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to, for the drainage ditch waits.… It’s not so much that the Dutch driver is careless and undisciplined, more that the driver’s seat of the car is the one place where theDutchman throws off his terror of government and becomes a devil of a chap, all aggressive to show what a brave tough fellow he is underneath.
    What an extraordinary self-confidence I possessed, thought Van der Valk, easing his stiff hip, pushing the stick parallel to the leg he had stretched as far as he could (never far enough in small cars, but no matter). The amateur psychiatrist. The silent understander of the human heart. Dear Lord what a clown. But what a lot he had learned, this last year.
    He had learned that he was a far less good policeman than he had thought, which was very good for his vanity. He had thought himself clever when he had just been eccentric. What made him look clever was simply the spur of frustration awaiting anything of originality in our century, our generation of polite mediocrity, where everything is organized – Holland! – and nobody can improvise because it is not allowed. Most people’s standards of thought and conduct he had found ignoble, and the revolt against the pressure-to-conform had produced a flint-and-steel analogy. Sparks of intuition that he had mistaken for big talent. He hadn’t any big talent: he had a small talent. And it wasn’t enough.
    He found himself thinking of the last case he had had in Amsterdam. A woman, married peaceably for twenty-three years to a steady plodding fellow, a marriage seeming a model of stability. Their life was comfortable if not spectacular, they had two nice average children with no problems. A good husband, who went out once a week to play cards, once a week to his ‘club’, once a week with her to the pictures. What could have gone wrong? The husband had decided, sensibly, not impulsively, that he was getting nowhere with the firm where he had been for seventeen years, and decided to move to Germany, where he had found a house, a better job, and twice the salary. That was not enough, was it, for her to go out, buy quite a large sharp kitchen knife (bad that, in law, where it is called premeditation) and stick him with it, dead dead, before going, calmly and reasonably, to the police to tell them?
    A homicide; the station called Van der Valk. He had found her sitting quiet, undishevelled, unhysterical, in a police waiting-room (metal furniture, upholstered in sponge rubber, covered with grey plastic, circular perspex table with ashtray thoughtfully provided, four climbing plants on the wall and a geranium on the table in awhite pot); she was drinking tea. He sat down to read the report of her quite coherent tale.
    â€˜What made you do that?’ he asked quietly.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ she answered, putting down her teacup.
    They never got any further. Not that there was no answer; there were too many. As a distinguished sociologist had recently remarked, ‘Anything, on any page, of the
New York Times
is sociology.’ Ha. The world was so full of phony ‘behavioural sciences’ that everything was important, and nothing mattered any more. Officers of Justice, who in Holland combine the functions of examining magistrate and courtroom prosecutor, send for three or four head-shrinkers nowadays at the first drop of the pencil, but they got no further than Van der Valk had. What, a harmless, unagitated, untense woman had knifed her husband? And she had brooded, to the stage of going out for something more lethal than the little knife she peeled potatoes with?
    They had produced page upon page of clotted nonsense disguised in jargon. Van der Valk had seen it, and seen it to be nonsense. Dutch assize courts were generally good; six months later when the case came up the president had tried hard. He had been quiet and kind. But by then there was too much paper, and the poor woman had been dulled into total apathy. They