Strike Out Where Not Applicable by Nicolas Freeling Read Free Book Online

haven’t lost confidence in Maartens – he let us down badly there yesterday.’
    â€˜It wasn’t Maartens who was indiscreet. It was you.’
    Francis unscrewed his pill-bottle and kicked fretfully at the breakfast tray.
    â€˜Take this damn thing away, Marion, I can’t move without that blasted clinking noise.’
    â€˜I know; you mean I’m making the blasted clinking noise. I’m not going on and on – you were indiscreet and there’s an end of it. Just remember that if Mr Van der Valk starts becoming an habituéaround here you’ve nobody – nobody to blame but yourself, so please think it over and make the best of it. He’s not a stupid man.’
    â€˜Marion, if you don’t mind, I’m feeling very tired and I haven’t slept at all well.’
    â€˜Here, have some sugar.’ She threw the literary section of the Sunday whatever-it-was back to him, picked up the tray expertly, and swished off, her taffeta morning-coat making a more attractive sound than the blockhouse of newsprint Francis was busy building.
    Sunday is the day of the dark suit and the white shirt, of early Mass and the sermon to which Commissaire Van der Valk does not listen, of the lavish breakfast – a Boiled Egg and Toast, instead of just coffee and bread. Holland has a peculiar tabu that runs No-Fresh-Bread-May-Be-Sold-Before-Ten which Arlette combats, now that she is Bourgeoise, by making her own, but not on Sundays.
    After breakfast there is a great panic to get out to the golf course, for several reasons. The morning sun is often replaced by afternoon rain, and anyway the place is emptier, for most golf-playing dignitaries go to ten o’clock church services more ponderous and worthy, the sermons longer and even more crushing. Also it gives one an appetite for Arlette’s roast beef. Even at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning it is often icy cold and a blustering north-wester is driving sheets of rain at one, but today everything works and at twenty past the Commissaire, a perfect figure of fun, is driving Arlette’s milky deux-chevaux out to the sand dunes. The figure wears a black tracksuit now gone greenish, with khaki rainproof trousers and an English suède windcheater. On his head he has a green beret: the whole get-up makes him look, says Arlette, like a very old and ratty white mercenary from the Congo. But Doctor Haversma as well has violent reactions from the primnesses of his week and has a tweed deerstalker with the brim turned down all round, and German plus-fours in the Campbell tartan, as though hoping to be mistaken for the Duke of Argyll bawling the factor out about salmon poaching.
    They share seven golf clubs with a warped look, and at least seven balls, for Van der Valk, being a detective, is quite good at finding other people’s in trackless jungle. They do not know whose ball is whose, but this matters little, for they know none of the Strict Rules either. They take no helpers; it would not do for anyonein Holland to hear the language used by two high civic functionaries, which is elementary-school with a faint smack of Chatterley charm. There is, too, a tradition of elementary-school humour in fake foreign languages (‘Pivot, divot’ and ‘I haf kein schwung in my schwing’). Today, though, Van der Valk had eaten breakfast absentmindedly, and had as little idea how-many-after-Pentecost it was – it was the Third Sunday after Easter – as any mother-in-law in a Mauriac novel.
    â€˜What about this blood pressure and the other things I’ve been hearing about? Couldn’t he have had vertigo or something and been kicked while lying on the ground, or perhaps sitting?’
    â€˜He could, and again he could have been struck by a mini-meteorite while in orbit.’
    â€˜Any sudden crisis would show up in the bloodvessels or wherever, wouldn’t it? He wouldn’t have had a cardiac or cerebral