Criminal Conversation

by Nicolas Freeling

  Who could this witness be? Someone you cannot legally use, since you are so coy about it?

  Could it conceivably be Beatrix?

  Somebody there is, or you would not dare me so brashly to complain of your indefensible behaviour. You have somewhere, an ace in the hole.

  Eight

  I had no patients the evening that Casimir came. It must have been coincidence, since he cannot possibly have known that. I think now that he was merely pushing forward a pawn, thinking that if I reacted he would develop his offensive. I agreed to see him out of curiosity as much as anything. This man whom I hated, whom I feared, who had had, already, an unforeseen effect upon my life – I was curious to try and understand better. Him, his life – which I envied – is it not absurd? Be it as it may I had no evening engagement. No patient, no mistress, no concert. And we live in Amsterdam. There is no question, as there would be in a German city of this magnitude and importance, of saying ‘Have we nothing to do? Let’s go to the Opera then.’

  Beatrix was going out, of course. She goes out every night that she does not spend prating with her peers here, or staring at her television programmes. What on earth is it that she does? She cultivates her intellectuals, I suppose. She frequents all sorts of pretentious and hollow figures that whim brings into the fashion - so-called painters and writers, very probably the self-styled ‘conférenciers’ and ‘cabaretiers’ of the television. These excursions she calls ‘being in touch with the stream of modern thought’. I have, naturally, long given up trying to show her that a flow of chatter may well be called a stream, but that it is neither modern nor thought.

  I do not speak like that out of vanity, notice. I have myself few pretensions at being intellectual, and none at all at being modern even in my work. Any doctor will confirm for you that the scientific research into the origins of disease and into new nostrums is sometimes impressive and occasionally heartening. He will also confirm that every lunatic asylum in Europe is filled to three times its maximum capacity.

  As for thought… I am fairly widely read. By no means all my energies, whatever you may imagine, nor my curiosities, go into seducing women, an occupation that takes perhaps one per cent of my time. There are people who get more pleasure from the dodging and the plotting, the evasion of others and the making of furtive assignations, than they do from their rather pallid adulteries. I am not among them. My distraction is music. I go perhaps to half of the concerts and recitals given here in Amsterdam, which are often very good.

  You will have been puzzled to find that I appear to have no friends. It is true, but friendship is rare. I have a couple of professional friends, with whom I talk medicine or music. But I have a closed character. There is nobody that knows anything about me. There, my friend – believe me, I use the word here in consciousness of its meaning – you will have struck a blank. Make of the fact whatever you please.

  I have, of course, a need for affection. You would be surprised to know how much I receive.

  Casimir had written no note, of course. He rang at the front and I let him in myself. He had counted on my answering in person, since he must know that I employ only daily help. There has never been a maid that slept in the house, and since Beatrix has always been sterile in every meaning of the word there has never been a child to care for.

  Casimir stood in the hallway gibbering and mouthing. Might he explain something? I supposed he was bothered about something the builders had said or done while mending the roof. I hoped they had not found dry rot or anything: I am fond of this house and should be loath to see its fabric altered or replaced.

  I let him into my consulting-room. This is much more my private room than that idiotic ‘drawing-room’ Beatrix takes pride in, on the first floor. I have inherited all old Munck’s arrangements, including the excellent idea that only patients should be allowed at the front door. He put in the iron staircase at the back, and the glassed passage to the back door. The bell at the back rings in the kitchen during the day, and at night it is answered by the chauffeur – he prefers being called that to gardener – or his wife, in the cottage at the back. I have made no alterations at all, except for moving Miss Maas upstairs to make room for the ‘bathroom’. One might think all this awkward, but things of the sort are inevitable when a doctor has his practice under his own roof, an arrangement I prefer to the English system of a house where four or five doctors hive together for consultations. There is no real invasion of privacy. Beatrix complains that since patients have been allowed upstairs they pretend to lose their way and peep at her rooms. I pay no attention; in anyone else’s house she would do exactly the same. And if we do, by any chance, have guests, and use as a consequence the front door, the stairs, and the damned drawing-room, it is evening and there are no patients. All European doctors have similar arrangements, and it is never a bother.

  I sat Casimir down on the patient’s chair, went myself to sit behind the bureau, and offered him the box of cigarettes, since for a wonder his mouth was empty. He took one greedily.

  “Well… Repairs gone off all right? No further trouble with the roof?”

  “No…no. They replaced a few tiles, I think. I suppose you’ll want to look to see exactly what they have done.”

  “I haven’t the least interest in seeing what they have done.”

  I may have sounded a scrap tart; Casimir looked flabbergasted anyway. He is just the type to accuse the servants of theft if there were a rubber band missing. If he were rich as Onassis he would creep about from bathroom to bathroom sticking slivers of old soap together.

  “What is it exactly you wish to see me about?”

  He shuffled about inside that tweed jacket, as though the hairs tickled his neck.

  “It’s a – uh, personal matter, really.”

  I lit a cigarette myself so that I would notice less the flavour of gin and unmended teeth that hung about.

  “Since you asked especially to see me, I take it there is something on your mind.”

  “Yes, indeed. Of importance. Just that…uh…” I said nothing, looked at him. In all honesty I had no suspicion whatever.

  “The fact is that some time ago one evening I happened to be in the garden.”

  “And may I ask not only what you were doing in my garden but how you came to get into it?”

  He surprised me by giving a pathetic answer, irrelevant of course but the truth, I think.

  “I’m not getting any younger, and I find I get odd irrational fears, and I’ve been agitated at the idea that there might be a fire, and if I were upstairs and if,” laboriously, “I couldn’t reach – there were fire on the staircase, you see, and…” he just trailed off.

  “Are you asking me to make you a fire escape or are you asking for advice about your irrational fears?”

  “Well yes, but that isn’t really the most important.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t consider the fire escape: if you find that flat too isolated it would be best to look for another. What else is there then?”

  His answer was the really brazen remark of someone who is a great coward.

  “I have these fears, yes, but you see I’m getting on a bit, and I know of course I do drink a good deal, and I have worries about money, and I thought the best thing really would be if you could let me have a quite small regular sum of money.”

  Only then really did light dawn on my wits. After all I am a neurologist. People who come with the most rambling and incoherent tales of obscure fears are legion.

  “Ah. And what do you think entitles you to claim that regular sums of money would be the best treatment for your age and infirmities?”

  Casimir, of course, had had this answer ready for a long while. “What I saw in the garden,” with a decayed and sickly grin.

  There are Venetian blinds, naturally, covering those verandah windows where my examination-room is built out, and there are curtains as well. How could anybody get into the garden anyway, even at night, except by the aid of some involved and dif
ficult clambering? Casimir has not what one would call an athletic figure, and I made up my mind at once that whatever he had seen or imagined, this was not a likely tale.

  “Most remarkable,” I said unpleasantly. “I am not a psychiatrist, Mr Cabestan, but you might be well advised to try and realise how unreal this tale must sound. I can assure you that a practising physician is not a honeypot for wasps to gather round.”

  He went red, patchily.

  “That high and mighty tone won’t help you,” stung. “What I’ve got on you will soon make you sing smaller, when it sinks in.” He heaved his clotheshorse of a frame on to its feet and stumped jerkily towards the door. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours, no more, to think things over. After that – the Medical Association, and the press. I shouldn’t wonder then if the police were quick to pay a call, too, once it was public. Twenty-four hours. I’ll be at home. Just ring at the doorbell when you’ve seen the light, before this time tomorrow evening.”

  “Goodbye, Mr Cabestan,” I said politely. “Remember what I have said – a psychiatrist is more competent to help you than myself.”

  I watched him out, and observed him from behind my curtains: he stood on the pavement a while jerking around and mumbling to himself. When I heard the angry slam of his street door, which is only a metre away, as you know, from my corner of the consulting-room, I sat down to consider.

  No, consider is the wrong word; that is pure self-deception. I was frightened and angry. It is frightening to discover someone has grounds for blackmailing one, the attempt itself gives a nasty nervous shock, and there is the added fear – a tedious nagging uncertainty – of not knowing what those grounds could be. What did he know, or more exactly, how much? Just how much? I thought at once about Suzanne, with my belly full of fear. I had a good look at the garden, and then went back to the bureau, where I poured out a moderate glass of cognac. I was a little calmer already. He could not have direct evidence. The most he could have was what he might conceivably have been told – the hows and the whys of the telling passed, for the moment, my understanding. Nobody would believe Cabestan. I did not think he was really mentally disturbed in any medical sense, but he was in poor health, vague and unreliable, not perhaps exactly disreputable but not a figure to inspire confidence in anybody. Except in young innocent girls, I muttered as wildly as he could have. My thoughts, nearly at peace, were turned suddenly to the overmastering hatred I felt for Casimir. One moment I was considering calmly that however damaging his insinuations no responsible person would give him credence or even audience – next moment I was clutching the neck of the cognac bottle. I drank some then. It made me shudder violently, for I am not a drinker; I like a small glass before going to bed. Once again my thoughts stumbled, changed direction involuntarily, and took a new turn.

  Casimir – I had got close to him in these last weeks; I almost always thought of him now in terms of his ridiculous first name - had gone off frightened too. Frustrated, but most of all frightened at his own intrepidity. He was a scared blackmailer. Was not that likely to make him dangerous? Plainly, and I wondered why, he had come to hate me as I hated him. How much gin had he needed to steady his weak nerves and his wobbling knees, after seeing me? A good deal, I rather thought. Quite enough to make him thoroughly drunk and incapably dozy.

  It was at that moment that the desire gripped me. I can only describe it as a thirst. Once it enters the mind it penetrates the whole physical organism. In the throat, the mouth, the stomach, the head, the hands, burns the thirst.

  Have you ever wished to kill a man, van der Valk? You and a policeman and it is conceivable, even quite likely, that you have pointed a firearm at some shadowy and fugitive figure. When you pressed the trigger, did you wish to kill? Did you feel that thirst? I am told that the pressing of the trigger can in certain conditions produce instant orgasm. I am not concerned with that. I can only recall a thirst so insistent… Wished to kill. Have you? Have you?

  My mind now worked with startling ease and rapidity. If I were now to react to Cabestan very quickly and suddenly indeed… The blackmail I had already forgotten. It was a small mechanism in my mind, I think, what one might call a percussion cap. The explosive charge was my hate.

  Casimir would suspect, if I put him off with words, and even if I paid him a large sum which I could later take steps to recover, that I was meditating malice. Once in fear of his miserable existence he would try to take some steps to ensure it. Hardly the Medical Association – not as long as he thought there was the faintest chance of money. But perhaps some third person. I hardly knew, as long as I was also ignorant of what exactly he had come to hear. But he would certainly be in high hopes over the next twenty-four hours that I would climb down. Little he knew me, and of what ferocity and finality I was capable. I was going, I saw, to react to Monsieur Cabestan with a suddenness that would surprise both of us.

  Two hours after he had left I decided that he was sufficiently far gone in his cups. Ring the doorbell indeed! Monsieur Cabestan appeared to have forgotten, so little interest had I always shown in his doings and movements, that I possessed the keys to his doors. I had been sitting in the dark a long while, accustoming my eyes to it. Finishing my cognac, enjoying a cigar. Yes, enjoying, by that time. I had collected, still in the dark, a hypodermic syringe, a pair of surgical gloves, a bottle containing gin, as much money as I could lay my hands on, and two or three trivial unremarked household objects. Half an hour later Casimir, who had been foolish enough to get extremely drunk, breathed, in a coma, his last. He had noticed nothing from beginning to end; I doubt if he even felt the hypodermic needle. I spent some time then, determined to be clearheaded, seeing whether anything could have been left – by him, not by me – that could point my way when he was discovered. I found nothing, and reflected that I would have a better opportunity within a day or two.

  I went home. Beatrix had returned and gone to bed, unconscious that I had been walking softly about just over her head. I tidied up, went to the kitchen, and had a glass of hot milk. I reviewed matters in bed, but I fell very rapidly asleep. Even the pain of thinking about Suzanne had been effaced, or more accurately excised under anaesthesis.

  You are going to say that I am a doctor. Had I no professional conscience? As a doctor, was I not aware of the value – the sacredness, as we are told emotionally – of life? I think that it was not the doctor that killed Casimir. I do not think it was even the man. I think that Casimir was killed by the young student who loved Suzanne, who was a bare three years older than she was. An adolescent. In adolescence, one feels nothing of this weightiness of life. That is why adolescents make the only really satisfactory soldiers. The adult who makes a really good soldier has a narrow, rigid and, I am certain, unbalanced mind. He has many of the characteristics of the psychopath.

  Nine

  The day following the next I was drinking a cup of cocoa at around ten-thirty in the morning – a bright, warm, sunny summer morning – and resting for five minutes between patients, when Miss Maas came in. I looked up a second in some surprise, for she never disturbs me at work but with very good cause. I thought a patient had probably cancelled; recall that I was occupied with my work, which I am good at. Casimir was simply not in my mind.

  “Forgive me but I thought I should ask you. I have a slightly agitated young man outside, with some involved tale about the lodger.”

  Miss Maas has several small harmless snobberies and has always referred to Casimir in this way, generally once a year, when the accountant comes to go over my income and arrives at the checking of taxes, rates, and so on, calculated for the third floor.

  “I think we may have to intervene. The lodger, it seems, does not answer his bell, and hadn’t yesterday either, and this young man fears a mishap. It occurred to me that we have keys; they’ll be in the safe. Should I perhaps go myself, or should I look for a patrolling policeman? Mrs van der Hulst is in the top waiting-room whenever you’re ready for her.”

  “I think tha
t sounds sensible, Miss Maas.”

  The conclusion was reached when I emerged at lunchtime. Miss Maas had immured the police, a plainclothes man by this time, in the bottom waiting-room, where I noticed that the daily girl had been a bit negligent with her dusting that morning.

  “Very sorry indeed to trouble you, sir. I think we have all the available facts from your secretary; she’s been most helpful. Simply that since you are the owner of the property, sir, I thought it best to explain to you…”

  “I’m afraid I’ve been busy with patients the whole morning and haven’t yet the least idea what it’s all about. Can you just give me a brief account?”

  “Sorry, sir, of course. Gentleman upstairs is dead, I’m afraid. Wasn’t in good health as we hear and been drinking heavily, habitually too. He must have collapsed up there and not been able to call for help; there’s no phone there either and it’s high of course. We’ve had the police doc; heart failure, night before last probably, and we’ve taken him away. There’s just his property and things, and that’s on your premises, sir. Oh, here’s your keys again; sorry, I forgot to give them to the lady.”

  “I’m sorry to hear all this. I hardly knew him at all, but he’s been a fixture here in the house since before my time. What about family and so on?”

  “Can’t tell yet, sir. Young man who came is an acquaintance, but knows nothing, he says; I thought you might have known, perhaps.”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea, but I feel a certain responsibility. Perhaps the bank?”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “Perhaps if the bank feels able to send someone round he could come and see me, and I will help in any way I can.” “Very obliging of you, sir.”

  I took the keys, sent Miss Maas for lunch with the remark that I would have to go and see about this, and went up those stairs, noticing in calm now a step that had alarmed me two nights before by creaking, but without emotion: I was simply being forced to play the polite hypocrite for a day, a thing I had had to bear in mind throughout. The police had rummaged about hurriedly looking for a clue where to shuffle off the bother, and had not found the tape recorder any more than I had. There was a very long flex to the microphone, which I calcuated would be just right, when dangled out of the window, to reach my verandah windows. It seemed an amateurish and inefficient way of spying. Still… I satisfied myself that Casimir had left nothing else; his hiding-places for things were obvious.