Over the High Side (15 page)

‘I am the commissaire of the district in which Mr Martinez – your father-in-law, isn't it – was killed under unexplained circumstances, and I have made a visit here to – how do you say? – enlarge the scope of the inquiry.'

‘Oh yes. Now you mention it, my wife told me someone called and that was you – I understand now.' Not a very good liar, but give the man time.

Outside he could hear a pattering and banging, sounds with which he was familiar and which he could place with accuracy; the noise made by a couple of smallish children in pyjamas and bare feet (they never know where their slippers are) resisting, with great strength and ingenuity, efforts to get them to go to bed.

‘But you said we could look at the television.'

‘I did my teeth this morning – that's today, isn't it.'

‘My slipper's gone.'

‘Well he took my book and he hit me with it and then I gave him a push and he fell over and started to cry – Baby!'

‘Mama I want a drink of water.'

It was a side to Stasie that was important, that he could not disregard. Not only did he have to Love Her Too if he were going to get anywhere, but he had to understand. She was a housewife, apparently busy and contented, with three young children. She wasn't an aimless, unoccupied, bored, frustrated woman. What went on there inside?

Van der Valk went on explaining boringly: Flanagan listened with politeness, as though all this were quite new. The
door opened a crack, propelled by juvenile curiosity: he handled this in a practised way.

‘Out. Daddy's talking business. And the door shut if you please.'

He was not as tall as Van der Valk but broadly built, good looking with dashing Irish looks that might be getting a little gross. Topping the thirty-five mark, with big candid brown eyes, a massive jaw, curly brown hair that needed cutting badly, a neck taking a big size in shirts, and feet and hands to match, an unexpectedly soft small voice, the pushful beginning of a stomach. The eyes were clear and unlined; he did not look that much of a drinker but for the readiness with which one could imagine the pleasant voice saying, ‘How about going for a jar?'

Van der Valk had to exorcize the long white beard; his metallic voice acquired an edge. How did one cut into all this Irish mist? The Lynch family provided one with straight answers to a straight question, but he was rapidly getting the notion that the Flanagan family was sort of oblique.

‘You understand that I have to learn more about this relationship between Mr Martinez and the boy Denis Lynch.'

‘Quite; yes – uh – I'm wondering. I mean you seem to have talked to my wife – she mentioned it more or less in passing. It was only yesterday, wasn't it?' He lit a cigarette, puffing noisily. There was intelligence there, a lot of nervous tension, an elaborate wariness, and as well a faintly cocky, knowing air, as though he was well abreast of the police and their little tricks.

‘You mean she hasn't had time to tell you? Or that you don't know Denis?' asked Van der Valk.

‘Oh I know Denis of course; he's a bit of a family friend then, perhaps. I don't know him well, of course, how old is he now, maybe twenty-two or so, and what have I seen of him really? I mean I don't know what I can usefully add.'

‘More your wife's friend? She told me she knew him well.'

‘That's right,' agreed Flanagan calmly, almost with a sort of bland impudence. ‘He was going to go about and look to see whether he couldn't get some sort of job in Europe somewhere. Yes I know that sounds vague but that's just the sort
of vague idea one gets at that age, isn't it? I mean his family had plenty of money; he wasn't in any hurry, and if he wanted to find some agreeable kind of job who'd blame him then?'

‘Yes,' patiently. ‘About Holland.'

‘I think he asked my wife whether she could give him an introduction, don't you know, anybody in Holland who might be useful, and she said I suppose that she didn't know anybody much – she's lived here since she was a child almost, y'know. So she gave him her father's name I think, and I guess that's just about all I know about it.'

‘You guess.'

‘I wasn't there at the time, myself,' with disarming simplicity.

At this moment, on cue, as though to save dear Eddy some questions that might be embarrassing, exactly as though she had been listening outside – and quite likely she had – the door opened and Stasie came floating in. Van der Valk got up politely. She was relaxed and untidy in a brown skirt and sweater, wisps of hair coming down, and hadn't stopped to comb it or repair her lipstick. Housewife ‘au naturel' who has just worked the children off to bed and reappears slightly dishevelled, warmed by stooping under beds to find the missing slipper, sleeve finely spattered with soapy water from supervising a nailbrush, just a tiny bit sweaty since supper time. With some women – Stasie was one – this adds greatly to charm. Her unusually good looks were embellished, her magnetism intensified. She held a hand out with casual amiability, unembarrassed, unworried, unsurprised.

‘Sorry – but I'm sure you understand. Give me a cigarette then, Eddy.' Out of politeness, perhaps, she spoke Dutch, which Eddy appeared at least to follow. She waved Van der Valk back into her chair, and curled up on a divan, arranging her feet under her, pulling her skirt modestly over her knees, puffing at the cigarette, screwing her eyes and blinking to keep smoke out, with a vague stare at the wall behind him. So much relaxation and casual composure, so easy a ‘take us as you find us' manner – was there a bit too much, was it defensive? And if it were? Natural: strange policeman coming moseying in, second time in two days; could get to be a nuisance. But she was all politeness. And plausibility.

‘It must trouble you, Commissaire, to find me so as you might think unconcerned, about my father's death. But he was an old man though he didn't look it, he'd always lived a very strenuous fully-packed existence and we've always expected – my husband, my sisters, all who knew him – that something in the end would give way suddenly and that he'd just die without any longdrawn illness or anything. And that's just what did happen. Oh yes, I know he died by violence – and that is indeed very shocking and dreadful. We've had though – saying this to you is absurd – to learn to live with violence; there's such a lot in the world. We all felt quite sure that he'd been attacked by some crazy person for no reason – oh, of course, to the crazy person there's a reason, obvious, and the need to do something about it quite overwhelming, but that is just typically psychopathic, isn't it. It is unexplainable in any other way – I mean, people don't stab one in the street, do they? I suppose it may have been someone he knew at best very slightly and had some imagined grievance, thought he'd been outsmarted in some deal, I suppose, stabbed him in a sudden fit of rage like a child and then walked off into the blue without a care in the world. Those people don't have a guilty conscience or anything, do they? – and that's surely the reason why you don't find anything that makes any sense.'

A fluent talker, our Stasie. Van der Valk felt in his pocket, found a crumpled box of Gitanes, put one in his mouth. Helpful Eddy jumping up snapping a lighter. Now he mustn't be heavy and Dutch being all sarcastic.

‘Thanks … what you say sounds perfectly plausible, yes.' Very light and colourless.

Her eyes set in an oblique plane and flicked at him – she'd got it at once; nobody's fool.

Good old Eddy hadn't got it, and put his great foot in it.

‘Not only plausible, surely.'

Van der Valk took the cigarette out to straighten it; got a bit bent in his pocket.

‘A murder, Mr Flanagan. Crime of blood, crime of violence. The escaped lunatic, the psychopath let out on parole a bit premature – oldest cliché in the business. Plenty of legal brains
expended energy on this notion. If it hadn't been rejected I wouldn't be here.' Eddy fidgeted with an ashtray.

‘I was down on Seapoint Avenue,' went on Van der Valk peaceably. ‘Nice view there is. Very quiet. Holland's like that – we like to think we're very peaceful. No broken glass, un-emptied dutsbins, riots with Porto-Ricans in Spanish Harlem, police sirens wailing – we think of that as something on the television, hm? all the fourteen-year-olds able to buy guns freely. Or the pretty young woman, mother of small children – like your wife here – who goes to the shooting gallery after shopping and carries a thirty-eight in her handbag. But violence – as your wife says – is everywhere. Cliché to think it can't happen here. Cliché to think that I'm just a filler-in of forms because I don't walk about carrying a machine-gun. This trouble with clichés is a handicap in police work. Like the policemen in books, who're all nice quiet guys with wives and children. Not a bastard among them. Like you – like me. Except,' blandly, ‘that I've a dirty mind.'

‘Sure, sure,' said Eddy, disturbed. Stasie said nothing.

‘I don't want to seem rude,' went on Van der Valk, ‘but I didn't come for a cosy chat about psychopaths.'

‘Yes but violence…'

‘Violence is like the Good Housekeeping Seal; it comes in the package.'

‘That,' objected Eddy, ‘sounds a bit cheap.'

‘You're quite right, it is a bit cheap, and I'm sorry. I think I should have said that lacking perhaps a good honest dirty war to exercise their muscles people do have a tendency to violence, even gratuitously – anywhere. We ought maybe to give them a little red book to carry.'

‘Dammit,' protested Eddy, ‘I didn't know Denis – I don't know Denis – at all that well, but I find this pretty hard to swallow.'

‘So do I, and I don't know him at all. Why do you think I come to you? – for whatever light you can help shed.'

‘Stasie,' in a cowardly way, ‘knows him of course better than I do.'

‘Well enough that I don't believe it for a moment. Or perhaps I don't know him at all. But anyway, Commissaire,
isn't all this the greatest nonsense? Just an exercise in rhetoric?' It was as though she wished to show him she carried claws and could defend herself: his eyes crinkled up with enjoyment, his ‘tiny little eyes all brimming with spite', as Arlette said. She saw this and was pleased with herself.

‘You can't just settle on Denis simply because he handily happened to be around. Not unless my notions of justice are a great deal queerer even than American television.'

‘Nobody has “settled on Denis”, that I know of. He isn't accused of anything whatever, everybody is taking pains to be extremely fair and he certainly isn't being harassed. He's a witness, and I'd like to see him: that doesn't mean there's some sort of dragnet out for him.'

‘If there is it's a poor one,' said Stasie mockingly, ‘because he's in Rome.'

‘If he's still in Rome,' remarked Van der Valk.

‘How do you know anyway?' asked Eddy.

‘I had a card from him this morning – it's on the chimneypiece.'

Eddy jumped up, studied a gaudy tourist photo-card, and passed it to Van der Valk. It was addressed to, ‘Signora S. Flanagan,' and said in a slant, ‘Having a good time seeing a lot of new things as well as old wish you were here to share it love Denis.'

‘There's a proof he's not hiding or anything,' said Eddy.

‘Very conventional and reassuring,' agreed Van der Valk politely.

‘And hardly sounding like a murderer,' added Stasie.

‘Very true. Well, you've been very kind and cleared up a lot of doubt; I've bothered you long enough.'

There were the essential perfunctory exclamations of regret that they could help him no further. Plus, he thought, a pleasurable feeling of sending him off with a flea in his ear.

He looked at his map under a streetlamp: it was such a nice night that he felt like a long walk and made it, right out to Dalkey along the sea front. He wondered what had put him into such a good mood; he could see no real cause for such gullible self-satisfaction, but there it was, he was immensely
pleased with himself and even found himself singing, that catchiest of all waltz tunes.

‘Mit mir, Mit mir –
Keine Nacht dir zu lang'

– and guffawed, since this sentiment was addressed to the deliciously beddable Stasie, no doubt. Being Baron Ochs in a lecherous frame of mind amused him so much that he recalled another of those superbly complacent remarks.

‘Hab halt so ein jung und hitzig Blut,
Ist nicht zum Stillen!'

– and an old Dublin biddy going home from the pub took a look at this idiot figure laughing to himself and talking alone out loud in German, and made a significant gesture with her finger.

‘Sure these Poles are all the same, God help them,' she remarked sympathetically, disappearing up a side street. A small pale full moon, looking anaemic and sorry for itself, appeared in the sky. Van der Valk looked at it like Eugène de Rastignac gazing over Paris, but was not quite pleased enough with himself to say, ‘A nous deux maintenant,' – on the contrary, he was thinking that Baron Ochs had fallen with a loud crash through the trap-door into the dung-heap, and doubtless it would happen to him very shortly. He always did manage to get into the shit sooner or later.

Why was he behaving in so ridiculous a way, he wondered – he hadn't had any whisky for hours …

*

Dear Arlette,

Have just had very large Irish breakfast in bed – coffee abominable natch but tea delicious here. This plus large amounts whisky would have horrible effect on liver, but I walk a great deal. Town centre nicely compact, like A'dam walkable: this is nice. Today got to go to effing embassy; job is pretty awful as usual but Irish v. amusing. Lunch yesterday with politician's wife in expensive restaurant: grub not up to much but drinks good, and post just brought invit. dinner private house of same – run to hire dinner-jacket Moss Bros! His cigars are good.