Criminal Conversation Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked to examine a person – I won’t say a patient because you are convinced, let us say, that there is nothing whatever wrong with him – you would still do so.Discreetly, dispassionately. You would not tell this man that he was either ill or well – first, quietly, you would try to find out. Aren’t I right? – of course I’m right. Naturally you agree. I am a police officer. Instead of complaining that I have no commission or mandate – a thing for which there is no call or need – be glad that I don’t arrive on your doorstep with a flourish, telling your secretary who or what I am, giving rise to scandal and innuendo. You may have something in your life you would not wish the police to investigate. Even little things can be very damaging to a professional man.” A remark, he thought with pleasure, that could not have tripped more smoothly off the lips of the most accomplished blackmailer.
    It was the smile, and the fastidious fingers, that stayed with him most after that first meeting with Dr Hubert van der Post. The smile was warm and charming, but it was Olympian. He found everything amusing because it was seen from a great height of superiority; he was set so far apart from the ruck, so far above the roughened fingers, broken nails, grimy knuckles, that he could see little but comedy in agitated sweaty little men like van der Valk. Perhaps it was less a question of vanity than a sense of humility that was missing from his character. A humiliation would be the worst blow, possibly, that anyone could give him.
    Everything about him, too: his clothes, his desk, his room. Van der Valk tried to think of adjectives to fit. Delicate, exact, in exquisite taste, purified of all vulgarity. Masculine, certainly. But a little too poised, a scrap too exquisite. Would he be inclined to see all sadness, all worry as merely tiny, ludicrous incidents that could and would never touch, bother, irritate, penetrate his room?

Five
    Mr Samson seemed to have found a solution to Cross-eyed Janus, unless he had simply given it up. He showed no sign of being in either a good humour or a bad one, but then he never did. He was reading a pornographic magazine, part of the loot from the unfortunate gentleman whose auto had fallen in the canal. It could not have been interesting, because he put it down almost with alacrity when van der Valk came in to make his report.
    â€œWell now: how’s your little affair?”
    Van der Valk told about the cautious games with taxis around the Javakade and the remarks made by Heer Merckel, at which Mr Samson began pulling faces.
    â€œAnother one with his puritan conscience, shovelling it all on top of us. Could just as easily have knocked off this Capstan himself-assuming anybody ever did knock him off; huh?”
    â€œNothing to show he didn’t. I was fed up, I can tell you.”
    â€œNot surprised though, I hope – you wait till you’ve been in this department as long as I have. There isn’t one in ten of this type that has any basis in fact. They feel bothered by something they’ve got involved with that seems a scrap dirtier than their usual lives, and turn it around in their minds till they reach a completely illogical certainty that a crime has been committed. I’ve seen dozens of them. They come racing in to tell us about it and then they feel much better. Leaving me to pull the plug when they’re quite finished. As for concrete evidence, that doesn’t enter their schemeof things. Morality is what bothers them. If we had less morality we might have more justice. Want a dirty book? – it’s bloody dull.” Mr Samson was in a good mood after all. Van der Valk decided to admit that he had thought there was a little more to Mr Merckel than a suburban housewife with a guilty conscience.
    â€œYou thinking of doing anything about this doctor? Isn’t anything you can do – I read that medical report