Criminal Conversation (17 page)

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 difficult 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.

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 that 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.

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.

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.