Strike Out Where Not Applicable by Nicolas Freeling Page B

anyone who isn’t.’
    â€˜This is an interesting point of view you’re advancing’ – Maartens was evidently taken aback by the aggressiveness of the other’s words – ‘but I don’t quite see what you’re getting at.’
    â€˜Briefly, that Fischer was killed – we’re ready to accept that. By whom? It’s pretty plain that it was somebody who knew himfairly well. Somebody who realized that it would very likely be taken for an accident – and perhaps worked that out beforehand. Somebody who knew his way around the riding-school and would pass there relatively unnoticed. Which leaves me in an unenviable position.’
    It was coat-trailing, but this trick of pretending to drop confidences was Van der Valk’s way, always had been, and he hadn’t done too badly with it sometimes. It depended on whether the other person had a streak of innocence and frankness – he thought Maartens had.
    â€˜Why? It sounds to me as though it would narrow your field of enquiry a lot – and that is a help, surely.’ It had worked – he had taken another cigarette and lit it; he was hooked …
    â€˜Nine-tenths of our work is straightforward. Straightforward crime, first, committed for gain by professional criminals, who take a calculated risk – housebreaking, frauds, and so on. Then the crimes committed by young men who want to assert themselves, ranging from the simple ones who want to be tough to the neurotic ones who want not to be failures. Put together they make the majority – the bread-and-butter business.
    â€˜Next category are the loonies. They’re difficult for the courts, but easy for us. Nearly all psychopath in varying degrees. The humiliated, the downtrodden and the solitary, the ones who want to get their name in the paper and employ press-cutting agencies. The misfits.
    â€˜Last, most difficult – and happily the rarest, though still unpleasantly common – the bourgeois crimes. Family crimes. The most respectable families have little scabrous secrets, which they will cover up to their last breath. It looks like that type, here. They are often the most unsympathetic, the most treacherous, the meanest and pettiest of criminals. One starts with a bias. To break it down, to get some tangible proof that can be presented to a court, is very hard indeed, and one resorts occasionally to pretty ignoble expedients. The only way of getting them, often, is to blacken them systematically. Make out everything they think and do as criminal. Persuade oneself that they are cold-blooded, wicked, scheming poisoners. And they aren’t, you know. They’re mostly frightened people – even pathetic. If one knew something of their inner lives it would be easier to avoid pigeonholing them as the foulest of criminals.’
    â€˜But they are criminals – by your own admission the worst and the most dangerous.’
    â€˜Not always.’
    â€˜But we come back to the original point,’ warmly. ‘That is the function of the court to decide.’
    â€˜The court goes along the rails laid down in the instruction. It’s rare that any totally new spectacular fact comes to light in a court. The prosecutor’s dossier is built on that of the instructing magistrate – here in Holland above all, because it’s one and the same person. The lines taken by the instruction follow the police enquiry – it’s inevitable. If the police devote themselves to proving a criminal guilty – and the harder it is the more effort they put into it – the court will inevitably tread the same path. I want to avoid that – I want to find out all I can about these people, and that means things they won’t tell me. One of the sources I want to reach is you. The family doctor.’
    â€˜Infringes my oath.’
    â€˜That’s right. You don’t get justice without infringing laws, and that’s