Criminal Conversation

by Nicolas Freeling

  Well – now or never. If he was a policeman, he had been instructed to go round to the back with his hat in his hand. If he was a patient, he might very probably be out of a job next week. Van der Marlowe crossed his palm with silver, looked about hopefully for a black cat, and walked up the short gravel path. The doctor’s door was a heavy old affair with carved panels; ordinarily these doors open but this resisted efforts to turn the handle. He rang, and a voice answered at once on a speakbox concealed behind a rococo wrought-iron grille. Quiet voice of a middle-aged woman.

  “May I know who you are, please?”

  “My name is van der Valk, but you don’t know me.”

  “You wish to consult the doctor?”

  “Yes.” What else could one say to an intercom?

  “Would you be so good as to come straight up the stairs you will see in the hallway and into the room marked ‘Secretary’?”

  “Thank you.” The door buzzed and clicked. A neat notice at eye level said, ‘Please close it behind you’. Hat-rack; he hung his hat; could always come back later to hang himself. Hall furniture, fairly sumptuous, colourless. Stairs, doors on a landing. At the end a curtained portière; living quarters. He walked obediently into ‘Secretary’, which was a small neat office, bright with clear colours and flowers. A thin, light woman, with blued hair, rimless octagonal glasses and an unassuming green woolly frock sat at the desk.

  “Mr van der Valk? I am Miss Maas. Do please sit down. What time of day do you prefer for an appointment?”

  “I would very much like to see the doctor today if at all possible.”

  She smiled professionally. “That is usually very difficult but as it happens I do have a cancellation this morning. But I will have to ask you to wait half an hour – would you prefer to come back? Will that suit?”

  “Perfectly.”

  Her smile approved of him beamingly for not being difficult. “Just give your name at the speaker.”

  He had time for a leisurely stroll into the Wozzeckstraat. It was an alleyway sandwiched between two rows of patrician houses that had gardens; there were high walls, garages, sheds where obscure little businesses were carried on, an ‘interior decorator’, a metal smith, a hand weaver, a window-cleaner, plebeian amidst this art but certainly with four times the income. The back of the doctor’s house was a garage with a flat above it – chauffeur, doubtless, possibly doubling as gardener, and wife as concierge, for there was another brass plate. ‘For all messages, goods delivered, offers or collections. H. v. d. Post.’ In the alley stood a cherry-red Alfa Romeo town car with the entwined snake at the windscreen corner. Again – rather an individual auto for a doctor. Still… He walked on as far as the water, where he stood gazing, rattling small change in his trouser pocket.

  When he got back the secretary had a sort of orange form. He gave his own home address, his profession as Business Man.

  “Have you been recommended to come here by any other doctor? You just came on your own – I see,” brightly still. “And have you a state insurance number, or is yours private? Thank you so much. I’ll be calling you within five minutes, probably.”

  Well, there he was, a patient, and he hadn’t been told to go to the back door. Would the doctor send a bill for professional services in to the police department? Ha. He felt buoyant, a thing that made him feel lucky. He was confident, now that he was in, that he wouldn’t get flung out on his ear. The intercom clicked above his head and the bright soft voice addressed him.

  “Mr van der Valk, would you be so kind as to take the door on your left at the bottom of the stairs? Dr van der Post is ready for you.”

  The organisation here is pretty good, he thought on his way down: they don’t have a heap of people sitting staring at each other – and that fact, no doubt, is reflected in the bills patients get presented with.

  Four

  He had no time to absorb the surroundings straight away, that first visit. It was later that he discovered afresh innumerable details of the figure, its background, its frame, and began to fit them in, for they were all broken up and jumbled by the jigsaw – the strain induced and the boldness needed. Carrying through with this confidence trick, this quite brazen piece of imposture, had not been at all easy. When he left the house he was stunned with nervous fatigue and with a confused heap of unco-ordinated impressions. He stood blinking at the traffic flowing at the main road, a hundred metres down from the house with the lindens. He did not quite know what to do; it was latish for going back to an office where there was, he hoped, nothing for him to do but catch up on some neglected paperwork, and it was too early to go home. That atmosphere, besides the smell of dinner cooking, of his house, of his wife’s skin when he kissed her, the whole feeling of home – no no, that would all destroy the very picture he was trying to paint, the colouring he was trying to pin down. He needed something to do, something small and unimportant, that would be symbolic of what, to him, promised to become a particularly delicate and risky piece of work.

  He walked with heavy steps into a stationer’s, where he bought three cardboard folders. A little further on was a café, where he sat down deliberately to examine his purchase: not feeling at all alcoholic he ordered a blackcurrant juice. There was a green folder, a sort of insipid nile-green, and a beige one; he shoved these at the back of his briefcase. A grey one seemed to him the most suitable. He fished for a ballpoint and lettered it in neat capitals. C M P. Cabestan-Merckel-Post. Canadian Mineral Prospectors. Consolidated Madagascan Potash.

  There was certainly a connection. That this doctor had killed Cabestan was not impossible. That he played games with the more sympathetic of his women patients was, perhaps, even probable. Because, thought van der Valk, meditating over his blackcurrant juice and his scribbling pad, Dr Post knew, he rather thought, why he had come, even if he had not known himself. Oh yes, he could fly balloons about the coincidental death of a seedy painter who had happened to live in the attics up above, but there was not proof enough to condemn a cockroach on, and Post knew that. Did he know that just because he was a doctor, with the professional knowledge of a man who has at some time taken a course in forensic medicine, or was it the cynicism of a man laughing at the amazing naïveté and stupidity of the police? Van der Valk didn’t know. That attitude of amused indifference…

  Had he gone about this the right way? But once in a false position – in a situation where any position would be false – it was hard to see how else he could have done it. He could have retreated promptly into his official identity and said the words out of the book, upon which the doctor – any doctor, knowing a little about the world – would have challenged them. There was no evidence of any weight at all, and the impudent bluff would have been called.

  Van der Valk had followed, perhaps, that instinct that made him a dangerous policeman, and sometimes so frightened his superiors: his instinct for fitting his approach towards a problem to the nature of that problem. In a false position a false game. He had pretended, for a moment, to be a patient, and had then embarked on a transparent fiction that these suspicions were really delusions to be discussed in confidence – even that he was presenting unusual symptoms to a doctor’s scrutiny for analysis and judgement. He was asking for a diagnosis, that was it.

  “You know,” Post had said with his constant smile, “this is really a good example of what the books call a systematised fantasy, don’t you agree?” He had a twenty-two carat professional manner: the exact blend of interested sympathy and studied objectivity. But he was no cheap smoothie, like the man inviting you to sign the hire-purchase agreement.

  “You are, by your account, a police officer, with a highly improbable tale – you are aware how improbable it must sound, and that, not unnaturally, makes you uneasy. So you explain your presence in my house with the remark that since you have received an accusation relating to me, and since I am also a doctor, you feel that the simplest way of handling your unease is to pretend informality, coming and asking what I think of it
all, inviting as it were my discreet co-operation – have I understood your somewhat confused remarks?”

  “Very well. Wouldn’t you agree that it was not only the simplest way but the right method? My unease – perfectly true – springs from the fact that the facts as I know them lie outside my understanding. Since you are a neurologist, I call you into consultation.” He added his own smile to Post’s.

  “Do I even know you are a real policeman?”

  Van der Valk passed his identity card across the desk.

  “Most remarkable. Well, apart from repeating the obvious, that your informant, since I take it there is an informant, needs medical treatment that I am probably not competent to give, I cannot see how I can help. I could even complain to the police department that my time was being wasted by an officer highly enough placed to know better, since you have no interrogatory commission or official standing.”

  This was unpleasantly slippery; van der Valk hurried off the ice.

  “Come,” he said, in the pleasant tone the other used, with the same perpetual smile, the same detached amusement, “come now; you wouldn’t do that. If you were asked to examine a person – I won’t say a patient because you are convinced, let us say, that there is nothing whatever wrong with him – you would still do so. Discreetly, dispassionately. You would not tell this man that he was either ill or well – first, quietly, you would try to find out. Aren’t I right? – of course I’m right. Naturally you agree. I am a police officer. Instead of complaining that I have no commission or mandate – a thing for which there is no call or need – be glad that I don’t arrive on your doorstep with a flourish, telling your secretary who or what I am, giving rise to scandal and innuendo. You may have something in your life you would not wish the police to investigate. Even little things can be very damaging to a professional man.” A remark, he thought with pleasure, that could not have tripped more smoothly off the lips of the most accomplished blackmailer.

  It was the smile, and the fastidious fingers, that stayed with him most after that first meeting with Dr Hubert van der Post. The smile was warm and charming, but it was Olympian. He found everything amusing because it was seen from a great height of superiority; he was set so far apart from the ruck, so far above the roughened fingers, broken nails, grimy knuckles, that he could see little but comedy in agitated sweaty little men like van der Valk. Perhaps it was less a question of vanity than a sense of humility that was missing from his character. A humiliation would be the worst blow, possibly, that anyone could give him.

  Everything about him, too: his clothes, his desk, his room. Van der Valk tried to think of adjectives to fit. Delicate, exact, in exquisite taste, purified of all vulgarity. Masculine, certainly. But a little too poised, a scrap too exquisite. Would he be inclined to see all sadness, all worry as merely tiny, ludicrous incidents that could and would never touch, bother, irritate, penetrate his room?

  Five

  Mr Samson seemed to have found a solution to Cross-eyed Janus, unless he had simply given it up. He showed no sign of being in either a good humour or a bad one, but then he never did. He was reading a pornographic magazine, part of the loot from the unfortunate gentleman whose auto had fallen in the canal. It could not have been interesting, because he put it down almost with alacrity when van der Valk came in to make his report.

  “Well now: how’s your little affair?”

  Van der Valk told about the cautious games with taxis around the Javakade and the remarks made by Heer Merckel, at which Mr Samson began pulling faces.

  “Another one with his puritan conscience, shovelling it all on top of us. Could just as easily have knocked off this Capstan himself-assuming anybody ever did knock him off; huh?”

  “Nothing to show he didn’t. I was fed up, I can tell you.”

  “Not surprised though, I hope – you wait till you’ve been in this department as long as I have. There isn’t one in ten of this type that has any basis in fact. They feel bothered by something they’ve got involved with that seems a scrap dirtier than their usual lives, and turn it around in their minds till they reach a completely illogical certainty that a crime has been committed. I’ve seen dozens of them. They come racing in to tell us about it and then they feel much better. Leaving me to pull the plug when they’re quite finished. As for concrete evidence, that doesn’t enter their scheme of things. Morality is what bothers them. If we had less morality we might have more justice. Want a dirty book? – it’s bloody dull.” Mr Samson was in a good mood after all. Van der Valk decided to admit that he had thought there was a little more to Mr Merckel than a suburban housewife with a guilty conscience.

  “You thinking of doing anything about this doctor? Isn’t anything you can do – I read that medical report – no positive indication of any interference with natural processes and without that we can’t move. This Merckel of yours isn’t worth a burnt match.”

  “I saw this doctor, though.”

  “You mean without getting chucked out?”

  “I didn’t show my card. Secretary took me for a patient, and just let me in without asking. There I was, sitting in the chair.”

  The commissaris pushed his glasses down and stared over them.

  “Look, boy, if this doctor raises a stink, I’m the one on the block.”

  “He won’t complain. Complaining would make his fingers dirty. He’s far above such things. He treated it all as though it were just funny. I think, too, he’d be scared. He gave me a lot of time. There’s something there he wouldn’t want to come out.”

  “You mean you think he does amuse himself with the women patients?”

  “He amuses himself with everything.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How does one ever know anything? He amused himself with me. It struck me afterwards. You see, I went in there and told him that I had unsupported information and that I had to look into it, blahblah, and chose to come and talk it over discreetly, unofficially – to cover myself, of course. Well. He took this up, began to weave a comic analogy. It was funny. I was a neurotic patient, come to him with fantasies, which he then has to treat. It tickled him. I’m his patient; he is going to diagnose the nature of my delusions. I liked that. I started trying to diagnose him. There’s something out of the ordinary about him.”

  Mr Samson put his elbows on the table and stared at his subordinate with a square, wooden face.

  “Go on,” in an ominous voice.

  “I had my foot in the door, I thought, and by pure luck, since I was expecting clam-up and the-door-is-over-there. So I said to him, ‘Now that I’m your patient, I’ll be coming again for consultation - treatment too, perhaps.’ I thought he’d tell me off. He just grinned and said, ‘Perhaps your delusions will be interesting enough to warrant my continuing this file’ – the secretary had filled out one of those cardboard files with my name and age; that crap. I knew he was scared, then. He wants to keep in touch, to hear if I say anything, try and know what I think. There must be something there.”

  “Yes,” agreed the old man.

  “So I went out and bought myself a cardboard folder too. And wrote his goddam name on it,” finished van der Valk, and realised that he had spoken with an emphasis that had something near fury in it. Old Samson almost grinned.

  “All right, my boy. Just bear one thing in mind. If this chap is playing with you, he doesn’t need to make a complaint. I see what’s in your mind. You think that because you’ve made no formal move, he can’t make a formal complaint to the Emperor Franz Josef upstairs. True, but I looked up this doctor of yours. He says one quiet word to some high pooha and your days in this department are over. He’s married to a whole family of magistrates: friends everywhere and lord knows whom he may have in his pocket. Grateful ex-patients quite probably including the minister of justice. I won’t be able to save you.”

  It was a long speech. Van der Valk realised that if the old man didn’t approve of what he had done there would just have been a grunt �
� if that.

  “If we stopped every time, before breaking a rule, to think what would happen if we got the sack, how many things would we miss? Would we ever get Janus, for example?” It was an impudent remark; the old man went a bit turkey-cocky.

  “You bother about this doctor, and leave me to deal with Janus.”

  It was as near a green light as van der Valk would ever get. Mr Samson threw the magazine in the waste-paper basket as he went out. The last van der Valk saw he was stooping, purple, to fish it out again, having just remembered that the cleaning women would find it.

  “How’s Father?” Inspector Scholten, who shared his office, and was deep in some administrative rigmarole.

  “Reading a dirty book.”

  “He was on the rampage this morning. Said he wished Kan were back. Minute later he said when he saw Kan he’d kick him so he’d never dare have piles again.”

  “Why?” since he was obviously expected to ask why.

  “Kan sent in a report he’d done at home, saying he’d explored every possibility and there wasn’t any legal hold on that Janus character. Old man went fair mataglap. Not my pigeon, thank God.”

  “Ah.” Van der Valk rather thought he understood.

  Six

  A week later. Brilliant weather; August heat over Amsterdam. The mornings were clear and splendid, the afternoons reeled with sun and the pavements danced under temperatures in the thirties. The evenings had a pleasant coolness, but all night the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed. Sometimes huge spots of rain fell, but always by midnight the charged clouds had passed, and the humidity with them, and the thermometer went down to sixteen, and fresh cool air flickered in at bedroom windows.