Criminal Conversation (5 page)

A week later. Brilliant weather; August heat over Amsterdam. The mornings were clear and splendid, the afternoons reeled with sun and the pavements danced under temperatures in the thirties. The evenings had a pleasant coolness, but all night the thunder rumbled and the lightning flashed. Sometimes huge spots of rain fell, but always by midnight the charged clouds had passed, and the humidity with them, and the thermometer went down to sixteen, and fresh cool air flickered in at bedroom windows.

It was the silly season. Everybody was in Spain or Italy; Commissaris Samson had a chalet on a West Friesian island and was away for three weeks. Scholten was camping in a tent somewhere in the south. Kan was back, grumbling – his holiday was not due till September. As for van der Valk, he had gone on holiday in June; it had rained all the time but he hadn't cared. They had had a cottage on the Loire, belonging to Arlette's brother, who was a specialist in stressed concrete and was busy on a building project down in Toulon, where it was raining too, much to Arlette's satisfaction. They had been thoroughly lazy, doing little but swim, arguing that that way you didn't get any wetter.

He didn't care; he liked the warm weather, and the quiet; there was not much to do – it was too hot. For the sun was blazing down on Holland, and everybody was grumbling, of course, and walking about as naked as possible, sweaty and uncomfortable, guzzling fizzy lemonade whenever they got the chance. Not him. He was
married to a woman who came from the Midi; he knew how to behave in warm weather, and had his shirt buttoned up and even a jacket on. He sat in the office drinking tea and beaming at Chief Inspector Kan, who looked thoroughly uncomfortable and undignified in his unaccustomed shirtsleeves, fanning himself with the latest Monthly Supplement to the General Police Standing Orders and Instructions – a singularly dismal document.

“Lamentable,” he was saying. “Lamentable.” Kan was rather a one for literature, and when he made out a procès-verbal had always a dictionary at his elbow, since law, he said, depended on the precise meanings of words. The hunt for the exact word preoccupied him greatly and not long ago he had put ‘apotheosis' in a report, causing Mr Samson to take his glasses off and say with awful quiet, ‘There are times, Chief Inspector, when I should like to take a run-up of about a hundred metres at you doing up your shoe-lace.' Kan, who was one of the new university-degree career policemen, despised Samson, and told the inspectors sometimes that the old man ‘was not oriented to modern methods'.

Still, Kan was handy in many ways. Van der Valk thought him a sharp-nosed little twerp, a pedantic fusspot, and a scared baby-sitter, but could not deny that he knew his law backwards, and, apparently, the entire history and background of every company director in Holland. He was very smart when it came to economics – and most criminal work in Holland is a question of economics – but he didn't like murders, and Samson, the old-fashioned type of policeman who had learned his work on the streets, never gave him work of this kind. He interfered as a consequence very little with van der Valk. This job now – the CMP file – he would have had a fit if he had known the things his nominal subordinate was thinking up, but the innocent had not noticed that his brains were being picked.

“Well now,” he was saying, “you know that I have a lot of friends who are doctors. I looked up your man pretty carefully. Very brilliant student, came from a good family. There was a grandfather on the mother's side who was Governor General of the East Indies. People of standing. I agree, of course, that those days are gone, but it still
counts, you know – you'd be surprised, van der Valk, but then you know nothing about this class of person. His wife's family carries a lot of weight too. An uncle of hers was Queen's Commissioner for one of the eastern provinces; now it's slipped my mind exactly which. It'll come back to me.

“Her father was only a canton magistrate, but there is a brother, a Substitute Officer of Justice, been transferred recently to Utrecht – getting near the top, my lad,” with admiration. “And there is a cousin, an Advocate to the Court of Appeal – most distinguished family. I would say that it was that marriage more than the man himself that made him. His reputation's sound, of course, but there's something, from what I hear – he's clever enough but lacking fibre, if you understand me. He's brilliant, yes, but a thought lightweight, a scrap too unorthodox, dabbles a bit in chimerical theories. I'd almost go as far as to say that he's never been quite altogether accepted by the very top members of the profession.”

Kan was well launched on just the sort of thing that pleased him: his famous accurate précis – it could not be called thumbnail – of the character and attainments of someone in public life.

“There's been a certain amount of comment on the marriage, too, I hear. She's a splendid woman, thoroughly intelligent, broad intellectual interests, knowing what is expected of her position. Naturally, one makes a remark like this guardedly, but it has been said that people felt she'd rather thrown herself away. A man of remarkable promise, who hadn't quite fulfilled the hopes people had of him.”

“Thanks very much,” said van der Valk, poker-faced, busily drawing tiny imps of malice with vicious little horns and curly spiky tails in the margin of his scribbling pad. “Big help.”

“You don't need the warning, of course,” went on Kan generously, “but bear in mind, won't you, that people would be very slow to accept an idea of his being in any way dubious, don't you know. Even if it were only for her sake. He himself, I rather think, hasn't all that many friends; I mean close friends. Bit stand-offish, bit prickly, not really all that good a mixer and of course that's so
important.” He brooded, while van der Valk thought that if there were a modern version of Samuel Smiles'
Self-Help,
or a
Guide for the Rising Young Executive,
they could get Kan to write the Foreword to the Dutch Edition.

“But I wouldn't want to give you an unbalanced picture: he has a very wealthy and important circle of patients, and there's no doubt at all of his success or his talent. Just that he doesn't quite belong, you know, in the milieu where it really counts. Still, of course, you remember the sort of experience we had in that disgraceful affair we had of the one who was picked up that time for drunk driving. They all close the ranks – you'd never get one of them to come into court and say it outright.”

“More or less like Janus,” said van der Valk naughtily.

“Good heavens, man, there's no comparison.”

“Can't see much difference.”

“There are still things you have to learn,” said Kan snubbingly.

“You too,” amiably. “Like staying away from that horse-piss lemonade on a day like this.” Chief Inspector Kan opened his mouth as soon as he had thought of a suitable phrase, but van der Valk was out of the door by then.

It had developed rapidly enough into the situation no policeman sees with any enthusiasm – a conviction, virtually a certainty, that a man is guilty of a legally punishable action, without any evidence of anything. Van der Valk had made no written reports; Mr Samson, he knew, would not want them. No jurist would glance twice at what he had, even if Merckel stood up and said all he knew, which nobody would want him to. Van der Valk knew he had been safe in agreeing to leave the banker out of it, since if he ever got anywhere with this it would be on the strength of his own scheme, aided by nothing but his own tactics.

That tactic could only be to exploit the odd acceptance with which Dr van der Post had received his challenge. Peculiar. The man could so easily have hidden behind his official image. Everything he did and everything he said to a patient was confidential, and no policeman had a right even to set foot in his house unless backed by an official order.

He had gone back to chance his luck. He would try a throw of laughable audacity, because if it didn't work there was nothing to do but go home, forget all about Dr Hubert van der Post, and six months later advise Heer Carl Merckel that we regret we do not see our way at present to granting your application for a loan. It was this course that he was prepared for, after listening to Chief Inspector Kan, and anybody else that could tell him anything about doctors.

He had rung up the secretary again and asked for another appointment, wondering what he would hear, since a brush-off would be so simple. Had she not been warned that he was unbalanced, or a hypochondriac – or a blackmailer? She would have accepted any explanation, and stalled him politely. ‘The Doctor feels unable to help you, I'm afraid.' Very smooth and courteous.

But no. She had heard him say his piece, and given him an appointment without the slightest hindrance, and when he had walked again into that consulting-room it had almost been as a guest that he had been received. It had been – now, yes, embarrassing. That was the only word: it was almost as though the doctor wished, tacitly, to admit. Admit what? Why? Bravado? Sarcasm, knowing that the policeman would never find proof? None of the explanations was satisfying.

It was a fine room, originally the drawing-room. That had been in the Kaiser's time, when things were done in a big, solid way. Generous windows, with dark-ripe-apricot-coloured velvet curtains. Velvety-expensive the olive-green wall to wall carpet. Plenty of bookshelves, a couple of decorative pictures. All of it far more front than a doctor will ordinarily present, even an expensive specialist. Outside the windows the lindens made a luxuriant pattern of sunlight-dappled green against the ivory slats of the venetian blinds. A big room, and a desk to match, placed diagonally in the corner by the windows. Long fine hands lay on the desk. They looked very relaxed; they played a little with a simple square crystal ashtray, but they did not fiddle. A fountain pen lay on the blotter, with his ‘file' beside it. The telephone, the desk calendar, the other functional objects were all cleared away on a swinging typewriter table to one side.

There was a chair opposite – looked a comfortable chair at that: he had sat on it last time but he didn't remember. The thin, neat, upright man in a very well-cut formal suit had that professional but certainly attractive smile round the eyes and the wide thin mouth, just as before, and the hand in the shantung cuff pointed at the sofa.

“People often find that comfortable.” A long sofa, with a severe oblong coffee-table in front of it. A very good simple vase, to match the ashtray – Vosges crystal – with tiger lilies in it today. Van der Valk liked all these things very much. Last time he had been too close to his antagonist, and had not had a chance to study the surroundings. From the sofa, too, he could survey better. Had the doctor thought of that? Was he deliberately being allowed to sit here, lower, further back, with a perspective of the room?

This furniture was modern. Over there, though, between the doors behind him, was a console table so mannered, so delicate, that he felt sure it was a faithful copy of some piece by a court ebonist of Louis Quinze. Really, Madame de Pompadour would not have found this room ugly, and he felt immediately that this beauty, this elegance, was important to the man that sat there at the desk. The elegance was not exclusively feminine, but it was a room where a woman would immediately feel at home, at ease, ready to confide, to blossom. Quite a remarkable notion I have there, thought van der Valk, making chit-chat to the man at the desk.

The man is sure of himself, he thought: absolutely smooth, his self-command unusually well administered to his features, his actions. And yet there is anxiety there. But it was not a simple guessing puzzle, for this was a complicated, sophisticated person. He shook his head to get rid of an unpleasant sensation of being trapped in cobwebs, suddenly decided to get up and walk about, and did so, rather to his own surprise, wondering what instinct had told him to yield openly to a feeling of inadequacy.

Post's face, courteous, intelligent, good-humoured, smiled at him amusedly.

“You plainly do not expect to find help from me. But you hope, as plainly, to find that I can give you relief from the fears and distortions that press upon you. You are feeling harassed. By all means walk about if it helps you.”

Van der Valk had to exert a great deal of his own self-command not to get swept off his feet by a sudden red tide of fury. Now damn the fellow's bloody cheek. He thought, deliberately, of standing on a
beach, chest high in water, at the moment a big roller breaks. One wrestles to stay upright, forcing one's feet to stay buried in the shifting, swirling sand against the undertow. As the wave goes back all the sand is sucked away behind one's heels and one nearly loses all balance afresh, to sit ignominiously in the surf.

“I am walking about. It does help me.”

Isn't there a kind of wrestling, he thought vaguely, where by pretending to give in you reach a winning position? Or is there a better analogy in a chess sacrifice? Now that is characteristic of my poor muddled brain; I have really very little idea how to stop myself looking ridiculous. I have no footing at all. By being friendly and pleasant and oh so co-operative, he has lured me on: I thought he was opening the door for me and so he was, to watch me fall into the pit dug inside and laugh his head off – and all I can think of is chess, a subject on which my level is roughly that of an averagely bright elementary-school child.

The only advantage he possessed, he thought while staring at a shelf of unhelpful medical literature, was a kind of vague moral force. The man was expecting an orthodox police reaction; he had to find an unorthodox reply.

He had reached the door to the back when Post made the expected remark.

“I need hardly say, my friend, that those doors lead to my examination-rooms, where I do not allow you to wander about unsupervised – nor at all without a permission I shall not, naturally, give. Even police inspectors are not allowed upon private property without impressive pieces of paper, which you do not possess simply because, as I have reminded you, you are suffering from delusions.”