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Banging on the door first thing in the morning. Where were the boys?
    The boys worked, and earned, and brought money in. They had the right to some freedom, and to enjoy themselves. They went out with their friends and the odd time, weekends and such, stayed out all night. She didn’t ask. They were men now, and entitled to be treated as such. And didn’t welcome Mum nosey-parkering, or playing the anxious old hen.
    â€œIt’s all right,” grimly. “I’m not going to break down and cry. But these bloody police, sorry, but I’ve said it and I’m not about to go back on it, they just rang up and said ‘Your son is dead’. Like that. As though it was a dog run over. Can you imagine that?”
    â€œOne sec. First they came?”
    â€œThat’s right. Pascal was in bed, so was I. Saturday, youknow; didn’t have to get up that early. Where was Olivier? – did I know, did he know? Neither of us knew anything about it. And they knew, all the time. Roaming around, poking their noses in everything. Hour or so after, bop. Your son is dead – your number came up, you know.”
    â€œPascal is the younger?”
    â€œNo, the elder. Olivier was nineteen.” And now she could not stop her tears.
    â€œThis is abominable,” said Arlette.
    Solange had thrown her coat on, rushed to the local police post. They said they knew nothing about it, try down town, that’s right, the central headquarters. Pushed around there from pillar to post, nobody wants to know, oh yes, finally, here’s a fellow willing to tell you.
    Arlette who – one way or the other – had a fairly wide experience of the police, could of course see the other side. They’d behaved, alas, with a heavy-handed callousness and brutality that was simply inadmissible, but at the time they made the raid, they hadn’t grasped that the boy was dead. It had happened in the country: a message from the gendarmerie in the middle of the night had been misunderstood or garbled. Once the urban police realized the boy was dead, and not wounded or captive, they’d make a clumsy cover-up.
    The facts were that a group of boys had broken into a country house they thought empty. But the owner had been there – a weekend cottage. In a panic he had reached for his gun and fired into the night. The boy had been fatally wounded. Naturally, the others fled in terror. The gendarmes called to the scene had found the boy’s identity papers and sent the urban police to rope in the rest of the band.
    Solange had come to terms with this. It wasn’t just stupid, she said bleakly, it was damn dishonest. There he’d asked for trouble, and got it. Excessively, yes. Unfairly, yes, but it was her experience that life was that way. She blamed herself more than him. She’d let the reins drop too soon. It was a crime, all right.
    She took, in fact, a much more severe view than Arlette did. But there, it wasn’t Arlette’s son.
    Her own two sons, aged seventeen and fifteen, had been run in for what the Amsterdam police called street hooliganism. Piet van der Valk, at that time a Chief Inspector, had been called round to the station: the boys were being let go after a talking-to. Intensely humiliated, he had lost his cool. He’d hit them both in the face, baff baff, in front of the station sergeant. It had taken a long time, for all concerned, to get over this episode.
    The police had called the elder son down to headquarters and questioned him roughly. They hadn’t perhaps beaten him up, but Arlette could guess that they’d roared and slapped him about. They simply didn’t believe his tale (which he stuck to) that he knew nothing about his brother’s friends, or their activities, or movements. She didn’t think she believed it herself. It was loyalty, solidarity. Bastardly cops. They’d clapped him in the cell, kept him three weeks. The judge of instruction let him