The use of the pronoun our disturbed the chief commissioner. He had spoken with Inspector Trignant in Paris about Cooper. He's obnoxious, but he knows what he's about. If we had listened to him, we would have caught the Whitney woman red-handed. It was the same phrase Cooper had just used.

Toon Willems made his decision, and it was based partly on the well-publicized failure of the French police to apprehend the hijackers of the De Beers diamonds. Where the French police had failed, the Dutch police would succeed.