen.

They had given out that the wife had had an incurable disease. He had been much sympathized with, the good man. Perhaps he would marry again, as soon as standing and provincial morality approved.

I took one of my real cards out slowly.

‘I am here on the instructions of the Procureur-Général. This whole business must be cleared up.'

‘It has nothing whatever to do with me.'

‘Your wife, alas, died.'

‘Whatever it is that you are investigating, uh – Inspector, I would prefer you to stop these attempts to drag my wife's memory into disrepute.'

‘Ah. I quite understand. You would prefer it if nothing more was ever said or done. Unfortunately, I'm going through with this, regardless of whatever must be disturbed or uncovered.'

Good heavens, how the fellow sat, encrusted in virtue. I'd really like to tell him he deserves pelting with stale eggs for producing such lousy milk. Look at him – rancid as his own butter.

Now that won't do. I must not allow these things to affect me. My feelings about butter are not relevant to the death of a poor wretch's unhappy wife.

‘I'll do everything I can to spare you pain or publicity. You see that I have come anonymously, and very likely I'll never worry you again. But this is like a creeping sepsis – we really must cut deep. These frightened little prods at the surface only make things worse.'

It seemed to have no effect. Fellow sat there like a bump
on a log, correct, humourless, righteous. I felt as though I were wading through toffee, and ploughed heavily.

‘This is a judicial inquiry; you are legally required to answer my questions. Now – correct me if these details are wrong, which I quote from official police reports. When you found your wife, you immediately locked the whole house, you went in person to the police, and you asked for the inspector in person. You refused to speak to the uniformed agent. You did not telephone. You appeared at the bureau at eight-ten in the morning; you waited twenty minutes for the inspector and you insisted that he come, alone.'