Her masters hadn’t killed her for two reasons. They knew I could have tied them up with her death and that would be coming too close to home. And they didn’t have to because she was gone and no longer a danger to them: fear, if it is sufficiently great, can seal lips as effectively as death.
I’d liked her and would have liked to see her happy again. I couldn’t blame her. For her, all the doors had been closed.
CHAPTER NINE
The view from the top of the towering Havengebouw, the skyscraper in the harbour, is unquestionably the best in Amsterdam. But I wasn’t interested in the view that morning, only in the facilities this vantage point had to offer. The sun was shining, but it was breezy and cool at that altitude and even at sea-level the wind was strong enough to ruffle the blue-grey waters into irregular wavy patterns of white horses.
The observation platform was crowded with tourists, for the most part with wind-blown hair, binoculars and cameras, and although I didn’t carry any camera I didn’t think I looked different from any other tourist. Only my purpose in being up there was.
I leaned on my elbows and gazed out to sea. De Graaf had certainly done me proud with those binoculars, they were as good as any I had ever come across and with the near-perfect visibility that day the degree of definition was all that I could ever have wished for.
The glasses were steadied on a coastal steamer of about a thousand tons that was curving into harbour. Even when I first picked her up I could detect the large rust-streaked patches on the hull and see that she was flying the Belgian flag. And the time, shortly before noon, was right. I followed her progress and it seemed to me that she was taking a wider sweep than one or two vessels that had preceded her and was going very close indeed to the buoys that marked the channel: but maybe that was where the deepest water lay.
I followed her progress till she closed on the harbour and then I could distinguish the rather scarred name on the rusty bows. Marianne the name read. The captain was certainly a stickler for punctuality, but whether he was such a stickler for abiding by the law was another question.
I went down to the Havenrestaurant and had lunch. I wasn’t hungry but meal-times in Amsterdam, as my experience had been since coming there, tended to be irregular and infrequent. The food in the Havenrestaurant is well spoken of and I’ve no doubt it merits its reputation: but I don’t remember what I had for lunch that day.
I arrived at the Hotel Touring at one-thirty. I didn’t really expect to find that Maggie and Belinda had returned yet and they hadn’t. I told the man behind the desk that I’d wait in the lounge, but I don’t much fancy lounges, especially when I had to study papers like the papers I had to study from the folder we’d taken from Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s, so I waited till the desk was momentarily unmanned, took the lift to the fourth floor and let myself into the girls’ room. It was a fractionally better room than the previous one they’d had, and the couch, which I immediately tested, was fractionally softer, but there wasn’t enough in it to make Maggie and Belinda turn cartwheels for joy, apart from the fact that the first cartwheel in any direction would have brought them up against a solid wall.
I lay on that couch for over an hour, going through all the warehouse’s invoices and a very unexciting and innocuous list of invoices they turned out to be. But there was one name among all the others that turned up with surprising frequency and as its products matched with the line of my developing suspicions, I made a note of its name and map location.
A key turned in the lock and Maggie and Belinda entered. Their first reaction on seeing me seemed to be one of relief, which was quickly followed by an unmistakable air of annoyance. I said mildly: ‘Is there something up, then?’
‘You had us worried,’ Maggie said coldly. ‘The man at the desk said you were waiting for us in the lounge and you weren’t there.’
‘We waited half an hour.’ Belinda was almost bitter about it. ‘We thought you had gone.’
‘I was tired. I had to lie down. Now that I’ve apologized, how did your morning go?’
‘Well — ‘ Maggie didn’t seem very mollified — ‘we had no luck with Astrid — ‘
‘I know. The man at the desk gave me your message. We can quit worrying about Astrid. She’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ they said.
‘Skipped the country.’
‘Skipped the country?’
‘Athens.’
‘Athens?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep the vaudeville act for later. ‘She and George left Schiphol this morning.’
‘Why?’ Belinda asked.
‘Scared. The bad men were leaning on her from one side and the good guy — me — on the other. So she lit out.’
‘How do you know she’s gone?’ Maggie enquired. ,
‘A man at the Balinova told me.’ I didn’t elaborate, if they’d any illusions left about the nice boss they had I wanted them to keep them. ‘And I checked with the airport.’
‘Mm.’ Maggie was unimpressed by my morning’s work, she seemed to have the feeling that it was all my fault that Astrid had gone and as usual she was right. ‘Well, Belinda or me first?’
‘This first.’ I handed her the paper with the figures 910020 written on it. ‘What does it mean?’
Maggie looked at it, turned it upside down and looked at the back. ‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Let me see it,’ Belinda said brightly. ‘I’m good at anagrams and cross-words.’ She was, too. Almost at once she said: ‘Reverse it. 020019. Two a.m. on the 19th, which is tomorrow morning.’
‘Not bad at all,’ I said indulgently. It had taken me half an hour to work it out.
‘What happens then?’ Maggie asked suspiciously.
‘Whoever wrote those figures forgot to explain that,’ I said evasively, for I was getting tired of telling outright lies. ‘Well, Maggie, you.’
‘Well.’ She sat down and smoothed out a lime-green cotton dress which looked as if it had shrunk an awful lot with repeated washing. ‘I put on this new dress to the park because Trudi hadn’t seen it before and the wind was blowing so I had a scarf over my head and — ‘
‘And you were wearing dark glasses.’
‘Right.’ Maggie wasn’t an easy girl to throw off stride. ‘I wandered around for half an hour, dodging pensioners and prams most of the time. Then I saw her — or rather I saw this enormous fat old — old — ‘
‘Beldam?’
‘Beldam. Dressed like you said she would be. Then I saw Trudi. Long-sleeved white cotton dress, couldn’t keep still, skipped about like a lamb.’ Maggie paused and said reflectively : ‘She really is a rather beautiful girl.’
‘You have a generous soul, Maggie.’
Maggie took the hint. ‘By and by they sat down on a bench. I sat on another about thirty yards away, just looking over the top of a magazine. A Dutch magazine.’
‘A nice touch,’ I approved.
‘Then Trudi started plaiting the hair of this puppet — ‘
‘What puppet?’
The puppet she was carrying,’ Maggie said patiently. ‘If you keep on interrupting I find it difficult to remember all the details. While she was doing this a man came up and sat beside them. A big man in a dark suit with a priest’s collar, white moustache, marvellous white hair. He seemed a very nice man.’
‘I’m sure he was,’ I said mechanically. I could well imagine the Rev. Thaddeus Goodbody as a man of instant charm except, perhaps, at half-past three in the morning.
‘Trudi seemed very fond of him. After a minute or two, she reached an arm round his neck and whispered something in his ear. He made a great play of being shocked but you could see he wasn’t really, for he reached a hand into his pocket and pressed something into her hand. Money, I suppose.’ I was on the point of asking if she was sure it wasn’t a hypodermic syringe, but Maggie was far too nice for that. ‘Then she rose, still clutching this puppet, and skipped across to an ice-cream van. She bought an ice-cream cornet — and then she started walking straight towards me.’
‘You left?’
‘I held the magazine higher,’ Maggie said with dignity. ‘I needn’t have bothered. She headed past me towards another open van about twenty feet away.’
‘To admire the puppets?’
‘How did you know?’ Maggie sounded disappointed.
‘Every second van in Amsterdam seems to sell puppets.’
That’s what she did. Fingered them, stroked them. The old man in charge tried to look angry but who could be angry with a girl like that? She went right round the van, then went back to the bench. She kept on offering the cornet to the puppet.’