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didn’t know.
    Down the other side of the room ran a slight airy colonnade. There were more statues but he didn’t look at them; he had had all the statues he could take for a while. The ceiling was marble too – a sort of cracked uneven paving – upside down! More moss grew there. Light came like rosy-fingered Aurora from behind the colonnade: he could not help it, the whole thing, he was forced to admit it, had beauty.
    â€˜Still I gazed and still the wonder grew,’ he muttered crossly.
    â€˜It kept him happy for a remarkable length of time,’ she answered in a dry murmur. ‘You don’t ask what it cost?’ maliciously.
    â€˜If it didn’t matter to him it doesn’t to me.’
    â€˜For that you shall have a reward.’
    Jean-Claude’s bedroom was on the far side. It told nothing at all; like his wife’s, it was modern, tidy and without extravagance. There were plenty of things like clothes, hairbrushes, and cufflinks, simple and expensive, and he had left them all behind without a glance. He wanted his evening shirt-studs to be real black pearls and not just jet, but they meant nothing to him; the only things that interested him were the things one couldn’t buy, like peace or the green Dresden diamond.
    It was the same story everywhere. There was a beautiful library, with a Matisse, some of those very good cigars, a splendid collection of Beethoven records, and some fine morocco bindings, any one of these to an ordinary man like Van der Valk the summit of a life’s ambition. It was all rather pathetic.
    â€˜Did he spend much time at home?’
    â€˜Yes. There might come a time when he was out every evening for a fortnight, and there came other fortnights when he never put a foot outside the door. He liked it here, and he liked me here. Peculiar as it may seem, he was very attached to his wife. She was, I say without any pride, the only woman who had any meaning for him. She failed, somewhere.’
    â€˜Was there anything in his behaviour at all that struck you, in the days – weeks, if you like – before he went?’
    â€˜No. He just went, silently. No scene, no edginess, no pointer at all. He was as he always is, and one morning he was not there. He took nothing. Which means nothing, since he has virtually unlimited money and can pick up anything he fancies anywhere – down to another bathroom.’
    â€˜One stupid, obvious, rude question that I have to ask. Were you ever unfaithful to him?’
    â€˜No. I am, oddly, quite Spanish about such things.’
    â€˜Thank you very much indeed.’
    â€˜If you give your name on the telephone, this house will be open to you at any time.’
    â€˜Again thanks. May I ask your name?’
    â€˜Anne-Marie.’
    *
    He walked back towards the centre of the town, uninterested in all the antheaps that were disgorging. Daylight was beginning to fade, and as each traffic light turned green the incredible crowd of bicycles that astonish every stranger to Amsterdam surged forward like the charge of the Light Brigade. He paid no attention.
    â€˜
Anne-Marie, que fais-tu dans le monde?
    J’irai dans la ville, où’ly aura des soldats’
    Professional skill at keeping appointments brought him to the door of the Hotel Polen at precisely five-thirty, despite bicycles. Miss Kramer was not hard to recognize, a stocky woman of fifty with a bush of greying fair hair and a tweed suit, standing just inside the doorway clutching a huge secretarial handbag and the sort of secretarial shopping bag containing a folded raincoat, indoor shoes, knitting and the raw materials of the coming evening’s supper.
    â€˜What would you like?’
    â€˜Might I have whisky?’ Just what he liked, a robust woman with no nonsense.
    â€˜Two whiskies, please. Well, you know what I’m after.’
    â€˜I have thought and thought, but I can’t recall anything the least unusual.