Criminal Conversation by Nicolas Freeling Page B

retaliating. She would then pay blackmail money, thinking it safer and easier to stand for the squeeze. How much could she pay without your noticing?”
    â€œIt’s unheard of,” muttered Merckel furiously.
    â€œYou see, it’s not enough to insist on meeting me where no one would recognise you. It has not even occurred to you that I am, in different circles, I grant, as widely known a figure in this town as you are. Here, for example – full of musicians – I might easily be recognised. I might even be seen by someone who would have very little trouble, and might easily think that little bit worth taking, uncovering your own identity. You will have to get accustomed to numerous ideas, including that of my questioning your wife.”
    Merckel gave him a slow look. Not furious or unhappy, but appraising, as though he were sizing up a man who had asked him for the loan of money.
    â€œWell, Mr van der Valk,” he said at last. “I see that my notion that you would not show vigour was wide of the mark. You have evidently seen Dr van der Post and are not, apparently, afraid of what he could do to your career. What conclusions you have really drawn from this visit are not my business. I now ask you whether you have thought what I can do to your career. As you remarked when I first met you, I am acquainted with a number of persons prominent in public life.”
    â€œYet you still came to me. Perhaps you were sure that we would be careful not to probe too deep. If we were able to pin a crime - any crime – on the good doctor, that would destroy his reputation and you would be content. But the idea of your wife being a likely suspect of a possible murder – and it was you, Mr Merckel, who first mentioned the word – we would be too tactful to let that occur to us. Of course. You got the wrong man.”
    Merckel smiled contemptuously.
    â€œYou have as mistaken an impression of me as most people,” drily. “I am pleased that you do not allow yourself to be intimidated; if you did you would be of singularly little use. If you wish to talk to my wife do so by all means; I do not stand in your way. I ask youto respect my original wish for discretion and not to mention my name, even to her.”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t your name be mentioned?”
    â€œThat concerns me.”
    â€œI’ll respect that,” careful to make no protest or further query.
    Lot of things I don’t understand in that quarter as well, he thought, having a little stroll; the trouble with Chinese food is that one invariably eats too much of it. I think I would almost have preferred it if Merckel had made more objection to my questioning his wife. He sounds pretty sure of her. Still…
    He had to get an auto; Merckel lived out in Aerdenhout, on the far side of Haarlem. One of the creamy residential districts of Holland; elegant quiet streets lined with trees, down which purred elegant quiet autos, lined with bank-notes; the plebeian Volkswagen, in these streets, made a noise like the umbrella of classical tradition dropped on the floor of the British Museum. The streets wound aristocratically in and out of one another, noiseless but for the tocking whirr of lawnmowers: the villas all looked the same and all rather ugly, with cedars, plenty of grass lush from the automatic sprinkler, a slight tendency to stained glass and bulbous grandiosities, and a patrician disregard of street-numbers. He had leisure to admire a good deal of gaudy garden furniture strewn about among the cedars before he found the right house, and the usual Spanish maid to take his card, on the back of which he had scribbled, ‘I have just had lunch with your husband’.
    Mrs Merckel was installed in one of those swinging garden sofas with fringes and a canopy, pretending to be reading
Ideal Homes
with an eye cocked on his approach. He had expected her to try an icy madam act, gaze fixed on his shoes (they were quite