Death of a Dutchman

by Magdalen Nabb

  'Yes. Thanks.'

  He put the receiver down.

  'That was no lady,' he muttered to himself, but he appreciated Franca's discretion and was amused by her having checked out the boys as well. He couldn't really imagine the Dutchman having picked up a prostitute at all, but the idea of his picking up one of the transvestites down the river . . . Even so, if you checked, you checked everything, otherwise there was no point.

  'Is anything wrong, Marshal?' The receptionist, who did double duty as a porter,was observing him apprehensively.

  'No,' the Marshal answered.

  The one thing he had wanted to avoid was dragging any of the lads into this business, but he couldn't go on in this soaked condition and he couldn't neglect his hotel round either.

  He had to stand where he was until Lorenzini turned up because he was too wet to sit down in any of the cheap green armchairs in the reception hall. He had already made large black footprints and a spreading damp patch on the bit of carpet near the desk. Once again he noted with relief the Signora's reluctance to part with a lira; he would have been distressed to have to drip in the foyer at the Excelsior.

  Lorenzini clattered up the stairs at a run, as he always did, his grey eyes bright with curiosity.

  'This Signora here.' The Marshal pointed to the name on the register. 'If she comes out of her room the porter here—I'm sure he's paying attention although he's polite enough to be pretending not to—will tell you which is she. If she leaves I want you to follow her.'

  'Follow...' Lorenzini's face dropped. 'Follow her? But... I mean . . . I'm not a detective!'

  'What's that got to do with anything?'

  'Well. . .' He looked down at himself. 'I'm in uniform, sir. She'll notice me. I mean, have I got to dodge in and out of doorways and stuff like that?'

  'What the devil would you want to do that for?'

  'Well ... so she won't see me.'

  The porter looked from one to the other like someone at a tennis match, his mouth slightly open. Both he and Lorenzini jumped when the Marshal exploded.

  'What the devil does it matter whether she sees you or not! I want to know where she goes, that's all! I want to know where she goes! Do you understand me?'

  'Yessir!'

  'Just don't let her out of your sight!'

  'Yessir!'

  'And keep in touch with me. I'm going home. I'm wet!'

  With this superfluous piece of information he stumped off down the stairs muttering, to the consternation of some guests on their way up, 'Dodge in and out of doorways, for the love of God ... !'

  The rain had eased off slightly and the Marshal was so wet anyway that he stumped round the rest of his hotel checks before going home, and gave the owner of the Pensione Giulia a piece of his mind for still not having found the date of issue of the Simmons passport, though still sure he'd 'jotted it down'.

  'But Marshal, what if it was out of date, anyway? Really, what do you expect me to do? If people don't have their papers in order it's not my responsibility.'

  'Your responsibility! You don't know the meaning of the word. But one of these days you'll be sorry. You'll be shouting for help and expect us to come running.'

  'Well, anyway, it was only for one night, no harm done,' said the proprietor weakly.

  And the Marshal exploded again.

  When he finally got back to the Station, two hours later, Gino was in the office doorway, waiting for him. There were great pools of water in the gravel but the worst was over and he had taken away the board that stopped the cellar getting flooded.

  'You're wet!' said young Gino in consternation. 'Marshal, I'd better tell you—'

  'Gino, lad, whatever you want to tell me, let me in first.'

  'But the thing is, Lorenzini telephoned and—'

  'He's lost her! I'll break his neck, so help me!'

  'No, sir, I mean no, he hasn't, but he said—'

  'What are you whispering for?'

  Gino glanced unhappily over his shoulder. 'He said to tell you that she took a taxi and he followed her and now he's at Borgo Ognissanti Headquarters and what is he to do—only that was over an hour ago . . .'

  'He's where? And where the devil is the woman he's supposed to be following? Will you for goodness' sake let me in!'

  When Gino still didn't move, the Marshal began to push him out of his way. He didn't notice the extra car parked beyond the van.

  'But that's where she is, sir, or she was, and now there's an officer . . .'

  The Marshal had pushed past him into the office. On the end of the table there was a slightly rain-spotted hat with a gold flame on the front of it and silver braid around it. In his chair, with a file in front of him and a gloved finger tapping slowly on the file, sat the young Lieutenant, his face pale and his lips pursed.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Marshal had never been happier. The Goossens file was open on the desk in front of him, its contents spread out, and he was scribbling fast on a sheet of foolscap. Below the tall window, cars came and went, their sirens starting up or winding down as they reached the electronic gates of Headquarters. After the storm, the last hours of sunshine had seemed like a new day, and the sky was wide and clear as it turned pink. When, occasionally, the door of the operations room opposite opened to let out a burst of noise, the Marshal didn't look up from his work but a look of satisfaction crossed his face. He felt the computers were whirring for his benefit. The Lieutenant had gone across to make contact with the French authorities and check on the date when Signora Goossens crossed the Channel. The Marshal, who had joined up well before everything had become so computer-orientated, would have liked to go with him but he was afraid of being in the way or of touching something he shouldn't. The boys in there looked hardly more than students to him and he had said to himself, as he glanced in there in passing, 'By God, but we get some educated lads, these days!' He felt as proud of them as if they had been his own children.

  There was a knock at the door and a carabiniere came in with two cups of coffee and some biscuits on a tray.

  'Lieutenant Mori ordered these, sir.'

  'Thanks. Let me move these papers and you can put the tray down here.'

  He sat back in his chair for a moment sipping the coffee. The lad who had brought it had been young and pink-faced and had reminded him of Gino. He smiled, as everyone always did, at the thought of Gino, of his frightened face when the Marshal and the Lieutenant had emerged from the office and found him still trying to disperse the floodwater in front of the entrance. It was the face children have when their parents quarrel and they are helpless to intervene. The Marshal had patted his shoulder on the way out, wanting to tell him, 'It's all right, lad.'

  Because it had been all right. The Lieutenant, after a rambling and embarrassed preamble, had eventually announced that Signora Goossens had been to see him, and the Marshal had braced himself, his mind already groping for an explanation to offer—not to the Lieutenant but to his own wife after his sudden transfer. He hadn't thought at the time that he had been risking so much, but the Lieutenant's embarrassment, his reluctance to say what he had to say, made him think that things were much more serious than he had expected. He found it difficult to concentrate on what was being said to him as he sat there looking down at his large, clasped hands, his face red. Eventually, because the Lieutenant turned and spoke more directly, urgently to him, a clear sentence reached his troubled consciousness.

  'There was something about that woman—Signora Goossens—that I found deeply disturbing; I felt she was hiding something—but then, why should she come and see me? I felt a sort of defiance in her attitude, as if she'd done something but was convinced she had the perfect right... I don't know exactly how to put it, Marshal, but I feel sure that if you'd seen her . . .'

  There was enough of a pause for those last words to sink in, and for the Marshal to start pulling himself together. She hadn't made a complaint. She hadn't dared, then. She had pretended not to know she was being foll
owed and had presented herself at Headquarters to put herself in the right. It always seemed to come back to that... 'I have the right' . . . and the Lieutenant had noticed it, too, and been equally baffled by it.

  'All the time she was talking to me, her eyes were darting about as if she thought someone might pop out of a cupboard and arrest her. I can't think who . . .'

  The Marshal was silent.

  'She admits . . . says . . . that she was here to see her stepson, though she hasn't seen him in ten years, but I couldn't very well force her to tell me why; she would only say it was a private family matter, chiefly concerning herself, and could have no bearing on the suicide . . .'

  'She actually said suicide?'

  'Yes. But I had already mentioned the Substitute Prosecutor's feeling on the matter, so ... I really can't see why she should have been so nervous. The way she kept glancing at the door you'd think she was afraid someone had followed her to my office . . .'

  The Marshal stared at his wet shoe.

  'I see that you think I'm exaggerating. I'll confess something to you: this is my first case . . . the first I've dealt with on my own ..."

  The Marshal arranged his features in an expression of surprise.

  'Yes,' insisted the Lieutenant, 'it is.'

  How old would he be? Twenty-four or -five? He looked younger. Perhaps because he had freckles. Underneath them, his face flushed slightly, annoyed with himself, probably, for having dropped his guard, for forgetting that he was an officer talking to a humble Marshal, behaving instead like a nervous youngster asking a more experienced man for help. The Marshal's heart went out to him for that blush, but he couldn't tell him what he wanted to know without unloading on to his young shoulders the responsibility for his own unauthorized activities. Instead, he asked:

  'Have you spoken to the Substitute Prosecutor?'

  'This evening, briefly, before coming here.'

  'And what does he say?'

  'He . . . he's already sent in his application to the Instructing Judge for an Archiviazione under "No action required".'

  'I see.'

  'I rather thought that you . . . that when you came to see me yesterday morning you were of the opinion . . .'

  'That the Dutchman had been murdered, sir. Yes.'

  'I naturally looked into the matter carefully, and there are one or two things that don't quite fit with the usual sort of suicide. If anything further happens to come to your notice . . .'

  'One or two things have, sir.'

  'The Instructing Judge won't sign the Archiviazione until after the funeral in case a complaint should be brought by a member of the family. That means we have until about lunch-time tomorrow . . .'

  'We can only do our best then, sir, can't we? If you wouldn't mind ... I think I ought to get changed . . .'

  It was only then that the Lieutenant noticed that the Marshal's uniform was soaked.

  Now it was a little after eight-thirty in the evening and the light outside was dissolving into dusk. The Marshal finished his coffee and switched on the Lieutenant's desk lamp. It seemed they now had an hour longer than they had expected. The Dutch Consulate had telephoned to say they had a message from the Dutchman's mother-in-law; the baby had been born at five this morning, a boy, two weeks premature. As a consequence of the onset of her daughter's labour, the mother-in-law had not caught the train last night as planned but had taken the Holland-Italia express this afternoon. This train would not arrive in Florence until ten-thirty-six tomorrow, so the funeral had been put back an hour to eleven-thirty. The goldsmith, Signor Beppe, had taken charge of all the arrangements as soon as the body had been released by the Medico- Legal Institute. The Dutchman was now lying in his coffin in the goldsmith's front studio which had been cleared for the purpose and decorated with the blind man's flowers and two beeswax candles.

  'Better here,' the goldsmith had said when the Marshal and the Lieutenant had called to pay their respects on the way over to Headquarters, 'than up there.' His eyes looking momentarily at the ceiling. 'I never knew him unhappy in this room.'

  They hadn't disagreed with him.

  'Marshal.' The Lieutenant hurried into the room now with a slip of paper in his hand which he put before the Marshal without a word before sitting down at his own side of the desk.

  'Well, we had to expect that, Lieutenant,' said the Marshal after glancing at the slip. 'Nobody would be foolish enough to lie about it, not after filling in an embarkation card.'

  'I know.' The Lieutenant rubbed at his eyes with fingers taut with nervousness. 'It's just that we're so pressed for time that every dead end has to be counted in minutes wasted.'

  In the Marshal's experience, .checking the obvious was an important part of any inquiry, but now was hardly the time to say so.

  'I've made a list of everything we know,' he said. 'And of all the people in any way involved—perhaps we should start with the sequence of events as far as we know it. If you like, I'll read it out and you can think.'

  'Go ahead.' The Lieutenant looked up through his fingers.

  'Right. The Dutchman was last here four months ago and we know from Signor Beppe that at some point during that visit he said his stepmother—whom he hasn't seen for about ten years—must come back now. He didn't say why. What a lot of trouble he might have saved us if he had. After he left, his mail was sent on to him but there seems to have been nothing of note among it—in any case, Signora Goossens says she came to Florence having arranged to meet her stepson by letters going between England and Amsterdam. So the Dutchman sets off for a trip to Florence, telling his wife it was a business trip. Signor Beppe and Signora Giusti both say the wife is anti-stepmother since she has never met the woman and only knows her as someone who caused her husband a lot of upset when she disappeared. Presumably that's why he didn't tell her the real reason. He caught the Holland-Italia express that leaves Amsterdam at eight-nineteen in the evening and which should have arrived in Florence at sixteen-thirty-three the following afternoon, that was Sunday. In fact—' he checked his notes against the details provided by the station-master—'the train was delayed nineteen minutes in Basle because of the derailment of a goods train, and having then missed its turn at every station after that it lost more time and eventually arrived in Florence at four minutes to seven. We know from what he ate that he called at at least two places to get food. We could check on that if need be. Cold meat and cheese, etcetera, he could only have got from a meant-roaster becausee it was Sunday. The coffee he could have bought from any number of bars.'

  'For that we would need a recent photograph of him which we don't have.'

  'Signora Giusti might well have one in her album, We can't get in to see her now, she'll be in bed, but perhaps tomorrow . . .

  'Now, he didn't call on Signora Giusti when he got to the flat—that could have something to do with keeping the assignation a secret but it could just be that it would be after her bedtime by then and he had no good reason for disturbing her—she's always in bed by half past seven. The mysterious woman arrived towards eight. We can assume she had eaten because she didn't eat with the Dutchman—at least, I hardly think she could have cleared up after herself and not after him; it would have looked too odd. Perhaps she made the famous jug of coffee while he was eating. It's likely, because, judging from where his plate was found on the table as I remember it, he would have had his back to her as she worked at the sink and the cooker.'

  The Lieutenant thought a moment and then said:

  'That would suggest somebody familiar; it certainly doesn't sound as if it were a prostitute . . . '

  'It wasn't I've checked. One of them could be lying, of course, but I don't see why a prostitute should want to kill him.'

  'To rob him? He could have been carrying stones, even illegally . . . '

  'In that case she'd have had to stay around until he went to sleep and rob him, not quarrel with him and leave. According to Signora Giusti she left immediately following the quarrel. Later there was a
lot of crashing about — that would be the Dutchman searching the bathroom, possibly looking for the aspirin bottle from which, at some point, he'd taken a couple of pills, thinking he'd made a mistake and taken something poisonous. Then nothing till I found him, but the pathologist tells us he had vomited the first dose, or some of it and, having slept off most of the rest,he woke up and took more of the coffee, whether purposely or accidentally we can't be sure. The unknown woman has vanished into thin air, and if she did steal anything we don't know what. Legally imported stones would mean documentation to go with them and copies in his office at home, but no such documentation exists. A registered importer has no reason to fool about carrying stuff illegally because it wouldn't be worth his while according to Signor Beppe, and it certainly seems reasonable. She could have stolen something else, of course, like a compromising letter, but he doesn't sound the type for it, and again, she would surely have had to wait until he was safely asleep. Anyway, she vanishes on Sunday night. On Tuesday Signora Goossens arrives in Florence, oddly enough oh that same train which has carriages coming from most northern European cities . . . She books in at the Pensione Giottino. She has an appointment with her stepson but she isn't saying why. That's all wrong!'

  'What is?' The Lieutenant roused himself from contemplation. 'Well, if . . . when did she say this appointment was for?'

  'Well, she didn't. Naturally since he was dead when she arrived . . .'

  'I wonder who told her?'

  The Lieutenant reached for the annotated sheet of foolscap and frowned at it.

  'You see what I mean, apart from that? If they had an appointment for Wednesday, or even Tuesday evening, why should the Dutchman leave home on Saturday to be here on Sunday? Especially as he was supposed to have no other real business here and his wife was annoyed at his leaving her. The letter from his stepmother agreeing to the appointment or asking for it . . . ?'

  'It wasn't among his things here and his mother-in-law was unable to find any clue to the reason for his visit among his papers at home. It's more than likely that he got rid of it, given that he was being secretive about the whole business. So, if Signora Goossens didn't get here until Tuesday, the day after he died, if there really was a woman in the flat with him as we think, then he must also have had an appointment with her, not just with his stepmother— after all, she couldn't have found him at the flat by chance, I don't suppose, given that he only spends a few days a year there. This may mean that Signora Goossens doesn't come into the thing at all, just as she says . . .'