Eric Ambler: Siege at the Villa Lipp

They also believe, despite the angry merriment of old-school policemen, for whom the idea is naturally upsetting, in the existence of an entire criminal species of sub-genus about which little or nothing is as yet known: that of the Able Criminal.

Krom’s description of the species is one of the more celebrated. It was part of a lecture delivered at a meeting of the International Police Association in Berne. Although he himself, writing in German, prefers to identify his quarry as Der Kompetente Kriminelle, on this occasion he was, in deference to the majority among his polygot audience, speaking in English. Having uttered the phrase Able Criminal aloud on a lecture rostrum for the first time, he then went on: ‘I am not, my friends, in any way alluding to the Master Criminal of blessed memory, that beguiling figment of nineteenth-century fictional imaginations who so often fell prey to amateur detectives, but to a present-day occupant of the real world.

‘The Able Criminal, male or female, may be presumed to possess a high IQ, to be emotionally stable and ‘well adjusted,’ to exhibit none of the personality defects said to be characteristic of the accepted ‘criminal types’ and to belong to none of the much-publicized crime syndicates so dear to the romantics in some of our law-enforcement agencies. He will, except in the protective cover role of worthy citizen, be unknown to such agencies and unsuspected by them. He (or she — gender has no relevance here) has no discernible and hence no classifiable modus operandi, and unless disease or advancing age causes deterioration of his faculties, he is virtually uncatchable.

‘Of the kinds of crime he commits, fraud is naturally high on the list; yet fraud is not, for some of the species, the only, nor even a principal, source of revenue. Here in Berne it will be unnecessary to remind you that the laws on income tax evasion — not avoidance, evasion — vary widely between our different countries. In America and Britain evasion is a crime. In Switzerland it is not, in a great many other parts of the world, in places like Monaco, Grand Cayman, Bermuda and the New Hebrides, there are no income taxes to evade. Within the stratified complexities of international tax and corporation law the opportunities for the Able Criminal are boundless. On the evidence which has been available to me — unhappily not evidence of the quality upon which our democratic justice likes to depend — these opportunities include large-scale but non-prosecutable embezzlement and blackmail, plus undetectable forgery as well as property crime, chiefly connected with heavily-insured works of art, of the more traditional sort. I do not have to tell this audience that where there is crime for gain on that scale, however sophisticated it may be, there too will be found, sooner or later, its inevitable accompaniments, gangsterism and violence.’

Krom had gone on to list some of the technical difficulties to be overcome in researching the species, and had compared them with those which had confronted the physicists who first set out to investigate the behaviour of energized particles in a cyclotron.

‘The investigators might think that they knew what was going on inside, but until they had devised an exact way of knowing what was going on, the validity of their suppositions could not be assessed.’

Connell, in his doctoral thesis, had commented sadly on the comparison. ‘Professor Krom might have added that while physicists have long since solved those and many other sets of even more complex problems, we, the new criminologists, are still grappling with the most basic among ours. We have not yet learned to recognize source material as such even when we are staring at it.’

Dr Henson, writing in The New Sociologist, had been explicit about her difficulties.

‘No matter how ingenious the investigative techniques employed, the likelihood of the student learning anything that our able criminal would prefer to keep secret is small. The writer, and she does not think herself uniquely handicapped, has had to depend largely for her data-gathering upon methods of enquiry which only the charitable could call serious. To put it bluntly, they involve unscientific fumblings with minor strokes of luck; for example, the accidental unearthing of a conventional criminal informer who talked unwittingly of matters the real significance of which he himself had not even begun to grasp.’

She had made her point. She might have been wiser to have left it at that. Instead, she had gone on to lambast some of her critics.

‘Understandably, members of the older schools of criminology, recoiling from the difficulties, have chosen to deny the able criminal’s existence. They have preferred either to continue cultivating the already over-cultivated study fields of juvenile delinquency and Mafia-style organized crime, or to dabble in forensic medicine.’

The critics had hit back fiercely. Among the politer was one who reminded her that phenomena which are so very difficult to observe without ‘unscientific fumblings’ frequently turn out to exist only in the minds’ eyes of the committed few who claim to have observed them. The able criminal could well be compared in that context with such aberrations as the Unidentified Flying Object and the little green men from outer space. And were there not simple persons who still believed in ghosts?

Poor Dr Henson. With that truthful but unfortunate reference to fumbling she had handed her opponents the only weapon they could effectively use. Yet, her frankness did not go unrewarded, for the controversy it aroused brought her to the special attention of Professor Krom. He had known of her book, of course, but now he was reminded of her, and of the views she held, at a decisive moment.

Something remarkable had happened to him and he needed kindred spirits with whom to share the experience.

Connell has emphasized the difficulty for the new criminologists of recognizing a source when they see it. Henson has spoken of the remoteness of even that opportunity. Only Krom, with all his experience, having stumbled upon a major and reliable source, having recognized it as such and then decided patiently to wait and watch, may now know how lucky he has been.

I know of only two other similar cases of this magnitude. In both, the consequences for all concerned were most unpleasant. There were failures of nerve and regrettable lapses into primitive modes of behaviour, not quite as unexpected as those upon which I have to report but no less outrageous. In neither of those cases, however, were there any survivors.

So, whether he is prepared to admit it or not, Krom was lucky in a number of ways. The most important of them, undoubtedly, was the discovery of his windfall source in me.

By the failures of the world in which I move I have been accused in my time of possessing nearly all the anti-social qualities. It has been said that, both in my business and in my private lives, I have been consistently sly, treacherous, ruthless and rapacious, vindictive, devious, sadistic and generally vile. I could add to that list. But no one, no one, has ever yet suggested that I would even condone a resort to violence by others, much less promote or organize the use of it myself. Squeamishness? Timidity? Think what you please. I have seen enough of violence to convince me that even where it appears to succeed, as in some struggles for political power, the success usually proves in the end to have been more apparent than real.

I do not, of course, expect justice; that would be too much; but I believe that I am entitled to a fair trial before the only court I recognize, the only court whose judgements I now value; that is the court of public opinion.

Now that the real ‘Mr X’ has been identified by me and the full extent of his perfidy is no longer a secret, those who are prepared to consider the evidence with open and objective minds — evidence that proves beyond doubt and sans whitewash that far from being the villain of the piece I am his principal victim — should be allowed to do so.