‘I did not see them go. I did not see their car, far less its number.’
Dekker spoke with the air of a man who is exercising massive restraint.
‘When I say they freed me, I meant that they had unlocked and removed the
handcuffs. Took me a couple of minutes to remove the strips of
Elastoplast and damnably painful it was, too. Took quite a bit of skin
amd my moustache with it too. Then I hopped through to the kitchen and
got the bread knife to the ropes round my ankles. The money was there,
all right and I’d be glad if you’d put it in your police fund because I
won’t touch their filthy money. Almost certainly stolen anyway. They and
their car, of course, were to hell and gone by that time.’
Van Effen was diplomatically sympathetic. ‘Considering what you’ve been
through, Mr Dekker, I think you’re being very calm and restrained. Could
you describe them?’
‘Ordinary clothes. Rain-coats. That’s all.’
‘Their faces?’
‘It was dark on the canal bank, dark in the car and by the time we
reached here they were all wearing hoods. Well, three of them. One stayed
on the boat.’
‘Slits in the hoods, of course.’ Van Effen wasn’t disappointed, he’d
expected nothing else.
‘Round holes, more like.’
‘Did they talk among themselves?’
‘Not a word. Only the leader spoke.’
‘How do you know he was the leader?’
‘Leaders give orders, don’t they?’
‘I suppose. Would you recognize the voice again?’
29
Dekker hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Well, yes, I think I would.’ ‘Ah. Something
unusual about his voice?’
‘Yes. Well. He talked funny Dutch.’
‘Funny?’
‘It wasn’t – what shall I say – Dutch Dutch.’
‘Poor Dutch, is that it?
‘No. The other way around. It was very good. Too good. Like the
news-readers on TV and radio.’
‘Too precise, yes? Book Dutch. A foreigner, perhaps?’
‘That’s what I would guess.’
‘Would you have any idea where he might have come from?’
‘There you have me, Lieutenant. I’ve never been out of the country. I hear
often enough that many people in the city speak English or German or both.
Not me. I speak neither. Foreign tourists don’t come to a fishmonger’s
shop. I sell my fish in Dutch.’
‘Thanks, anyway. Could be a help. Anything else about this leader – if
that’s what he was?’
‘He was tall, very tall.’ He tried his first half-smile of the afternoon.
‘You don’t have to be tall to be taller than I am but I didn’t even reach
up to his shoulders. Ten, maybe twelve centimetres taller than you are. And
thin, very very thin: he was wearing a long rain-coat, blue it was, that
came way below his knees and it fell from his shoulders like a coat hanging
from a coat-hanger.’
‘The hoods had holes, you say, not slits. You could see this tall man’s
eyes?’
‘Not even that. This fellow was wearing dark eye-glasses.’
‘Sun-glasses? I did ask you to tell me if there was anything odd about
those people. Didn’t you think it odd that a person should be wearing a
pair of sun-glasscs at night?’
‘Odd? Why should it be odd? Look, Lieutenant, a bachelor like me spends a
lot of time watching movies and TV. The villains always wear dark glasses.
That’s how you can tell they’re villains.’
‘True, true.’Van Effen turned to Dekker’s brother-in-law. ‘I understand, Mr
Bakkeren, that you were lucky enough to escape the attentions of those
gentlemen.’
30
‘Wife’s birthday. In town for a dinner and show. Anyway, they could have
stolen my boat any time and I would have known nothing about it. If they
were watching Maks here, they would have been watching me and they’d know
that I only go near my boat on weekends.’
Van Effen turned to de Graaf. ‘Would you like to see the boats, sir?’
‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’
‘No. Well, might find out what they’ve been doing. I’ll bet they haven’t
left one clue for hard-working policemen to find.’
‘Might as well waste some more time.’
The brothers-in-law went in their own car, the two policemen in van
Effen’s, an ancient and battered Peugeot with a far from ancient engine. It
bore no police distinguishing marks whatsoever and even the radio telephone
was concealed. De Graaf lowered himself gingerly into the creaking and
virtually springless seat.
‘I refrain from groaning and complaining, Peter. I know there must be a
couple of hundred similar wrecks rattling about the streets of Amsterdam
and I appreciate your passion for anonymity, but would it kill you to
replace or re-upholster the passenger seat?’
‘I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick
up anything back in the house there?’
‘Nothing that you didn’t. Interesting that the tall thin man should be
accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the
leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also
probably fbreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?’
‘It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave
orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least
understood, Dutch. Doesn’t necessarily follow, of course. The orders may
have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the
others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers
of his own homeland. He might – I say just might – have been able to
identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or
three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if
31
we’d heard this person speaking, we’d have been able to tell his country?’
‘There’s a chance. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. I know what you’re
thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of
the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer – you know
how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don’t strike me as people
who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did
succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the hell would that help
us in tracking them down?’
De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De
Graaf paid no attention. He said: ‘You’re a great comforter. Give us a few
more facts – or let’s dig up a few more – and it might be of great help to
us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner,
all we know about this lad is that he’s very tall, built along the lines of
an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.’
‘Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears
sun-glasses at. night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad.
Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks
sun-glasses are de rigueur for the better class villain. Maybe, like the
American President’s Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any
potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent’s eyes are
fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be
just suffering from nyctalopia.’
‘I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter,
that you will enlighten me at your leisure.’
‘Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it’s the only
English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one
hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset,
the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can
be taken to
day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the
causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but
its existence has been well attested to.
32
The sun-glasses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special
correctional lenses.’
‘It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation
of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap.
Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates
by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were
afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. just a little bit too
far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly
scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he’s got a squint. Maybe an eye
whose iris is streaked or parti-coloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris
is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the
pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic
goitrc, which resuits in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he’s only got one
eye. In any event, I’d guess he’s suffering from some physical abnormality
by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those