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of the private bin,’ said Chief Inspector Kan cattily, meeting him in the corridor. Van der Valk cursed halfheartedly.
    Towards evening time he got an idea. Jean-Claude Marschal had served during the war with a British Army Intelligence unit. Nothing spectacular: rank of major, the usual fistful of decorations, no wounds. Nine tenths of it desk work; still … Had he ever done anything special? Was there any corner of Europe where he had been parachuted or infiltrated or rowed ashore in a little rubber dinghy? Anything that might give him a nostalgia for a time that had been less boring? Van der Valk rang up the War Office in London; they were quite polite in a sticky way, and once they overcame a natural inertia they promised to get him off a night letter.
    Anne-Marie had promised him photographs, and on his way home he picked them up. None were very recent, but the bony face with the sharp nose was not one that would change a great deal. It was even fairly distinctive; there was something about that nose that reminded him of somebody-but-he-couldn’t-say-who – it would occur to him later.
    More jollification this evening; climax of carnival, under the cold, dry, bitter, dusty north-east wind. Holland watched the goings-on with a confusion of disapproval, envy, and a slightly concussed horror.
    â€˜Turn the rubbish off, it gets on my nerves,’ said Arlette: she was dressmaking in an angry way peculiar to herself, with vicious snips and clashes. The tock of her thread breaking sounded like an arrow in a target; her machine had a sudden nervous whirr like partridges in stubble. There was an anguished squawk as she ripped a length of cotton across. He studied the map of Europe. Mr Marschal had a French passport. If he was in Holland he would surely have shown up by now; nobody was sleeping under any bushes in carnival weather. He had left his little Panhard coupé behind. Where was he? Or was he dead?
    If one went places, to get away, to flee, to withdraw, to be alone, did one go to a place that held a special kind of memory?
    Why had Mr Canisius been so insistent on bringing the police into it? Could there be any reason at all for suspecting a crime?Anne-Marie … complex woman … Van der Valk went to bed to mend his head. Vinegar and brown paper …
    *
    Ash Wednesday. Arlette went to church to have her forehead marked and be reminded that she was dust. He went to the office, with a gloomy feeling that a policeman was reminded daily he was dust, but there was the reply waiting for him from London.
    Major Marschal had not done anything fancy. He had worked after the landings as a liaison officer between the British and General de Lattre. He had been at Colmar, Stuttgart, Ulm – the French ‘Rhine and Danube’ army. Later, under the occupation, he had been De Lattre’s contact man with the British commander in Köln – ha ha, the one that had decided that Adenauer must be sacked. Köln again; strange, that. A superstitious person sometimes, especially when he had no facts to go on, Van der Valk was fascinated by the way the name kept cropping up. He had once been there himself, to arrest a gentleman working a cheque fraud. Man had made an amusing travelling companion, though that had not stopped him getting eighteen months.
    He had made a friend, too, of the German policeman that had tidied it up for him. Heinz Stössel was as German as his name, but you would have to be up early in the morning to get ahead of him. Poor old Heinz; carnival would be a naughty time; all those drunks in cowboy costume who turned out next day to be company directors. How would Heinz look in cowboy costume?
    It was ridiculous, of course; there was absolutely no reason to believe that Jean-Claude Marschal was anywhere in the Rhein-land. Fellow was in Switzerland long gone, with a damned great bank account under a code number in Zürich. Enjoying that healthy diet of milk chocolate.
    Still,