The Murderer (1935), page 10
That was more likely. To avoid a scandal. The Van Malderens had tried to persuade him to go away so that the whole affair could be hushed up and forgotten.
But he hadn’t fallen in with their little plan. On the contrary, by staying in Sneek he was forcing them every day to shake hands with a murderer. What did they think about that? Were they scared of him?
In any case, he wasn’t going away. If he’d ever thought of it, this journey to Amsterdam would have been enough to choke off the idea. He simply couldn’t face the thought of living anywhere else but in Sneek, in his own house, his own familiar little corner. He was longing to be back there among the familiar objects that had surrounded him for so many years.
“Three no trump.”
The mayor of Staveren went up on deck a few minutes before they arrived, and was the first down the gangway, so as not to be seen landing with Kuperus. As usual, the latter had his first-class compartment to himself.
It was dark, too, just as it had been two months before.
“Hindeloopen!”
And ten minutes later:
“Workum!”
Then:
“IJlst!”
Suddenly he went pale, because the train slowed down just as it had the other time. Perhaps it was the usual thing, only he’d never noticed it before. He got up from his seat and had his hand on the door handle.
But it didn’t stop after all, and a few minutes later he was handing in his ticket at Sneek. He looked into the man’s eyes, and the man looked into his as he said:
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Had he always said thank you like that? He couldn’t remember, and he wondered whether the words contained a threat.
He walked into the center of town with his suitcase in his hand, and paused outside the lighted windows of the Onder den Linden.
It was the one thing left to do to finish up the day. To go inside and oblige them all to shake hands with him, to sit among them and stare at them defiantly!
Van Malderen was there. He seemed embarrassed.
“Been to Amsterdam?”
“Yes.”
Billiard balls rolled across the brightly lighted tables. In a corner, four members of the club were playing bridge.
Van Malderen’s question, asked merely for form’s sake, and the half-hearted handshakes of the others — that was all he had of human contact with these people. Even Old Willem wasn’t the same as before. When he brought him his glass of beer, he seemed to do so with some mental reservation.
To annoy them, Kuperus asked:
“What’s become of that charming girl?… What was her name? Oh, yes! Lina!”
He looked insistently at Loos, then at Van Malderen. Some of the others looked embarrassed or smirked.
“She’s gone.”
“Really? What, all alone?”
“No. With that Englishman who was here.”
An Englishman had been staying in town, to study the manufacture of Dutch cheese. At one of the tables Kuperus saw his friend the examining magistrate. He nodded to him but got no response. Perhaps the other hadn’t noticed.
It was as though there was a vacuum around him, a hollow emptiness in which the clack of the billiard balls echoed strangely and in which an occasional voice struck a false note. If he left, it would have been a relief to everybody, he knew very well, and for that very reason he made a point of staying, ordering another glass of beer and then a gin.
The gin reminded him of the previous evening, when he’d had a lot of it, so much that by the time he’d got back to the Ritz he’d been pretty thoroughly drunk, and he really couldn’t remember how he’d got to bed. He had awakened in a state of anxiety, expecting Karl to turn up at any moment with demands for money, backed by threats. Nobody had appeared, however, and he’d caught his usual train.
“How’s Jane?” he asked Van Malderen.
“Very well, thanks…”
Everyone was against him. Every way he turned, he came up against a blank wall. And in addition to all the people who suspected him, there was one who knew. For Kuperus was not forgetting the anonymous letter.
“An accident,” Karl had said, speaking of the girl he’d suffocated with a pillow.
But there wasn’t anything accidental about the shooting of Schutter and Alice, was there? Unless a kink could be called an accident! Could it?
What had made Karl say that about a vicious kink?
Vicious indeed! A man who’d lived forty-five years of unblemished respectability? He had never deceived his wife, except once, in Paris, and that had been a silly little affair of no importance. Even so, it had given him weeks of nightmares, because he was afraid he might have picked up some disease. The pocket knife had been dishonest, admittedly, but that could be dismissed as a misdeed of childhood.
Vicious indeed! To live fifteen years in the same house, and buy his wife new furniture when it wasn’t necessary at all? To go every evening to the Billiard Club, and have as his one and only ambition to become its president?
Vicious indeed! To get out of bed at night ten or twenty times a month to deliver babies?
It was enough to make one weep!
“A gin, Willem…”
Never mind if it was one too many. Never mind if the others looked at him reprovingly. He needed to know, and the gin helped him in the job of self-examination.
In Karl’s case, there was no room for doubt.
He had suffocated a girl accidentally, his intention being merely to stop her screaming.
But he? Why had he done what he had?… That still had to be found out.
His head was heavy as he stood up.
“Who’d like two hundred up with me?” he asked.
No one answered. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were glassy as he glared at them one after the other.
“I asked who’d like a game with me?” he insisted.
He could feel the gin mounting to his head, but imagined the others couldn’t see it. It was Franz Van Malderen who, as his oldest friend, finally took it upon himself to answer:
“Why don’t you go home to bed?”
And just as he could hardly remember undressing the night before in Amsterdam, he had, next morning, only the vaguest idea of how he’d left the café, where his departure had been followed by a long silence, then by a sudden burst of conversation.
* * *
SEVEN
« ^ »
It was ten o’clock in the morning, and Kuperus had not yet finished dressing. Standing in front of the mirror, he was in the act of tying his tie when all at once he paused, motionless, listening.
Through the wall came the sound of a piano, at first a few casual notes, then some firmer chords, which formed the opening bars of one of Schumann’s compositions.
For a moment he was at a loss to know what it was that had caught him off guard. It wasn’t surprise, but, rather, some sort of wistful nostalgia. As he looked at his reflection, he saw a Kuperus different from that of the last few days, a Kuperus who was touched, agitated, bewildered.
“Mia!” he whispered.
Mia had returned. Perhaps she was cured. The doctor was so affected by the idea that he almost forgot he had been summoned to appear before the examining magistrate.
The house next door, on the side toward the bridge, was smaller than the others, but it was more spick-and-span than any of them, with its woodwork freshly painted every year and its white curtains starched. In it lived the Braundts, the quietest and most respected people on the street. Braundt was a master at the grammar school; his wife was housekeeper in an upper school for girls.
They went off at the same time every day, leaving their little girl, Mia, in the care of a governess. Mia was twelve. She didn’t go to school because of her health and also because she spent a lot of time studying the piano. For the last two years, Kuperus had been used to hearing her practice while he saw his patients.
The autumn before, she had been so ill that they’d sent her off to spend the winter in Switzerland, and the doctor had so far forgotten her that he had ceased to notice the absence of the music.
And now she had come back, and the sound of her playing filled his house.
“The little girl’s come back,” said a voice behind him.
It was Neel, who was busily brushing his bowler.
“Yes, she’s back,” he murmured.
Downstairs, he didn’t go out at once, but wandered first into the living room. Against the wall was an upright piano, the top of which was littered with photographs and ornaments.
On the music stool was a cushion of dark crimson plush, which had been made specially for little Mia.
At one time, she had come in regularly every afternoon to do her practicing under the supervision of Madame Kuperus. For Alice played, too, though not well enough to give the child her lessons. For that, a teacher came to the Braundts’ every morning.
Alice had kept a special box of chocolates for Mia. Perhaps it was still there in the dining-room sideboard.
“Will you be seeing any patients while you’re out? If so, you’d better take your bag.”
Neel followed him to the front door.
“No. I won’t need it.”
He had been quite relieved, that morning, to receive the official notice asking him to be at the examining magistrate’s office by eleven o’clock. Somehow, its effect had been to set his mind at rest. But Mia’s playing had sufficed to upset him again, and it was with a heavy heart that he heard the familiar sound of the front door shutting behind him.
Many a time Mia had still been with Alice when her mother had come back from work in the evening. If so, the latter had simply banged on the wall, which was the signal for the child to return home.
It was a dull gray day. Kuperus made an effort to shake off the melancholy effect of the music. He succeeded sufficiently to be able to throw a glance of complete indifference at the veranda from which he knew Jane Van Malderen would be watching him. In fact, he was almost tempted to put out his tongue!
What was the examining magistrate going to call him? Anton Groven and Hans Kuperus had been to school together, and by rights should call each other by their Christian names. They always had. It’s true they had never seen a great deal of each other, but that was only because his wife was the most disagreeable woman in Sneek. Nobody could stand her.
Why had he been summoned? Had the writer of the anonymous letter come forward at last? Or had the ticket collector been to the police?
When he’d got up that morning, Kuperus had been in a pugnacious mood, ready to confront the world and answer whatever questions they cared to put to him. But a few notes of music had cut the ground from under his feet, bringing back the past, years and years of it, right from the time of Mia’s first scales, when she’d had to have two cushions on the music stool.
The law courts were grayer than the rest of the town. The doctor walked straight upstairs and knocked on the examining magistrate’s door. Before there was any answer, he heard the sound of chairs being moved inside.
Finally the door was opened by the magistrate’s clerk. Anton Groven stood rather uneasily behind his desk, trying to look dignified.
“Come in… Take a seat…”
He didn’t shake hands. He didn’t call his visitor by his Christian name. Sitting down again, he tugged at his little beard, while with the other hand he turned over the papers of a file whose bulk surprised Kuperus.
“I had to summon you to come. There are a few questions I must ask you before winding up this inquiry. I’ve received reports from various quarters, and there are one or two points that require elucidation…”
He had obviously rehearsed the sentences beforehand, since he sounded rather like a schoolboy reciting one of the fables of La Fontaine. He hadn’t even raised his eyes from the dossier.
“For instance, I see here that at the time of the incident you were sheltering a certain Karl Vorberg, of German nationality, whose record is highly unsatisfactory. The Emden police have informed us that this Vorberg is strongly suspected of having committed a murder, but there’s not sufficient evidence to provide grounds for extradition…”
At last Groven raised his head. He looked timidly at Kuperus, as though he feared the latter would present a painful spectacle.
“Were you aware of the presence of this Vorberg in your house?”
“No.”
“In that case, I’m afraid I must quote from another report. It states here that you saw this person twice yesterday in a street of ill repute in Amsterdam. Do you deny that?”
“No.”
Kuperus tried to banish the strains of the piano from his mind. He realized now that, though he had been left alone, he had nonetheless been the subject of pretty exhaustive inquiries. He had even been followed. And he hadn’t noticed it!
He looked at the dossier. Was every page of it a trap in some form or other?
“Don’t think I’m trying to trip you up… But we must get this clear… On the one hand, you’ve told me you didn’t know Vorberg. On the other, you admit having seen him twice yesterday… ”
“That’s right.”
“Would you mind explaining that, please?”
“I didn’t know Karl at the time. I had no idea there was a man sleeping in the house…”
“How did you find out?”
“From the maid. When I took her as my mistress.”
The clerk hesitated to write that down, and Groven looked inquiringly at the doctor, who went on:
“I take full responsibility for what I’m saying. I had the maid down to sleep with me, and then it came out that she had another man upstairs… To get rid of him, I gave him some money, on condition he go to Amsterdam.”
“Has he been blackmailing you?”
“No. But it’s only natural he should expect a little compensation for obliging me. Yesterday I gave him a little more to get along with.”
For a moment there was silence while Groven studied his papers. Then he looked up again and made a sign to the clerk not to take down what he was going to say.
“The presence of this German under your roof was the most obscure part of the whole affair, and the police were almost prepared to draw certain conclusions from it…It will be easy to have your story confirmed by the servant and by Karl Vorberg himself… With that out of the way, there’s not much to bother about…” That might have been taken ironically, since there were at least a hundred typewritten sheets in the dossier, and presumably they weren’t about nothing! “I suppose,” went on the magistrate, “that, on your side, you’ve no information to give us…”
He said that rather hurriedly, as though he was afraid the doctor might have.
“I’m ready to answer your questions,” answered the latter.
“I wish I could spare myself the task of having to ask them… As you know, of course, Schutter’s wallet disappeared, which suggested an obvious motive. But we couldn’t blind ourselves to the fact that there might be another one — in other words, jealousy. I take it that you deny having shot your wife and her companion…”
Kuperus sat still for a moment, assailed by a strange temptation. He would have loved to contradict the magistrate. He would have loved to answer:
“I don’t deny any such thing!”
But it wasn’t so easy. And if, in the end, he nodded, it was because Groven, by the attitude he adopted, practically forced him to.
“That evening, when you returned from Amsterdam, you went as usual to the Onder den Linden, after which you went straight home.”
Groven breathed deeply. He was relieved. He made a little movement of his hand as though to banish the clouds.
“Of course, if it was assumed to be a crime of passion, the sentence would be correspondingly lenient, as it always is in such cases… On the other hand, it would unloose a scandal that could only be described as disastrous…”
Kuperus gave a bleak smile.
“On your side, is there anybody on whom you could throw suspicion?”
“No. Nobody,” answered Kuperus without a trace of sarcasm.
The magistrate paused while the clerk wrote that down. Then he stood up and cleared his throat. He had come to the most difficult part of all, but he was determined to go through with it.
“I hope,” he began, looking everywhere but at Kuperus, “I hope you fully realize the situation. This crime, this double crime, was committed in such a way as to leave us with no serious indications as to the perpetrator, or, at all events, with no formal proof. If the case was sent before the Assizes, it’s more than probable there’d be an acquittal, because the accused would be given the benefit of the doubt…”
The clerk had got up, too, and had disappeared into an alcove, where he was washing his hands.
“The accused?” asked Kuperus. “Who do you mean?”
“I don’t know… I’m just speaking in the abstract…But let me go on. At this stage we can hardly hope for any fresh evidence. That’s why I’ve asked you to come today. By this evening there’s every probability that the case will have been dropped…And, if it’s dropped, the important thing is that it should be forgotten; in other words, there should be nothing to keep it fresh in people’s minds… You understand me, Doctor?”
He’d said “Dcotor”! That made it thoroughly official! Admittedly, it would have been difficult for Groven to call him Hans.
“As a matter of fact, one of our mutual friends, Van Malderen to be exact, told me you were intending to go away as soon as the case was finished… And I must say I think it’s a very wise decision…”
He had come out with it at last! With his hands in his pockets, he walked slowly to and fro behind his desk, pronouncing his words syllable by syllable to give full weight to all they were meant to convey.
“Your answers to my questions have been entirely satisfactory, and I feel sure that, before the day is out, what you have told me will be confirmed from other sources. That leaves us with only one or two details that are a little troublesome, though I don’t suppose they would amount to much in the eyes of a jury. At the station they’ve hunted for your railway ticket without success. The man at the barrier has admitted that some people, particularly the regular passengers, occasionally leave the station via the buffet, in which case they don’t hand in their tickets…You can imagine what capital a lawyer could make out of an admission like that!”
