Criminal Conversation

by Nicolas Freeling

  “Sounds like your night for collecting a phone bill. Why not do this in the office – then you wouldn’t have to pay for them?”

  “I just feel extravagant. Is there any milk? I’d like some cocoa very much if you could manage it… Hallo, Mr Simons. Inspector van der Valk here. What? Well no, the night’s still young. How was Arthur? Hard at work boring the public? Now I would like you to tell me the girl’s name, please, and at once. Yes, that is all, quite all. My dear fellow, say once more that you don’t know and you’ll find a summons to attend at the headquarters bureau on your desk tomorrow, which will bore you even more than it will me. No, no, pally-wally, I need no explanations. I need them not, I wish them not, I desire them not. Wilde, thank you. Sleep tight…”

  “Haven’t we any whisky?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Pity. I would have enjoyed whisky. One more tiny call; let’s see, I’ve got the number written somewhere…hidden amidst all this evidence… Hallo? Mrs Merckel? Inspector van der Valk; I’m very sorry to bother you. Entirely my fault; a tiny point of no importance that I should have asked you this afternoon and stupidly forgot. Your name from your first marriage. Wilde? Thank you very much, and my apologies again for disturbing you.”

  Ten

  Arthur de Vries was one television producer with no beard. He had rimless glasses, and a bright happy-to-know-you smile, and pale shiny skin. There were little cushions of smooth plumpness distributed all around his face, as though the bony bits needed something comfortable to sit on. A good deal of very white shirt covered a stocky body; he had, too, elaborately plaited and decorated moccasin shoes, and liked to talk a kind of weird Hilversum-Manhattan English, as though wanting to remind everyone that he had once made a trip to New York.

  When van der Valk arrived at the studio in Bussum he was very matey; come in the sanctuary and let’s see if we can rustle up a cup of coffee. At home, no doubt, he would have Martinis for the guests, in a ‘pitcher’. He had been primed to be vague about anyone called Simons, so van der Valk didn’t mention anybody called Simons.

  “Yes, I do recall a party – it was for my wife’s birthday, but you know how these parties are.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m not a great party-goer. That’s what I’ve come for – so that you could tell me.”

  “Well, you know, these parties tend to fill up with people one may owe a bit of hospitality to – or people you regard as fairly interesting company but not much more. There might be thirty people you know well enough to say Hallo-Joe-how’s-it-going, but only three you really know anything much about.”

  Van der Valk acknowledged all this worried apologia with the faint polite smile.

  “Which category would you put Mrs van der Post in?” Arthur, who had been expecting a different name, beamed and became even more voluble.

  “Now that illustrates perfectly what I mean because I know her, yes, but just the way everybody knows her. Everybody invites her because she’s one of the good mixers. Intelligent, bright, good-looking, poised – delightful woman. Knows everybody herself, no worry having to run about bringing her into things. And knows all the stuff we’re likely to be talking about: you know – she’s really with it.” It was delivered with wholehearted approval; praise could have flown no higher.

  Van der Valk had decided to take lessons from this prodigious female. Be easy, engaging, disarming. If poss, be with it.

  “Suppose now,” he said – engagingly – drinking tea, “she was a character in a play, and you wanted to give me a sketch of a key personage. You are hoping, perhaps, that I will finance a production or whatever. You want to make her very real, very convincing. How would you present her? Appearance, manner, character.”

  Arthur beamed some more, tickled with the notion.

  “Sounds like a party game. Still, let’s see. Well dressed in a rather formal way, always gloves, you know, and just enough good jewellery, and just been to the hairdresser. Must be in her forties, but looks younger, say about thirty-five. Quite slim, moves well, nice quiet voice. Blonde hair, bright, looking a little metallic, but not artificial. Blue eyes that protrude a scrap. Good teeth. Very elegant, very poised.

  “Let’s see: she’s calm, cool, gives an impression of balance and judgement – controlled, what you’d call unemotional. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. I suppose that all sounds dry, rather lacking in impact, but that isn’t so. I’m fond of Bea; she’s a grand person. She can listen to one’s problems – you feel you can confide in her.”

  Arthur waved his cigarette through the air in a confiding pattern; he was getting quite carried away by his party game, and continued zestfully.

  “She’s got no zing – I mean she’s good-looking but you don’t think of her as attractive first and foremost. You wouldn’t get the feeling after three highballs of cuddling up to bedroom eyes with Bea, but you’d listen to what she had to say. She’s reliable. And she’s a grand temperature-taker. I mean say we were discussing a play or something, you might ask her ‘How did you think that little scene in the auto?’ and she’d say ‘Too quick’ or ‘Too slow’ and you’d see at once she was dead right. I say, Inspector, I am talking a lot though, aren’t I? Poor old Arthur, they say, you can’t stop him once he puts the nickel in. How did I shape up: did I score high or low on the old projection test?”

  “Not bad at all,” grinning. “No need to worry about topping out just yet awhile.”

  “Ah ha ha, you know the language, I see. You sure, though, you don’t mind if I have to dash now, because it’ll pile up there without me?”

  “You go on right ahead,” said van der Valk. “The play’s the thing wherein we catch the conscience of the other thing.”

  “Splendid, splendid,” said Arthur approvingly, feeling very clever at having avoided all reference to Harry Simons.

  It was all too neat, too pat, he found on his way back to Amsterdam. Each character linked so smoothly to the other, and all too much in a careful little pattern that would delight the heart of imbeciles like Arthur. Six characters in search of an author.

  Doctor has mistress, mistress has daughter, daughter knows painter, painter knows – presumably – doctor’s wife, painter blackmails doctor. Cog slipping somewhere in that wheel.

  Painter knows gigolo, painter knows daughter of doctor’s mistress. Gigolo knows daughter. Does painter know of doctor’s mistress through daughter? Does gigolo know? Gigolo knows doctor’s wife? Does gigolo know of painter’s little schemes? Are they even gigolo’s little schemes?

  This is exactly like a fruit machine. We could go on all day and never hit the jackpot. Try another.

  Painter blackmails banker, banker’s wife sleeps with doctor, banker’s daughter knows gigolo, gigolo knows doctor’s wife. No further.

  Doctor has possibly knocked off painter. Alternatively doctor has guilty knowledge of someone else knocking off painter. Who? Could be any of the fruit in the machine.

  Doctor is undoubtedly scared. Not very scared. Perhaps not scared at all and scared is the wrong word. If scared, then perhaps not scared enough? Perhaps has nothing to be scared about really, bar scandal. Not very afraid of scandal. Too many notables involved. Doctor’s notable patients, wife’s notable family, banker’s notable damn-near-everything.

  Does gigolo know or has gigolo guessed anything about the blackmail?

  There’s no doubt about one thing: this play’s not observing any classical unities. So much the worse for van der Valk.

  The sunshine was making him sleepy and he yawned hugely getting out of his auto at the police parking lot. He was about to be rudely awakened by Chief Inspector Kan in a great state. Damn it, some important personage’s Buick, a thing as long as a bus, had been stolen right here just outside the headquarters building while the owner was inside making a very strongly worded complaint about jewellery being pinched out of his hotel room. He, Kan, would worry about the auto; he was sure he knew all about that. He, van der Valk, would please see about this jewellery
straight away because this was a very important personage and there had already been the Swiss Consul on the line and there would be the Swiss Embassy any second now.

  Van der Valk sighed heavily and trudged off. His play would have to wait; weeks, quite possibly.

  Eleven

  Mr Samson was back, offensively brown, bringing as it were a flavour of fish-scales and seawater into the smell of paper. The old man – it was one of his most likeable characteristics – detested paper, and had a strong dislike of all written reports. “I’ve done too many of those things myself not to know all the wangles that can be worked in,” he would say often. “Verbal report, please.” Administrative peccadilloes did not worry him, but his cross-questioning had a way of uncovering carelessness or downright stupidity that could be cunningly masked by the adroit bureaucratic phrase that pleased all magistrates no end. Even Mr Samson could not stem the tide, of course. Van der Valk had once worked out that in a week by no means out of the ordinary he had spent fifty-eight per cent of his time writing reports (a stopwatch on his desk and a neat tabulated column of figures on the back of a memorandum about misuse of official stationery).

  “Well,” to van der Valk after some ominous grunting about the jewellery and the Buick, though both had been recovered, “what’s been happening about your doctor?” He had to collect his mind. Really he had not given it much thought these last few days. It had almost been a holiday occupation; something to do while business was slack. A crossword puzzle? No, not that. The crossword mentality, adopted by many policemen he knew, who prided themselves on being ‘objective’, was a fatal temptation. No, a play. That was as bad. Maybe it was worse.

  “I think, really, there isn’t a lot we can do. The more I poked about the more of a hornets’ nest I uncovered. I got a certain distance bluffing people with talk, but I can’t get any further.”

  Did Mr Samson have a very faint grin somewhere under his nose? Van der Valk…the best talker in the regiment.

  “I’ve talked to the doctor twice. He’s very tense about something: I don’t know whether he’s nervous of me or not. He might have knocked off this painter, sure, and he might be a lot more bothered at my poking about in a story where all the characters are interconnected in a bloody funny way. The painter turns out to have known a girl who is the daughter by a first marriage of this banker’s wife who was the doctor’s mistress. And he met her, got to know her, in a circle where this doctor’s wife is also a well-known figure. There is also a sort of coolness between wife and doctor. All a mess.”

  “You aren’t clear.”

  “No more am I.”

  “You aren’t thinking that the doctor’s wife may have been blackmailed too?”

  “No, I don’t, but anything is possible. The joker in the pack seems to be a sort of playboy art-dealer who knew the painter and even found him dead. Has a tale to cover that, not provable, not disprovable. This playboy knows the doctor’s wife, who is a shining light in these artistic intellectual circles, and also knew the painter’s girl, the other woman’s daughter. He tried to gloss over that fact. I didn’t like him, but I’ve got nothing whatever on him either.”

  “So you’re stuck.”

  “Yes. I’d got that far when this Swiss lark began, and I didn’t like it then and don’t now. This art boy is a type that is not above turning a profit out of anything. Blackmail idea may have come from him. He is in a good position. He knows the painter, knows – we don’t know how well – the doctor’s wife, knows – equally – the girl who is the daughter of the doctor’s mistress. Now all of a sudden we find this girl in the company of our painter deceased-but-not-greatly-regretted. They may have been introduced by the art boy, but the wife was also present. She may have done it, or the idea may have come from her. We don’t know what knowledge to impute to her. Assume she has none at all and it sounds queer. Wife present at introduction of mistress’ daughter to man who is, coincidentally, blackmailing mistress’ husband and possibly – we’ve no proof or even a hint – her own husband. Impute any knowledge of her husband’s goings on to her and it smells even worse.”

  “You mean that knowing or guessing she arranges a situation out of malice?”

  “She might not know about any blackmail. She might have known about the mistress and tried to attack her through the daughter. This painter had a reputation for collecting young girls. On the other hand she knew this art-dealing smoothie, whom the painter had known previously, antecedent to all this. She may have given some grounds for blackmail herself. The painter may have been screwing on two separate married couples and been suppressed by any of them, as well as this boyfriend who – it just so happens – found his body, in the flat above the house occupied by the doctor and his wife.”

  Mr Samson was sniffing and twisting his nose discontentedly. “Sounds all very staged, this. Very melodramatic. Very artificial.”

  “Exactly what I thought. As though it had all been rigged expressly to throw dust in our eyes. And we haven’t a damn thing on any of these people. Not even the art boy. He told me a couple of harmless lies and so what?”

  “So your wish, conclusion, deduction – ha – would be to withdraw.”

  “We’ve had absolutely nothing but a sort of backstairs accusation from this banker. I could, I think, show him now that he might be well advised to drop it. His wife was badly frightened and so was the doctor. There’s grounds for nothing at all but one of these old-fashioned ways of getting back at the fellow that’s been sleeping with your wife – alienation of affection, or criminal conversation, or whatever it’s called. And this banker would never make a formal complaint; he’s not opposed to press publicity, oh no, not much.”

  “Baldly, then, you’re advising against any further action of any kind, since you don’t know what you might start, and you don’t know where it might not stop.”

  “Yes.”

  “You called this young fellow, this art-dealer, who according to you is slightly objectionable in a harmless way, the joker in the pack. You don’t like him. You even think him capable of blackmail himself.” Mr Samson was speaking very heavily and laboriously, with puffs of cigar-smoke between each phrase. He reminded his subordinate of an old rusty French steam locomotive that is perfectly capable still, when the mood takes it, of hauling a night express at a hundred miles an hour the whole way from Paris to Bordeaux. One sees them groaning and complaining horribly, bunting an endless line of stubby goods wagons across the points of suburban marshalling yards. Suddenly he accelerated with loud puffs.

  “I see this girl more as the joker myself. This daughter. How old is she?”

  “Sixteen.” Van der Valk was greatly surprised.

  “Sixteen. Uh. What does she know or guess or imagine, what mayn’t she say or do, what mightn’t she let out? Have you talked to her?”

  “No,” stupidly, still astonished.

  “Well why not? If there’s anything at all in all this she’s the key figure.”

  “I’ve only just found out her identity. By accident, picking up a little background on this painter, I heard this girl mentioned. Unprompted patter by other people. Then the art boy didn’t want to give me her name. When I did hear it I was struck, but I didn’t see how I could approach a girl of that age.”

  “But you agree that it’s possible that she might have played a part in contriving this stagy set of circumstances. Suppose, for example, that she learned something about her mother, mightn’t she then have approached the doctor’s wife?”

  “Anything is possible. Even a damn queer conspiracy. It’s a family affair. We know about family affairs, huh – and the way the more one finds out the more one becomes involved in things nobody can understand.”

  “Yes,” said Samson slowly. “Pity the policeman who arrests an old woman in a village accused of killing her husband with weed-killer.”

  “We might not,” said van der Valk, “be far off that right now.”

  There was a long sullen silence. Just so does
the engine in the marshalling yard collapse into lengthy immobility, for no reason any outsider can see. Dead stillness. Outside the window a whole crowd of Amsterdamse sparrows chattered and gibbered in a tree. Sun, warm and cheerful, giving again that holiday illusion, poured down.

  “I want to talk to this girl myself.” Another unexpected burst of activity from the old engine. “I’m not going to decide whether or not to let you go any further into this till I have seen her. I’ll send a polite note. No question of any interrogatory summons or anything judicial. A polite impersonal form. Where’s my idiot boy? Blom… Blom, get a form, the one that says please present yourself with a date and time. Not the one saying failure to comply is punishable. In my name, here to this room. Van der Valk, you give him the address, and I’ll want you here when she comes, to take notes.”

  “Leave out Motive,” said Van der Valk. “Leave out Commissaris and leave out Criminal Branch. Just put Room Twenty-five.”

  The secretary, who was not a real secretary at all, but a trainee inspector learning administrative routine, put the form in one of those brown envelopes with ‘Service’ printed on them and a transparent panel in the front. Van der Valk, who was watching, put a hand out, removed the envelope and handed it back; the boy looked puzzled.

  “Look,” patiently. “You get one of those in the post and anybody that sees it knows what it is. Which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes bad and most times indifferent. This time it is a good idea to avoid publicity. Take a plain white envelope, address it by hand, and trot out for a fifteen-cent stamp, there’s a good boy.”

  Twelve

  The form was sufficiently minatory not to be disregarded. ‘You are politely requested,’ it ran in officialese, ‘to present yourself at Police Headquarters, Amsterdam. Please observe strict punctuality to the time mentioned hereunder. This form should be handed to the concierge on arrival.’ The concierge had been tipped off.