Gun Before Butter, page 11
Her hand made a movement inviting him to sit; the diamond ring caught his eye again, and he was reminded of another analogy that had, perhaps, helped him. This woman was also a diamond. She had contributed to the peculiar life of Gérard de Winter. She had cut some of his facets. He crossed his knees and fixed her with a glassy eye, waiting for her to speak. She had the ball; now let’s see her carry it.
‘I must take you into my confidence, I see. You will not be satisfied until you know about my relations with my husband. Yes, smoke if you feel like it. Gauloises? Not for me, thanks, I can’t abide them . . . . Yes, I do smoke but only filters. I don’t know quite how to begin. At the beginning, you will say. Very well. I married Gérard when I was a young and inexperienced girl. I am from the country here; I am Ostendaise. My mother is still alive, my father died some few years ago. He had bronchial trouble. He was a hairdresser, the best in Ostend. My mother sold the business after his death; she lives now in a flat in Brussels.
‘No, I am the only child left. I had a brother, but he got TB during the war. He died in Davos in forty-eight.
‘Yes, it does look as though the women had the strength of the family. Does that mean anything? Isn’t it often the case? You are in Belgium, Inspector. The women run many businesses here.
‘Gérard, yes. He was a local figure. I won’t say prominent, but known, certainly. I think that he has always lived here, yes, as far as I know. I don’t know about wartime; he never spoke of it. But he had had the business since the war, and before that his father owned it. No, I have made the modernizations, but it has always had a good name and done good business.
‘The marriage – oh I will be frank; you will see – was not a success. No, never, right from the start. I don’t know what kind of woman he wanted. He was always – withdrawn? – call it what you like. Say it was my fault if you please, I don’t care. I am not a housewife; I admit it. Housekeeping bores me stiff. It may have disappointed him that I had no children . . . . He never mentioned it and I never asked him . . . . He has always made a habit of going away . . . I don’t know where, I have not been curious.
‘Yes, I suppose he does have other women. You don’t believe me? I can’t help that. It was our agreement and we both kept it. I would never query or comment on what he did. I haven’t spied on him . . . I wasn’t sufficiently interested, perhaps. I had plenty to occupy me . . . . He made me a full equal partner in the hotel, and he left the running of it to me; he knew that was what I wanted. It’s what always interested me.
‘I’m not ashamed of being a business woman; why should I be? Since I am a good one.
‘Certainly; I have doubled the value of this place; turnover, profit, everything. It was always a good building in a good position, yes. But it was terribly old-fashioned – kitchen in the basement, plumbing all over the place – now, every room has its private shower, and the kitchen is modern from one end to the other. Those details mean nothing to you, possibly, but I am a professional hotelier and proud of it. And known as such.
‘Yes, he tended gradually to go away more often, and for longer. This last year, I’ve hardly seen him. But he would be fair; he would take my place when I wanted a break or even a holiday. I want to be fair too; he was not mean. I have no complaint against him, and we have never quarrelled.
‘Would you like tea?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I’ll have some sent up.’
‘Was he secretive, though?’ asked Van der Valk. ‘You didn’t ask, but he hid – or did he? – what he did – where he went – who he saw?’
‘That was his right. I do know, vaguely, that he spent a lot of time in Germany. I assumed, without his ever saying so, that he must have a woman somewhere. But as for what he did – I have no idea.’
‘I appreciate your being open. It helps us greatly.’
‘But I have nothing to hide. Though I don’t think I’m bound to answer any questions about my private life.’
‘You aren’t bound to answer anything at all. But if you didn’t, and I wasn’t satisfied, there might be a judicial enquiry set on foot. Police, mandates, the examining magistrate possibly, clerks taking everything down – you notice that I’m writing nothing. You would quite likely get the press, as well. By answering everything freely now, you will probably avoid a process that might bring disagreeable publicity and even do your business harm.’
‘Do you think I haven’t realized all that?’ she said coolly. ‘I only act in my own interests.’
‘Yes,’ he said, drinking tea.
‘You still have more questions?’
‘A few. Inoffensive, but perhaps indiscreet.’
‘As you have seen, that is not one of the things that bothers me greatly.’
He set his tea-cup down slowly. She had made a good recovery. Was it, then, only the initial shock, the hearing of a sudden death, that had unnerved her? She was oddly impersonal about this dead man, now. He might have been a total stranger to her. Her heart was completely armoured, yes, but by egoism alone? Or, in addition, by the self-control and dramatic skill of the accomplished woman criminal? Could she really feel no loss at all? She was feeding the Pekinese cake out of her saucer; what would she do if one of the dogs – her children – got killed?
‘When was it last, about, that you slept with your husband?’
‘Three years. Four perhaps. I didn’t write the date in my diary.’
‘During wartime, you lived in Ostend?’
‘Yes. I was no more than a child, really.’
‘And he was here?’
‘The hotel was, I think, requisitioned. I seem to remember hearing that he went into the maquis, or at least that he was involved with the local resistance.’
‘He took no further interest in the hotel, after turning it over to you?’
‘He never was greatly interested; he had no feeling for it ever. He knows the work, of course. He is able to check the books, all that goes on here.’
‘But if I have understood right, you make the major decisions as well as having the heavier responsibility?’
‘Certainly. I planned every detail of the new buildings with the architect, and arranged all the financing, everything. I saw the builder every day. He only had to sign a few papers.’
‘Doesn’t it seem unfair that you have only half the profit?’
She smiled at the little pitfall. ‘It has. I have thought the same. But it was a reasonable price to pay for freedom.’
‘Freedom of action. Not freedom to live as you wished. You never wished for a divorce, for example?’
‘No. I am at liberty to do as I please. Remarrying has no appeal for me.’
‘But the hotel remains his property?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is yours now? What arrangement was made, in the event of his death?’
The clear aquamarine eyes were level and untroubled now. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to ask that. The financial interest in a death. Isn’t that the policeman’s obsession?’
‘Money and sex are most people’s obsessions,’ cheerfully. ‘Policemen are no exception.’
‘The truth is simple. I become sole owner. If you wish to conclude that I had something to gain by Gérard’s death, I cannot prevent you.’
‘You said that he went away, but that you never had the interest to find out more.’
‘I said it and I’ll confirm it. I’m not ashamed of it.’
‘There is a difference between interest and curiosity. I ask these questions out of interest – I wouldn’t do so out of curiosity. I admit that you had no interest; I might find it more difficult to believe that you never had any curiosity. Never, ever.’
She considered the point, unflustered. ‘I suppose I felt curious, sometimes. I don’t think I showed it. What good would it have done me?’
‘I should think that you could have satisfied it without showing it.’
‘What do you mean? That I would follow him? That I was jealous? Not at all.’ Contempt in her voice. For Gérard? For him, the stupid policeman? Or for other women, those who did feel jealous of their men, their husbands?
‘Not necessarily. You have the figures of the business at your disposal?’
‘I see what you’re getting at. Did he take money?’
‘For example.’
‘Certainly not more than he had a right to. The net profits can be calculated. The accountant does it. The two halves are banked separately. No question of his taking more.’
‘You have told me you were not jealous. The picture I get is of a man who was not jealous either. Is that correct?’
‘Perfectly correct. We did not interfere in each other’s lives.’
‘He showed no interest in your emotional life?’
‘Why should he? He had his own, I imagine.’
‘He was normally sexed?’
‘Is there any such thing?’ coolly.
‘No,’ grinning. ‘Lawyers like to pretend there is.’
‘I suppose he was.’
‘I can ask you the same question?’
‘You’re bound to show an interest.’ She had a remarkable calm. Too much calm. ‘You’d find out easily, I suppose. I prefer to answer to having you rummaging about among the staff.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Then I will tell you that yes, I do have lovers.’
‘Several?’
‘I don’t know what you call several, Inspector.’
‘I don’t know either. What I meant was together? One at a time? Do they last long, or is there a high rate of mortality?’ He was beginning to assume the unconscious brutal joviality he showed sometimes in examining a person he suspected of a crime.
‘I like the way you put things; it’s charming.’
‘I’m not a moralist. Or a jurist. I merely assemble facts. If I ask, for instance, whether they are local people, or strangers, or both, I simply want to know. I haven’t any morbid obscene interest.’
‘The simplest answer, then, is to tell you that they are temporary, casual meetings, mostly with guests in the hotel. There is very little emotion involved.’
‘If you like a man you sleep with him.’
‘I generally wait for him to ask me,’ almost gaily.
‘And you don’t particularly make a secret of it?’
‘Chambermaids know everything,’ indifferent. ‘And for that reason I do not care to get over-intimate with the neighbours or the local people. This is a village and they all gossip. I let them gossip, but I don’t cause local scandals.’
‘And your husband did not bother to listen to the gossip of chambermaids?’
‘I should have been most surprised if he had; it would be most unlike him. He knew all about me.’ Very good answer, he thought.
Really she was as efficient – and about as lovable – as a trench mortar. He would try a last throw at penetrating this armour.
‘You don’t like emotional involvements, do you?’
‘No.’
‘What does involve your emotions? Your dogs?’ He had not seen the bedroom but he made a guess. ‘Your own good looks? Your possessions? The well-filled linen-cupboard of Ostendaise tradition?’
His tone stung her. Blood showed in her face. She did not answer; her hands went to the big silver table-lighter and clicked it irritably, several times. She might have wished it were the action of a gun, he thought, pleased, and pressed his little advantage.
‘Are you so afraid, then, of emotions? They are quite normal things to have.’
She refused to be discountenanced; she had herself again under control. ‘I am exactly like many thousands of women, Inspector.’
‘I can’t say I agree, you know. I’m not trying in the slightest to be rude, but I find you unusually efficient, and perhaps ruthless.’
‘I see that I have given you the impression of a very cold and calculating woman, Inspector. I seem to give most people that idea; I don’t see it myself. What is so extraordinary about having common sense and being businesslike? But I was good friends with my husband. I am sorry, really sorry, that he is dead. I want to ask how he came to die. I care. Can you understand that, or are you too so prejudiced?’ Me too, he thought. This is a woman who has no friends, whom nobody trusts, whom nobody will ever love, and therefore a little tragic.
‘I cannot answer that yet, Madame. You will still have to be patient a little while. Your husband died under circumstances that aren’t yet explained. When they are, you will hear, I promise. Meanwhile I should like to ask you – I don’t think you should find it too difficult – to go on living and acting exactly as when your husband was alive. Just common sense.’
‘Yes.’ She had to accept. Had she not boasted of her indifference, of her control? If necessary, thought Van der Valk, I could put so much pressure on this woman’s nerves that she would snap like a dry stick. Bah, these ones, who have no emotions – they have not the suppleness of a normal woman. They have no reserves of love, of warmth, of courage. They have nothing but their lousy cold blood. To me, they are zero. He could not help disliking this woman. Believing her guilty of a crime was another matter.
He walked out of the hotel indifferently, as though now he was perfectly satisfied. She could easily be a criminal, he thought. The cool ones; wasn’t it often the cool ones, the well-organized ones who had their life wound round and buckled like a belt, who despised emotion, that found one gay day their life explode and emotion turn round and claw them?
He drove a little way to avoid the curious eyes that, by now, Erneghem would have trained upon him, and stopped to look at his road map. It was quite interesting – here he was following the path that de Winter had driven, week after week, and then month after month. Which way did he go?
Sometimes, no doubt, he would have gone north, towards the border, to make his little arrangements. Which way did he drive? Along the coast? Hardly. It was a boring drive, and one had to skirt the Wester Scheldt and then along the border north of Antwerp. He doubted whether de Winter ever came that way. The roads are less good, and the country dismal to a man who loved the woods and waters of Limburg.
More likely that he went straight on, the way Van der Valk himself had come, along the fast motor road through Bruges and Ghent to Brussels. And when he went to Germany he could go along the Liège road out towards Aachen and Cologne. He thought about the black Peugeot, and started to drive in its track, meditative.
What had he found in Belgium then – apart from a promising suspect? – he would have to think about the widow de Winter. He had no idea still why Meinard Stam should have bought a white Mercedes or a house in Amsterdam. The widow presumed he had a woman somewhere, and he believed that. Because the widow’s story was certainly true – as far as it went. The man who had married the smart, pretty hairdresser’s assistant from Ostend had very soon realized that she was long on business sense but short on affection. He had waited to see if she became pregnant, a physical change and growth that might warm and ripen that arid character. When she did not, he had cut his losses. Where in the course of the history had he found, and slipped on as though it were an old overcoat, the personality of Meinard Stam? How had he stepped into the even more careful and exclusive company of the butter-smugglers? In these surroundings he had found a personal life –could one say an emotional life? – that he had lacked. Had it been enough? Had it satisfied a romantic spirit? A man like that, with a need for emotional outlet, had found something like happiness in the woods and fields perhaps. But had that continued to satisfy? Might he not have come to long to share, to confide, to give? Had not his life, too, perhaps come to appear arid and pointless without a woman? The romanticism of a Ruritanian shooting-lodge might easily become a thin cardboard affair, concluded Van der Valk.
De Winter had behaved sensibly. He had not misjudged his wife a second time. The pact, for instance, that would have seemed unthinkable to Arlette, say, had appeared reasonable and natural to him because it was logical and sensible to Solange. He would have lost confidence in women. It might have been a long time before he could again bring himself to trust one, to yield to the need for one. But if he had yielded, it would be with a bump. The surrender would be total, an infatuation.
Van der Valk was nearing Brussels. He could get the civil servants here to look up de Winter’s family and origins, but it was not, he guessed, really necessary. He was certainly what he claimed to be – a man who had lived in a small place virtually all his life. There would be people still alive that remembered his father.
Some time, during the war presumably, he had got acquainted with the border. Maquisard formation, doubtless. It had laid a groundwork for later ideas. Not only useful knowledge and contacts when it came to smuggling butter, but the idea of living in a hide-out in the woods, dear to this kind of character. Somewhere during the war, de Winter, an ideal type, probably, with his romantic ideals and his imaginative courage, for resistance work, had met a man called Stam. Something of an age, with some – at least –physical resemblance, and perhaps an affinity. The Dutch army officer and the Belgian hotel-keeper had been friends. De Winter had learned enough of Stam’s past. Then Stam had perished, and had left no trace. Had been deported to Germany, there to perish – with his family perhaps – under night and fog. Or had simply been killed in an affray. Either way there had been no witnesses, and de Winter had seen a chance to acquire false papers that might at any moment be very useful. He had kept them. It had occurred to him, two – three – four years later, to use them. When he had met the baron, and given the name of Stam, it must have been a shock to realize that here was someone who could pierce his alias, but the baron, already old, forgetful, and capricious, had not recalled the features of a man who had been a very young officer when he was already a colonel. And from a danger, the baron had become the greatest asset, an invaluable reference to make the alias above all suspicion. Who would query the baron’s word that this was an officer and a gentleman?
The system of fast motor roads approaching Brussels makes this city unusually easy of access. From the direction of Ostend, for instance, one hurtles into the suburb of Berchem, and the autostrade meets the Chaussée de Gand, the old highway, at the Avenue Charles Quint. The Chaussée de Gand itself goes straight to the heart of the old town, at the Porte de Flandre. Here there is a system of ring boulevards, that turns around the town and brings one out to continue hurtling south towards Namur. Or from the Porte de Flandre one can enter the majestic town, up to the Place de la Bourse and all those monuments to bourgeois pride that witnessed also the Joyous Entry of the emperor Charles the Fifth.
