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deserted as an Andalusian village at two on a July afternoon; the leggy streetlamps poured their dirty orange light upon a total silence that blew to and fro in the curtains of rain; wind whistled over the tall grimy blocks of concrete but did not touch a silence as whole and heavy as the silence of the forest. He had never seen a forest until a year or so ago; Arlette had laughed at him – forty years old and never seen the forest. Well, there weren’t any forests in Holland. But after his accident he had learned to walk in the forest country where Arlette had taken him. Forests of beech, of spruce and pine – now he had them in his blood. Mile after mile of silence, until one expected to come upon strange shapes in the clearing, scrape away the moss and find an Inca city unseen and untouched for seven hundred years.
    Not a cat on the Van Lennepweg, and in the café were only three dispirited men bleakly drinking beer behind the uncurtained window with its sour pot-plants. And the young were not going to hang about this dragsville boulevard, but went into town to the steamy snackbars: enticing smells of
patates
not only fried in ignoble oil but smothered in mayonnaise – just the medicine for adolescent acne.
    Three hundred two-bedroom flats as like as the spruce trees in his forest, tremendously overheated, spotlessly clean. A smell of hot dust from the glowing valves of television sets, a sickly waft of artificial vanilla from the biscuits that were being munched. He climbed steps, his stick under his arm. The man he had posted to watch the building materialized behind him.
    â€˜Hallo, chief.’
    â€˜Been here long?’
    â€˜Took over from Gerard an hour ago. Not a mouse. No husband, no lover, no nobody.’
    â€˜He hear what the neighbours were saying?’
    â€˜Ho yes: full of it, but flummoxed. Nobody knew the woman. Nice little girl, they say, but a different name, foreigner, ja, so that if your husband is away a lot, even if one can’t say for sure, you very likely lead a loose immoral life, what?’
    The neighbours did not seem to have been startlingly original; Van der Valk shrugged.
    â€˜I’m going to look about for an hour.’
    An hour later he knew nothing positive. A few negatives, like finding no photo album. Everyone has a photo album, no? Not even a photo of Ruth, as though, as though … no, no conclusions. Esther Marx was neither tidy nor untidy. Her clothes were expensive, but there were not many of them. She wore trousers a lot, but she had a very nice frock of Chinese silk and a nearly new jersey cocktail dress with the boutique label of a couturier, and two or three pairs of fragile high-heeled sandals. Mm, one would have to show her photograph in hotels and bars, but he felt instinctively that it was a thin idea.
    The furniture was dull, conventional; she had had dress sense but no taste. She brightened her day with whisky, it would seem; there was an empty bottle and another a thirdfull. She liked peanuts and ate a lot of fruit. She cooked a lot of Indonesian rice dishes – so did half Holland. She had no jewellery – a few pairs of earrings. She seemed to get no personal letters and there was no sign of any family or friends anywhere. Her pockets and handbag held several ticket-stubs from cinemas, but only one at a time. No, there was nothing odd or irregular in the pattern, for a woman who lived much alone. The television set was well used, there were no books, but plenty of magazines –
Match, Express
– ordinary French taste.
    Personal papers were in a cardboard shoebox. A savings book for Ruth, extract of marriage certificate (the French functionary had had some difficulty with Dutch spelling), Ruth’s birth certificate, dated three months later and baldly saying ‘Father Unknown’. No passport or identity card for Esther. There were social security papers, rent receipts, odds and ends that meant