Criminal Conversation

by Nicolas Freeling

  “I am an honest man,” he said. “I mustn’t tell you I know yet exactly how to treat your case. My diagnosis isn’t complete, I can see that. But of course, as always, recovery depends upon the patient in the end, hm? Since you are evidently going to help me, I have confidence in your recovery. Well, we are both busy men, and I mustn’t take up more of your expensive time. But next time we meet I shall hope to find you on the right road; getting better.”

  Post said nothing at all. Just smoked his cigarette in a mannered careful way, and looked at him amiably.

  Outside on the pavement van der Valk shook his head at his own performance, so crude, so coarse, so uncivilised by comparison with Post’s. I should be a fairground salesman, he thought, that’s about my speed. Selling some quack cure – all in a pretty bottle to astounded villagers. Contains real gold, ladies and gentlemen, and only two-fifty the half litre. Van der Valk the tally-boy; live now and pay later. But there’s no doubt, that’s the approach with a civilised type like the good Dr van der Post. He felt mightily pleased with his awful self.

  Eight

  Next morning, back in the office, he was less inflated, less horribly pleased with himself, but still feeling lucky. It was undoubtedly the weather, that he enjoyed, that made everything light and bright around him, that gave him energy and speed, that protected him from the landslide of gloomy depression that generally followed an early success in one of his affairs. But no, really he couldn’t help it, couldn’t feel like a wooden police official, dependent on a mountain of administrative paper, surrounded by the querulous nagging of clowns like Chief Inspector Kan – not in this light that bathed Amsterdam in a dusty golden shimmer. The smell of green, of leaves, of shooting flowering bushes, was too strong, even conquering the sewer smell of the canal, and the inky-cardboardy smell of the office. And Mr Samson was on an island, and Scholten was in a tent, and that juggle-buggle of a Kan was lost somewhere in a perfect epidemic of autothefts. The autos seemed mostly to belong to German tourists; why was that? Was it simply that they contained a richer loot of money and passports, cameras and binoculars? – or was it some cunning notion perhaps master-minded by Cross-eyed Janus? Van der Valk didn’t know and didn’t care, and if he were Kan, he thought happily, he’d go to Zandvoort and lie on the beach, and watch the German tourists playing with their expensive beach toys, and think with content of the unfortunate police of Köln – even more swamped by the epidemic than they were here. Summer madness… August heat. Van der Valk, who had bought a paper bag full of greengages on his way to work, wiped juice off his chin and felt happy. He had to go and wash; when he got back he felt like making a nuisance of himself and telephoned Mr Carl Merckel on his private line.

  “Speaking.” As though he didn’t know; that grey, guarded, neutral voice.

  “Here van der Valk. I’d like to see you. Before, during or after lunch – not knowing your appointments I leave it open.”

  “You have something conclusive to say to me?”

  “I’ve a slight case of sunstroke. Say the word.”

  “It does not sound as though I have much choice,” vexed.

  “No,” blandly.

  “I have no lunch appointment. One o’clock precisely, in the Chinese restaurant opposite the Concert Building.”

  Good heavens, thought van der Valk, what extraordinary precautions to avoid being seen. He knew it well, an unpretentious place needing repainting, but the food was good; being much frequented by the musicians from over the road it had to be.

  “Sweet and sour everything – and lots of shrimp crackers,” he told the boy in the white jacket.

  “Well?” said Merckel, still sounding vexed.

  “I’ve taken up the matter you would probably have preferred me not to take up.”

  “How can you possibly know, or claim to know, what I prefer?”

  “Why, I’ll admit to you that the overwhelming impression I had when we met was of someone who wishes to avoid a responsibility and who makes a criminal indictment with every effort to minimise its possible truth or even likelihood.”

  “You do not know me well, I see. Enquire among those of your associates who know something of the business world whether I am afraid of responsibility.”

  “If you had not considerable moral courage, I agree, you would have kept silence altogether,” lightly. “There must be many things you would not be happy to have me know.”

  “I distinguished, I recall, between the private, I presume discreet knowledge of a police officer under oath, and the public, uninformed insinuations of the press.”

  “That is precisely the position of my new acquaintance Dr van der Post. He does not mind my asking, guessing, even knowing all sorts of things as long as it is kept inside the walls of his consulting-room. What might be said outside would be a much naughtier idea, but he knows that I have no convincing evidence. He realised, however, that however disagreeable company I may be, I am a great deal preferable to the press.”

  “Are you telling me that my suppositions about this man are true but that you either cannot or do not propose to do anything about it?”

  “Some of it is certainly true, I think. All of it even, possibly. What you suggest might easily turn out to be the case. Wouldn’t be unheard of. I might even say it happens every day,” tranquilly, with his mouth full of shrimp cracker.

  Merckel laid down his soup-spoon, wiped his mouth meticulously, and turned a cold eye on the policeman.

  “You give me an impression – I have no wish to sound offensive – of being decidedly lukewarm.”

  “I am lukewarm. I would warm up if I knew more things that I think have been kept from me hitherto. Have I, Mr Merckel, all the information you can give me? Suppose, for instance, I imagined the likely hypothesis that your wife had received blackmail threats also. And that she had gone to her doctor, perhaps insisting that he remove the source of pressure and pain?”

  Merckel looked, surprisingly, extremely shocked, as if this had never occurred to him.

  “She has a very strong sense of values,” he said sharply. “She would have come to me, knowing that I would give her every support and that I would stand by her no matter what.”

  “No doubt. But in her loyalty to you, she might think that none of this must reach you. That your position – more, your integrity, your honour; you have a very strong sense of honour – must not be smeared or even touched. Assume by all means that she would not think of any violent means of retaliating. She would then pay blackmail money, thinking it safer and easier to stand for the squeeze. How much could she pay without your noticing?”

  “It’s unheard of,” muttered Merckel furiously.

  “You see, it’s not enough to insist on meeting me where no one would recognise you. It has not even occurred to you that I am, in different circles, I grant, as widely known a figure in this town as you are. Here, for example – full of musicians – I might easily be recognised. I might even be seen by someone who would have very little trouble, and might easily think that little bit worth taking, uncovering your own identity. You will have to get accustomed to numerous ideas, including that of my questioning your wife.”

  Merckel gave him a slow look. Not furious or unhappy, but appraising, as though he were sizing up a man who had asked him for the loan of money.

  “Well, Mr van der Valk,” he said at last. “I see that my notion that you would not show vigour was wide of the mark. You have evidently seen Dr van der Post and are not, apparently, afraid of what he could do to your career. What conclusions you have really drawn from this visit are not my business. I now ask you whether you have thought what I can do to your career. As you remarked when I first met you, I am acquainted with a number of persons prominent in public life.”

  “Yet you still came to me. Perhaps you were sure that we would be careful not to probe too deep. If we were able to pin a crime - any crime – on the good doctor, that would destroy his reputation and you would be content. But the idea of your wife be
ing a likely suspect of a possible murder – and it was you, Mr Merckel, who first mentioned the word – we would be too tactful to let that occur to us. Of course. You got the wrong man.”

  Merckel smiled contemptuously.

  “You have as mistaken an impression of me as most people,” drily. “I am pleased that you do not allow yourself to be intimidated; if you did you would be of singularly little use. If you wish to talk to my wife do so by all means; I do not stand in your way. I ask you to respect my original wish for discretion and not to mention my name, even to her.”

  “Why shouldn’t your name be mentioned?”

  “That concerns me.”

  “I’ll respect that,” careful to make no protest or further query.

  Lot of things I don’t understand in that quarter as well, he thought, having a little stroll; the trouble with Chinese food is that one invariably eats too much of it. I think I would almost have preferred it if Merckel had made more objection to my questioning his wife. He sounds pretty sure of her. Still…

  He had to get an auto; Merckel lived out in Aerdenhout, on the far side of Haarlem. One of the creamy residential districts of Holland; elegant quiet streets lined with trees, down which purred elegant quiet autos, lined with bank-notes; the plebeian Volkswagen, in these streets, made a noise like the umbrella of classical tradition dropped on the floor of the British Museum. The streets wound aristocratically in and out of one another, noiseless but for the tocking whirr of lawnmowers: the villas all looked the same and all rather ugly, with cedars, plenty of grass lush from the automatic sprinkler, a slight tendency to stained glass and bulbous grandiosities, and a patrician disregard of street-numbers. He had leisure to admire a good deal of gaudy garden furniture strewn about among the cedars before he found the right house, and the usual Spanish maid to take his card, on the back of which he had scribbled, ‘I have just had lunch with your husband’.

  Mrs Merckel was installed in one of those swinging garden sofas with fringes and a canopy, pretending to be reading Ideal Homes with an eye cocked on his approach. He had expected her to try an icy madam act, gaze fixed on his shoes (they were quite expensive shoes, since any policeman is kind to his feet, but they needed mending and could have done with a lick of polish). He was agreeably surprised when she jumped up, in a lithe, active way, offered her hand, and said, “I am Mrs Merckel; how do you do”, in a voice that had a pleasant warmth in it, like a ripe apricot.

  “Do sit down. Have some orange juice?”

  “Yes, please.” She poured him a glass full, out of a Provençal earthenware jug that made a nice tinkling sound of ice-cubes and had that primitive look he liked, as though it had been dug up in a field with bones of ancient Gauls.

  “Cigarette? Oh, I love those ones of yours; may I have one?” It made a good impression, easy and unaffected and no kittenish gurgling.

  She was a solid, well-constructed woman, not fat at all but all curves, with the very fine-textured, pearly skin that goes so well with dark chestnut hair. Small good teeth, quite rare in Holland, where the women have excellent teeth looking like a well-polished row of marble gravestones. A big wide comic mouth. She should have had large clear brown eyes, but they were small, with crinkles round them, and brilliant dark blue. He liked this face, and he liked her for not trying to hide behind the dark glasses, which she had taken off to look at him with a kind of honest curiosity.

  “I must sound awfully inquisitive, but lunch with my husband sounds quite important, and I’m wondering where I come in?”

  “That is quite easily told. My name is van der Valk, I am an inspector of the recherche in the Amsterdam Police, and trouble is my business, as Sam Spade used to say. Has anybody ever tried to blackmail you, Mrs Merckel?” The well-known raid technique: the amiable little domestic pleasantry and the bomb in the same breath. Van der Valk, the smiler with the knife.

  No, he could swear the reaction was genuine; she was too unguarded and too spontaneous.

  “I’m sorry…but talk about a bolt out of the blue… Do you mean my husband thinks…?…oh…” It had suddenly come to her to wonder why anyone should think she was being blackmailed, and she immediately looked stricken.

  “Don’t look so worried,” kindly. After the flash, the burn cream. “I think I know why someone might, possibly, have tried to blackmail you.” She looked then with relief at him, wanting to be open, but too cautious to put her feet in the water before she knew how cold it was likely to be.

  “What has my husband told you?”

  “Nothing. I told him. A little succession of things that had come to my notice, giving me a notion that an attempt of the sort might have been made.” There was something rather theatrical about this talk, he thought. Blackmail, in this summery birdy garden, sitting on a padded swinging sofa on the lawn, innocently drinking orange juice with a pretty woman in primrose yellow shorts and a white shark-skin shirt. It did not sound convincing at all. He didn’t mind, because he didn’t believe in it either. She was looking wary, but there was something transparent about this woman that was a most attractive quality.

  “Did you ever hear of a man called Casimir Cabestan?”

  “No. Sounds like a juggler in a cabaret.”

  “A painter – quite well known at one time.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about painting.”

  “Mrs Merckel, I’m going to tell you quite honestly what I know about all this, and you can tell me then quite honestly whether it means anything to you, and if so, whether there are things I don’t know, or have maybe misunderstood.”

  She laughed now. She had never heard of Capstan, as Mr Samson called him, and that made her think she was in the clear. It was evident that she thought he was driving at something else altogether, and was greatly relieved about it.

  “I’m quite willing to try,” amiably.

  “This Cabestan – your husband knew him slightly, because a good few years ago he did a portrait, it appears, for him – lived in a flat in Amsterdam, on top of a house owned by a Dr Hubert van der Post. I say lived, because, you see, he is dead.” The laughter went out of the eyes and they glanced around nervously before she fixed them on the ground, pretending to be puzzled.

  “I know Dr Post of course; he has treated me. But I’m afraid I’ve never heard…”

  “I’m going to put this quite bluntly, so please forgive me. The implication is that this man got the idea that you and the doctor were too friendly, and was so certain he could establish this that he decided to try and make trouble.”

  “Have you told my husband this?”

  “Yes. Your husband is interested in nothing but in supporting you, and if necessary protecting you. And so am I; it is what I am here for.”

  “Do you mean that Dr van der Post complained to the police that this horrible man tried to – to get money from him – with this revolting tale?”

  “No, Mrs Merckel. The man is dead. He may have been a horrible man; we don’t know, yet. But he’s dead, and when a man dies soon after an attempt to extort money it may be a complete coincidence but we do tend to believe that there may have been something in his story.”

  “You don’t mean perhaps that you think I killed this man?”

  “Hush, not so loud. No, I don’t. It might be thought, not necessarily by me, that your husband did.”

  “But that’s impossible. You simply don’t know my husband. He’s intensely scrupulous, very very upright – even if something…”

  “Mrs Merckel, the story is true, isn’t it? You are, or have been, the doctor’s mistress?”

  “Oh my god. Yes.”

  “Listen, this is very important. Your husband – and I – wish to keep this whole tale from the public, the press, maybe even from a court, where you might be called as a witness, upon oath. He is as concerned for your good name as for his own. You must be quite straightforward with me; if you try to bottle up anything you know you simply increase the risk of its coming out another way. Better me,
your husband, a few lawyers, than the boulevard press. Are you sure now that you know of no effort to blackmail you, or your husband, or the doctor?”

  “No. Honestly.”

  “Have you seen him in the last three weeks?”

  “No.”

  “Phoned?”

  “No. Wait. He did phone me, but only to ask whether I was all right. It’s true – really – that I wasn’t quite well, not ill but not quite a hundred per cent, and he did make me better. He did call up maybe two to three weeks back; I couldn’t say for sure. But he just asked whether I had any troubles.”

  “In those words – any troubles?”

  “Well, I can’t swear to the words. He might have said troubles, or bothers, or miseries – but meaning just was I all right.”

  “Or, possibly, meaning has anyone tried to blackmail you?”

  “But – I suppose it could be twisted – but I knew nothing; how could I have guessed – god, what have I done?”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t say anything at all to your husband, unless he does, and I feel myself extremely sure that he won’t. He will behave exactly as he always does; do the same.”

  “But if my name gets in the paper?”

  “It won’t. Dr Post has many patients. None of them would be at all happy if this business gets broadcast. The trouble is that someone was banking on exactly that fact. You get on well with your husband, don’t you?”

  “Very well indeed. This is the second marriage, you know, for both of us. Perhaps that’s why some things appear strange…” Her voice trailed off; she decided not to try and explain or justify.

  “Neither of you has any children?”

  “My husband hasn’t. I have a daughter from my first marriage - she’s sixteen now. She’s studying art at the Royal College. But that isn’t an obstacle between us if that’s what you’re thinking. Carl is devoted to Suzanne, quite openly. Perhaps the more since he has none of his own. In fact, I’ll tell you quite frankly, Mr van der Valk, because I don’t want any misunderstandings, if my husband’s attitude seems odd to you it doesn’t to me. He’s fond of me, certainly, but if he appears, how shall I put it, indulgent towards any failings of mine it will be more for Suzanne’s sake than for mine, or even for his, touchy though he is about his good name.”