Criminal Conversation

by Nicolas Freeling

  The bank, since this was an unrewarding affair, sent a minion, a foolish young man who grovelled before me in the stiff phrases that had been taught him. We went through all papers. I felt confident that I could handle anything that might crop up, but there was nothing. We unearthed some cousin in the provinces who could be called on to arrange the funeral and get rid of the belongings… It was all very simple, and a phone call to the manager of the bank next day convinced me that there was nothing amiss. I instructed Miss Maas to send flowers, which I am sure she did with her usual skill and taste.

  Ten

  You have grasped, my dear van der Valk, that in a sense I killed Casimir in order to inherit his flat – I could almost say his life. That flat magnetised me.

  I had naturally a pretext. It was a minor problem. I could not allow it to remain empty, nor did I want another tenant, and I never even considered reconverting the house to its four original storeys. I do not think you were altogether surprised to find that I had practically moved up there, though I pretended to you only that I spent a little time there. I needed to make no changes. The cousin from the provinces had decided that the cheap furniture was not worth the trouble of moving it out and himself suggested simply leaving it there for a new tenant. The good man!

  There was nothing on the spools of the tape recorder. That is to say there were scraps of conversation, since, evidently, I have my windows open sometimes, but it was an inaudible gabble. The tones of my voice could be distinguished, and there were other plainly feminine tones, some of them recognisable – to me – as those of Bella, but there was no criminal conversation. I did not know how often nor for how long Casimir had tried this trick, but however pertinacious he had not been successful. Nothing had been achieved that way.

  Just what way had it been achieved?

  Bella is a delightful woman. She is a little too noisy, but she is warm-hearted, charming and amusing. She is not conspicuous for brains, her education is sketchy, and the contrast with Beatrix complete. She has sense, character and worth, and being a good mimic she has fitted herself excellently into her local milieu, that of big business. Her husband is the director of a merchant banking firm, with large financial interests. A man of sixty, somewhat desiccated but not uninteresting. I know little about him, but enough; I treated him once. He asks little enough of her but to provide the usual comforts and amenities, like entertaining, which she does well, I imagine. She knows how to charm, how to patter the hostess jargon, and I am sure that her food and drink and flowers are admirably organised.

  She came to me with commonplace nervous troubles of a pretty, energetic woman of forty who has not enough to do. Absolutely banal complaints like chronic constipation, common to all these women. She has a fashionable family doctor, who often sends me patients: he is very conscientious and very busy, and since they have plenty of money he sends them to me. I always send them back cured.

  She is one of the women whom I have come to feel real affection for. Certainly Bella has given me plenty of affection back, though at the start she was simply a woman to my taste. I recall how pleased I was when I saw her first: her enchanting warm smile, her enthusiastic voice, her pleasure in simple little things, her naive snobbery – a nice person. She had all the attributes I find attractive; she is like a very good cake. Everything about her is right, her furs, her perfume, her lacy, silky, wealthy underclothes. Her figure was and is admirable and she had just the right mixture of provincial beliefs and little petty moral rigidities. I enjoyed her immensely even before I came to value her.

  I telephoned Bella and she came to see me for a ‘check-up’. She was in good health and looking splendid. She gave my cheek an affectionate little tick with her rings.

  “Naughty,” she said, going off to the bathroom.

  “How is Suzanne?” I asked when she came back, putting her weapons back in her handbag.

  “She’s all right. Tiresome, yes, but I’m hoping now she’ll grow out of it. There’s so much that is new at that age; one forgets quickly.”

  “Never any disagreeable aftertaste from our arrangements?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  That, anyway, put me at ease. Casimir had either not dared or not known enough for certain to approach Bella with requests to keep him comfortable in his old age.

  There I was, in perfect security. Till you walked in.

  We have come to your third visit. In the course of the first two, I had had an uneasy suspicion that you might one day come to detect me. But it was on this occasion that I felt, for the first time, the certainty that you had understood. Not only that you were capable of understanding.

  You asked abruptly to see Casimir’s flat. I had told you off about poking in my house, but I had no way of objecting to this request.

  “You will have keys, no doubt?” Of course you knew this; it was in the police report.

  “Oh, yes; they’re even in my pocket.” You would see anyway that I had them in my pocket. “I’ve been rearranging it. There was some old junk that needed clearing out.”

  We walked up the stairs.

  “I spend some time up here myself.” I let it fall coolly; I wasn’t going to let you think you had me at a disadvantage.

  “A refuge?” cocking that nasty bright blue eye of yours.

  “Perhaps a game. I had never set foot here, you know: I was agreeably surprised to find out how pleasant it was. I have decided not to consider a new tenant. The one drawback is that interminable staircase.”

  “It should be a spiral staircase. Then you would be in a lighthouse – seductive feeling.” You seemed to be talking to yourself.

  “And who keeps it clean? – you do that, too.” People’s household arrangements, even trivial details, have a lot of importance to you; I have noticed that. You roamed about, stared out of the window leaned out and peered at the garden below. My back room stuck out just there where the verandah used to be, and I wondered whether you had thought of Casimir’s idiotic tape-machine trick.

  You sat down on the divan, a narrow cheap thing from some multiple store; I sleep on it three or four times a week – I had not accepted Casimir’s bed, a scrap too personal an object. My own bedroom is a great deal more comfortable, but there is only a door between Beatrix and myself. I sleep very well, up here.

  You were sitting on the divan now, turning over some of my ‘bedside books’. You glanced up with – it sounds odd, I know – with something like respect. I do not think I can be altogether wrong. I was studying you too, for I had the sudden knowledge of a bond between us. This was increased when I noticed with amusement that you no longer looked like a policeman, for you had the look of simple pleasure that anyone who likes books gets with a book between his hands. At that moment you had, I can swear, no interest in crime or criminals. You were feeling too, I knew, for contact between us. I thought then that you would not try to arrest me, however much evidence you possessed, before making a genuine effort to grasp for understanding of the things you did not know, would never know.

  Is it not to help you in that, and that alone, that I have written a thick loose-leaf notebook?

  It is not a need to be understood. I have made that clear already. It is more the friendship that exists between soldiers that fight against each other. I have no friends of this sort, perhaps because I have never been a soldier; my military service was first deferred and then cancelled. Perhaps because I have never given the kind of gift one needs for friendship. To have suffered together? I am groping; it is one of the things that are closed books to me.

  You were turning over a book now that I picked up recently out of a casual coincidence, for the writer has the same name as myself. A South-African Dutchman – become English since, but without losing the grip on his own country – a Colonel van der Post. The book has a banal, probably deliberately understated title. The name is all we share, and it is a common enough Dutch name. I have never served in the army, let alone become English, I have never been in Africa bar a
holiday once – should I use the word honeymoon? – in Tunis, I have never been in a Japanese prison camp, I have never climbed a mountain, I have never forged friendships – there lies, perhaps, my fascination with this book.

  You were searching for some memory, turning pages.

  “There is, somewhere, a letter to his wife. No, from his wife – I have it.”

  Your voice loses its professional monotony when you have a book in your hands, reading from it.

  “It seems to me that people’s private and personal lives have never mattered as they do now. For me the whole future depends on the way people live their personal rather than their collective lives. It is a matter of extreme urgency. When we have all lived out our private and personal problems we can consider the next, the collective step.”

  You looked at me with no grin for a minute, then the harsh lines reappeared with the two huge furrows alongside your mouth. I thought you looked tired and battered and middle-aged, though you are several years younger than I am.

  “Thought for today,” you said hatefully. And went back down to the consulting-room. And picked your everyday policeman’s hat off the peg with your everyday policeman’s look back on. And the grin well in place.

  “Au revoir, Doctor. You’re a very patient patient.”

  Eleven

  I do not think that the trouble lies anywhere but at Beatrix’s door. She quite certainly knows that I seduce women patients, though she has never alluded to any such thing. But she is a most accomplished spy. She would be quite capable, I am sure, of setting afoot this mysterious oblique approach to me that culminates in your visits.

  But I hardly think she can be your witness. Coming as she does from a legal and judicial family, she knows all the roundabout ways of the law, can get advice secretly, and could certainly keep out of trouble. Added to this she would never entangle her famous family by being behind a legal attempt to put an end to me. Too likely to compromise those gentlemen. She is alive to every sort of ecclesiastical nicety; she would have done no such thing.

  No, I have thought carefully. Can it be Suzanne? In that case I am a dead goose, trussed and stuffed for roasting. For Suzanne, you see, has been my only real crime. I have sometimes wondered whether Beatrix, who might well know about Bella, may not have so arranged things that Suzanne should meet Casimir. It is far-fetched, perhaps. She is after all an art student; she might have met him anywhere. He would be regarded, of course – she told me so herself – as old-fashioned and even meretricious by the rising generation. She tried to conceal from me that she knew him; I only found it out by accident.

  There has been no crime but for Suzanne, or you could say perhaps that there would have been no crime but for Suzanne. For everyone will be pretending that my life is extremely reprehensible, but that, as you know, and I know, is claptrap. All very dreadful, no doubt, and I would be expelled from the Medical Association with some very highflown sorrowing phrases. But I have never done any of these women the slightest harm. If I say it myself, I have done most of them a lot of good. A definite therapeutic effect. I may have scratched some moralities, but criminal – never. Let us, besides, please not be hypocritical. Give the private life of twenty other doctors the attention you are giving mine, and you will receive a surprise. The capacity that women have for getting tender over their doctors… Remarkable, my dear Inspector. I dare say, even, that it has happened to you.

  Nevertheless, I am ashamed of myself.

  There is of course criminal conversation with children under the legal age of consent – I do not know the legal terminology. That, I quite agree, is vicious. Still, Suzanne was a ripe sixteen and well-developed for her age. Mentally, van der Valk, mentally, in case you find at these words an inclination to snigger.

  Bella came to me one day a few months ago, in a great state.

  “I want to ask your help. I have complete confidence in you, and indeed you are the only friend who can help me.” Friend! There is considerable affection between Bella and myself, as well as shared secrets, jokes, and a considerable amount of pleasure. Does she think of that as friendship?

  I lit her cigarette for her. As always she was looking luscious, like a peach not yet quite over-ripe, but whose juice will run uncontrollably down your chin as you bite.

  “But any little thing I can do…”

  “It’s for my daughter – for Suzanne.” I raised my eyebrows. “She’s only sixteen. She’s pregnant. I want to ask you – indeed I beg of you” – I must have assumed an unsympathetic expression – “will you do something? Must I put it in crude words?”

  “You are asking something difficult, you know, my dear. It is not one of the things I do.” You may be surprised, but this is true. I have been approached often with the same request – what doctor hasn’t? - and have always turned it down flatly. Firstly, it is criminal – yes, I distinguish, and without hypocrisy.

  Secondly, it is tricky. I can do it safely, of course, without risk; that is not what I mean. I mean that there is chatter. It is inevitable that such practices become widely known.

  Lastly, I have an objection. Even a moral objection. Ach, not exactly the conventional moral objection, the one advanced by moralisers who have never been in touch with reality. More a personal feeling that I am barred from doing such things. Beatrix, you see, is sterile. Let me be utterly honest. She has always refused to take an opinion, which she says is humiliating to her. Humiliating! Bitch, useless bitch, caring that a doctor should know what she admitted suspecting herself. But I have never known for certain. The women I make love with take extreme pains. Once or twice I have been asked to make a woman pregnant. And I have not succeeded. Nowhere do I know of a child that belongs to me. One time, long ago, a girl delighted me, though she herself had no importance, but I found later that the child could have had any of half a dozen fathers. I had to find out, you see.

  I cannot be certain that I am not myself sterile. That has given me an overmastering reason for my refusal to take children away from other people. If I cannot create, I may not destroy. Does that make any sense to you?

  Bella, however, had more to say.

  “I can see that you’re thinking me just like all the others that you so despise. Scared for what the neighbours would say. You will tell me to send her abroad or get her married, even. It’s not that, though. I’m really concerned for Carl.”

  Carl is her husband. I have never told her so, but I know him, for I have treated him. I even like him. He came to me a year or so ago, with hypertension – I need not go into that. I helped him. I found him sympathetic, and for a reason I have just given: he wished for children of his own. He is a rigid person, naturally. He would not run after women. Bella did not want to have another child. He had said nothing, but he had transferred the devotion he had for his wife to Suzanne. He was immensely proud of her, wrapped up in her - enfin, the usual tale: the child kicked against this concentration of affection. From her mother she had a looser, less intense, more casual attention, and the mother got in return confidences that the unhappy fellow did not get. The girl had fallen among art students, and followed courses at the Conservatory or whatever they call it. If Carl, a Christian businessman if ever I saw one, found out about this unlucky pregnancy, he might turn and rend the girl. Bella was of course even more concerned at the idea that he might turn and rend Bella.

  When, after a long minute’s silence, during which she had the sense to hold her tongue, I accepted, or showed signs that I might accept, I did not show that I was thinking as much of the man as of the woman, or the girl.

  “I have to know more. Does the girl herself want this child?”

  “She doesn’t know – at sixteen, how can she know? She isn’t at all happy at the idea of a bond with the father. I’ve checked – an unpleasant, rather undesirable person all round. Took advantage of her in a mean-minded way – got her drunk, the little idiot, after the warnings I’ve given her.”

  I made up my mind, with difficulty. Had I some no
tion that the step meant my undoing?

  “If,” I said slowly, picking my words, “you were to find a pretext for my seeing her that she would accept, I might find means to terminate this pregnancy without her being aware of the fact. How far is she?”

  “Two and a half months.”

  “Less bad. How’s her general health?”

  “Good. She’s perhaps a scrap on the anaemic side.”

  “That might serve. The miscarriage at three months is a commonplace. I must warn you that one such sometimes seems to involve a tendency towards more.”

  “Oh, my dear, I would be grateful all my life. I simply daren’t risk Carl’s finding out.” In her relief she was letting slip what really worried her. “Carl would quite assuredly throw all the blame on me, and in shock, rage, horror – believe me, you don’t know my husband – he might do anything.”

  It was ironic that she did not suspect that this famous husband was exactly the reason why I agreed. I disregarded the outburst, tactfully.

  “Send her to me.”

  Twelve

  They were fateful words, those. A week later Suzanne was sitting on the chair opposite, and I was coming the heavy, ‘Well, young lady…’ Pompous puffwit that I was.

  I may have been pompous, even a little adrift right from the start, because I am not accustomed to young girls. I see few, and have never been altogether at my ease with them. I can explain that, and will, perhaps, in the course of this narrative. What I cannot explain, van der Valk, is first that I found her desperately desirable, and second that I fell – yes, fell, it is the only word – in love with her. With a girl of sixteen. To explain… A phrase comes into my mind from some book or other. Disraeli said upon some occasion to an English duke – ‘My dear Henry, never explain’. There is no wiser counsel. But I cannot, even had I wished, and I do wish, I suspect. I have come to wish to explain everything to you.