A Long Silence by Nicolas Freeling Page B

what he looked like?’
    â€˜Looked like? I don’t know. Sort of between two ages. Biggish. Glasses – sort of hair which isn’t fair and isn’t really grey. Hell, I didn’t look; I wasn’t buying him.’
    â€˜Did he have a walking stick?’
    â€˜Now I come to think, believe he did.’
    â€˜Walk a bit funny, a little stiff?’
    â€˜Didn’t see him walk, not to notice.’
    â€˜Talk a lot – voluble, persuasive?’
    â€˜God, yes. Been on at you, has he?’
    â€˜I rather think so.’
    â€˜Not going on about that French picture, I hope.’
    â€˜No. In fact I wonder whether he’s really interested in art at all.’
    â€˜What, then?’
    â€˜Snowing me with a ridiculous tale about a watch. Don’t bother, Louis – perhaps if you run across him again you might mention it.’
    *
    â€˜In pictures,’ Van der Valk wrote laboriously, spelling it all out, ‘there is plenty of opportunity. There are large sums – now what is he doing with large sums? There’s no proof or even evidence of any large illegal deal, but it doesn’t matter. The fact is that things and people are being manipulated – now why? Louis is obvious – he needs his technical expertise. But the boy – what can he need the boy for? Not for personal reasons, said B. – and he’s pretty shrewd, he’d know. But – “a bad man …’ It didn’t add up to anything, except that by the trick with the watch – and some trick there was – he had a hold over the boy. And Bosboom had said as good as straight out that he had a hold over Louis. And people who liked to acquire holds over others were never altogether to be lost from sight.’
    Well, what could he do? He shrugged a bit at the silliness of it – the private detective lark. He was still a working policeman – why not make an official memo, turn it over to the criminal bureau in Amsterdam, people whom he knew, after all, and ask them to spend a little time there, preferably working from the hypothesis of a tax fiddle on works of art? No, he wouldn’t do that, because it wouldn’t get anywhere. No complaint had been made, no evidence existed, there were no grounds whatever for any perquisitions or examinations – they simply would not act and Amsterdam would not fail to point that out to him. What could they do, in any case, but warn Saint that they were interested in him, and then he would cover up anything not already well covered, and quietly go to ground.
    Anyway this would dash his ‘private detective’ experiment. Did that make any difference? Was the experiment any use at all beyond a foolish whim? Hadn’t he already proved that one couldn’t do anything as a private detective, except hang around and bother people, and even then only when someone was handing out large sums of money as a ‘retainer’? Nobody had handed him any retainer. But that, he told himself, was the point. Nobody was his principal, nobody had any say in his doings, he owed nobody secrecy, loyalty or silence – except the state. Hadn’t that been the basis of his ‘experiment’ – the notion of a private detective who has no client to protect, noaxe to grind, no vendettas to indulge or honesty to be compromised except his ordinary state oath, getting rid of all those fictitious private eyes with private codes of ethics?
    Anyway, he had done all that a private man could do. Lean on Prins a bit, lean on Saint a bit – unless Saint was a very stupid man he would surely have realized that an eye had rested on him, and that it might be a police eye, not anyone inviting him to come to the station and assist in enquiries but a very gentle, very discreet touch intended to provoke him into getting rattled and doing something silly.
    Would Saint now react? Probably not. He would lie low to see whether the cat would