Shah-Mak

blue and white door of the Grutsmolen. The windmill stood on six storeys, of which the first three were living quarters — painstakingly preserved seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, like the inside of a giant dolls’ house. Packer began to forget his frustrations as he climbed to the fourth floor; this would contain the machinery that never failed to fascinate him. But there was little machinery to be seen. Between the sloping walls were a couple of wooden bins and some rusted wheels. He climbed to the next floor and saw with disgust that the stones, ‘horses’, and grain chutes had been stripped out and replaced by a large circular table with a relief map of the Low Countries, showing a network of dykes and canals.

He started back down, scowling at the old Dutchman who had relieved him of two guilders for the entrance fee. Outside, both the launch and the bus had gone. He walked out into the rain and kicked viciously at the gravel path, and heard a shrill voice behind him — ‘Engleesh?’ — followed by a high-pitched laugh.

Packer turned and saw a short, immensely fat man, wet and flushed and grinning, swaying in front of a stationary taxi.

‘Your wife, she leave you, hein?’ The man wiped some rain from the tip of his pointed beard. ‘So we follow, hein?’

Packer took a step towards him; and even through the rain he could smell the gin on his breath. ‘Who are you?’ The man was obviously not English, which he had spoken with an absurdly distorted Cockney accent.

At this moment the fat man reverted to French. ‘I thought I would catch you at the mill, but then the lady decides to disappear — poof! Comme toutes ces femmes emmerdantes!’ He stepped back and grappled unsteadily with the rear door of the taxi. ‘Please, monsieur!’ he cried, in his cooing voice.

Packer took another step forward and stopped. ‘I didn’t see you on the boat,’ he said fiercely, ‘so they must have told you at the hotel, and you came by taxi.’ The man gave a giggle, which exploded into a belch. ‘Who the hell are you?’ Packer yelled.

‘’Oo the ’ell am I?’ the fat man repeated, again in English; then with some difficulty he reached under his raincoat and pulled out a stout crocodile wallet from which he handed Packer a card.

Packer read, in embossed copperplate: CHARLES AUGUSTE POL (Légion d’Honneur) Conseil d’Affaires, P.O. 248, Genève, La Suisse

Packer started to hand it back, but the Frenchman brushed him aside, at the same time managing to drag the taxi door open. ‘Please, you are my guest!’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Packer. ‘Where do you want to take me?’

‘To find the young lady, of course! Cherchez la femme!’ He gave Packer a boss-eyed grin and rolled almost head first into the back of the taxi. The driver sat watching him with mild reproof; he had switched off the engine, but the meter was still running and showed over fifty guilders. Monsieur Charles Auguste Pol was being an unusually lucrative customer.

Packer still stood outside, holding the door open, while the Frenchman had already settled back into the corner, his thighs and buttocks filling more than half the space on the seat. Packer wondered, for one wild moment, whether the man were some eccentric private eye who had run amok on Dutch gin while employed by Sarah’s family to obstruct Packer in this feeble spasm of foreign pleasure.

He said to the fat man in French, ‘Will you please explain what this is all about? How you know about this girl and me, and why you’re following us both?’

Charles Pol patted the seat beside him. ‘All in good time, my friend! First we must find the lady.’

Reluctantly, and mostly because the rain had increased again, Packer climbed into the taxi. Pol grunted something unintelligible and the driver started the engine. Packer quickly opened the window to relieve the fumes from his companion, which he now recognized as a mixture of Bols and sour sweat. He was wondering when the Frenchman had last had a bath, when the taxi turned out on to the autobahn south to Utrecht. The driver kept to the outside lane, going very fast.

‘How far is this tulip nursery?’ Packer asked, feeling the first twinge of unease.

Monsieur Pol flapped a hand which was like a freshly peeled shrimp. ‘Do not disturb yourself, mon cher! You will soon be reunited with your loved one.’

‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ Packer muttered to himself; then, in French: ‘Did you follow us from the hotel, or the airport, or out from London?’

Pol put a fat forefinger to his cherry lips. ‘Shall we just say that I found the lady particularly attractive, as you say in English? That red beret is most coquettish. And so easy to follow!’ He gave his giggle and wiped a string of spittle from his mouth.

Owen Packer was leaning against the open window, his head and shoulders wet with rain, and was trying to look round the driver to see if there was a registered number somewhere on the dashboard. He was unfamiliar with Dutch taxis. But before he had time, he was hurled back into the corner of his seat as the driver pulled across the centre lane, cutting dangerously in front of a little Daf that squealed at them with headlamps flashing; then swerved into the slip road which ran out along an embankment above the lowlands.

Packer’s attention was momentarily distracted by a row of windmills on the horizon. He was relieved to see that the flat landscape was dotted with little houses and what looked like plots of vegetable garden.

‘Relax, Monsieur Packer! We are soon there.’

Packer swung round in his seat. ‘How do you know my name?’

Pol gave him a beady grin. ‘Let us say that you are not entirely a stranger to me, Monsieur Packer. Or should