Over the High Side (23 page)

‘I do see,' Arlette was getting interested despite herself.

‘Next day there were huge newspaper reports, very highly coloured journals – but what I remember is the photo, of the car standing there, and the headline underneath, “Rosemeyer's car was waiting”.'

But she had not understood.

‘But what happened?'

‘Sorry, of course you didn't know. He got killed. The moment he heard that Caracciola had broken the record he got in and went off. He was going faster still, and the side wind caught him, veered him straight off the road into the woods. It's near Mannheim somewhere, you can still see where – the Germans put a little plaque, saying, “Here he laid down his life”, or something. Words to that effect.'

‘But why did he do anything so foolish?'

‘But he had to.'

*

And what put that in my head, thought Van der Valk, I just can't think. Wasn't much of a Rosemeyer bumping out along Leeson Street in Mr Ryan's rather smelly, very dreary notquite-new Ford. Not even much of a Caracciola, except of course for the limp, and perhaps the face a bit. The hammy face of his youth, the beaming chubby look of Baby Cadum, had been gone a good while now. As for the lines, he shaved them every morning and was used to them, but now and then when pain or fatigue got the better of him he did notice that an innocent idealistic Dutch face had acquired a few claw-marks. Could be worse; he was not yet embittered. The face looked out still jovial enough and – he was a little astonished – quite kind. Not as big a bastard as all that.

Nor as clever, he said nastily to the driving mirror. You enjoy playing the part of crafty old Rudi, Schranz the super skier – that's me, wily Karli the Old Fox of the Arlberg (except when journalists forgot and called him the Old Lion). But have the courage now to admit that just for a tiny moment back there you weren't the old fox of any damn berg, not even a Dutch one, not by a very long stretch of virgin snow you weren't. In fact Stasie took you for a fast ride downhill on
your face. You may have pretended to Flynn that you knew where you were going, but in fact now you're just trying to get your own back, you're playing her a filthy trick, and in short you're not Persil-white one bit: you're a chewed dog-biscuit.

Good old Rudi drove soberly out through Donnybrook, out across Ailesbury Road to the sea-front, and trundled along to Temple Hill feeling more ashamed of himself than triumphant, and well he might.

Lovely fine warm evening, would be a lovely sunset, pity to spoil it. Stasie wearing a coat of some rough cottony material, an attractive pinkish grey, looking he was bound to say very pretty. Huge appealing grin that would have been more appealing still if one hadn't suspected it of being well practised. But it was appealing all the same; an immense glee at skipping school, a great big happy laugh at playing such a fine trick on all the good bourgeois. The grin was so naughty – and the coat so enveloping – that he had a suspicion she hadn't anything on underneath, and was relieved when she took it off: respectable skirt and an Italian printed shirt. Hair was loose today, falling informally to shoulders. Looked young and vulnerable, and he was not convinced that it was altogether put on. On the contrary, he thought that she was genuinely – spontaneously – out just to enjoy herself and found himself wondering if he wasn't for the second time in two days due to make a horrible great ass of himself.

Need a few quick drinks, he thought, rubbing his nose furiously with his forefinger.

‘Where are we going?'

‘Stepaside.'

‘Oh good.' She burst out laughing, possibly at a memory. ‘Well done you. But how do you know about Stepaside?'

‘Found it on the map, and who could resist that? Seems there's a place one can eat.'

‘There is too. And a very nice view, all over Dublin.'

‘They know you there?'

‘No no, have no fear; I know how to be discreet. I've hardly been there in ages, knew it well once, but then it was just Doyle's pub. You know the way?'

‘Well if I go wrong you'll be able to put me right, won't you?'

‘Yes. I used to go to school around here. Will you give me one of your nice cigarettes? No don't bother, I can light it for myself.'

Stupid to be caught lagging behind all the time! Stasie was a very agreeable companion. Why not? She was an intelligent, educated woman. And moreover Martinez' daughter. Had it not been the progressive unfolding of a rich intricate character that had first captivated him, back in Holland? Had it not been apparent that of his children Stasie was the one closest to him? In sympathy with his theatrical manner, understanding – and practising – his little tricks and subterfuges? He thought of the fine white hands, the very good gold signet, the casual play with the Mercedes ignition keys.

Familiar too was the adaptability. There is nothing to be surprised at, he told himself. The petty suburban background, world of knitting, sitting small children on the pot and getting the dishes washed, had not seemed in the least jarring in Belgrave Square. Stasie shopping in the supermarket, pushing a pram, a tatty scarf disguising the hair in curlers – no sense of shock there. Dutch housewife! Stasie number Two, who came to visit him in his hotel room – well yes, a shock. But not a huge shock; he had at least suspected this one's existence. And this one … very poised, quite the sophisticate, ordering expensive food and plenty to drink in the languid way of someone who does so every day … Martinez had been just the same. It had been, no doubt, this many-sided charm and vitality that had delighted Denis.

No, what got him was her ease and fluency, the unselfconscious confidence with the policeman investigating her father's death. Who suspected her of complicity. And who she had calmly climbed into bed with. Now that was dotty, surely. A bit simple, that. Stasie was not that simple.

‘Do you mind if I give Agathe a buzz? She's at home this evening. I like someone to look in on the children from time to time.' The simplicity of this was engaging in such a devious woman.

‘Of course. Give her my love.' Tickled, she laughed. As with Mrs Lynch, he had ‘earned a good mark'.

The sunset, and the twilight over the hills, and the sweep of Dublin Bay below him was all that he had hoped, making up for the meal. They had three cups of coffee, and another go of cognac: plenty of time to get their respective troops into position. Her eyes were promising that he wasn't wasting his time and he hoped she was right!

In the car she snuggled up, a mouth tasting agreeably of herself, flavoured with cognac, Gitanes, and fresh lipstick: she had drunk a great deal, and showed no sign of it at all.

‘Lovely dinner.'

‘Marvellous view,' he corrected.

‘But now I want a drive. Fresh air. And a change of view.' Yes, darkness was growing. In fact darkness was there. Couldn't tell one car from another car.

A little uncanny, almost making the back of his neck prickle, how closely the scenario followed the script he had written! Stasie disposed with artistry, the backs of cars quite the natural habitat of the species. Bits of clothes scattered around – she would have made quite a good impression too in the Crazy Horse Saloon. And he himself, hardly able to move at all: not a bad thing, wouldn't be able to make any sudden jumps that might spoil the camera angle. Trying to take this light-hearted view of matters did not prevent it being among the vilest half-hours he had spent in his life. In fact he could only remember one worse: waiting at the age of eight with an abscess on a back tooth, in the outpatients' clinic of a busy hospital, knowing that he would be gassed and extracted. His mother sitting beside him, grimly clutching her handbag, suffering worse than he did. Gassing was like guillotining, quickly over: it was the waiting that was unspeakable. And now, as an adult, he had the keener and more exquisite torments of degradation and humiliation, of conscious knowing hypocrisy, of simulating passion, of artificially inducing desire – of making a hearty meal of gall. I paid there, he thought later, for my moment of lechery.

Even when the flashbulb came blinding in it was no relief: it was an anticlimax. He had waited too long for it. No
congratulation at having been right, no sense of liberation. He felt he had pulled off the trick the way Sherlock Holmes got out of the Reichenbach Fall – by cheating everybody.

Stasie gave a most convincing scream and grovelled on the floor. Laborious, Van der Valk fumbled with the lock, and heaved out into grassy-smelling darkness inhabited by a man taller and broader-shouldered than himself, taking attachments off his camera and tucking them busily into pockets.

‘Cooked your goose, I think, friend.' Native Dublin notes, perhaps blurred by watching the adventures of the cops from the ninety-ninth precinct, on the telly. Very cold, being not only bigger but not having any broken bones.

‘How do you do, Mr Collins?' said Van der Valk mildly.

The man was jarred, enough to step backwards and go further into his role. Lacks imagination, thought Van der Valk, looking at a large nasty nine-millimetre pistol.

‘It is a dangerous habit,' coldly, ‘to finger loaded firearms in that flustered way.'

‘No false move, chum.' And banal.

‘It's not original, either, Jim boy.' A hand as big as his own and Jim's put together – or so it very properly seemed – came reaching out of the gloom and took the pistol away.

‘It's not even polite,' said Inspector Flynn. ‘Luckily for yourself I know just how dimwitted your ideas are – creeping about in the dark there like Doctor Fu Manchu – you breathe too heavy.'

‘I'm afraid that gave you a lot of trouble,' said Van der Valk, grateful to Flynn for being so tactful and not looking at him.

‘Sure we're right up to date, then,' comfortably, ‘and when nineteen-thirty dawns we'll be there, with the very latest technology. We do have the inconspicuous old Chevrolet with the infra-red headlamps – picks you out like daylight it does; read all about it in
True Detective
. These boys are always doing things like this, attacking stage-coaches and the like in the middle of the night. Now Jim, the hands please. What are you doing then with your girl-friend?' Stasie, wooden, was sullenly smoking in the back of the car. Something else unravelled in that complex person, Van der Valk was thinking.
Not only was she getting a considerable kick out of her games, but she was considerably sharpened up by the idea of being snapshotted playing them. Been let down on both counts.

‘I think we all go home to Belgrave Square,' he suggested; ‘one of the few positive points about all this is that Eddy really is away.'

‘Saw him on to the boat myself so I did,' said Flynn, ‘the idea isn't bad. Act Three by the cosy fireside, like.'

*

Flynn opened the camera with careful sausage fingers, held the film up to the light and said, ‘There now. Disposes of what we might call the evidence. Needn't mention it again.' He sat down heavily.

‘No,' said Stasie sarcastically. ‘Doesn't show your pal in a very creditable light, does it?'

‘The Commissaire isn't proud of himself,' unemotionally, ‘and neither am I. But don't be too hasty now, Mrs Flanagan. Holding the scrap of film up to the light doesn't clean the slate and I don't much like this situation of yours. You'll be thinking maybe I can't prove anything, and if you did I'd answer you that I don't have to. Jim here – now we don't have nothing on him, of course not. But he goes up, being a stupid man, for illegal possession of a firearm, carriage of same, proffering menaces with same.

‘So all we know about you is you're out too late at night. And I take things into consideration, shall we say? I think about the children, maybe, and about Eddy Flanagan, shall I say, and about the Commissaire here who provoked you kind of and isn't too proud of himself. But there are arguments, yes serious arguments, for charging you with a few things too. Don't have to cast around, you know. Attempted corruption of a functionary in the course of his duty. Corrupting a functionary isn't a very grave crime in my eyes because they expect it, shall we say. Withholding material information is, though, and wilful misleading of a judicial inquiry, and attempt to shield and conceal a fugitive. No, I'm not making no threats. I'm suggesting to you you do a bit of serious thinking. I don't want to know nothing, and as a consequence
I don't ask you to come down the Castle tomorrow and make a written statement.'

‘If I may suggest,' said Van der Valk, ‘I'll come down the Castle and make the statement. Now that I'm no longer embarrassed by private eye there, I've got an interrupted conversation to continue, about an accident I had.'

‘Very good so,' agreed Flynn. ‘You two have a nice cup of tea, while your man and I here will keep one another handy company as far as the Castle. The boys were thinking it was time he did something to earn that great big pension they pay him.'

‘You,' said Mr Collins, ‘can go and get yourself effed. And you too,' he told Van der Valk.

‘But don't say it to your sister-in-law,' said Mr Flynn, ‘she might take you seriously.' Crude, Van der Valk thought; the kind of thing I say too sometimes – and yet under the circumstances I couldn't. He was looking at Stasie's face, at once so falsely and so genuinely pathetic.

*

‘The nice cup of tea is a good idea, you know.' No answer. ‘Here, have one of these cigarettes you like.' Still no answer. ‘Understand me, I haven't come to crow over you. What the man said is true; I don't feel pleased with myself. I don't even want to twist your arm, any more than Flynn did. He could have arrested you, you know.'

‘I've committed no crime,' she said angrily. ‘All the rest is moonshine – imaginary. It's all imaginary. You're just trying to blackmail me.' He had to laugh.

‘Ah yes? – as you did me?'