Eric Ambler: Siege at the Villa Lipp

They stopped the car by the gateway in the wall on the lower coast road. Then, after a moment or two, the three of them climbed out stiffly, their shirts clinging to their backs. It had been a long, hot drive.

From the shade at the end of the terrace I could see them clearly through the binoculars.

Professor Krom, the older man, I already knew; there could be no doubt about him. The younger man and the woman, however, had to be identified from recent snapshots taken by private enquiry agencies on the subjects’ respective campuses. Although I can never take photographic identification quite seriously — I have seen, and used, too many false passports for that — these two, I decided, looked sufficiently like the persons they were supposed to be for me to assume that they were indeed those persons.

The car was a rented Fiat 127 with Milan registration plates. Their baggage, except for the hand stuff, was on a roof-rack. There was no unauthorized fourth person inside. They appeared, for the moment, to have adhered to the terms of the agreement I had worked out with Krom.

For several seconds they stood staring up at the Villa Lipp. Then, lips began to move and gestures were made. One did not have to be a skilled lip-reader to know what was being said.

‘Are we expected to carry our bags up all those steps?’ That was the woman, running sweaty fingers awkwardly through her hair as she spoke.

Krom, the leader of the expedition, gave her a fatherly pat on the shoulder. ‘I doubt it, my dear. But why don’t we go and find out?’ He looked up again, showing me his teeth this time; he had realized that I had to be watching. ‘I’m quite sure he’s there.’

‘And laughing his head off.’ Dr Connell, the younger man, was eyeing the house with dislike and massaging his aching neck muscles. He had done all the driving. ‘I’ll bet there’s an upper access road, too,’ he went on. ‘No one builds a villa like that without a driveway. This is pure one-upmanship. The son-of-a-bitch just wants us to arrive pooped.’

He was not entirely right. True, I had omitted the access road from the sketch-map I had sent Krom; but not simply in order to cause them discomfort. What I had wanted, too, was plenty of time in which to examine them and their belongings before they could examine too closely me and mine. Not that they would see many of my belongings in that expensively rented petit palais, but they would all see Yves and Melanie as well as me. There was no way of preventing their doing so — we had been rendered, to some extent, expendable — but the attendant risk could at least be minimized.

Evidence of the need for such precautions soon became visible.

Once they had decided that there was no point in their just standing there and that they had better start climbing, Connell took what at first looked like a portable radio from the car before he locked it. Then, when he turned, I saw that what he had in fact was a tape-recorder.

This flagrant violation of the agreed ground rules did not greatly surprise me. Dr Connell was, my sources had informed me, that sort of young man; the academic counterpart of the boardroom Wunderkind, always confident of being able to talk anyone misguided enough to disagree with him into seeing things his way.

Well, Yves would know how to deal with him. The one who had begun to interest me more, from a security point of view, was the woman, Dr Henson.

As they climbed the lower flight of stone steps and passed the fountain at the foot of the main stairway, she swung the embroidered satchel she had been carrying slung on her left shoulder over to her right one. The satchel looked ordinary enough, the sort of object that a slacks-and-shirt woman of her kind might normally carry. What bothered me was that, judging from the way she had to heft it across her body, the contents of the thing were much heavier than one would have expected them to be.

I spoke to Melanie as I went inside.

‘Before you go out to meet them, tell Yves that the woman may have something in her bag that shouldn’t be there. I’ll be in my room when he’s ready to report.’

While I waited, I went through the three dossiers again and reread my own notes on them.

The subjects, in order of both temporal and academic seniorities, were:

FRITS BÜHLER KROM, Professor of Sociology and Social

Administration

Nationality: Dutch

Age: 62

Civil Status: Married, two sons, one daughter.

My own office had turned up that information after a few minutes with standard reference books. The only additional information that I had been able to get about his personal life, as opposed to his professional life at the German university where he worked and about which every piddling little detail seemed to be known, was that he had eight grandchildren with a ninth on the way.

GEORGE KINGHAM CONNELL, Assistant Professor,

Department of Social Sciences

Nationality: USA

Age: 36

Civil Status: Married, one daughter (by first wife who divorced him), two sons (present marriage).

I had a note which said that he was currently in Europe to attend by invitation a seminar at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germany, and that his family was at a Maine lakeside summer resort.

The American agency commissioned by me to carry out the Connell investigation had complained about the deadlines I had imposed on them. They had, however, managed to gather in the time available a surprisingly large amount of campus gossip. One item reported ‘a widespread belief that certain members of the university Board of Regents were objecting vigorously to any renewal of Dr Connell’s contract which might result in his promotion to associate rank and securing of tenure. The objectors were all, it was said, lawyers.

GERALDINE HOPE HENSON, Research Fellow, Faculty of

Social Sciences

Nationality: British

Age: 33

Civil Status: Divorced, no children.

At the end of a detailed account of her career and an estimate of her credit-worthiness, the British agency had added a cosy note. Henson had been her maiden name and after her divorce she had gone back to using it. To her many friends, however, she had always been known affectionately as ‘Hennie.’

Krom, Connell, Henson.

Social scientists all, but with not much else in common, apparently. Then, one looks at the titles of some of their published books and papers and the picture changes. All three of these scholars are not only criminologists, but criminologists of a new and peculiar breed; they all have the same kind of bee in their bonnets.

Krom’s The Lombroso Fallacy in Contemporary Criminology and Frontiers of Criminal Investigation may not be as conspicuously iconoclastic as Connell’s The Myth of Organized Crime or Henson’s The Professional Criminal — Six Studies in Incompetence, but his preface to the monumental Criminal Statistics 1965–1975, an Analytical Appraisal makes his position clear. Along with such authorities as John A. Mack of Glasgow and Hans-Jürgen Kerner of Tübingen, as well as younger scholars like Connell and Henson, he had joined the ranks of those criminological heretics who believe that most current ideas about criminal psychology, criminal biology and criminal psychiatry are either fallacious or irrelevant. They believe this because they hold that what criminologists have been studying so assiduously over the years is not the criminal as he or she may exist, but only those one or two species of the genus which are, and always have been, catchable.