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saw he was stooping, purple, to fish it out again, having just remembered that the cleaning women would find it.
    â€œHow’s Father?” Inspector Scholten, who shared his office, and was deep in some administrative rigmarole.
    â€œReading a dirty book.”
    â€œHe was on the rampage this morning. Said he wished Kan were back. Minute later he said when he saw Kan he’d kick him so he’d never dare have piles again.”
    â€œWhy?” since he was obviously expected to ask why.
    â€œKan sent in a report he’d done at home, saying he’d explored every possibility and there wasn’t any legal hold on that Janus character. Old man went fair mataglap. Not my pigeon, thank God.”
    â€œAh.” Van der Valk rather thought he understood.

Six
    A week later. Brilliant weather; August heat over Amsterdam. The mornings were clear and splendid, the afternoons reeled with sun and the pavements danced under temperatures in the thirties. The evenings had a pleasant coolness, but all night the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed. Sometimes huge spots of rain fell, but always by midnight the charged clouds had passed, and the humidity with them, and the thermometer went down to sixteen, and fresh cool air flickered in at bedroom windows.
    It was the silly season. Everybody was in Spain or Italy; Commissaris Samson had a chalet on a West Friesian island and was away for three weeks. Scholten was camping in a tent somewhere in the south. Kan was back, grumbling – his holiday was not due till September. As for van der Valk, he had gone on holiday in June; it had rained all the time but he hadn’t cared. They had had a cottage on the Loire, belonging to Arlette’s brother, who was a specialist in stressed concrete and was busy on a building project down in Toulon, where it was raining too, much to Arlette’s satisfaction. They had been thoroughly lazy, doing little but swim, arguing that that way you didn’t get any wetter.
    He didn’t care; he liked the warm weather, and the quiet; there was not much to do – it was too hot. For the sun was blazing down on Holland, and everybody was grumbling, of course, and walking about as naked as possible, sweaty and uncomfortable, guzzling fizzy lemonade whenever they got the chance. Not him. He wasmarried to a woman who came from the Midi; he knew how to behave in warm weather, and had his shirt buttoned up and even a jacket on. He sat in the office drinking tea and beaming at Chief Inspector Kan, who looked thoroughly uncomfortable and undignified in his unaccustomed shirtsleeves, fanning himself with the latest Monthly Supplement to the General Police Standing Orders and Instructions – a singularly dismal document.
    â€œLamentable,” he was saying. “Lamentable.” Kan was rather a one for literature, and when he made out a procès-verbal had always a dictionary at his elbow, since law, he said, depended on the precise meanings of words. The hunt for the exact word preoccupied him greatly and not long ago he had put ‘apotheosis’ in a report, causing Mr Samson to take his glasses off and say with awful quiet, ‘There are times, Chief Inspector, when I should like to take a run-up of about a hundred metres at you doing up your shoe-lace.’ Kan, who was one of the new university-degree career policemen, despised Samson, and told the inspectors sometimes that the old man ‘was not oriented to modern methods’.
    Still, Kan was handy in many ways. Van der Valk thought him a sharp-nosed little twerp, a pedantic fusspot, and a scared baby-sitter, but could not deny that he knew his law backwards, and, apparently, the entire history and background of every company director in Holland. He was very smart when it came to economics – and most criminal work in Holland is a question of economics – but he didn’t like murders, and Samson, the old-fashioned type of policeman who had