Criminal Conversation Read Online Free PDF Page A

smile approved of him beamingly for not being difficult. “Just give your name at the speaker.”
    He had time for a leisurely stroll into the Wozzeckstraat. It was an alleyway sandwiched between two rows of patrician houses that had gardens; there were high walls, garages, sheds where obscure little businesses were carried on, an ‘interior decorator’, a metal smith, a hand weaver, a window-cleaner, plebeian amidst this art but certainly with four times the income. The back of the doctor’s house was a garage with a flat above it – chauffeur, doubtless, possibly doubling as gardener, and wife as concierge, for there was another brass plate. ‘For all messages, goods delivered, offers or collections. H. v. d. Post.’ In the alley stood a cherry-red Alfa Romeo town car with the entwined snake at the windscreen corner. Again – rather an individual auto for a doctor. Still… He walked on as far as the water, where he stood gazing, rattling small change in his trouser pocket.
    When he got back the secretary had a sort of orange form. He gave his own home address, his profession as Business Man.
    â€œHave you been recommended to come here by any other doctor? You just came on your own – I see,” brightly still. “And have you a state insurance number, or is yours private? Thank you so much. I’ll be calling you within five minutes, probably.”
    Well, there he was, a patient, and he hadn’t been told to go to the back door. Would the doctor send a bill for professional services in to the police department? Ha. He felt buoyant, a thing that made him feel lucky. He was confident, now that he was in, that he wouldn’t get flung out on his ear. The intercom clicked above his head and the bright soft voice addressed him.
    â€œMr van der Valk, would you be so kind as to take the door on your left at the bottom of the stairs? Dr van der Post is ready for you.”
    The organisation here is pretty good, he thought on his way down: they don’t have a heap of people sitting staring at each other – and that fact, no doubt, is reflected in the bills patients get presented with.

Four
    He had no time to absorb the surroundings straight away, that first visit. It was later that he discovered afresh innumerable details of the figure, its background, its frame, and began to fit them in, for they were all broken up and jumbled by the jigsaw – the strain induced and the boldness needed. Carrying through with this confidence trick, this quite brazen piece of imposture, had not been at all easy. When he left the house he was stunned with nervous fatigue and with a confused heap of unco-ordinated impressions. He stood blinking at the traffic flowing at the main road, a hundred metres down from the house with the lindens. He did not quite know what to do; it was latish for going back to an office where there was, he hoped, nothing for him to do but catch up on some neglected paperwork, and it was too early to go home. That atmosphere, besides the smell of dinner cooking, of his house, of his wife’s skin when he kissed her, the whole feeling of home – no no, that would all destroy the very picture he was trying to paint, the colouring he was trying to pin down. He needed something to do, something small and unimportant, that would be symbolic of what, to him, promised to become a particularly delicate and risky piece of work.
    He walked with heavy steps into a stationer’s, where he bought three cardboard folders. A little further on was a café, where he sat down deliberately to examine his purchase: not feeling at all alcoholic he ordered a blackcurrant juice. There was a green folder, a sort of insipid nile-green, and a beige one; he shoved these atthe back of his briefcase. A grey one seemed to him the most suitable. He fished for a ballpoint and lettered it in neat capitals. C M P. Cabestan-Merckel-Post. Canadian Mineral Prospectors. Consolidated