Double-Barrel by Nicolas Freeling Read Free Book Online

‘his’ firms came to consult him on some point; he saw nobody else. He had been invited to people’s houses; he came courteously andbehaved perfectly, but let it be understood that he preferred not to come. People had learned to respect his small eccentricities.
    Of course, when he appeared in the village, as he sometimes did for gum or string, carbon paper or a pair of socks, children whooped and people whispered. He was used by the peasantry as a bogy-man; many a tiny Drentse cropped-head was threatened with ‘the Russian professor’. But his manner, indifferent, formal, always courteous, conquered even peasant suspicions. When he raised his hat so politely to some dumpy mottled milkmaid behind the pencils and envelopes, pointing with a shaky forefinger at a roll of scotch tape, he could hardly be thought of as a bogy.
    He had been here ten years now. He had got shakier, his eyesight worse. He could still walk upright, but uncertainly, with a stick. But mentally he had not failed.
    He wore corduroy trousers like the workmen; cheap ready-made coats; he had a ‘good suit’, indistinguishable from that of a local churchwarden. He had experimented with hats, and wore at present an extraordinary green thing, Dutch-Tyrolean, cut from hairy cardboard. He sometimes shuffled out in the wooden shoes he used for gardening.
    Nothing about him, though, of the comic-strip absent-minded scientist. His hair was cut short and he used a clothes-brush vigorously. At sixty he was trim, neat, and tidy; a small thin man with authority still in his carriage. He had fine flowers behind his high grey wall, and on the sunny side a cherry tree facing the little window of his living-room. The little cottage was only two rooms, with a sort of lean-to kitchen at the back, and a septic-tank lavatory across a tiny yard. He had electricity but no gas.
    He always wore dark glasses over his sharp blue eyes. The doctor had given him maybe another five years. These nervous degeneration diseases are deadly, but extremely slow. He hoped, he said, to have another two of useful work.
    He had been examined dozens of times by every conceivable sort of neurologist and psychiatrist. Perfectly sane, perfectly lucid. Remarkably well adjusted to severe trauma.
    Might such a person write threatening obscene letters to respectable married women; creep about peering and listening for some little human misdeed or indiscretion?
    Even if he might he hadn’t known any of them, or anything about them. But a theory had been built up by some artful imbecile of a policeman. The electronics firm manufactured, among other specialized gadgets, tiny microphones and listening sets of incredible power and sensitivity. One of their recent efforts could (classified, highly secret, but the policeman had wormed out certain facts) pick up conversational tones at twenty metres or more, through the walls of houses. Even disregarding the legend that former-engineer Besançon was a conjuring-trick king, had he ever, through his work, had access to any such thing? It had been investigated; answer definitely negative. He had never even been in the factory. Still, it was a seductive notion. How else had the letter-writer found out some of the things he appeared to know?
    â€˜Time to go to bed,’ said Arlette, yawning. ‘There’s been quite good variety from München. My German’s getting better, but that Bayerische dialect is beyond me. Come on, get unglued.’

Part two: ‘Acquaintance’
1
    Having read that exhaustive dossier, and being quite convinced that this man had nothing whatever to do with writing naughty letters, it was, I admit, a pure waste of time to go and see him. Quite unjustifiable. But I was enjoying the sensation of doing unjustifiable things – there was nobody shouting at me to justify myself. It was not just vulgar curiosity that took me in his direction next day: I had to see for myself – and was it